Police Officer Crufts was in charge. From Todak transferred to the Cameron Highlands, he had undergone a six-months’ intensive course in the Hokkien dialect. The Force now recognized the importance of Chinese as well as Malay to run Malaya, and to be gazetted for permanent establishment, officers could offer either language instead of Malay only, as pre-Emergency.

After six months in the cool pine and mist-scented Highlands of Malaya, Crufts came down to earth and to taking a shipload of detainees (now called banishees), sentenced to deportation, to China.

There were three kinds of deportees on this ship, which sailed under a South American flag; whose skipper was Swedish; whose crew was mainly from the Celebes; and which belonged to a British firm. Political banishees, coming from the detention camps under Emergency Regulations. Two contraband and opium smugglers from Singapore, and one from Kuala Lumpur. A few voluntary repatriates.

The smugglers were wealthy. One of them, it was whispered, was the genuine king of the opium dens of Kuala Lumpur. He was, of course, a secret society man as well, at least a Tiger General. He was being deported to Manila, having appealed successfully against being deported to China.

The other two were going to China, and seemed no whit concerned about the anti-corruption drive now in process
on the mainland.

Since these three were free to buy whatever passage they could afford they travelled first class in luxurious suites. Strolling with bodyguards on deck after dinner, they puffed the smoke of three large cigars into Crufts’s face.

The voluntary repatriates were also allowed to buy their passages. Detained under Emergency Regulations, born in Malaya and British subjects, they could not legally be deported. But they could ask for ‘repatriation’, and obtain it. Some did willingly, others as a way out of detention. Among the latter was the woeful, tear-smeared Boh Heng, whose hair had gone iron-grey, a strange event in a Chinese woman under fifty. Carried away on the stark sea (whose red-eyed demons lurking behind crested waves she dreaded with the horror of belief), it was too late to alter her fate. At the port of embarkation her children had stood behind the wire fence, holding out useless baskets of fruit and food and crying and her daughters rending their clothes.

Perhaps, thought Crafts, if she had stuck it another year or so … someone on the Advisory Committee, on the Revision Board, might have got interested; but the Police always had the right to reverse the decisions taken by any Board or any Committee, in the interests of Security; perhaps Boh Heng had done best for herself after all, and one day her children might follow her to China …

The largest group, the political detainees, were housed according to sex: the men in the hold, the women and children in a large low room separated from the hold by a space for the storing of goods and luggage.