On the telephone voices nasillant, throaty, laughing, or shy asked for Miss Lee, Ah Mei, and unknown others. Ah Mei would always know, even if it was I who took the garbled messages when she was strolling in the Sultan’s flower gardens, open to the public. Occasionally I supplied remedies for tooth-ache, ringworm, diarrhoea, and esoteric diseases such as tingling over the right eye and a pain in the left side starting at nine in the morning but ending just before supper was due.

One afternoon Evangeline was dropped. Evangeline was twelve and had been a bandit for two years in the jungle. Captured by the Gurkhas in a raid on the terrorist camp where she lived, wounded by bullets in the assault, she was treated at the hospital for seven weeks and became rather spoilt. Everyone in the hospital, from the friendly and vigorous English matron to the sleepy, coconut oil-smelling Malay sweepers, brought her toys and sweets and petted her and sat on her bed, admiring her.

Evangeline came up our stairs dressed in a gingham cotton gown with red, green, and yellow checks, made by a Scots nursing sister at night and fitted on Evangeline with the whole of the nursing staff brimful of advice standing round. Her two hands clutched the first toy she had been given, a duck fluffy with white downy feathers, on wheels, and with a yellow papier-mache beak. Evangeline’s hair was cut crew style, parted and brilliantined like a boy’s, and to cultivate a wave she wore a large curler on a spring. But her hair was too thick and alive and the curler snapped off and fell to the ground when she moved. Then she clipped it on again, firmly.

Gravely she bowed. Her eyes lingered upon the polished wooden floor and remained scanning it, measuring its extent, noting its surface.

‘Go ahead,’ I said, ‘try it.’ Immediately she produced a large key from her pocket, wound up the spring, and put down her duck. It went round and round in wide ecstatic circles, rolling its wheels with tremendous whirrs and whooshes, beating its wings in time together, veering upon the slight bumps on the floor and saying quack, quack, quack.

The duck having adopted our floor, Evangeline signified she would stay, and remained eleven weeks.

Softly Ah Mei came upstairs, happiness upon her face, and took Evangeline’s hand, and called her Little Sister, and seemed to cling to her with love, and said that she would look after her and arrange a space on her sleeping mat for Evangeline.

And then Miss Lee and I went to Singapore, and bought two lengths of cotton for frocks and a pair of red Bata sandals for Evangeline.

Days later two detectives and an official from the Ministry of Information came to see Evangeline. The Information official was an amiable and gay ex-officer of the Chinese Nationalist Army, Jimmy Lo. ‘What a pretty little girl, and so intelligent,’ he said, ‘how I wish she were my daughter.’