In a cluster on the heavy settee and on other chairs covered with sanitarily white slips sat English women, police wives or wives to be, in flowery dresses, speaking intently and in an accumulation of high-pitched voices, with that emphasis which in tropical lands clings to details of housing, the servants’ duplicities, and personal digestive troubles. On ornate upright chairs drawn against the wall sat three Chinese women in long Chinese dresses with high collars, and three more dressed in the fashion of the Babas,[1] with filmy kebayas and flowery sarongs. These smiled into infinity, not bothering to talk or to move. Two Malay women with the long flowing tunics of Johore hiding their slim bodies sat together, nervously holding hands; next to them stood their husband, a wizened little man, who occasionally emitted a loud squeal of laughter, then sucked at an empty pipe to check himself. The rest of the room was occupied by standing groups of men; British police officers in mess kit talking shop to other police officers in mess kit; or talking of the Emergency with government officials in lounge suits; Chinese towkays, belonging to the various companies, clans, guilds, and associations of Quo Boon, who all, through their various trades and concerns, had to do with the police: timber merchants, who could not fell timber without police licences; contractors, who built houses for the government; rice merchants; rubber merchants; lorry company owners, who ran their trucks in food convoys up and down the roads, under police protection, in danger of ambush; sellers of barbed wire to a government which needed hundreds and hundreds of miles of barbed wire; they were all there, in tight little knots, with a uniformly fixed smile upon their faces, trying hard and always boisterously to appear at ease.

Occasionally one would detach himself from the orbit of his own group: tiptoe perilously across the foot or two which separated him from a circle of white police officials, and, raising his glass, holding it with both hands, gesture that he wished to drink with one or the other Englishman. Upon which the white man, turning half round, would raise his eyebrows to manifest his delight, convulsively clutch his own glass, and drink slowly, with every gesture of delectation and exquisite enjoyment. After which ceremony, with a sigh of relief and mutual bows and smiles of extreme good will, each would return to his own kind.