‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Betchine. ‘You’ll get used to Malaya, my dearr girrl.’ Her R’s rolled in the fashion of the Scots University town where she had studied. Dr Betchine was tall, Euro-Indian, draped pastel georgette sarees on her body and a stethoscope round her neck. Her large brown eyes, long lashes, aristocratic features, would look well on the cover of Life magazine, sub-titled: Woman of Modern Asia.

It was my first week as Lady Medical Officer in the women and children’s clinic of the Hospital, taking over from Betchine now to be transferred to Kuala Lumpur. In one week, I had become a witch’s cauldron of seething irritation, boiling resentment, and hissing rage. Betchine assured me, unsoothingly, that it was Malaya.

‘They’re all like you, when they start,’ she repeated. ‘They’ referred to doctors like myself, newly recruited into the Service. ‘After a few months, they calm down. This is Malaya. Everything takes a long, a very long time, in Malaya. Things get done, occasionally, but more often they don’t, and the more in a hurry you are, the quicker you break down. I got a breakdown in Kuala Lumpur, in those barracks they pretend is a hospital. Now I’m posted back to it.’ She laughed, good-natured, hearty, high-pitched laughter, and twirled the end of her stethoscope round and round. Her laughter mocked herself and the confusion, the inadequacy, the overcrowded room around her. Thus had she laughed when, on my first day, I exclaimed that half the wards of the Hospital were closed down. ‘Shortage of nurses,’ said Betchine.

‘Look at this waiting-room, my dearr girrl. Wouldn’t you think that a building as imposing as this one, costing millions of dollars, with corridors eighty yards long and five yards wide, would have a decent waiting-room for women and children patients? But of course not. Women still don’t count much in this country. They give us this fourteen-feet-by-twelve cubicle where each day one hundred and ten patients cram themselves to be seen by me, and after today, by you.

‘That’s why I call this place the whited sepulchre,’ she concluded with her habitual mirth. ‘Actually there are worse places. It isn’t the doctors … many of us are hardworking enough, but we get tired of fighting the creeping paralysis called administration. We are frustrated at every turn, and finally give up. It’s the Emergency which is to blame. There isn’t enough money, and things don’t get done without money.’