Golden Earth by Norman Lewis

of body and mind. It would have been extraordinary not to have found it figuring largely in the reformative processes of an up-to-date prison. For up-to-date Rangoon was. The bars were made of wood, and, as the Director General cheerfully admitted, very easy to cut through. However they would not be replaced. Suchgrants of money as they received would be spent in a more positive way. He was aiming, eventually, at a prison without walls. ‘That edifice over there,’ he pointed to a blackened building, ‘was accidentally devastated by fire. A fortuitous circumstance. We can do without same. Now there will be no excuse for the non-existence of a football pitch.’ There was no problem here about making the prison too comfortable. He had heard of some place – Mexico, he thought – where this had been done. ‘Why, do you know those fellows actually asked to come back when they were discharged!’ It was enough to stop a Burman from gambling and dressing-up. Liberty was a precious thing.
    The influx of prisoners – eighteen thousand passed through their hands in one year – was attributable to the unsettled times and the breakdown of monastic education, with nothing to fill the gap. The present custom, said U Ba Thein, of entering a monastery for a week was useless. In the old days a boy spent at least a year there. Now he got no schooling until he was ten years of age, if at all. Parents wouldn’t send their children to boarding school, far from home. ‘There but for the Grace of God …’ he quoted. U Ba Thein had been a village boy himself, he told me; and had first gone to school when he was ten. ‘For several years they caned me daily, because like uneducated Burmese people I pronounced f as p.’ It had been the pons asinorum of the Director General’s youth. Having in the end surmounted this obstacle he had taken to learning with a zest, and found what remained comparatively easy. He had gone about noting down all the new words he heard, committing them to memory and practising in conversation as soon as he could. Usually he got the meaning wrong. But no matter, it impressed most people. U Ba Thein said it was a habit he had never grown out of. ‘You may have noticed that I still use long words in the wrong place? It is a habit I am noted for. People are still continually pulling my leg about it.’
    At the end of the war U Ba Thein had visited England to enable him to study the British prison system on the spot. He had been impressed by the kindness he had received, the kippers and the watercress of course, and by the favouritism of people behind the bars of public-houses, whohad produced cigarettes for him from under the counter. No one had ever guessed that he was Burmese. It was at a time when all Far-Easterners were Japanese, although nobody had apparently bothered to enquire what a Japanese was doing in England at such a time. When, on one occasion, he addressed some Borstal boys, he invited questions at the conclusion of his remarks. He had mentioned Buddhism, and one of the boys asked if it was true that Buddhists could have more than one wife. ‘I informed them that that was so,’ U Ba Thein said, ‘and I must say they all seemed to regard it as an excellent thing.’
    As we paced solemnly down the passages, the prisoners stood to attention by their folded bedding. ‘Look at those fellows,’ U Ba Thein said. ‘They are a product of the times. There is no inherent criminality in those faces.’
    It was perfectly true. The convicts looked no more vicious than the young fellows to be seen in the streets outside. They were in for robbery, crimes of violence, murder. Fortunately, sexual crimes were very rare. There was no sexual repression in Burma, the Director General said, owing to the freedom practised between the sexes from the age of puberty. Bigamy was not an offence, and charges of rape were rarely brought because the offender in such cases was considered automatically to have married the