We waited in the lallang grass outside the barbed wire fence stretching round the camp. Inside the fence, huddled near the closed gates, we could see the women waiting with their latex pails, their tapping knives, and their children. The bolder women were grumbling because already it was getting light in the east, yet the mata-mata had not opened the gates. And that meant going out later in the heat of the day collecting the latex, and neither they nor their children would eat or drink for the next eight or nine hours, until afternoon, when they stop tapping and return home. At last someone went and rapped on the closed door of the police post; the Malay came out, sleepy, dressed in a torn sarong and holding a shotgun. He did not search the women for food hidden on their bodies, he was too sleepy. He opened the gates. At that moment we sprang at him out of the darkness and the tall grass, and gagged him and took him away before he could shout. The women and children were frightened but before they could cry out, Ah Kei said quickly and clearly, pointing to the star on his cap: ‘Don’t worry, it is us, the People Inside.’ They knew us at once, and walked out quietly looking straight in front of them as if we were so much mist and nothing to be seen.

We then rushed the post. There were four more policemen. We sprang on them before they could rise. One of them, Ah Lam recognized as having been a torturer of our people, an informer in Japanese times, who led parties of Japanese devil-soldiers in Segamat looking for Chinese girls to rape. So we hacked him to pieces with his own parang.[4]

The others begged us to let them go. We made them say they hated their masters, the British, who treated them like lapdogs; that they only did this work for food; and so on. We made them apologize and promise to help us. They gave us food and ammunition, eighty rounds and three rifles and a pistol. We burnt the police post and went back to the jungle. Thus we avenged the wrongs of our people.

Tonight the red-haired troops have arrived and are searching the district. No one in Ulu Cheli is allowed out of huts, even to go to the latrines outside. The soldiers are searching each house and each person. But the news of our justice has spread, and the rubber estates will know about it.

15 July The people of Ulu Cheli have been taken away in trucks to a detention camp. Yesterday an officer holding a stick came with an interpreter, and shouted at them, calling them wicked and bandit-helpers. The women muttered to each other: ‘You have burnt our homes and killed our pigs and wasted our crops. You have put us in this mud hole where our children die. Heaven has eyes. We appeal to Heaven.’