He is beaten, crucified, and left to die by the Japanese soldiers. The thefts are investigated and Harman takes the blame to save Jean and the rest of the group. On one occasion, Harman steals five chickens from the local Japanese commander. Jean is carrying a toddler, whose mother has died, and this leads Harman to believe that she is married to avoid complications, Jean does not correct this assumption. He steals food and medicines to help them. Jean meets an Australian soldier, Sergeant Joe Harman, also a prisoner, who is driving a lorry for the Japanese and they strike up a friendship. Many of them, not used to physical hardship, die. The Japanese refuse all responsibility for the group and march them from one village to another. As she speaks Malay fluently, Jean takes a leading role in the group of prisoners. The second part of the story flashes back to Jean's experiences during the war, when she was working in Malaya at the time the Japanese invaded and was taken prisoner together with a group of women and children. Jean decides that her priority is to build a well in a Malayan village. In the firm's interest, but increasingly with personal interest, Strachan acts as her guide and advisor. But the solicitor is now her trustee and she only has the use of the income until she inherits absolutely, at the age of thirty-five, several years in the future.

In post-World War II London, Jean Paget, a secretary in a leather goods factory, is informed by solicitor Noel Strachan that she has inherited a considerable sum of money from an uncle she never knew.

The story falls broadly into three parts. Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman, becomes romantically interested in a fellow prisoner of World War II in Malaya, and after liberation emigrates to Australia to be with him, where she attempts, by investing her substantial financial inheritance, to generate economic prosperity in a small outback community-to turn it into 'a town like Alice' i.e. A Town Like Alice (United States title: The Legacy) is a romance novel by Nevil Shute, published in 1950 when Shute had newly settled in Australia.

A town like alice