There is a short story by William Boyd called Good at Games in which the central character, it would be inaccurate to call him the hero, attempts to kill a man who is playing cricket.
The attacker is seeking revenge on the man for bullying him mercilessly at their English boarding school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The story was made into a television movie but the reviews were indifferent. One columnist, though, waxed nostalgically about a scene that epitomised many of his memories of private education in Britain - the one in which an entire dormitory of boys perform Jimmy Page's solo on Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven using their tennis rackets as guitars.
But I'm digressing. My point is that it would be fascinating to poll every Hong Kong man and woman packed off to boarding school and ask them who, if anyone, they would now like to do some damage to on a cricket wicket, football field or basketball court - delete as applicable.
Would it be the school bully who looted their tuck box and swore he would beat his victims to a pulp if they told the housemaster? Or the sadistic physical education teacher who forced them out on cross-country runs when even the horses were stabled up warmly against the cold.
Possibly it would be the head teacher who peered down his bifocals and announced gravely, 'You shall never amount to anything', to the quaking youth who grew up to be an arbitrager with homes on every continent.
Just possibly, the people these Hong Kong old boys and old girls would like to cudgel in revenge for all that adolescent suffering thousands of kilometres from home would be their mother and father.
These same people waved them off at Kai Tak with little advice about coping in an education system - whose basic tenets were formed by medieval European monks - other than wrap up against the cold and write home often.
