As we went up to the church, I could see little family groups, women and children and a few men, coming out of the huts and walking wordlessly down to the centre of the village, where a small level area, like a central village square, had been reserved for some public buildings to be erected later. Grey-green uniformed British soldiers in groups of twos and threes came out of or went into the huts, looking for arms, ammunition, pamphlets, anything suspect. They brought bundles of clothing and cooking utensils, and threw them in heaps outside the huts. At one side of the main road was a chain of trucks and a prison lorry into which a few men and women were being led with their hands clasped on their heads.

Up the slope, stepping aside for the soldiers and the cars, Father Destier became more wrathful with every step. At the church door we stopped, looking down, and Father Destier muttering: ‘Les idiots, les idiots. As if they will ever arrest the real murderers. I knew it was coming, of course, and I know why … Ah,’ he turned, half-comical, half-woeful, to me, ‘had the good God made me an Englishman, or given me the gift of speaking English correctly, perhaps “they” would have listened and this could have been prevented.’

A posse of two hundred men from a famous British regiment was combing the jungle round Todak. Four hundred more searched the rubber plantations, large and small, European and Asian, on both sides of the resettlement area. All the shops were closed, the region under curfew. ‘Probably a twenty-two hour a day curfew. Only two hours a day will the people be allowed out of their shacks to draw water, buy food, throw away the refuse – the business of living.’

‘And then “they” will bomb the jungle,’ Father Destier was fiercely derisive. ‘… throw bombs among the trees. Paf, paf, paf. Psychological warfare, it’s called. And strafing the area. Then the newspapers will say that Red hideouts have been smashed. Nobody but a few trees will have been smashed … not even a wild pig. And then I suppose they will again move these people, transport them elsewhere, pull down the huts … ha, if only I could have spoken le bon Anglais!’

‘Calmez-vous, mon Pere,’ I soothed.

This was the beginning of my knowledge of Todak, and of Father Destier, and of Oliver Daley, later to become Resettlement Officer in place of the man who had been killed by the People Inside.