”’I stole those mucking chickens and I gave them to her.

She befriends a truck driver from the Australian outback, Jim Harman, who steals much needed supplies at great risk. With every brutal mile, their ranks are thinned, and the youngest woman among them becomes their de facto leader. So they march them in what turns out to be random directions towards mythical camps for women and children that never materialize. They separate the men from the women, haul the men off to camps, and don’t have a clue what to with the women and children. The Japanese take all foreign nationals in Malaya prisoner. Some of that is translation problems, and some of those are changes necessary to tell the story he wants to tell. The women and children taken by the Japanese during the war are Dutch, not British, and Nevil Shute gets many things wrong. This story is set in Malaya, but the real story is set in Sumatra. It involves a woman named Jean Paget, to him more of a girl, but as we learn her story, we find out just how much of a woman she really is. Our narrator is a solicitor by the name of Noel Strachan who is ”as solid as the Bank of England, and as sticky as treacle.” He becomes involved with an estate that seems to be a straightforward affair, but soon it evolves into his most all consuming case. There was a 1981 mini-series starring Bryan Brown and Helen Morse. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.” I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. ”I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes.

Author a town like alice