They decided to build a new guesthouse for foreigners, and I moved into it from Bartholomew's for two months, leaving Millionaires Row behind.

The chosen site was on Health Department land at the far end of the village. As a teenager, I'd always wanted to be an architect, and I now thought that my chance had come. But True Love sketched the first design in five minutes, and then the Colonel's son-in-law, who had brought a diploma in engineering from Rangoon to the Revolution, made working drawings of a sort that few Karen houses can ever have had before. The Colonel himself arrived and considered the matter of orientation, urging that the verandah face east while pointing north himself. A carpenter had been called from Barterville, and a boy of fourteen with a Kalashnikov brought a workforce of prisoners – not PoWs, but thieves and adulterers. They spent three days bringing rafts of pale yellow-green bamboo down from the best groves, which some then split and flattened into wall panels while others put up a timber frame topped with corrugated tin. Another heap of bamboos were split to make the floor. It was assembled with kilos of nails, and all done in a few days.

Before any of this could be embarked on, however, the land had to be cleared. It was scrubby and tangled, having been an unkempt banana grove before. It needed long parangs and hard labour; there were tree stumps, tough grasses and snagged vines. All this was cut away by the schoolgirls from Boarders.