White Rock woke us before dawn with martial music from a ghettoblaster. At 4.30 a.m. he called us in the name of Ba U Gyi, first leader of the Karen rebellion, to honour the flag and the Karen New Year. And so Fragrance got up and crept about the kitchen, blowing up the fire and putting rice on to boil. I watched her from my hammock.

When it grew light, Bartholomew, her father, tied a Karen flag to a long bamboo and lashed it to a post at the front of the house. At six-thirty the drum beats began, rapid and alternating between a dull thud and a hard clack, soft stick and hard stick, accompanied by a battle horn – the Karen type made of a cow horn with a brass reed, capable of two thin, weedy but nonetheless penetrating notes. Bartholomew put on his Karen shirt of thick cotton, with vertical red stripes and long fringes, and we pinned two campaign medals to his chest. The girls put on their long white dresses, and flipflops which the evening before they'd taken to the river and scrubbed clean with old toothbrushes. Then we went to the football field.

At 7 a.m. in December the sun had not yet appeared, and the forest was cold and damp. Mist blurred the kapok trees, palms, bananas and bamboo clumps – ostrich feather fans drawn with a soft pencil. The steep forested hills less than a mile away were hardly visible.

On the far side of the field there was a fenced-off flagpole, and a bamboo frame supporting a large and ancient drum of dull grey-brown bronze.