Word: hawkingses
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Two miles from the Communist front lines southwest of Shanghai, in the city's smartest residential section, a fresh-faced young Chinese officer stood before a bluff, hearty Englishwoman. Behind him stood several soldiers, holding baskets of wood shavings. They had come to burn down Mrs. Gladys Hawkings'...
The young officer grinned and relented. On a map which showed the houses to be demolished he drew a small circle around the Hawkings place; the little bit of Britain stubbornly holding out against China's civil war was safe again, for the moment.
...Have This." A week before, Shanghai's Nationalist commander had warned the Hawkingses and other foreigners that their lives would be in danger unless they moved inside the city's defenses. Most foreigners withdrew, but Mrs. Hawkings, sometime of Winterbourne, Kingston, Dorset, and her husband William, who is general manager of a Shanghai shipping firm, did not budge...
The 15-room Hawkings home (called "The Limit," because it is the last house on Shanghai's southwestern boundary) at once became a front-line position. Nationalist soldiers pulled down fences all around, dug trenches through neighboring gardens, put neighboring houses to the torch. When one group of soldiers...
"I managed to stop them from building a gun post in the middle of the bowling green, by showing them a much better strategic position," said Mrs. Hawkings, "and I saved my bed of anchusas and the bushes of weigela and nemophila from being dug up for a trench, by...