A Town like Alice

for us. A well right in the middle of the village, within a couple of hundred yards of every house. It's what they ought to have. I'm sure it wouldn't have to be more than about ten feet deep, because there's water all about. The water level can't be more than about ten feet down, or fifteen feet at the most. I thought if I went back there and offered to engage a gang of well-diggers to do this for them, it'll sort of wind things up. And after that I could enjoy this money with a clear conscience." She looked up at me again. "You don't think that's silly, do you?"
    "No," I said. "I don't think that. The only thing is, I wish it wasn't quite so far away. Travelling there and back will make a very big hole in a year's income."
    "I know that," she said. "If I run out of money, I'll take a job in Singapore or somewhere for a few months and save up a bit."
    "As a matter of interest," I said, "why didn't you stay out there and get a job? You know the country so well."
    She said, "I had a scunner of it, then-in 1945. We were all dying to get home. They sent three trucks for us from Kota Bahru, and we were taken to the airfield there and flown down to Singapore in a Dakota with an Australian crew. And there I met Bill Holland, and I had to tell him about Eileen, and Freddie and Jane." Her voice dropped. "All the family, except Robin; he was four years old by that time, and quite a sturdy little chap. They let me travel home with Bill and Robin, to look after Robin. He looked on me as his mother, of course."
    She smiled a little. "Bill wanted to make it permanent," she said. "I couldn't do that. I couldn't have been the sort of wife he wanted."
    I said nothing.
    "When we landed, England was so green and beautiful," she said. "I wanted to forget about the war, and forget about the East, and grow to be an ordinary person again. I got this job with Pack and Levy and I've been there two years now- ladies' handbags and attache cases for the luxury trade, nothing to do with wars or sickness or death. I've had a happy time there, on the whole."
    She was very much alone when she got home. She had cabled to her mother directly she reached Singapore; there was a long delay, and then she got a cable in reply from her Aunt Agatha in Colwyn Bay, breaking to her the news that her mother was dead. Before she left Singapore she heard that her brother Donald had died upon the Burma-Siam railway. She must have felt very much alone in the world when she regained her freedom; it seemed to me that she had shown great strength of character in refusing an offer of marriage at that time. She landed at Liverpool, and went to stay for a few weeks with her Aunt Agatha at Colwyn Bay; then she went down to London to look for a job.
    I asked her why she had not got in touch with her uncle, the old man at Ayr. "Quite honestly," she said, "I forgot all about him, or if I thought of him at all I thought he was dead, too. I only saw him once, that time when I was eleven years old, and he looked about dead then. It never entered my head that he would still be alive. Mother's estate was all wound up, and there were very few of her personal papers left, because they were all in the Pagets' house in Southampton when that got blitzed. If I had thought about Uncle Douglas I wouldn't have known where he lived…"
    It was still pouring with rain. We decided to give up the idea of going out that afternoon, and to have tea in my flat. She went out into my little kitchen and began getting it, and I busied myself with laying the tea table and cutting bread and butter. When she came in with the tray, I asked, "When do you think of going to Malaya, then?"
    She said, "I thought I'd book my passage for the end of May, and go on working at Pack and Levy up till then," she said. "That's about another six weeks. By then I'll have enough saved up to pay my passage out and home, and I'll still have about sixty pounds I saved out of my wages in this last two years." She had been into the cost of her journey, and had found a line of intermediate class cargo ships that took about a dozen passengers for a relatively modest fare to Singapore. "I think I'll have to fly to Kota Bahru from Singapore," she said. "Malayan Airways go to Kuantan and then to Kota Bahru. I don't know how to get from Kota Bahru to Kuala Telang, but I expect there'll be something."
    She was quite capable of walking it, I thought; a journey through the heart of Malaya could mean little to her now. I had had the