by Nevil Shute
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 hill-top; 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 shops. 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 civilisation 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 a 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 enquired.
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 as 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 school building 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 schoolhouse; 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.”<
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“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’ld 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? But 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.