by Nevil Shute
‘Homesick!’ Mrs Price said. ‘Aren’t we all?’
The Australians had a smart argument with their guard that morning, who refused point-blank to let the women ride down on the trucks. There was some reason in this from their point of view, because the weight of seventeen women and children added to two grossly overloaded trucks might well be the last straw that would bring final breakdown, in which case the guards themselves would have been lucky to escape with a flogging at the hands of their officer. Harman and Leggatt had to put the back axle together again; they were finished and ready for the road about the middle of the morning.
Joe Harman said, ‘Keep that little bastard busy for a minute while I loose off the union.’ He indicated the Jap guard. Presently they started, Harman in the lead, dribbling a little petrol from a loosened pipe joint, unnoticed by the guard. It was just as well to have an alibi when they ran out of fuel, having parted with six gallons to the Chinaman.
From Maran to Kuantan is fifty-five miles. The women rested that day at Maran, and next day began the march down the tarmac road. They reached a village called Buan that night. Jean had looked for Joe Harman’s truck all day, expecting to see it returning; she was not to know that it had been stranded overnight at Pohoi, short of petrol, and was a day late in the return journey. They stayed next day at Buan in an atap shed; the women took turns with Jean watching for the truck. Their health already was somewhat improved. After the railway track and the jungle paths the tarmac road was easy walking, and the medicines were already having an effect. The country, too, was growing higher and healthier, and the more imaginative of them were already saying they could smell the sea. And finally their contact with the two Australians had had a marked effect on their morale.
They did not see Joe Harman’s truck as it passed through. Instead, a Malay girl came to them in the evening with a brown paper parcel of six cakes of Lifebuoy soap; it was addressed to Mrs Paget. Written on the parcel was a note which read,
DEAR LADY,
I send some soap which is all that we can find just at present but I will get more later on. I am sorry not to see you but the Nip won’t let us stop so I have given this to the Chinaman at Maran and he says he will get it to you. Look out for us on the way back and I will try and stop then.
JOE HARMAN
The women were delighted. ‘Lifebuoy,’ said Mrs Warner, sniffing it ecstatically. ‘You can just smell the carbolic in it! My dear, wherever do you think they got it?’
‘I’d have two guesses,’ Jean replied. ‘Either they stole it, or they stole something to buy it with.’ In fact, the latter was correct. At Pohoi their Japanese guard had taken off his boots to wash his feet at the village well; he washed his feet for about thirty seconds and turned round, but the boots had vanished; it could not have been either of the Australians because they both appeared immediately from the other direction. The mystery was never cleared up. Ben Leggatt, however, was most helpful and stole a pair from a sleeping Japanese that evening and gave them to their guard, who was so relieved that he gave Ben a dollar.
The next day the women marched to Berkapor. They were coming out into much better country now, a pleasant, relatively healthy part where the road wound round hillsides and was mostly shaded by the overhanging trees. That day for the first time they got coconuts. Mrs Price had an old worn-out pair of slippers that had belonged to Mrs Horsefall; she had carried them for weeks and had never really used them; they traded these at Berkapor as soon as they got in for milk coconuts, one for each member of the party, thinking that the vitamins contained in the fluid would be good for them. At Berkapor they were accommodated in a large atap copra shed beside the road, and just before dusk the two familiar trucks drew up in the village, driven by Ben Leggatt and Joe Harman. As before, they were headed for the coast and loaded high with railway lines and sleepers.
Jean and several of the others walked across the road to meet them, with the Japanese sergeant; the Japanese guards fell into conversation together. Joe Harman turned to Jean. ‘We couldn’t get loaded at Jerantut in time to make it down to Kuantan tonight,’ he said. ‘Ben’s got a pig.’
‘A pig?’ They crowded round Ben’s truck. The corpse was lying upon the top of the load, a black, long-nosed Oriental pig, somewhat mauled and already covered in flies. Somewhere near the Tekam River Ben, whose truck was in the lead, had found this pig upon the road and had chased it with the truck for a quarter of a mile. The Japanese guard beside him had fired six shots at it from his rifle and had missed it every time till with the seventh he had wounded it and so enabled Ben to run over it with one of the front wheels. They had stopped and Harman coming close behind them had stopped too, and the two Aussies and the Japanese guard had heaved the pig on to the load and got moving again before the infuriated Chinese storekeeper had caught up with them to claim his property. Harman said quietly to Jean, ‘We’ll have to let the bloody Nips eat all they can and carry away a bit. Leave it to me; I’ll see there’s some for you.’
That night the women got about thirty-five pounds of boiled pig meat, conveyed to them surreptitiously in several instalments. They made a fire of coconut shells behind the copra store and made a stew with their rice ration, and ate all of this that seemed prudent to them; at that there was enough meat left for the three meals that they would have before they took the road again. They sat about in the shed or at the roadside after they had finished, replete with the first really nourishing meal that they had had for months, and presently the Australians came across to talk to them.
Joe Harman came to Jean. ‘Sorry I couldn’t send over more of that pig,’ he said in his slow Queensland drawl. ‘I had to let the bloody Nips have most of it.’
She said, ‘It’s been splendid, Joe. We’ve been eating and eating, and there’s still lots left for tomorrow. I don’t know when we last had such a meal.’
‘I’d say that’s what you need,’ he observed. ‘There’s not a lot of flesh on any of you, if I may say so.’
He squatted down upon the ground beside the women, sitting on one heel in his peculiar way.
‘I know we’re pretty thin,’ Jean said. ‘But we’re a darned sight better than we were. That Chinese stuff you got us as the substitute for Glauber’s salt – that’s doing the trick all right. It’s stopping it.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Maybe we could get some more of that in Kuantan.’
‘The pig was a god-send,’ she said. ‘That, and the fruit – we got some green coconuts today. We’ve been very lucky so far that we’ve had no beriberi, or that sort of thing.’
‘It’s because we’ve had fresh rice,’ said Mrs Frith unexpectedly. ‘Being in the country parts we’ve had fresh rice all through. It’s old rice that gives you beriberi.’
The Australian sat thoughtful, chewing a piece of stick. ‘Funny sort of a life for you ladies,’ he said at last. ‘Living in a place like this, and eating like the boongs. These Nips’ll have something coming to them, when it’s all added up.’
He turned to Jean. ‘What were you all doing in Malaya?’ he asked.
‘Most of us were married,’ she said. ‘Our husbands had jobs here.’
Mrs Frith said, ‘My hubby’s District Engineer on the railway. We had ever such a nice bungalow at Kajang.’
Harman said, ‘All the husbands got interned separately, I suppose?’
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Price. ‘My Arthur’s in Singapore. I heard about him when we was in Port Dickson. I think they’re all in Singapore.’
‘All comfortable in a camp while you go walking round the country,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Frith. ‘Still, it’s nice to know that they’re all right, when all’s said and done.’
‘It seems to me,’ said Harman, ‘the way they’re kicking you around, they just don’t know what they can do with you. It might not be too difficult for you to just stay in one place, as it might be this, and live till the war’s over.’
Mrs Frith sai
d, ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’
Jean said, ‘I know. I’ve thought of this ever since Mrs Frith suggested it. The trouble is, the Japs feed us – or they make the village feed us. The village never gets paid. We’d have to earn our keep somehow, and I don’t see how we could do it.’
Harman said, ‘It was just an idea.’
He said presently, ‘I believe I know where I could get a chicken or two. If I can I’ll drop them off for you when we come up-country, day after tomorrow.’
Jean said, ‘We haven’t paid you for the soap yet.’
‘Forget about it,’ he said slowly. ‘I didn’t pay cash for it myself. I swapped it for a pair of Nip rubber boots.’ With slow, dry humour he told them about the boots. ‘You got the soap, the Nip got another pair of boots, and Ben got a dollar,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s happy and satisfied.’
Jean said, ‘Is that how you’re going to get the chicken?’
‘I’ll get a chicken for you, one way or another,’ he said. ‘You ladies need feeding up.’
She said, ‘Don’t take any risks.’
‘You attend to your own business, Mrs Boong,’ he said, ‘and take what you get. That’s what you have to do when you’re a prisoner, just take what you can get.’
She smiled, and said, ‘All right.’ The fact that he had called her Mrs Boong pleased her; it was a little tenuous bond between herself and this strange man that he should pull her leg about her sunburn, her native dress, and the baby that she carried on her hip like a Malay woman. The word boong put Australia into her mind, and the aboriginal stockmen, and she asked a question that had occurred to her, partly from curiosity and partly because she knew it pleased him to talk about his own country. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘is it very hot in Australia, the part you come from? Hotter than this?’
‘It’s hot,’ he said. ‘Oh my word, it can be hot when it tries. At Wollara it can go to a hundred and eighteen – that’s a hot day, that is. But it’s not like this heat here. It’s a kind of a dry heat, so you don’t sweat like you do here.’ He thought for a minute. ‘I got thrown once,’ he said, ‘breaking in a brumby to the saddle. I broke my thigh, and after it was set in the hospital they used to point a sort of lamp at it, a sunray lamp they called it, to tone up the muscles or something. Do you have those things in England?’
She nodded. ‘It’s like that, is it?’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s a kind of warm, dry heat, the sort that does you good and makes you thirsty for cold beer.’
‘What does the country look like?’ she inquired. It pleased the man to talk about his own place and she wanted to please him; he had been so very kind to them.
‘It’s red,’ he said. ‘Red around Alice and where I come from, red earth and then the mountains are all red. The Macdonnells and the Levis and the Kernots, great red ranges of bare hills against the blue sky. Evenings they go purple and all sorts of colours. After the wet there’s green all over them. In the dry, parts of them go silvery white with the spinifex.’ He paused. ‘I suppose everybody likes his own place,’ he said quietly. ’The country round about the Springs is my place. People come up on the ‘Ghan from Adelaide and places in the south, and they say Alice is a lousy town. I only went to Adelaide once, and I thought that was lousy. The country round about the Springs is beautiful to me.’
He mused. ‘Artists come up from the south and try and paint it in pictures,’ he said. ‘I only met one that ever got it right, and he was an Abo, an Abo called Albert out at Hermannsburg. Somebody gave him a brush and some paints one time, and he started in and got it better than any of them, oh my word, he did. But he’s an Abo, and he’s painting his own place. I suppose that makes a difference.’
He turned to Jean. ‘What’s your place?’ he asked. ‘Where do you come from?’
She said, ‘Southampton.’
‘Where the liners go?’
‘That’s it,’ she said.
‘What’s it like there?’ he asked.
She shifted the baby on her hip, and moved her feet in the sarong. ‘It’s quiet, and cool, and happy,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It’s not particularly beautiful, although there’s lovely country round about – the New Forest, and the Isle of Wight. It’s my place, like the Springs is yours, and I shall go back there if I live through this time, because I love it so.’ She paused for a moment. ‘There was an ice rink there,’ she said. ‘I used to dance upon the ice, when I was a girl at school. One day I’ll get back there and dance again.’
‘I’ve never seen an ice rink,’ said the man from Alice. ‘I’ve seen pictures of them, and on the movies.’
She said, ‘It was such fun …’
Presently he got up to go; she walked across the road with him towards the trucks, the baby on her hip, as always. ‘I shan’t be able to see you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We start at dawn. But I’ll be coming back up the road the day after.’
‘We shall be walking to Pohoi that day, I think,’ she said.
‘I’ll see if I can get you those chickens,’ he said.
She turned and faced him, standing beside her in the moonlit road, in all the noises of the tropic night. ‘Look, Joe,’ she said. ‘We don’t want meat if it’s going to mean trouble. It was grand of you to get that soap for us, but you did take a fearful risk, pinching that chap’s boots.’
‘That’s nothing,’ he said slowly. ‘You can run rings round these Nips when you learn how.’
‘You’ve done a lot for us,’ she said. ‘This pig, and the medicines, and the soap. It’s made a world of difference to us in these last few days. I know you’ve taken risks to do these things. Do, please, be careful.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and get the chickens, but if I find things getting hot I’ll give it away. I won’t go sticking out my neck.’
‘You’ll promise that?’ she asked.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘You’ve got enough troubles on your own plate, my word. But we’ll come out all right, so long as we just keep alive, that’s all we got to do. Just keep alive another two years, till the war’s over.’
‘You think that it will be as long as that?’ she asked.
‘Ben knows a lot more than I do about things like that,’ he said. ‘He thinks about two years.’ He grinned down at her. ‘You’d better have those chickens.’
‘I’ll leave that with you,’ she said. ‘I’d never forgive myself if you got caught in anything, and bought it.’
‘I won’t,’ he said. He put out his hand as if to take her own, and then dropped it again. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Boong,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘I’ll crack you with a coconut if you say Mrs Boong again. Goodnight, Joe.’
‘Goodnight.’
They did not see him next morning, though they heard the trucks go off. They rested that day at Berkapor, as was their custom, and the next day they marched on to Pohoi. The two trucks driven by Harman and Leggatt passed them on the road about midday going up empty to Jerantut; each driver waved to the women as they passed, and they waved back. The Japanese guards seated beside the drivers scowled a little. No chickens dropped from the trucks and the trucks did not stop; in one way Jean was rather relieved. She knew something of the temper of these men by now, and she knew very well that they would stop at nothing, would be deterred by no risk, to get what they considered to be helpful for the women. No chickens meant no trouble, and she marched on for the rest of the day with an easy mind.
That evening, in the house that they had been put into at Pohoi, a little Malay boy came to Jean with a green canvas sack; he said that he had been sent by a Chinaman in Gambang. In the sack were five black cockerels, alive, with their feet tied. Poultry is usually transported in the East alive.
Their arrival put Jean in a difficulty, and she consulted with Mrs Frith. It was impossible for them to kill, pluck and cook five cockerels without drawing the attention of their guards to what was going on, and the first thing t
hat the guards would ask was, where had the cockerels come from? If Jean had known the answer to that one herself it would have been easier to frame a lie. It would be possible, they thought, to say that they had bought them with money given to them by the Australians, but that was difficult if the sergeant wanted to know where they had bought them in Pohoi. It was unfortunate that Pohoi was a somewhat unfriendly village; it had been genuinely difficult for the village to evacuate a house for the women, and it was not to be expected that they would get much co-operation from the villagers in any deceit. Finally they decided to say that they had bought them with money given to them by the Australians, and that they had arranged at Berkapor for the poultry to be sent to them at Pohoi from a village called Limau, two or three miles off the road. It was a thin tale and one that would not stand up to a great deal of investigation, but they saw no reason why any investigation should take place.
They decided regretfully that they would have to part with one of the five cockerels to their guards; the gift of a chicken would make the sergeant sweet and involve him in the affair, rendering any serious investigation unlikely.
Accordingly Jean took the sack and went to find the sergeant.
She bowed to him, to put him in a good temper. ‘Gunso,’ she said, ‘good mishi tonight. We buy chickens.’ She opened the sack and showed him the fowls lying in the bottom. Then she reached down and pulled out one. ‘For you.’ She smiled at him with all the innocence that she could muster.
It was a great surprise to him. He had not known that they had so much money; they had never been able to buy anything but coconuts or bananas before, since he had been with them. ‘You buy?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘From Limau. Very good mishi for us all tonight.’
‘Where get money?’ he inquired. Suspicion had not dawned, for they had never deceived him before; he was just curious.
For one fleeting moment Jean toyed with the idea of saying they had sold some jewellery, with a quick, intuitive feeling that it would be better not to mention the Australians. But she put the idea away; she must stick to the story that they had prepared and considered from all angles. ‘Man prisoner give us money for chicken,’ she said. ‘They say we too thin. Now we have good mishi tonight, Japanese and prisoner also.’
