Her face was swollen with weeping.

‘He doesn’t want to go. My boy isn’t a bad boy or anything of the sort. He’s begged me to stay … ‘I’ll work all my life, mem, for no money, if you let me stay …’ ‘What for I go to China, mem, I don’t know China, I come here as a small baby, don’t know anything about China …’

‘Cheer up, dear,’ said her husband, ‘you’ve tried your utmost to help him, you have … she even wrote to h.q.,’ he turned to Crufts, ‘but we were told the decision was final, these were all hardened cases …’

‘In a big thing like this, the innocent suffer with the guilty,’ said Crufts, knowing he was being platitudinous, but finding comfort in the alignment of these words. ‘It’s war. These people have no one but their countrymen in the jungle to blame for the fix they’re in …’

‘But they don’t see it that way,’ replied Mrs Hinchcliffe. ‘They think it’s us … and my boy was such a gentle boy, so wonderful with my puppies …’

Again her eyelids brimmed.

‘You should have seen our girls last week,’ Hinchcliffe hastily started another story to stop his wife’s recurrent grief. ‘About a dozen of them had done their time, and I put them on the train. They were going up north. They’re not allowed to return to their old villages, you know, in case their pals the comrades get in touch with them again. You should have seen them when the time came to say good-bye. Tears rolling down their cheeks. Had to wipe their faces one by one with my own handkerchief.

‘They were really sorry to go. They’d all been rehabilitated. They were afraid to get out of the wire again to fend for themselves; life isn’t easy these days. Here it was some kind of security for them, in camp …’

‘And it’s perfectly horrid,’ cut in Mrs Hinchcliffe indignantly, ‘the way some people will take advantage of them. Their own people, mind you. One poor dear left us six months ago, and landed in Social Welfare last week, just skin and bones. She’d been taken by a family as their servant. It sounded a good job, wealthy family and all that, but they worked her like a slave. Clean and cook and wash and iron and everything for nine people. Never any time off. They didn’t give her a bed, she slept on the ground under her mistress’s bed … and they took her identity card away from her so that she couldn’t run away.’

‘There, there, dear,’ said Mr Hinchcliffe, and looked as if at any moment he might pull out his handkerchief again. ‘You mustn’t always believe what these girls tell. They’re mighty good at grouses.’