A Town Like Alice (15 page)

In the morning she went with Tungku Bentara and Mat Amin to the Japanese Civil Administrator, and told her tale again. The Civil Administrator had been to the State University of California and spoke first-class American English; he was sympathetic, but declared that prisoners were nothing to do with him, being the concern of the Army. He came with them, however, to see the military commanding officer, a Colonel Matisaka, and Jean told her tale once more.

It was quite clear that Colonel Matisaka considered women prisoners to be a nuisance, and he had no intention whatsoever of diverting any portion of his force to guarding them. Left to himself he would probably have sent them marching on, but with Tungku Bentara and the Civil Administrator in his office and acquainted with the facts he could hardly do that. In the end he washed his hands of the whole thing and told the Civil Administrator to make what arrangements he thought best. The Civil Administrator told Bentara that the women could stay where they were for the time being, and Jean started back for Kuala Telang with Mat Amin. They lived there for three years.

"It was three years wasted, just chopped out of one's life," she said. She raised her head and looked at me, hesitantly. "At least-I suppose it was. I know a lot about Malays, but that's not worth much here in England."

"You won't know if it was wasted until you come to an end of your life," I said. "Perhaps not then."

She nodded. "I suppose that's right." She took up the poker and began scraping the ash from the bars of the grate. 'They were so very kind to us," she said. "They couldn't have been nicer, within the limits of what they are and what they've got. Fatimah, the girl who showed us what to do in the rice fields in those first weeks-she was a perfect dear. I got to know her very well indeed."

"Is that.where you want to go back to?" I asked.

She nodded. "I would like to do something for them, now that I've got this money. We lived with them for three years, and they did everything for us. We'd have all died before the war was ended if they hadn't taken us in and let us stay with them. And now I've got so much, and they so very, very little…"

"Don't forget you haven't got as much as all that," I said. "Travelling to Malaya is a very expensive journey."

She smiled. "I know. What I want to do for them won't cost so very much-not more than fifty pounds, if that. We had to carry water in that village-that's the women's work-and it's a fearful job. You see, the river's tidal at the village so the water's brackish; you can use it for washing in or rinsing out your clothes, but drinking water has to be fetched from the spring, nearly a mile away. We used to go for it with gourds, two in each hand with a stick between them, morning and evening-a mile there and a mile back-four miles a day. Fatimah and the other girls didn't think about it; it's what the village has done always, generation after generation."

"That's why you want to dig a well?"

She nodded. "It's something I could do for them, for the women-something that would make life easier for them, as they made life easier for us. A well right in the middle of the village, within a couple of hundred yards of every house. It's what they ought to have. I'm sure it wouldn't have to be more than about ten feet deep, because there's water all about. The water level can't be more than about ten feet down, or fifteen feet at the most. I thought if I went back there and offered to engage a gang of well-diggers to do this for them, it'll sort of wind things up. And after that I could enjoy this money with a clear conscience." She looked up at me again. "You don't think that's silly, do you?"

"No," I said. "I don't think that. The only thing is, I wish it wasn't quite so far away. Travelling there and back will make a very big hole in a year's income."

"I know that," she said. "If I run out of money, I'll take a job in Singapore or somewhere for a few months and save up a bit."

"As a matter of interest," I said, "why didn't you stay out there and get a job? You know the country so well."

She said, "I had a scunner of it, then-in 1945. We were all dying to get home. They sent three trucks for us from Kota Bahru, and we were taken to the airfield there and flown down to Singapore in a Dakota with an Australian crew. And there I met Bill Holland, and I had to tell him about Eileen, and Freddie and Jane." Her voice dropped. "All the family, except Robin; he was four years old by that time, and quite a sturdy little chap. They let me travel home with Bill and Robin, to look after Robin. He looked on me as his mother, of course."

She smiled a little. "Bill wanted to make it permanent," she said. "I couldn't do that. I couldn't have been the sort of wife he wanted."

I said nothing.

"When we landed, England was so green and beautiful," she said. "I wanted to forget about the war, and forget about the East, and grow to be an ordinary person again. I got this job with Pack and Levy and I've been there two years now- ladies' handbags and attache cases for the luxury trade, nothing to do with wars or sickness or death. I've had a happy time there, on the whole."

She was very much alone when she got home. She had cabled to her mother directly she reached Singapore; there was a long delay, and then she got a cable in reply from her Aunt Agatha in Colwyn Bay, breaking to her the news that her mother was dead. Before she left Singapore she heard that her brother Donald had died upon the Burma-Siam railway. She must have felt very much alone in the world when she regained her freedom; it seemed to me that she had shown great strength of character in refusing an offer of marriage at that time. She landed at Liverpool, and went to stay for a few weeks with her Aunt Agatha at Colwyn Bay; then she went down to London to look for a job.

I asked her why she had not got in touch with her uncle, the old man at Ayr. "Quite honestly," she said, "I forgot all about him, or if I thought of him at all I thought he was dead, too. I only saw him once, that time when I was eleven years old, and he looked about dead then. It never entered my head that he would still be alive. Mother's estate was all wound up, and there were very few of her personal papers left, because they were all in the Pagets' house in Southampton when that got blitzed. If I had thought about Uncle Douglas I wouldn't have known where he lived…"

It was still pouring with rain. We decided to give up the idea of going out that afternoon, and to have tea in my flat. She went out into my little kitchen and began getting it, and I busied myself with laying the tea table and cutting bread and butter. When she came in with the tray, I asked, "When do you think of going to Malaya, then?"

She said, "I thought I'd book my passage for the end of May, and go on working at Pack and Levy up till then," she said. "That's about another six weeks. By then I'll have enough saved up to pay my passage out and home, and I'll still have about sixty pounds I saved out of my wages in this last two years." She had been into the cost of her journey, and had found a line of intermediate class cargo ships that took about a dozen passengers for a relatively modest fare to Singapore. "I think I'll have to fly to Kota Bahru from Singapore," she said. "Malayan Airways go to Kuantan and then to Kota Bahru. I don't know how to get from Kota Bahru to Kuala Telang, but I expect there'll be something."

She was quite capable of walking it, I thought; a journey through the heart of Malaya could mean little to her now. I had had the atlas out while she had been telling me her story to see where the places were, and I looked at it again now. "You could get off the aeroplane at Kuantan," I said. "It's shorter from there."

"I know," she said. "I know it's a bit shorter. But I couldn't bear to go back there again." There was distress in her voice.

To ease the situation I said idly, "It would take me years to learn how to remember these Malay names."

"It's all right when you know what they mean," she said. "They're just like English names. Bahru means New, and Kota means a fort. It's only Newcastle, in Malay."

She went on with her work at Perivale, and I went on with mine in Chancery Lane, but I was unable to get her story out of my mind.

There is a man called Wright, a member of my club, who was in the Malayan Police and was a prisoner of the Japanese during their occupation of Malaya, I think in Changi gaol. I sat next to him at dinner one night, and I could not resist sounding him about it. "One of my clients told me an extraordinary story about Malaya the other day," I said. "She was one of a party of women that the Japanese refused to put into a camp."

He laid his knife down. "Not the party who were taken at Panong and marched across Malaya?"

"That was it," I said. "You know about them, do you?"

"Oh yes," he said. "It was a most extraordinary thing, as you say. The Japanese commanders marched them from place to place, till finally they were allowed to settle in a village on the east coast somewhere, and they lived there for the rest of the war. There was a very fine girl who was their leader; she spoke Malay fluently. She wasn't anybody notable; she'd been a shorthand typist in an office in Kuala Lumpur. A very fine type."

I nodded. "She's my client."

"Is
she! I always wondered what had happened to her. What's she doing now?"

I said dryly, "She's a shorthand typist again, working in a handbag factory at Perivale."

"Really!" He ate a mouthful or two, and then he said, "I always thought that girl ought to have got a decoration of some sort. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can give to people like that. But if she hadn't been with them, all those women and children would have died. There was no one else in the party of that calibre at all."

"I understand that half of them did die," I said.

He nodded. "I believe that's true. She got them settled down and working in the rice fields in the end, and after that they were all right."

I saw Jean Paget from time to time in the six weeks before she left this country. She booked her passage to sail from London docks on June 2nd, and she gave notice to her firm to leave at the end of May. She told me that they were rather upset about it, and they offered her a ten shilling rise at once; in view of that she had told Mr Pack about her legacy, and he had accepted the inevitable.

I made arrangements for her income for the months of July and August and September to be available to her in Singapore, and I opened an account for her with the Chartered Bank for that purpose. As the time for her departure drew closer I became worried for her, not because I was afraid that she would overspend her income, but because I was afraid she would get into some difficulty due to her expenses being higher than she thought they would be. Nine hundred a year does not go very far in these days for a person travelling about the east.

I mentioned that to her about a week before she left. "Don't forget that you're a fairly wealthy woman now," I said. "You're quite right to live within your income and, indeed, I have to see you do. But don't forget that I have fairly wide discretionary powers under your uncle's will. If you get into any difficulty, or if you really need money, let me have a cable at once. As, for example, if you should get ill."

She smiled. "That's very sweet of you," she said. "But honestly, I think I'll be all right. I'm counting upon taking a job if I find I'm running short. After all, I haven't got to get back here to England by a given date, or anything like that."

I said, "Don't stay too long away."

She smiled. "I shan't Mr Strachan," she said. "There's nothing to keep me in Malaya once I've done this thing."

She was giving up her room in Haling, of course, and she asked if she might leave a trunk and a suitcase in the box-room of my flat till she came back to England. She brought them round the day before she sailed, and with them a pair of skating boots with skates attached, which wouldn't go into the trunk. She told me then that she was only taking one suitcase as her luggage.

"But what about your tropical kit?" I asked. "Have you had that sent on?"

She smiled. "I've got it with me in the suitcase," she said. "Fifty Paludrine tablets and a hundred Sulphatriads, some repellent, and my old sarong. I'm not going out to be a lady in Malaya."

She had nobody but me to go down to the docks with her to see her off; she was very much alone in the world, and friends she had who might have liked to come were all working in jobs, and couldn't get the time off. I drove her down in a taxi. She took her journey very much as a matter of course; she seemed to have made no more preparation for a voyage half way round the world than a girl of my generation would have made for a weekend at Chislehurst. The ship was a new one and everything was bright and clean. When the steward opened the door of her cabin she stood back amazed, because he had arranged the flowers all round the little room, and there were plenty of them. "Oh Noel, look!" she said. "Just look at all the flowers!" She turned to the steward. "Wherever did they come from? Not from the Company?"

"They come in three big boxes yesterday evening," he replied. "Make a nice show, don't they, Miss?"

She swung round on me. "I believe you sent them." And then she said, "Oh, how perfectly sweet of you!"

"English flowers," I said. "Just to remind you to come back to England soon." I must have had a premonition, even then, that she was never going to come back.

Before I could realize what she was doing, she had slipped an arm round my shoulders and kissed me on the lips. "That's for the flowers, Noel," she said softly. "For the flowers, and for everything you've done for me."