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world. It was not what we did or what befell us for we did virtually nothing and suffered no real events but it was the easy manner of our doing and experiencing nothing that struck me at the time, the absence of any sense that we had wickedly wasted time. We left the main road down by the shore, whirred down a smooth dirt track that ran out in sand and stopped at a simple wooden house on stilts, graced by a little carved tracery over the eaves and windows. Walter would no doubt have been able to tell you exactly the ethnicity of the style. Underneath the house was a mess of wood and bicycles, displaced doors and buckets amongst which children swarmed, a sort of attic in reverse. To one side, a man in a sarong was pouring buckets of water over his own head and slapping his chest as though in self-congratulation. Hamid climbed down and called up at the first floor, like Romeo to Juliet, where a fat woman appeared, knotting her sarong and smoothing her hair. She shouted something back and giggled.
    â€œJavanese,” smirked Hamid, with relief. It appeared that we were in a Javanese kampung , a sort of home from home, then. We were welcome and the men were round the back. The Chinese rickshawman sat down on the house ladder and refused all attempts to be paid. We now owed him money and he would not allow this relationship to be so brutally cut. He would sit here until Tuan wanted to go back to the city and then both fares could be paid together. He was, it seemed, now our dedicated and loyal rickshawman, nobly refusing all other offers. The woman brought him cold water to drink from a can that made him gush with sweat and waved us again round the side of the house.
    About a dozen men were squatting there under a tree, most old, some young, surrounded by cockerels under airy baskets like cloche hats. Their poses struck me at once. There is a posture you find all over the islands, a hunkering down, legs together, the elbows resting on the knees and flapping as from a loose hinge. It is a pose of relaxation but provokes a tension in the thighs, lumbar region and across the shoulders that I immediately yearned to capture with my charcoal. Hamid indicated the tree, lush and big leafed.
    â€œWherever you see this tree, there are sailors,” he explained. “It has big seeds that float so they use them to stuff the jackets to keep sailors afloat when they fall in the sea. The jackets get broken. The seeds get out. It is a tree we respect, a holy tree, for it saves the lives of sailors.”
    There followed a long conversation in Javanese. The woman, embarrassingly, reappeared to bring a single chair and insisted I sit on it in majestic isolation in the shade while I was ignored by the men who seemed locked in some headshaking disagreement with Hamid.
    He turned and spoke in Dutch. “There can be no cockfight today, kakak .” He smiled regret. “It is an unlucky day for fighting.” He gently pressed the hands of the old men. “ Tidak apa apa .” No what what. Never mind, it does not matter.
    But if there could be no fighting, there was no reason not to examine the birds and they compared them and showed them off with a passion no less intense than that of Vorderman with his Kandinsky and Prokoschka daubings. First, they passed round a magnificent, haughty bird with black plumage, edged at wings and rump with gold feathers like flames, bounced it on the ground, stroked its throat, felt its treading thighs, nodded and Ooh!ed and Aah!ed – or rather Wah!ed – in admiration. Other birds followed, bigger, smaller, some beautiful high strutters, some tawdry street-fighters, arguments raged, cigarettes were flung on the ground, birds squared up to each other – only to be put back under their baskets. They sat a huge cock on my lap and laughed when it pecked me and knocked me off my chair. I laughed too, stayed on the ground and lit a cigarette. Tidak apa apa . No what what. Then, they taunted me