‘Che Azamah your honoured wife would be invaluable to us in pip,’ said Sir Moksa. ‘Too bad she’s wasting her time with pumo (that means the Practically Universal Malayan Organization: I used to belong to it, but left them, they wanted to walk before they could crawl).’ This aside was to me.

‘She’s busy at the moment organizing the young Merdeka Girl Guides,’ answered her husband cheerfully. The word Merdeka, which is Malay for freedom, seemed to freeze Clerkwell, who muttered something about the loss of the good old virtues, ‘even among the Malays … freedom hallucinates them’.

‘We can’t let the Chinese have any say in this country,’ Bob Stewart, Assistant Superintendent of Police, was saying to Maxine Gerrard in loud tones between bites of the crackling piglet’s skin. ‘What I say is, any Chinese who won’t be loyal must be deported … ship the whole lot of them back to China.’

Again he set to crunching the delicious crackled skin. ‘Been moved myself fourteen times in the last two years,’ he pursued between bouts of champing. ‘Just get round to knowing the name of my deputy, and one or two inspectors, plough half through the files on my predecessors’ desk, and bang, get transferred again … the next chap carries on the war against the bandits.’

‘It sounds like musical chairs to me,’ said Maxine, tossing back her hair, and glancing proprietorially at Luke Davis, sitting at the next table: ‘Hope Luke gets transferred to Singapore. At least he’ll stay put.’

‘Can’t avoid being moved around in Malaya,’ explained Bob. ‘So many of the chaps away on their six months’ furlough, or just coming back from it … but I think fourteen transfers in two years is the record, so far,’ he added, very pleased with this distinction.

At the next table Luke sat by one of Quo Boon’s daughters, of whom no fewer than five were present. Three of them were in kebayas, blouses with open collars and long sleeves, with scalloped embroidered edges, pinned, instead of buttoned, with gold pins encrusted with artificial diamonds, and wore sarongs. It was Malay and yet not Malay, being the dress of an older generation of Malay women. Thus did the Nonyas dress, Chinese women whose ancestors had lived here for over a century, and who had adopted many things from the Malays round them: the serenity, and some of the indolence; the old dress, and much of the language. ‘Baba Chinese,’ the new generation of Chinese called them. In Quo Boon’s family, the older daughters wore Baba dress; the younger, fiercely conscious of their Chineseness, would never do so. The Asian Revolution, Nationalism, and the War had come between.