Next morning I thought for a moment that a revolution had started. Chinese firecrackers rattled around the town like rifle fire, and truckloads of singing Chinese boys roared past my hotel window banging drums and clashing cymbals. New Year’s Day – the first day of the Year of the mischeevious Golden Monkey.

The crackers were particularly impressive, considering a government ban I read about in the Sarawak Tribune that had been pushed under my hotel door. The following ‘items of fireworks’ had been banned, the paper said: Coloured Pearls, Silvery Chrysanthemum, Ground Bloom Flowers, Sparkling Wheel, Flashing Wheel, Dancing Fresh Flowers, Spider’s Web, Peacock Fountain, Silvery Glittering Flower, Fire Splinter, King Cat Sparklers, Small Bee, Red Ground Chicken, Friendship Fireworks, Moon Flitting Phoenix and coloured Electric Sparks. It seemed a pity to have missed all that.

I drank green tea and telephoned Bushey Webb. ‘I can hardly hear you,’ he shouted. ‘The illegal firecrackers. Deafening. Must have been smuggled in somehow!’

I was downstairs when he strode in through the glass-fronted door in a short-sleeved flowered shirt, shorts and sandals. ‘You see me in my who-gives-a-bugger kit,’ he announced, beaming like a large and overwhiskered ginger cat. ‘Let’s go home.’

Alan Webb has lived in Sarawak for nearly thirty years, and is one of very few – perhaps four – foreign residents to have been granted Malaysian citizenship since that country became independent of the British in 1957. He is a solid man of medium height with a reddish round face. A massive pair of bushy sideburns come together at his upper lip and give him his nickname. He is a Buddhist, a convivial drinker, and describes himself with a hearty laugh as a gourmet. I had met him two years earlier with my seafaring friend Brian McGarry, towards the end of a six-month search I had made in McGarry’s old ketch, the Fiona, for the Eastern world of Joseph Conrad – scouting the places Conrad had visited as the master of ships in the 1880s and later written about in novels like Victory and Lord Jim. When we had reached Kuching in the Fiona, Brian found he needed to repair a life raft. The firm Webb owns was able to provide all that was required, and a good deal of unexpected hospitality as well.

He is a hospitable man in the unstinting tradition of all the local people – Dayaks, Malays, Chinese or British. Little jungly Sarawak – the domain carved out in the early nineteenth century by James Brooke, the first of the White Rajahs – is a place of outstanding interracial harmony, despite, or perhaps because of, the furious nineteenth-century sea and river battles between, on the one hand, Brooke, his British and Malay followers and allies, and odd ships of the Royal Navy, and, on the other, the rebellious chiefs, intruding pirates and marauding sea rovers from wild north Borneo and the ill-famed Sulu Sea. The peace the victorious Rajah Brooke imposed and maintained has survived the threats of communist terror, banditry and three hectic years of Indonesian armed confrontation in the 1960s, when British troops came to help the Malaysian armed forces resist an Indonesian invasion. Malaysia had just achieved independence from Britain and President Sukarno of Indonesia was contesting by force the inclusion of the western Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah within Malaysia. That was when I came to Kuching for the first time. The little port had become a bustling military cantonment, and the nights were raucous with the Hogarthian revelry of young British soldiers down from the thousand-mile-long border with Indonesian Kalimantan – down from the mountains, from the heads of half-lost rivers, from the tents and longhouses of Dayak headhunters, from patrolling jungles inhabited by snakes, wild boars and orang-utans. Actually, their revelry was more Rowlandsonian than Hogarthian; the troops were rowdy and drunken, but not in the ugly, vicious way of a Hogarth print, and the people of Kuching seemed to understand.

Now the fighting was long over and the foreign troops gone. Sarawak, a state of independent Malaysia, was as peaceful as it had been in the twenties and thirties in the days of British administrators, bank managers, young company assistants, police officers, museum curators, the days of British clubs, memsahibs and scandals – the world you can read about in the short stories of Somerset Maugham.

Bushey Webb lived in a pleasant Maugham-like, wood-frame bungalow on the edge of the town. It was set back in a cleared rectangle among trees where bright-coloured birds flitted among frangipani, bougainvillea and clumps of tall pale-green bamboo. I clumped up wooden steps across a creaking wooden veranda and entered a large L-shaped room whose front part had a home-made curving bar at one end and bookcases at the other. An overhead fan stirred the sticky air, and harmless chichak lizards flicked about the walls. Motionless, their black pinhead eyes looked sharply about them for insects, and they breathed quickly in the heat, their sides labouring.

‘Oi Fah,’ Bushey called from the bar. ‘People are dying of bloody thirst in here, you know.’ When his young smiling Chinese wife appeared carrying a dish, Bushey said, ‘What’s this, then? Spare ribs? Jolly good show.’ He poured Tiger beer into mugs for all of us. ‘Kong hee fat choy!’ he toasted across the foam. ‘Happy New Year,’ said Oi Fah.

I said, ‘Oi Fah, I read somewhere – in Somerset Maugham, I think – that, to the Chinese, Europeans have the smell of corpses. Is that true?’

‘Not of corpses,’ she said promptly. ‘Of cheese.’ She and Bushey laughed. ‘And yet you married me,’ he said.

An Italian-made electric organ stood in the other part of the room and a pile of old copies of the Observer and the Sunday Times lay on a bamboo table. The books in the shelves were about Borneo or cooking, and there were novels by John Masters and memoirs of the India of the Raj by Philip Mason. Firecrackers sounded distantly. A golden oriole, a bright-yellow bird the size of a thrush, perched on a rail of the veranda. It could easily have been 1934. ‘Did you clap your hands and shout “Boy!” to bring your servants running in the old days?’

‘Never, I promise. Anyway, now we only have an amah who helps Oi Fah in the kitchen, and a Malay who cuts the grass.’

I knew from Maugham that life for the British residents in Malaya in the good old days had not been all hectic sex in exciting mansions with bowing servants and slippered ease. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been much to planters’ houses,’ a Maugham character says. ‘They’re a bit dreary. A lot of gimcrack furniture and silver ornaments and tiger skins. And the food’s uneatable.’ The Webbs’ food was far from uneatable. After the Tiger beer and pink gins (‘Gin merah, they’re called in these parts, red gin’), we sat down to curry. Bushey pushed a dish of sliced red chillies in my direction. ‘That’s the real stuff, that is. Make you hold onto the rail later on. Just the thing.’

‘Bushey!’ Oi Fah reproved him, patting his arm.

‘About Maugham,’ Webb said, ‘there was a certain amount of resentment in Malaysia towards him, you know – abuse of hospitality, that sort of thing.’

I said, ‘Maugham answered that in a preface. He admits that his stories are about the exceptions. British government servants, traders, planters, ordinary people living in Malaya were as happy or unhappy with their wives as most people elsewhere. I think he calls them “good, decent, normal people”. But there must have been some peculiar people about, surely? And dramatic incidents. After all, stories like “The Letter” were based on fact, weren’t they?’

‘Yes, oh yes,’ said Bushey. ‘Certainly, there were eccentrics out here. Take old Fred Salt, an ex-sergeant major from the Gunners, who always wore one gold earring in his ear, while his dog, a bitch, went around with the other gold earring in her ear. He now lives in Darwin with his Dayak wife.

‘Nowadays the British community here is very small. There’s me, there’s a bank manager who is also the honorary consul, and there’s a Guinness representative, Frank Burke-Gafney, a very young-looking Old Hand. But he’s usually travelling because Guinness is popular in Borneo and Indonesia. A potent aphrodisiac, people think, and cheaper than snake wine or rhino horn.’

Bushey took more rice and scattered red-hot chillies over it. ‘In the days of the Rajah, I lived up-country at Sibu. The Island Club there would have thirty to forty members. Just a wooden bungalow with an atap roof, a tennis court and a bowling alley. With old English bowls, mark you, made by Gamages out of the hardest wood there is. There was the resident, the district officer, the police superintendent, the land-survey wallah, an agricultural officer, the public works engineer, a judge, a doctor and business people like me. Timber in my case.’

‘Any Chinese or Malay members?’

‘You could bring them in as guests, but Malays don’t usually drink and the Chinese preferred their own clubs – we played bridge, not mah-jongg or fan-tan. There were no planters here; there’s no rubber in Sarawak. The planters were all in the Malay Peninsula – in the Federated Malay States, the FMS, as we used to say. Raffles’s Long Bar was full of them.’

I had often seen in my mind’s eye the newly arrived young planters, fresh off the P&O steamer from home, catching their breath at Raffles, so to speak, before taking the train to the rubber estate up-country, where they would work for an initial stretch of seven years before their first home leave. Thereafter, leave came every five years. ‘They call the young planter a creeper,’ wrote Maugham, ‘and you can tell him in the streets of Singapore by his double felt hat and his khaki coat turned up at the wrists. Callow youths who saunter about staring and are inveigled into buying worthless truck from Birmingham which they send home as eastern curios, sit in the lounges of cheap hotels drinking innumerable stengahs, and after an evening at the pictures get into rickshaws and finish the night in the Chinese quarter.’

Maugham had eyed the creepers from the window of a room very like the one I occupied in Raffles. Now he would see only tourists – mainly American, Australian and Japanese – loaded with electronic gadgets from Hong Kong or Japan. Singapore no longer has cheap hotels to lounge in, and to drink ‘innumerable’ stengahs would be to squander a small fortune. But it is still possible to spend an evening at the pictures and then get into a cycle-rickshaw to finish the night in the Chinese quarter – but only just possible, because the government is rapidly demolishing such parts of old Singapore.

If Maugham returned he would find another change. No doubt the English accents that assailed his ears in the card rooms of all those clubs he frequented were monotonously upper class, although perhaps the limited social shake-up after the First World War might have intruded an occasional sound of something more regional. I recalled the expressions of dismay he overheard in the bar of an up-country club when the news appeared in the Straits Times that one of its pillars, a Mr Harold ‘Knobby’ Clarke, had died on the ship taking him home on leave:

Nowadays in, say, the Singapore Cricket Club, which has long been multi-racial, the British members are more likely to address each other as ‘Squire’, ‘Vicar’ or even ‘mate’ than as ‘old man’ or ‘old boy’. Mr Warburton, the tetchy and snobbish Resident in Maugham’s story ‘The Outstation’, would not be amused. He was the official who had been brought close to apoplexy by the action of his callow and insubordinate assistant, Cooper, when he returned from an up-country tour to find that the young man had torn open and read his most recent batch of newspapers from London:

‘I wonder you didn’t open my letters as well.’

‘Oh, that’s not quite the same thing. After all, I couldn’t imagine you’d mind my looking at your newspapers. There’s nothing private about them.’

‘I think it extremely impertinent of you. They’re all mixed up.’

Mr Warburton’s newsagent, Maugham tells us, had instructions to write on the outside of the wrapper the date of each paper he dispatched. Mr Warburton then numbered them, and his head boy’s orders were to place one on the table every morning in the veranda with the early cup of tea. This gave Mr Warburton the illusion of living at home. Every Monday morning he read the Monday Times of six weeks back, and so on through the week. On Sunday he read the Observer. Returning to the scene of his lifework, Mr Warburton’s irascible ghost might be interested to find that, while in those days it took him a week in a coaster from Singapore and forty-eight hours lying on the bottom of a native boat to reach his outstation, it would now take him a couple of hours by air and a few more by motor launch. But he might be amused to find that the techniques of newspaper distribution have failed to keep pace with aerodynamic progress. On my last visit the most recent Observer hanging on the newspaper racks in the Singapore Cricket Club was exactly six weeks old, the same time its predecessors sixty years ago used to take to travel by water from London to the back of beyond.

‘It wasn’t all beer and skittles being a planter in Malaya, you know,’ Bushey said. ‘In Maugham’s time, there probably wasn’t any ice to cool your drinks, though later some planters had swimming pools. It could be bloody boring. The tuan – the white master – got up at five in the morning for the rollcall of his workers. Then he inspected the estate, a long, tiring walk. Breakfast at nine, then some office work, and he’d be finished by twelve. You have to tap rubber early in the morning; while it’s cool, it runs, but in the heat it congeals like latex.’

In a setting very like that of the old days we were discussing, I could imagine the planter in his khaki shorts and flannel shirt (a bit thick for the climate), heavy boots and stockings, doing the rounds between the rubber trees in their prim rows, assigning the day’s work to the mostly Tamil workers (‘coolies’ they called them – some to tap, some to weed, some to dig ditches. Then, at noon, relaxation in a sarong and a loose shirt with warm beer and a pipe. Tea at the club, dinner in the bungalow at eight, bed about nine thirty.

I thought of the wives in their cool, fresh, simple frocks, with not nearly enough to do, working at their pillow lace to keep busy. Maugham had noted it all. ‘Pretty dull for the memsahibs,’ Bushey admitted. ‘But worse for their opposite numbers, the Dutch wives, over in Sumatra. A general manager of an estate there might order a young married assistant to take his plain old wife to the club film, and himself invite the assistant’s young wife up to his bungalow for you-know-what. The assistant wouldn’t refuse; it guaranteed his job with the company.’

We stood up and walked to the doorway looking down to the trees. Mynah birds whistled and cursed one another, stalking stiff-legged on the lawn, and a pair of golden orioles flew past the veranda.

I said, ‘Maugham’s story “The Letter” revolves around the disgracing of an unmarried Englishman because he kept a Chinese mistress.’

‘It has never been a disgrace here in Sarawak,’ Bushey said. ‘A mistress might not go to the club, but her English boyfriend, her tuan, certainly could – no stigma there. In fact, the Rajahs encouraged their young whites to have local birds to keep them happy on the long five-year tour. Sarawak came to feel like home, so they stayed on. Good policy.

‘Talking like this brings back so many stories. I’ll tell you one or two if you like. They’re not libellous, and they may interest you.’

Oi Fah said, ‘Bushey adores telling stories. You’d be doing him a favour by listening.’

Bushey said, ‘In 1953 there was a young English chap named George out here, working in timber like I was. He must have lived in Kuching for about a year before being sent to Miri in east Sarawak, and he formed a liaison with a Malay girl there who moved in with him. She used to play him up a bit by going off now and again with someone else, but he’d have her back again. He would never be harsh to the opposite sex. I know it sounds odd to say it, but – well, he was a natural gentleman.

‘Anyway, his company rented him a wooden bungalow two miles out of Miri, and she went with him. It was a pleasant area on the edge of the town opposite a cantonment where the Borneo Company Europeans lived. Now, being a Malay, the girlfriend was very fond of golden ornaments, and had purchased on credit a lot of ornaments from an old Malay woman who used to go around the houses selling them. Finally she owed this woman a hundred dollars.

‘At last the old woman demanded that she pay up what she owed. According to the evidence in court later, the girl said, “All right. My tuan has given me the money, so come round tomorrow when he’s at the office and I’ll pay you what I owe. I may even buy more, so bring your entire stock with you.”

‘Well, in the late afternoon of that day, George’s office boy went off to the house to cut the grass, and he noticed that all the windows of the house were closed, and that the place looked desolate. But all of a sudden a window swung open and the girlfriend leaned out and said, “Look, you don’t have to cut the grass today. Go away. Come back tomorrow.” The Malay noticed that there was blood on her arms, so he dashed back to the office and reported this to George, who immediately drove home.

‘Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – he had a puncture, and didn’t arrive at the house until well after six o’clock. By that time, whatever had transpired in the bungalow had been sorted out. The windows were open again, and his girlfriend seemed calm. With her in the house there was also her brother and her brother’s boyfriend – among the young Malays, homosexuality is not rare.

‘Anyway, George asked what all the trouble was, and what was all this about blood on her arms. She claimed that she’d had a miscarriage that afternoon, although George noticed there were also bloodstains on the wall of the lounge. He said, “All right, you’d better go and see a doctor,” but she said, “I’m all right now. I’d like to go to the pictures.” So he had his bath and then took her off to the Palace cinema.

‘Well, in the back of this house was a large kitchen, or dapor, with a Chinese type of stove made of concrete, rather like a table with two holes in it through which the heat of the charcoal is forced up. Underneath this sort of table very large pieces of charcoal were stored. When the old Malay woman had come to the house, she had been attacked by the girlfriend, her brother, and her brother’s boyfriend. Apparently they had strangled her with the cable from the electric iron. They hid the body under the charcoal in the dapor when George returned. While George was out at the cinema, these two characters got the old woman’s body out of the back window after dark and carried it down to the jungle at the back of the house with the intention of burying her in a grave they had dug in the morning before she visited the house. This was probably fatal to their case, since the digging of the grave showed premeditation. At the same time it was also their undoing because Miri is subject to floods, with the river rising and falling fifteen feet every six hours or so. The grave was now a pond full of water, and quite useless for their purpose. So they stuck the body in a hedge, covered it over with jungle, came back and went to bed.

‘In the Malay kampong [village] where the old lady lived there was a hue and cry. Next day, more hue and cry, the police also joining the hunt, and eventually, of course, their inquiries led to George’s house. The arrest of his girlfriend and brother and boyfriend followed. George was questioned closely, a search of the area produced the body, and the game was up.’

Bushey broke off. ‘You can’t listen to this without a glass in your hand. Brandy? Beer?’ Even under the fan, the afternoon temperature felt like 120 degrees, and the lizards on the walls were panting even harder. ‘Beer,’ I said. He poured two mugs, and went on.

‘Now, in Sibu at that particular time – bear in mind that Sarawak was still a colony – the head of the police was a very able European called Roy Henry, who later on became commissioner of police, and today is the number one of the police in Hong Kong. Roy was the investigating officer because it was a very serious crime, particularly since a European seemed to be at least partly involved. Anyway, in the course of the questioning, the girlfriend changed her evidence and said that the blood on the wall was not human blood but animal blood from a chicken she had slaughtered. Roy decided that in order to check her evidence she should have a medical examination, so he sent her up to the hospital. The examination showed that she had not had a miscarriage.

‘Eventually the trial was held, and the three of them were accused of murder. It lasted about ten days. There were amusing incidents during the trial. The boyfriend turned out to have a rather low intellect and, when questioned as to where he was on that night when George and his girlfriend were at the cinema, he claimed that he had not slept in the house that night, but was sleeping with a European. “What was her name?” His answer was that it was a he, a young European of the Borneo Company across the road. This evidence was not produced in court.

‘The girlfriend’s appearance in court was that of a nun or saint. She had no make-up on, wore a drab, grey, full-length dress, and had her hair done up in plaits. Questions were asked about this: “Would it be fair to say that normally you would not dress up as you are today?”

‘She replied, “Normally I would not dress like this, but it is in respect for the court I’m dressed like this today.”

‘“Do you normally wear European-type clothes?”

‘“Yes.”

‘“Would it be true to say that normally you would wear lipstick?”

‘“Yes.”

‘“And nail varnish?”

‘“Yes.”

‘“In fact, would it be truthful to say that you look after your appearance very well?”

‘But the Malay translator made a mistake, and asked, “Would it be fair to state that you look after Europeans very well?”

‘And, before the translation could be corrected, she answered, “I look after Europeans very well!”

‘This produced a great deal of laughter from the court, including the judge himself, who, being an old Rajah hand, could also speak fluent Malay.

‘Anyway, judgement was given, the brother and sister were both found guilty, and the judge felt that he could not recommend mercy for either of them, mainly because the grave had been dug. The boyfriend was found not guilty – largely because he was of such low intelligence.

‘Late in the afternoon of the last day of the trial, the two accused in handcuffs were led outside the court, where a tremendous crowd of relatives of the old woman was gathered, and were taken away in a Black Maria to the prison. They would be taken down to Kuching the following day on the steamer anchored at the wharf about a hundred yards away. Roy Henry, whose office was immediately above the court, instructed the boyfriend to be brought to his office immediately after the case ended. Roy explained to the boy in Malay that, but for the grace of God, he, too, would have been sentenced to be hanged. The law being the law, he was free, but for the boyfriend’s own safety, Roy said, he was going to keep him in the jail that night. “See all those Malays outside? If I let you loose tonight they’ll kill you. For your own protection I’m going to take you into custody, and tomorrow you’ll go down to Kuching. If I ever see you in my division again, I’ll make sure that you’re arrested.” To which the boy said, “Tuan, before I go I would like to ask one favour.” And Roy said, “Yes, what is it?” “Tuan, could you lend me five dollars?”

‘Two or three months later the appeal for clemency failed, and it was the last night before they were to be hanged. George was down in Kuching, and went to the jail to say farewell. He always maintained that, had she been found not guilty, he would have taken her back to his house, despite all that had happened. I think it was pretty plucky for George to say that. That’s the end of the story. She was the only woman ever hanged in Sarawak.’

The yellow bird had returned to the veranda rail, this time bringing a mate. They were beautiful creatures perched there, beaks open, breathing with difficulty in the heat. They flew off when the Webbs’ cat sidled around a shaded corner.

‘What about George?’ I asked. ‘Did people steer clear of him once it came out about his Malay girlfriend?’

Bushey looked shocked. ‘Good God, no. He stayed on to be a very successful and popular member of the community. As I told you, he was a natural gentleman.’ He put a big red arm around Oi Fah. ‘Sometimes, though, there are difficulties the other way, but I think your family have finally accepted that I’m a reasonable barbarian husband, haven’t they?’

She laughed fondly. ‘It’s lucky you’re a Buddhist, or they might not have.’

Later, when I reached Hong Kong, I met Roy Henry, the policeman who had investigated the case. He remembered it well, particularly the girlfriend. ‘She was a very haughty woman. Very brave, her head high – unlike her brother, who had to be carried to the gallows. It was widely believed by Malays that she could cast spells and work magic with incantations and herbs. Even my Malay officers believed it. I think she thought that because she was with a tuan she might get off. But she was very brave.’

*

In the evening coolness, Bushey walked with me to Kuching’s museum, famous in the region. It contained a reconstruction of a Dayak longhouse, Dayak weapons and tools and artifacts, cases of local fish, birds, animals and old Chinese porcelain. We looked at the ancient embossed cannons, the paintings of James Brooke and his dashing sailing ship, the Royalist, the scourge of marauding sea rovers from Sulu. We stared into the angry glass eyes of stuffed orang-utans, red and shaggy, half the size of a man, their huge arms draped over reconstructed branches, and gazed in awe at the long, red, glowing nose of the proboscis monkey, another large creature. The Malays call it orang blanda (Dutchman), showing what they thought about their overlords in the East Indies.

We paused before a case of birds of paradise, perhaps the most wonderful of tropical creatures, and, a few paces further on, looked at the grotesque hornbills with their unwieldy-looking bills and the long tail feathers that the superstitious Dayaks like to wear as headdresses. Then we saw that the custodians were closing the museum.

As we walked slowly down the hill to the Aurora, Bushey said, ‘I ended the war in Burma, you know. Place called Prome. Now at Prome there was as queer a coot as you’ll ever find. The local province engineer said to me one day, “Would you like to meet a real prewar British type?” This odd chap had been in the Burmese police, right up on the Burmese–Chinese border. He’d been left alone by the Japs because even then I suppose they thought he was too old to do any harm.

‘We drove up in a jeep to his pleasant timber bungalow, thatched roof, raised off the ground. The old boy had very little hair, and must have been eighty. He wore a lungi, the Burmese sarong, and a collarless Burmese shirt with no buttons but with studs joined by a golden chain – the usual formal dress of Burmese males. He gave us pink gins – no choice, take it or leave it. His friends were there, some Burmese, some Brits who had come back to restart their timber concessions, and we sat on teak cane-bottom chairs with extendable arms and slots in them for the glasses.

‘Old Montague lay back, feet up on his chair, talking about tiger shooting in the Arakan area. Tigers had snatched one or two chaps from the Eighty-second West African Division when they passed through. After a drink or two, he called out, and an aged Burmese woman shuffled out from behind a curtain – his wife, it turned out – carrying a spittoon. She lowered his legs, put the spittoon under his lungi, and we realized he was peeing.’

We turned from the Padang into the bar of the Aurora and sat down at a small table behind a trio of large Sikhs, who sat talking volubly over a thicket of empty bottles. Bushey resumed: ‘Well, he kept on chatting, and after a bit he said something to her, and she bent down and dived under the lungi, then bore the spittoon away covered with a piece of cloth. Talk went on as before, no one had taken a bit of notice, and the old man put his feet back up.’

I wonder whether Eric Blair of the Burma Police, later to change his name to George Orwell and write 1984 and Animal Farm, knew old Montague?

*

Next day Bushey Webb got out his old car and made his annual round of New Year courtesy visits to Chinese friends. Through the leafy avenues of Kuching he drove like a Panzer officer afraid of slowing up a blitzkrieg, waving gaily at people on the pavements who waved back, Malays and Ibans – the local people – as well as Chinese. Once we passed three young Malays who pranced and giggled in women’s dresses. Bushey said, ‘Malays don’t mind that sort at all. They accept transvestism as quite normal. Look, one of them, the one in the beautiful red dress, has the whole works – tits, brassière, the lot. Wonderfully tolerant about that, the Malays. Good for them, I say.’ Good for Bushey, too, I thought.

As we slowed at a corner, two Malays called out cheerfully, ‘Orang putih!’ – ‘white man’ – and we exchanged waves. ‘Funny how they call us white,’ said Bushey. ‘We’re anything but, really. Pink, purple – pink and purple – off-white. Red – the Chinese are right to call us red barbarians.’