A Town like Alice

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 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 Bata 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 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