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By Root 5823 0

of the rats and the centipedes which had once made it their home, seething, devouring, copulating, businesses rose and fell, sank their teeth into each other, swallowed, broke away, gulped down other firms, or mounted each other to procreate smaller companies, just as they do elsewhere in other great capitalist cities. But up here in Tanglin people moved in a quiet and orderly way about their daily affairs, apparently detached from these sordid encounters, detached especially from the densely packed native masses below. And yet they moved, one might suppose, as the hands of a clock move. Imagine a clock in a glass case; the hands move unruffled about their business, but at the same time we can see the working of springs and wheels and cogs. That ordered life in Tanglin depended on the same way on the city below, and on the mainland beyond the Causeway, whose trading, mining and plantation concerns might represent wheels and cogs while their mute, gigantic labour force are the springs, steadily causing pressures to be transmitted from one part of the organism to another … and not just as that time or just to Tanglin, of course, but much further in time and in space: to you thousands of miles away, reading in bed or in a deck-chair on the lawn, or to me as I sit writing at a table.

2

The Blacketts, on the whole, had reason to be satisfied with the calm and increasingly prosperous life they were leading in Singapore in 1937. Only once or twice in the two decades following the Great War had anything occurred to disturb their peace of mind and even then nothing that could be considered particularly serious. True, their elder daughter, Joan, had shown signs of becoming involved with unsuitable young men … but that is the sort of thing that any family with growing children has to expect.

Although his wife, Sylvia, became greatly agitated, Walter himself was inclined to take it calmly at first. Joan, who had recently returned from a finishing school in Switzerland, had found it hard to settle down in Singapore, separated from the friends she had made in Europe. She was rebellious, contemptuous of the provincial manners of the Straits, as one naturally would be, Walter supposed, after being at such a school (the school, incidentally, had been her mother’s idea). Given time it was something that she would get over.

Joan’s involvement with the first of these young men, a penniless flight-lieutenant whom she had met nobody knew where, was an act of rebellion probably. Even Joan had not tried very hard to pretend that he was anything but impossible. Besides, she knew well enough what her parents, who took a dim view of the Services, thought of even those generals and air vice-marshals whom duty had called to Singapore, let us not speak of flight-lieutenants. Walter had not set eyes on the person in question because Joan had had the good sense not to try to bring him home. He had waited calmly for her to see reason, explaining with a touch of exasperation to his wife that her tears and her fretting were a waste of energy which she could use to greater profit in some other direction, because Joan would presently come to her senses with or without the aid of her mother’s tears. In due course, it had taken a little longer than he had expected, Walter’s confidence had been justified. Joan had disposed of the flight-lieutenant as surreptitiously as she had found him. Tranquillity had returned to the Blackett household for a while.

Presently, however, it transpired that Mrs Blackett, testing the material of one of Joan’s cotton frocks beween her finger and thumb, felt an unexpected crinkle of paper. Ah, what was this? Something left by the laundry? Mrs Blackett had happened to grasp the light material of her daughter’s frock just where there was a pocket. Joan, who was in the frock at the time, blushed and said that it was nothing in particular, just a piece of paper of no importance. ‘In that case,’ replied Mrs Blackett, ‘we had better throw it away immediately, because it does not do to let our clothes bulge out in an ugly fashion by