A Town Like Alice (12 page)

"Sixty miles from the homestead? That's where you live?"

"That's right."

"Are there any other homesteads on it?"

He stared at her. "There's only the one homestead on each station. Some have an outstation, a shack of some kind where the boys can leave blankets and maybe a little tucker, but not many."

"How long does it take you to get to the furthest point, then-to the Kernot Range?"

"Over to the Range? Oh well, to go there and come back might take about a week. That's with horses; in a utility you might do it in a day and a half. But horses are best, although they're a bit slow. You never take a packhorse faster'n a walk, not if you can help it. It isn't like you see it on the movies, people galloping their horses everywhere-oh my word. You'd soon wear out a horse if you used him that way in the Territory."

They sat together for over an hour, talking quietly at the entrance to the schoolhouse. At the end the ringer got up from his strange posture on the ground, and said, "I mustn't stay any longer, case those Nips come back and start creating. My cobber, too-he'll be wondering what happened to me. I left him to boil up."

Jean got to her feet. "It's been terribly kind of you to get us these things. You don't know what they mean to us. Tell me, what's your name?"

"Joe Harman," he said. "Sergeant Harman-Ringer Harman, some of them call me." He hesitated. "Sorry I called you Mrs Boong today," he said awkwardly. "It was a silly kind of joke."

She said, "My name's Jean Paget."

'That sounds like a Scotch name."

"It is," she said. "I'm not Scotch myself, but my mother came from Perth."

"My mother's family was Scotch," he said. "They came from Inverness."

She put out her hand. "Goodnight, Sergeant," she said. "It's been lovely talking to another white person."

He took her hand; there was great comfort for her in his masculine handshake. "Look, Mrs Paget," he said. "I'll try if I can get the Nips to let your party ride down on the truck with us. If the little bastards won't wear it, then we'll have to give it away. In that case I'll see you on the road again before you get to Kuantan, and I'll make darn sure there's something crook with the truck. What else do you want?"

"Soap," she said. "Could you possibly get us soap?"

"Should be able to," he said.

"We've got no soap at all," she observed. "I've got a little gold locket that one of the women had who died, a thing with a bit of hair in it. I was going to see if I could sell that here, and get some soap."

"Keep it," he said. "I'll see you get soap."

"We want that more than anything, now that you've got these medicines for us," she said.

"You'll have it." He hesitated, and then said, "Sorry I talked so much, boring you with the outback and all that. There's times when you get down a bit-can't make yourself believe you'll ever see it again."

"I wasn't bored," she said softly. "Goodnight, Sergeant."

"Goodnight."

In the morning Jean showed the women what she had got.

"I heard you talking to him ever so long," Mrs Price said. "Nice young man, I'd say."

"He's a very homesick young man," Jean said. "He loves talking about the cattle station he comes from."

"Homesick!" Mrs Price said. "Aren't we all?"

The Australians had a smart argument with their guards 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 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 knew 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. 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 said, "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 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?"