A Town like Alice Read Online Free PDF Page A

I asked.
    He paused with his pen poised over the paper. "Well, you could take your pick of half a dozen things. I hadn't time to do a post mortem, of course. Between you and me, I don't really know. I think he just died. But he'd recovered from enough to kill a dozen ordinary men, so I don't know that it' really matters what one puts down on the certificate. No legal point depends upon the cause of death, does it?"
    "Oh, no," I said. "All I want is the death certified."
    He still paused, in recollection. "He had a huge tropical ulcer on his left leg that we were treating, and that was certainly poisoning the whole system. I think if he'd gone on we'd have had to have taken that leg off. He got that because he was one of those chaps who won't report sick while they can walk. Well, while he was in hospital with the ulcer, he got cerebral malaria. We had nothing to treat that damn thing with till we got around to making our own quinine solutions for intravenous injection; we took a frightful risk with that, but there was nothing else to do. We got a lot through it with that, and Paget was one of them. He got over it quite well. That was just before we got the cholera. Cholera went right through the camp-hospital and everything. We couldn't isolate the cases, or anything like that. I never want to see a show like that again. We'd got nothing, nothing, not even saline. No drugs to speak of, and no equipment. We were making bed-pans out of old kerosene tins. Paget got that, and would you believe it, he got over cholera. We got some prophylactic injections from the Nips and we gave him those; that may have helped. At least, I think we gave him that-I'm not sure. He was very weak when that left him, of course, and the ulcer wasn't any too good. And about a week after that, he just died in the night. Heart, I fancy. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll put down for Cause of Death-Cholera. There you are, sir. I'm sorry you had to come all this way for it"
    As I took the certificate I asked curiously, "Did you get any of those things yourself?"
    He laughed. "I was one of the lucky ones. All I got was the usual dysentery and malaria, the ordinary type malaria, not cerebral. Overwork was my trouble, but other people had that, too. We were in such a jam, for so long. We had hundreds of cases just lying on the floor or bamboo charpoys in palm huts-it was raining almost all the time. No beds, no linen, no equipment, and precious few drugs. You just couldn't rest. You worked till you dropped asleep, and then you got up and went on working. You never came to an end. There was never half an hour when you could slack off and sit and have a smoke, or go for a walk, except by neglecting some poor sod who needed you very badly."
    He paused. I sat silent, thinking how easy by comparison my own war had been. "It went on like that for nearly two years," he said. "You got a bit depressed at times, because you couldn't even take time off to go and hear a lecture."
    "Did you have lectures?" I asked.
    "Oh yes, we used to have a lot of lectures by the chaps in camp. How to grow Cox's Orange Pippins, or the TT motor-cycle races, or Life in Hollywood. They made a difference to the men, the lectures did. But we doctors usually couldn't get to them. I mean, it's not much of an alibi when someone's in convulsions if you're listening to a lecture on Cox's Orange Pippins at the other end of the camp."
    I said, "It must have been a terrible experience.
    He paused, reflecting. "It was so beautiful," he said. "The Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. You've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains… We used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. However terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if it's beautiful."
    When Jean Paget came to see me on Wednesday evening