‘You must remember, Ah Mei, that the people in the jungle have done terrible things … that they must be defeated. If no one helped them, they would quickly surrender. Then things would become more normal. The People Inside must be made to surrender.’ I hammered the sentence, woodenly, exactly like an official of the Information Department, and to convince myself more than Ah Mei … for after a few months in Malaya, I could no longer hide from myself my own conviction, that of this cruel and colossal muddle there could be no end with the means that were used.
‘Surrender …’ slowly Ah Mei blushed, up and up to the roots of her hair. ‘Surrender, you say, doctor. Yes, some do surrender. But the good ones, they never surrender … don’t you think so, doctor?’ Softly she said it, but in her face was all the passionate violence which I would never see again upon Ah Mei.
8
NO FRUIT BUT THORNS
Barbed wire is incorporate to the land, another vegetation. It swings its leagues along the roads, unnoticed of motorists whose vision leaps the miles by the speedometer’s mutation. It encloses the resettlement areas, where six hundred thousand ex-farmers now live. Thickened to triple depth and height, it bristles with the watchtowers of detention camps, loops around the police posts, straggles up and down labour lines and factories, dodges the jungle to enclose the forests of rubber with their managers’ bungalows, special constables’ quarters, and machinery sheds. Barbed-wire wooden gates, flanked by sentry posts for police searches, open along the metalled roads winding through villages and towns. Unseen from the air barbed wire delimits the jungle, the front line palisades of its retreat. Barbed wire fences the clearings where man survives, and outside it is the grey-green toppling surge, all-engulfing, of the jungle.
Standing upon the small hillock of the church, within the resettlement area of Todak, Father Destier looked furiously around him. From that modest height the perimeter wire of the camp, frail and vulnerable wisp, threaded the air against the orderly grey boles of a rubber plantation, lost itself in the plots of tapioca and the banana clumps farther towards the road. Angular as grasshopper legs, the stakes paced up the hill where the brown barracks of the police post of Todak dominated, in martial fashion, two thousand identical squatters’ huts in uniform, straggling rows of grey-brown attap leaf roofs, plywood walls, and tapioca and the privy at the back. The motor road ran east to west and cut Todak neatly in two; the higher land, with police post, church, huts, and the Resettlement Officer’s bungalow, and the low land, also covered with huts, slithering down into the mangrove swamp of the river. Against the horizon sky the jungle humped and reared, a shaggy, partly sliced, prurient green broccoli.