Luke’s car turned into the road, at this hour full of little girls in white shirts and blue school uniforms, going to the convent school. There were Indians with dark skin and flashing eyes and teeth, tossing their plaits and giggling … ‘Janiki, Vijaya, come on, hurry faster …’ Little Chinese girls with serious round faces and glossy black hair crimped in the rigid locks of identical per-manents, going from various dialects into English and back again into dialect: ‘I didn’t do my homework, let me see yours, tolong lah …’ Eurasians with green eyes and black hair, looking Chinese, or looking European with golden hair and brown eyes … ‘We’ve got another baby, my mummy brought it home last night from the Hospital after makan …’ Some on foot, most in cars, quite a few in very large cars with chauffeurs, the daughters of wealthy Chinese businessmen, the daughters of Malay officials, all went to convent school. A limousine drove by, out of which the Princess, daughter of the Sultan’s eldest son, stepped and immediately merged, indistinguishable among dozens of other little girls. Heads bobbing, a blue and white stream of little girls and their soft laughter flowed towards the buildings of the Convent, in front of which a white stone statue of the Virgin, donated by the Moslem Sultan, showed stark and new.
The Convent was constantly growing in size, adding wings of extra classrooms; acquiring more land, as more and more little girls from Catholic or pagan India, Catholic or pagan Chinese, Catholic Eurasian and Islamic Malay families, docile, blue clad and happy little girls rippling with talk and laughter, poured into the Convent, their goal the Cambridge Overseas School certificate, their English new and fresh and flavourful, lilting Malayan singsong English lovely to hear.
‘Come, I will show you.’
‘Die for you, lah.’
‘I say no, Mai.’
Luke Davis thought: ‘This is the first time I really see this little town in Malaya.’ After months of going to the office and back to the Mess in his car without noticing anything on the way, this morning, his work completed, driving into Singapore to unfold the project upon which he had toiled, his mind had become observant of things other than the Emergency. Perception gave him a pleasurable feel of enchanting newness, fresh as the sudden perfume of a rose. He looked and listened and saw and heard for the first time in months, sprightly of spirit, excited by the lavish-ness of sound and colour. Malaya was wonderful. Look at them, the little girls of the future Malaya, filing into school, so many races, so many golden shades to melt and fuse together into one nation … he felt as if his heart would burst in fragrant tenderness, a moonflower’s abrupt blossoming. These little girls must have been babies during the Japanese occupation … one war should be enough for any little girl …