Unofficial Interlude

The McClures returned to Ocean Island towards the middle of 1925 from a four and a half months' tour of Japan and Australia. In his brilliant, effortless way Reggie had written the greater part of a book¹ at odd moments of his holiday and also, while in Australia, had dashed off for the Sydney Sunday Times a front-page article or two on Pacific naval strategy. Writing, never less than an agony for my labouring mind, was no more than an amusing relaxation for his swift versatility. Nevertheless, the example of his successes did decide me to try my luck at freelance journalism—though on a less exalted plane than his—when next I went on leave to Sydney.

As things fell out, that 'next' had to be almost at once. Less than a year back on the equator had already drained poor Olivia's cheeks of all their English pink and reduced her once more to the frail ghost she had been in 1920, after our first page 174six years in the islands. I too was more like a wraith than a human being, for I hadn't yet managed to shake off all the effects of that sorcerer's dose of cantharides. For these reasons, our eighteen weeks of leave together in Australia were spent convalescing in perfect idleness at Turramurra (in those days one of Sydney's still rustic North Shore suburbs) and never a notion of breaking into journalism recurred to me until Olivia had to leave again for England.

But then the doctor suddenly said I needed another six weeks of his treatment, which brought me hard up against the question of finance. By that time all the full-pay leave due to me had run out: a six weeks' extension could therefore only be granted on half pay, and half pay was not even enough to maintain the family in England, let alone a father idling in Australia. It was in this dilemma that I turned to journalism for help. Wasting no time in struggling to emulate Reggie's superb front-page achievement, I began to grind out anonymous news paragraphs of the hit or miss kind for several Sydney dailies and single-column signed articles for those which ran weekly magazine pages.

Every Saturday morning (if I remember the day aright) I would queue up at their various pay desks with other contributors of my sort and, after producing evidence of identity and publication, rake in the fees with which—at two guineas a column for stories or articles and rates ranging between an honest penny and a princely twopence a line for paragraphs— they were good enough to reward our industry. It was contrary to colonial regulations and sadly discordant with every accepted notion of proconsular dignity, but the fun of it was more stimulating than all the physic in the world. It added 8 pounds to my weight in a fortnight. More important still, it increased my income by altogether £24 12s. 4d., and this easily covered my personal maintenance including doctor's bills, while a small advance against salary from our very kind Colony Agents, Burns, Philp & Company, closed every other gap on the domestic front until I got back to full pay again.

page 175

But this happy interlude of rebellion had lasted only four weeks when poor Reggie was found by the doctor at Ocean Island to have a heart murmur and had to be sent by the next ship to Sydney for further diagnosis. Luckily there was a sailing from Sydney to Ocean Island the day after he left, which landed me back on the equator, with orders to act for him once more, almost as soon as he reached Australia.

The Methvens being still away at Fanning Island, no huge and smiling Stuartson was in the boat that came out to take me ashore. But a new friend—Jack Blaikie, ex-airman of the Great War, whom the education department of Victoria had lately lent us as headmaster of our government school for Baanaban boys—was at the boat harbour to give me a welcome. I couldn't stay at the residency, he told me, as Mrs. McClure had not left with Reggie; so would I care to put up with him and his wife until further notice? I jumped at the offer, and thus it came about in the fullness of time—meaning about a month from then—that poor Dorothy Blaikie's bungalow on the crest of the slope that fell away south-eastwards to the B.P.C.'s settlement at Uma was turned into a kind of guardroom and general rendezvous for everyone who had anything to do with the handling of the Chinese riot.

Dies Irae

The riot happened on a day somewhere near the middle of October. The Chinese opened the show with a raid on the Gilbertese labour location, to which they had dedicated months of preparation. Though the weapons of the rank and file were simple bars of iron, the most loving thought had been spent on arms for their leaders. The Generalissimo and his three Generals carried ancient revolvers smuggled in from Hong Kong; Colonels and Majors dispensed jam-jar and salmontin bombs of local manufacture; Captains and Lieutenants had the privilege of wielding the most romantic-looking page 176scimitars from behind corrugated-iron shields and bucklers of curious design.

Gelignite for the bombs had been stolen fragment by fragment, detonators one by one, fuse a few inches at a time, from the white overseers responsible for blasting operations. It twists the heart queerly in retrospect to think of the piled-up patiences that went to the making of those bombs, and of the pains so tenderly lavished upon the fashioning of the little scimitars; for the bombs were hardly more lethal than rather big crackers and the scimitars, so bright, so beautifully curved, were piteously ineffective against the rude Gilbertese bludgeons and rocks; and I don't believe that either was really meant to kill. What I do believe is that both they and the aged revolvers of the Generals were, like the grandiose military titles themselves, just the wistful bang-crash-flashing panache or artists starved of romance—symbols of a desperately felt right to glory brandished in the teeth of a cold alien world.

The plan of battle, already hatched and written down months before the day of the riot, was to catch the hated Gilbertese workers at their most vulnerable moment; that is, while enjoying their lunch in the big open-sided messroom fifty yards uphill from the northern boundary of the Chinese location. It was laid down in the orders that three columns, each about 200 strong (and each led by a General firing his revolver, a Colonel and two Majors tossing their bombs, four Captains and eight Lieutenants striking their scimitars with frightful clashing noises upon their corrugated shields), should emerge from different parts of their location and, rushing upon the messroom from its eastern, southern and western sides respectively, drive the terrified enemy with intimidating shouts and painful blows of their iron bars northwards up the hillside, into the ignominious shelter of their own sleeping quarters.

If there was any offensive intent beyond this climax neither the written plan nor the evidence taken after the event had anything to say about it. The testimony offered to me months page 177later by the Generalissimo, just before his release from prison, was that the men with the iron bars had been definitely instructed to give up intimidating the Gilbertese as soon as these had dived into their funk-holes. After that point, it seemed, the magnanimous host was to have marched from the field in disdainful silence, leaving the stricken islanders alone with their humiliation.

All warlike stores and equipment having been assembled by early October, nothing remained then for the dedicated six hundred but to await the next reasonable cause of battle. The precipitating event occurred towards the middle of the month, when a Gilbertese youth jerked a ladder from under a Chinese house-painter and his paint-pot. It was a loutish trick, enough to have caused a general sit-down strike at any time. But nobody flung his tools down that day. A war council was held instead, that same evening, in the Chinese location; and next day, according to plan, the triple assault upon the Gilbertese messroom was launched.

Jack Blaikie and I were sitting on his verandah ready for lunch when the sound of an explosion, and then another, came up to us from the Uma settlement. Had there been no more than a couple of bangs like that, we wouldn't have noticed them—blasting was always going on somewhere on the island —but these bangs were followed hard by three or four pops like pistol-shots and a clamour of distant shouting. We jumped from our seats, staring at each other. ''I bet that's the Chinese!'' exclaimed Blaikie, inspired I don't know how, and next moment both of us were out of the house plunging down the path to Uma as fast as our legs would take us. We hardly noticed the sudden rain that lashed us as we ran.

We came panting to the narrow-gauge railway line that divided the two locations. By that time the attack, so laboriously prepared, so proudly launched, was already smashed to bits. The Gilbertese issuing lunchless and furious from their messrooms (a few of them smarting damnably from nails and scrap-iron implanted in their anatomies by the page 178two bombs we had heard) had counter-attacked on the spot with rocks torn from the borders of their location footpath. A good half of the Chinese had incontinently fled back to the shelter of their sleeping quarters. The rest, split into a dozen fragments, were still hanging about just out of range of the Gilbertese rocks, while half a dozen of the B.P.C.'s white staff and five or six Ellice Island policemen, all unarmed, rushed back and forth trying to get everyone to go home.

Blaikie raced ahead of me a hundred yards to the major centre of trouble east of the messroom; I stayed on the hither side, by a wooden bridge on the roadway above the railway line, where Sergeant Nape stood opposing his mighty chest and fourteen stone of Ellice Island brawn to twenty-one scimitars and a pistol whose owners were screaming to get by him, back into the fray. Fifty yards down the road, armed with bludgeons, shovels and rocks, waited a score of Gilbertese, roaring at him to let the little men pass.

What knocked at my heart as I scrambled up the bank to join Nape was that, for all their fury of impatience to get him out of the way, not one of those men raised a weapon against him, while he, on his side, never once drew his truncheon to drive them back. When they did at last manage to shift him aside, it was by dint of forming a crocodile scrum of fours behind fours and heaving against him with the united thrust of forty-four legs. Just as I reached the level of the pathway, he popped out of the bridge-end like a cork from a ginger beer bottle and rolled on his back:

"Sillipuggers, sillipuggers!" he bawled at me as the forty-four legs rushed over him. "They gerremselves dead longa Gilibert boys too quick!" and, leaping up, flung himself in headlong chase—the perfect gentle policeman that he was—to save them if he could from the results of their own foolishness. I found myself dashing beside him through the puddles close on the heels of the rearmost warrior, who happened to be a wild-haired, pistol-brandishing General.

page 179

That flourished gun most kindly ceased at once to cause me any anxiety because, under my eyes as he ran, the General suddenly pulled it down from the air and, with a series of the most artistically blood-curdling yells, emptied its six chambers into the earth. This seemed to me proof enough of its strictly aesthetic intentions on the field of battle. Nape, however, decided on his own account against leaving it with him, and, taking a diagonal dive at his back, brought him down in the slush immediately under my feet. The gun flew forward from his outflung hand and I like an arrow after it in a belly-dive over their bodies. I didn't care what happened to it after that. Nape and I sat there recovering ourselves while the scimitar men, unhindered, rushed upon their fate. "Sillipuggers! Sillipuggers!" roared Nape again as we watched them piteously break and melt away for the second time that day before the Gilbertese counter-attack, leaving four men wounded on the pathway. We managed to get some dejected stragglers to pick these up—they weren't very badly hurt— and bear them uphill to the hospital. The General had disappeared.

I personally saw no more of the fighting than that small sideshow. But things had been more serious at Blaikie's end. A savage Gilbertese sortie had cut off the retreat of some iron-bar men into their own location and left one of them pulped to death, with seven others only just alive strewn around him, on the slope above the boat harbour. There had been ferocious clashes, too, on the higher levels. Yet, by the time Nape and I got there, Blaikie and his half-dozen fellow Australians with a few unarmed policemen had already contrived to shepherd most of the Chinese back into their location. That was a job which many times their number of armed men could never have managed without inviting more bloodshed; and the special constables who, for the next week or so, stood on guard unarmed between the two locations made the only kind of 'force' that could peaceably have prevented the Gilbertese— seething still to show how deeply they scorned firearms of page 180any kind—from launching a night raid, with all-out slaughter, on their wretched enemies.

And so those proud attackers finished (in the words of our Chinese interpreter) as "the humbled objects of our solicitous moral defence." That was a sad come-down for them at the time. Nevertheless, by my reckoning, it cost them no loss of face in the end, because the riot they had staged made it impossible for anyone to ignore their genuine grievances any longer. The British Phosphate Commissioners found themselves obliged at last to invest a bit of money and thought in their security. A beautiful new Chinese location was built up the hillside, a mile away from the Gilbertese quarters, and the two labour forces were set to work in mining areas and workshops well apart from each other.

Alas, however, the first thing to be done when things simmered down a little was to bring a few responsible people to account. Not that anybody regretted the imprisonment of the Gilbertese youth who had upset the painter and his pot. But it was more difficult to spot the villains on the Chinese side. The iron-bar men could hardly be regarded as ringleaders and the rôle of the scimitar men had clearly been little more than that of artists in a state of effervescence. The same was of course true of the top-rankers, too, with their big titles and little bombs and aged revolvers; but the law never can altogether condone the use of guns and explosives in an affray, so it was these who had to suffer. Also, because death had come to one and wounds to many, the sentences had to be more than a joke. The Generalissimo and his three Generals got a year's hard labour each.

Cryptic New Friend

When the General whom Nape had bowled over was brought in for trial, his first act was to step up to the court table and lay his gun before me. "It is unloaded," explained the gentle-page 181manly Ellice Island constable in charge, "and he very much wanted to hand it over himself, so we let him."

"But wasn't this taken from you that day at Uma?" I asked the General, a grim-looking character much more heavily boned and muscled than the average of his fellows.

No, the interpreter told me after some talk with him: the fact was that when he and Nape and I had crashed together in the pathway he had been the first to get up (because Nape had struck his head on a rock and I was ignominiously winded, my mind corroborated him). Picking up his gun before either of us was in a state to notice much, he had slipped quietly off to the Chinese location, where the weapon had lain hidden ever since.

"But what about the search?" I spoke rather indignantly because, ten days after the riot, a landing party from H.M. sloop Veronica had helped us to comb the location for concealed arms and explosives as a preliminary to allowing the Chinese back to work again.

The interpreter smiled apologetically. "Ah … the search," he murmured "…it is to be assumed, I fear, that the prisoner did not altogether approve of that operation."

"Didn't approve …?" I repeated blankly.

There was a little more talk between the two. Then the interpreter explained, "Only the local government, in his humble opinion, is entitled to receive the surrender of his weapon."

From the impersonal stare of the prisoner I couldn't guess whether this was meant as a high courtesy or a crushing reproach; but I distinctly felt he had won the first round, either way; something queerly like an aura of authority emanated from him as he stood there barefoot in his tattered canvas shorts and stained sweat-rag.

As an indictable offence was at issue, our court was sitting with two assessors on the bench. One of these now pointed out that the prisoner had not as yet been fairly put on his defence and so ought to be told at once that nothing he had page 182so far done or said before us could be used in evidence against him.

The General listened with a strained frown while the interpreter explained this point and also the further nicety that I, as his judge, was debarred from testifying to anything I may have seen him do during the riot. I have never seen bewilderment written plainer on any face than on his as he stood in silence before replying; and I shall never forget the half tolerant, half contemptuous smile he gave me, or the odd gesture he made—as if to push aside invisible cobwebs from his eyes—as he answered, "There is my gun. You know what I did. I was a leader," and left it at that.

"Well, advise him at least to plead Not Guilty to the charge," I told the interpreter forlornly: "Sergeant Nape's the only witness for the prosecution, and he might not be able to swear to the man's identity."

"I am guilty," was his only answer to this, while the gaze he fixed on me said as plainly as if he had shouted the words, "To hell with all this hoky-poky and let's get straight to the facts." And again I felt that strange emanation of authority from him.

The only form of 'hard labour' at our headquarters gaol that qualified for so stern a name was that of humping sand and shingle from a beach near Tabiang village to the public works yard on top of the island. Every medically fit prisoner had to put in two days a week at this chore, and everyone (barring that tragic lapse of Teakai's) had always been allowed to go very easy on it. But the General wanted no such indulgence. He set so monstrous an example of industry filling bags and rushing them up the steep hillside that, before his first month was out, his all-Chinese working party was begging to be rid of his company. The warders heartily backed the petition. They too were tired to death of trying to keep him in sight uphill.

We set him next to sawing logs for firewood. (Free fuel for the kitchen stove was every local official's celestial privilege page 183in those spacious days, and great was the demand for it every morning). But the trouble here for the General was that it takes two—one at each end—to keep a crosscut saw going. It was our trouble too. We couldn't very well reproach him for putting his whole strength into the work, neither could we decently penalize his successive mates for refusing to work at his fearful speed.

If only he had taken things a bit more cheerfully all round, he might not have got himself so hated. But he just hurled himself at every task, his grim jaw set, his eyes unsmiling and aloof, as if not a warder or a fellow prisoner existed for him except to be shown up as a slacker. Feeling got so hot about him in the end that the only thing to do was to invent a special job for him absolutely apart from everyone else. I don't know who first thought of turning him loose on the so-called vegetable garden at the residency, but I found him waiting for me there with the interpreter one morning when I went up to work in Reggie's private office.

We trooped together round the desolate half-acre of flat ground between the back yard and the servants' quarters. Once upon a time, somebody had tried to start a kitchen garden there, but the hopeless battle with the sterile soil— almost pure phosphate of lime, insoluble in water—had long been abandoned. Not even the weeds grew freely in that sunsmitten square of dust and crumbling rocks.

But the General's gaze was fixed on the deep forest of calophyllum trees that marched right up to the edge of our clearing. Could he go in there and cut what sticks he liked and dig as much leaf mould as he wanted, he asked. And could he have a spade, and a fork, and a mattock, and a hoe, and an axe, and a saw? And could we spare a wheelbarrow, not forgetting some planks to wheel it on from the forest to the garden? And would we let him build a little leaf shack there for all his tools? And might he sit in it to eat at midday instead of wasting time going down to the prison cook-house? And might he get back to work again as soon as ever he liked page 184after eating? And would we this, and might he that or the other thing, and so on, and so on—he stood there forgetful of his prison clothes pelting us with endless questions, a man with suddenly shining eyes lost in a vision of himself creating a garden in a wilderness. I never saw him without a smile on his face from that day forward.

The residency orderly was supposed to take charge of him at eight every morning, and so he did in a strictly official sense for the first week or so. After that, however, it wasn't a prisoner but a master craftsman that he went to watch. He would sit fascinated for hours together on the kitchen steps while, stroke by stroke of mattock, spade and hoe, barrow by barrow of leaf mould from the forest, the General laid down the first few perches of his garden, And then, before a month was out, the orderly was down to the job himself, making mat shelters and seedling boxes for a nursery under the General's direction. And the week after that, the residency cook had joined him as a learner. I watched them both taking instructions on how to set up a cover of loose leaves on six-foot stilts over the whole new plot before the General—plainly now the officer in charge of everything—went off to dig more trenches, and cut more stakes, and cart more earth for more and more plots beyond it.

And so he continued, his daily output that of any three average navvies, until he had laid out two more plots as big as the first and was half-way towards finishing yet another. But then the plants in his original plot began to flower, and all at once he was a different man. He dug no more trenches, left the new beds to lie fallow and worked happily all day among the green things he had brought to life. It was as if the promise of their fruition had stilled at last some savage unrest in his heart and called a truce to his wild industry.

Or perhaps he felt that what they needed now to bring them into fullest bearing was an infusion of his own strong spirit. The way he talked to them as he watered their roots or simply stood silent, empty can in hand, brooding over them, page 185suggested some kind of spiritual outpouring. Or so, at least the interpreter thought, and I found his theory easy to believe when I came to taste of the fruits of the garden. The General's tomatoes and pumpkins, melons and runner beans were certainly the best I had ever eaten in the tropics.

He and his fellow Generals had served no more than eight months of their sentence when a chance came to return them to Hong Kong, and we decided not to miss it. (I was Resident Commissioner myself by that time.) They were released three days before their ship sailed so as to give them plenty of time to pack up and say good-bye to their friends. They left the prison at 6 a.m. but the General, dressed now in a neat jumper suit of dark blue denim and shouldering a small wooden chest, was back at the residency with the interpreter before midday. He asked for permission to sleep in his tool-shed for the next three nights, because that would enable him to spend a little more time with his plants and his friends.

The friends he meant were, of course, the orderly and the cook, from whom he had picked up an astonishingly fluent gabble of Gilbertese. Both were delighted at his return and the cook, a family man, insisted on taking him into his own house. That was the first and last time I ever saw an islander grant this particular honour to anyone but a relation by blood or marriage. It was an enormous success. When I looked in on the family after dinner, there was the General sitting on the guest mat with the latest baby in his arms and two little girls cuddling up to him on either side.

The day his ship sailed, he brought the interpreter to my office for an early morning farewell. He plunged without preliminaries, rather to my surprise, into a statement of his immediate plans. He had a mother, a wife and two children, he said, who lived on a piece of land that he owned outside the city of Canton. He had left them several years ago to seek his fortune alone in foreign parts. But now he was going back to them, because here, on Ocean Island, he had come to understand that they were his real fortune.

page 186

"The clear implication is," explained the interpreter— "that this revelation had come to him through the garden you have so courteously allowed him to make and the family life into which the cook has so graciously admitted him."

"I'm delighted to hear it," I said, more than a little touched, "and I'm sure the cook would be, too."

"He has already returned thanks to the cook," replied the interpreter, "and all that remains for him to do now is to thank you too in the same manner. Being far from his native land, he is, to his sorrow, unable to bring with him the kind of gift that he would have wished to lay before you on such an occasion as this, but he begs you to accept instead the enclosed quite unworthy, nevertheless entirely sincere, token of his gratitude and respect." Having said which, he laid on the desk before me an O.H.M.S. envelope, obviously borrowed from my office, containing a £ I note

"But you know I can't take this from him," I exclaimed when I had recovered from the shock of it.

"To avoid serious loss of face on the giver's part," he replied imperturbably, "I advise acceptance with immediate and profuse expressions of appreciation. A return gift of, say, five times the value somewhat later in the day should suffice to maintain your own prestige in the matter."

So I accepted the General's gift and received for further recompense a handclasp as warm and friendly as any a brother man ever honoured me with. Some hours later he left the residency all smiles with two precious tinned hams and a sackful of other provisions from my store cupboard slung over his shoulder, while the orderly followed carrying his little box, and the cook's two children trotted alongside, weeping profusely, to see him off.

But a week or so after he was gone it was still on my mind that I had repaid him in kind instead of money. "He couldn't have saved much out of his wages," I said to the interpreter one day: "nearly half his time here was spent in prison, poor fellow."

page 187

"It is a fact," he replied, "that the money he had could hardly be called savings. Nevertheless, 'poor fellow' is an epithet I should hesitate to apply to him. He left the island with some eight hundred £ I notes in his chest."

"Eight hundred? Impossible. Why, his pay…" I began, but he cut me short: "Not pay but winnings. Winnings at mah-jong and fan-tan. That was why he was so eager to go to prison. Nobody could win it back from him up here."

"A truly complicated character," he added as he turned to leave me, and I let it rest at that.

Formula for a Fence

The great majority of the Chinese on Ocean Island were good citizens. Nevertheless, there were always lawless elements among them, and most of our headaches in that lovely little place came from the fact that we were not allowed to control the doings of the midnight-minded by enclosing their settlement in a nice tall steel fence.

The official situation was a very tricky one. Although over a quarter of a century had passed since the Chinese labour scandals in South Africa had overthrown a government in England, the words 'compound,' 'enclosure' and even 'fence' were still politically anathema in Whitehall, and the Colonial Office was frightened into fits by any proposal to surround anyone at all with anything more substantial than a cobweb.

It was stupid indeed of me to forget about all that in 1927, when I put up my ingenuous scheme for establishing allround safety on Ocean Island. But I was still handicapped by the belief that what Secretaries of State wanted most from the grand old colonial service was the truth about the actual needs of colonial populations. Under this pious illusion, I reported how bold by night a lawless element among the Chinese labourers was becoming, how alarmingly for everyone the page 188crimes of burglary and housebreaking had increased, how impossible for a police force short of an army it was, without an enclosing fence and floodlights, to prevent marauders from issuing at will from the Chinese reserve to prowl through the British Phosphate Commissioners' unprotected settlements.

The answer from Whitehall was a cold despatch to the High Commissioner, who had backed my proposals, pointing out that any such enclosure of indentured Chinese within a fence as I had proposed was out of the question.

Reading back into the files then, and balancing one thing with another, I got my first real inkling of how much more in those days the Colonial Office had to worry about the political safety of the Secretary of State than about the physical safety of any colonial population. This lesson having been digested, and the plague of housebreaking remaining constant, the obvious thing to do was to offer the Secretary of State a much more attractive political reason for granting what we needed than the mere proof of how urgent our need was.

A dear little Gilbertese boy of five or six stepped in to help us at this point. He walked one afternoon on the edge of the Chinese location, innocently throwing stones at birds, and one of his shots fell near a coolie who stood watching him. Though the man was not actually hit, he had to skip aside very suddenly to save his shins, and there was immediate uproar. The child was not harmed, but held and brought yelling to the residency by a deputation of twenty men. The idea was that his father had maliciously delegated him to do their colleague grievous bodily harm, and must be made to pay instant compensation.

I had to tell them that, since nobody had in fact been hurt, it wasn't likely that he would agree to pay anything. But I had learned by then that you must never send a Chinese deputation away absolutely empty; the maintenance of face demanded that they should leave with something positive to tell their fellow countrymen. So, casting around rather hopelessly for the right thing to say, I asked them at random if they and page 189their friends wouldn't like to have a beautiful, unscalable, expanded steel fence put up around their location to protect them from prowling stone-throwers—a fence with gloriously bright arc-lamps set along it at intervals to tell their protectors, our police, of the approach of enemies out of the darkness; a fence … well, I admit I became inspired at that point. I suddenly had a vision of the Secretary of State for the Colonies goggling at me as I added detail after shocking detail to the enclosing fence of my dreams. From then on, I fear, the wistful fun of it engaged me more than the actual business of the deputation.

I was the more astounded, therefore, at the clamour of agreement that greeted my forlorn flight of fancy. Nothing, they said, could possibly be more to their liking than the notion of being enclosed day and night with a Io-foot fence such as I had described, provided only one thing, which was that it must be topped off with the crowning glory of another three feet of wire bristling with barbs. The knowledge of being thus securely protected from their alleged protectors, the police, as well as from all their other enemies, they said, would at last give all of them a sense of being permanently safe in, and masters of, their very own piece of territory. They indicated that the good work had better be put in hand pretty soon, or else…

I promised with sudden new hope to use all my personal pull with the King of England himself to persuade him to order their employer to give them their heart's desire.

The child and his father forgotten, they hurried off to spread the grand news far and wide. The same evening, I drafted a despatch carefully devoid of reference to any previous correspondence on the subject of fences. The capture, after a struggle, of the stone-thrower (a male; age omitted) by the gravely alarmed Chinese and the subsequent deputation clamouring at the gates of the residency for some sort of permanent protection made nice copy, even in officialese. So did the closing recommendations, if I may say so. Everything, of page 190course, depended at that point upon avoiding any mention of the forbidden words. The proposed fence accordingly became 'a series of excluding barriers of expanded steel,' and these barriers, instead of being built to surround or enclose anyone in the world, had to be 'erected in the neighbourhood of the Chinese location in such a manner as to afford the inhabitants maximum protection on every hand against unfriendly intrusions from outside.' I draw particular attention to the words 'maximum protection,' meaning roughly an unbroken ring of steel.

We were allowed to proceed almost at once with our Great Wall of Chinatown. (Officialese has its uses, after all.)