Rubber was a boon, it had made Malaya the wealthiest possession in the world. Rubber was a curse, for Malaya was a in the hands of others. Malaya would never be thought of as a land with a mind of its own; always, here the divided mind, the divided peoples, the divided purposes, and though it was true enough that in spite of the differences and the divisions there was a new, a growing will to freedom and to nationhood, too many people were still intent on division.

He passed the Singapore customs shed, the police in blue-grey shirts, and on his left the Naval Base, famous of infamous memory. From Johore Bahru the Base could be seen, its grey ships moored, its white buildings spotless in the sun, its bungalows on the undulating land within its heavily guarded gates.

Would it be any use in another war, or would it fall without a blow again, as it had done in the last war?

The Bukit Timah road stretched in front of him. Already lorries rumbled along it, loaded with pigs in cylindrical wide-meshed rattan baskets, the pigs stacked snout to tail, in three superimposed layers, squealy noisy lorries rolling into Singapore from Johore. Those were squatter pigs from the Chinese farmers. They were breeding pigs again. In the first years of the Emergency so many pigs had been killed, resettling the farmers. Now they were starting again. Looking at the backs of the lorries with their medieval pattern of snouts and tails, Luke felt like singing. Hell, he thought of the farmers, they’ve got guts, they deserve better than what we’ve given them so far.