A Town like Alice

village with a fresher step. And there, in front of them; they saw two trucks and two white men working on them while Japanese guards stood by.
    They marched quickly towards the trucks, which were both heavily loaded with railway lines and sleepers; they stood pointing in the direction of Kuantan. One of them was jacked up on sleepers taken from the load, and both of the white men were underneath it working on the back axle. They wore shorts and army boots without socks; their bodies were brown with sunburn and very dirty with the muck from the back axle. But they were healthy and muscular men, lean, but in good physical condition. And they were white, the first white men that the women had seen for five months.
    They crowded round the trucks; their guard began to talk in staccato Japanese with the truck guards. One of the men lying on his back under the axle, shifting spanner in hand, glanced at the bare feet and the sarongs within his range of vision and said slowly, "Tell the mucking Nip to get those mucking women shifted back so we can get some light."
    Some of the women laughed, and Mrs Frith said, "Don't you go using that language to me, young man."
    The men rolled out from under the truck and sat staring at the women and the children, at the brown skins, the sarongs, the bare feet. "Who said that?" asked the man with the spanner. "Which of you speaks English?" He spoke deliberately in a slow drawl, with something of a pause between each word.
    Jean said laughing, "We're all English."
    He stared at her, noting the black hair plaited in a pigtail, the brown arms and feet, the sarong, the brown baby on her hip. There was a line of white skin showing on her chest at the V of her tattered blouse. "'Straits-born?" he hazarded.
    "No, real English-all of us," she said. "We're prisoners."
    He got to his feet; he was a fair-haired powerfully built man about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. "Dinkie-die?" he said.
    She did not understand that. "Are you prisoners?" she asked.
    He smiled slowly. "Are we prisoners?" he repeated. "Oh my word."
    There was something about the man that she had never met before. "Are you English?" she asked.
    "No fear," he said in his deliberate way. "We're Aussies."
    She said, "Are you in camp here?"
    He shook his head "We come from Kuantan," he said. "But we're driving trucks all day, fetching this stuff down to the coast."
    She said, "We're going to Kuantan, to the women's camp there."
    He stared at her. "That's crook for a start," he said slowly. "There isn't any women's camp at Kuantan. There isn't any regular prisoner camp at all, just a little temporary camp for us because we're truck drivers. Who told you that there was a women's camp at Kuantan?"
    "The Japanese told us. They're supposed to be sending us there." She sighed. "It's just another lie."
    "The bloody Nips say anything." He smiled slowly. "I thought you were a lot of boongs," he said. "You say you're English, dinky-die? All the way from England?"
    She nodded. "That's right. Some of us have been out here for ten or fifteen years, but we're all English."
    "And the kiddies-they all English too?"
    "All of them," she said.
    He smiled slowly. "I never thought the first time that I spoke to an English lady she'd be looking like you."
    "You aren't exactly an oil painting yourself," Jean said.
    The other man was talking to a group of the women; Mrs Frith and Mrs Price were with Jean. The Australian turned to them. "Where do you come from?" he inquired.
    Mrs Frith said, "We got took in Panong, over on the west coast, waiting for a boat to get away."
    "But where did you come from now?"
    Jean said, "We're being marched to Kuantan."
    "Not all the way from Panong?"
    She laughed shortly. "We've been everywhere-Port Swettenham, Port Dickson-everywhere. Nobody wants us. I reckon that we've walked nearly five hundred miles."
    "Oh my word," he said. "That sounds a crook deal to me. How do you go on for tucker, if you aren't in a camp?"
    She did not understand him. "Tucker?"
    "What do you get to eat?"
    "We stay each night in a village," she said. "We'll have somewhere to stay here. Probably in a place like this it'll be the school. We eat what we can get in the village."
    "For Christ's sake," he said. "Wait while I tell my cobber." He swung round to the other. "You heard about the crook deal that they got?" he said. "Been walking all the time since they got taken. Never been inside a prison camp at all."
    "They've been telling me," the other