A Town like Alice

the Malay administration at his house,
    Tungku Bentara Raja. Tungku Bentara was a little thin Malay who spoke excellent English; he was genuinely concerned at the story that he heard from Mat Amin and from Jean.
    "I am very, very sorry," he said at last. "I cannot do much to help you directly, because the Japanese control everything we do. It is terrible that you should have to work in the rice fields."
    "That ' s not terrible at all," Jean said. "As a matter of fact, we rather like it. We want to stay there, with Mat Amin here. If the Japanese have got a camp for women in this district I suppose they'll put us into that, but if they haven't, we don't want to go on marching all over Malaya. Half of us have died already doing that."
    "You must stay with us tonight," he said. "Tomorrow I will have a talk with the Japanese Civil Administrator. There is no camp here for women, anyway."
    That night Jean slept in a bed for the first time in nearly seven months. She did not care for it much; having grown used to sleeping on the floor she found it cooler to sleep so than to sleep on a mattress. She did not actually get out of bed and sleep upon the floor, but she came very near to it. The bath and shower after the bath taken by holding a gourd full of water over her head, however, were a joy, and she spent a long time washing.
    In the morning she went with Tungku Bentara and Mat Amin to the Japanese Civil Administrator, and told her tale again. The Civil Administrator had been to the State University of California and spoke first-class American English; he was sympathetic, but declared that prisoners were nothing to do with him, being the concern of the Army. He came with them, however, to see the military commanding officer, a Colonel Matisaka, and Jean told her tale once more.
    It was quite clear that Colonel Matisaka considered women prisoners to be a nuisance, and he had no intention whatsoever of diverting any portion of his force to guarding them. Left to himself he would probably have sent them marching on, but with Tungku Bentara and the Civil Administrator in his office and acquainted with the facts he could hardly do that. In the end he washed his hands of the whole thing and told the Civil Administrator to make what arrangements he thought best. The Civil Administrator told Bentara that the women could stay where they were for the time being, and Jean started back for Kuala Telang with Mat Amin. They lived there for three years.
    "It was three years wasted, just chopped out of one's life," she said. She raised her head and looked at me, hesitantly. "At least-I suppose it was. I know a lot about Malays, but that's not worth much here in England."
    "You won't know if it was wasted until you come to an end of your life," I said. "Perhaps not then."
    She nodded. "I suppose that's right." She took up the poker and began scraping the ash from the bars of the grate. 'They were so very kind to us," she said. "They couldn't have been nicer, within the limits of what they are and what they've got. Fatimah, the girl who showed us what to do in the rice fields in those first weeks-she was a perfect dear. I got to know her very well indeed."
    "Is that.where you want to go back to?" I asked.
    She nodded. "I would like to do something for them, now that I've got this money. We lived with them for three years, and they did everything for us. We'd have all died before the war was ended if they hadn't taken us in and let us stay with them. And now I've got so much, and they so very, very little…"
    "Don't forget you haven't got as much as all that," I said. "Travelling to Malaya is a very expensive journey."
    She smiled. "I know. What I want to do for them won't cost so very much-not more than fifty pounds, if that. We had to carry water in that village-that's the women's work-and it's a fearful job. You see, the river's tidal at the village so the water's brackish; you can use it for washing in or rinsing out your clothes, but drinking water has to be fetched from the spring, nearly a mile away. We used to go for it with gourds, two in each hand with a stick between them, morning and evening-a mile there and a mile back-four miles a day. Fatimah and the other girls didn't think about it; it's what the village has done always, generation after generation."
    "That's why you want to dig a well?"
    She nodded. "It's something I could do for them, for the women-something that would make life easier for them, as they made life easier