THE WIDE STREETS OF KOWLOON TONG, situated on mainland China, closely flanked the island of Hong Kong. The district housed predominately well-to-do locals, CEOs and movie stars. Since Kell was working in Hong Kong on a contract back then, and Caucasians like him (yes, that distinction was regularly made) often lived in Kowloon Tong, in Kowloon City West, that is where he rented the next house Michael would live in.
By March 1968, Hong Kong politics had settled down considerably so Mother brought the boys back from their brief sojourn of relative security in Sydney. I actually stayed on in Sydney independently and worked as a buyer for the Sportsgirl boutique chain till November, when I rejoined the family’s Asian adventures. Then we were all briefly under the one roof again; although, as I was almost 21, I was itching to live my own life and wouldn’t stay long. The Kowloon Tong house was nothing fancy: a typical single-storey, three-bedroom house. Nevertheless, the generous servants’ quarters off the kitchen were very much appreciated by Ah Chang.
On her Tuesday afternoons off she’d visit the local market, never failing to return with fresh white sea bream, Chinese mackerel and grey mullet for Tinkerbell, the scraggly little tortoiseshell cat that had followed Michael home one day. This little waif reminded us of delightful Bashō’s seventeenth-century haiku: Why so scrawny, cat? / starving for fat fish / or mice … / Or backyard love?
Ah Chang spurned the idea of anything less than fresh fish for Master Michael’s ‘mao’, as they call a cat in Cantonese. And in fact Michael’s rescued stray would become famous! She posed with him for a photograph to go with an article in the local newspaper, The China Mail. He’d entered her in a pet competition and lo and behold, they won.
And there—there is another character name that Michael chose for his beloved ones that was lifted from the pages of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy tales. His pretty tabby Tinkerbell was named after Peter Pan’s hyperactive, mischievous fairy protector, and his baby would be called Tiger Lily, as the Native American princess in Neverland was called.
Master Michael and Master Rhett, as Ah Chang called them, had always shared a room. Now they had their separate domains. Top priority for Michael’s was a bookshelf spilling over with titles he loved to read including The Egypt Game by Californian Zilpha Keatley Snyder and Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. I also recall reading him Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy classic A Wizard of Earthsea out loud, as it was a little harder. We loved that book. His chess set was nearby; his favourite model aircraft of the moment carefully set up on a top shelf. A boomerang on the wall hinted at his Australian background. Tinkerbell shared Michael’s bed, later joined by her kitten Tabitha. From this vantage point, the terrible furred twosome took delight in lunging at Ah Chang’s braid as it swung from side to side while she firmly tucked in the sheets. None of us had dared try to make our own bed since an earlier amah, who didn’t stay long, had summoned the chauffeur, who agreed with her 100 per cent: for us to make our own beds would be a dire insult to her housekeeping skills.
Then it came time for Michael to enrol at the newly opened Beacon Hill School, an international primary one. Being friendly and confident, he immediately began making friends. Once again he was not exactly top of his class, but he got by. His teachers enjoyed having him there. But that didn’t stop him from getting up to mischief.
One of the other boys at Beacon Hill Primary was Tim Stewart, an American. One lunch time Tim walked out of a stall in the upstairs boys’ restroom to wash his hands and found Michael staring intently out the window. The two of them were about nine years old.
‘What’s so interesting out there?’
‘See those girls playing jump rope?’ asked Michael.
‘Yes …’
‘Do you think if we soak rolls of toilet paper and throw them down at them, we could get them wet?’
They looked at each other with intent. The best way to solve a physics problem like this was to give it a go, really. You would never know if you didn’t. So they took all the extra supplies of toilet paper and began soaking them in the sink. Michael threw the first. It landed short. The girls didn’t even notice. Tim was up next and fared better, coming closer to target. Michael realised he needed to aim a little more to the left. His next shot was much better as it landed—sploosh!—right next to the rope, spraying the girls. The boys congratulated and highfived one another. They grabbed their next sog-balls with joy. They weren’t bad marksmen, they found, and could actually connect with individual girls who at this point were hopping and running in different directions.
Just as Michael ducked into a stall to retrieve more ammunition, a teacher marched in, catching Tim with a dripping toilet roll in his hand. In one swift movement he had Tim by the back of his collar and was dragging him towards the door when he noticed Michael.
‘Are you involved in this villainous behaviour too?’ he asked. Caught off guard, Michael started to give an explanation but the look on his friend’s face said, ‘Just say no.’
Tim never ‘ratted’ on Michael and their childhood bond was cemented that day in a close friendship, the depth of which few people understood at the time.
At first Mother stayed home, concentrating on being the dutiful wife and hands-on parent until once again, with the family in need of extra funds, she returned to make-up artistry. Independent movie producers would call when they came to town to shoot as Patricia Hutchence had by now built a reputation for being talented, professional and reliable. The boys regularly visited her on set. They were well-versed in set protocol. They stayed in one place unless asked to move and understood all the commands called out by the assistant director.
‘Final touches’—make-up artist, hairstylist and wardrobe must do their final check. ‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen, this is a take, quiet on the set.’
And depending on the size of the set, or if it was exterior, several assistants would repeat, ‘Quiet.’
‘Roll sound, roll camera,’ the assistant director would say, and get the reply: ‘speed’, then ‘marker’ as what used to be a clapperboard was clamped down in front of the camera or the actor’s face. ‘Scene 23, take three.’
And finally the director would get to call out, ‘Action!’
Bless their hearts, Michael and Rhett would be stationary, barely breathing; what a feat for two little boys who normally couldn’t stand still if you promised them the first ride on Apollo 11. Of course they were always forewarned: ‘One sound or trip over a cable and you are banned from the set.’
Mother’s large make-up case intrigued them, particularly the special-effects products. Michael taught himself how to extract the ‘blood’ to use on his GI Joes and tiny soldiers when he was very young. He and Rhett would send their friends home with scorched bullet holes and gore-dripping gashes for maximum parental effect. But for our mother, their surreptitious raids on her kit were no joke. Authentic-looking ‘blood’ was not easy to come by in Hong Kong and more than once we had to scrounge around and find some of the local stuff they used at the big local film production house, Shaw Brothers, which was not nearly as convincing. We eventually figured out how to make it with gelatine.
When I returned to Hong Kong from my time living independently in Sydney, I found that Mother and Kell had separated—although it was clear that Michael and Rhett did not grasp this. While Kell was hard at work between an office in Kowloon and a factory in the New Territories, our mother would be at the house waiting for the boys to arrive home from school. When Kell was at home, we ate dinner together as a family. They even attended business functions together. She went to school events and planned meals, took Michael and Rhett to their swim meets and shopped for their clothing. She always put the boys to bed and stayed over occasionally but in fact she was sharing an apartment on the island with a friend from the Gold Coast who was appearing as a showgirl in one of the popular nightclubs in town. It was a very central place and I moved in with them. It wasn’t that she wanted to move out of the family home; it was that when they decided to separate, Kell, like a lot of men, decided he was not going to be the one to move out.
When he was eleven, in grade six, Michael made his first recording. It came about because one night at a party, Mother found herself chatting with a director of the global ad agency network Ling-McCann-Erickson. In passing she mentioned her two sons.
This grabbed the advertising man’s attention. ‘Can either of them sing?’ he asked.
She mused for a long moment. ‘Well, Michael has recently begun guitar lessons. He isn’t tone deaf.’
Obviously desperate to fix a client’s crisis at this point, the director asked her to bring Michael to a recording studio directly the following day.
Michael was excited though a bit apprehensive. There had been no preparation and he wasn’t sure what they were going to ask him to sing.
Our mother was nervous for him too. He was given a list of Christmas carols including ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Silent Night’, directed to an isolation booth and given headphones. It was a bit touch-and-go at first. They played the backing tracks but he forgot the words. He needed prompting from the control booth, but in no time at all, it seemed to Mother, Michael was singing out loud and clear. It was obvious that he enjoyed it too, and not just because he was handed a cheque for HK$300 (US$50). He was much more excited about actually getting his hands on a copy of his first record when it came out. As Christmas approached, we were sent to an address where we were told his recording was on sale. We were baffled to find it was the toy department. And astonished to purchase our copy, because Michael’s first record turned out to be a little orange disc you slotted into the gut of a plastic Santa. Still, we were amazed and delighted to hear those carols jingling away with Michael’s clear voice, before it broke, piping out in the foreground.
Soon it was time for him to uniform up to attend King George V School in Ho Man Tin. (Michael’s third school in Hong Kong is now known simply as ‘K-G-Five’.) He looked so handsome in his long navy-blue trousers, white short-sleeved shirt with the school badge on the pocket, navy-blue V-neck pullover and polished black shoes.
Although Hong Kong drew a whirlpool of immigrants from around the globe, KGV was predominantly British. Just to be understood, Michael had to learn to anglicise his vowels and sharpen up his consonants. He also discovered he had a knack for mimicking the foreign brogues and language variants spoken there and quietly worked up some spot-on imitations of the principal and various teachers. He had us all in fits.
I’d like to tell you a bit more about the history of that school, actually, because it really illustrates the turbulent background of Hong Kong, which in turn helped make Michael Hutchence.
KGV is the oldest English-speaking school in Hong Kong. When it first opened in 1894 as Kowloon College, it only let in the children of British subjects. Two years later it was laid waste by a typhoon. Upon reopening, it was renamed Kowloon British School and it thrived until 1937, when China was invaded by Japan.
The majority of European women and children then in Shanghai were evacuated to Hong Kong, where Michael’s old school was designated a refugee camp to cope with their influx.
A few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor in early December 1941, Japanese forces began a brutal ambush of the tiny British Crown Colony. For the seventeen days before the Fall of Hong Kong was complete, the heavily outnumbered British and allied local forces commandeered the school to use as an impromptu hospital for the many casualties. After that, the Japanese used it as a hospital for their prisoners-of-war. From 1946, it reopened as a school, and a year later welcomed students of all nationalities, including, in the autumn of 1971, Michael.
However, his stay was to be short-lived. By the following year, Kell had plans to be on the move again. The school provided a letter, dated 22 September 1972, with a report on Michael’s progress.
‘Michael Hutchence was admitted to KGV in September 1971,’ it stated, ‘and completed Form One. His attainment during the year was slightly below average for his form.’ On the plus side, ‘Michael has taken part in a number of extra-curricular activities including Swimming and Athletics for his House, and is a keen member of the Model Club and Sailing Club. Out of school he is a Scout and member of a Christian Youth Fellowship, with Judo and fencing and guitar playing as hobbies. He has a pleasant, affable personality and should adapt easily to his new school. I have pleasure in recommending him for a place in high school in Australia.’
This is the letter Michael would take with him on his first day at Killarney Heights High School, a day of jagged downs—and one big up.