Distant Archipelagos

He dropped money bags from low-flying biplanes on remote rubber plantations and tin mines spent nights in deep jungle longhouses aboard fishing <I>kelongs</I> manned by aboriginals far out at sea in mosquito-infested swamps collecting malarial parasites and on beaches where giant leatherback turtles came to lay their eggs. He accompanied commonwealth troops hunting for terrorists on the Thai-Malaysian border flew reconnaissance patrols seeking guerilla camps and escorted Field Marshal Templer on his return visit to the country he had liberated from communist insurrection.</p>He met Lady Edwina Mountbatten wife of the architect of India's independence interviewed actors Orson Welles and Sir Donald Wolfit and was conversing with the French Ambassador when a ghost walked into the room. He worked with William Holden Susannah York and Capucine on a film in which nearly everyone ended up miscast. He helped conceal an escaped prisoner in a hilarious fake jail-break trailed the Sultan of Pahang on a regal progress through Malaysia's largest state and befriended one of President Soekarno's infamous red beret parachutists sent on a sabotage mission during the height of Indonesian confrontation.</p>Mostly he loved the land and its people so much that he shunned the cocktail circuit and the city life for the simple pleasures of the <I>kampong</I> and the open road learning the language and feeling his way towards what French author Henry Fauconnier had called the Soul of Malaya. With <I>Distant Archipelagos</I> Peter Moss follows up his account of an Anglo-Indian childhood in <I>Bye-Bye Blackbird</I> by painting a vivid portrait of another vanished world.