Bartholomew, head of the Health and Welfare Department, was almost a ‘traditional’ Karen. Before leaving for Burma I had bought a volume of photo-ethnography called Peoples of the Golden Triangle by E. and P. Lewis, in which the Karen are present as a nation dressed in red and white-striped homespun with their hair in buns on one side, living a life of illiterate animism and primitive but effective agriculture from thatched huts on the hillside. In the quasiurban, educated atmosphere of Riverside, Bartholomew stood out as being distantly related to these traditionals.

He was not young – nearly sixty now, he'd thus been about twenty when the rebellion began. Under short, thin hair his face was angular, high-cheeked and simian, usually set in a scowl which I soon realised was a long-running joke. His eyes could change suddenly from shrewd, narrow slits to wide ingenuousness. He was evidently a man who worked hard, tough and grubby about the fingernails, with a deformed right wrist that he'd broken years ago and which now became swollen and painful after manual work. He stumped about, extracting more entertainment from grumpy irony than anyone I've ever met. Shy and retiring, he could also play the buffoon, or let loose a terrible rage – which usually ended with the household helpless with laughter. He was my boss, and in December 1986 I moved into his home.

He was a repository of practical skills. If there was something he couldn't make, he would learn. He joked (like William the teacher) that in Kawthoolei one had to be a kay ler thera, an ‘everything teacher’.