Читать книгу A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute Norway - Страница 6

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I suppose there was a long pause after she said that. I remember being completely taken aback, and seeking refuge in my habit of saying nothing when you don’t know what to say. She must have felt reproof in my silence, I suppose, because she leaned towards me, and she said, “I know it’s a funny thing to want to do. May I tell you about it?”

I said, “Of course. Is this something to do with your experiences in the war?”

She nodded. “I’ve never told you about that. It’s not that I mind talking about it, but I hardly ever think about it now. It all seems so remote, as if it was something that happened to another person, years ago—something that you’d read in a book. As if it wasn’t me at all.”

“Isn’t it better to leave it so?”

She shook her head. “Not now, now that I’ve got this money.” She paused. “You’ve been so very kind to me,” she said. “I do want to try and make you understand.”

Her life, she said, had fallen into three parts, the first two so separate from the rest that she could hardly reconcile them with her present self. First, she had been a schoolgirl living with her mother in Southampton. They lived in a small, three-bedroomed house in a suburban street. There had been a period before that when they had all lived in Malaya, but they had left Malaya for good when she was eleven and her brother Donald was fourteen, and she had only confused memories of that earlier time. Apparently Arthur Paget had been living alone in Malaya when he met his death, his wife having brought the children home.

They lived the life of normal suburban English children, school and holidays passing in a gentle rhythm with the one great annual excitement of three weeks holiday in August in the Isle of Wight, at Seaview or at Freshwater. One thing differentiated them slightly from other families, in that they all spoke Malay. The children had learned it from the amah, of course, and their mother encouraged them to continue talking it in England, first as a joke and as a secret family language, but later for a very definite reason. When Arthur Paget drove his car into the tree near Ipoh he was travelling on the business of his company, and his widow became entitled to a pension under the company scheme. He had been a competent and a valuable man. The directors of the Kuala Perak Plantation Company, linking compassion with their quest for first-class staff, wrote to the widow offering to keep a position for the boy Donald as soon as he became nineteen. This was a good opening and one that they all welcomed; it meant that Donald was headed for Malaya and for rubber-planting as a career. The Malay language became a matter of importance in giving him a good start, for very few boys of nineteen going to the East for their first job can speak an Oriental language. That shrewd Scotswoman, their mother, saw to it that the children did not forget Malay.

Jean had liked Southampton well enough, and she had had a happy childhood there in a gentle orbit of home, school, the Regal cinema, and the ice-skating rink. Of all these influences the one that she remembered best was the ice rink, connected in her mind inevitably with Waldteufel’s Skaters Waltz. “It was a lovely place,” she said, staring reminiscently into the fire. “I suppose it wasn’t much, really—it was a wooden building, I think, converted out of something that had been put up in the first war. We skated there about twice a week ever since I can remember, and it was always lovely. The music, and the clean, swift movement, and all the boys and girls. The coloured lights, the crowd, and the ring of skates. I got quite good at it. Mummy got me a costume—black tights and bodice, and a little short skirt, you know. Dancing was wonderful upon the ice . . .”

She turned to me. “You know, out in Malaya, when we were dying of malaria and dysentery, shivering with fever in the rain, with no clothes and no food and nowhere to go, because no one wanted us, I used to think about the rink at Southampton more than anything. It was a sort of symbol of the life that used to be—something to hold on to in one’s mind.” She paused. “Directly I got back to England I went back to Southampton, as soon as I could—I had something or other to do down there, but really it was because all through those years I had promised myself that one day I would go back and skate there again. And it had been blitzed. It was just a blackened and a burnt-out shell—there’s no rink in Southampton now. I stood there on the pavement with the taxi waiting behind me with my boots and skates in my hand, and I couldn’t keep from crying with the disappointment. I don’t know what the taxi-driver thought of me.”

Her brother had gone out to Malaya in 1937 when Jean was sixteen. She left school at the age of seventeen and went to a commercial college in Southampton, and emerged from it six months later with a diploma as a shorthand typist. She worked then for about a year in a solicitor’s office in the town, but during this year a future for her in Malaya was taking shape. Her mother had kept in contact with the chairman of the Kuala Perak Plantation Company, and the chairman was very satisfied with the reports he had of Donald from the plantation manager. Unmarried girls were never very plentiful in Malaya, and when Mrs. Paget approached the chairman with a proposal that he should find a job for Jean in the head office at Kuala Lumpur it was considered seriously. It was deemed undesirable by the Company that their managers should marry or contract liaisons with native women, and the obvious way to prevent it was to encourage unmarried girls to come out from England. Here was a girl who was not only of a family that they knew but who could also speak Malay, a rare accomplishment in a shorthand typist from England. So Jean got her job.

The war broke out while all this was in train, and to begin with, in England, this war was a phoney war. There seemed no reason to upset Jean’s career for such a trivial matter; moreover in Mrs. Paget’s view Jean was much better in Malaya if war was to flare up in England. So Jean left for Malaya in the winter of 1939.

For over eighteen months she had a marvellous time. Her office was just round the corner from the Secretariat. The Secretariat is a huge building built in the more spacious days to demonstrate the power of the British Raj; it forms one side of a square facing the Club across the cricket ground, with a perfect example of an English village church to one side. Here everybody lived a very English life with tropical amenities; plenty of leisure, plenty of games, plenty of parties, plenty of dances, all made smooth and easy by plenty of servants. Jean boarded with one of the managers of the Company for the first few weeks; later she got a room in the Tudor Rose, a small private hotel run by an Englishwoman which was, in fact, more or less a chummery for unmarried girls employed in the offices and the Secretariat.

“It was just too good to be true,” she said. “There was a dance or a party every single night of the week. One had to cry off doing something in order to find time to write a letter home.”

When war came with Japan it hardly registered with her as any real danger, nor with any of her set. December the 7th, 1941, brought America into the war and so was a good thing; it meant nothing to the parties in Kuala Lumpur except that young men began to take leave from their work and to appear in uniform, itself a pleasurable excitement. Even when the Japanese landed in the north of Malaya there was little thought of danger in Kuala Lumpur; three hundred miles of mountain and jungle was itself a barrier against invasion from the north. The sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse was a catastrophe that didn’t mean a thing to a girl of nineteen who had just rejected her first proposal.

Soon the married women and the children were evacuated to Singapore, in theory at any rate. As the Japanese made headway down the peninsula with swift encirclements through jungle that no troops had ever penetrated before, the situation began to appear serious. There came a morning when Jean’s chief, a Mr. Merriman, called her into the office and told her bluntly that the office was closing down. She was to pack a suitcase and go to the station and take the first train down to Singapore. He gave her the name of their representative at an address off Raffles Place, and told her to report there for a passage home. Five other girls employed in the office got the same orders.

The Japanese at that time were reported to be near Ipoh, about a hundred miles to the north.

The serious nature of the position was obvious to everyone by then. Jean went to the bank and drew out all her money, about six hundred Straits dollars. She did not go to the station, however; if she had, it is doubtful whether she would have been able to get down to Singapore because the line by that time was completely blocked with military traffic coming up to the Front. She might have got away by road. Instead of that, she went to Batu Tasik to see Mrs. Holland.

Batu Tasik is a place about twenty miles north-west of Kuala Lumpur, and Mr. Holland was a man of forty, the manager of an opencast tin mine. He lived in quite a pleasant bungalow beside the mine with his wife Eileen and their three children, Freddie aged seven, Jane aged four, and Robin, who was ten months old. Eileen Holland was a comfortable, motherly woman between thirty and thirty-five years old. The Hollands never went to parties or to dances; they were not that sort. They stayed quietly at home and let the world go by them. They had invited Jean to come and stay with them soon after she arrived, and she had found their company restful. She had been to see them several times after that, and once, when she had had a slight attack of dengue, she had spent a week with them recuperating. In Kuala Lumpur on the previous day she had heard that Mr. Holland had brought his family into the station but had been unable to get them on the train, so they had all gone home again. Jean felt she could not leave without seeing the Hollands and offering her help with the children; Eileen Holland was a good mother and a first-rate housewife, but singularly unfitted to travel by herself with three children in the turmoil of evacuation.

Jean got to Batu Tasik fairly easily in a native bus; she arrived about lunch-time and she found Mrs. Holland alone with the children. All trucks and cars belonging to the mine had been taken by the army, and the Hollands were left with their old Austin Twelve with one tyre worn down to the canvas and one very doubtful one with a large blister on the wall. This was the only vehicle that they now had for their evacuation, and it didn’t look too good for taking the family to Singapore. Mr. Holland had gone into Kuala Lumpur to get two new outer covers; he had gone in at dawn and Mrs. Holland was already in a state of flutter that he had not come back.

In the bungalow everything was in confusion. The amah had gone home or had been given notice, and the house was full of suitcases half packed, or packed and opened again. Freddie had been in the pond and was all muddy, Jane was sitting on her pot amongst the suitcases, crying, and Mrs. Holland was nursing the baby and directing the cooking of lunch and attending to Jane and worrying about her husband all at the same time. Jean turned to and cleaned up Freddie and attended to Jane, and presently they all had lunch together.

Bill Holland did not come till nearly sunset, and he came empty-handed. All tyre stocks in Kuala Lumpur had been commandeered. He had found out, however, that a native bus was leaving for Singapore at eight in the morning, and he had reserved seats for his family on that. He had had to walk the last five miles for lack of any other transport, and walking five miles down a tarmac road in the middle of the afternoon in the heat of the tropics is no joke; he was soaked to the skin and with a raging thirst, and utterly exhausted.

It would have been better if they had started for Kuala Lumpur that night, but they didn’t. All movement on the roads at night was prohibited by the military, and to start out in the Austin in the dark would have been to risk a burst of fire from trigger-happy sentries. They decided to leave at dawn, which would give plenty of time to get to Kuala Lumpur before eight. Jean stayed the night with them in the bungalow, wakeful and uneasy. Once in the middle of the night she heard Bill Holland get up and go out into the veranda; peering out through her mosquito net she could see him standing motionless against the stars. She climbed out from under the net and slipped on her kimono; in Malaya one sleeps with very little on. She walked along the veranda to him. “What is it?” she whispered.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just thought I heard something, that’s all.”

“Someone in the compound?”

“No—not that.”

“What?”

“I thought I heard guns firing, very far away,” he said. “Must have been fancy.” They stood tense and listening against the great noise of the crickets and the frogs. “God,” he said presently, “I wish it was dawn.”

They went back to bed. That night the Japanese advanced patrols infiltrated behind our forces lining the Bidor and penetrated as far as Slim River, less than fifty miles away.

They were all up before dawn and loading up the Austin with the first grey light; with three adults and three children and the luggage for all of them the Austin was well loaded down. Mr. Holland paid the boys off and they started down the road for Kuala Lumpur, but before they had gone two miles the tyre that was showing canvas burst. There was a strained pause then while they worked to put the spare on, the one with the blister on the wall; this took them for another half mile only before going flat. In desperation Mr. Holland went on on the rim; the wire wheel collapsed after another two miles, and the Austin had run to its end. They were then about fifteen miles from Kuala Lumpur, and it was half-past seven.

Mr. Holland left them with the car and hurried down the road to a plantation bungalow about a mile away; there was no transport there, and the manager had left the day before. He came back disappointed and anxious, to find the children fretful and his wife only concerned to get back to their bungalow. In the circumstances it seemed the best thing to do. Each of the adults took one child, and carrying or leading it they set out to walk the five miles home again, leaving the luggage in the car, which they locked.

They reached home in the first heat of the day, utterly exhausted. After cold drinks from the refrigerator they all lay down for a little to recover. An hour later they were roused by a truck stopping at the bungalow; a young officer came hurrying into the house.

“You’ve got to leave this place,” he said. “I’ll take you in the truck. How many of you are there?”

Jean said, “Six, counting the children. Can you take us into Kuala Lumpur? Our car broke down.”

The officer laughed shortly. “No I can’t. The Japs are at Kerling, or they were when I last heard. They may be further south by now.” Kerling was only twenty miles away. “I’m taking you to Panong. You’ll get a boat from there to get you down to Singapore.” He refused to take the truck back for their luggage, probably rightly; it was already loaded with a number of families who had messed up their evacuation, and the Austin was five miles in the direction of the enemy.

Kuala means the mouth of a river, and Kuala Panong is a small town at the entrance to the Panong river. There is a District Commissioner stationed there. By the time the truck reached his office it was loaded with about forty men, women, and children picked up for forcible evacuation from the surrounding estates. Most of these were Englishwomen of relatively humble birth, the wives of foreman engineers at the tin mines or gangers on the railway. Few of them had been able to appreciate the swiftness and the danger of the Japanese advance. Plantation managers and those in the Secretariat and other Government positions had had better sources of information and more money to spend, and these had got their families away to Singapore in good time. Those who were left to be picked up by truck at the last moment were the least competent.

The truck halted at the D.C.’s office and the subaltern went inside; the D.C. came out presently, a very worried man, and looked at the crowded women and children, and the few men amongst them. “Christ,” he said quietly as he realised the extent of the new responsibility. “Well, drive them to the accounts office over there; they must sit in the veranda for an hour or two and I’ll try and get something fixed up for them. Tell them not to wander about too much.” He turned back into the office. “I can send them down in fishing-boats, I think,” he said. “There are some of those left. That’s the best I can do. I haven’t got a launch.”

The party were unloaded on to the veranda of the accounts office, and here they were able to stretch and sort themselves out a little. There were chatties of cold water in the office and the veranda was shady and cool. Jean and Bill Holland left Eileen sitting on the veranda with her back against the wall with the children about her, and walked into the village to buy what they could to replace the luggage they had lost. They were able to get a feeding-bottle for the baby, a little quinine, some salts for dysentery, and two tins of biscuits and three of tinned meat; they tried for mosquito nets, but they were all sold out. Jean got herself a few needles and thread, and seeing a large canvas haversack she bought that, too. She carried that haversack for the next three years.

They went back to the veranda about tea-time and displayed their purchases, and had a little meal of biscuits and lemon squash.

Towards sunset the lighthouse-keepers at the river mouth telephoned to the D.C. that the Osprey was coming into the river. The Osprey was the Customs launch that ran up and down the coast looking for smugglers from Sumatra across the Malacca Strait; she was a large Diesel-engined vessel about a hundred and thirty feet long, normally stationed at Penang; a powerful, seagoing ship. The D.C.’s face lit up; here was the solution to his problems. Whatever was the mission of the Osprey she must take his evacuees on board, and run them down the coast out of harm’s way. Presently he left his office, and walked down to the quay to meet the vessel as she berthed, to interview the captain.

She came round the bend in the river, and he saw that she was loaded with troops, small stocky men in grey-green uniforms with rifles and fixed bayonets taller than themselves. With a sick heart he watched her as she came along-side, realising that this was the end of all his endeavour.

The Japanese came rushing ashore and arrested him immediately, and walked him back up the jetty to his office with guns at his back ready to shoot him at the slightest show of resistance. But there were no troops there to resist; even the officer with the truck had driven off in an attempt to join his unit. The soldiers spread out and occupied the place without a shot; they came to the evacuees sitting numbly in the veranda of the accounts office. Immediately, with rifles and bayonets levelled, they were ordered to give up all fountain-pens and wrist-watches and rings. Advised by their men folk, the women did so silently, and suffered no other molestation. Jean lost her watch and had her bag searched for a fountain-pen, but she had packed it in her luggage.

An officer came presently, when night had fallen, and inspected the crowd on the veranda in the light of a hurricane lamp; he walked down the veranda thrusting his lamp forward at each group, a couple of soldiers hard on his heels with rifles at the ready and bayonets fixed. Most of the children started crying. The inspection finished, he made a little speech in broken English. “Now you are prisoners,” he said. “You stay here tonight. Tomorrow you go to prisoner camp perhaps. You do good things, obedience to orders, you will receive good from Japanese soldiers. You do bad things, you will be shot directly. So, do good things always. When officer come, you stand up and bow, always. That is good thing. Now you sleep.”

One of the men asked, “May we have beds and mosquito nets?”

“Japanese soldiers have no beds, no mosquito nets. Perhaps tomorrow you have beds and nets.”

Another said, “Can we have some supper?” This had to be explained. “Food.”

“Tomorrow you have food.” The officer walked away, leaving two sentries on guard at each end of the veranda.

Kuala Panong lies in a marshy district of mangrove swamps at the entrance to a muddy river; the mosquitoes are intense. All night the children moaned and wailed fretfully, preventing what sleep might have been possible for the adults. The night passed slowly, wearily on the hard floor of the veranda; between the crushing misery of captivity and defeat and the torment of the mosquitoes few of the prisoners slept at all. Jean dozed a little in the early hours and woke stiff and aching and with swollen face and arms as a fresh outburst from the children heralded the more intense attack from the mosquitoes that comes in the hour before the dawn. When the first light came the prisoners were in a very unhappy state.

There was a latrine behind the accounts office, inadequate for the numbers that had to use it. They made the best of that, and there was nothing then to do but to sit and wait for what would happen. Holland and Eileen made sandwiches for the children of tinned meat and sweet biscuits, and after this small breakfast they felt better. Many of the others had some small supplies of food, and those that had none were fed by those who had. Nothing was provided for the prisoners that morning by the Japanese.

In the middle of the morning an interrogation began. The prisoners were taken by families to the D.C.’s office, where a Japanese captain, whom Jean was to know later as Captain Yoniata, sat with a lieutenant at his side, who made notes in a child’s penny exercise book. Jean went in with the Hollands; when the captain enquired who she was she explained that she was a friend of the family travelling with them, and told him what her job was in Kuala Lumpur. It did not take very long. At the end the captain said, “Men go to prisoner camp today, womans and childs stays here. Men leave in afternoon, so you will now say farewell till this afternoon. Thank you.”

They had feared this, and had discussed it in the veranda, but they had not expected it would come so soon. Holland asked, “May we know where the women and children will be sent to? Where will their camp be?”

The officer said, “The Imperial Japanese Army do not make war on womans and on childs. Perhaps not go to camp at all, if they do good things, perhaps live in homes. Japanese soldiers always kind to womans and to childs.”

They went back to the veranda and discussed the position with the other families. There was nothing to be done about it, for it is usual in war for men to be interned in separate camps from women and children, but none the less it was hard to bear. Jean felt her presence was unwanted with the Holland family, and went and sat alone on the edge of the veranda, feeling hungry and wondering, with gloom tempered by the buoyancy of youth, what lay ahead of her. One thing was certain; if they were to spend another night upon the veranda she must get hold of some mosquito repellent. There was a chemist’s shop just up the village that they had visited the afternoon before; it was probable that in such a district he had some repellent.

As an experiment she attracted the attention of the sentry and pointed to her mosquito bites; then she pointed to the village and got down from the veranda on to the ground. Immediately he brought his bayonet to the ready and advanced towards her; she got back on to the veranda in a hurry. That evidently wouldn’t do. He scowled at her suspiciously, and went back to his position.

There was another way. The latrine was behind the building up against a wall; there was no sentry there because the wall prevented any exit from the accounts office except by going round the building to the front. She moved after a time and went out of the back door. Sheltered from the view of the sentries by the building, she looked around. There were some children playing in the middle distance.

She called softly in Malay, “Girl. You, you girl. Come here.”

The child came towards her; she was about twelve years old. Jean asked, “What is your name?”

She giggled shyly, “Halijah.”

Jean said, “Do you know the shop that sells medicine? Where a Chinese sells medicine?”

She nodded. “Chan Kok Fuan.”

Jean said, “Go to Chan Kok Fuan, and if you give my message to him so that he comes to me, I will give you ten cents. Say that the mem has Nyamok bites”—she showed her bites—“and he should bring ointments to the veranda, and he will sell many to the mems. Do this, and if he comes with ointments I will give you ten cents.”

The child nodded and went off. Jean went back to the veranda and waited; presently the Chinaman appeared carrying a tray loaded with little tubes and pots. He approached the sentry and spoke to him, indicating his wish to sell his wares; after some hesitation the sentry agreed. Jean got six tubes of repellent and the rest was swiftly taken by the other women. Halijah got ten cents.

Presently a Japanese orderly brought two buckets of a thin fish soup and another half full of boiled rice, dirty and unappetising. There were no bowls or utensils to eat with. There was nothing to be done but to eat as best they could; at that time they had not fallen into the prisoner’s mode of life in which all food is strictly shared out and divided scrupulously, so that some got much more than others, who got little or none. There were still food supplies, however, so they fell back on the biscuits and the private stocks to supplement the ration.

That afternoon the men were separated from their families, and marched off under guard. Bill Holland turned from his fat, motherly wife, his eyes moist. “Good-bye, Jean,” he said heavily. “Good luck.” And then he said, “Stick with them, if you can, won’t you?”

She nodded. “I’ll do that. We’ll all be in the same camp together.”

The men were formed up together, seven of them, and marched off under guard.

The party then consisted of eleven married women, and two girls, Jean and an anaemic girl called Ellen Forbes who had been living with one of the families; she had come out to be married, but it hadn’t worked out. Besides these there were nineteen children varying in age from a girl of fourteen to babies in arms; thirty-two persons in all. Most of the women could speak no language but their own; a few of them, including Eileen Holland, could speak enough Malay to control their servants, but no more.

They stayed in the accounts office for forty-one days.

The second night was similar to the first, except that the doors of the offices were opened for them and they were allowed to use the rooms. A second meal of fish soup was given to them in the evening, but nothing else whatever was provided for their use—no beds, no blankets, and no nets. Some of the women had their luggage with them and had blankets, but there were far too few to go round. A stern-faced woman, Mrs. Horsefall, asked to see the officer; when Captain Yoniata came she protested at the conditions and asked for beds and nets.

“No nets, no beds,” he said. “Very sorry for you. Japanese womans sleep on mat on floor. All Japanese sleep on mat. You put away proud thoughts, very bad thing. You sleep on mat like Japanese womans.”

“But we’re English,” she said indignantly. “We don’t sleep on the floor like animals!”

His eyes hardened; he motioned to the sentries, who gripped her by each arm. Then he hit her four stinging blows upon the face with the flat of his hand. “Very bad thoughts,” he said, and turned upon his heel, and left them. No more was said about beds.

He came to inspect them the next morning and Mrs. Horsefall, undaunted, asked for a water supply; she pointed out that washing was necessary for the babies and desirable for everyone. A barrel was brought into the smallest office that afternoon and was kept filled by coolies; they turned this room into a bathroom and wash-house. In those early days most of the women had money, and following the example of Chan Kok Fuan the shopkeepers of the village came to sell to the prisoners, so they accumulated the bare essentials for existence.

Gradually they grew accustomed to their hardships. The children quickly learned to sleep upon the floor without complaint; the younger women took a good deal longer, and the women over thirty seldom slept for more than half an hour without waking in pain—but they did sleep. It was explained to them by Captain Yoniata that until the campaign was over the victorious Japanese had no time to construct prison camps for women. When all Malaya had been conquered they would be moved into a commodious and beautiful camp which would be built for them in the Cameron Highlands, a noted health resort up in the hills. There they would find beds and mosquito nets and all the amenities to which they were accustomed, but to earn these delights they must stay where they were and do good things. Doing good things meant getting up and bowing whenever he approached. After a few faces had been slapped and shins had been kicked by Captain Yoniata’s army boots, they learned to do this good thing.

The food issued to them was the bare minimum that would support life, and was an unvarying issue of fish soup and rice, given to them twice a day. Complaint was useless and even dangerous; in the view of Captain Yoniata these were proud thoughts that had to be checked for the moral good of the complainant. Meals, however, could be supplied by a small Chinese restaurant in the village, and while money was available most of the families ordered one cooked meal a day from this restaurant.

They received no medical attention and no drugs whatsoever. At the end of a week dysentery attacked them, and the nights were made hideous by screaming children stumbling with their mothers to the latrine. Malaria was always in the background, held in check by the quinine that they could still buy from Chan Kok Fuan at an ever increasing price. To check the dysentery Captain Yoniata reduced the soup and increased the rice ration, adding to the rice some of the dried, putrescent fish that had formerly made the soup. Later, he added to the diet a bucket of tea in the afternoon, as a concession to English manners.

Through all this time, Jean shared with Mrs. Holland the care of the three Holland children. She suffered a great deal from weakness and a feeling of lassitude induced, no doubt, by the change in diet, but she slept soundly most nights until wakened, which was frequently. Eileen Holland suffered much more. She was older, and could not sleep so readily upon the floor, and she had lost much of the resilience of her youth. She lost weight rapidly.

On the thirty-fifth day, Esmé Harrison died.

Esmé was a child of eight. She had had dysentery for some time and was growing very thin and weak; she slept little and cried a great deal. Presently she got fever, and for two days ran a temperature of a hundred and four as the malaria rose in her. Mrs. Horsefall told Captain Yoniata that the children must see a doctor and go to hospital. He said he was very sorry, but there was no hospital. He would try and get a doctor, but the doctors were all fighting with the victorious army of the Emperor. That evening Esmé entered on a series of convulsions, and shortly before dawn she died.

She was buried that morning in the Moslem cemetery behind the village; her mother and one other woman were allowed to attend the burial. They read a little of the service out of a Prayer Book before the uncomprehending soldiers and Malays, and then it was over. Life went on as before in the accounts office, but the children now had nightmares of death to follow them to sleep.

At the end of six weeks Captain Yoniata faced them after the morning inspection. The women stood worn and draggled in the shade of the veranda facing him, holding the children by the hand. Many of the adults, and most of the children, by that time were thin and ill.

He said, “Ladies, the Imperial Japanese Army has entered Singapore, and all Malaya is free. Now prisoner camps are being built for men and also for womans and childs. Prisoner camps are at Singapore and you go there. I am very sad your life here has been uncomfortable, but now will be better. Tomorrow you start to Kuala Lumpur, not more than you can go each day. From Kuala Lumpur you go by train to Singapore, I think. In Singapore you will be very happy. Thank you.”

From Panong to Kuala Lumpur is forty-seven miles; it took a minute for his meaning to sink in. Then Mrs. Horsefall said, “How are we to travel to Kuala Lumpur? Will there be a truck?”

He said, “Very sorry, no truck. You walk, easy journeys, not more than you can go each day. Japanese soldier help you.”

She said, “We can’t walk, with these children. We must have a truck.”

These were bad thoughts, and his eyes hardened. “You walk,” he repeated.

“But what are we to do with all the luggage?”

He said, “You carry what you can. Presently the luggage is sent after you.” He turned, and went away.

For the remainder of the day they sat in stunned desperation; those who had luggage sorted hopelessly through their things, trying to make packs that would hold the essentials and yet which would not be too heavy. Mrs. Horsefall, who had been a schoolmistress in her time and had assumed the position of leader, moved among them, helping and advising. She had one child herself, a boy of ten called John; her own position was better than most, for it was possible for a woman to carry the necessities for one boy of that age. The position of the mothers with several younger children was bad indeed.

Jean and Mrs. Holland had less of a problem, for having lost their luggage they had less to start with and the problem of selection did not arise. They had few clothes to change into, and what they had could easily go into Jean’s haversack. They had acquired two blankets and three food bowls between them, and three spoons, and a knife and a fork; they decided to make a bundle of these small possessions in the blankets, and they had a piece of cord to tie the bundle with and to make a sling, so that one could carry the haversack and one the bundle. Their biggest problem was their shoes, which had once been fashionable and were quite unsuitable for marching in.

Toward evening, when the children had left them and they were alone with the baby in a corner, Mrs. Holland said quietly, “My dear, I shan’t give up, but I don’t think I can walk very far. I’ve been so poorly lately.”

Jean said, “It’ll be all right,” although deep in her mind she knew that it was not going to be all right at all. “You’re much fitter than some of the others,” and this possibly was true. “We’ll have to take it very slowly, because of the children. We’ll take several days over it.”

“I know, my dear. But where are we going to stay at night? What are they going to do about that?”

Nobody had an answer to that one.

Rice came to them soon after dawn, and at about eight o’clock Captain Yoniata appeared with four soldiers, who were to be their guard upon the journey. “Today you walk to Ayer Penchis,” he said. “Fine day, easy journey. Good dinner when you get to Ayer Penchis. You will be very happy.”

Jean asked Mrs. Horsefall, “How far is Ayer Penchis?”

“Twelve or fifteen miles, I should think. Some of us will never get that far.”

Jean said, “We’d better do what the soldiers do, have a rest every hour. Hadn’t we?”

“If they’ll let us.”

It took an hour to get the last child out of the latrine and get the women ready for the march. The guards squatted on their heels; it was a small matter to them when the march started. Finally Captain Yoniata appeared again, his eyes hard and angry. “You walk now,” he said. “Womans remaining here are beaten, beaten very bad. You do good thing and be happy. Walk now.”

There was nothing for it but to start. They formed into a little group and walked down the tarmac road in the hot sun, seeking the shade of trees wherever they occurred. Jean walked with Mrs. Holland carrying the bundle of blankets slung across her shoulders as the hottest and the heaviest load, and leading the four-year-old Jane by the hand. Seven-year-old Freddie walked beside his mother, who carried the baby, Robin, and the haversack. Ahead of them strolled the Japanese sergeant; behind came the three privates.

The women went very slowly, with frequent halts as a mother and child retired into the bushes by the roadside. There was no question of walking continuously for an hour and then resting; the dysentery saw to that. For those who were not afflicted at the moment the journey became one of endless, wearisome waits by the roadside in the hot sun, for the sergeant refused to allow the party to move on while any remained behind. Within the limits of their duty the Japanese soldiers were humane and helpful; before many hours had passed each was carrying a child.

Slowly the day wore on. The sergeant made it very clear at an early stage that there would be no food and no shelter for the party till they got to Ayer Penchis, and it seemed to be a matter of indifference to him how long they took to get there. They seldom covered more than a mile and a half in the hour, on that first day. As the day went on they all began to suffer from their feet, the older women especially. Their shoes were quite unsuitable for walking long distances, and the heat of the tarmac swelled their feet, so that before long many of them were limping with foot pains. Some of the children went barefoot and got along very well. Jean watched them for a time, then stooped and took her own shoes off, savouring the unaccustomed road surface gingerly with her bare feet. She walked on carrying her shoes, picking her way with her eyes upon the ground, and her feet ceased to pain her though from time to time the tarmac grits hurt her soft soles. She got along better barefoot, but Eileen Holland refused to try it.

They stumbled into Ayer Penchis at about six o’clock that evening, shortly before dark. This place was a Malay village which housed the labour for a number of rubber plantations in the vicinity. The latex-processing plant of one stood near at hand and by it was a sort of palm thatch barn, used normally for smoking sheets of the raw rubber hung on horizontal laths. It was empty now and the women were herded into this. They sank down wearily in a stupor of fatigue; presently the soldiers brought a bucket of tea and a bucket of rice and dried fish. Most of them drank cup after cup of the tea, but few had any appetite for the food.

With the last of the light Jean strolled outside and looked around. The guards were busy cooking over a small fire; she approached the sergeant and asked if she might go into the village. He understood that, and nodded; away from Captain Yoniata discipline was lax.

In the village she found one or two small shops, selling clothes, sweets, cigarettes, and fruit. She saw mangoes for sale, and bought a dozen, chaffering over the price with the Malay woman to conserve her slender cash. She ate one at once and felt better for it; at Kuala Panong they had eaten little fruit. She went back to the barn and found that the soldiers had provided one small lamp with an open wick fed by coconut oil.

She distributed her mangoes to Eileen and the Holland children and to others, and found they were a great success. Armed with money from the women she went down to the village again and got four dozen more, and presently all the women and children were in mango up to the ears. The soldiers came in with another bucket of tea and got a mango each for their pains, and so refreshed the women were able to eat most of the rice. Presently they slept, exhausted, weak, and ill.

The barn was full of rats, which ran over them and round them all night through. In the morning it was found that several of the children had been bitten.

They woke aching in new places with the stiffness and fatigue of the day before; it did not seem possible that they could march again. The sergeant drove them on; this time the stage was to a place called Asahan. It was a shorter stage than the day before, about ten miles, and it had need to be, because they took as long getting to it. This time the delay was chiefly due to Mrs. Collard. She was a heavy woman of about forty-five with two children, Harry and Ben, aged about ten and seven. She had suffered from both malaria and dysentery at Panong, and she was now very weak; she had to stop and rest every ten minutes, and when she stopped they all stopped since the sergeant would not allow them to separate. She was relieved of all load and the younger women took turns to walk by her and help her along.

By the afternoon she had visibly changed colour; her somewhat ruddy face had now gone a mottled blue, and she was complaining constantly of pains in her chest. When they finally reached Asahan she was practically incapable of walking alone. Their accommodation was another rubber-curing barn. They half carried Mrs. Collard into it and sat her up against the wall, for she said that lying down hurt her, and she could not breathe. Somebody went to fetch some water, and bathed her face, and she said, “Thank you, dearie. Give some of that to Harry and Ben, there’s a dear.” The woman took the children outside to wash them, and when she came back Mrs. Collard had fallen over on her side, and was unconscious. Half an hour later she died.

That evening Jean got more fruit for them, mangoes and bananas, and some sweets for the children. The Malay woman who supplied the sweets refused to take money for them. “No, mem,” she said. ”It is bad that Nippon soldiers treat you so. This is our gift.” Jean went back to the barn and told the others what had happened, and it helped.

In the flickering light of the cooking fire outside the barn Mrs. Horsefall and Jean held a conference with the sergeant, who spoke only a very few words of English. They illustrated their meaning with pantomime. “Not walk tomorrow,” they said. “No. Not walk. Rest—sleep—tomorrow. Walk tomorrow, more women die. Rest tomorrow. Walk one day, rest one day.”

They could not make out if he understood or not. “Tomorrow,” he said, “woman, in earth.”

It would be necessary to bury Mrs. Collard in the morning. This would prevent an early start, and would make a ten-mile stage almost impossible. They seized upon this as an excuse. “Tomorrow bury woman in earth,” they said. “Stay here tomorrow.”

They had to leave it so, uncertain whether he understood or not; he squatted down on his heels before the fire with the three privates. Later he came to Jean, his face alight with intelligence. “Walk one day, sleep one day,” he said. “Womans not die.” He nodded vigorously, and she called Mrs. Horsefall, and they all nodded vigorously together, beaming with good nature. They were all so pleased with each other and with the diplomatic victory that they gave him a banana as a token of esteem.

All that day Jean had walked barefoot; she had stubbed her toes two or three times and had broken her toenails; but she felt fresher that evening than she had felt for a long time. The effect of the march upon the women began to show itself that night in very different forms, according to their age. The women under thirty, and the children, were in most cases actually in better condition than when they left Panong; they were cheered by the easier discipline, and stimulated by the exercise and by the improvement in the diet brought by fruit and sweets. The older women were in much worse case. For them exhaustion outweighed these benefits; they lay or sat listlessly in the darkness, plagued by their children and too tired to eat. In many cases they were too tired even to sleep.

In the morning they buried Mrs. Collard. There was no burial ground at hand but the Malay headman showed them where they could dig the grave, in a corner of the compound, near a rubbish heap. The sergeant got two coolies and they dug a shallow grave; they lowered Mrs. Collard into it covered by a blanket, and Mrs. Horsefall read a little out of the Prayer Book. Then they took away the blanket because they could not spare that, and the earth was filled in. Jean found a carpenter who nailed a little wooden cross together for them, and refused payment; he was a Moslem or perhaps merely an animist, but he knew what the Tuans did for a Christian burial. They wrote JULIA COLLARD on it and the date of death with an indelible pencil, hoping it would survive the rain, and then they had a long discussion over the text to put underneath it. This interested every woman in the party, and kept them happy and mentally stimulated for half an hour. Mrs. Holland, rather surprisingly, suggested Romans xiv. 4: “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth,” meaning the sergeant who had made them march that day. But the other women did not care for that, and finally they compromised on “Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away.” That pleased everybody.

They sat around and washed their clothes after the burial was over. Soap was getting very scarce amongst them, but so was money. Mrs. Horsefall held a sort of meeting after rice and examined the money situation; half the women had no money left at all, and the rest had only about fifteen dollars between them. She suggested pooling this, but the mothers who had money left preferred to keep it for their own children; as there was so little in any case it did not seem worth while to worry them by making an issue of it. They all agreed, however, to share rations equally, and after that their feeding times were much better organised.

Captain Yoniata turned up about midday, driving into Kuala Lumpur in the District Commissioner’s car. He stopped and got out, angry to find that they were not upon the road. He abused the sergeant for some minutes in Japanese; the man stood stiffly to attention, not saying a word in explanation or defence. Then he turned to the women. “Why you not walk?” he demanded angrily. “Very bad thing. You not walk, no food.”

Mrs. Horsefall faced him. “Mrs. Collard died last night. We buried her this morning over there. If you make us walk every day like this, we shall all die. These women aren’t fit to march at all. You know that.”

“What woman die of?” he enquired. “What illness?”

“She had dysentery and malaria, as most of us have had. She died of exhaustion after yesterday’s march. You’d better come inside and look at Mrs. Frith and Judy Thomson. They couldn’t possibly have marched today.”

He walked into the barn, and stood looking at the two or three women sitting listless in the semi-darkness. Then he said something to the sergeant and went back to his car. At the door he turned to Mrs. Horsefall. “Very sad woman die,” he said. “Perhaps I get a truck in Kuala Lumpur. I will ask.” He got into the car and drove away.

His words went round the women quickly; he had gone to get a truck for them, and they would finish the journey to Kuala Lumpur by truck; there would be no more marching. Things weren’t so bad, after all. They would be sent by rail from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, and there they would be put into a proper camp with other Englishwomen, where they could settle down and organise their lives properly, and get into a routine that would enable them to look after the children. A prison camp would have a doctor, too, and there was always some kind of a hospital for those who were really ill. They became much more cheerful, and the most listless ones revived, and came out and washed and made themselves a little more presentable. Their appearance was a great concern to them that afternoon. Kuala Lumpur was their shopping town where people knew them; they must get tidy before the truck came for them.

Captain Yoniata appeared again about an hour before sunset; again he spoke to the sergeant, who saluted. Then he turned to the women. “You not go to Kuala Lumpur,” he said. “You go to Port Swettenham. English destroy bridges, so railway to Singapore no good. You go to Port Swettenham now, and then ship to Singapore.”

There was a stunned silence. Then Mrs. Horsefall asked, “Is there going to be a truck to take us to Port Swettenham?”

He said, “Very sorry no truck. You walk slow, easy stages. Two days, three days, you walk to Port Swettenham. Then ship take you to Singapore.”

From Asahan to Port Swettenham is about thirty miles. She said, “Captain Yoniata, please be reasonable. Many of us are quite unfit to walk any further. Can’t you get some transport for the children, anyway?”

He said, “Englishwomans have proud thoughts, always. Too good to walk like Japanese womans. Tomorrow you walk to Bakri.” He got into his car and went away; that was the last they ever saw of him.

Bakri is eleven miles in the general direction of Port Swettenham. The change in programme was the deepest disappointment to them, the more so as it showed irresolution in their destiny. Mrs. Holland said despairingly, “I don’t see why he shouldn’t have known at Panong that the bridges were down, and not sent us to Kuala Lumpur at all. It makes one wonder if there’s going to be a ship when we get to Port Swettenham. . . .”

There was nothing for it, and next morning they started on the road again. They found that two of the privates had been taken away, and one remained to guard them, with the sergeant. This was of no consequence to their security because they had no desire to attempt to escape, but it reduced by half the help the guards had given them in carrying the younger children, so that it threw an extra burden on the mothers.

That day for the first time Jean carried the baby, Robin: Mrs. Holland was walking so badly that she had to be relieved. She still carried the haversack and looked after Freddie, but Jean carried the bundle of blankets and small articles, and the baby, and led Jane by the hand. She went barefoot as before; after some experiments she found that the easiest way to carry the baby was to perch him on her hip, as the Malay women did.

The baby, curiously, gave them the least anxiety of any of the children. They fed it on rice and gravy from the fish soup or stew, and it did well. Once in the six weeks it had seemed to be developing dysentery and they had given it a tiny dose or two of Glauber’s salt, and it recovered. Mosquitoes never seemed to worry it, and it had not had fever. The other children were less fortunate. Both had had dysentery from time to time, and though they seemed now to be free of it they had gone very thin.

They slept that night in the bungalow that had belonged to the manager of the Bakri tin mine, an Englishman. In the seven or eight weeks since he had abandoned it it had been occupied by troops of both sides and looted by the Malays; now little remained of it but the bare walls. Marvellously, however, the bath was still in order though filthily dirty, and there was a store of cut wood for the furnace that heated water. The sergeant, true to his promise, allowed them a day of rest here, and they made the most of the hot water for washing their clothes and themselves. With the small improvement in conditions their spirits revived.

“I should think there’d be hot water on the ship,” said Mrs. Holland. “There usually is, isn’t there?”

They marched again next day to a place called Dilit; this was mostly a day spent marching down cart tracks in the rubber plantations. The tracks were mostly in the shade of the trees and this made it pleasant for them, and even the older women found the day bearable. They had some difficulty in finding the way. The sergeant spoke little Malay and had difficulty in understanding the Malay women latex-tappers that he asked for directions from time to time. Jean found that she could understand the answers that the women gave, and could converse with them, but having got the directions they required she had some difficulty in making the sergeant understand. They reached an agreement by the end of the day that she should talk to the women, who talked to her less shyly in any case, and she developed a sign language which the sergeant understood. From that time onwards Jean was largely responsible for finding the shortest way for the party to go.

In the middle of the afternoon Ben Collard, the younger son of Mrs. Collard who had died, trod on something while walking barefoot in the grass that bit him with poison fangs and got away. He said afterwards that it looked like a big beetle; possibly it was a scorpion. Mrs. Horsefall took charge and laid him on the ground and sucked the wound to draw the poison from it, but the foot swelled quickly and the inflammation travelled up the leg to the knee. It was obviously painful and he cried a great deal. There was nothing to be done but carry him, and this was no easy matter for the women in their feeble condition because he was a boy of seven and weighed five stone. Mrs. Horsefall carried him for an hour and after that the sergeant took him and carried him the rest of the way. By the time they got to Dilit the ankle was enormous and the knee was stiff.

At Dilit there was no accommodation for them and no food. The place was a typical Malay village, the houses built of wood and palm thatch raised about four feet from the ground on posts, leaving a space beneath where dogs slept and fowls nested. They stood or sat wearily while the sergeant negotiated with the Malay headman: very soon he called for Jean, and she joined the tri-lingual discussion. The village had rice and could prepare a meal for them, but the headman wanted payment, and was only with difficulty induced to agree to provide rice for so many on the word of the sergeant that they would be paid some day. As regards accommodation he said flatly that there was none, and the party must sleep under the houses with the dogs and poultry; later he agreed to move the people from one house, so that the thirty prisoners had a roof to sleep under on a floor about fifteen feet square.

Jean secured a corner for their party, and Eileen Holland settled into it with the children and the baby. A few feet from them Mrs. Horsefall was working on Ben Collard. Somebody had some permanganate crystals and someone else an old razor blade; with this they cut the wound open a little, in spite of the child’s screams, and put in crystals and bound it up; then they applied hot fomentations. There was nothing Jean could do, and she wandered outside.

There was a sort of village kitchen, and here the Japanese private was superintending the activities of women of the village who were preparing rice. At a house near-by the headman was sitting at the head of the steps leading up to his house, squatting on his heels and smoking a long pipe: he was a grey-haired old man wearing a sarong and what once had been a khaki drill jacket. Jean crossed to him and said rather shyly in Malay, “I am sorry we have been forced to come here, and have made trouble for you.”

He stood up and bowed to the mem. “It is no trouble,” he said. “We are sorry to see mems in such a state. Have you come far?”

She said, “From Bakri today.”

He made her come up into the house: there was no chair and she sat with him on the floor at the doorless entrance. He asked their history, and she told him what had happened, and he grunted. Presently the wife came from within the house bearing two cups of coffee without sugar or milk; Jean thanked her in Malay, and she smiled shyly, and withdrew into the house again.

Presently the headman said, “The Short One”—he meant the Japanese sergeant—“says you must stay here tomorrow.”

Jean said, “We are too weak to march each day. The Japanese allow us to rest a day between each day of marching. If we may stay here tomorrow it will help us a great deal. The sergeant says he can get money for the food.”

“The Short Ones never pay for food,” the headman said. “Nevertheless, you shall stay.”

She said, “I can do nothing but thank you.”

He raised his grey old head. “It is written in the Fourth Surah, ‘Men’s souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted with what ye do’.”

She sat with the old man till rice was ready; then she left him and went to her meal. The other women looked at her curiously. “I saw you sitting with the headman, chatting away,” said one. “Just as if you were old chums.”

Jean smiled. “He gave me a cup of coffee.”

“Just fancy that! There’s something in knowing how to talk to them in their own language, isn’t there? What did he talk about?”

Jean thought for a minute. “This and that—about our journey. He talked about God a little.”

The woman stared at her. “You mean, his own God? Not the real God?”

“He didn’t differentiate,” Jean said. “Just God.”

They rested all next day and then marched to Klang, three or four miles outside Port Swettenham. Little Ben Collard was neither better nor worse: the leg was very much swollen. The chief trouble with him now was physical weakness: he had eaten nothing since the injury for nothing would stay down, and none of the children by that time had any reserves of strength. The headman directed the villagers to make a litter for him in the form of a stretcher of two long bamboo poles with spreaders and a woven palm mat between, and they put him upon this and took turns at carrying it.

They got to Klang that afternoon, and here there was an empty schoolhouse: the sergeant put them into this and went off to a Japanese encampment near at hand, to report and to arrange rations for them.

Presently an officer arrived to inspect them, marching at the head of a guard of six soldiers. This officer, whom they came to know as Major Nemu, spoke good English. He said, “Who are you people? What do you want here?”

They stared at him. Mrs. Horsefall said, “We are prisoners, from Panong. We are on our way to the prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore. Captain Yoniata in Panong sent us here under guard, to be put on a ship to Singapore.”

“There are no ships here,” he said. “You should have stayed in Panong.”

It was no good arguing, nor had they the energy. “We were sent here,” she repeated dully.

“They had no right to send you here,” he said angrily. “There is no prison camp here.”

There was a long, awkward silence: the women stared at him in blank despair. Mrs. Horsefall summoned up her flagging energy again. “May we see a doctor?” she asked. “Some of us are very ill—one child especially. One woman died upon the way.”

“What did she die of?” he asked quickly. “Plague?”

“Nothing infectious. She died of exhaustion.”

“I will send a doctor to examine you all. You will stay here for tonight, but you cannot stay for long. I have not got sufficient rations for my own command, let alone feeding prisoners.” He turned and walked back to the camp.

A new guard was placed upon the schoolhouse: they never saw the friendly sergeant or the private again. Presumably they were sent back to Panong. A Japanese doctor, very young, came to them within an hour; he had them all up one by one and examined them for infectious disease. Then he was about to take his departure, but they made him stay and look at little Ben Collard’s leg. He ordered them to continue with the hot fomentations. When they asked if he could not be taken into hospital he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I enquire.”

They stayed in that schoolhouse under guard, day after day. On the third day they sent for the doctor again, for Ben Collard was obviously worse. Reluctantly the doctor ordered his removal to the hospital in a truck. On the sixth day they heard that he had died.

Jean Paget crouched down on the floor beside the fire in my sitting-room; outside a change of wind had brought the London rain beating against the window.

“People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had,” she said quietly, staring into the embers. “They don’t know what it was like, not being in a camp.”