Beneath a tree sits a thin young beggar woman with a newly born infant in her arms. We bend down to give her our gifts.

‘Gold, frankincense and myrrh for the Hope of the World,’ my daughter utters as we count out the coins.

Bali

HOLDING MUNGO’S HANDS, the two sisters, small girls in their smocked chintz dresses, socks and shoes, walk to the village. Mungo’s own children are looked after by her mother. Her husband is dead. They live in an earth-walled hut that seems to emerge out of the hill. It is very dark and cool inside her hut, like a cave. The floor is of smooth cowdung. The interior of the house is so dark. You feel as if you are a lizard clinging to the inside of a clay pot. The roof of the hut is thatched with new straw. It is dry and the strands rustle in the heat. Menike, Mungo’s younger daughter, comes out of the hut blinking at the strong rays of the sun. Her eyes are red and sore, the lashes matted with pus. She is half blind with an eye disease. The sun spins like a silver disc through the screen of green plantain fronds and dark dhel leaves.

The village is close to the house of the two children; but they are small, to them distances seem long, the path rugged and stony. The snakes are coiled in the undergrowth or lying hidden inside their thumbasas. The green snakes, the ahatullas twine among the creepers. ‘Eye-peckers’, their mother calls them. ‘Be careful when you go out into the garden, the green snakes will peck out your eyes ….’ Janine sees them on the granadilla vine like fine green tangled stems, pliant and supple, their heads watchful and raised.

The children’s house is one of the railway bungalows on the hill. The roof is tiled, with glass skylights set in it through which light filters into the bedroom. There are no ceilings. The glass globed lamps hang from the rafters. The night lamp is brought into the bedroom at six o’clock in the evening. It is placed in a niche where it burns, flickering in the dark. Shadows dance against the whitewashed walls with their borders of black tar to keep away the termites. The rooms are full of furniture, the settees with cretonne-covered cushions, the centre table covered with brass ornaments and blue Chinese glass vases. There are heavy gilt-framed paintings on the walls, of Scottish landscapes, glens, forests, waterfalls. A leopard-skin backed with red felt lies on the floor, its jaws open in a grimacing snarl, its hard yellow-fanged teeth sharp against the exploring palm as the children thrust their hands inside its mouth.

Green tats hang in the verandah—rolled up and tied. They are pulled down to keep the sun out. Stepping out into the verandah, the children walk under the arbour of thumbergia into an enchanted world with thornless roses and hollyhocks, crimson dahlias, white mugerines, the Holy Ghost orchid, scorpion orchids; the world in which they played exploring every nook and cranny with Mungo.