Edward was very slow to forgive. During the weeks after the acrimonious Monday Free Discussion at which the fate of the girls of Boarders had been debated, he and Ruth found many opportunities to make their feelings felt. Seeing me to be in Bartholomew's camp on the issue, Edward cut me and refused to answer any questions. On other occasions both he and Ruth quietly but firmly remarked that they thought the whole procedure, whereby the girls had been taken out of school without their permission, to have been thoroughly disrespectful. They felt hurt, and said so; not, it seemed to me, without some justice. But for Edward it was not merely the lack of consultation, the slight to his office. There were deeper issues for him. It had been a conflict between two Departmental patriarchs, and of their ideas of what mattered for the Revolution. It was a trial between two equally dedicated but quite different views of the Karen – the one looking for intimacy with village people and their local knowledge, the other concerned with the modern state and an outward looking future. And for Edward it was another round in his own battle for personal prestige and political survival.

Edward was the archetype of the Karen urban elite from the Delta, and in the terms of that élite he was much the best-equipped administrator in the District, a man familiar with modern accounting, office procedure, printing and audio-visuals and Thai bureaucracy, vehicles and firearms, the English language and international politics. All this competence he had brought with him to the Revolution.