THE FRAGRANT HARBOUR
THE DRIVE TO OUR LODGINGS, THE SOMEWHAT OSTENTATIOUSLY named Grand Hotel, took but minutes. My room was on the third floor next to my parents’. It had a narrow balcony on to which I stepped the moment the door was opened, to look down upon a street lined with wrist watch, jewellery, camera, curio and tailors’ shops. Directly below me was a rickshaw stand, the coolies who pulled them squatting or lying between the shafts of their scarlet-painted vehicles. Those not asleep smoked short pipes, the sweetly pungent, cloying fumes rising up to tease my nostrils.
Before I could begin to unpack my suitcase, my mother entered. She ran a damp flannel over my face and a wet comb through my hair, then hustled me down to the hotel lobby and out into the dark blue saloon once again.
‘BB,’ my mother whispered as I got into the car. It was her code for Best Behaviour.
‘Where are we going?’ I murmured.
‘Lunch,’ my father replied sternly. ‘And mind your Ps and Qs.’
The saloon drove through a gateway guarded by two army sentries and pulled up in front of a large, long Nissen hut with
very un-military gingham curtains hanging in the windows. Along the walls were prim flowerbeds of low, pendulous scarlet and orange blossomed bushes being watered by a barefoot Chinese man in a conical rattan hat with two watering cans suspended from a bamboo pole balanced over his left shoulder. His hair was not tied in a cue either.
Inside the building was a large dining room with a bar at one end. The tables and chairs were made of rattan, the cushions, tablecloths and napkins matching the curtains. We were joined by the officer who had met us on the Corfu. He handed his peaked cap to a Chinese waiter and we sat at a table. Another waiter dressed in loose black trousers, a white jacket fastened with cloth buttons and black felt slippers took our order for drinks. I requested the usual east-of-Gibraltar lemonade, but this was countermanded by the officer who ordered me a brown-coloured drink in a green fluted bottle with a waxed paper straw in it. The glass was running with condensation.
‘What is it, sir?’ I enquired, heedful of the Ps and Qs – whatever they were – and my father’s previous instruction that I was henceforth to address all men as sir unless I knew them very well indeed. Or else … That veiled threat implied a succession of brief consecutive meetings between the sole of his slipper or the back of my mother’s silver hairbrush and my nether regions.
‘It’s called Coca Cola. If you don’t like it,’ the officer replied, ‘you don’t have to drink it and I’ll get you that lemonade.’
He was not to know it but that first day in Hong Kong, he started me on a lifelong addiction as effectively as if he had been peddling dope.
The same thing happened when we came to order our meal. To be on the safe side, I asked for an egg and cress salad. What appeared before me was a salad with, arranged around it, some bizarre, pink, curled objects with long feelers, a battery of legs and
black shoe-button eyes. Each of these weird creatures was about four inches long.
‘Prawns,’ the officer said, leaning across the table to me in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Have you ever eaten crab?’
I nodded, a little overwhelmed at his paying me so much attention, not to mention his forthcoming and amicable manner: to him I was not a child so much as an adult-in-training. My father certainly never treated me in such a fashion.
‘These are first cousins to the crab,’ the officer went on. ‘Much nicer and without the stringy bits and chips of shell.’ He picked one up and deftly stripped off its carapace with his thumbnail, dipping it in a ramekin of mayonnaise and holding it out to me. I bit it in half and another addiction was given its first rush. He then showed me how to shell one, rinsed his fingers in a bowl of warm water with a segment of lime floating in it and turned his attention back towards my parents.
At the end of the meal, which was punctuated by steam locomotives periodically hauling trains along a railway track not thirty feet from the Nissen hut, the officer shook my hand.
‘A word of advice, my lad,’ he said. ‘So long as you are in Hong Kong, whenever someone offers you something to eat, accept it. That’s being polite. If you don’t find it to your fancy, don’t have any more. But,’ he looked me straight in the eye, ‘always try it. No matter what. Besides,’ he went on, ‘Hong Kong is the best place in the world to eat. Promise?’
My mother listened to this counsel with an ill-suppressed look of maternal anxiety but she did not protest: assuming the officer to be superior to my father, she was perhaps afraid to speak out for fear of disregarding naval protocol. I never knew the officer’s name, nor ever saw him again, but I was never to break my promise.
As dusk fell, the street below my balcony at the Grand Hotel
underwent a remarkable transformation. Drab hoardings and shop signs erupted in numerous shades of neon colour. Peering over the balcony was like looking down on a fairground: even the lights of the circus or the seaside funfair in Southsea could not compare. There, the lighting had been provided by ordinary light bulbs. These were fashioned out of thin neon tubes shaped into Chinese characters, English letters, watches, diamonds, suit jackets, cameras and even animals. Just down the road was a restaurant bearing a red and yellow dragon ten feet high. The illuminated words were strange, too: Rolex, Chan, Leica, Fung, Choi, Tuk …
That evening, my parents were invited to a welcoming cocktail party and I was left in the care of the hotel child-minding service, which consisted of a middle-aged Chinese woman with her black oiled hair severely scraped into a tight bun. I was introduced to her by my mother.
‘This is Ah Choo,’ she said.
I collapsed into paroxysms of laughter which were promptly silenced by a stern maternal grimace.
‘Ah Choo is the hotel baby amah,’ my mother went on.
‘What’s an amah?’ I enquired to defuse the situation, ignoring the deprecatory implication that I was a baby.
‘A female servant,’ my mother replied, ‘and you’ll do exactly as she tells you. Exactly!’ She turned to the amah standing in the door. ‘Ah Choo, this is my son, Martin.’
‘Huwwo, Mahtung,’ the amah replied, then, looking at my mother, said, ‘You can go, missee, I look-see Mahtung. He good boy for me.’
‘Behave yourself,’ my father said pointedly as my parents bade me goodnight. ‘If I hear from Ah Choo that you’ve been monkeying about …’ He left the rest unsaid. I caught a brief vision of a leather slipper.
The first thing Ah Choo attempted to do after my parents had departed was undress me. I had not been undressed before by anyone in my life save my mother and grandmothers and I wasn’t going to let this diminutive, alien stranger called Sneeze be the first.
As soon as she unfastened one button and turned to the next, I did the first up again. Finally, unable to undo more than three shirt buttons at a time, she gave up, informing me, ‘You bafu w’eddy.’ Going out of the room, she left me to disrobe and wash myself.
I gave her a few minutes, wet the bar of foul-scented hotel soap, pulled the bath plug and glanced outside the bathroom. I had expected to find her in my bedroom. She was not there. The door to the corridor was open. Leaving the room, I headed nimbly along it and down the stairs, into the lobby and out on to the street. I knew this excursion came under the ‘monkeying about’ heading yet I could not resist it. The street called to me as a gold nugget must beckon to a prospector. Until then, my life had been bounded by my parents’ small suburban garden, a nearby playing field, an ancient tractor and, more recently, a ship’s rail. Now, it was colourfully lit, boundless, unknown, exciting and throbbing with adventurous potential.
No-one paid me any attention. The hotel doorman completely ignored me. Reasoning that I would not get lost if, at every corner, I turned left and would therefore end up where I started, I turned left.
Buzzing with the frisson of an explorer stepping into unmapped territory, I made off down the street. The first shop I stopped at was a jeweller’s. In the brightly illuminated window, gold bracelets, necklaces and chains glistened enticingly. Strings of pearls glowed with a matt marbled lustre. A black velvet-lined tray of diamonds sparkled like eyes in a jungle night. Inside the
shop stood a sailor, his arm round the waist of a young Chinese woman wearing a very tight dress that shimmered under the shop lights. The sides of the garment were slit from the bottom hem to the top of her thigh. When she moved, almost her entire leg was visible. I had never seen anything like it – the dress or the female limb.
The sailor’s uniform was very different from a British naval rating’s. It was all white with thin blue edging and insignia, topped off with a pill-box-shaped hat that made me think of Popeye. His sleeves were rolled up tightly to his armpits showing the tattoo of an anchor, a palm tree and the words San Diego. As my grandfather had several faded tattoos, these did not surprise me. What did take me aback was that, as I watched him, he slid his hand in one of the slits in the dress and squeezed the young woman’s buttocks. She made no sign of complaint and I wondered if this was how one greeted all Chinese women.
I was still contemplating the social manners of the Orient when the shop door opened and the pair came out, the young woman admiring a gold bangle on her wrist.
‘Hey, kid!’ the sailor addressed me. ‘How yah doin’?’
Not quite understanding him, I answered defensively, ‘I’m not doing anything, sir.’
‘Why you out late time?’ the young woman asked. She stroked my hair. Her fingernails were long and painted vermilion. So were her toenails, visible through the ends of her high-heeled sandals.
‘Where d’yah live, kid?’ asked the sailor. I pointed down the street. ’Well, y’ come along now, y’ hear? Ain’t right for yah to be out so late.’
They took a hand each and walked me back to the Grand Hotel, passing me into the custody of the desk clerk who was given an earful of invective by the young woman. A brief but
heated argument ensued at the end of which the hotel doorman arrived. An uncharacteristically burly Chinese, the sailor took a swing at him. It did not meet its intended target. More invective followed before the sailor, holding the young woman’s hand, grinned at me and said, ‘Stay lucky, kid!’ and with that they were gone.
Back in my room, Ah Choo had run another bath. I closed the door, undressed, washed and put on my pyjamas. I had just pulled up the bottoms and was tying a bow in the cord when Ah Choo came in without so much as a brief knock, bending down to gather up my clothing. I seized the moment to test my rudimentary understanding of local etiquette and squeezed one of her buttocks. It was soft and pliable like a semi-deflated balloon.
She stood bolt upright as if a lightning shaft had run along her spine.
Turning sharply to face me, she exclaimed, ‘You v’wy lautee boy, Mahtung!’ Yet, behind her castigation and indignation there lingered a smile.
She put me to bed, switched on a pedestal fan, lowered the slatted blinds and left. I slid out of bed and went on to the balcony. The rickshaw coolies were sharing a saucepan of rice on top of which was a complete boiled fish – head, fins and all. I watched as they dissected it with their chopsticks, spitting the bones on to the street. Opposite my balcony was a tenement building which housed a workshop over a tailor’s establishment. Under the blaze of strip lights, a dozen men deftly cut and sewed suits. Next door, four Chinese men shuffled what looked to me to be cream-coloured dominoes. They rattled loudly on the metal table top as they were mixed up, sounding with a report as they were slammed down. From a window higher than mine, a small boy was peering out through metal bars. I waved to him but he did not respond: instead, he disappeared and I heard him calling out. A
shirt on a hanger hung from the bars of another window. In yet another was a dark blue glazed pot holding a single, red lily. The illuminated windows reminded me of an advent calendar except that this was secular and alive.
I climbed into bed. My cotton pyjamas were sticking to me with the heat so I removed them and fell asleep to the staccato rattle of the game tiles, the passing traffic, the occasional raised voice or laugh from the rickshaw coolies and the drone of the fan.
The next morning, I woke with a nagging headache. So did my parents.
Sitting at breakfast in the hotel dining room, my mother remarked, ‘I only had two G ’n’ Ts last night. I hope we’re not all coming down with something.’
‘You didn’t sleep well, Joyce,’ my father observed. ‘Tossing and turning …’
‘Well,’ she answered, ‘what with the whine of the fan, the clatter of that infernal mahjong game opposite and the stench of the rickshaw coolies’ pipes, is it any wonder? I really don’t think, Ken,’ she went on, ‘we can go on staying here.’
I was not a little dismayed at this turn of events. I wanted to explore more of the streets. Furthermore, Ah Choo had not ratted on me. I wondered why until it dawned on me that to do so would have been to bring her job into jeopardy.
‘I like it here,’ I chipped in. Then, hoping to justify my statement, added, ‘I like the smell of the coolies’ pipes.’
For a long moment, my parents looked at each other.
‘That does it!’ my father agreed. ‘We move as soon as we can. Another week here and we’ll all be ruddy opium addicts.’