And now Luke was driving on Singapore Island, and it was another country, another government. Singapore was a Crown Colony, and Malaya was nine Moslem Sultanates grouped in a Federation, nine medieval Chairs of State propped up by British power. Independence had been promised to both as soon as the people were ‘ready’ for it. But what being ‘ready’ meant, Luke, for one, could not explain. Would Singapore be independent first, or Malaya first? Obviously they must form one country one day, for this absurd separation was like making London one country, distinct from the rest of England. But there was feeling against union at the moment. The three million Malays of Malaya did not want Chinese Singapore, with its near-million Chinese and its handful of Malays, to swamp them; and the million Chinese of Singapore were not keen to put up with the kind of racial discrimination and the special privileges accorded to the Malay race, which kept the three million Chinese of Malaya in a state of perpetual grievance … And in this dilemma the British ran everything of importance, though promising independence, and even, if goaded enough, making gestures towards it, which were not insincere, even if liberal tendencies were always denounced with overwhelming emphasis by the vested interests, the big companies, as hasty, premature, and ill-timed. All over South East Asia there were white men pointing out, loud and long, how bad freedom was for anyone but themselves.

But the people of Malaya were getting impatient. Some were saying quite loudly that the longer independence was denied, the more chance for communism, for only a truly free country would fight. ‘Set a thief to catch a thief, said the Malays, currently talking of the Police and the People Inside the jungle. And they said that they preferred a bad government of their own, rather than to be run by others.

Of course, thought Luke, the end was inevitable. One day people like himself would have to leave on a pension for life, and people like Che Ahmad and Abdullah would take over. Meanwhile the Chinese were fobbed off with those extraordinarily complicated citizenship laws which very few understood. Citizenship was so difficult to get, it was openly admitted that the law had been devised to keep the Chinese out rather than to bring them into the fold of the country … and now it had succeeded in making one million stateless people in Malaya, one in six of the people of the country.

‘And after that,’ said Luke aloud to himself, ‘how can we have the bloody cheek to ask for their loyalty?’ It was such a mess, he thought, all this balancing and weighing and hedging, this rule by expediency in which people were but pawns, in the local game of power or in the larger scale game of the cold war in South East Asia.. And in this war Malaya was rubber, and not people; a factor, not a country.