by Nevil Shute
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 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 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 kno
w 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.’