‘Responsibility,’ said Mr Bee, returning. ‘It’s a tremendous responsibility, every time, I tell you. And it’s all on me, man, all on me. Suppose someone blew up those fellas on the stage there … I’ve got to have eyes everywhere … The moment I see someone doing something suspicious … ho! ho!’ He shook his head. ‘It takes a lot out of me, that and my committees … I couldn’t sleep last night thinking of the responsibility. One grenade, just one hand-grenade, would finish that lot, man, I’m telling you.’

We both gazed longingly towards the stage. ‘Yes, man, when I was a kid I could have aimed that far, but I tell you now I shall be happy-lah when this is all over. It’s sending up my blood pressure.’

And Mr Bee held out his wrist for me to take his pulse.

I murmured that nothing would happen, but ‘That’s what people always say,’ retorted Mr Bee. ‘But ‘They’ have us on their black list, the shu tsai (the forest rats). Anyone who works with the whiteskins. I know I’m on a list. Maybe I’m at the head of one. I hope the police are doing their duty. But these Malay fellows are no good, they sleep standing up …’ If anyone had been caught with a grenade, Mr Bee would have felt that his life had point and meaning. Later he flitted by again. ‘I’m taking all precautions. I am not caught napping. I have a permit and I have a gun on me.’ And he slapped his bulging pocket. ‘A gun,’ he repeated, looking round, daring anyone to come for him.

And now we were all getting hungry, and Mr Poh came down the stage and he and Mr Bee conferred importantly. And then the microphone’s prehensile black claw rose from the stage floor and thrust itself up to Sir Moksa’s face, and all of us – Chinese shopkeepers, hawkers, a few trisha pullers asleep at the back, Malay teachers and Indian clerks, and plain clothes men and informers –
re-arranged our hands and feet and prepared for the next four hours of speech making.

Down from the gallery a solid row of khaki and black belts and polished badges loomed upon Sir Moksa, the Chief Police Officer, and Clerkwell, presiding deities, intimidating as any Olympus gazing upon mere mortals, and it really looked as if Sir Moksa was terribly brave, especially when in the first half-hour he raised his hand and banged the blue linoleum cloth and said: ‘Colonialism must come to an end,’ and from the Malays present, both above and below, came quick light hand-claps.

After the ceremony Mr Bee got hold of me again as I stepped out of the now steamy cinema into the more suffocating street.