by Nevil Shute
‘No more prisoner to Singapore,’ he said. ‘Strict order.’
‘Well, can we stay here and make ourselves a camp, and have a doctor here?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘No prisoner stay here.’
‘But what are we to do? Where can we go?’
‘Very sad for you,’ he said. ‘I tell you where you go tomorrow.’
She went back to the women after he had gone. ‘You heard all that,’ she said calmly. ‘He says we aren’t to go to Singapore after all.’
The news meant very little to the women; they had fallen into the habit of living from day to day, and Singapore was very far away. ‘Looks as if they don’t want us anywhere,’ Mrs Price said heavily. ‘Bobbie, if I see you teasing Amy again I’ll wallop you just like your father. Straight, I will.’
Mrs Frith said, ‘If they’d just let us alone we could find a little place like one of them villages and live till it’s all over.’
Jean stared at her. ‘They couldn’t feed us,’ she said slowly. ‘We depend upon the Nips for food.’ But it was the germ of an idea, and she put it in the back of her mind.
‘Precious little food we get,’ said Mrs Frith. ‘I’ll never forget that terrible place Tampin in all my born days.’
Captain Nisui came the next day. ‘You go now to Kuantan,’ he said. ‘Woman camp in Kuantan, very good. You will be very glad.’
Jean did not know where Kuantan was. She asked, ‘Where is Kuantan? Is it far away?’
‘Kuantan on coast,’ he said. ‘You go there now.’
Behind her someone said, ‘It’s hundreds of miles away. It’s on the east coast.’
‘Okay,’ said Captain Nisui. ‘On east coast.’
‘Can we go there by railway?’ Jean inquired.
‘Sorry, no railway. You walk, ten, fifteen miles each day. You get there soon. You will be very happy.’
She said quietly, ‘Seven of us are dead already with this marching, Captain. If you make us march to this place Kuantan more of us will die. Can we have a truck to take us there?’
‘Sorry, no truck,’ he said. ‘You get there very soon.’
He wanted them to start immediately, but it was then eleven in the morning and they rebelled. With patient negotiation Jean got him to agree that they should start at dawn next day; this was the most that she could do. She did, however, get him to provide a good supper for them that night, a sort of meat stew with the rice, and a banana each.
From Gemas to Kuantan is about a hundred and seventy miles; there is no direct road. They left Gemas in the last week of May; on the basis of their previous rate of progress Jean reckoned that it would take them six weeks to do the journey. It was by far the longest they had had to tackle; always before there had been hope of transport of some sort at the end of fifty miles or so. Now six weeks of travelling lay ahead of them, with only a vague hope of rest at the end. None of them really believed that there were prison camps for them at Kuantan.
‘You made a mistake, dearie,’ said Mrs Frith, ‘saying what you did about us staying and making a camp here. I could see he didn’t like that.’
‘He just wants to get rid of us,’ Jean said wearily. ‘They don’t want to bother with us – just get us out of the way.’
They left next morning with a sergeant and a private as a guard. Gemas is a railway junction and the East Coast railway runs north from there; the railway was not being used at all at that time, and there was a rumour that the track was being taken up and sent to some unknown strategic destination in the north. The women were not concerned with that; what concerned them was that they had to walk along the railway line, which meant nearly walking in the sun most of each day, and there was no possibility of getting a ride in a train.
They went on for a week, marching about ten miles every other day; then fever broke out among the children. They never really knew what it was; it started with little Amy Price, who came out in a rash and ran a high temperature, with a running nose. It may have been measles. It was impossible in the conditions of their life to keep the children segregated, and in the weeks that followed it spread from child to child. Amy Price slowly recovered, but by the time she was fit to walk again seven of the other children were down with it. There was nothing they could do except to keep the tired, sweating little faces bathed and cool, and change the soaked clothes for what fresh ones they could muster. They were at a place called Bahau when the sickness was at its height, living at the station in the ticket office and the waiting-room, and on the platform. They had bad luck because there had been a doctor in Bahau three days before they arrived, a Japanese army doctor. But he had gone on in his truck in the direction of Kuala Klawang, and though they got the headman to send runners after him they never made contact with him. So they had no help.
At Bahau four children died, Harry Collard, Susan Fletcher, Doris Simmonds, who was only three, and Freddie Holland. Jean was most concerned with Freddie, as was natural, but there was so little she could do. She guessed from the first day of fever that he was going to die; by that time she had amassed a store of sad experience. There was something in the attitude of people, even tiny children, to their illness that told when death was coming to them, a listlessness, as if they were too tired to make the effort to live. By that time they had all grown hardened to the fact of death. Grief and mourning had ceased to trouble them; death was a reality to be avoided and fought, but when it came – well, it was just one of those things. After a person had died there were certain things that had to be done, the straightening of the limbs, the grave, the cross, the entry in a diary saying who had died and just exactly where the grave was. That was the end of it; they had no energy for afterthoughts.
Jean’s care now was for Mrs Holland. After Freddie was buried she tried to get Eileen to care for the baby; for the last few weeks the baby had been left to Jean to feed and tend and carry, and she had grown very much attached to it. With both the older children dead Jean gave the baby, Robin, back to its mother, not so much because she wanted to get rid of it as because she felt that an interest must be found for Eileen Holland, and the baby would supply it. But the experiment was not a great success; Eileen by that time was so weak that she could not carry the baby on the march, and she could not summon the energy to play with it. Moreover, the baby obviously preferred the younger woman to its mother, having been carried by her for so long.
‘Seems as if he doesn’t really belong to me,’ Mrs Holland said once. ‘You take him, dear. He likes being with you.’ From that time on they shared the baby; it got its rice and soup from Eileen, but it got its fun from Jean.
They left four tiny graves behind the signal box at Bahau and went on down the line carrying two litters of bamboo poles; the weakest children took turns in these. As was common on this journey, they found the Japanese guards to be humane and reasonable men, uncouth in their habits and mentally far removed from western ideas, but tolerant to the weaknesses of women and deeply devoted to children. For hours the sergeant would plod along carrying one child piggyback and at the same time carrying one end of the stretcher, his rifle laid beside the resting child. There was the usual language difficulty. The women by that time were acquiring a few words of Japanese, but the only one who could talk Malay fluently was Jean, and it was she who made inquiries at the villages and sometimes acted as interpreter for the Japanese.
Mrs Frith surprised Jean very much. She was a faded, anaemic little woman of over fifty. In the early stages of the journey she had been very weak and something of a nuisance to them with her continued prognostications of evil; they had trouble enough in the daily round without looking forward and anticipating more. Since she had adopted Johnnie Horsefall Mrs Frith had taken on a new lease of life; her health had improved and she now marched as strongly as any of them. She had lived in Malaya for about fifteen years; she could speak only a few words of the language but she had a considerable knowledge of the country and its diseases. She was quite happy that they were going to Kuantan. ‘Nice over there
, it is,’ she said. ‘Much healthier than in the west, and nicer people. We’ll be all right once we get over there. You see.’
As time went on, Jean turned to Mrs Frith more and more for comfort and advice in their predicaments.
At Ayer Kring Mrs Holland came to the end of her strength. She had fallen twice on the march and they had taken turns in helping her along. It was impossible to put her on the litter; even in her emaciated state she weighed eight stone, and they were none of them strong enough by that time to carry such a load very far. Moreover, to put her on a litter meant turning a child off it, and she refused even to consider such a thing. She stumbled into the village on her own feet, but by the time she got there she was changing colour as Mrs Collard had before her, and that was a bad sign.
Ayer Kring is a small village at a railway station; there were no station buildings here, and by negotiation the headman turned the people out of one house for them, as had been done several times before. They laid Mrs Holland in a shady corner and made a pillow for her head and bathed her face; they had no brandy or any other stimulant to give her. She could not rest lying down and insisted on sitting up, so they put her in a corner where she could be supported by the walls. She took a little soup that evening but refused all food. She knew herself it was the end.
‘I’m so sorry, my dear,’ she whispered late in the night. ‘Sorry to make so much trouble for you. Sorry for Bill. If you see Bill again, tell him not to fret. And tell him not to mind about marrying again, if he can find somebody nice. It’s not as if he was an old man.’
An hour or two later she said, ‘I do think it’s lovely the way baby’s taken to you. It is lucky, isn’t it?’
In the morning she was still alive, but unconscious. They did what they could, which wasn’t very much, but her breathing got weaker and weaker, and at about midday she died. They buried her in the Moslem village cemetery that evening.
At Ayer Kring they entered the most unhealthy district they had passed through yet. The central mountains of Malaya were now on their left, to the west of them as they marched north, and they were coming to the head waters of the Pahang river, which runs down to the east coast. Here the river spreads out into numerous tributaries, the Menkuang, the Pertang, the Belengu, and many others, and these tributaries running through flat country make a marshy place of swamps and mangroves that stretched for forty miles along their route, a country full of snakes and crocodiles, and infested with mosquitoes. By day it was steamy and hot and breathless; at night a cold wet mist came up and chilled them unmercifully.
By the time they had been two days in this country several of them were suffering from fever, a fever that did not seem quite like the malaria that they were used to, in that the temperature did not rise so high; it may have been dengue. They had little by that time to treat it with, not so much because they were short of money as because there were no drugs at all in the jungly villages that they were passing through. Jean consulted with the sergeant, who advised them to press on, and get out of this bad country as soon as possible. Jean was running a fever herself at the time and everything was moving about her in a blur; she had a cracking headache and it was difficult to focus her eyes. She consulted with Mrs Frith, who was remarkably well.
‘What he says is right, dearie,’ Mrs Frith declared. ‘We won’t get any better staying in this swampy place. I think we ought to walk each day, if you ask me.’
Jean forced herself to concentrate. ‘What about Mrs Simmonds?’
‘Maybe the soldiers would carry her, if she gets any worse. I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s cruel hard, but if we’ve got to go we’d better go and get it over. That’s what I say. We shan’t do any good hanging around here in this nasty place.’
They marched each day after that, stumbling along in fever, weak, and ill. The baby, Robin Holland, that Jean carried, got the fever; this was the first ailment he had had. She showed him to the headman in the village of Mentri, and his wife produced a hot infusion of some bark in a dirty coconut shell; Jean tasted it and it was very bitter, so she judged it to be a form of quinine. She gave a little to the baby and took some herself; it seemed to do them both good during the night. Before the day’s march began several of the women took it, and it helped.
It took them eleven days to get through the swamps to the higher ground past Temerloh. They left Mrs Simmonds and Mrs Fletcher behind them, and little Gillian Thomson. When they emerged into the higher, healthier country and dared to stay a day to rest, Jean was very weak but the fever had left her. The baby was still alive, though obviously ill; it cried almost incessantly during its waking hours.
It was Mrs Frith who now buoyed them up, as she had depressed them in the earlier days. ‘It should be getting better all the time from now on,’ she told them. ‘As we get nearer to the coast it should get better. It’s lovely on the east coast, nice beaches to bathe on, and always a sea breeze. It’s healthy, too.’
They came presently to a very jungly village on a hilltop; they never learned its name. It stood above the river Jengka. By this time they had left the railway and were heading more or less eastwards on a jungle track that would at some time join a main road that led down to Kuantan. This village was cool and airy, and the people kind and hospitable; they gave the women a house to sleep in and provided food and fresh fruit, and the same bark infusion that was good for fever. They stayed there for six days revelling in the fresh, cool breeze and the clear, healthy nights, and when they finally marched on they were in better shape. They left a little gold brooch that had belonged to Mrs Fletcher with the headman as payment for the food and kindness that they had received, thinking that the dead woman would not have objected to that.
Four days later, in the evening, they came to Maran. A tarmac road runs through Maran crossing the Malay peninsula from Kuantan to Kerling. The road runs through the village, which has perhaps fifty houses, a school, and a few native shops. They came out upon the road half a mile or so to the north of the village; after five weeks upon the railway track and jungle paths it overjoyed them to see evidence of civilization in this road. They walked down to the village with a fresher step. And there, in front of them, they saw two trucks and two white men working on them while Japanese guards stood by.
They marched quickly towards the trucks, which were both heavily loaded with railway lines and sleepers; they stood pointing in the direction of Kuantan. One of them was jacked up on sleepers taken from the load, and both of the white men were underneath it working on the back axle. They wore shorts and army boots without socks; their bodies were brown with sunburn and very dirty with the muck from the back axle. But they were healthy and muscular men, lean, but in good physical condition. And they were white, the first white men that the women had seen for five months.
They crowded round the trucks; their guard began to talk in staccato Japanese with the truck guards. One of the men lying on his back under the axle, shifting spanner in hand, glanced at the bare feet and the sarongs within his range of vision and said slowly, ‘Tell the mucking Nip to get those mucking women shifted back so we can get some light.’
Some of the women laughed, and Mrs Frith said, ‘Don’t you go using that language to me, young man.’
The men rolled out from under the truck and sat staring at the women and the children, at the brown skins, the sarongs, the bare feet. ‘Who said that?’ asked the man with the spanner. ‘Which of you speaks English?’ He spoke deliberately in a slow drawl, with something of a pause between each word.
Jean said laughing, ‘We’re all English.’
He stared at her, noting the black hair plaited in a pigtail, the brown arms and feet, the sarong, the brown baby on her hip. There was a line of white skin showing on her chest at the V of her tattered blouse. ‘Straits-born?’ he hazarded.
‘No, real English – all of us,’ she said. ‘We’re prisoners.’
He got to his feet; he was a fair-haired powerfully built man about twenty-seven or twenty-eight ye
ars old. ‘Dinky-die?’ he said.
She did not understand that. ‘Are you prisoners?’ she asked. He smiled slowly. ‘Are we prisoners?’ he repeated. ‘Oh my word.’
There was something about this man that she had never met before. ‘Are you English?’ she asked.
‘No fear,’ he said in his deliberate way. ‘We’re Aussies.’ She said, ‘Are you in camp here?’
He shook his head. ‘We come from Kuantan,’ he said. ‘But we’re driving trucks all day, fetching this stuff down to the coast.’
She said, ‘We’re going to Kuantan, to the women’s camp there.’
He stared at her. ‘That’s crook for a start,’ he said slowly. ‘There isn’t any women’s camp at Kuantan. There isn’t any regular prisoner camp at all, just a little temporary camp for us because we’re truck drivers. Who told you that there was a women’s camp at Kuantan?’
‘The Japanese told us. They’re supposed to be sending us there.’ She sighed. ‘It’s just another lie.’
‘The bloody Nips say anything.’ He smiled slowly. ‘I thought you were a lot of boongs,’ he said. ‘You say you’re English, dinky-die? All the way from England?’
She nodded. ‘That’s right. Some of us have been out here for ten or fifteen years, but we’re all English.’
‘And the kiddies – they all English too?’
‘All of them,’ she said.
He smiled slowly. ‘I never thought the first time that I spoke to an English lady she’d be looking like you.’
‘You aren’t exactly an oil painting yourself,’ Jean said.
The other man was talking to a group of the women; Mrs Frith and Mrs Price were with Jean. The Australian turned to them. ‘Where do you come from?’ he inquired.
Mrs Frith said, ‘We got took in Panong, over on the west coast, waiting for a boat to get away.’
‘But where did you come from now?’
Jean said, ‘We’re being marched to Kuantan.’
‘Not all the way from Panong?’
