I will go to the forest for justice,
For justice and righteousness,
And become a green-clad man.
The rulers pursue me with soldiers,
With riders, chariots, and spears.

I will go to the forest for justice,
The people will flock to me.
I right their wrongs from the green shade,
And kill the rulers with arrows.
The horsemen stumble with fear.

I will go to the forest for justice.
The wind for my garment I wear.
Together with my many companions,
The wind for my garment and the rain my drink,
We build a new heaven and earth.

‘Ah, how typical, isn’t it?’ mused Jimmy. ‘Justice … the justice of the forest. It’s old and steeped in tradition … A corrupt, incompetent government, and the just and good men going to the green forest and becoming bandits, but Right is on their side …’ Suddenly he became nostalgic, uneasy and fretful. ‘Of course we call them bandits, I don’t think the English understand their idea …’

‘Of course they do, they’ve got Robin Hood, you know,’ I said.

But there is nothing more futile than to discuss the rights and wrongs of the Emergency. Evangeline stopped singing, and I dressed her wound, which still oozed a little serum and needed occasional care. With the good life and the food she healed well and gained weight. We now ate three pounds of butter a week and Cookie had a new reason: ‘Evangeline eats such a lot of butter.’

Cookie’s children and Evangeline raced about the house, in the front and back gardens, climbed the butterfruit trees to shake down the round yellow woolly fruit, built fences for the ducks and chickens, fished in the ditches round the prison, bringing back iridescent fishlets flashing like thunderless lightning in the clear water and all terror-weaponed with red and gold streaked flanks. A monkey appeared, and stayed until he too waxed inordinately fond of butter. Two tortoises, a pi-dog with a hyena sandy coat, six Siamese cats added their wealth of life to ours, until the house was uproarious with shouting, laughing, quarrelling, living, and every day Cookie brought some crockery or article broken by one or another, human or animal. ‘Broken,’ he would point laconic, carrying the fragments with care on a teak-wood tray, and depositing them in front of me at the breakfast table.

*  *  *

The families and friends of our guests came and went in tranquil fishing-craft fashion, in and out of the harbour of our kitchen. They arrived from the ulu, the wilderness of secondary jungle, tangled and abandoned rubber estates and fenced-in resettlement areas now called New Villages. They came without food, because Emergency Regulations forbade food outside the wire on pain of five years’ imprisonment. Operation Starvation against the jungle went on and on, and there were road blocks and police searches on every road.