At first he was very clearly nervous, for he was teaching eight English officers oriental languages and was himself only 26 years old. It took a long time to get to understand him, but he eventually became one of my closest friends. I was attracted to him because he was one of the most honest and uncompromising people I knew; he was proud, yet prided himself that he could behave as correctly in a Javanese household as he could in a European one, for he was too intelligent to try to submerge either of the cultures that ran in his veins, being acutely conscious of both. When his barriers were at last down – and that wasn’t until I met him again after the war – I learnt that what I had suspected was true, that he was a thoroughly shrewd young man who had hesitated to accept Noel and me entirely at our face values, and had feared that we’d forget all the political and racial problems that had unfolded themselves round his bed area, where most of the intelligent Indische Jongens, officer and O.R., used to assemble.

Freiman himself was an Indische Jongen who claimed only to be an Indische Jongen – not a Dutchman, and not Sundanese. In Java the Indische Jongens theoretically have full European rights, and compared with Eurasians anywhere in the British Empire they have little to complain about. But in Java there are several hundred thousand of them, and in practice it cannot work out that they have those same rights often so proudly boasted of by the Dutch. This section is written because we English rubbed shoulders and worked alongside every Asiatic race and most European ones and, as the Eurasian problem is a universal one, it was interesting to study it as applied to Java, a country where it has so far been most honestly treated.

In Java there are three types of these Indische Jongens: first, the Eurasian pure and simple; then the man who is predominantly European in blood and who tries to identify himself solely with the Dutch; and lastly there is a considerable section of orphans, for whom both races bear the responsibility, and who have a grudge against the white world and gravitate back to the kampongs where often as not they marry a Javanese woman. It is quite obvious that these three types neither want nor get the same rights.