Lady Provost Elizabeth Grubb tells of emotional return to Australia

In one hand, clutched tightly, is a much-loved dolly and in the other a cuddly, handmade felt donkey she'd found lying on a Queensland beach. She picked it up, dusted away the sand and gleefully claimed it as one of her few toys.

Six decades since that photograph was taken, and Edinburgh's Lady Provost Elizabeth Grubb stands in the grandeur of her City Chambers office holding that same little donkey.

She's kept it all those years as a precious reminder of an almost epic journey half a world away that crossed continents, saw her family divided by the horrors of war and which ultimately concluded with the indescribable joy of being reunited.

The little donkey, as fresh as it was in the 1940s, is a simple but acutely poignant keepsake.

For just as Elizabeth gathered that lost toy in her arms and showered it with childish care, so too was she – a wartime refugee in a strange land – willingly accepted into the arms of strangers.

Remarkably, more than 60 years on, those bonds she made with Australian families who cared for her and her mum after they fled the Japanese threat to their Hong Kong home, remain as strong as ever.

Those ties were reinforced last month when Elizabeth returned to Australia for the first time since childhood. Unlike in the Forties when she was a bewildered refugee from a foreign land, this time she was there in her prestigious role as Edinburgh's Lady Provost, accompanying her Lord Provost husband George at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

It was her opportunity to say thank you to the descendants of the families who selflessly cared for her and her mother when they were cast adrift from what had been their lives in Hong Kong and uncertain of the fate of her father in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

"It was such a thrill to go, 65 years later, and see all these people, some of them distant relatives, some school friends I had in Hong Kong," she says.

"It was a chance to say 'thank you' to Australia for what they did for us: taking people who were virtually refugees with no place to go. I couldn't thank them enough for what they did for my mum and me.

"And it was just a wonderful, very emotional homecoming to find that Australia, so kind and hospitable to us during the war, is just the same now."

As she watched the military razzmatazz of the Tattoo – complete with its replica Edinburgh Castle, lone piper and colourful displays – from the royal box, it felt a world away from her arrival in Australia in the early 1940s with her mum and a couple of trunks containing all their worldly goods.

She was just three years old when the life her parents, Betty and Walter, had been carefully creating in Hong Kong was turned on its head.

Her dad was working as a chief engineer for shipping giant Jardine Mathieson, a thriving business founded in the 19th century by two Scots traders, which had already experienced Japanese aggression in 1932 during an attack on China which led to its offices there being closed.

When suggestions emerged that the Japanese had set their sights on Hong Kong in 1939, Arbroath-born Walter took the decision, like many others at the time, to usher his family to safety.

"We were evacuated to Singapore for nine months," recalls Elizabeth, a former teacher at Donaldson's School for the Deaf. "Some people started to drift back to Hong Kong, but my father, thank goodness, believed it would only get worse and organised for us to go by Blue Funnel line to Australia."

Mum and daughter arrived in Freemantle at an empty dockside with nowhere to go and no-one to help them.

"It must have been very frightening for my mother," she recalls. "She went to find someone to help us and I remember clearly sitting on the boxes, wondering where my mother had gone and would she ever come back."

It was a startling welcome to what would be a nomadic life in Australia that saw her mum valiantly strive to support her daughter and cope with horrifying news that her father's ship had been torpedoed and he was missing.

While it was a turbulent childhood spent living in guesthouses or bunking down in distant relatives' homes, there were also periods of delight and joy for the young Elizabeth.

She recalls exciting pony and trap rides to Outback picnics with sizzling barbecues, often eaten standing up for fear of the potentially deadly spiders; Queensland's golden beaches and crystal blue waters and the overwhelming kindness of strangers.

Clearest among her vivid memories is the arduous train journey from Perth to Melbourne, the result of devastating news that her father's ship had been hit.

"My father's ship, the Saing-Wo, was a merchant ship. It was taken over by the navy and he became a lieutenant engineer. They were carrying the wages for the Prince of Wales troops when they were bombed," she says.

"The impact broke her back but my father was able to beach her and she ran aground on Banka Island in the Straits of Sumatra. To stop all this money on board falling into enemy hands, all the engineers below deck were shoving notes into the boilers to burn it.

"News came through that my father was missing," she remembers. "So we had to go to the naval headquarters on the other side of Australia, in Melbourne."

They travelled, with a friend and her daughter who had also fled Hong Kong, for four days in a rickety train with goatskin bags containing warm, vile water hanging from the luggage racks, no food and eight people – four of them Aussie soldiers – tucked in a small compartment.

"But the soldiers were so kind," recalls Elizabeth, now 73. "Two slept on the luggage ranks, two on the floor so my mum and I had one seat and our friends took the other side.

"The people we met couldn't have been kinder."

Eventually, Elizabeth would come to understand how devastated her mother must have been but at the time she simply remembers her remaining stoic and dependable, always somehow finding a job or a place to stay.

"If she suffered, she never showed it. She was a pillar of strength and I never saw her cry."

In Melbourne, mother and daughter found a place to stay with the Bales family. Stuart Bales was just three years old at the time. Now in his late 60s, he was reunited with Elizabeth when she invited him to join her and husband George in the royal box at the Tattoo.

Also there was Robina Thomas, the granddaughter of her father's aunt and uncle, Robina and Jim, who also opened their Queensland home to the refugee parent and child.

"I'd never met her, but as soon as I saw her I knew that it was my father's aunt's granddaughter," smiles Elizabeth. "The memories of it all are so vivid."

Elizabeth and her mum travelled again, this time to the Outback where they tuned in their radio on 8 May, 1945 to hear the remarkable news that war in Europe had finally ended

"We couldn't believe it," she smiles. "We were in this little hamlet with just a church and a school and a wooden shop but, oh, we celebrated.

"After all of that, it meant we could finally go home."

THREE YEARS OF HELL

WHILE young Elizabeth and her mother crisscrossed Australia, her father was suffering the hell of a Japanese PoW camp.

Walter was captured after his vessel was run aground, and was sent to endure the horrors of the Zentsuji camp.

"It was in the Japanese Alps," says Elizabeth, "because it was so remote it was one of the last camps to be liberated.

"My father was a prisoner for three years. When he came out his back was covered with carbuncles and he weighed less than 100lbs. He was a wreck."

After his release the family were to be reunited in Britain. While mum and daughter travelled by ship through the Panama Canal, Walter travelled via Canada, to buy time to make himself appear healthier. "VJ Day was in August but he didn't get home until October.

"As the day came for him to come home, my mother placed his slippers at the fireplace, ready for him.

"She had carried these slippers all around the world.

"He arrived, skin and bones, and we gave him Arbroath smokies and the most amazing homecoming you can imagine."