A Town Like Alice

by Nevil Shute

  One of them came up to her as soon as she was through the Customs; there had been nothing to make a story in this load of passengers. A happy-looking girl was a small dividend, however. He said, ‘Miss Paget? The stewardess tells me that you’re getting off here and you’re staying at the Darwin Hotel. Can I give you a lift into town? My name is Stuart Hopkinson; I represent the Sydney Monitor up here.’

  She said, ‘That’s terribly kind of you, Mr Hopkinson. I don’t want to take you out of your way, though.’

  He said, ‘I’m staying there myself.’ He had a small Vauxhall parked outside the hanger; he took her suitcase and put it in the back seat and they got in, chatting about the Constellation and the journey from Singapore. And presently, as they drove past the remains of Vestey’s meatworks, he said, ‘You’re English, aren’t you, Miss Paget?’ She agreed. ‘Would you like to tell me why you’re visiting Australia?’

  She laughed. ‘Not very much, Mr Hopkinson. It’s only something personal – it wouldn’t make a story. Is this where I get out and walk?’

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ he said. ‘It was just a thought. I haven’t filed a story for a week.’

  ‘Would it help if I said that I thought Darwin was just wonderful? “London Typist thinks Darwin wonderful”?’

  ‘We can’t go panning London, not in the Monitor. Is that what you are, a typist?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Come out to get married?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  He sighed. ‘I’m afraid you’re not much good to me for a story.’

  ‘Tell me, Mr Hopkinson,’ she said, ‘how do the buses go from here to Alice Springs? I want to go down there, and I haven’t got much money, so I thought I’d go by bus. That’s possible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. One went this morning. ‘You’ll have to wait till Monday now; they don’t run over the weekend.’

  ‘How long does it take?’

  ‘Two days. You start on Monday, stop at Daly Waters Monday night, and get in late on Tuesday. It’s not too bad a journey, but it can be hot, you know.’

  He put her down at the hotel and carried her bag into the lobby for her. She was lucky in that overcrowded place to get a room to herself, a room with a balcony overlooking the harbour. It was hot in Darwin, with a damp enervating heat that brought her out in streams of perspiration at the slightest movement. This was no novelty to her because she was accustomed to the tropics; she bolted the door and took off her clothes and had a shower, and washed some things in the hand basin, and lay down to sleep with a bare minimum of covering.

  She woke early next morning and lay for some time in the cool of the dawn considering her position. It was imperative to her that she should find Joe Harman and talk to him; at the same time the meeting with Mr Hopkinson had warned her that there were certain difficulties ahead. However pleasant these young men might be, their duty was to get a story for the paper, and she had no desire whatever to figure in the headlines, as she certainly would do if the truth of her intentions became known. ‘Girl flies from Britain to seek soldier crucified for her …’ It would be far easier if she were a man.

  However, she wasn’t. She set to work to invent a story for herself, and finally decided that she was going out to Adelaide to stay with her sister who was married to a man called Holmes who worked in the Post Office; that seemed a fairly safe one. She was travelling by way of Darwin and Alice Springs because a second cousin called Joe Harman was supposed to be working there but hadn’t written home for nine years, and her uncle wanted to know if he was still alive. From Alice she would take the train down to Adelaide.

  It didn’t quite explain why she had come to Darwin in a Constellation, except that there is no other way to get to Darwin. Lying on her bed and cogitating this it seemed a pretty waterproof tale; when she got up and went downstairs for breakfast she decided to try it out on Stuart Hopkinson. She got her chance that morning as he showed her the way to the bus booking-office; she let it out in little artistic snippets over half an hour of conversation, and the representative of the Sydney Monitor swallowed it without question so that she became a little ashamed of herself.

  He took her into a milk bar and stood her a Coca-Cola. ‘Joe Harman …’ he said. ‘What was he doing at Alice nine years ago?’

  She sucked her straw. ‘He was a cowboy on a cattle farm,’ she said innocently, and hoped she wasn’t overdoing it.

  ‘A stockman? Do you remember the name of the station?’

  ‘Wollara,’ she said. ‘That’s the name, Wollara. That’s near Alice Springs, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and find out.’

  He came back to her after lunch with Hal Porter of the Adelaide Herald. ‘Wollara’s a good long way from Alice Springs,’ said Mr Porter. ‘The homestead must be nearly a hundred and twenty miles away. You mean Tommy Duveen’s place?’

  ‘I think that’s it,’ she said. ‘Is there a bus there from Alice Springs?’

  ‘There’s no bus or any way of getting there except to drive there in a truck or a utility.’

  Hopkinson said, ‘It’s on one of Eddie Maclean’s rounds, isn’t it?’

  ‘Now you mention it, I think it is.’ Porter turned to Jean. ‘Maclean Airways run around most of those stations once a week, delivering the mail,’ he said. ‘You may find that you could get there by plane. If so, that’s much the easiest.’

  Her ideas about reporters had been moulded by the cinema; it was a surprise to her to find that in real life they could be kind and helpful people with good manners. She thanked them with sincere gratitude, and they took her out for a run round Darwin in a car. She exclaimed at the marvellous, white sand beaches and the azure blue of the sea, and suggested that a bathing party might be a good thing.

  ‘There’s one or two objections,’ Mr Porter said. ‘One is the sharks. They’ll take you if you go out more than knee deep. Another is the alligators. Then there’s the stone fish – he lies on the beach and looks just like a stone until you tread on him, and he squirts about a pint of poison into you. The Portuguese Men-o’-War aren’t so good, either. But the thing that really puts me off is Coral Ear.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A sort of growth inside your head that comes from getting this fine coral sand into your ear.’

  Jean came to the conclusion that perhaps she wouldn’t bathe in Darwin after all.

  She got her bathe, however, because on Sunday they drove her forty miles or so southwards down the one road to a place called Berry Springs, a deep water hole in a river where the bathing was good. The reporters eyed her curiously when she appeared in her two-piece costume because the weeks that she had spent in native clothes in Kuala Telang had left her body tanned with sunburn in unusual places. It was the first mistake that she had made, and for the first time a dim suspicion crossed their minds that this girl held a story for them if they could only get it out of her.

  ‘Joe Harman …’ said Hal Porter thoughtfully to Stuart Hopkinson. ‘I ’m sure I’ve heard that name before somewhere, but I can’t place it.’

  As they drove back from the bathe the reporters told her about Darwin, and the picture they painted was a gloomy one. ‘Everything that happens here goes crook,’ Hal Porter said. ‘The meatworks has been closed for years because of labour troubles – they got so many strikes they had to close it down. The railway was intended to go south to Alice and join up with the one from Alice down to Adelaide – go from north to south of the continent. It might have been some good if it had done that, but it got as far as Birdum and then stopped. God knows what it does now. This road has just about put the railway out of business – what business it ever had. There used to be an ice factory, but that’s closed down.’ He paused. ‘Everywhere you go round here you’ll see ruins of things that have been tried and failed.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Jean asked. ‘It’s not a bad place, this. It’s got a marvellous harbour.’

&nb
sp; ‘Of course it has. It ought to be a great big port, this place – a port like Singapore. It’s the only town of any size at all on the north coast. I don’t know. I’ve been up here too long. It gives me the willies.’

  Stuart Hopkinson said cynically, ‘It’s got outbackitis.’ He smiled at Jean. ‘You’ll see a lot of this in Australia, specially in the north.’

  She asked, ‘Is Alice Springs like this?’ It was so very different from the glowing recollections of Alice that Joe Harman had poured out to her, six years before.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Hopkinson, ‘Alice is different. Alice is all right.’

  ‘Why is it different?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t really know. It’s railhead, of course, for trucking cattle down to Adelaide – that’s one thing. But it’s a go-ahead place is Alice; all sorts of things go on there. I wish to God the Monitoria send me there instead of here.’

  She said goodbye to her two friends that night, and started at dawn next morning in the bus for Alice Springs. The bus was a big, modern Bedford, heavily streamlined; it towed a trailer carrying goods and luggage. It was comfortable enough although not air-conditioned; it cruised down the wide, empty tarmac road at fifty miles an hour, hour after hour, manned by ex-naval crew.

  As far as Katherine, where the bus stopped for lunch, the country was well wooded with rather stunted eucalyptus trees, which Jean discovered were called gums. Between these trees were open meadows of wild land, ungrazed, unused, and uninhabited. She discussed this country with a fellow traveller, a bank inspector on his way to Tennant Creek, and she was told that all this coastal belt was useless for farming for some reason that she could not understand. After Katherine the country gradually became more arid, the trees more scattered and desiccated, till by the evening they were running through a country that was near to desert.

  At dusk they stopped for the night at a place called Daly Waters. Daly Waters, she discovered, was a hotel, a post office, a large aerodrome, and nothing else whatsoever. The hotel was a rambling collection of single-storey wooden huts or dormitories for men and for women, strange to Jean but comfortable enough. She strolled outside before tea, in the dusk, and looked around. In front of the hotel three young men were squatting on their heels with one leg extended in the peculiar attitude that Joe Harman had used; they wore a sort of jodhpur trouser and elastic-sided boots with a very thin sole, and they were playing cards upon the ground, intent upon their game. She realized that she was looking at her first ringers.

  She studied them with interest; that was how Joe Harman would have looked before he joined the army. She resisted an absurd temptation to go up to one of them and ask if they knew anything about him.

  The bus started at dawn next day, and drove on southwards down the tarmac road, past Milners Lagoon and Newcastle Waters and Muckety Bore to Tennant Creek. As they went the vegetation grew sparser and the sun grew hotter, till by the time they stopped at Tennant Creek for a meal and a rest the country had become pure sand desert. They went on after an hour, driving at fifty to fifty-five miles an hour down the scorching road past tiny places of two or three houses dignified with a name, Wauchope and Barrow Creek and Aileron. Toward evening they found themselves running towards the Macdonnell Ranges, lines of bare red hills against the pale blue sky, and at about dusk they ran slowly into Alice Springs and drew up at the Talbot Arms Hotel.

  Jean went into the hotel and got a room opening on to a balcony, the hotel being a bungalow-type building with a single storey, like practically every other building in Alice Springs. Tea was served immediately after they arrived, and she had already learned that in Australian country hotels unless you are punctual for your meals you will get nothing. She changed her dress and strolled out in the town after tea, walking very slowly down the broad suburban roads, examining the town.

  She found it as Joe Harman had described it to her, a pleasant place with plenty of young people in it. In spite of its tropical surroundings and the bungalow nature of the houses there was a faint suggestion of an English suburb in Alice Springs which made her feel at home. There were the houses standing each in a small garden fenced around or bordered by a hedge for privacy; the streets were laid out in the way of English streets with shade trees planted along the kerbs. Shutting her eyes to the Macdonnell Ranges, she could almost imagine she was back in Bassett as a child. She could now see well what everybody meant by saying Alice was a bonza place. She knew that she could build a happy life for herself in this town, living in one of these suburban houses, with two or three children, perhaps.

  She found her way back to the main street and strolled up it looking at the shops. It was quite true; this town had everything a reasonable girl could want – a hairdressing saloon, a good dress shop or two, two picture houses…. She turned into the milk bar at about nine o’clock and bought herself an ice-cream soda. If this was the outback, she thought, there were a great many worse places.

  Next morning, after breakfast, she went and found the manageress, a Mrs Driver, in the hotel office. She said, ‘I want to try and get in touch with a second cousin of mine, who hasn’t written home for ten years.’ She told her story about being on her way from London to Adelaide to stay with her sister. ‘I told my uncle that I’d come this way and stop in Alice Springs and try and find out something about Joe.’

  Mrs Driver was interested. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Joe Harman.’

  ‘Joe Harman! Worked out at Wollara?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jean said. ‘Do you know if he’s there still?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘He used to come in here a lot just after the war, but he was only here about six months. I only came here in the war; I don’t know about before that. He was a prisoner of the Japs, he was. They treated him terribly. Came back with scars on his hands where they’d put nails right through, crucified him, or something.’

  Jean expressed surprise and horror. ‘Do you know where he is now?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. Maybe one of the boys would know.’

  Old Art Foster, the general handyman who had lived in Alice Springs for thirty years said, ‘Joe Harman? He went back to Queensland where he come from. He was at Wollara for about six months after the war, and then he got a job as station manager at some place up in the Gulf country.’

  Jean asked, ‘You don’t know his address?’

  ‘I don’t. Tommy Duveen would know it, out at Wollara.’

  ‘Does he come into town much?’

  ‘Aye, he was in town on Friday. He comes about once every three or four weeks.’

  Jean asked innocently, ‘I suppose Joe Harman took his family with him when he went to Queensland. They aren’t living here still, are they?’

  The old man stared at her. ‘I never heard Joe Harman had a family. He wasn’t married, not so far as I know.’

  She said defensively, ‘My uncle back in England thinks he’s married.’

  ‘I never heard nothing of a wife,’ the old man said.

  Jean thought about this for a minute, and then said to Mrs Driver, ‘Is there a telephone at Wollara? I mean, if Mr Duveen knows his address, I’d like to ring him up and get it.’

  ‘There isn’t any telephone,’ she said. ‘They’ll be speaking on the radio schedule morning and evening from Wollara, of course.’ There was an extensive radio network operated by the Flying Doctor service from the hospital; morning and evening an operator at the hospital sat down to call up forty or fifty stations on the radio telephone to transmit messages, pass news, and generally ascertain that all was well. The station housewife operated the other end. ‘Mrs Duveen is sure to be on the air tonight because her sister Amy is in hospital here for a baby and Edith’ll want to know if it’s come off yet. If you write out a telegram and take it down to Mr Taylor at the hospital, he’ll pass it to them tonight.’

  Jean went back to her room and wrote out a suitable cable and took it down to the hospital to Mr Taylor, who agreed to pass it to Wollara.
‘Come back at about eight o’clock, and I may have the answer if they know the address right off; if they’ve got to look it up they’ll probably transmit it on the schedule tomorrow morning.’ That freed her for the remainder of the day, and she went back to the milk bar for another ice-cream.

  In the milk bar she made a friend, a girl called Rose Sawyer. Miss Sawyer was about eighteen and had an Aberdeen terrier on a lead; she worked in the dress shop in the afternoons. She was very interested to hear that Jean came from England, and they talked about England for a time. ‘How do you like Alice?’ she asked presently, and there was a touch of conventional scorn in her tone.

  ‘I like it,’ Jean said candidly. ‘I’ve seen many worse places. I should think you could have a pretty good time here.’

  The girl said, ‘Well, I like it all right. We were in Newcastle before, and then Daddy got the job of being bank manager here and we all thought it would be awful. All my friends said these outback places were just terrible. I thought I wouldn’t be able to stick it, but I’ve been here fifteen months now and it’s not so bad.’

  ‘Alice is better than most, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what they say – I haven’t been in any of the others. Of course, all this has come quite recently. There weren’t any of these shops before the war, they say.’

  Jean learned a little of the history of the town and she was surprised at the rapidity of its growth. In 1928 it was about three houses and a pub; that was the year when the railway reached it from Oodnadatta. The Flying Doctor service started about 1930 and small hospitals were placed about in the surrounding districts. The sisters married furiously, and Jean learned that most of the older families were those of these sisters. By 1939 the population was about three hundred; when the war came the town became a military staging point. After the war the population had risen to about seven hundred and fifty in 1945, and when Jean was there it was about twelve hundred. ‘All these new houses and shops going up,’ Miss Sawyer said. ‘People seem to be coming in here all the time now.’