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.

Most steady of our visitors were Ah Mei’s mother and her brother. They came from near Labis, another ‘bad spot’ on the police map. Years past, they had owned a few acres of rubber and a hut, but all had gone when the Emergency began, and they had been resettled behind wire and gone tapping rubber for a big British estate. And then Ah Mei’s mother was caught in a swoop and detained in a camp, while Ah Mei herself went to the jungle. The mother was later released and now she came with her son to visit her daughter.