I sat with Miriam in the Cambridge cinemas, compulsively watching the newsreels of the hydrogen-bomb tests. The sight of these immense explosions at Eniwetok stirred and enthralled me, and often I had to steady my trembling hands to avoid frightening Miriam. The mysterious mushroom clouds, rising above the Pacific atolls from which the B-29s had brought to Nagasaki the second day of apocalypse, were a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything. Fantasies of nuclear war fused forever with my memories of Shanghai, reminding me of the white dust in the Avenue Edward VII, down which I had walked like a child straying into a preview of the future.

Working as a copywriter for an advertising agency in London, I thought constantly of the pioneers of aviation—Lilienthal and the Wrights, Lindbergh, and even little Mignet, who ended his days in poverty, camping in disused hangars under the wing of his beloved Flying Flea. In my mind all the romance and ascensionist myths of flight were linked to weapons of destruction and the greater possibilities that lay beyond them.

At a reunion of Shanghai friends at the Regent Palace Hotel, I saw David Hunter for the first time since our arrival at Southampton in 1946. Despite the seven years he had scarcely changed, eyes under his pale fringe still watching the doors and windows as if he had just escaped from a penal institution. After a few years of working for his father, an import-export agent in the City, he had been a tennis instructor, a trainee actor, and even, briefly, a Jesuit novice. We began to see each other for lunch, drawn together by that sense of an unresolved past which we shared. He was nearly always drunk, but at the same time almost pedantically sober, unable to make sense of his own life but certain about the right course for mine. When his face was flushed with gin I could see the bruises rising through his skin.

“Psychiatry wasn’t right for you, Jim,” he told me frankly, waving aside an entire career. “You’d have spent all your time analysing yourself.”

“Why? I didn’t know there was anything to analyse.”

“You could have fooled me, dear sport. Your patients would never have left the waiting room.” David glanced at me in the same irritating and knowing way that Richard Sutherland had sometimes watched me in his office at the Psychology Department, as if waiting for some sudden insight into my character. “Tell me, do you still think about Shanghai?”

“Less than I used to. We might as well forget it—Shanghai’s forgotten us.”

“Unsettling, that. Strange city, but it does have a kind of claim on us. All those poor bloody Chinese. What was Cambridge like?”