A Town like Alice by Nevil Shute Read Free Book Online

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 manager 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 the 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