‘And then it became like a refrain, one of those terrible and stupid contagious formulae repeated without ever thinking … that the people of Todak were a bad lot, and needed a firm hand. Whenever I saw an official in the town, at one of those government meetings; when Mr Clerkwell asked me to come over and I tried to explain, it was the same thing; ‘They’re a bad lot … we’re satisfied with what the R.O. is doing …’

‘Mon Dieu’ cried Father Destier, ‘it was like a nightmare. I knew it couldn’t go on, there was so much hate, like the stench from the swamp, rising in silence … something would happen, but I did not know what, and I was unable to move …’

*  *  *

Tommy Uxbridge had been a captain in the Indian Army and a major in Palestine, where he had acquired a bad knee and a slight limp. He was forty-three, childless, fond of dogs, and his wife had left him years ago for an American. He had served the Empire in its outposts before the Asian Revolution had become respectable, and his notion of the world, like Mont Blanc, consisted of a white top and a submissive yellow-brown-black base. In Malaya he was not yet an anachronism.

Coloured folk were on the whole loyal, and strove hard to achieve equality (which meant as fair a likeness to an Englishman like himself as striving could achieve). But they were still a long way off it, and meanwhile they were misled by ‘bad lots’. The appellation Sahib, Tuan, or Master, uttered with native respect, mingled with an upward gaze of devotion and trust, evoked in Tommy Uxbridge fairness, benevolence, generosity, and a paternal protective glow.

Tommy Uxbridge had no vices, but his meagre personal income did not allow in England the reasonable supply of Scotch, nor induce in his neighbours the hospitable friendliness, to which he had grown accustomed; when the Colonial Office advertised for Officers to deal with resettlement camps in Malaya, Uxbridge applied and favourably impressed the Selection Board.