This is not a book to be read by travellers. Nor is it intended for the benefit of the many people who have lived and worked in the East.

I left England, and returned, a young man, with a mind open to receive impressions and scan them with the impartial eye of the outsider. The only aim of this book is to record without dramatic colouring or biased opinion the things I saw and felt and experienced. That explains the use of the first person, for in no other way could this object be achieved.

I have made no attempt to chronicle the war in Malaya. I have no authority with which to debate that issue. Any impressions are merely those of a civilian observer.

For the youmg man desirous of taking up Colonial Service the book will answer many questions, replies to which I found were lacking in the Government Brochures when I studied the matter the first time myself.

To this young man a word of warning will not be amiss. The warning is this: if your aim is to make money, you will fail, for the high pay is not proportional in the East; if you enter the Service thinking that it is a life of ease and pleasure, you will end in misery, for the only way to live in Malaya is to get up at dawn and work until dusk, and even then your leisure hours will drag unless you are eager to exert your brain and body: but if you go East to serve, realizing that you are to fill a corner in the Empire system, remembering that you are one of few leading many, responsible by your actions and attitude for the building or destruction of that prestige on which the life of our Empire still depends, then I wish you luck and one day hope to meet you there.

For to serve, to create, to mould, were my reasons for joining the Service. Because of these, in spite of having lost all my possessions and savings, broken my career and prejudiced my future, I have no regrets. I made friends, which are Life's antidote for anything; I saw the World.

I learned to appreciate the Government's task in the War which covers the whole Empire: and I found my vocation.

The average reader will find thrills and humorous scenes, but the underlying motive has been to portray the life of an ordinary boy who was lifted from the fireside of a middle class home to a spot eight thousand miles away where he was surrounded by people strange and brown or yellow or black, all eyeing him with that challenging stare which implies: 'You are a White Man'.