MRS. HAWKINGS SEES IT THROUGH

From crumbling Shanghai, TIME Correspondent Robert Doyle cabled:

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' house because it was "in the line of fire." Said firm, 58-year-old Mrs. Hawkings: "Young man, I was living in this house before you were born. This is my home and I intend to stay."

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.

"We Can't 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 started to chop down Mrs. Hawkings' trees, she told them: "We've lived in this house for 27 years and brought up five daughters here, and we can't have this sort of thing going on." The soldiers, overwhelmed by her bearing and her perfect Chinese, obediently put away their hatchets.

"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 showing them how to take better shelter down by the lily pond. I got them so sympathetic for my garden that they even held the flowers apart so they could thread barbed wire without breaking the blooms."

"Bit of Bad Luck." When the Communists started their drive up from the southwest, Gladys Hawkings opened the big red doors of her walled compound and let in scores of refugees.

One morning, after the fighting had eddied around the house for several hours, a shell hit the compound and wounded six Nationalist soldiers who had moved into the garden house.

"Bit of bad luck, you know," said Mr. Hawkings, a trim man in grey flannels. "Yes," agreed Mrs. Hawkings, "things were a bit tight last night. For the first time in my life I slept with my shoes on."

She called her two servants, a smiling, white-jacketed No. 1 boy and a greying, gold-toothed amah. "Here," she explained, "are Lao Wu and Amah. Lao Wu has been in the family for 45 years, Amah for 34. What would they do if we ran away and left them?"

In front of the house a group of soldiers were wolfing down bowls of rice. When Mrs. Hawkings appeared in her cardigan sweater and plaid skirt, the soldiers stopped eating and gazed at her with awe and affection. One young soldier started singing China's national anthem. "They're nice boys, really," said the mistress of The Limit.

"Last Outpost." Later, she and her husband pointed out the room where they would hole up if the going really got rough--the pantry. "The bathroom is overhead," explained Mrs. Hawkings, "and that has a thick cement floor. Between the outside walls of the house and the pantry are two thick inner walls." Into the hallway by the pantry, Hawkings had already moved a mattress, four gunnysacks of rice and a row of tin trunks.

The drawing-room windows were barricaded with piles of logs, and a six-by-nine-foot Union Jack was draped over a bookcase. Said Mrs. Hawkings: "I know the Communists don't like a display of flags, but we just wanted to look at it."

She sat down to pour a cup of tea.

The thump of shells echoed sporadically in the cool room. "Curious how easily one gets used to this," Mrs. Hawkings said. "Just yesterday when we'd heard no explosions for half an hour I remarked to Billy, 'Isn't it quiet?' "

The Hawkingses have no sure water supply, but the electricity was still on last week, and they have an ample stock of food and four bathtubs 'filled with water before the regular supply failed (plus the lily pond when these give out). During the long evenings Mr. and Mrs. Hawkings play Russian bank for pennies and halfpennies. "We call ourselves the last outpost of Empire out here," Mrs. Hawkings said. "I don't think we British ought to quit anywhere. It's a matter of prestige."

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