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Over the coming months, the Emergency continued, with constant attacks on rubber estates, police stations, tin mines and other colonial outposts. The communist insurgents derailed trains and torched buildings and buses, as well as whole villages where the population was unwilling to support them with supplies or where they believed villagers to be collaborating with the colonial powers. The colonial government responded with curfews and detention without trial of suspected CTs – or bandits as they were commonly known. The planters and their families became accustomed to living under siege conditions, walking their estates with pistols in their belts and going to bed at night with armed guards posted outside.
At Bella Vista there was now a permanently manned gate, and a barbed wire fen
