Revisiting "A Town Like Alice"

 Neville Shute Norway was a British novelist and an aeronautical engineer who started his career with the de Havilland Aircraft Company and then moved to Vickers Ltd in the development of airships. He served in the World War 11 war effort and later went to live in Australia where he died of a stroke in 1960. I discovered him a few years later in college.  

His novels are built around the war, flying, young men and women filled with quiet courage. Some of my favourites among his many books are: A Town Like Alice, The Chequer Board, No Highway, The Far Country, Lonely Road. I am re reading them thanks to the bounty from Indira Vasudevan. The books are ’70 edition, paper ready to tear, binding delicately held, print close and small. I wonder how I ever read that font till I remember my strong young eyes that devoured books with penlight.

A Town like Alice remains my favourite for its beautiful love story between a girl of conviction and a man of great personal courage. I was inspired by Jean and Joe, their understated attraction at odds with the passion of their yearning to seek each other out. I marvelled at the depth of their love which found little means of expression but spoke volumes of commitment unlike loud protestations which dwindle away to habit and form.

Jean Paget is in Malay when WW11 breaks out. Sargent Joe Harman, an Australian POW in a Japanese camp. Joe Harman meets Jean: “black hair plaited in a pigtail, the brown arms and feet, the sarong, the brown baby on her hip.” He mistakes her for a ‘Straits born’ woman and is astonished that she is “real English.” Joe steals food, and other supplies for Jean and her ragged gang who are force marched by the Japs. Joe and Jean get friendly and tells her about himself, his life at Alice Springs. He calls her Mrs Boong.

“Where’s the Springs, then?”

“Alice,’” he said, “Alice Springs. Right in the middle of Australia, halfway between Darwin and Adelaide.”

Joe describes Alice Springs to Jean calling it a bonza place.         

Jean is caught with stolen chickens and Joe takes the blame. The Jap military policemen crucify Joe, nail him to a tree and beat him to death.

Jean goes back to England after the war, comes into an inheritance and decides to build a well in the Malay village. In the village by chance she comes to know that Joe survived and sets off to Australia to meet him. She learns Joe is a Cattle Manager at Willstown.

Joe and Jean meet and Joe is unnerved by the sight of the strange smart pretty girl in a light summer frock, it couldn't possibly be the same woman whom he had known, the tragic sunburnt dirty Mrs Boong in Malay It puts a distance between them which Jean is desperate to push aside. She dresses herself in her old faded cotton sarong, barefooted, hair hung down her back in a plait. She is no longer the strange English girl with money: She was Mrs Boong again, the Mrs Boong he had remembered all those years. She came to him rather shyly and put both hands on his shoulders, and said, “Is this better, Joe?” 

Joe and Jean marry and Jean uses her inheritance to transform Willstown into a town like Alice.

    Along with “…Here’s looking at you, kid,” from Casablanca, 

“   " Is this better,Joe?” remains one of my favourite romantic lines.