by Nevil Shute
‘As a matter of interest,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you stay out there and get a job? You know the country so well,’
She said, ‘I had a scunner of it, then – in 1945. We were all dying to get home. They sent three trucks for us from Kota Bahru, and we were taken to the airfield there and flown down to Singapore in a Dakota with an Australian crew. And there I met Bill Holland, and I had to tell him about Eileen, and Freddie and Jane.’ Her voice dropped. ‘All the family, except Robin; he was four years old by that time, and quite a sturdy little chap. They let me travel home with Bill and Robin, to look after Robin. He looked on me as his mother, of course.’
She smiled a little. ‘Bill wanted to make it permanent,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t have been the sort of wife he wanted.’
I said nothing.
‘When we landed, England was so green and beautiful,’ she said. ‘I wanted to forget about the war, and forget about the East, and grow to be an ordinary person again. I got this job with Pack and Levy and I’ve been there two years now – ladies’ handbags and attaché cases for the luxury trade, nothing to do with wars or sickness or death. I’ve had a happy time there, on the whole.’
She was very much alone when she got home. She had cabled to her mother directly she reached Singapore; there was a long delay, and then she got a cable in reply from her Aunt Agatha in Colwyn Bay, breaking to her the news that her mother was dead. Before she left Singapore she heard that her brother Donald had died upon the Burma-Siam railway. She must have felt very much alone in the world when she regained her freedom; it seemed to me that she had shown great strength of character in refusing an offer of marriage at that time. She landed at Liverpool, and went to stay for a few weeks with her Aunt Agatha at Colwyn Bay; then she went down to London to look for a job.
I asked her why she had not got in touch with her uncle, the old man at Ayr. ‘Quite honestly,’ she said, ‘I forgot all about him, or if I thought of him at all I thought he was dead, too. I only saw him once, that time when I was eleven years old, and he looked about dead then. It never entered my head that he would still be alive. Mother’s estate was all wound up, and there were very few of her personal papers left, because they were all in the Pagets’ house in Southampton when that got blitzed. If I had thought about Uncle Douglas I wouldn’t have known where he lived …’
It was still pouring with rain. We decided to give up the idea of going out that afternoon, and to have tea in my flat. She went out into my little kitchen and began getting it, and I busied myself with laying the tea table and cutting bread and butter. When she came in with the tray, I asked, ‘When do you think of going to Malaya, then?’
She said, ‘I thought I’d book my passage for the end of May, and go on working at Pack and Levy up till then,’ she said. ‘That’s about another six weeks. By then I’ll have enough saved up to pay my passage out and home, and I’ll still have about sixty pounds I saved out of my wages in this last two years.’ She had been into the cost of her journey, and had found a line of intermediate class cargo ships that took about a dozen passengers for a relatively modest fare to Singapore. ‘I think I’ll have to fly to Kota Bahru from Singapore,’ she said. ‘Malayan Airways go to Kuantan and then to Kota Bahru. I don’t know how I’ll get from Kota Bahru to Kuala Telang, but I expect there’ll be something.’
She was quite capable of walking it, I thought; a journey through the heart of Malaya could mean little to her now. I had had the atlas out while she had been telling me her story to see where the places were, and I looked at it again now. ‘You could get off the aeroplane at Kuantan,’ I said. ‘It’s shorter from there.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know it’s a bit shorter. But I couldn’t bear to go back there again.’ There was distress in her voice.
To ease the situation I said idly, ‘It would take me years to learn how to remember these Malay names.’
‘It’s all right when you know what they mean,’ she said. ‘They’re just like English names. Bahru means New, and Kota means a fort. It’s only Newcastle, in Malay.’
She went on with her work at Perivale, and I went on with mine in Chancery Lane, but I was unable to get her story out of my mind. There is a man called Wright, a member of my club, who was in the Malayan Police and was a prisoner of the Japanese during their occupation of Malaya, I think in Changi gaol. I sat next to him at dinner one night, and I could not resist sounding him about it. ‘One of my clients told me an extraordinary story about Malaya the other day,’ I said. ‘She was one of a party of women that the Japanese refused to put into a camp.’
He laid his knife down. ‘Not the party who were taken at Panong and marched across Malaya?’
‘That was it,’ I said. ‘You know about them, do you?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘It was a most extraordinary thing, as you say. The Japanese commanders marched them from place to place, till finally they were allowed to settle in a village on the east coast somewhere, and they lived there for the rest of the war. There was a very fine girl who was their leader; she spoke Malay fluently. She wasn’t anybody notable; she’d been a shorthand typist in an office in Kuala Lumpur. A very fine type.’
I nodded. ‘She’s my client.’
‘Is she! I always wondered what had happened to her. What’s she doing now?’
I said dryly, ‘She’s a shorthand typist again, working in a handbag factory at Perivale.’
‘Really!’ He ate a mouthful or two, and then he said, ‘I always thought that girl ought to have got a decoration of some sort. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can give to people like that. But if she hadn’t been with them, all those women and children would have died. There was no one else in the party of that calibre at all.’
‘I understand that half of them did die,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I believe that’s true. She got them settled down and working in the rice fields in the end, and after that they were all right.’
I saw Jean Paget from time to time in the six weeks before she left this country. She booked her passage to sail from London docks on June 2nd, and she gave notice to her firm to leave at the end of May. She told me that they were rather upset about it, and they offered her a ten shilling rise at once; in view of that she had told Mr Pack about her legacy, and he had accepted the inevitable.
I made arrangements for her income for the months of July and August and September to be available to her in Singapore, and I opened an account for her with the Chartered Bank for that purpose. As the time for her departure drew closer I became worried for her, not because I was afraid that she would overspend her income, but because I was afraid she would get into some difficulty due to her expenses being higher than she thought they would be. Nine hundred a year does not go very far in these days for a person travelling about the east.
I mentioned that to her about a week before she left. ‘Don’t forget that you’re a fairly wealthy woman now,’ I said. ‘You’re quite right to live within your income and, indeed, I have to see you do. But don’t forget that I have fairly wide discretionary powers under your uncle’s will. If you get into any difficulty, or if you really need money, let me have a cable at once. As, for example, if you should get ill.’
She smiled. ‘That’s very sweet of you,’ she said. ‘But honestly, I think I’ll be all right. I’m counting upon taking a job if I find I’m running short. After all, I haven’t got to get back here to England by a given date, or anything like that.’ I said, ‘Don’t stay too long away.’
She smiled. ‘I shan’t Mr Strachan,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to keep me in Malaya once I’ve done this thing.’
She was giving up her room in Ealing, of course, and she asked if she might leave a trunk and a suitcase in the box-room of my flat till she came back to England. She brought them round the day before she sailed, and with them a pair of skating boots with skates attached, which wouldn’t go into the trunk. She told me then that she was only taking one sui
tcase as her luggage.
‘But what about your tropical kit?’ I asked. ‘Have you had that sent on?’
She smiled. ‘I’ve got it with me in the suitcase,’ she said. ‘Fifty Paludrine tablets and a hundred Sulphatriads, some repellent, and my old sarong. I’m not going out to be a lady in Malaya.’
She had nobody but me to go down to the docks with her to see her off; she was very much alone in the world, and friends she had who might have liked to come were all working in jobs, and couldn’t get the time off. I drove her down in a taxi. She took her journey very much as a matter of course; she seemed to have made no more preparation for a voyage half way round the world than a girl of my generation would have made for a weekend at Chislehurst. The ship was a new one and everything was bright and clean. When the steward opened the door of her cabin she stood back amazed, because he had arranged the flowers all round the little room, and there were plenty of them. ‘Oh Noel, look!’ she said. ‘Just look at all the flowers!’ She turned to the steward. ‘Wherever did they come from? Not from the Company?’
‘They come in three big boxes yesterday evening,’ he replied. ‘Make a nice show, don’t they, Miss?’
She swung round on me. ‘I believe you sent them.’ And then she said, ‘Oh, how perfectly sweet of you!’
‘English flowers,’ I said. ‘Just to remind you to come back to England soon.’ I must have had a premonition, even then, that she was never going to come back.
Before I could realize what she was doing, she had slipped an arm round my shoulders and kissed me on the lips. ‘That’s for the flowers, Noel,’ she said softly. ‘For the flowers, and for everything you’ve done for me.’ And I was so dumbfounded and confused that all I could find to say to her was, ‘I’ll have another of those when you come back.’
I didn’t wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly. I went back in the taxi to my flat alone, and I remember that I stood for a long time at the window of my room watching the ornamented wall of the stables opposite and thinking of her fine new steamer going down the river past Gravesend and Tilbury, past Shoebury and the North Foreland, taking her away. And then I woke myself up and went and shifted her trunk and her suitcase to a corner of the box-room by themselves, and I stood for some time with her boots and skates in my hand, personal things of hers, wondering where they had better go. Finally I took them to my bedroom and put them in the bottom of my wardrobe, because I should never have forgiven myself if they had been stolen. She was just such a girl as one would have liked to have for a daughter, but we never had a daughter at all.
She travelled across half the world in her tramp steamer and she wrote to me from most of the ports she called at, from Marseilles and Naples, from Alexandria and Aden, from Colombo, from Rangoon, and from Penang. Wright was always very interested in her because he had known about her in Malaya, and I got into the habit of carrying her latest letter about with me and telling him about her voyage and how she was getting on. He knew the British Adviser to the Raja at Kota Bahru quite well, a Mr Wilson-Hays, and I got him to write out to Wilson-Hays by air mail telling him about Jean Paget and asking him to do what he could for her. He told me that that was rather necessary, because there was nowhere a lady could stay in Kota Bahru except with one of the British people who were living there. We got a very friendly letter back from Wilson-Hays saying that he was expecting her, and I was able to get a letter out to her by air mail to meet her at the Chartered Bank telling her what we had done.
She only stayed one night in Singapore, and took the morning plane to Kota Bahru; the Dakota wandered about all over Malaya calling at various places, and put her down upon the air-strip at Kota Bahru early in the afternoon. She got out of the Dakota wearing the same light grey coat and skirt in which she had left London, and Wilson-Hays was there himself to meet the aeroplane, with his wife.
I met Wilson-Hays at the United University Club a year later, when he was on leave. He was a tall, dark, quiet man with rather a long face. He said that she had been a little embarrassed to find that he had come to the airstrip to meet her personally; she did not seem to realize that she was quite a well-known person in that part of Malaya. Wilson-Hays knew all about her long before we wrote to him although, of course, he had heard nothing of her since the end of the war. He had sent word to Mat Amin when he got our letter to tell him that she was coming back to see them, and he had arranged to lend her his jeep with a driver to take her the hundred miles or so to Kuala Telang. I thought that very decent of him, and I told him so. He said that the prestige of the British was higher in the Kuala Telang district after the war was over than it was before, due solely to the presence of this girl and her party; he thought she’d earned the use of a jeep for a few days.
She stayed in the Residency two nights, and bought a few simple articles in the native shops. When she left in the jeep next morning she was wearing native clothes; she left her suitcase and most of her things with Mrs Wilson-Hays. She took with her only what a native woman of good class would take; she wore a faded old blue and white chequered sarong with a white coatee. She wore sandals as a concession to the softness of her feet, and she carried a plain tan Chinese type umbrella as a sunshade. She had done her hair up on top of her head in the native style with a large comb in the middle of it. She carried a small palm-leaf basket, but Mrs Wilson-Hays told her husband there was very little in it; she took a toothbrush but no toothpaste; she took a towel and a cake of antiseptic soap and a few drugs. She took one change of clothes, a new sarong and a flowered cotton top to match; she took three small Woolworth brooches and two rings as little presents for her friends, but she took no cosmetics. That was about all she had.
‘I thought her very wise to go like that,’ said Wilson-Hays. ‘If she had gone dressed as an Englishwoman she’d have made them embarrassed. Some of the English residents were quite upset when they heard she’d gone off in native dress – old school tie, and letting down the side, and all that sort of thing. I must say, when I saw her go I thought it was rather a good thing to do.’ He paused. ‘After all, it’s how she was dressed all through the war, and nobody talks about her letting down the side then.’
It is a long day in a jeep from Kota Bahru to Kuala Telang; the roads are very poor, and there are four main rivers to be crossed which necessitate ferrying the jeep over in a boat, apart from a large number of fords. It took her fourteen hours to cover the hundred miles, and it was dark when they drove into Kuala Telang. There was a buzz of excitement as the jeep drove through the shadowy village, and people came out of their houses doing up their sarongs; there was a full moon that night, so that there was light enough to see to drive. They stopped in front of the headman’s house, and she got out of the jeep a little wearily, and went to him, and put her hands up in the praying gesture, and said in Malay, ‘I have come back, Mat Amin, lest you should think the white mems have forgotten all about you when their need is past.’
He said, ‘We have thought and talked about you ever since you went.’ And then there were people thronging about them, and she saw Fatimah approaching with a baby in her arms and a toddler hanging on to her sarong, and she pushed through the crowd and took her by the hand, and said, ‘It is too long since we met.’ And there was Raihana, and Safirah binti Yacob, and Safirah binti Taib, and little Ibrahim who squinted, now grown into a young man, and his brother Samat, and old Zubeidah, and Meriam, and many others, some of whom she did not know, because the men had come back from the labour gangs soon after she left Malaya, and there were a number of new faces.
Fatimah was married to a young man called Derahman bin Ismail, and she brought him forward and presented him to the white mem; Jean bowed before him and wished that she had brought a shawl to pull over her face, as would have been polite when being introduced to a strange man. She put her hand up to her face, and said, ‘Excuse me that I have no veil.’ He bowed to her and said, ‘It is no matter,’ and Fatimah broke in and said,
‘He knows and everybody knows that the white mems never veiled their faces when they lived with us, because different people have different ways. Oh Djeen, we are so happy that you have come back.’
She made arrangements with Mat Amin for the accommodation of the driver, and then went with Fatimah to her husband’s house. They asked if she had eaten, and she said no, and they made her a supper of rice and blachan, the highly-spiced paste of ripe prawns and fish that the Malays preserve in an upended concrete drain pipe. And presently, tired out, she made a pillow of her palm-leaf bag and lay down on a mat as she had done a thousand times before, and loosened the sarong around her waist, and slept. It would not be entirely accurate to say that she slept well upon the floor after sleeping in a bed for three years. She woke many times throughout the night, and listened to the noises of the night, and watched the moonlight creep around the house, and she was happy.
She had a talk with Fatimah and Meriam and old Zubeidah next morning, squatting round the cooking-pots behind the house out of the way of the men. ‘Every day that I have been away I have thought of this place,’ she said; it was not precisely true, but near enough. ‘I have thought of you all living and working as I lived and worked. I was working in England, in an office at books in the way that women have to work in my country, because, as you know, I am a poor woman and I have had to work all my life to earn my living till I find a husband who suits me, and I am very particular.’ The women laughed, and old Zubeidah said, ‘It is very strange that a woman should earn her living in that way.’
Meriam said, ‘There is a woman of our people working in the bank at Kuala Rakit. I saw her through the window. She was doing something with her fingers on a machine, and it went clock-click-click.’
Jean nodded. ‘That is how I earn my living in my country, working a machine like that to make a printed letter for the Tuan. But recently my uncle died; he lived far away from me and I have only met him once, but he had no other relatives and I inherited his money, so that now I need not work unless I want to.’ A murmur of appreciation went around the women. Two or three more had drifted up to enlarge the circle. ‘And now having money of my own for the first time in my life, I thought more of you here in Kuala Telang than ever before, and of your kindness to us when we lived with you as prisoners. And it came to me that I should give a thank-offering to this place, and that this thankoffering should be a present from a woman to the women of Kuala Telang, nothing to do with the men.’