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gold smuggling, drug smuggling, illegal gambling dens and every kind of vice. The confusion over its ownership meant that the police could not enforce the law and, indeed, would not even enter the infamous city. Even today, they go in large groups if they are hunting particular criminals, and usually the man they want effectively disappears into its sordid alleyways.
    The area was large in population, small in size. A mere six acres sheltered 30,000 people (or double that; no census has ever found the true number). The housing was appalling; no building regulations could be enforced, so crazy-angled apartment blocks without sanitation, water or lighting straddled the streets. A maze of tangled wires was graphic evidence of the fact that their electricity was tapped from the public supplies outside the Walled City. But you cannot steal sanitation, so excrement had to be emptied into the stinking alleys below. At street level there were two toilets for all 30,000 people; the “toilets” consist of two holes over overflowing crawling cesspools—one for women, one for men.
    It seemed unlikely that a place like the Walled City would have schools and churches. But in this appalling place where children were born and brought up, Mrs. Donnithorne had found premises and begun a general primary school. The teachers were not properly qualified, but they had attended secondaryschool to fourth or fifth form level. The school was small, but it had morning and afternoon shifts and taught several hundred pupils. On the very first day that I visited the school, Auntie Donnie asked me to teach there. Without thinking, I said, “Yes,” and she immediately said, “How often?” Before I had fully realized what I was getting myself into, I had agreed to teach percussion band, singing and English conversation three afternoons a week.
    I soon found the Chinese education system to be so miscast that very often the brightest got fed up and dropped out. The system demanded that you learn all your lessons by heart. Every month, every term and every year there were exams. Should a child fail annual exams, he or she had to repeat the whole of the year’s lessons. It was not unusual to come across children who had taken the Primary One exam at the end of their first year no less than three times. I formed a theory that it was the bright ones who got bored with the system and jumped off the ladder while the duller ones climbed up.
    Percussion band and singing are not too difficult to teach even if there is little or no conversation. However, when it came to teaching English conversation I was a complete failure.
    All the teaching in the school was highly regimented. I would read out, “John and Mary went into the wood,” and the students would repeat after me in unison, “John and Mary [it came out “Mairly”] went into the wood” without comprehension. Traditionally, understanding in Chinese education is not held to be important, but learning is considered vital, and they all learn to repeat what the teacher says like machines.
    My attempts to enliven their stories by acting out what was happening were completely misunderstood; we had a classroom riot every time. No one had ever tried to teach them to participate in stories and dramatic ideas; the freedom that I tried to show them resulted in classroom anarchy within a matter of minutes. So I sadly went back to reading out sentences from the book—the sure way to maintain calm.
    Once a week, one of the classrooms was converted into a church for a Sunday night service. So Miss Poon—I now proudlyhad a Chinese name—played the harmonium. This meant pedaling at 50 mph or so to produce an accompaniment that could be heard against the singing—otherwise, having started on a particular note, they would continue to sing in that key quite regardless of the one I was playing in. I usually gave in and joined them.
    Mostly, the worshipers were older Chinese women—some with babies wrapped tightly to