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we waited for the tide before crossing the Ta-ku bar and sailing up the Wang-Pu river to Tientsin, which like Shanghai and Calcutta is a major port on a tidal river, and not directly on the sea.
    We must have passed Wei-hai-wei in the dark, because I don’t remember anything about it. But I do remember the scenery on the way up river, and the Ta-ku forts, which had been fired on in the days of the ‘Old Buddha’ Tse Shi, the last Empress of China, and created an international incident. They were to create another one in the future, but that was still a good many years ahead.
    Contrasting our voyage up river to Calcutta with our present one up the Wang-Pu, I gave the present one no marks at all. For once again the sky was grey and lowering, and the clouds were spitting a thin drizzle that did nothing for the scenery. If this was China proper, I thought nothing of it. The land appeared to be harsh, flat and treeless, and land, houses and people together a study in grey and beige. I couldn’t think how Tacklow could have fallen in love with it so many years ago when he came this way in a Victorian troopship. Bets and I leant side by side on the railings and stared at the view in mutual condemnation.
    Tientsin was another Treaty Port in which, as in Shanghai, a variety of different nations had been granted Concessions. It turned out to be far less attractive than Shanghai (and I hadn’t thought much of that ). To begin with it was much more parochial, and there seemed to be none of the speed and excitement about it that had been so noticeable in Shanghai. Tientsin plodded. We were now in June, and it was summer, but even when it stopped raining and we were treated to patches of warm sunlight, the temperature was depressingly low and the central heating in all the houses was much too high.
    We shivered outside and sweated indoors, and my memory of those first few days is muddled and chaotic. We met and made laborious conversation to a series of unfamiliar people: aunts, uncles and numerous cousins, none of whom, to my knowledge, we had ever met before. Our first few nights were spent with a Mr Isemonger, whose daughter had been a friend of ours in India. He had been Chief of Police in Peshawar in the days when Tacklow had been head of CID, and they were old friends. When his wife died and his daughter married, he decided to retire in North China – heaven only knows why!
    Someone took us out to lunch at the Golf Club, where I was startled to see a large noticeboard in the hall which said: ‘Players finding their ball in a coffin may remove it without penalty.’ On demanding an explanation for what I took to be a macabre joke in distinctly bad taste, I was told that as a general rule the only uncultivated land in that part of China would be a disused graveyard – particularly if it had a few clumps of trees growing on it. If it were not so, the trees would almost certainly have been cut down for firewood or building material, and the land used for crops or hay. Only when a graveyard fell into disuse, either because of overcrowding or because the descendants of the dead had moved away or their line died out, leaving no one to tend the graves or remember the names of those who lay there, would the land be regarded as waste and left unused.
    The Tientsin golf course was a case in point, and since the Chinese do not bury their elaborate wooden coffins deep in the ground, but place them in a shallow trench and cover them with earth on which they plant grass and flowers and seedling trees, centuries of wind and rain would have worn down each grassy hillock into little more than a low mound and rotted the wooden coffins within, exposing the bones of the long-forgotten occupants in a shallow depression that trapped many a golf-ball.
    All I remember about Mr Isemonger’s house is that it was as depressingly Edwardian-suburban in design as Uncle Ken’s had been, that it was much too hot, and that