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floor-shows. Their men played in dance-bands and orchestras, sang, acted or put on performances of the ballet. There was more than one Russian theatre in the city and several Russian churches.
    Many of the women claimed to be princesses, or the daughters of grand-dukes, and some of them may well have been. But in one respect their stories were chillingly similar: the horrors they had witnessed or endured at the hands of the Bolsheviks. The terrible hardships of escape and flight across endless, empty miles of some of the most hostile territory in the world, where the weakest – the old or the very young – had died from thirst or starvation, or merely from exhaustion. Many of these refugees were robbed and cheated by the wandering tribes of Central Asia and Mongolia, with the result that by the time they reached China – or Manchuria – they were penniless and forced to beg for food or for any work, however ill-paid or degrading.
    *   *   *
    Tacklow’s intention had been to travel to Tientsin by the Shanghai Express. But he changed his mind when he learned that the train had recently been ambushed (and not for the first time) by night and in the middle of nowhere, probably by the private army of one of the self-styled Generalissimos who were rampaging around in those days, creating havoc wherever they went. The train had been stopped in a particularly desolate stretch of country, its passengers robbed of everything they possessed, and a good few rich Chinese taken captive and held for ransom. One or two people who had objected had been shot, and after that the rest of the passengers and crew had given no trouble.
    We were told that one intrepid Consular lady, an Austrian or Italian Contessa as far as I remember, had not only had the sense to realize at once what had happened, but, acting with lightning speed, had tilted the entire contents of her well-stocked jewel-case into a brown silk head-scarf and, unseen in the darkness and confusion, had jumped down on to the track, hastily scratched a hole in the nearest bit of earth, buried the loot and scrambled back into her compartment. There she brushed the mud from her hands, filled the empty jewel-case with odds and ends of make-up and hair curlers, and put on a convincing act of being asleep when the raiders reached her compartment and proceeded to strip it of all her cash and belongings, together with any of the carriage fittings that were not actually nailed down.
    And did the resourceful Contessa get her jewels back? Yes, she did indeed. But I imagine that the tale of how she nearly lost them may have had something to do with Tacklow’s decision to finish our journey by sea.
    We said goodbye to Shanghai with some regret, for thanks to Aunt Peg we had had a lot of fun there – and expected to have a lot more, for Peg had said: ‘Once you get really settled into a house of your own, and begin to get used to living here, I hope you’ll come down here and visit us whenever you feel like a change of air. We shall expect to see a lot of you.’
    But we were never to see Shanghai again, or Peg and Alec either – though Mother did, when they were old and ill and living in England and the Shanghai they had known was about to become no more than a memory. A happy one for almost all of the ex-Shanghaiers, for in later years I never met one of them who did not say: ‘It was a wonderful city to have lived in. We had such fun !’

Chapter 3
    The voyage from Shanghai to Tientsin was not a long one: a few days at most. And there was nothing much to look at, because the ships in those days (and even more so now, I gather) feared piracy more than bad weather, and did not hug the coast. Our ship took us northward up the Yellow Sea to Tsing-tao, where we stopped briefly, and from there past Wei-hai-wei, still at that time a British Concession and headquarters of our China Fleet. On across the Gulf of Pe-chih-li to Ta-ku, where