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though it was always the same, watery rice porridge, bubur, and tea without milk or sugar, a form of pointless expertise had developed around it. The rice mixture was brought in in buckets, crusted thicker on top and watery at the bottom and doled out into prisoners’ mugs. There were three schools of thought about this. The first held that there was most solid nourishment in the viscous, top layer so it paid to come early. The second held that all the mystical ‘goodness’ was leached out and lay only in the watery bottom layer so the trick lay in ensuring you got to the front of the queue towards the end of one bucket but before they started on the next. The servers knew this and some would deliberately switch buckets before they were quite empty just for the leering sense of power it gave them. The Bishop of Singapore, on his watch, had almost provoked a riot by stirring up the depths to the top with a muscular egalitarianism that had earned him a reputation for communist leanings. The third school held that it all depended on the amount of gritty lime the Japanese had added to the rice as an insecticide, which varied from day to day and so it was a lottery. The result was that the queue became a caricature of hypocrisy with an alternation of shoving and dithering punctuated with smooth ‘After you!’s or sharp little ‘Excuse me. I think it is my turn!’s as people tried to shorten the odds in favour of their own view of the world. Rarely, there was dried, salt fish or meat to add relish to the porridge but mostly it was a diet of tasteless or slightly mouldy wallpaper paste. In his pocket, Pilchard had his secret boy-scout ingredient—earthworms of the phylum Annelida, captured in the gardens and sundried on the window sill to little salty wisps of pseudo-bacon. As always when they lugged in the bubur, he smiled and thought of the Malay proverb ‘the rice has already become porridge’ something like ‘no point in crying over spilt milk’. No point indeed.
    Today, it was pompous, suspiciously chubby Arthur Truefitt, from the water board, on duty at the rice table, wielding his ladle of authority like an alderman’s mace as the rice buckets were dragged in and the crowd fell hungrily silent and watchful. Changi was a very paradise for frustrated colonial bureaucrats with constant elections for camp commandant to deal with the Japanese, a representative to supervise each floor, endless specialist committees on matters as diverse as religious services and latrines and a complex system of rotating chores that ensured a constantly elevated sense of social injustice. Its administration required a greater density of officialdom than the Chinese empire. Pilchard rose to his feet and used his youth and height to drift with passive, genteel violence to the front.
    By deft manipulation of his implement, allowing porridge to slop down the side of the mug and back into the bucket or not, he reckoned that the officiating ladler could adjust the amount dispensed by at least fifteen percent in either direction. Today, Pilchard knew, it should be all right. After all, he and Truefitt were on the Christmas planning committee together and in staunch alliance against those extremists who wanted to ban carols of German origin from the festivities. But they were also on the education sub-committee and there bitterly divided on the topic of whether geography and history should be taught to the children in secret defiance of Nip orders to the contrary, for Pilchard remembered his own childhood and knew that both were essential supplements to the thin gruel of reality from which they would otherwise build their worlds. Truefitt looked him in the eye and hesitated, then scooped the ladle around the bucket, not waiting for the level to adjust back down, and quickly plonked the ration squarely in the mug without further droolage. The Christmas committee meeting, after all, came before the education