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though in Ohio had a kilted pipe-band. I met some of her college friends while I was studying in America: they spoke with delight about this mysterious Far Easterner whose original mind produced skits and upsets some unmalicious Tinker Bell might have engineered. Vitality and ingenuity were the keynotes of their testimony, though they also remembered with awe a 14½ oz tennis racket called a Dreadnought with which she won the singles three years in succession until lobbed into defeat in her senior year. After graduation she returned to China as a missionary and taught for three years before returning to Columbia to gain an MA for a thesis on Lafcadio Hearn and a teacher's diploma. Ecclesiastical New York was split between Harry Emerson Fosdick and fundamentalists. Mother made up her mind on that controversy: she never swerved from her conviction that the Scriptures were to be taken as they were and life conformed to them- not the reverse. In 1925 she met and married a young Scots master mariner. The sea that provided their living also divided them and turned them into superb letter writers. Their first home in Shanghai was a prefab made from ships' steel plate from the Clyde. My father, a Clydesider himself ordered it and had it erected. It was to survive the relentless Japanese scavenge for scrap metal, and for a time after world war II was a Christian literature centre. While Mao Tse Tung and Chiang Kai Shek fought to control Shanghai, father went one evening to the nursing home to see his wife and inspect his firstborn. He had to scramble under barbed wire. Half-way through he saw dead ahead a couple of hairy highland legs. A gruff voice asked 'Wha's the passwurrd'? To which he replied 'Glencoe'. The sentry 'wasny a Campbell': he was let in. Later my father's ship was pirated on the Yangtze with the whole family on board. Mother was on tenterhooks wondering how the pirate on guard would take being threatened with a light bulb by an 18 month old. But like so many others threatened since with enlightenment from the same source he managed to be remarkably stoical.
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