‘Next thing we knew was at breakfast, when the mata-mata at the outer gate asked to speak to me. Said there was a chap outside wanting to come in. He’d been there since the previous afternoon, he said, and they’d already driven him off once or twice, but he kept on returning. Said he lived here, said he wanted to be let in … can you imagine: wanting to be put in a detention camp …? So I went down with the mata-mata, to the gate, and who did I see on the other side of the wire, sobbing with joy and kneeling in the road? Old Grandpa. He’d walked all the way up from the Hospital, and when he saw me, he was that happy! … Kept on saying: ‘It’s my home. I’ve nowhere else to go. I live here,’ he kept on telling the boys at the gate. My, was that man happy when I took him back!’ Again he looked round, nodded: ‘I believe,’ he said solemnly, ‘some of them have found more comfort and security inside the camp than out.’

The inspection committee stood between the tables where the detainees sat at work. Smiling, as if for a camera, Sir Moksa leaned over a sewing machine, but found nothing to say. Quo Boon stood at the back and wiped his glasses and looked at the ceiling of the attap roof. Mr Poh nodded vigorously, murmuring ‘Home, yes, home, sweet home …’, for he was having a good time, and so he should. Was he not holding power of attorney for several detainees who were still among the ‘greys’ or the ‘blacks’? It was indeed a merry day for Mr Poh, controlling the wealth of his friends behind barbed wire, friends once wealthy owners of rubber estates or timber felling areas, guilty of paying their subscription to the jungle. It was in vain they protested that they couldn’t do otherwise, that had they refused they’d have been ambushed and shot or hacked to pieces. Mr Poh was immensely relieved to find that not one of his friends had been promoted to the ‘whites’.

The kitchens, the barracks of the ‘greys’; the hut where across ten feet and a double hedge of barbed wire the detainees once a month were allowed to see their wives. They shouted cheerfully at each other. And then the ‘blacks’, with triple guards; and the cells, the huts, confined from each other by barbed wire. No tree, no shade, and silence.

‘Do they get anything to read?’ asked Quo Boon.

‘No,’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘It is difficult. What can they read? Lots of them can’t read,’ he added hastily.

The inspection body went by and from inside the barbed-wire fences the prisoners stared. They were all men in this section. They wore khaki shorts and no shirts.

‘They’re healthy, awfully healthy,’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘The doctor comes round once a month to inspect the camp.’