Wooden huts were all over Diamond Hill, and there was a studio.  It was home to many, like Kowloon Walled City.  (In Ngau Chi Wan) there were farmlands growing vegetables and grains.  

Tai Hom Village was a gorgeous place.  It was prestigious; only the rich to lived there.  We didn’t even dare to go look at the houses, because only those with deep pockets could move in.  They were houses of one or two storeys.  Later it looked messy, but it was nothing of the sort at that time.

The whole of San Po Kong was the airport area.  Where Rhythm Garden is today belonged to RAF, and Ho Lap College was the runway.  There were roads; Bus No.9 and No.5 ran through it, and the terminus was at St. Joseph's Anglo-Chinese School.  Ngau Tau Kok was not yet developed at that time.  There was only one footpath to Ngau Tau Kok.  It was undeveloped, and all it had was wooden huts, and the footpath verged on the hillside.

At today’s Kai Tak Mansion was a mound, with the police headquarters on the top.  The side facing St. Joseph’s was rocky, so many people quarried stones there.  They made some crude tents out of gunnysack and bamboo and went quarrying.  There was a one-way lane, and a bit further was a blasting site.  The lane was narrowest approaching Amoy Gardens.  You would lose balance If you were not very good at cycling.  I myself went off balance one time.  It was a gravel road so it really thrust you aside.  Cycling there, the slope was on the left, and the development area on the right was wire fenced.  At the end of Amoy was a ditch, so it was also the lane’s end.  It was a factory area, like leather factory and glasswork factory… When I was small I went there to pick up goods for my family.

I moved to Kwun Tong in 1959.  At that time Choi Hung Estate was still under construction, and I lived in Garden Mansion.  When I moved in, Ngau Tau Kok was the farthest I could get to by car; there was not even a roadway, and I felt like I was “sold like pigs”.  My co-workers in the airport told me I could apply to live in Kwun Tung.  They said it was easy; our engineers took someone in the Housing Society out for dinner, and we needed only to queue up for registration in the office.  Then we got in, so it’s really easy.