Afterword

Among those works listed below which have been most valuable in this attempt to recreate the Far East of forty years ago I am particularly indebted to Professor P. T. Bauer’s work on the rubber industry and especially to his classic report on smallholdings prepared for the Colonial Office in 1946 which, with J. S. Furnivall’s Colonial Policy and Practice, first suggested to me another angle from which to consider the British Empire. The passage from The Planter in 1930 read by Matthew in the dying-house is quoted in Bauer, The Rubber Industry, p. 285. R. C. H. MacKie’s This Was Singapore, the most evocative description of Singapore between the wars, also exerted a considerable influence on certain scenes. For Chinese love terminology I have relied chiefly on the fascinating Yin Yang, The Chinese Way of Love by Charles Humana and Wang Wu, though here and there I have been unable to resist taking a hand in it myself. Finally, no one could consider writing about the military campaign without making use of the outstanding work of the official historian, the late Major-General S. Woodburn Kirby.

Books apart, I am grateful to old Singapore hands, particularly Mrs Enid Sutton and Mr Richard Phelps, who have enlightened me about life there in those days, as well as to those inhabitants of modern Singapore who gave me their hospitality and help, especially Mr Nick Bridge of the New Zealand High Commission, and Mr Donald Moore. I would also like to thank: Mr Lacy Wright and Miss Thé-anh Cao who kindly showed me Saigon in the last few weeks before it became ‘Ho Chi Minh City’, Mr Ian Angus of King’s College Library, London, my brother, Robert Farrell, of the University of Victoria Library, a constant source of good ideas and information, and Giorgio and Ginevra Agamben, from whom I first heard of the ‘Singapore Grip’. Lastly, without a generous contribution from Booker McConnell Ltd for an earlier novel it would have been financially difficult for me to write this one.