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that I would return to the subject of Walter, allowed to drop in the previous digression, but the moment is not yet right. You left me in Rome. I have to get to Java and that getting was no small matter.
    My mother, her mind haunted by images of colonial heat, insects – possibly even Komodo dragons – was convinced that I would die.
    â€œWhy is it we worry more about you than all our six other children put together?” she sobbed.
    â€œThe Indies is not Africa, mother. Our people live long, healthy lives there, given the proper precautions. Anyway,” I added with the heartlessness of youth, “everyone has to die somewhere.”
    Proper precautions were much on the mind of my father, certain that I would fall foul of the exotic women he knew to roam abroad not just singly, as in Amsterdam, but in great wild herds. His parting gift to me, slipped into my pocket on the harbour jetty, was a large, flat tin embossed with the names of Goodyear and Hancock. In my innocence, I had assumed it was a puncture repair kit for the bicycle I had declared I would buy in emulation of Nieuwenkamp. Only later, when stowing my gear in the tiny cabin, did I open it to find a confusing sausage of sturdy rubber with instructions for scrubbing in hot water after use and regular airing to prevent the growth of mould.
    The little boat, Bintoehan , of the KPM line was a smart tin toy. Nearly new and brightly painted she was somewhat too frisky for many of the passengers in the slow swell that set in immediately we left Rotterdam. Deft Javanese stewards roamed the corridors with tinkling dinner gongs and hips that swayed to the memory of other gongs in childhood gamelan orchestras, trying in vain to tempt the passengers off their sickbeds. My own stomach withstood the pounding, indeed the sea air had lent me fierce appetite. I dined virtually alone in the dining room, sumptuously over-served, under a poster that sang the charms of Bali. At that time it seemed to me wonderfully evocative. It showed a beautiful slant-eyed maid sitting erect and cross-legged and holding a lotus flower as a Madonna her child. The older eyes of memory reveal it as nothing but – to use Mrs van Damm’s word – a hopeless and embarrassing pastiche – an obviously Javanese girl with Javanese covered breasts, sitting awkwardly in a male pose, Balinese headdress slapped on her head and holding a Buddhist icon. It was the sort of thing that nowadays Professor Grits would write humourlessly about in grim erudition – “Colonial Photography – no Photgraphies – and the Framing of the Cultural Negative”, or some such nonsense. Never mind. It fired my imagination as I chewed my way through endless dishes spiced with chilli and turmeric – the Dutch rijstafel – a meal for the indecisive that allows you to taste everything without finishing anything, served on a bed of steaming rice. It was still the jazz age, a fact confirmed by a list of cocktails illustrated by a sophisticated sketch of a dancing glass. Embarking cautiously on the path of adventure, I worked down daily one spot from the Americano to the Zanzibar, judging that I would reach the Singapore Sling at the same time as the eponymous port. Few other concessions to modernity had been made. Syncopated rhythms had not seduced the ship’s band, a bunch of gnarled old tooters and scrapers with shiny jacket collars, dusted with dandruff, who ground out endless arthritic foxtrots under the ticking ceiling fans.
    Other figures began to appear, inevitable Dutch planters in crumpled alpaca suits, faded wives, plump and pushy administrators, a young pig-faced Lieutenant van Gennep of the sappers. All were swiftly and jealously appraised for a touch of the tarbrush and spontaneously sifted themselves into a rigid colonial hierarchy of race. The ship itself was a model of empire in miniature: stern-faced white officers; unseen helots, Chinese and Indian, toiling