‘Beautiful,’ she murmurs, ‘beautiful, thick hair.’

Dorothy’s own hair is short, straight, without the slightest ripple or wave, but Christina admires her ivory complexion, her slanted eyes dark as sloes, her slightly purplish, plum coloured lips. Dorothy is from Singapore and has the exquisite fineness of a Chinese ivory carving.

The children stand in straight rows, sing hymns from the Methodist hymn book: ‘All things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘To Thee I vow my Country’, ‘Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah’; translations from Greek and German hymns of early churchmen and of John Wesley, Frances Jane Van Alstyne. Christina ponders deeply over the anonymous early Christian hymn writers: Anonymous c. fifth century ‘Aeterne Rex Altissime’; or the fifteenth century ‘Gloriosi Salvatoris’; or ‘O amor quam exstatitus’—fifteenth century; or the German ‘Lobe den Herren der Machtigen Konig der Ehren’ of Joach im Neander (1650–80) translated by Catherine Winkworth (1829–78). Here, then, is the discovery of that early metaphor of praise and thanksgiving shaped by a Christian evangelism. They are the privileged ones, separated from the primitive heathens, from the pagans, born to inherit the kingdom of God. And into this kingdom the children are led gently, without threat of hellfire and brimstone, by the missionaries. After the hymns, the psalms, the prayers, as they sit on the rough coir mats listening to the announcements, the reading of long lists of mark-sheets, poems, extracts of letters from ‘Home’, from prisoner-of-war camps in Germany in the 1940s, pyramids of words build up before their eyes, too strong for them to break, and quietly, silently they lie entombed within those structures for all time.