双语·像爱丽丝的小镇 Chapter 3

Chapter 3

They stayed in Klang eleven days, not knowing what was to become of them. The food was bad and insufficient, and there were no shops in the vicinity: if there had been shops they could not have done much with them, because their money was now practically gone. On the twelfth day Major Nemu paraded them at half an hour's notice, allocated one corporal to look after them, and told them to walk to Port Dickson. He said that there might be a ship there to take them down to Singapore; if there was not they would be walking in the general direction of the prison camps.

That was about the middle of March 1942. From Klang to Port Dickson is about fifty miles, but by this time they were travelling more slowly than ever. It took them till the end of the month; they had to wait several days in one village because Mrs Horsefall went down with malaria and ran a temperature of a hundred and five for some time. She recovered and was walking, or rather tottering, within a week, but she never recovered her vigour and from that time onwards the leadership fell more and more upon Jean's shoulders.

By the time they reached Port Dickson their clothes were in a deplorable condition. Very few of the women had a change of any sort, because burdens had been reduced to an absolute minimum. Jean and Mrs Holland had nothing but the thin cotton frocks that they had worn since they were taken; these were now torn and ragged from washing. Jean had gone barefoot since the early stages of the march and intended to go on without shoes: she now took another step towards the costume of the Malay woman. She sold a little brooch for thirteen dollars to an Indian jeweller in Salak, and with two of the precious dollars she bought a cheap sarong.

A sarong is a skirt made of a tube of cloth about three feet in diameter; you get into it and wrap it round your waist like a towel; the surplus material falling into pleats that permit free movement. When you sleep you undo the roll around your waist and it then lies over you as a loose covering that you cannot roll out of. It is the lightest and coolest of all garments for the tropics, and the most practical, being simple to make and to wash. For a top, she cut down her cotton frock into a sort of tunic which got rid of the most tattered part, the skirt, and from that time she was cooler and more at ease than any of them. At first the other women strongly disapproved of this descent to native dress: later most of them followed her example as their clothes became worn out.

There was no haven for them at Port Dickson, and no ship. They were allowed to stay there, living under desultory guard in a copra barn, for about ten days; the Japanese commander then decided that they were a nuisance, and put them on the road to Seremban. He reasoned, apparently, that they were not his prisoners and so not his responsibility; it was the duty of those who had captured them to put them into a camp. His obvious course was to get rid of them and get them out of his area before, by their continued presence, they forced him to divert food and troops and medical supplies from the Imperial Japanese Army to sustain them.

At Siliau, between Port Dickson and Seremban, tragedy touched the Holland family, because Jane died. They had stayed for their day of rest in a rubber-smoking shed: she had developed fever during the day's march and one of the two Japanese guards they had at that time had carried her for much of the day. Their thermometer had been broken in an accident a few days before and they had now no means of telling the temperature of malaria patients, but she was very hot. They had a little quinine left and tried to give it to her, but they could not get her to take much of it till she grew too weak to resist, and then it was too late. They persuaded the Japanese sergeant to allow them to stay at Siliau rather than to risk moving the child, and Jean and Eileen Holland stayed up with her, sleepless, fighting for her life in that dim, smelly place where the rats scurried round at night and hens walked in and out by day. On the evening of the second day she died.

Mrs Holland stood it far better than Jean had expected that she would.“It's God's will, my dear,”she said quietly,“and He'll give her Daddy strength to bear it when he hears, just as He's giving us all strength to bear our trials now.”She stood dry-eyed beside the little grave, and helped to make the little wooden cross. Dry-eyed she picked the text for the cross:“Suffer little children to come unto Me”. She said quietly,“I think her Daddy would like that one.”

Jean woke that night in the darkness, and heard her weeping.

Through all this the baby, Robin, throve. It was entirely fortuitous that he ate and drank nothing but food that had been recently boiled; living on rice and soup, that happened automatically, but may have explained his relative freedom from stomach disorders. Jean carried him every day, and her own health was definitely better than when they had left Panong. She had had five days of fever at Klang, but dysentery had not troubled her for some time, and she was eating well. With the continual exposure to the sun she was getting very brown, and the baby that she carried on her hip got browner.

Seremban lies on the railway, and they had hoped that when they got there there would be a train down to Singapore. They got to Seremban about the middle of April, but there was no train for them; the railway was running in a limited fashion but probably not through to Singapore. Before very long they were put upon the road to Tampin, but not till they had lost another member of the party.

Ellen Forbes was the unmarried girl who had come out to get married and hadn't, a circumstance that Jean could well understand by the time she had lived in close contact with her for a couple of months. Ellen was a vacuous, undisciplined girl, good humoured, and much too free with Japanese troops for the liking of the other women. At Seremban they were accommodated in a schoolhouse on the outskirts of the town, which was full of soldiers. In the morning Ellen simply wasn't there, and they never saw her again.

Jean and Mrs Horsefall asked to see the officer and stated their case, that a member of their party had disappeared, probably abducted by the soldiers. The officer promised to make inquiries, and nothing happened. Two days later they received orders to march down the road to Tampin, and were moved off under guard.

They stayed at Tampin for some days, and got so little food there that they practically starved; at their urgent entreaty the local commandant sent them down under guard to Malacca, where they hoped to get a ship. But there was no ship at Malacca and the officer in charge there sent them back to Tampin. They plodded back there in despair; at Alor Gajah Judy Thomson died. To stay at Tampin meant more deaths, inevitably, so they suggested it was better for them to continue down to Singapore on foot, and a corporal was detailed to take them on the road to Gemas.

In the middle of May, at Ayer Kuning, on the way to Gemas, Mrs Horsefall died. She had never really recovered from her attack of malaria or whatever fever it was that had attacked her two months previously; she had had recurrent attacks of low fever which had made Jean wonder sometimes if it was malaria that she had had at all. Whatever it was it had made her very weak; at Ayer Kuning she developed dysentery again, and died in two days, probably of heart failure or exhaustion. The faded little woman Mrs Frith, who was over fifty and always seemed to be upon the point of death and never quite made it, took over the care of Johnnie Horsefall and it did her a world of good; from that day Mrs Frith improved and gave up moaning in the night.

They got to Gemas, three days later; here as usual in towns they were put into the schoolhouse. The Japanese town major, a Captain Nisui, came to inspect them that evening; he had known nothing about them till they appeared in his town. This was quite usual and Jean was ready for it; she explained that they were prisoners being marched to camp in Singapore.

He said,“Prisoner not go Singapore. Strict order. Where you come from?”

She told him.“We've been travelling for over two months,”she said, with the calmness borne of many disappointments.“We must get into a camp, or we shall die. Seven of us have died upon the road already—there were thirty-two when we were taken prisoner. Now there are twenty-five. We can't go on like this. We must get into camp at Singapore. You must see that.”

He said,“No more prisoner to Singapore. Very sorry for you, but strict order. Too many prisoner in Singapore.”

She said,“But, Captain Nisui, that can't mean women. That means men prisoners, surely.”

“No more prisoner to Singapore,”he said.“Strict order.”

“Well, can we stay here and make ourselves a camp, and have a doctor here?”

His eyes narrowed.“No prisoner stay here.”

“But what are we to do? Where can we go?”

“Very sad for you,”he said.“I tell you where you go tomorrow.”

She went back to the women after he had gone.“You heard all that,”she said calmly.“He says we aren't to go to Singapore after all.”

The news meant very little to the women; they had fallen into the habit of living from day to day, and Singapore was very far away.“Looks as if they don't want us anywhere,”Mrs Price said heavily.“Bobbie, if I see you teasing Amy again I'll wallop you just like your father. Straight, I will.”

Mrs Frith said,“If they'd just let us alone we could find a little place like one of them villages and live till it's all over.”

Jean stared at her.“They couldn't feed us,”she said slowly.“We depend upon the Nips for food.”But it was the germ of an idea, and she put it in the back of her mind.

“Precious little food we get,”said Mrs Frith.“I'll never forget that terrible place Tampin in all my born days.”

Captain Nisui came the next day.“You go now to Kuantan,”he said.“Woman camp in Kuantan, very good. You will be very glad.”

Jean did not know where Kuantan was. She asked,“Where is Kuantan? Is it far away?”

“Kuantan on coast,”he said.“You go there now.”

Behind her someone said,“It's hundreds of miles away. It's on the east coast.”

“Okay,”said Captain Nisui.“On east coast.”

“Can we go there by railway?”Jean inquired.

“Sorry, no railway. You walk, ten, fifteen miles each day. You get there soon. You will be very happy.”

She said quietly,“Seven of us are dead already with this marching, Captain. If you make us march to this place Kuantan more of us will die. Can we have a truck to take us there?”

“Sorry, no truck,”he said.“You get there very soon.”

He wanted them to start immediately, but it was then eleven in the morning and they rebelled. With patient negotiation Jean got him to agree that they should start at dawn next day; this was the most that she could do. She did, however, get him to provide a good supper for them that night, a sort of meat stew with the rice, and a banana each.

From Gemas to Kuantan is about a hundred and seventy miles; there is no direct road. They left Gemas in the last week of May; on the basis of their previous rate of progress Jean reckoned that it would take them six weeks to do the journey. It was by far the longest they had had to tackle; always before there had been hope of transport of some sort at the end of fifty miles or so. Now six weeks of travelling lay ahead of them, with only a vague hope of rest at the end. None of them really believed that there were prison camps for them at Kuantan.

“You made a mistake, dearie,”said Mrs Frith,“saying what you did about us staying and making a camp here. I could see he didn't like that.”

“He just wants to get rid of us,”Jean said wearily.“They don't want to bother with us—just get us out of the way.”

They left next morning with a sergeant and a private as a guard. Gemas is a railway junction and the East Coast railway runs north from there; the railway was not being used at all at that time, and there was a rumour that the track was being taken up and sent to some unknown strategic destination in the north. The women were not concerned with that; what concerned them was that they had to walk along the railway line, which meant nearly walking in the sun most of each day, and there was no possibility of getting a ride in a train.

They went on for a week, marching about ten miles every other day; then fever broke out among the children. They never really knew what it was; it started with little Amy Price, who came out in a rash and ran a high temperature, with a running nose. It may have been measles. It was impossible in the conditions of their life to keep the children segregated, and in the weeks that followed it spread from child to child. Amy Price slowly recovered, but by the time she was fit to walk again seven of the other children were down with it. There was nothing they could do except to keep the tired, sweating little faces bathed and cool, and change the soaked clothes for what fresh ones they could muster. They were at a place called Bahau when the sickness was at its height, living at the station in the ticket office and the waiting-room, and on the platform. They had bad luck because there had been a doctor in Bahau three days before they arrived, a Japanese army doctor. But he had gone on in his truck in the direction of Kuala Klawang, and though they got the headman to send runners after him they never made contact with him. So they had no help.

At Bahau four children died, Harry Collard, Susan Fletcher, Doris Simmonds, who was only three, and Freddie Holland. Jean was most concerned with Freddie, as was natural, but there was so little she could do. She guessed from the first day of fever that he was going to die; by that time she had amassed a store of sad experience. There was something in the attitude of people, even tiny children, to their illness that told when death was coming to them, a listlessness, as if they were too tired to make the effort to live. By that time they had all grown hardened to the fact of death. Grief and mourning had ceased to trouble them; death was a reality to be avoided and fought, but when it came—well, it was just one of those things. After a person had died there were certain things that had to be done, the straightening of the limbs, the grave, the cross, the entry in a diary saying who had died and just exactly where the grave was. That was the end of it; they had no energy for afterthoughts.

Jean's care now was for Mrs Holland. After Freddie was buried she tried to get Eileen to care for the baby; for the last few weeks the baby had been left to Jean to feed and tend and carry, and the had grown very much attached to it. With both the older children dead Jean gave the baby, Robin, back to its mother, not so much because she wanted to get rid of it as because she felt that an interest must be found for Eileen Holland, and the baby would supply it. But the experiment was not a great success; Eileen by that time was so weak that she could not carry the baby on the march, and she could not summon the energy to play with it. Moreover, the baby obviously preferred the younger woman to its mother, having been carried by her for so long.

“Seems as if he doesn't really belong to me,”Mrs Holland said once.“You take him, dear. He likes being with you.”From that time on they shared the baby; it got its rice and soup from Eileen, but it got its fun from Jean.

They left four tiny graves behind the signal box at Bahau and went on down the line carrying two litters of bamboo poles; the weakest children took turns in these. As was common on the journey, they found the Japanese guards to be humane and reasonable men, uncouth in their habits and mentally far removed from western ideas, but tolerant to the weaknesses of women and deeply devoted to children. For hours the sergeant would plod along carrying one child piggyback and at the same time carrying one end of the stretcher, his rifle laid beside the resting child. There was the usual language difficulty. The women by that time were acquiring a few words of Japanese, but the only one who could talk Malay fluently was Jean, and it was she who made inquiries at the villages and sometimes acted as interpreter for the Japanese.

Mrs Frith surprised Jean very much. She was a faded, anaemic little woman of over fifty. In the early stages of the journey she had been very weak and something of a nuisance to them with her continued prognostications of evil; they had trouble enough in the daily round without looking forward and anticipating more. Since she had adopted Johnnie Horsefall Mrs Frith had taken on a new lease of life; her health had improved and she now marched as strongly as any of them. She had lived in Malaya for about fifteen years; she could speak only a few words of the language but she had a considerable knowledge of the country and its diseases. She was quite happy that they were going to Kuantan.“Nice over there, it is,”she said.“Much healthier than in the west, and nicer people. We'll be all right once we get over there. You see.”

As time went on, Jean turned to Mrs Frith more and more for comfort and advice in their predicaments.

At Ayer Kring Mrs Holland came to the end of her strength. She had fallen twice on the march and they had taken turns in helping her along. It was impossible to put her on the litter; even in her emaciated state she weighed eight stone, and they were none of them strong enough by that time to carry such a load very far. Moreover, to put her on a litter meant turning a child off it, and she refused even to consider such a thing. She stumbled into the village on her own feet, but by the time she got there she was changing colour as Mrs Collard had before her, and that was a bad sign.

Ayer Kring is a small village at a railway station; there were no station buildings here, and by negotiation the headman turned the people out of one house for them, as had been done several times before. They laid Mrs Holland in a shady corner and made a pillow for her head and bathed her face; they had no brandy or any other stimulant to give her. She could not rest lying down and insisted on sitting up, so they put her in a corner where she could be supported by the walls. She took a little soup that evening but refused all food. She knew herself it was the end.

“I'm so sorry, my dear,”she whispered late in the night.“Sorry to make so much trouble for you. Sorry for Bill. If you see Bill again, tell him not to fret. And tell him not to mind about marrying again, if he can find somebody nice. It's not as if he was an old man.”

An hour or two later she said,“I do think it's lovely the way baby's taken to you. It is lucky, isn't it?”

In the morning she was still alive, but unconscious. They did what they could, which wasn't very much, but her breathing got weaker and weaker, and at about midday she died. They buried her in the Moslem village cemetery that evening.

At Ayer Kring they entered the most unhealthy district they had passed through yet. The central mountains of Malaya were now on their left, to the west of them as they marched north, and they were coming to the head waters of the Pahang river, which runs down to the east coast. Here the river spreads out into numerous tributaries, the Menkuang, the Pertang, the Belengu, and many others, and these tributaries running through flat country make a marshy place of swamps and mangroves that stretched for forty miles along their route, a country full of snakes and crocodiles, and infested with mosquitoes. By day it was steamy and hot and breathless; at night a cold wet mist came up and chilled them unmercifully.

By the time they had been two days in this country several of them were suffering from fever, a fever that did not seen quite like the malaria that they were used to, in that the temperature did not rise so high; it may have been dengue. They had little by that time to treat it with, not so much because they were short of money as because there were no drugs at all in the jungly villages that they were passing through. Jean consulted with the sergeant, who advised them to press on, and get out of this bad country as soon as possible. Jean was running a fever herself at the time and everything was moving about her in a blur; she had a cracking headache and it was difficult to focus her eyes. She consulted with Mrs Frith, who was remarkably well.

“What he says is right, dearie,”Mrs Frith declared.“We won't get any better staying in this swampy place. I think we ought to walk each day, if you ask me.”

Jean forced herself to concentrate.“What about Mrs Simmonds?”

“Maybe the soldiers would carry her, if she gets any worse. I don't know, I'm sure. It's cruel hard, but if we've got to go we'd better go and get it over. That's what I say. We shan't do any good hanging around here in this nasty place.”

They marched each day after that, stumbling along in fever, weak, and ill. The baby, Robin Holland, that Jean carried, got the fever; this was the first ailment he had had. She showed him to the headman in the village of Mentri, and his wife produced a hot infusion of some bark in a dirty coconut shell; Jean tasted it and it was very bitter, so she judged it to be a form of quinine. She gave a little to the baby and took some herself; it seemed to do them both good during the night. Before the day's march began several of the women took it, and it helped.

It took them eleven days to get through the swamps to the higher ground past Temerloh. They left Mrs Simmonds and Mrs Fletcher behind them, and little Gillian Thomson. When they emerged into the higher, healthier country and dared to stay a day to rest, Jean was very weak but the fever had left her. The baby was still alive, though obviously ill; it cried almost incessantly during its waking hours.

It was Mrs Frith who now buoyed them up, as she had depressed them in the earlier days.“It should be getting better all the time from now on,”she told them.“As we get nearer to the coast it should get better. It's lovely on the east coast, nice beaches to bathe on, and always a sea breeze. It's healthy, too.”

They came presently to a very jungly village on a hilltop; they never learned its name. It stood above the river Jengka. By this time they had left the railway and were heading more or less eastwards on a jungle track that would at some time join a main road that led down to Kuantan. This village was cool and airy, and the people kind and hospitable; they gave the women a house to sleep in and provided food and fresh fruit, and the same bark infusion that was good for fever. They stayed there for six days revelling in the fresh, cool breeze and the clear, healthy nights, and when they finally marched on they were in better shape. They left a little gold brooch that had belonged to Mrs Fletcher with the headman as payment for the food and kindness that they had received, thinking that the dead woman would not have objected to that.

Four days later, in the evening, they came to Maran. A tarmac road runs through Maran crossing the Malay peninsula from Kuantan to Kerling. The road runs through the village, which has perhaps fifty houses, a school, and a few native stops. They came out upon the road half a mile or so to the north of the village; after five weeks upon the railway track and jungle paths it overjoyed them to see evidence of civilization in this road. They walked down to the village with a fresher step. And there, in front of them, they saw two trucks and two white men working on them while Japanese guards stood by.

They marched quickly towards the trucks, which were both heavily loaded with railway lines and sleepers; they stood pointing in the direction of Kuantan. One of them was jacked up on sleepers taken from the load, and both of the white men were underneath it working on the back axle. They wore shorts and army boots without socks; their bodies were brown with sunburn and very dirty with the muck from the back axle. But they were healthy and muscular men, lean, but in good physical condition. And they were white, the first white men that the women had seen for five months.

They crowded round the trucks; their guard began to talk in staccato Japanese with the truck guards. One of the men lying on his back under the axle, shifting spanner in hand, glanced at the bare feet and the sarongs within his range of vision and said slowly,“Tell the mucking Nip to get those mucking women shifted back so we can get some light.”

Some of the women laughed, and Mrs Frith said,“Don't you go using that language to me, young man.”

The men rolled out from under the truck and sat staring at the women and the children, at the brown skins, the sarongs, the bare feet.“Who said that?”asked the man with the spanner.“Which of you speaks English?”He spoke deliberately in a slow drawl, with something of a pause between each word.

Jean said laughing,“We're all English.”

He stared at her, noting the black hair plaited in a pigtail, the brown arms and feet, the sarong, the brown baby on her hip. There was a line of white skin showing on her chest at the V of her tattered blouse.“Straits-born?”he hazarded.

“No , real English—all of us,”she said.“We're prisoners.”

He got to his feet; he was a fair-haired powerfully built man about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old.“Dinky-die?”he said.

She did not understand that.“Are you prisoners?”she asked.

He smiled slowly.“Are we prisoners?”he repeated.“Oh my word.”

There was something about this man that she had never met before.“Are you English?”she asked.

“No fear,”he said in his deliberate way.“We're Aussies.”

She said,“Are you in camp here?”

He shook his head.“We come from Kuantan,”he said.“But we're driving trucks all day, fetching this stuff down to the coast.

She said,“We're going to Kuantan, to the women's camp there.”

He stared at her.“That's crook for a start,”he said slowly.“There isn't any women's camp at Kuantan. There isn't any regular prisoner camp at all, just a little temporary camp for us because we're truck drivers. Who told you that there was a women's camp at Kuantan?”

“The Japanese told us. They're supposed to be sending us there.”She sighed.“It's just another lie.”

“The bloody Nips say anything.”He smiled slowly.“I thought you were a lot of boongs,”he said.“You say you're English, dinky-die? All the way from England?”

She nodded.“That's right. Some of us have been out here for ten or fifteen years, but we're all English.”

“And the kiddies—they all English too?”

“All of them,”she said.

He smiled slowly.“I never thought the first time that I spoke to an English lady she'd be looking like you.”

“You aren't exactly an oil painting yourself,”Jean said.

The other man was talking to a group of the women; Mrs Frith and Mrs Price were with Jean. The Australian turned to them.“Where do you come from?”he inquired.

Mrs Frith said,“We got took in Panong, over on the west coast, waiting for a boat to get away.”

“But where did you come from now?”

Jean said,“We're being marched to Kuantan.”

“Not all the way from Panong?”

She laughed shortly.“We've been everywhere—Port Swettenham, Port Dickson—everywhere. Nobody wants us. I reckon that we've walked nearly five hundred miles.”

“Oh my word,”he said.“That sounds a crook deal to me. How do you go on for tucker, if you aren't in a camp?”

She did not understand him.“Tucker?”

“What do you get to eat?”

“We stay each night in a village,”she said.“We'll have to find somewhere to stay here. Probably in a place like this it'll be the school. We eat what we can get in the village.”

“For Christ's sake,”he said.“Wait while I tell my cobber.”He swung round to the other.“You heard about the crook deal that they got?”he said.“Been walking all the time since they got taken. Never been inside a prison camp at all.”

“They've been telling me,”the other said.“The way these bloody Nips go on. Makes you chunda.”

The first man turned back to Jean.“What happens if any of you get sick?”

She said cynically,“When you get sick, you get well or you die. We haven't seen a doctor for the last three months and we've got practically no medicines left, so we mostly die. There were thirty-two of us when we were taken. Now we're seventeen.”

The Australian said softly,“Oh my word.”

Jean said,“Will you be staying here tonight?”

He said,“Will you?”

“We shall stay here,”she said.“We shall be here tomorrow too, unless they'll let us ride down on your trucks. We can't march the children every day. We walk one day and rest the next.”

He said,“If you're staying, Mrs Boong, we're staying too. We can fix this bloody axle so it will never roll again, if needs be.”He paused in slow thought.“You got no medicines?”he said.“What do you want?”

She said quickly,“Have you got any Glauber's salt?”

He shook his head.“Is that what you want?”

“We haven't got any salts at all,”she said“We want quinine, and something for all these skin diseases that the children have got. Can we get those here?”

He said slowly,“I'll have a try. Have you got any money?”

Mrs Frith snorted,“After being six months with the Japs? They took everything we had. Even our wedding rings.”

Jean said,“We've got a few little bits of jewellery left, if we could sell some of those.”

He said,“I'll have a go first, and see what I can do. You get fixed up with somewhere to sleep, and I'll see you later.”

“All right.”

She went back to their sergeant and bowed to him because that pleased him and made things easier for them. She said,“Gunso, where yasme tonight? Children must yasme. We see headman about yasme and mishi?”

He came with her and they found the headman, and negotiated for the loan of the schoolbuilding for the prisoners, and for the supply of rice for mishi. They did not now experience the blank refusals that they formerly had met when the party was thirty strong; the lesser numbers had made accommodation and food much easier for them. They settled into the school building and began the routine of chores and washing that occupied the bulk of their spare time. The news that there was no women prisoners' camp in Kuantan was what they had all secretly expected, but it was a disappointment, none the less. The novelty of the two Australians made up for this, because by that time they were living strictly from day to day.

At the trucks the Aussies got back to their work. With heads close together under the axle, the fair-haired man that Jean had talked to said to his cobber,“I never heard such a crook deal. What can we do to fix this bastard so as we stay here tonight? I said I'd try and get some medicines for them.”

They had already rectified the binding brake that had heated up the near side hub and caused the stoppage. The other said,“Take the whole bloody hub off for a dekko, 'n pull out the shaft from the diff. That makes a good show of dirty bits. Means sleeping in the trucks.”

“I said I'd try and get some medicines.”They worked on for a little.

“How you going to do that?”

“Petrol, I suppose. That's easiest.”

It was already growing dark when they extracted four feet of heavy metal shafting, splined at both ends, from the back axle; dripping with black oil they showed it to the Japanese corporal in charge of them as evidence of their industry.“Yasme here tonight,”they said. The guard was suspicious, but agreed; indeed, he could do nothing else. He went off to arrange for rice for them, leaving them in charge of the private. Who was with him.

On the excuse of a benjo, the fair-haired man left the trucks and in the half light retired behind a house. He slipped quickly down behind a row of houses, and came out into the street a couple of hundred yards down, towards the end of the village. Here there was a Chinaman who ran a decrepit bus; the Australian had noted this place on various journeys through Maran; they plied regularly up and down this road.

In his deliberate manner he said quietly,“Johnnie, you buy petrol? How much you give?”It is extraordinary how little barrier an unknown language makes between a willing buyer and a willing seller. At one point in the negotiation they resorted to the written word, and the Australian wrote GLAUBER'S SALT and QUININE and SKIN DISEASE OINTMENT in block letters on a scrap of wrapping paper.

He slunk back behind the houses carrying three two-gallon cans and a length of rubber hose, which he hid behind the latrine. He came back to the trucks presently, ostentatiously buttoning his shorts.

In the darkness, early in the night, he came to the school-house; it may have been about ten o'clock. One of the Japanese soldiers was supposed to be on guard all night, but in the five weeks that they had been with this pair of guards the women had not shown the slightest inclination to escape, and their guards had long given up watching them at night. The Australian had made sure where they were, however, and when he had seen them squatting with the truck guards he came silently to the school.

At the open door he paused, and said quietly,“Which of you ladies was I talking to this afternoon? The one with the baby.”

Jean was asleep; they woke her and she pulled up her sarong and slipped her top on, and came to the door. He had several little packages for her.“That's quinine,”he said.“I can get more of that if you want it. I couldn't get Glauber's, but this is what the Chinese take for dysentery. It's all written in Chinese, but what he says it means is three of these leaves powdered up in warm water every four hours. That'll be for a grown-up person. If it's any good, keep the label and maybe you could get some more in a Chinese drug shop. I got this Zam-Buk for the skin, and there's more of that if you want it.”

She took them gratefully from him.“That's marvellous,”she said softly.“How much did it all cost?”

“That's all right,”he said in his deliberate manner.“The Nips paid, but they don't know it.”

She thanked him again.“What are you doing here?”she asked.“Where are you going with the trucks?”

“Kuantan,”he said.“We should be back there tonight, but Ben Leggatt—he's my cobber—he got the truck in bits so we had to give it away. Get down there tomorrow, or we might stretch it another day if it suits, though it'ld be risky, I think.”He told her that there were six of them driving six trucks for the Japanese; they drove regularly from Kuantan up-country to a place upon the railway called Jerantut, a distance of about a hundred and thirty miles. They would drive up one day and load the truck with sleepers and railway lines taken up from the track, and drive back to Kuantan the next day, where the railway material was unloaded on to the quayside to be taken away by ship to some unknown destination.“Building another railway somewhere, I suppose,”he said. A hundred and thirty miles is a long way to drive a heavily loaded truck in a day in tropical conditions, and they sometimes failed to reach Kuantan before dark; when that happened they spent the night in a village. Their absence would not be remarked particularly at Kuantan.

He had been taken somewhere in Johore, and had been driving trucks from Kuantan for about two months.“Better than being in a camp,”he said.

She sat down on the top step of the three that led up to the school, and he squatted down before her on the ground. His manner of sitting intrigued her, because he sat down on one heel somewhat in the manner of a native, but with his left leg extended.“Are you a truck driver in Australia?”she asked.

“No bloody fear,”he said.“I'm a ringer.”

She asked,“What's a ringer?”

“A stockman,”he said.“I was born in Queensland out behind Cloncurry, and my people, they're all Queenslanders. My dad, he came from London, from a place called Hammersmith: He used to drive a cab and so he knew about horses, and he came out to Queensland to work for Cobb and Co., and met Ma. But I've not been back to the Curry for some time. I was working in the Territory over to the west, on a station called Wollara. That's about a hundred and ten miles south-west of the Springs.”

She smiled.“Where's the Springs, then?”

“Alice,”he said.“Alice Springs. Right in the middle of Australia, half way between Darwin and Adelaide.”

She said,“I thought the middle of Australia was all desert?”

He was concerned at her ignorance.“Oh my word,”he said deliberately.“Alice is a bonza place. Plenty of water in Alice; people living there, they leave the sprinkler on all night, watering the lawn. That's right, they leave the sprinkler on all night. Course, the Territory's dry in most parts, but there's usually good feed along the creeks. Come to that, there's water all over if you look for it. You take a creek that only runs in the wet, now, say a couple of months in the year, or else not that. You get a sandy billabong, and you'll get water there by digging not a foot below the surface, like as not—even in the middle of the dry.”His slow, even tones were strangely comforting.“You go to a place like that and you'll find little diggings all over in the sand, where the kangaroos and euros have dug for water. They know where to go. There's water all over in the outback, but you've got to know where to find it.”

“What do you do at this place Wollara?”she asked.“Do you look after sheep?”

He shook his head.“You don't find sheep around the Alice region,”he said.“It'd be too hot for them. Wollara is a cattle station.”

“How many cattle have you got?”

“About eighteen thousand when I come away,”he said.“It goes up and down, according to the wet, you know.”

“Eighteen thousand? How big is it?”

“Wollara? About two thousand seven hundred.”

“Two thousand seven hundred acres,”she said.“That's a big place.”

He stared at her.“Not acres,”he said.“Square miles. Wollara's two thousand seven hundred square miles.”

She was startled.“But is that all one place—one farm, I mean?”

“It's one station,”he replied.“One property.”

“But however many of you does it take to run it?”

His mind ran lovingly around the well-remembered scene.“There's Mr Duveen, Tommy Duveen —he's the manager, and then me—I'm the head stockman, or I was. Tommy said he'd keep a place for me when I got back. I'd like to get back to Wollara again, one day...”He mused a little.“We had three other ringers—whites,”he said.“Then there was Happy, and Moonlight, and Nugget, and Snowy, and Tarmac...”He thought for a minute.“Nine boongs we had,”he said.“That's all.”

“Nine what?”

“Black boys—black stockmen. Abos.”

“But that's only thirteen men,”she said.

“That's right. Fourteen if you count Mr Duveen.”

“But can fourteen men look after all those cattle?”she asked.

“Oh yes,”he said thoughtfully.“Wollara is an easy station, in a way, because it hasn't got any fences. It's fences make the work. We've got the Palmer River and the Levi Range to the north, and the sand country over to the west; the cattle don't go there. Then there's the Kernot Range to the south and Mount Ormerod and the Twins to the east. Fourteen men is all right for a station like that; it would be easier if we had more whites, but you can't get them. These bloody boongs, they're always going walkabout.”

“What's that?”she asked.

“Walkabout? Why, an Abo ringer, he'll come up one day and he'll say, ‘Boss, I go walkabout now.’ You can't keep him. He'll leave the station and go wandering off just in a pair of pants and an old hat with a gun if he's got one, or a spear and a throwing stick, maybe, and he'll be away two or three months.”

“But where does he go to?”she asked.

“Just travels. They go a long way on a walkabout—oh my word,”he said.“Four or five hundred miles, maybe. Then when he's had enough, he'll come back to the station and join up for work again. But the trouble with the boongs is, you never know if they'll be there next week.”

There was a short silence; they sat quietly in the tropic night together on the steps of the atap schoolhouse, exiles far from their homes. Over their heads the flying foxes swept in the moonlight with a dry rustling of leathery wings.“Eighteen thousand cattle...”she said thoughtfully.

“More or less,”he said.“Get a good wet, and it'll maybe rise to twenty-one or twenty-two thousand. Then you get a dry year, and it'll go right down to twelve or thirteen thousand. I reckon we lose about three thousand every year by drought.”

“But can't you get them to water?”

He smiled slowly.“Not with fourteen men. There's enough cattle die of thirst each year in the Territory and Northern Queensland to feed the whole of England. Course, the horses make it worse on Wollara.”

“Horses?”

“Oh my word,”he said.“We've got about three thousand brumbies, but you can't do nothing with them—they're vermin. Wollera used to be a horse station years ago, selling horses to the Indian Army, but you can't sell horses now. We use a few, of course—maybe a hundred, with packhorses and that. You can't get rid of them except by shooting, and you'll never get a ringer to shoot horses. They eat the feed the cattle ought to get, and spoil it, too. Cattle don't like feeding where a horse has been.”

She asked,“How big is Wollara—how long, and how wide?”

He said,“Oh, I'd say about ninety miles from east to west, and maybe forty-five to fifty, north to south, at the widest part. But it's a good station to manage, because the homestead is near the middle, so it's not so far in any one way. Over to the Kernot Range is the furthest; that's about sixty miles.”

“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 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 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 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 that 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 cooperation 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.”

He put up two fingers.“Two.”

She went up in a sheet of flame.“One, not two, gunso,”she said.“This is a present for you, because you have been kind and carried children, and allowed us to walk slowly. Five only, five.”She showed him the sack, and he counted them carefully. It was only then that she took note of the fact that the birds were rather unusually large for the East, and jet black all over.“One for you, four for us.”

He let the sack fall, and nodded; then he smiled at her, tucked the cockerel under his arm, and walked off with it towards the kitchen where his meal was in preparation.

That day there was a considerable row in progress at Kuantan. The local commanding officer was a Captain Sugamo, who was executed by the Allied War Crimes Tribunal in the year 1946 after trial for atrocities committed at Camp 302 on the Burma-Siam railway in the years 1943 and 1944: his duty in Kuantan at that time was to see to the evacuation of the railway material from the eastern railway in Malaya and to its shipment to Siam. He lived in the house formerly occupied by the District Commissioner of Kuantan, and the District Commissioner had kept a fine little flock of about twenty black Leghorn fowls, specially imported from England in 1939. When Captain Sugamo woke up that morning, five of his twenty black Leghorns were missing, with a green sack that had once held the mail for the District Commissioner, and was now used to store grain for the fowls.

Captain Sugamo was a very angry man. He called the Military Police and set them to work; their suspicion fell at once upon the Australian truck drivers, who had a record for petty larceny in that district. Moreover, they had considerable opportunities, because the nature of their work allowed them a great deal of freedom; trucks had to be serviced and refuelled, often in the hours of darkness when it was difficult to ascertain exactly where each man might be. Their camp was searched that day for any sign of telltale feathers, or the sack, but nothing was discovered but a cache of tinned foods and cigarettes stolen from the quartermaster's store.

Captain Sugamo was not satisfied and he became more angry than ever. A question of face was now involved, because this theft from the commanding officer was a clear insult to his position, and so to the Imperial Japanese Army. He ordered a search of the entire town of Kuantan: on the following day every house was entered by troops working under the directions of the military Police to look for signs of the black feathers or the green sack. It yielded no result.

Brooding over the insults levelled at his uniform, the captain ordered the barracks of the company of soldiers under his command to be searched. There was no result from that.

There remained one further avenue. Three of the trucks, driven by Australians, were up-country on the road to or from Jerantut. Next day Sugamo dispatched a light truck up the road manned by four men of his military police, to search these trucks and to interrogate the drivers and the guards, and anybody else who might have knowledge of the matter. Between Pohoi and Blat they came upon a crowd of women and children walking down the road loaded with bundles; ahead of them marched a Japanese sergeant with his rifle slung over one shoulder and a green sack over the other. The truck stopped with a squeal of brakes.

For the next two hours Jean stuck to her story, that the Australian had given her money and she had bought the fowls from Limau. They put her through a sort of third degree there on the road, with an insistent reiteration of questions: when they felt that her attention was wandering they slapped her face, kicked her shins, or stamped on her bare feet with army boots. She stuck to it with desperate resolution, knowing that it was a rotten story, knowing that they disbelieved her, not knowing what else she could say. At the end of that time a convoy of three trucks came down the road; the driver of the second one, Joe Harman, was recognized by the sergeant immediately, and brought before Jean at the point of the bayonet. The sergeant of the Military Police said,“Is this man?”

Jean said desperately,“I've been telling them about the four dollars you gave me to buy the chickens with, Joe, but they won't believe me.”

The military policeman said,“You steal chickens from the shoko. Here is bag.”

The ringer looked at the girl's bleeding face and at her bleeding feet.“Leave her alone, you bloody mucking bastards,”he said angrily in his slow Queensland drawl.“I stole those mucking chickens, and I gave them to her. So what?”

Darkness was closing down in my London sitting-room, the early darkness of a stormy afternoon. The rain still beat upon the window. The girl sat staring into the fire, immersed in her sad memories.“They crucified him,”she said quietly.“They took us all down to Kuantan, and they nailed his hands to a tree, and beat him to death. They kept us there, and made us look on while they did it.”