Photo courtesy of Henry Ching:
Nos 5,7 and 9 Village Road are the three storey block in the centre of the photo, with No.5 on the left of the photo and No.9 on the right. The small balcony with the potted plants marks the room which the children occupied (my three sisters, myself and my younger brother). It eventually became mine when the others grew up and left home.
The man wearing the hat in the photo is my father, and the small boy standing next to him is my younger brother Charles. Charles passed away in 2000 shortly after he had retired as one of the three permanent Judges of the Court of Final Appeal.
The boy facing them, leaning against the nullah wall, was my good friend Peter Martin. Peter’s father ((A. G. Martin)) worked in the Public Works Department – the Martin family (parents and two boys) were interned in Stanley during the Japanese occupation. We were not interned, but after the war we were repatriated to Australia on an RN warship (escort carrier HMS Arbiter), and on arrival in Sydney we were sent to a Red Cross camp in St. Mary’s, then west of Sydney and now an outer suburb. It was at the camp that I first met Peter, and we remained friends until his family left Hong Kong in about 1950 when we lost contact. The photo was taken by me in about 1948.
The photo shows, on the right, a part of the large mansion that was next to us at No.9 (just to the right of the Wang Tak Street sign). The mansion belonged to a family named Fok and occupied the triangle of land formed by Po Shin Street and Wang Tak Street. It was demolished in the late 1950s and replaced by the Ascot Hotel which, I think, still stands. ((The current building on the site has a completion date of 1983, so the Ascot Hotel was likely knocked down around 1980.))