The women and children continued their exhausting odyssey until their only guard died and Jean Paget who was fluent in Malay arranged for the remaining party to stay in a village and work in the rice fields until the end of the war instead of marching on. When he was found out, he was nailed to a tree and beaten to death before the eyes of the other prisoners. One of them was the Australian stockman Joe Harman who got himself into dangerous trouble stealing chickens from the Japanese captain for the women and children, but above all for Jean Paget. After several months on the road they met two other prisoners-of-war, men driving trucks for the Japanese. On one occasion she told him the whole story of her life or rather survival in Malaya during World War II, when she and thirty-one women and children were taken prisoner by the Japanese and marched criss-cross through the country under guard. As the widowed solicitor got to know Jean Paget better, he took a fancy bordering on love to the unusually mature woman of twenty-eight years. Strachan told her that her uncle had left her his estate, even though in trust until she was thirty-five, and that the capital yields that she was to receive until 1956 would allow her to live without the need to work unless she wanted to. It was quite a surprise for the shorthand typist in a shoe and handbag factory, when Mr. The narrator of A Town Like Alice is the old family solicitor Noel Strachan from London who writes down the story of Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman whose trustee he was according to the will of the late Douglas Macfadden. Nevil Shute died in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, shortly before his sixty-first birthday in January 1960. Also his autobiography of the years before 1938, Slide Rule (1954), was produced during this last period of his life. Notable among his Australian novels are above all A Town Like Alice (1950), Round the Bend (1951), The Far Country (1952), In the Wet (1953), Beyond the Black Stump (1956), and On the Beach (1957). In the late 1940s the novelist decided to move to Australia with his family. His most important works produced until after World War II are Ruined City (1938 published as Kindling in the USA), What Happened to the Corbetts (1939), Pied Piper (1942), Pastoral (1944), The Chequer Board (1947), and No Highway (1948). From 1938 on Nevil Shute wrote full-time and prolifically. By then he had already published three novels: Marazan (1926), So Disdained (1928), and Lonely Road (1932). After his engineering studies he worked as an aeronautical engineer until 1938, when he decided to retreat from his own (highly successful) aircraft construction company. Nevil Shute, in full Nevil Shute Norway, was born in London, England, U.K., in January 1899.
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