package holidays

At the heart of Jewel in a Jade Rainbow is a collection of personal letters sent home by a young cadet District Officer and his wife during three years in Sabah, from July 1960 through August 1963. The officer, David Fielding, served in the British military in Malaya during the Emergency. After returning to England, he read geography at Oxford and upon graduating in 1959, he applied for a post with the Colonial Office. His application was successful, but first, before being posted, he was sent for a year to study law and languages at Cambridge. One has the sense that this year was largely a waste of time. In any event, at the end of it, with a letter of confirmation in hand, he proposed and married Sue, a registered nurse at Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. It was a "rash act", as he tells us in the preface, for, in those days it required the permission of the Governor to marry and bring a wife to North Borneo on a first appointment. As students of colonial history will know, anti-marriage rules were virtually u niversal in colonial Southeast Asia down to the 1920s. Clearly, in North Borneo, they lingered on even longer. Luckily, the Governor was sympathetic.

From the perspective of the present, it seems remarkable, but, in 1960, newly appointed officers were allowed a full month's travel time in which to reach Sabah. Sensibly, the Fieldings made the long steamship trip from Southampton their honeymoon. Arriving in Jesselton (by way of Singapore) aboard the S.S. "Kunak", they are packed off almost at once to Tambuan, in the Interior Residency. Tambuan and the Fieldings prove to be a