A Town like Alice

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 there are you?"
    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 DC's office and the subaltern went inside; the DC 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 realized 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