Tari, a simpler character, is the Dance personified. When he talks he talks with his whole body and all his limbs. When he points to a person he looks at him and raises his chin in his direction – he never points with a finger, for that is not polite. Funnily enough he is an engineer and, as a prisoner, has had an unusually interesting time both driving motor boats in Bangkok harbour and sometimes an engine on our railway. But his whole background, education and language is basically Javanese. Most of his life has been spent in one of the K ratons, or Royal Palaces in Central Java; he spoke beautiful and fluent High Javanese, and in Java he had special dances assigned to him as his duty and privilege. His friend, and relation by marriage, who lay next to him, was a Dalang, or educator of the Javanese in the villages on the subject of manners and traditional behaviour. He too, is a dancer and an authority on the Wayang Kulit, or Puppet Show of mythological gods and heroes.

The characters of the musicians are more diverse. Barclay, the leader, is the organiser of the whole group and plays the violin, but sometimes another man, a sergeant with Ambonese blood, seizes the fiddle from him and plays like an oriental Magyar. Playing the string-bass made of a soap box and telephone wire is Leider, a round faced lad who speaks like a machine gun. He is very young and has an enormous Red Indian tattooed across his brown chest, but when he plays his bass he is away in a world of his own, twanging out a complicated rhythm that no one else can begin to copy, his whole being quite submerged in his music. Inevitably next to him is a little thin chap, a perfect Malaysian type, the clown of the gathering and as quick in his wit as lightning. His name is Franz, and he plays the ukelele. When he isn’t playing the ukelele he is gambling, and when he isn’t gambling he is smoking some foul cigarette and pulling somebody’s leg. He was the first person, after ten weeks hard work, that I dared to have a long Malay-talking evening with alone – I don’t know who was the most frightened.

Our two singers are both guitar players as well. One is a lazy, tolerant fellow with a remarkable voice and no ambition at all; the other is the better guitarist, a regular soldier, and a very hardworking, honest man. Just opposite us, and completing the party, are three men who come from the Isle of Ambon, where Malay is the common language. They are in demand for their very jolly Ambonese songs, the Ambonese being among the best soldiers in the Dutch East Indies, and having songs peculiarly their own and strikingly simple and joyful.