‘I’ve asked my boy to write,’ Mrs Hinchcliffe reverted obstinately to her subject. ‘If they’ll let him. Just a word, my boy, I say, just: “I’m okay, mem,” and I’ll understand, I told him. I’ll always know it’s from you. And I want to know. I want him to be happy, even if it is in Red China …’

*  *  *

Crufts also would have liked to know, as he sat watching the deck upon which people scurried like ants, busy with the business of living, and knew under their feet the others waiting as in a dark tunnel, waiting their emergence in the new land, the land of their ancestors.

Neo sat on his heels, a face and bent body of sullen stone, not raising his eyes as the light from the opened hatch streamed on him when Crufts came down the ladder on his daily visit.

His son was with him, small of frame, but a full man in spirit and knowledge of pain. Left behind in Malaya were the other three children. Although it was a principle not to separate families, but to deport or detain them together to lessen hardship, the death of Neo Saw had dislocated these arrangements, and the other children had become inmates of a Welfare Home.

Crufts’s attention was drawn to Neo because of his resemblance to the man in perpetual opium coma lying on deck above his head. Of the quieter detainees he was the quietest, quiet as a stone, never shifting nor moving, nor raising his eyes to Crufts.

‘He’s a real bad one,’ said Mr Tay the interpreter, pointing to Neo.

‘How do you know?’ asked Crufts, short-tempered.

Tay’s eyes rounded with surprise and the fear which abruptness in his masters roused in him. Tay’s spirit was as a fountain for ever spouting upwards, spurting anxiety to please in an unending stream. It gave him high blood pressure, this unceasing agony of love towards his overlords, and for this condition he administered unto himself both Chinese and Western drugs, invariably together.

Mr Tay came from Penang, the inviolate green little island whose inhabitants, Chinese Hokkiens, settled for a century, are, many of them, devotees of British rule. He was a Queen’s Chinese.

He was so loyal, he spoke about it all day, and dreamed of it at night. He was so fervent in his love for the Sovereigns of the British crown that he wept when ‘God Save the Queen’ was Played, and carried everywhere a scrap book where he had pasted cuttings from the local newspapers, going back for thirty years concerning the Royal Family.