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By Root 2635 0

and a horrid mass of red stuff around its middle. He was S-shaped because of the way they were carrying him and he had a sword, too, which scraped tinnily on the ground and kept getting in the way of the man behind who had him by the armpits. But really what gave me such a shock was the Chinese girl they dragged out of the doorway and threw up against the wall … at least, I thought then that she was Chinese because of her clothes, she was wearing a quilted tunic and black silk trousers and I’d never seen a Eurasian wear anything but European clothes, even though there was something about the colour of her hair which was a very dark red, I naturally thought that she had simply dyed it, which would have been nothing compared to the weird creatures in some of the nightclubs which Carlos had persuaded us to go to the night before. The point is that she looked as if she were about my age or even younger, and then she saw me in the crowd and that is what I found so upsetting.

‘Well, it’s not my fault that I’ve led such a sheltered life, is it? I suddenly thought that if I hadn’t been English it could have been me up against that wall. The little officer was shouting at her and striking her. Her face had gone grey, I mean literally grey, the colour of porridge. It gives you a shock yourself to see someone so frightened. Afterwards I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I kept thinking that if she were English she’d have only just left school like me.

‘I don’t know where everybody came from but by that time the street was full of people clustered in a very tight semicircle around the Japanese officer and the girl and the other two soldiers who had carried the dead man out of the house were having trouble getting through the crowd again to reach them. And suddenly … he was so busy screaming at the girl and slapping her face that he hadn’t noticed the crowd behind him … suddenly, they pressed forward and swallowed him and the girl up completely. There was some shoving and kicking and I think he tried to draw his sword but he was so tightly packed in with everyone else that of course he couldn’t do anything. And at that moment Carlos said: “Now’s our chance to beetle off” because the Japanese soldiers who had gone to the end of the street to stop people leaving were coming running back to rescue their officer, and between us Carlos and I managed to drag Mama around the corner and then he went off to find the car, and in no time we were drinking a much-needed cup of tea at the Park Hotel, all back safe and sound on Bubbling Well Road.

‘Well, that was that, and even Mama gradually came to see that she had had a little adventure and felt quite pleased with herself, especially when Carlos got hold of a newspaper which said that the officer had been lured into that house by a girl and then murdered by Communists. It didn’t say anything about what happened to the girl. Anyway, as I say, that was that and the holiday continued as before with sight-seeing and shopping et cetera and we went to the Moscowa nightclub which was full of the most divinely beautiful Russian girls, all aristocrats, Carlos said, I felt so jealous of them and … thank you, Daddy dear, but I know very well that I don’t though I wish I did, it must be nice … and so on and then, then it was time to go on board again to come back to dear old Singapore and Mama had to make a fuss about the way her maid was doing the packing, just rolling things up and cramming them into our trunks and, as you know, Mama has only to set eyes on a boat to get sea-sick, and so it was really lucky that Carlo was there, even though he was beginning to get on our nerves a bit and we’d privately christened him “The Stage Butler” because he was always so polite and pompous, because otherwise I’d have had to mope about by myself, what with Mama groaning and swallowing tablets in her cabin and all.

‘Well, we had lots of lovely dances and games on deck and simply enormous meals and one evening with some other young people we’d met we all got a bit tipsy and decided we’d have an adventure and explore