From where we stand, Singapore is a shore fringed with coconut palms, and farther a grey haze out of which emerge a few factory chimneys, tall and spare and spouting smoke. Lam suddenly looks clever.

‘This water, it is so convenient for smugglers, isn’t it?’

With his eyes he turns to Luke Davis, the white man, as if nudging him in the ribs, sharing with him the secret of the communist smuggling which goes on. It is a well-known joke that in this fifth year of the Emergency, daily and nightly, bullets and hand grenades, towels, rubber sheets, shoes, paper, printing ink, and cigarettes are smuggled to the jungles of Malaya from Singapore. But to us, standing across half a mile of water, it is a grey-green haze, ringed by opalescent water.

We turn and re-enter the car, while Lam speaks of the smuggling, and follow the road past the Sultan’s gardens with the tall red and yellow canna lilies, sentinel flags leading to the modest bungalow called the palace.

‘The old palace!’ says Lam, who has appropriated the landscape and doles it out to me. ‘What is your impression?’ He continues: ‘Not very modern; no air conditioning. Bathrooms not very many.’

And here we are. On the left the pink-washed buildings, the fence, a strong well-built fence jutting outwards at the top. The mata-matas, police constables in khaki, lean on their rifles, the tranquil vegetable placidity of their brown gaze upon us. A large, bearded and turbaned Sikh police sergeant lurks like a suspicious bear behind their palm-like tranquillity. The bear, officious, peers, then straightens to salute the white man with a clash of boots, and we crunch up the gravel road, down which armoured cars packed with policemen clutching sub-machine guns whirr with rough and dreadful importance in this war-not-war in Malaya.

‘Police Headquarters,’ says Lam unnecessarily to me, and smiles with beatific humour, ‘where my friend works,’ he adds, ‘my dear friend.’ And looks at Luke, tender, affectionate, as if he would put his arms around him, but does not; says ‘works’ as if it were highly comical, but also a pity; and there is compassion in Lam’s face as he jeers at the white man who works hard and long at the war of the jungle.