Lee Meng’s undaunted and courageous counsel, an Indian lawyer defending her without fee, had the case appealed. And suddenly from the steamy air of the Emergency in Malaya the case of The Grenade Girl was carried to the cold, indifferent, and impeccably scrupulous atmosphere of London, and there it was felt that England’s rule in Malaya could only compete successfully with communism by applying the highest standards of British justice, even to a ‘bandit’; finally, Lee Meng’s death sentence became life imprisonment.

Whatever Lee Meng’s political convictions, her courage aroused respect in police circles. ‘She’s quite different,’ confided Bob Stewart to me at a cocktail party. ‘She won’t say a word. ‘Do what you like,’ she says, ‘I won’t speak.’ And we can’t get one word out of her.’ In contrast to the verbosity of the S.E.P.s, Lee Meng’s silence and her utter conviction impressed her captors.

In Ah Mei’s case, the verdict depended on the evidence that she had a grenade in her hand when caught. Technically, she too should have been sentenced to death, but she was under twenty, whereas Lee Meng was twenty-six, and immediately turned round offering to help the police. Her defence said she had been bathing, and was partly clothed, when the alarm sounded and someone told her to run. She stooped to pick up some clothes, and there was the grenade. Another Grenade Girl was up for retrial.

Meanwhile Ah Mei came and went in a police car to Police Headquarters, and one day stood in front of me with a request:

‘May I go to Singapore?’

‘You haven’t got an identity card. No one is allowed to go about without an identity card.’

Two days later she returned. ‘I have official permission to go to Singapore.’

‘Oh well, if you’ve got a pass …’ She showed it to me. ‘But I couldn’t give you permission, you see, I have nothing to do with the Police.’

‘I’ll take my mother and little brother.’

I gave them a lift that sunny morning fresh and noisy with golden orioles nesting in the tembusu and the tulip trees, to the Green Express bus parked near the market, and watched it heave itself over the small bridge which spanned the fetid stream, the main sewer of the town, rolling into the waters of the Straits. On that bridge, Ah Mei had told me, the Japanese had lined heads on piles, until each was a hive of maggots and flies, for all to see and smell. Ah Mei waved until the bus turned the corner, and I saw it advancing purposefully along the Causeway towards Singapore.

It was mid-afternoon next day before they came back. Ah Mei’s face appeared above the banisters, and I was as relieved and happy to see her as if she had been my daughter.

‘I was worried, I thought you would be back last night.’