After living briefly in Bassett, Southampton, my mother, my younger brother Andrew and I travelled to Aden to join my father on the elderly troop ship the SS Empire Clyde (Figure 1) on what must have been one of its last voyages. Here I started school at Steamer Point RAF School, which was located at the top of an extinct volcano (or so my memories assure me). Because it was too hot for afternoon classes, I used to have to get up at dawn and be driven, sitting precariously with fellow pupils in the back of a RAF lorry up a road that I remember gave us panoramic views of Aden Harbour below, complete with matchstick-sized ships at anchor.

We lived firstly in married quarters at Khormaksar (Figures 2-, and then in a bungalow at Steamer Point. Aden made a big impression on me, and perhaps triggered a restlessness and curiosity that I’ve never lost. I especially remember the dusty heat, the light, the smells, the colours and the hubbub of Crater, with its crowded market, its beggars thrusting mutilated limbs at us, its cool and gloomy bookshop and its approach road, which lay at the base of a deep cleft in the volcano wall.

Other memories are of hearing the soundtracks from movies being shown at the open-air cinema, walking amongst the rocks tumbled against the shore of the harbour, the shark fence at the beach, singing The Mermaid folk song at school and winning a school prize for reading. Given that The Mermaid ends with a shipwreck and the drowning of everyone on board, it was a strange choice for children who would soon travel on ships to their home coutry!

After a year or so we returned to England on the SS Devonshire (Figure 16). We had been originally booked to sail on the SS Empire Windrush. For some reason the booking was cancelled and replaced by a later sailing on the SS Devonshire. My parents anger at the delay soon turned to relief, because the Empire Windrush caught fire and sank in the Mediterranean in March 1954, not long after picking up passengers from Aden.