Rosie Yip, now Chief Wardress in charge of female detainees, sniffed the sleek resistless air, honeyed with the pink-gold surge of sundown, looked at the indigo hills framing the horizon of the Straits, and heard the near and docile voices, the tittered obedient laughter from the class-rooms of the camp. Within the mask of her wrinkleless round face, devoid of those rippled emotions which betray the European, she appraised the intangible with unnamed sense, a spiritual bloodhound on the trail of impending violence. Violence was sediment of long immobility, compact spark of fire from the smouldering placation of endless caging. There had not been trouble in the camp for a long time, and trouble was due.

Such hours of expected eruption marred and marked the police calendar with prophetic cancelled leaves and doubled sentry posts. May and October were months of zealous ambushed moments, when communist-inspired rioting was awaited from the camps. When nothing happened there was a feeling of slight tedium, nearly disappointment.

Rosie remembered (and treasured, though she would not have known this hoarded memory precious) a windless opaque unaccounted night when the screaming had started among the ‘black’ females, gathered into a swelling clamour which pealed from hut to hut until like the fanfare of a forest fire it surged its fantastic shrill roaring through the camp.

Tear gas and seventy-six mata-matas with Stens, two armoured cars spitting machine-gun bullets, and a baton charge, had finally thudded flesh alive with screams into dull moans and sobs, reduced to an uneasy deadened whimper echoed in the grey dawn, when Rosie, suddenly exhausted, felt her strong calves quiver uncontrollably, the cold sweat trickle on the inside of her thighs, as she stood with her revolver painful to grip, and watched the police formation boot up the gravel of the paths in the quick trot of a last mop-up.

And all much ado for that fifteen-year-old, Ah Nia, condemned to death for consorting with terrorists but found too young to hang with her nineteen-year-old sister. She had been kept among the ‘blacks’ pending disposal, for the prisons were overflowing with the pick of over thirty thousand suspects, and she had begun the idiot frenzy, the ululating infection immortalized in official reports as ‘communist-inspired’.

Fong Kiap, with baby proof of her consorting with terrorists, but pregnant at trial and therefore unkillable, had been more lucky than Ah Nia. She had worked her way from ‘black’ to ‘white’, and was booked for rehabilitation, owning a vastly contented face and a gum-baring smile. Only capricious madness, thought Rosie, could account for some of the punishments or releases meted out. Whiteskin folly, or turn of fate? Rosie, believing in both, never attempted to intercede or to explain, for it was wrong to meddle in anyone’s destiny.

‘We can’t go on shoving people into camps, Wardress. All right the first few years, but it’s not good enough now. Quite dislocated the economy of the State … do you know that out of ninety thousand pigs three years ago only six thousand are left in this area? That’s why we’ve got to process these people, get them through the machine, and either try and deport them or get them back to production, quick.’