‘Laugh, laugh,’ Betchine repeated, holding the telephone receiver in one hand, for she had started the laborious process of ringing the children’s ward to announce baby’s arrival, otherwise Ward Sister might send it down again with the crisp note ‘No cot’. ‘My fiancé (he’s in the c.i.d.) was prosecuting some bandit helpers last week. They were the usual rubber tappers, going in a lorry to the rubber trees. It had rained, the road was slippery, and round a bend the lorry swerved too sharply. The tappers standing in it were thrown off balance as it skidded, whoosh whoosh, out came the rice, out from the cloth on their heads, from their pockets, their shirts, their belts, their blouses. They were plug full of rice for the jungle people. “You never saw anything so funny,” my fiancé said, “as these tappers scrambling to their feet laughing, laughing their heads off, pretending they couldn’t see the rice on the floor of the lorry, they didn’t know where it had all come from.”

‘My fiancé was in court, prosecuting the case. One of the girls in the dock, the usual People’s Movement worker of about seventeen, could not stop laughing. The Judge became very angry, banged the table, shouted at her: “What’s so funny? You’ve committed a crime, now you are being insolent. Will you tell the court what you’re laughing at?” The interpreter was frightened because the Judge looked so angry; he said: “Quick, tell why you laugh, or it will go hard for you.” So the girl said, still giggling: “Because he has such a funny, big nose,” pointing to the Judge. He wasn’t hard on her though, she got three years’ rigorous, same as the others.’

‘He is a kind-hearted man, lah, Judge Banks,’ interposed Doremy piously. ‘He knows what young girls are like. Got some growing daughters himself.’

The abandoned door (Doremy had left it to collect our coffee cups) now sprang open and into the examination room, wholly naked, on hands and knees, crawled a Tamil labourer woman, grey-haired, lips excoriated with burns from chewing betel with too much lime and letting the saliva trickle down the corners to her chin, purple with old thick scars. Garlic oil and cow dung had been smeared over her body. She advanced uttering screams. Doremy and Ah Kam sprang at her, pushed her out, and shut the door.

‘Mental, that one,’ said Doremy, chattingly. Already I was under her care. Taken in hand. She had charming, dark hands with pale pink glossy nails, the beautiful South Indian skin, soft, finely wrinkled like parachute silk.

‘Don’t tell me there isn’t a cot,’ Betchine shouted into the telephone. ‘This baby is coming in … well, put that girl on the floor on a mattress … I don’t care if it is the British Adviser’s head gardener’s niece …’