I can still see her, bent under the reading-lamp at my desk, in her flowery top and trousers, her half-long hair sweeping forward, the intent, studious look upon her face, her pen scraping the paper. Sometimes she would pause, think, a child writing a composition, groping for the next sentence.

After an hour or so she would get up, smile at me.

‘Doctor, would you like to read it?’

‘No, Ah Mei, this is nothing to do with me.’

‘I would not like to have made mistakes in words. I am not very educated.’ I do not think that she really worried about mistakes; she seldom made any. She wanted me to read what she had written. Why?

I read, handed it back. ‘There are no mistakes.’

A day or so later, sweeping my room, Ah Mei would come round to discussing her latest ‘case’. Ah Mei had a natural delightful grace of movement which made her sweeping and dusting symbolic gestures rather than efficient ones. I did the housework again after her.

‘That girl last week, it was really pitiful. She was not passing food at all. She was praying at the ancestors’ grave. It was Ching Ming Festival. She brought food for the ancestors’ spirits. They caught her. She cried so much.’ ‘They’, in our conversations, always meant the Police.

‘You should have told them so in your report, Ah Mei. The trouble in this country is that nobody knows anything about anyone else’s customs. That’s why terrible mistakes are made.’

‘I did write down what she said. But I hear she is up for trial all the same. They did not believe her. But of course the mata-matas are Malay, the troops are British, and they punish us, the Chinese. There are many injustices today, doctor.’

‘You can help a great deal, Ah Mei, you and the others, by telling the Police when they make mistakes.’

‘But then they would not think I write good reports, if I cannot find something wrong.’

‘But it cannot be right if it is not true. You must not find something wrong every time, Ah Mei.’ I became very disturbed.

‘There are a lot of private revenges being carried out now, doctor. People with a grudge will accuse their enemies to the Police, and the Police can never check, they never really know … there are many mistakes, doctor.’

Sudden nausea seized me, as it did so often in these cruel and stupid days in Malaya. ‘I know, Ah Mei.’ The muddles of ignorance, the suspicions based on race, the heavy hand of Emergency Regulations, condemning without trial, needing not evidence but plausible suspicion. And that was enough to detain anyone for a minimum of two years. I did not want to discuss these things with Ah Mei.