A Town Like Alice

by Nevil Shute

  ‘Is that just because of the workshop?’ I asked.

  He said slowly, ‘I think it must be – everything comes back to that, when you look at it. It’s not only the workshop, you see. She’s got two girls employed in the ice-cream parlour, and one lubra. Two in the beauty parlour, three in the dress shop, two in the fruit shop, three in the cinema. She employs quite a lot of people.’

  I was puzzled. ‘But can twenty girls in the workshop provide work for all these other girls?’ I asked.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to work that way,’ he said. ‘We were totting it up the other day. She’s never employed more than about thirty-five girls at any one time, but since she started there’s been forty-two girls married out of her businesses. They mostly marry ringers. Well, that’s forty-two families starting, forty-two women wanting cinema and beauty parlour and fresh vegetables and that, besides the thirty-five girls that she’s still got employed. It kind of snowballs.’ He paused. ‘Take the bank. There’s two girl clerks there that there never were before, because of the bigger business. The AMP have started up an office, and there’s a girl in that. Bill Wakeling’s got a girl in his office.’ He turned to me. ‘It’s a fact, there’s something like a hundred girls and married women under twenty-five in Willstown now,’ he said. ‘When Jean came, there was two.’

  ‘And the babies!’ he said. ‘There’s more babies than you could shake a stick at. They’ve had to send a special maternity nurse to the hospital. That’s another girl. She got engaged to Phil Duncan, the copper, last month, so there’ll be another one.’

  I smiled. ‘Are there enough men to go round?’

  ‘Oh my word,’ he said. ‘There’s no difficulty in getting men to work in Willstown. I’ve had ringers coming from all over Queensland, from the Northern Territory, too, wanting a job round about Willstown’. There was one chap came all the way from Marble Bar in Western Australia, two thousand miles or so. The labour situation’s very different now from what it was three years ago.

  I went to bed early that night with plenty to think about. We had a conference next morning with Mr Hope, the solicitor, in his office, and wrote a letter to the Queensland Land Administration Board suggesting a meeting to discuss the lease of Midhurst. That afternoon we spent in driving around Cairns to see the sights; it seemed to me to be a pleasant little tropical town, beautifully situated. On Sunday we drove up on to the Atherton Tableland, high rolling downs farmed somewhat on the English style.

  We flew to Willstown on Monday morning, in a Dakota. We landed at places called Georgetown and Croydon on the way and stayed on each aerodrome for about twenty minutes, picking up and setting down passengers and freight; as we circled Georgetown for the landing I was able to study the place. It was pathetic in a way, for you could see from the air the rectangular pattern of wide streets that once had been busy and lined with houses, now rutted with the rain and grass-grown. A few scattered houses stood at the intersections of what had once been these streets, and they were clustered rather more thickly around the hotel, the only two-storeyed building in either place. Both of these were derelict gold towns.

  The people who came to meet the aeroplane in trucks were bronzed, healthy, and humorous; the men were mostly great big tanned, competent people; the women candid, uncomplaining housewives.

  I sat at the window studying Croydon as we took off, till it fell away from view behind us. ‘I’m kind of glad that you’ve seen those,’ said Joe beside me. ’Willstown was like that, only a bit worse. It’s no great shakes yet, of course, but it’s better than Croydon, ‘oh my word it is.’

  We circled Willstown as we came in to land. It stood by quite a large river, and it was queerly like the other two towns in its layout. There were the same wide streets arranged in rectangular pattern, but the pattern was filling up with houses here. From the air the glint of the sun upon new corrugated iron roofs was everywhere, so that at one point as we circled opposite the sun I had to shut my eyes against the dazzle. All these houses seemed to be new, and a considerable number were still in the process of building. In the main street opposite the two-storeyed building that I guessed to be the hotel, a line of shrubs had been planted in a formal garden down the middle of the road, transforming the wide cattle-rack into two carriageways, and tarmac pavements had been made in this part of the town. Opposite the hotel I could see the swimming-pool with diving-boards and cabins and a lawn beside it, just as Jean had described it to me in her letters. Then the town was lost to view, and we were landing, coming in over a brand-new racetrack.

  She was there to meet me in her Ford utility, her own car that she had bought for running in and out of town to see to her businesses. She was more mature now than I had remembered her; she had grown into a very lovely woman. She said, Oh Noel, it is nice to see you. ‘Are you very tired?’

  ‘I’m not tired,’ I said. Three or four years older, perhaps. ‘You’re looking very well.’

  ‘I am well,’ she said. ‘Disgustingly well’. Noel, it was good of you to offer to come out like this. I wanted to ask you to, and then it seemed too much to ask. It’s such a very long way. Come and sit in the utility. ‘Joe’s just getting your bags.’

  They drove me out immediately to Midhurst. We passed through the main street of Willstown and I wanted to stop and see what she had done, but they would not let me. ‘Time enough for that tomorrow or the next day,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to Midhurst now, and you can rest a bit.’

  I knew the sort of scenery that I should see upon the way to Midhurst from many readings of her letters, and it was just as I had expected it to be. There was no road in the usually accepted sense; she picked her way across country in the car following the general line of the tracks but avoiding the deep holes. When we came to the first creek, however, I was interested to see that they had made a sort of concrete bottom or causeway across the river bed, and this causeway was marked by two massive wooden posts upon the bank at either end. ‘We haven’t got as far as having bridges yet,’ she said. ‘But this thing is a god-send in the wet, to know that you won’t hit a boulder under water.’

  The homestead was very much as I had expected it to be, but there was a garden now in front of it, bright with flowers, and there were great ranges of log stockades or cattle pens that I had not heard about. ‘They’ve gone up in the last two years,’ Joe said. ‘We’ve got three Zebu bulls now, and you want more stockyards when you start breeding.’ His Zebu bulls were a cross between Indian cattle and English Herefords. He told me that he was keeping a small herd of dairy cows, too, and that meant more enclosures still.

  ‘How many hands have you got now?’ I asked.

  ‘Eleven white stockmen,’ he said, ‘and ten boongs. It’s almost easier to get white than black in this part of the country.’

  They would not let me walk that day, but put me in a long chair in the veranda with a cool drink, and I sat watching all the work of the station as it went on in the yard below. It was fascinating to sit there and watch it all, the white stockmen and the black stockmen, the cattle, the dogs, and the horses, and a half grown wallaby lolloping about with puppies teasing it by playing with its tail. I could have sat there indefinitely watching it all, and watching the grace of Jean moving round the house attending to her children and her Abo women. I did sit there for three days.

  She took me into town one morning, and showed me everything that she had done. She took me to the workshop first, and she made me put a scarf on before we went in because it would be cold. It was not cold as we would know cold, but it struck chilly after the warm day outside, because she kept the air-conditioner going all the year round. ‘The girls do love it so,’ she said. ‘There’s always more of them wanting to work here than I can take on, just because of that.’ They all looked very smart and pretty in their green smocks, working at the leather goods. There was a long mirror at the end of the shop, and a few pictures of hair styles and frocks cut out of illustrated magazines pinned up on the wall. ‘We change those ever
y so often,’ she said. ‘I like them to make the best of themselves.’

  The workshop stood by itself, but she had arranged her other enterprises all in a row as a little street of shops. She had built a wooden veranda over the broad tarmac pavement to shade shopgazers from the sun or the rain. Here she had the beauty parlour with an Estonian in charge, a dark, handsome middle-aged woman, beautifully got up, with two Australian girls under her. There were four private little booths, and a glass counter and display-case full of women’s things; it was all very clean and nice. Next in the row came a little shop with a battery of four Home Laundries, and three young married women sitting gossiping while they waited for their wash. Next was the greengrocer’s shop, which sold seeds and garden implements as well as fruit and vegetables, and after that the dress shop. This was quite a big place, with counters and dummys clothed in summer frocks, and I was interested to see a small, secluded part served by a middle-aged woman where the elderly could buy the clothes they were accustomed to, black skirts and flannel petticoats and coarse kitchen aprons.

  She took me across the road and showed me the cinema and the swimming-pool. It was quite a hot day and by that time I had had about enough, so she took me to the ice-cream parlour and we had a cool drink there. She had some business to attend to and she left me there for half an hour, and I sat watching the people as they came into the parlour, or as they passed on the sidewalk. There were far more women than men. All of them seemed to be pretty, and at least half of them seemed to be in the family way.

  She came back presently, and sat with me in the parlour. ‘What comes next?’ I asked. ‘Is there any end to this?’

  She laughed and touched my hand. ‘No end,’ she said. ‘I keep on badgering you for more money, don’t I? As a matter of fact, I think I can start the next one out of the profits.’

  ‘What’s that one going to be?’

  ‘A self-service grocer’s shop,’ she replied. The demand’s shifting, Noel. When we started, it was entertainment that was needed, because everyone was young and nobody was married then. The solid, sensible things weren’t wanted. What they needed then was ice-cream, and the swimming-pool, and the beauty parlour, and the cinema. They’ll still need those things, but they won’t expand so much more. What the town needs now is things for the young family. A really good grocer’s shop selling good, varied food as cheap as we can possibly get it. And then, as soon as I can start it, we must have a household store. ‘Do you know, you can’t even buy a baby’s pot in Willstown?’

  I nodded at the store opposite. ‘Doesn’t Mr Duncan sell those?’

  ‘He’s got no imagination. He only sells big ones, that’ld hold the whole baby.’

  I asked her presently, ‘How do all your goods get here? They aren’t all flown, surely?’

  She shook her head. ‘They come by train from Cairns to Forsayth, and by truck from there. There’s no proper road, of course. It makes it terribly expensive, because a truck is worn out in about two years. Bill Wakeling says the Roads Commission are considering a road from here to Mareeba and Cairns – a proper tarmac road. Of course, he wants to build it. He thinks we’ll get it inside two years, because the town’s growing so fast. I must say, it’ll be a god-send when we do. Fancy being able to drive to Cairns in a day!’

  The Land Administration Board answered our letter later on that week and suggested a meeting on the following Tuesday or Wednesday, which suited our air services. I flew down to Brisbane with Joe Harman, picking up his solicitor in Cairns, and we had a conference with the Land Administration Board, which lasted most of one day, settling the Heads of Agreement. Then Harman went back to his station and Mr Hope and I stayed on in Brisbane passing the draft of the final agreement backwards and forwards to the Land Administration Board with amendments in red and green and blue and purple ink. On top of this, I was in communication with the solicitors for Mrs Spears over the option agreement for the final purchase of Midhurst; all this kept me busy in Brisbane for nearly a fortnight. Finally I was able to agree to them both, after an exchange of cables with Lester, and brought them back to Cairns. Joe Harman signed them, and we put them in the post, and my business in Queensland was done.

  I went back to Willstown with Joe and stayed another week with them, not because there was any reason why I should do so, but for an old man’s sentiment. I sat on the veranda with Jean, studying her drawing of the layout of the self-service grocery. We discussed whether it could not be combined with the hardware store. We went into Willstown and visited the site for it, and I spent some time with Mr Carter, the Shire Clerk, discussing with him the position in regard to the leases that she held for land. She showed me the swimming-pool and we talked about the cost of tiling over the rough concrete to make it look better, and I sat for hours in the ice-cream parlour watching those beautiful young women as they pushed their prams from shop to shop.

  I asked her once if she would be coming back to England for a holiday. She hesitated, and then said gently, ‘Not for a bit, Noel. Joe and I want to take a holiday next year, but we’ve been planning to go to America. We thought we’d go to San Francisco and get an old car, and drive down the west coast into Arizona and Texas. I’m sure we’d learn an awful lot that would be useful here if we did that. Their problems must be just the same as ours, and they’ve been at it longer.’

  Jean touched me very much one evening by suggesting that I stayed out there and made my home with them. ‘You’ve nothing to go back to England for, Noel,’ she said. ‘You’re practically retired now. Why not give up Chancery Lane, give up London, and stay here with us? You know we’d love to have you.’

  It was impossible, of course; the old have their place and the young have theirs. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said. ‘I wish I could. But I’ve got sons, and grandchildren, you know. Harry will be coming home next year and we’re all hoping that he’ll get a shore appointment. He’s due for a term of duty at the Admiralty, I think.’

  She said, ‘I’m sorry, for our sake. Joe and I talked this over, and we hoped we’d be able to get you to stay with us for a long time. Make your home here with us.’

  I said quietly, ‘That was a very kind thought, Jean, but I must go back.’

  They drove me to the aeroplane, of course, to see me off. Leave-takings are stupid things, and best forgotten about as quickly as possible. I cannot even remember what she said, and it is not important anyway. I can only remember a great thankfulness that the Dakota on that service didn’t carry a stewardess so that nobody could see my face as we circled after taking off to get on course, and I saw the new buildings and bright roofs of that Gulf town for the last time.

  It is winter now, and it is nearly three months since I have been able to get out to the office or the club. My daughter-in-law Eve, Martin’s wife, has been organizing me; it was she who insisted that I should engage this nurse to sleep in the flat. They wanted me to go into some sort of nursing-home, but I won’t do that.

  I have spent the winter writing down this story, I suppose because an old man loves to dwell upon the past and this is my own form of the foible. And having finished it, it seems to me that I have been mixed up in things far greater than I realized at the time. It is no small matter to assist in the birth of a new city, and as I sit here looking out into the London mists I sometimes wonder just what it is that Jean has done; if any of us realize, even yet, the importance of her achievement.

  I wrote to her the other day and told her a queer thought that came into my head. Her money came originally from the goldfields of Hall’s Creek in West Australia, where James Macfadden made it in the last years of the last century. I suppose Hall’s Creek is derelict now, and like another Burketown or another Croydon. I think it is fitting that the gold that has been taken from those places should come back to them again in capital to make them prosperous. When I thought of that, it seemed to me that I had done the right thing with her money and that James Macfadden would have approved, although I had run contrary to th
e strict intentions of his son’s will. After all, it was James who made the money and took it away to England from a place like Willstown. I think he would have liked it when his great-niece took it back again.

  I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On the publication of this book I expect to be accused of falsifying history, especially in regard to the march and death of the homeless women prisoners. I shall be told that nothing of the sort ever happened in Malaya, and this is true. It happened in Sumatra.

  After the conquest of Malaya in 1942 the Japanese invaded Sumatra and quickly took the island. A party of about eighty Dutch women and children were collected in the vicinity of Padang. The local Japanese commander was reluctant to assume responsibility for these women and, to solve his problem, marched them out of his area; so began a trek all round Sumatra which lasted for two and a half years. At the end of this vast journey less than thirty of them were still alive.

  In 1949 I stayed with Mr and Mrs J.G. Geysel-Vonck at Palembang in Sumatra. Mrs Geysel had been a member of that party. When she was taken prisoner she was a slight, pretty girl of twenty-one, recently married; she had a baby six months old, and a very robust sense of humour. In the years that followed Mrs Geysel marched over twelve hundred miles carrying her baby, in circumstances similar to those which I have described. She emerged from this fantastic ordeal undaunted, and with her son fit and well.