More and more bodies were being required once again by the Nips for up country maintenance of the railway and, though by knowing well all the Adjutants and Sergeant-Majors I held back the essential dancers for several weeks in the teeth of their Dutch C.O.s, a large draft had to go up only ten days before the show was due, and my complete cast went up into the jungle together rather than be hopelessly split up. The gamelan and Tari were used in the Dutch Show that happened to be on that week, but our Keraton Dance never went on.

Metz didn’t go up country because he was ill in hospital with fever and other troubles, and visiting him one day he pointed out to me a dark, grey-haired shrivelled up little Eurasian who looked just like a coolie. ‘That man,’ said Metz, ‘is one of the richest men in Sumatra. His name is Lorenzo. He speaks very good Malay. And if you like, I can arrange for him to give you and Mr Scott a series of talks. He is very interesting.’

So we formed a circle once a week that met to listen to Papa Lorenzo. Colonels and ornaments of the M.C.S. and even a few Dutch officers came along to listen. He became a sort of institution, and people placed orders with him for after the war, and one man started to write short stories about him.

Lorenzo dismissed as uninteresting Sago and Eucalyptus tree estates in Ambon – they only brought him in clothes money. But he told us a lot about his 5,000 acre estate of coconuts near Medan, in Sumatra, and he described in detail the processing of the copra that was carried on in his spick-splinter new factory there. It was very technical but most absorbing, and we learnt that this rather dirty mummy of a little man had a lovely house outside the town and used it occasionally to fly over the Straits of Malacca to do a little racing in Singapore. Certainly his Sumatra holdings were profitable!

But that was still small fry. For his real business was in pearls, and he was a pearl king from an old pearling family. He worked himself only three months a year, and that was when he went out on his 1,500 ton flagship to watch the work of his fleet of over a hundred pearling vessels as they worked in the seas and among the islands of the Moluccas. The normal ship was small, only about 250 tons, and they worked in teams to cover various areas yearly.