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willowy and deft, like a tickbird on a buffalo. The commando was not listening, they never did. It made no difference. Chatter and snip came together even if it went right over their heads. ‘A little more off the top dear?’ The commando grunted and groped at his own head with blunt fingers, then shook it. There were no large mirrors in this ‘salon’, just a fragment hanging on a string from the doorframe that required a face to be viewed in parts and mentally recombined. The customer stood up, a long way up, reached in his top pocket and took out a single crumpled cigarette, considered briefly but weightily and broke it in half, giving one part to eye-rolling Private Higgins and replacing the other, then lumbered off on splayed feet.
    â€˜Thank you, dear. I’ll put it in the vault.’ He leaned round the edge of the shelter and called after. ‘Anything for the wife?’ The next customer moved forward and slumped on the box, looking around with studied insouciance. Higgins poked fussily into the nest of red hair with scissors and comb. ‘I really am going to have to take my clippers to you dear. You can’t keep passing through here and coming out looking like the cat’s furball. Even the Japanese are going to notice. Let me at least trim the beard.’ Pilchard sat resentfully for several minutes as the scissors teased and snipped, squirming like a little boy suffering the wipe of a mother’s spitty handkerchief. Higgins sighed.
    â€˜Oh go on, then.’
    Pilchard rose and slipped nichodemously behind the sheet at the far end. On the other side stood the mildewed, stucco wall of the prison, surrounded by a fly-buzzing drainage ditch. He clambered down into the depression and approached the entrance to a big concrete pipe that led through into the storm-drain. It was barred by a grille of iron bars but two were rusted and removable. He lifted and climbed through, set them back in place and twisted their smooth faces outwards to match the rest. The drains were only flushed twice a day to save water so he removed his careworn sandals and splashed barefoot through unpleasant ankle-deep sewage and up, beneath the double outer wall, to emerge behind the latrine sheds in the area known whimsically as Crouch End or Lower Tooting, back into the jail itself. No one was on the lookout for someone breaking into a jail and Pilchard knew that security was brutally but only capriciously enforced so that the greatest risk was from a Japanese soldier grabbing a sly cigarette here out of sight. A bucket of water stood ready and he sloshed it, grimacing, over his feet and made his way, heavy-footed, up into the men’s section, hauling himself up the stairs by the hot and crumbly iron handrails.
    Changi was an ugly, fairly new confection of iron, brick and concrete, perennially dank and—with only the sea-facing cells able to catch even a breath of wind—as steamy as a pressure-cooker. The contractor had enjoyed a cosy and mutually profitable relationship with the Public Works Department so that rising damp, penetrating moisture and leaks from the roof now met and pooled resources on the second floor. It had been built for 600 inmates and presently held five times that number, including—with poetic irony—several of the civil servants who had cut corners on its construction. The one extravagance, the expensive steel doors, imported from England, that had once been a matter of pride, with fine Bramah locks and a series of sliding panels and peepholes that would have been the envy of a Chinese conjuror, now stood useless, open flat against the wall, a mere, hard-boned nuisance.
    The women and children were segregated off in a separate wing, but, in the male block, each cell had been built for two with the modern marvel of a crouchhole toilet. Most were now shared by five inmates, so three had no bunk but since this was only a slab of concrete anyway, the difference was less