It was the standard arrival. Four weeks out from Southampton, the yellow-funnelled P&O liner docked beside the troopships on Kowloon side. The Hong Kong government, whose Marine Department my father was now joining, might have no idea where to house us but it certainly knew its own priorities. Less than twenty-four hours after disembarking, he was back on board SS Canton surveying the engine room.

For almost the next half century after going ashore in June 1950 our family would regard the territory as much more than merely a staging point in careers or schooling largely spent elsewhere. My first years there coincided almost to the day with the duration of the Korean war and indeed the first newspaper I can recall reading was the front page of the South China Morning Post announcing the downing of yet another MIG-15 in a dogfight over the Korean peninsula. The Hong Kong of my boyhood was a decidely colonial enclave where the few fortunate Europeans and a small number of wealthy Chinese residents existed in a milieu that was remote from the clerks in the counting houses and the absolute poverty of the squatters in their tin shacks on the steep slopes across from our flat in Argyle Street.

Hong Kong in the early 1950s was a highly stratified, grossly unequal and most nervous place thanks to its own past and the international situation.