Mounting my cycle, I straightened the handlebars and brushed the dust from my blazer—the officious junior masters at the school liked to roam the city in their spare time, reporting anyone untidily dressed. I set off after the empty tram, steering between the polished rails. When it neared the Bund the conductor dismounted, swearing at the driver and waving his leather cash bag. The tram’s warning bell clanged at the empty street, watched by groups of Chinese clerks pressing themselves into the doorways of the office buildings.

A water spout rose from the choppy waves beside the bow of the Idzumo, hovered for a second, and then surged upwards in a violent cascade. Arms of hurtling foam punched through the air and soared high above the radio aerials and mast tops of the ancient cruiser. A second squadron of Chinese bombers swept in formation down the Whangpoo, midway between the Bund and the Pootung shore, where my father’s cotton mill lay behind a veil of greasy smoke. One of the planes lagged behind the others, the pilot unable to keep his place in the formation. He rolled his wings from side to side, like the stunt pilots at the aerobatic displays at Hungjao airfield.

“Jamie, leave your bike! Come with us!”

The white fenders of the Lincoln Zephyr had crept behind me. David’s Australian nanny was shouting to me, her arms stretched across the shoulders of the nervous Chinese chauffeur. Steadying her straw hat with one hand, she waved me towards the car. Nurse Arnold had always been easygoing and friendly, so much more pleasant to me than Olga, and I was surprised by her bad temper. David had recognised me, a gleam of triumph in his eyes. He brushed the blond hair from his forehead, aware that he was about to make the first capture of our marathon game of hide-and-seek.

The Idzumo was laying smoke around itself. Scrolls of oily vapour uncoiled along its bow. Through the sooty clouds I could see the tremble of antiaircraft fire, the sounds lost in the monotonous drone of the Chinese bombers.

“Jamie, you stupid…!”

I pedalled away from them into a wall of noise and smoke. Glass was falling from the windows of my father’s building in the Szechuan Road. Office girls darted from the doorways, their white blouses speckled with fine needles. My front wheel jolted over a piece of masonry shaken loose from a cornice. While I straightened the pedals a low-flying bomber veered away from the Japanese antiaircraft fire. It flew above the Bund, exposed its open bombing racks, and released two bombs towards the empty sampans moored to the quay.