"A Town Like Alice"

[fiefoe]

Nevil Shute must have specialized in tales featuring quiet, ordinary-seeming people who manage grand, extraordinary feats, (and conscientious lawyers who assist them.) The Malaysian part of the book held me spellbound.

• one has to make an effort at a time like that, and a clean break. It’s no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.
• However terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if it’s beautiful.’
• 'interesting, too, learning all about that trade.’ ‘Most jobs are interesting when you are learning them,’ I said.
• I told her. ‘You don’t feel any different as you get older. Only, you can’t do so much.’
• they lowered Mrs Collard into it covered by a blanket, and Mrs Horsefall read a little out of the Prayer Book. Then they took away the blanket because they could not spare that, and the earth was filled in.
• Somebody had some permanganate crystals and someone else an old razor blade; with this they cut the wound open a little, in spite of the child’s screams, and put in crystals and bound it up; then they applied hot fomentations.
• He talked about God a little.’ The women stared at her. ‘You mean, his own God? Not the real God?’ ‘He didn’t differentiate,’ Jean said. ‘Just God.’
• but when it came – well, it was just one of those things. After a person had died there were certain things that had to be done, the straightening of the limbs, the grave, the cross, the entry in a diary saying who had died and just exactly where the grave was. That was the end of it; they had no energy for afterthoughts.
• They did not now experience the blank refusals that they formerly had met when the party was thirty strong; the lesser numbers had made accommodation and food much easier for them.
• You never take a packhorse faster’n a walk, not if you can help it. It isn’t like you see it on the movies, people galloping their horses everywhere –
• an Abo called Albert out at Hermannsburg. Somebody gave him a brush and some paints one time, and he started in and got it better than any of them, oh my word, he did. But he’s an Abo, and he’s painting his own place. I suppose that makes a difference.’
• Her grief for him was more real and far deeper than that of the other women, and it was not in the least because she thought that he had been divine. She was entirely certain in her own mind that he wasn’t.
• The death of the sergeant left them in a most unusual position, for they were now prisoners without a guard.
• She thought quickly; the words of the headman at Dilit came into her mind. She said, ‘It is also written, “If ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted with what ye do.”’ He eyed her steadily. ‘Where is that written?’ She said, ‘In the Fourth Surah.’
• He said that the prestige of the British was higher in the Kuala Telang district after the war was over than it was before, due solely to the presence of this girl and her party; he thought she’d earned the use of a jeep for a few days.
• they made her a supper of rice and blachan, the highly-spiced paste of ripe prawns and fish that the Malays preserve in an upended concrete drain pipe.
• 'And it came to me that I should give a thank-offering to this place, and that this thankoffering should be a present from a woman to the women of Kuala Telang, nothing to do with the men.’
• He could not carry out his own part in the ritual; he could not show Bushido by granting the man’s dying wish. Therefore, the Australian could not be allowed to die, or he himself would be disgraced.
• then they had an opening ceremony when Jean washed her own sarong and all the women crowded into the washhouse laughing, and the men stood round in a tolerant circle at a distance, wondering if they had been quite wise to allow anything that made the women laugh so much.
• He thought about it for a minute. ‘You’ve probably started something,’ he remarked at last. ‘Every village will want one (well) now. Where did you get the plan of it – the arrangement of the sinks and all that sort of thing?’
• She looked at him in wonder. ‘Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done.’ ‘That’s as it may be,’ he replied. ‘The fact is, that you did it.’
• – Dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo, Dulce loquentem. It had been a part of my youth, that phrase, as I suppose it is a part of the youth of many young men who have been in love. I could not bear to go on reading Horace after.
• ‘I only found out that this May. I met the pilot that had flown her out from a place in Malaya called Kota Bahru. At Julia Creek, that was.’
• He paused. ‘It’s a grand country for a man to live and work in, and good money, too. But it’s a crook place for a woman.’
• Harman should be interviewed for the programme ‘In Town Tonight’. I said I’d see him about that, and he promised to send over the ticket. Then I got on to old Sir Dennis Frampton who has a herd of pedigree Herefords at his place down by Taunton and told him about Joe Harman, and he very kindly invited him down for a couple of nights.
• she had no desire whatever to figure in the headlines, as she certainly would do if the truth of her intentions became known. ‘Girl flies from Britain to seek soldier crucified for her …’
• she let it out in little artistic snippets over half an hour of conversation,
• Then there’s the stone fish – he lies on the beach and looks just like a stone until you tread on him, and he squirts about a pint of poison into you. The Portuguese Men-o’-War aren’t so good, either. But the thing that really puts me off is Coral Ear.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘A sort of growth inside your head that comes from getting this fine coral sand into your ear.’
• There was an extensive radio network operated by the Flying Doctor service from the hospital; morning and evening an operator at the hospital sat down to call up forty or fifty stations on the radio telephone to transmit messages, pass news, and generally ascertain that all was well. The station housewife operated the other end. ‘Mrs Duveen is sure to be on the air tonight because her sister Amy is in hospital here for a baby and Edith’ll want to know if it’s come off yet. If you write out a telegram and take it down to Mr Taylor at the hospital, he’ll pass it to them tonight.’
• and Jean admired it duly; it was clear that this was the one entertainment that the town provided, and they were doing their best to give her a good time. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that in England.’ They were duly modest. ‘Most towns around here have a bore like that, that you can light,’ they said.
• heels. The lining was a major difficulty at first till somebody suggested a young wallaby skin. Pete Fletcher went out and shot the wallaby and skinned it, and the tanning was carried out by a committee of Pete Fletcher and Al Burns and Don Duncan, working in the back of Bill Duncan’s store.
• If you take them as a pair of shoes made by a typist that hadn’t ever made a shoe before, working on her bed with no equipment, well, they’re bloody marvellous.’
• this midsummer madness of an English girl, a stranger to the Gulf country, who proposed to make shoes there and send them all the way to England to be sold.
• As usual they drove a little way out of town and stopped for an exchange of mutual esteem; as he held her
• Willstown lay about four hundred miles to the west-north-west; the first seventy miles of this course lay over the Atherton Tableland with mountains up to three thousand five hundred feet in height. With no radio navigational aids he would have to fly visually all the way, scraping along between the clouds and the treetops as best he could.
• though he had started spick and span from Midhurst as befits a man going in to town to see his girl, he had had to swim one of the two creeks on the way holding to the mane and saddle of his horse, which had rather spoilt the sartorial effect.
• This conversation, Jean felt, was not getting them anywhere; where poddys were concerned Joe’s moral standards seemed to be extremely low.