“Jamie, you’re to stay home today,” my father announced, staring through my eyes as he did when he had unfathomable reasons of his own. “You can finish your Robinson Crusoe.”

“You’ll meet Man Friday and the cannibals.” My mother smiled at this treat in store, but her eyes were as flat as they had been when our spaniel was run over by the German doctor in Columbia Road. I wondered if Olga had died during the night, but she was watching from the door, pressing the lapels of her dressing gown to her neck.

“I’ve already met the cannibals.” However exciting, Crusoe’s shipwreck palled by comparison with the real naval disaster about to take place on the Whangpoo River. “Can we go to the Tattoo? David Hunter’s going next week…”

The Military Tattoo staged by soldiers of the British garrison was filled with booming cannon, thunderflashes, and bayonet charges, and re-created the bravest clashes of the Great War, the battles of Mons, Ypres, and the Gallipoli landings. In a sense, the make-believe of the Tattoo might be as close as I would ever get to a real war.

“Jamie, we’ll see—they may have to cancel the Tattoo. The soldiers are very busy.”

“I know. Then can we go to the Hell Drivers?” This was a troupe of American daredevil drivers who crashed their battered Fords and Chevrolets through wooden barricades covered with flaming gasoline. The sight of these thrillingly rehearsed accidents forever eclipsed the humdrum street crashes of Shanghai. “You promised…”

“The Hell Drivers aren’t here anymore. They’ve gone back to Manila.”

“They’re getting ready for the war.” In my mind I could see these laconic Americans, in their dashing goggles and aviator’s suits, crashing through the flaming walls as they answered a salvo from the Idzumo. “Can I come to the golf club?”

“No! Stay here with Olga! I won’t tell you again…” My father’s voice had an edge of temper that I had noticed since the labour troubles at his cotton mill in Pootung, on the east bank of the river. I wondered why Olga watched him so closely when he was angry. Her toneless eyes showed a rare and almost hungry alertness, the expression I felt on my face when I was about to tuck into an ice-cream sundae. One of the Communist union organisers who threatened to kill my father had stared at him in the same way as we sat in the Packard outside his office in the Szechuan Road. I worried that Olga wanted to kill my father and eat him.

“Do I have to? Olga listens all the time to French dance music.”

“Well, you listen with her,” my mother rejoined. “Olga can teach you how to dance.”