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By Root 5495 0

to ‘the brave lads in khaki who had come from the four corners of the Earth to defend Malaya’. (‘Hear! hear!’) The trouble was that for the British this patriotism was operating at long distance: their real concern was not for Malaya but for a country several thousand miles away. As for the Indians and Chinese, the great majority of them felt more loyalty to their communities in India and China than to Malaya: they had, after all, simply come here to find work, not to die for the place. Moreover, Malaya’s population, already divided by race and religion, was even further divided by differing political beliefs. Walter Blackett, the Major knew, was concerned by the existence of clandestine Communist groups in his enormous labour force. Where the Government was concerned, anxiety about the allegiance of the Chinese and of their various ‘national salvation’ organizations was chronic.

A few weeks earlier the Major had been summoned by some official to the Chinese Protectorate on Havelock Road and shown a list of patriotic Chinese associations believed to be under Communist control. But, he had wanted to know, what had these alarming associations to do with his own gentlemanly Civil Defence Committee, which was never likely to cross the path, at least he hoped not, of, for example, the ‘Youth Blood and Iron Traitor-Exterminating Corps’? Blinking rapidly the official had replied that, in his ‘humble opinion’, the Malayan Communist Party would choose just such an innocent organization as the Major’s for its subversive manoeuvres. The Major should know that Communists behaved in a society, particularly in a Chinese society, the way hookworm larvae behave in the human body, boring their way from one organ to another.

Startled by this image, the Major had looked at the official more closely: he was a bald young man with glasses, sweating profusely; in the draught of the fan thin wisps of hair flickered about his ears like sparks of electricity. He had said his name was Smith. The Major wondered whether this could be the same Smith who, Walter had told him, had incurred the wrath of old Mr Webb one day in Walter’s office. The Major could not quite remember what it had been about…something to do with Miss Chiang, though. Perhaps he had made some disparaging remark about her, or about the Chinese generally, and Mr Webb had taken umbrage.

Yes, the young man had continued, they ignored what one considered to be the natural boundaries of the separate organs, passing through the skin into the blood-stream, migrating from the pulmonary capillaries into the air sacs, into the alveoli and bronchioles and thence, as adolescent worms, into the intestines where, developing a temporary mouth capsule, they attached themselves to the wall to suck blood, pumping it through their own horrible guts. And from time to time they would abandon the old site, which they had sucked dry … (‘dry, Major, d’you understand, dry …’) … and attach themselves to a new and more nourishing location.

‘Steady on!’ the Major had exclaimed, taken aback. ‘These blessed worms don’t have anything to do with civil defence. Nor with Communists, for that matter.’

‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Smith calmly, but with the tufts of hair still flickering around his ears in a disturbing sort of way. ‘Speaking of worms I’m trying to make you aware of how these men…and women, too, Major, I believe you are friendly with a certain Miss Vera Chiang, are you not? Yes? I thought so … of how they pass from one organ to another in our society. Did you know that Stalin has recommended infiltration of Nationalist movements in his Problems of Leninism? Ah, I see you did not! Did you know that the Comintern had opened a Far Eastern Bureau in Shanghai, Major, not to mention the Sun Yat-sen University and the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow? Perhaps some of your so innocent Chinese friends are graduates, Major, had you thought of that? Did you know that in 1925 the head of the Comintern, Zinoviev, declared that the road to world revolution lies through the East rather than the West