A TOWN LIKE ALICE by Nevil Shute; book review

Book Review: A TOWN LIKE ALICE by Nevil Shute (fiction) Pan Books, 1961

London attorney Noel Strachan's client, Douglas Macfadden, has just died. A search for his heirs turns up only one, niece Jean Paget, age twenty-six, a typist in a London office. She is amazed to learn she has inherited fifty-three thousand pounds [in present day dollars, a seven-figure amount.] “It means I'll never need to work—unless I want to,” is her reaction.

She ponders her options for several weeks and finally tells him, “I've made up my mind what I want to do first of all. I want to go to Malaya, Mr. Strachan. To dig a well.”

She tells him about her childhood; her father had worked for a British plantation in Malaya [a British colony back then]; and she had learned the Malayan language as a child. In 1939 when World War II broke out she applied for a job with her father's former employer and was accepted.

She was 21 when Japan joined the war and soon the Japanese army occupied all of Malaya. British citizens were taken prisoner. The Japanese sent the men to labor camps, but Japanese commanders had no camps for women and children; they were marched from one area to another. In the first six months, the group of forty that Jean was in had shrunk to eighteen. She was caring for a one-year-old whose mother had died, and she had walked some 400 miles. At one point they met a couple of Australian prisoners, truck drivers, who helped them by stealing some chickens from the Japanese.The Aussies were caught, and the Japanese captain had one, Joe Harmon, beaten and literally crucified. The women were forced to watch, and then were sent on yet another march.

Eventually even their Japanese guard died of fever. The surviving women realized they would all die if nothing changed. Jean, the only one fluent in Malay, spoke with the headman of the village they had reached, offering that the women would work in the rice fields with the village women, in exchange for food and shelter. They stayed in that village three years till the war ended.

Now financially free, she wants to offer a gift especially for the village women, who must travel a mile to fetch drinkable water. The village women unite to convince their husbands to accept Jean's gift. Well digging is a special skill, calling for several men from the town of Kuantan, the place where Jean had been forced to watch Joe's death. The well diggers remember the event, but say the man did not die. Japanese military tradition required the executioner to grant the prisoner's dying wish; Joe had defiantly demanded a beer, and there was none in town, so the captain could not allow him to die.

Now, six years later, she delays going back to England and instead goes to Alice Springs, Australia, Joe's last known address. Alice Springs is a beautiful town with plenty of water, jobs, shops, just as Joe had described to her. He has moved on, however, and now manages a cattle station near Willstown, in the Gulf area. She travels by the weekly plane, and finds it a miserable place to live. There is nothing to do there; most girls can't wait to leave and find jobs in Australia's coastal cities. With the women gone, it's hard to attract men to work in the cattle stations. Joe isn't there either; a letter from attorney Noel Strachan brings the surprising news that Joe is in England looking for her. He has just found out that the baby she always carried on her hip in Malaya was not her own, and that she is single. He traced her through a previous address, and was referred to Strachan.

Strachan is a good judge of character; professional ethics prevent him from telling Joe where she is, but says she is traveling in the Orient, and he will write her about Joe. Meanwhile, he arranges contact with cattle experts in England to give Joe a chance to study the latest methods of cattle management while he waits for her reply.

Jean and Joe finally meet at the airport in Cairnes; each barely recognizes the other from six years ago, now that they were both recovered from their war experience. They spend a weekend at a small resort on the Great Barrier Reef getting re-acquainted. They both agree they want to get married, but there are matters to discuss first:

Joe knows in his heart that Jean would never be happy in a town like Willstown. She knows Joe will not be happy giving up the ranch he has built up. Her solution: “We'll have to do something about Willstown.”

Jean has studied how girls growing up in Willstown might be persuaded to stay. One old man shows her a gator skin he hunts and tans. Alligator shoes and handbags are one of the items her employer in London dealt with. She realizes that Willstown with its cattle and gators and carpenters has all the raw materials for upscale women's shoes. Her own efforts are amateurish, but remarkable enough to catch the interest of the townspeople, and even her London employer when she mails him a pair. She proposes a plan to Strachan, her trustee, if he will allow a withdrawal of part of the principal trust to invest. First, build a shop for local girls to make alligator shoes. Second, build a shop to sell ice cream, magazines, cosmetics for the girls and people in and around Willstown. She already has been talking with a girl she met in Alice Springs who is willing to come. Third, construct small reservoirs to retain the rainwater that all comes in two months of the year, and thus enable expansion of the cattle herds.

Strachan and Mr. Peck, Jean's former employer, confer about the shoe business. Peck has an experienced supervisor willing to come to Australia for a year to get manufacture on a professional level.

Jean has the first two projects up and running before the rains begin in December. But she hasn't figured on a rivalry that threatens their very lives.