At the back of the church Father Destier lived in a hut of dimensions and beaten-earth floor identical with a squatter’s. But the walls were lined half way up with shelves of books, and above the books were photographs of France, and a photograph of the wire fence, dramatic, reared against an orange setting sun. Above a picture of Christ pointing to his heart aureoled with golden rays was a motto painted in bright vermilion on cream paper, embellished with a painted garland of crosses and lilies:

Better to die young, worn out
Than to get old, decaying.

Certainly Father Destier was doing his best to thin his span of years. His motor cycle tore along the roads of his parish, in the hot sun. Mass at Todak in the morning, mass at five in the afternoon for the rubber tappers who did not appear in the morning; in between, exhortations, family visits, very occasionally a conversion. (‘But I have nothing to give them, and when I see them here, within the wire, I am ashamed to preach to them. The Protestant chapel over there gives five dollars a conversion.’) Doctoring, which he had done in China, and continued in Malaya. Catechism, ‘trying to turn the young from communism’ … negotiating for the purchase of a hut to be turned into a small nursery to keep the babies in the morning, when the mothers went to tap rubber …

With cups of excellent coffee, Father Destier poured out his bitterness and his biography. Earnest or humorous, passionate or soberly reflective, truculent or humbly contrite, his moods of fervent unreason or cold sanity were altogether self-forgetful. It was bitterness which prevailed, that morning at Todak.

‘I’ve been here nearly a year. Yes, I was in China … ça se voit, n’est-ce pas? Ah, ça marque, la Chine, la grande et terrible Chine … I was priest for four years in a Hakka district in South China. Before that I was prisoner of war for five years in Germany. That was the good God’s wisdom, you see, giving me, so long ago, the habit and the taste of the barbed wire. I have come back to it, as a familiar landscape. Au tournant de la vie de chacun, il y a un camp qui attend, avec du fil barbelé autour … that is what a deported person once said to me. He had been in seventeen camps.’

His parish in China had been thirty scattered villages among the hills, all Hakka. ‘As you know, the Hakkas form a sub-group of their own. And when I came to Todak, I found fully seven out of ten people here were Hakkas … you see, Providence again. It made it so easy for me to get on. In fact, they came, the people, as soon as they heard that I spoke Hakka as well as they, and, miraculously, some of them were relatives of parishioners of mine, back in China … it gave me such a good start.’