While Grandfather’s teaching post was with a school for Chinese boys run by the Shanghai Municipal Government, Grannie worked as a teacher in a nursery school for English children.
I’m sure, as a vivacious, beautiful young woman, she threw herself whole heartedly into enjoying the expat life. She no doubt relished the freedom from her strict parents. I think it may have been the romance of life in Shanghai, then known as the Paris of the Orient, that attracted her almost as much as did my grandfather and as Europeans living in Shanghai they were welcome among the social élite.
In 1929 my father was born. It was the custom for expectant mothers to deliver their babies in Hong Kong, which was then a British Colony, but my grandmother refused to go so Dad was born in China, which presumably meant he was a Chinese citizen. So am I half Chinese?
Father had an ‘amah’ or nurse who looked after him. My
grandmother once told me how she’d tell Dad's amah
off for feeding him street food. He once caught dysentery and very nearly died but he eventually pulled through and regained his health.
Growing-up in Shanghai
My father had many fond memories of growing up in Shanghai in the thirties… swimming at the Country Club, playing in Jessfield Park, drives into the countryside and holidays in Japan.
Jessfield Park, after which my grandmother later named her house in England, was for Europeans and Americans only. It’s hard to believe now that we had the effrontery to exclude the Chinese from a park in their own country. The Chinese had a park of their own in which foreigners never set foot, with some exceptions that is. My father used to sneak into the Chinese park with his friends to fight with the local boys. They had ‘lovely scraps’ as Dad described them, as each group tried to gain control of a hillock in the park. The park-keeper watched from a distance until my father and his friends had taken a good thrashing. He would then break it up and throw the foreign boys out. Sometimes, however, teh Western lads would get the upper-hand and unsurpisingly the keeper was much quicker off the mark to throw them out.
Another thing Dad remembered from his childhood was the first traffic lights coming to Shanghai. I wonder how many there are now. When he more recently looked through a book on Shanghai in a London bookshop he couldn’t recognise anything though apparently Jessfield Park is still there, now called Zhongshan Park and open to everyone.
Many of Shanghai’s parks and roads have been renamed since the thirties. Bubbling Well Road, where they lived, is now West Nanjing Road and is easily found on a map leading to East Nanjing Road which connects to the famous Bund.
I was surprised when my father told me that, at the age of seven or eight he used to travel around Shanghai on his own by bus. He didn’t always buy a ticket and when he saw the ticket inspector heading his way he’d pick up a discarded one off the floor and show that. They never caught him out. This seems so unlike the man I know, a ‘pillar of the community' as once described in the local newspaper. It’s hard for me to imagine him as a naughty little boy.
They used to visit Japan on holiday which my father loved, both for the beautiful scenery and the warm hospitality. He remembers staying in a hotel with paper sliding walls and not being able to resist punching holes through the paper when no one was looking. No one ever said anything. Later he would simply find the holes had been patched up.
Twice my family went back to England on holiday – when my father was one and then again when he was six. Travelling via the USA they visited many fascinating places including San Francisco and the Grand Canyon and in the other direction their journey took them through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal and to Bombay (now Mumbai) and Singapore, so my father was very well-travelled at a young age. To him it was the norm and he thought everyone travelled the world like that.
above: Bubbling Well Road 1928 (courtesy of Northampton Museum), Dad on holiday in Japan
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