Their women were often as adept with a Bren gun or grenades as their husbands

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 165.

Although the Communists launched raids on isolated police stations, their preferred targets were the planters who ran rubber estates, which ranged from vast 14,000-acre enterprises, owned by London-based firms, down to more humble affairs consisting of a thousand acres owned by absentee Chinese. American mining operators were left alone, not least because they were formidably well armed. The rubber planters and their families lived in bungalows at the heart of their estates, places sometimes so isolated that three-week-old copies of the London Times were prized. They were a tough lot, many of them having survived internment by the Japanese before reverting to their lonely lives where the nearest neighbour was five or ten miles away. Whether they deserved the contempt visited on them in the stories of Somerset Maugham is debatable, but bridge, golf and whisky sodas (stengahs) played a major part in their lives, as did the amahs, boys, syces and tukan ayers who catered to their families’ needs. Their women, ‘mems’, who went by nicknames like Billy or Tommy, were often as adept with a Bren gun or grenades as their husbands. Planters learned to vary their routine as they ventured out to inspect the native men and women harvesting white sap oozing from spiral cuts in the trees, or when and where they sat down to lunch, lest a grenade fly through the window. Their sleep was periodically interrupted by bursts of gunfire from the pitch-black jungle beyond their homes.