A Town like Alice

She's on to a good wheeze, if she can put it over. I must say, when I read her letter where it says that she's paying seventy shillings for an alligator skin uncured, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Australian shillings, too-fifty-six bob of our money. Here have I been paying a hundred and seventy, hundred and eighty shillings for a cured skin, all these years, and thinking I was getting 'em cheap at that! I said to Mr Levy, I said, couple of bloody mugs, we are."
    "What can you suggest to help her?" I asked.
    "What I thought was this," he said. "If she could pay the passage of a forewoman out and home, I'd let her have a girl out of my shop, say for the first year. I got a girl that's getting restless-well, a woman she is, thirty-five if she's a day. She's a married woman but she isn't living with her husband- hasn't been for a long time. She was a sergeant in the ATS in the war, out in Egypt some of the time, so she knows about a hot country. Aggie Topp, the name is. You wouldn't get girls playing up in any shop with Aggie Topp in charge."
    "Does Miss Paget know her?" I inquired.
    "Oh, aye, Jean knows Aggie. And Aggie knows Jean. Matter of fact, Aggie came in yesterday and handed in her notice. I handed it back to her and jollied her along, you know. She does that every two or three months, getting restless, like I said. But I asked her then, how would she like to go out to Australia for a year to work with Miss Paget. She said she'd go anywhere to get away from standing in a queue for the bloody rations. She'd go out for a year, if Jean wants her. They all liked Jean."
    I said, "Can you spare her?"
    "She won't stay long, anyway," he said. "I don't want to lose her and perhaps I won't. If she gets a trip out to Australia and sees that other places aren't so good as England, then maybe she'll come back and settle down with us again. Get it out of her system."
    We talked about this for a time. The woman's passages and pay while travelling would tot up to about three hundred pounds, but it seemed cheap to me if it would help the venture through the early stages. For the rest of it, Mr Pack thought Jean's estimates of capital were on the low side, but not excessively so. "You can't afford much mechanization in the quality shoe trade," he said. "You got to keep changing the style all the time."
    About the style, he suggested that they air-mailed a sample to Willstown from time to time for Jean's party to copy. He was quite willing to do the selling for her. "Mind, I don't know if she'll be able to make a go of it upon the prices we can sell at," he said. "I'll tell her what we can buy at, and it's up to her. But I'd like to give this thing a spin, I must say. Manufacturing's getting so bloody difficult in this country with controls and that, one feels like trying something different."
    I thanked him very sincerely, and he went away. I wrote all this out to Jean Paget by air mail, and I believe Mr Pack wrote to her by the same mail. She did not get these letters for some days after their arrival, because she had gone down to Rockhampton to look for the girl Elsie Peters who worked in the shoe factory there. She went economically by train, a slow, hot journey of some seven hundred miles; till then she had not realized how vast and sparsely populated a state Queensland was. The aeroplanes had dwarfed it for her; fifty-one hours in the train to Rockhampton expanded it again.
    She found Elsie Peters, and the meeting was a complete fiasco. It only lasted ten minutes. They met in a cafe close outside the works; as soon as Jean broached the subject of a job in the Gulf country, Elsie told her she could save her breath. It might be a good thing, she conceded, to start something in the Gulf country, but not for her. Wild horses would not drag her back again.
    Jean came away from the cafe relieved in one way, and yet depressed. She would not have wanted anybody in that frame of mind, but she had been counting rather heavily on this unknown woman. She was very conscious of her own lack of managerial experience; as the venture became closer difficulties loomed up which had not been quite so obvious at the birth of the idea. She spent a depressed evening in the hotel, and flew back to Cairns next day in revolt at the long train journey; she found the air fare very little more expensive.
    She found our letters waiting for her at the Strand Hotel when she got back there, and her spirits revived again. She remembered the