DENS, DUCKS AND DIVES
133 BOUNDARY STREET HAD BEEN BUILT IN THE 1920S AS A BIJOU residence on the edge of the countryside. By the time we moved in, it had gone down in the world. The exterior stonework was blotched with dead lichen and algae, the kitchen was dark and dank, the servants’ quarters smelt of mould and the flat roof leaked into the bathroom. The city had reached out to it and the countryside was no more, although the barren foothills of the Kowloon hills did come down to within a hundred yards of the garden of the ground-floor flat.
Moving to a flat necessitated my mother employing more servants. As it was usual to employ a husband and wife wherever possible, the wash amah who had replaced Ah Fong was let go. She was genuinely sad at leaving us but my mother secured her a good job with an Army major and his wife who preferred to do her own cooking so only required an amah. That they had a blond-haired daughter no doubt helped to sweeten the bitterness of parting.
After an in-depth culinary interview, my mother took on Wong and his wife, Ah Shun. With them came their four-year-old son,
Chan-tuk, to whom my mother took an instant liking and nicknamed Tuppence.
So far as we knew, Wong – whose references gave his name as Hwong Cheng-kwee – was a Shanghainese who, like so many others, was a refugee from Communism. He and Ah Shun had several other children whom they lodged in the New Territories or had had to leave with relatives in China. A tall, round-faced man, Wong had apparently worked in a top-class hotel in Shanghai as a pastry chef. At least, that was what one of his well-thumbed references stated. My mother gave him a month’s probation. This ended after a day when he made his first sponge cake. It did not so much sit on the plate as float over it. We had never tasted anything like it. He had a permanent job from my mother’s first mouthful. Ah Shun became the wash and sew-sew amah and the two of them shared the chores of keeping house.
To say that Wong was a one-in-a-thousand cook-houseboy was not to be guilty of hyperbole. He was utterly superb, with the attentiveness of a high-class butler, the culinary skills if not of Escoffier then certainly of his sous chef, the attention to detail of a water-colourist and the mien of a true gentleman’s gentleman. He and Ah Shun wore the customary sam fu white jacket and black, loose-fitting trousers with felt slippers, in which they glided across parquet floors they had so highly polished you could see the reflection of the windows in them. They also served at table, which at first I found most peculiar. I had been served in restaurants, on the Corfu and the like, but in our own home … It was like being a member of the aristocracy.
There were some teething problems. Ah Shun starched my father’s white shorts which he wore to the office. The hems chafed his legs raw. Thereafter, she artfully starched only the crease. When the monthly provisions bill came, my mother found Wong had used six dozen eggs, which accounted for the levitatory
sponges. My mother asked him to cut down: then she saw he had used nine bottles of Heinz Salad Cream. As Wong did all the basic shopping, only discussing the matter of provisions or menus with my mother if she were holding a drinks or dinner party, this wanton purchase of salad cream seemed not only extravagant but suspicious. Wong was called into my mother’s presence. It was not long before I was summoned too.
‘What is this?’ my mother muttered, glowering at me as she held out the invoice.
I was inclined to tell her it was the bill, but kept my peace.
‘This!’ she repeated, indicating an item on the bill. ‘And this. And this. Wong tells me this is your doing.’
I had no idea why she was cross but I admitted I ate salad cream.
‘Eat it!’ my mother replied. ‘Wong tells me you put it on your bloody breakfast!’
Every morning, I ate breakfast alone, after my father had departed for work in HMS Tamar and whilst my mother was still preening herself for a hard day at the canasta table. Wong always provided a fried egg on crisp fried bread, a fried tomato and stiff rashers of brittle, grilled bacon. I ate the bacon first with my fingers then waded into the remainder which I smothered with salad cream. How I first discovered this curious amalgam of tastes I do not know, but I loved it. Indeed, I could go through a bottle in three days, especially if I asked Wong for salad cream instead of Marmite and lettuce sandwiches to take to school. My father being at the office, I was not punished for my abnormal gourmandizing but that avenue of pleasure was promptly closed.
Wong was paid $300 (approximately £19) a month plus an allowance of $75 for food. He lived with Ah Shun and Tuppence in the servants’ quarters beyond the kitchen: a closed-in balcony and laundry sink, two small bedrooms equipped with cast-iron
bunks and a shower room with a squat-down toilet which my father referred to (in what he claimed to be submariners’ slang) as the shit-shave-shower-shampoo-and-shoeshine. Wong and his family used our kitchen to prepare their food but they ate it squatting on the balcony until my mother found out. Thereafter, they ate at the kitchen table.
My mother found having servants somewhat disquieting and, if anything, ambiguous. She was a humanist at heart who believed no man should lord it over another. Yet here she was with two people who were there at her beck and call. Indeed, there were to be many times when my parents returned from a party in the early hours to find Wong staggering into the lounge, bleary-eyed and dopey with sleep, to see if they wanted a nightcap or a sandwich. She suffixed every request with please and thank you and made sure I did, too. It was impressed upon me that I should never make unreasonable demands of Wong or Ah Shun and I was never to say Fide! Fide! or Chop! Chop! (Quick! Quick!) at him. (I did once, out of pique, and he clipped my ear, whereby a mutual respect was born.)
Although not much more than a mile from the Fourseas, the environs of the flat were very different. Close by was La Salle College, a major Roman Catholic school primarily for Chinese. To the north-west was the one-time garden suburb of Kowloon Tong, to the north were the barren lower slopes of the nine Kowloon hills. Indeed, the name Kowloon derived from the Cantonese gau lung, meaning nine dragons. To the south was a residential area and the wooded grounds of the Kowloon hospital. Only the foothills offered the slightest opportunity for exploration and that was soon exhausted, my only find being that of a white plaster-of-paris death mask in a cave and a large chunk of mauve transparent volcanic rock. My mother and I hoped it was beryllium, a piece of which had been found in Hong Kong the
month before, making its finder rich. She took it to the geology department of the University. It wasn’t beryllium but silicate – glass.
Not a mile to the east, however, was the most romantic and allegedly dangerous place in the colony. It was called Kowloon Walled City.
The name was a misnomer. It was not and never had been a city. It covered not much more than 25,000 square yards and, although it had been surrounded by a crenulated wall, the defences had been demolished by British prisoners-of-war under Japanese command and used as hardcore for an airport runway extension and sea wall.
According to a history of Hong Kong owned by my mother, it had originally been established in the eighteenth century as a far-flung outpost of the Chinese empire; its subsequent history was convoluted and its sovereignty confused. After the British gained control of Hong Kong and, later, Kowloon at the end of the Opium and Arrow Wars in the early 1840s, the Chinese imperial government insisted on maintaining a local presence so the British turned a blind eye towards Kowloon Walled City. Behind its walls, a nominal Chinese garrison was maintained which primarily kept a watch on the foreign invaders and enforced Chinese law in the area not under colonial control. Pirates being a problem in the region, the mandarin stationed in the settlement was kept busy suppressing and executing them. When the New Territories were ceded to the British, Kowloon Walled City was to find itself twenty-five miles from the border with China, completely surrounded by British territory. The cessation treaty was also ambiguous. Kowloon Walled City was now, in effect, cut off and ruled and possessed by neither – or both – countries.
It remained a backwater for fifty years, visited at the turn of the
twentieth century by Europeans in Hong Kong for vicarious excitement, a fragment of the ‘real’ China on their doorsteps. Ruled by a mandarin from his yamen in the centre, it was quaint and exotic. The salacious aspect of the place lay in the fact that British law did not necessarily apply there, depending upon the interpretation of the treaty. Few Hong Kong policemen patrolled it and no government official collected taxes. The power supply was illegally tapped from the main grid and the water supply from the main. Kowloon Walled City was in effect a minute city state all on its own, arguably the smallest ever to have existed.
When China fell to the Communists in 1949, many criminal refugees fled to Hong Kong, some of them gravitating to the walled city area where they quickly established fresh enterprises. When the buildings were full, they built more, many little better than substantial squatter shacks. A disastrous fire in 1951 destroyed half the city but gave the new arrivals the opportunity to clear and build: it was said they set the fire in the first place. Thereafter, Kowloon Walled City remained an enclave governed by no-one. It was to Hong Kong what the Casbah was to Algiers, with one exception: it was more or less closed to outsiders. Trippers avoided it. It was said that any European who entered it was never seen again unless floating out of it down the nullah that served as a sewer. If ever the police entered the area, they went in armed patrols of three.
We had not been in Boundary Street a day when my mother took me aside.
‘Martin,’ she started, signifying her seriousness, ‘I know you like to roam and explore, and round here that’s all right. But,’ she continued, unfolding a map of Kowloon, ‘you do not go even near here.’
She pointed to the map. Kowloon Walled City was left as a blank uneven-sided square.
‘What is it?’ I enquired.
‘Ask no questions and be told no lies,’ my mother replied evasively, ‘and don’t go to find out.’
To utter such a dictum to a street-wise eight-year-old was tantamount to buying him an entrance ticket.
The following afternoon, homework hurriedly completed, I had a quick glance at the map and headed east down Boundary Street. In ten minutes, I was on the outskirts of Kowloon Walled City.
Nothing indicated to me why this place should be forbidden. A number of new six-storey buildings were being erected, with several already occupied or nearing completion; and a lot of shanties and older two-storey buildings were leaning precariously. It looked like a squatter area but with permanent structures in the middle in ill repair. A hutong lay before me, winding into the buildings and shacks. There being, I reasoned, no way my mother was ever going to find out, I set off down the alleyway, easing my way past a man pushing a bicycle, the pannier laden with cardboard boxes. He paid me not the slightest attention.
Through the open doors I spied scenes of industrial domesticity. To one side would be a kang or metal-framed bed, piled with neatly folded bedding; to the other several people seated at a table sewing, assembling torches, placing coloured pencils in boxes or painting lacquer boxes. Behind other doors were businesses, pure and simple. In one a baker was placing trays of buns in a wood-fired oven; in another, two men were involved in making noodles, swinging sheets of thin dough in the air around a wooden rolling-pin, the interior of their shack ghost-white under a layer of flour dust.
Wherever I went, the air was redolent with the smells of wood smoke, joss-sticks, boiling rice and human excrement. The effluent from this community, I soon discovered, flowed down
open gullies at the side of the hutongs to disappear through holes in the ground lined by stone slabs.
Arriving at one of the older stone buildings, I was about to peer in through an open door when a Chinese man rushed out and slammed it shut. Stripped to the waist, he bore a coloured tattoo of a dragon on his back. He glowered at me.
‘W’at you wan’?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said, fighting to stop myself sounding guilty, although of what I did not know. Then, hoping it might soften him a bit, I added, ‘Ngo giu jo Mah Tin.’ I held my hand out. ‘Nei giu mut ye meng?’
He was much taken aback by my introducing myself – especially in Cantonese – and it was at least thirty pensive seconds before he took my hand and firmly shook it. During that time, he eyed me up and down, much as a butcher might a bull being led to slaughter.
‘Mah Tin,’ he said at last. ‘Ngo giu jo Ho. Why you come?’
‘Just looking,’ I answered, shrugging and adding in pidgin English, ‘Come look-see.’
‘You no look-see,’ he answered sternly. ‘No good look-see for gweilo boy.’
I smiled, nodded my understanding, said, ‘Choi kin,’ (goodbye) and turned to go.
‘You look-see,’ he declared, changing his mind. He opened the door, indicating I follow him.
What until now had seemed a harmless saunter through just another warren of passageways immediately took on a sinister aspect. No-one knew I was here. What, I considered, if this old stone building with its substantial door was the headquarters of the evil Fu Manchu? I had recently read Sax Rohmer. If I stepped over the high lintel, I could vanish. For ever. On the other hand, not to accept Ho’s invitation would result in a massive loss of face.
I would never be able to come here again: and I had seen nothing yet. And so, I threw caution to the wind and followed him into the building.
The entire ground floor consisted of one vast room, heavy beams holding up the ceiling and second floor. It was furnished with upright rosewood chairs, the wood even darker with age, low tables and several ornately framed mirrors, the silvering missing in places. Halfway down the room stood a wooden screen, the top half pierced by intricate fretwork, the rest a painting depicting sheer-sided hills and lakes. I sensed I was being observed through it but, as I walked by the end, there was no-one there. The wooden floor was devoid of any covering. There was an air of much-faded gentility about the place.
To the rear was a staircase beneath which a door opened and an old hunched woman entered, walking with the aid of a stick. She took one look at me and grinned toothlessly, hobbled to my side and, inevitably, stroked my hair. This put me at ease. First, Fu Manchu was hardly likely to employ crones (unless, god forbid, this was his mother) and second, my golden hair was a passport to my security. No-one would risk harming such a harbinger of good fortune.
‘You come.’ Ho beckoned me up the stairs.
I followed him into a room along three sides of which were placed wooden kangs. Upon one of these lay a supine man asleep upon a woven bamboo mat, his head on a hard Chinese headrest, his legs drawn up, his hands twitching like a dog’s paws in a dream of chasing rabbits.
‘Nga pin,’ Ho announced and beckoned me further towards the fourth wall, the whole length of which was shuttered. I refrained from asking him what nga pin was for fear of seeming ignorant. Again, the last thing I wanted to do was lose face with him. He unlatched one of the shutters and we stepped out
on to the balcony, which sloped forwards alarmingly towards a crumbling balustrade.
From here, I was afforded a panoramic view of the walled city. The shacks were so tightly packed, it was well nigh impossible to see where the hutongs ran between them. Yet the real surprise was the few larger buildings tucked between them. One stood in a wide rectangular courtyard with a number of outbuildings close by; from another rose a faint cloud of bluish smoke which meant it had to be a temple. Three or four were in a row suggesting that, in olden days, they had stood upon a street. In the distance was Kowloon Bay, a cargo ship riding at a quarantine buoy. Over to my left was the bulk of Fei Ngo Shan, the most easterly of the Kowloon hills, the slopes sharp and clear in the late sun. To the south-west, indistinct in the haze, was Hong Kong Island.
Ho took me back inside. We passed the sleeping man, who was beginning to wake, and descended the stairs which creaked loudly. Once outside, Ho bade me farewell and went back into the house, closing the door. I set off along the way I had come, considering to myself that I had taken a terrible risk. Other than a shop, I had never accepted an invitation into a building. Reaching the edge of the squatter shacks, and stepping out on to a road with traffic going by, I resolved not to be so foolhardy again. Yet, where Kowloon Walled City was concerned, I knew I had to return to investigate the temple and the building in the courtyard.
When I returned to our apartment, I went into the kitchen where Wong was preparing supper and asked him what nga pin meant. He stopped stirring a pan for a moment, looked quizzically at me and replied, ‘Opium.’
On his return to Hong Kong, my father had taken delivery of a Ford Consul saloon which he promptly had resprayed two-tone grey with white walled tyres: my mother, with her penchant for Chinese names, called it Ch’ing Yan, which translated as Lover. Ch’ing Yan opened up a wide horizon for all three of us. It also gave my father a pastime. Never a man for a hobby, the car became the centre of his leisure activities. Having never owned a car before, he mollycoddled it as much as he might have done a mistress. The interior was kept pristine: no food or drink might be consumed therein. He checked the oil and tyres at least weekly and spent hours polishing the bodywork, dusting the interior and hoovering the carpets and seats. No-one was allowed to help in this endeavour. He rejected all the approaches of the itinerant car washers-and-waxers who did the rounds of residential areas every Saturday afternoon. When he saw Wong knocking dead leaves off the bonnet with a feather duster, he hurtled downstairs to stop him: the ends of the feathers, he explained, might be scratching the paint.
The first Sunday after the delivery of the car, my father announced we were going for a drive around the New Territories. And so, after a hearty breakfast which Wong insisted on cooking although it was his day off, we departed.
My father had decided to take a circular route without deviation, digression or diversion. My mother had been hoping we might have a look at a few places on the way, but my father was adamant and my mother did not drive. I really did not care. For the first time, I was going to find out what lay the other side of the Kowloon hills.
We crossed them by way of a pass on the Tai Po road next to a deep blue reservoir and descended to Sha Tin, a small fishing village on the shores of a large inlet. The tide was out, leaving mudflats upon which sampans lay settled on their hulls. Across on
the other shore, on the northern slopes of the Kowloon hills, was a rock outcrop that, if the imagination was stretched, looked in silhouette like a woman with a baby in a carrier on her back.
‘Amah Rock,’ my mother declared, reading from a notebook she was compiling in the hope that, one day, she might write a Hong Kong guide and history. She went on to relate a story about a fisherman lost at sea, his loyal wife who waited on the outcrop for his junk to return and the gods who changed her into stone so she could wait for ever. The story I had heard was that the stone was a childless baby amah who had stolen her mistress’s baby and been frozen in stone by punishing gods, but I said nothing.
We drove along the shore until my mother’s eye alighted on a small isolated building ahead between the road and the sea wall, surrounded by paper bark trees. It had an awning and a few car parking spaces, but little else.
‘Pull in, Ken,’ she said as imperiously as she dared. ‘I fancy a coffee.’
‘You’ve only just had breakfast, Joyce,’ he replied peevishly, edging his pride and joy into a parking space. He checked there were no boughs likely to become detached from the tree overhead in the next hour and led us inside.
The Sha Tin Dairy Farm Restaurant (aka The Shatin Roadhouse) was a small American-style diner with considerable pretensions. The menu was designed to be mailed to friends and it referred to itself as the magic kiosk by the side of the magic Tidal Cove, which bore reference to the fact that the Sha Tin inlet had four tides a day. At the top of the menu, in small print, were the words Please let us service your car while you eat. (‘Fat chance!’ my father remarked on reading it.) We sat at a table overlooking the inlet. The mountains were just beginning to shimmer in the day’s heat. On the other side of the inlet, a cluster of ancient houses stood between woods and the water’s edge. A junk sailed sedately
but slowly by, heading for the open sea. My father studied them all with his binoculars.
‘The rice grown in Sha Tin was so good it was reserved for the emperor alone,’ my mother remarked, reading from her notes.
I studied the menu. All the main dishes – even salads – were served with rice or toast. My parents ordered a coffee each and I requested a Chocolate Soldier, a sickly sweet bottle of thick, cold cocoa made with cow and soya milk. All three were automatically accompanied by toast.
As my parents drank their coffee, I read the blurb on the menu which outlined the attractions of the roadhouse: This is the only place you can watch and feel a roaring train while you eat … Occasionally you’ll be thrilled by the shooting vampires smacking out of the Blue … Your junior folks may enjoy fishing, fording, boating, ferrying, crabbing, clamming or simply playing around in the shallow mangroves. This is the place you’ll enjoy most! Please come again and save a trip to Miami or Geneva! I gazed out at the mudflats and tried to envisage my car-proud father’s response to a request to go crabbing in the mangroves (whatever they were: all I could see was an expanse of mud). I saw no vampires.
Leaving Sha Tin, the road more or less followed the coast and the railway, grass-covered hills rising on the left with heavily wooded valleys. The next town was another fishing community called Tai Po. My father, having lost time over the enforced coffee stop, drove straight through it. My mother attempted to take some photos from the moving car but had to give up.
Just beyond the town, the road divided. Left went through the Lam Tsuen valley to the market town of Yuen Long, right took a longer route to the same destination. My father signalled left. My mother wanted the scenic route. We drove three hundred yards towards the Lam Tsuen valley, my father swore a lot, reversed into a farm track, muddied one wheel arch, got out, wiped the
mud off with a rag and a bottle of water provided for just such an emergency and took the other road. We scowlingly bypassed Fanling and Sheung Shui, not stopping save for petrol. Then we entered old China.
The land became a patchwork of rice paddies separated by low dykes, the rice beginning to sprout above the water, bright green and pristine. The villages and farmhouses were ancient and could have changed little in two centuries. Farmers walked slowly along the side of the road wearing wide-brimmed conical hats, their trousers rolled up to the knee, leading docile-looking buffaloes. Man and beast had mud caked on their legs. Hakka women with coolie poles over their shoulders carried heavy loads of fodder or bundles of pak choi. It was my favourite Chinese vegetable, delicious when steamed and served at most dai pai dongs. Dogs ambled along just off the tarmac, moving from the shade of one eucalyptus or paper bark tree to the next.
Every now and then, my mother demanded my father stop for her to take a photo. Inevitably, every time she requested a halt, it was twenty yards before we came to a standstill so my father had to back up. Before long he was seething. When my mother suggested turning into a side road into the countryside, he lost it completely.
‘Joyce!’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘We’ve come to drive round the New Territories. Not into them. I am not driving into the blithering hills. For all I know, we could wind up in Communist China.’
‘That’s not likely,’ I injudiciously piped up. ‘If we take a road on the left we’ll stay in Hong Kong. China’s to the right. Anyway, you can’t drive into China because there’s a border and a river to cross and the river’s only got one bridge for the train and the police and the army—’
‘Shut up!’ my father exploded.
Several hundred yards further on, his patience was again tested by a duck farmer moving his gaggle of about two hundred birds from one pond to another, driving them ahead of him by means of two long, thin and very flexible bamboo poles. The ducks and a few geese waddled down the middle of the road. My father tentatively beeped his horn. The duck farmer turned. My father signalled curtly with his hand for the man to get a move on. At this, he turned and walked towards the car. My father unwisely wound his window down.
‘Mat yeh?’ the farmer said, somewhat belligerently. This translated roughly as: What d’you want? The added sub-text was: Damn your eyes, foreign devil.
My father, who spoke barely a word of Cantonese, looked blank.
‘Mat yeh?’ the farmer repeated, more antagonistically.
My father, still with a vacant look on his face, then suggested, ‘Martin, you’re always playing in the street. What’s he saying?’
‘I don’t know,’ I lied.
At this juncture, the farmer shrugged and turned. The ducks had meantime broken ranks and were all over the road and grass verge. The farmer picked up his herding poles. Taking his time, he rounded them up and continued to make his steady way ahead of us. We edged forward in a grinding first gear accompanied by my father’s grinding teeth.
At the next left junction, we turned up a narrow road towards a steep hill, the road eventually petering out in a grassy bank. We stopped and got out. My mother took photos of the view, my father stood wondering how he was going to do a three-point turn. Whilst he pondered, my mother and I set off up a path.
In a short distance, we came to a semi-circular stone platform with a horseshoe-shaped wall about two feet high running round half its circumference. In the wall was a tiny stone door upon
which some characters had been written in red paint. In front of the door were two rice bowls containing a sludge of dead leaves and rainwater and a stone weighing down a wad of faded Hell’s Banknotes.
‘What is this?’ I asked.
‘It’s a grave,’ my mother answered. ‘Behind that door is the coffin.’
I looked at it with a feeling of suppressed terror. I had visited my maternal grandfather’s grave in a municipal cemetery in Portsmouth but had never really come to terms with his body lying six feet under an oblong of stone chippings. Here, there was a man reclining in death just behind a door.
Higher up the slope we came upon a narrow terrace cut into the hillside. It was overgrown with grass and held a row of very large urns with lids like inverted plates. The view was spectacular, a vista of wetlands over which soared flights of ducks and, beyond, the sea.
My mother busying herself with her camera, I decided to look in one of the urns. It seemed strange that they had been left there, in the middle of nowhere, on a bleak and windswept mountainside. I took hold of one of the lids and lifted it clear. Inside, neatly packed away so that it might all fit in, was a human skeleton, the skull on top. The bones were brown and looked as if they had been lightly varnished. I quickly replaced the lid.
‘It’s called a kam taap,’ my mother said, not taking her eye from the viewfinder. ‘I’ve been told that when a Chinese dies, they bury the body for seven years then they exhume it, clean the bones and put them in an ossuary – that’s one of those urns.’
We walked down to the car. My father had turned it round and was buffing off scuff marks – caused by his reversing into a bush – on the rear bumper with a soft cloth.
‘The view’s wonderful,’ my mother said sweetly as we joined him.
‘You’re a bloody nuisance, Joyce,’ my father snarled.
We drove down to the main road and along it as fast as the surface and law would allow and my father’s temper could contain. It was not until my mother saw a sign off to the right reading Kadoorie Beach that she spoke.
‘Go down there, Ken,’ she commanded in a voice that would brook no opposition.
My father did as he was asked and we drove down a narrow lane overhung by Chinese pine trees, the wispy, delicate variety one saw in classical paintings. The lane culminated in a small car park and a sandy beach gently lapped by the sea. Removing her shoes, my mother tripped off down to the water’s edge. Beyond her, indistinct under the early-afternoon sky, was the island of Lan Tau, its peaks rising into a sub-tropical sky almost devoid of colour in the hot sun. A request that I might be allowed to join her was bluntly rebuffed by my father, so I sat in the car for fifteen minutes with my mouth shut.
When my mother returned to the car, my father said, ‘Make sure there’s no sand on your feet. I don’t want to be hoovering the bloody carpets for weeks.’
‘I do wish you’d shut up, Ken. It’s only a bloody car,’ she answered and, without removing the sand from her soles or putting her shoes back on, she got in the front and slammed the door.
In a mile or so, we came upon another sign by the road. It pointed to The Dragon Inn. My father, unbidden, turned and parked. Inside the inn, a cross between an English country pub, a Chinese tea house and a French café, we were served a plate of hot buttered toast, which my mother and I now considered must be obligatory once one crossed the Kowloon hills. My
mother ordered tea, I asked for a Coke and my father requested a San Miguel beer. Then he had another. At the third, my mother reminded him he was driving. He ordered a fourth to make his point. She commented that the car was brand new, the first he had ever owned, and would it not be a pity if it got dented.
‘Already bloody ruined by that benighted bush,’ my father grumbled, but he did not order a fifth beer.
The bill settled, we went to look at a tortoise the size of a half barrel that was said to have been hatched in the Ming dynasty. A notice stated rather obviously: A Tortoise Several Hundred Years Old; it occurred to me that it would have to be in a country where eggs could be a century old. The poor creature lived in a concrete-walled enclosure about four times its size, with a trough of stale water and a pile of bedraggled greens. At least it had a roof to protect it from the searing heat of the sun.
Disturbed by these conditions, I suggested to my mother that we either set up a tortoise protection society or come back that night and kidnap it. Her reply was that the car boot could not take the weight, with which I had sadly to concur. However, I was permitted to sit on it to have my photo taken.
At about five o’clock, we arrived back at Boundary Street. My mother strode directly into my parents’ bedroom and locked the door. I heard her running herself a bath. My father spent an hour rubbing imaginary scratches off the rear panelling of the Ford Consul. I went to my room and kept a low profile.
Over the coming weeks, I paid repeated clandestine visits to Kowloon Walled City. I did not, however, become acquainted
with many people. Whereas the stall-and shopkeepers of Soares Avenue and Mong Kok were open and welcoming, those of the walled city were polite but reticent.
Whenever I arrived, Ho appeared before I had gone twenty yards, trotting towards me and smiling expansively. It was as if some unseen sentry had been watching out for me, relaying news of my impending arrival. For as long as I was in the enclave, he would accompany me, talking all the time, improving his English and my Cantonese. Sometimes, we took a bowl of soup together in a shack done out as an eating-place, with tables and chairs and an elderly waiter who limped. On many occasions, I offered to pay but Ho invariably pushed my money aside. On the other hand, he never paid either.
Apart from inviting me into the opium den and to drink tea or broth with him, Ho took me nowhere else. I had hoped he would show me the temple but any attempt to steer the conversation or our feet in its direction were futile.
After a while, Ho told me he was going ‘long time Macau-side’ and introduced me to his ho pang yau (his good friend).
This man was in his mid-twenties, not tall but immensely handsome, lacking the prominent cheekbones, Adam’s apple and slightly flared nostrils of the average Cantonese male. He could, I thought, easily have been a film star. Muscular in a trim way, his hands were small but very strong. To my surprise, he spoke good pidgin English.
‘My name is Lau,’ he introduced himself when we first met. ‘I am Ho’s friend.’
‘I am Martin,’ I replied.
‘Mah Tin,’ he repeated. ‘In Cantonese, this mean horse, electric. You are electric horse.’ He grinned at his interpretation and mimicked riding a lively steed. ‘Like at Laichikok fun garden.’ It was a reasonable translation of fairground.
We shook hands and drank tea to cement our new-found friendship.
‘When you come Kowloon Walled City-side,’ he went on, slurping at his bowl of tea, ‘I be here for you. If I not here, you no come. You unner-stand? If you are good boy, I will show you this place.’
I agreed to these terms. After all, to have a personal guide to this maze of shanties and ancient buildings was more than I could have hoped for.
Our tea finished, I said goodbye to Ho and set off with Lau. He walked with a measured, easy pace. Everyone greeted him and stepped aside to let him pass in the narrow alleys. In his turn, he invariably made way for heavily laden coolies and young women. The former breathlessly grunted their thanks whilst the latter giggled.
‘I will show you some thing,’ Lau said as we made our way past the building with the balustrade. ‘From long time before. When China have emperor.’
We reached a place where the hutong widened. Lying beside the wall of a larger than average shanty were two massive cannons.
‘This,’ Lau began, ‘Chinese gun one time on city wall. Fight English like you.’ He grinned. ‘But no more fight. Now live no trouble, make money.’
Carrying on, we arrived at the temple and entered. At first, my eyes adjusting to the gloom, it looked no different from any other – dim lighting, incense smoke, the occasional wavering candle … Yet, as my eyes accepted the twilight, I saw that this one was grander than any I had previously seen. First, it had three larger-than-life-size effigies completely covered in gold except for the carving of their tightly curled, black painted hair: yet even that had a gold finial on top. All three were seated in front of intricately embroidered gold tapestries. The altar table was huge,
made of black wood and finely carved with gold-painted designs of leaves, dragons and curlicues. Upon it were not only the customary offerings but also exquisitely painted porcelain vases and two gold-leaf-coated lanterns. To one side, an old man was carefully applying gold leaf to one of the idols with a damp sponge. Second, the temple was spotlessly clean: usually they were dusty places, the floor scattered with the ashes of Hell’s Banknotes or the fine powder of burnt joss-sticks. Third, there was a sleeping dog chained to the wall on the left which got to its feet and snarled menacingly at me.
‘You like?’ Lau enquired.
‘Like plenty,’ I replied, took a joss-stick and, lighting it, bowed to the effigies with it held between my supplicating hands before sticking it in the sand of the incense bowl.
Lau watched me, bemused.
‘You no …’ he looked for the word in English and failed to find it ‘ … Gai duk toh?’ He made the sign of the Cross on the palm of his hand.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Church of England.’
‘Why you … ?’ He pointed to the altar and made a cursory bow.
‘Respect,’ I said, but Lau just smiled in his incomprehension.
We walked on. Suddenly, Lau stopped and said, ‘You no like ovver gweilo boy.’ For the first time, he touched my hair. ‘Now I show you good place.’
Our destination was the balustraded building I had visited on my first excursion into the Walled City. We entered it, passed through the downstairs room, still devoid of occupants although I could hear the noise of snoring emanating from upstairs, went behind the screen, out through a door into what might once have been a flagstoned courtyard and down some steps to a semi-cellar about thirty feet square. At the bottom of the steps was an old
wooden door secured by a large padlock. Lau produced the key and we entered.
There was a small table in the centre of the room, the walls of which were lined by benches similar to those used for gym lessons in the KJS school hall. Upon the walls hung various pennants and banners in red with serrated black borders and black writing upon them. Opposite the door was an altar bearing a small idol of a male god with a fierce-looking face, one candle alight before it.
‘God Kwan Ti,’ Lau explained. ‘This my god.’
Yet it was something other than the banners and Kwan Ti that caught my eye. Hung between the banners were macabre, sadistically ferocious-looking weapons. One was a chain with a ball set with spikes at one end; another chain culminated in a spear-point blade. Balancing in a wooden rack were a number of metal six-pointed stars of varying diameters. From their shine, the points were clearly well sharpened.
‘What is this place?’ I enquired.
Lau made no attempt to explain but said, ‘Gweilo no come here. You vew’y lucky boy I show you.’
Taking the chain with the point on it, he gave it a quick flick. The blade flashed through the air, faster than the eye could follow, and embedded itself in the rear of the door. It took both Lau’s hands to dislodge it. Once the blade was free and hanging back on the wall, he took down one of the smallest stars. With a brief twist of his wrist, it spun through the air and also lodged itself in the door timbers.
‘More good gun,’ Lau said. ‘No boom boom.’ He ushered me out. ‘You no tell you see here,’ he added as he locked the door. ‘You tell, plenty trouble for me. Plenty more for you.’ He made the sign of a knife slicing across his throat. ‘You, me,’ he said pointing from me to himself.
I nodded and we went back the way we had come. As we
moved through the big room in the building, a boy of about my age descended the stairs carrying a tray upon which there was a small lamp, several minute bowls, a number of metal needles and the most bizarre pipe. My grandfather always smoked a simple-looking Dunhill with a wooden bowl; my father, on occasion, smoked a swan-necked Meerschaum. This was very different. A good fifteen inches long, the stem was made of bamboo, the mouthpiece of milky-coloured jade or soapstone. The bowl was a curious device for it had nowhere that I could see in which to put the tobacco: indeed, it appeared to be a virtually sealed container. All there was in it was a tiny hole in the top.
‘Nga pin?’ I asked tentatively.
Lau stared at me.
‘How you know nga pin?’
‘I know,’ I shrugged, still not knowing exactly what it was.
He took me by the hand and led me up the stairs.
‘No talk,’ he whispered.
As my head rose above the first-floor level, I saw half a dozen men lying on the kangs. All but one were asleep on their sides, their hands tucked between their drawn-up legs or under their necks. One snored, another intermittently moaned softly, the only other sound was their breathing. The air had a strange and familiar perfume to it and it was at least a minute before I recognized it as the scent of the rickshaw coolies’ pipes on my first night in Hong Kong.
The man who was awake had by his head one of the little lamps, the flame contained within a thick glass funnel. The boy moved past us, giving me a quick and puzzled glance. He went to the man and impaled a small bead of something on one of the needles, starting to revolve it in the lamp flame: then, very adroitly, he placed it over the tiny hole in the pipe bowl, passing it to the man who lay on his side and sucked evenly on the pipe.
After doing this three times, the man lay down and closed his eyes. The boy removed the pipe and blew out the lamp.
‘We go,’ Lau murmured.
Once we were outside, I asked, ‘What was that man doing?’
‘He smoke opium,’ Lau answered. ‘Get dream, go good time-side.’
‘Can I smoke nga pin?’ I suggested.
‘No,’ Lau said emphatically. ‘No good for gweilo. Only for Chinese people.’
As I went to leave the walled city, Lau escorted me. Passing a very big shack indeed, I glimpsed a large pig through the wide door. Its feet were tied together. A man in a pair of bloodied shorts stepped up to it, grabbed one ear and yanked it back. The pig squealed, an eerie, unearthly sound. The butcher ran a sharp knife under its neck and slit its throat, stepping smartly backwards. The pig fell on its side, thrashing about and gurgling obscenely. Blood sprayed from its neck.
Lau put his hand on my shoulder in an affable manner and said, ‘You talk you see, maybe you like this.’
He pointed to the pig, its lifeblood soaking in the earth floor of the shack. And I knew he meant it.
The row of old buildings stood to the eastern end of the walled city. One day, as Lau and I were walking through the hutongs, the heavens opened. We ran for cover under one of the balconies. Standing on what must once have been the arcaded raised side of a street, I somehow sensed in a daydream the ghosts of history walking by: a mandarin in his fine brocades, a peacock feather in the jade finial of his hat, his retinue behind him; a Chinese soldier with an axe-bladed pikestaff; a British naval officer in a cocked hat accompanied by a platoon of marine ratings, bayonets drawn.
The rain fell in torrential sheets, curtains of water moving inexorably across the shacks.
‘What you think?’ Lau asked.
‘I think long time before Kowloon Walled City,’ I answered, his question snapping me back to the present. ‘See people walk here.’
‘You see ghost,’ Lau replied matter-of-factly. ‘Plenty ghost Kowloon Walled City-side.’
I accepted this without question. England had hardly any ghosts but China was steeped in them. Wherever one went, it seemed, there were ghosts, demons, devils, spirits and gods to ward them off.
‘I show you ve’y old place,’ Lau said. ’All same like China long time before.’
He turned, walked ten paces along under the balcony, from which rainwater was pouring down, and knocked on a narrow double door. Once again, my heart fluttered and thoughts of evil men with wicked intentions momentarily filled my mind, but I had now been into two buildings – the nga pin house and the half-underground house – and had come through each time unscathed.
‘You come,’ Lau beckoned.
I stepped over the characteristic high lintel to find myself in a small entrance hall. To one side, seated at a tiny desk, was an old woman. Lau greeted her and they spoke in quiet voices until Lau stepped aside to reveal my presence. The moment she saw me, the woman cackled asthmatically and entered into a conversation with Lau that was filled with much suppressed hilarity and sidelong glances at me.
Feeling I was being made the butt of their humour, and not quite knowing how to react, I looked down. It was then I saw the old woman’s feet projecting out from under the desk. They were minute, encased in scuffed brocade slippers no bigger than a baby’s knitted bootees. The toe end was squared off like the ballet dancing pumps girls wore at school.
‘Lotus foot,’ Lau said, following my line of sight. ‘Long time before, China-side, men say tiny foot on lady ve’y …’ he paused, searching for a word ’ … booty full. Like lotus flower.’
I nodded sagely but could not see how, with the wildest imagination, a foot could resemble a flower.
After the obligatory caress of my golden hair by the old woman, Lau led me down a corridor of dark wooden panelling, passing a number of narrow doors split like those of a stable. At intervals, dim bulbs provided the minimum of light. Towards the end of the passageway, Lau stopped at a door and knocked. The top half opened and a pretty Chinese woman looked out. She wore an imperial yellow silk cheongsam, her hair piled up and held in place by a soapstone pin. As they spoke in subdued voices, she did not take her eyes off me for an instant. Needless to say, she still reached out to touch my head.
There was the sound of a pulling bolt and the bottom half of the door also opened to reveal a panelled cubicle lit by a red lamp in front of a tiny shrine. The only furniture was a wide kang raised higher than normal from the floor and a Chinese-style chair. Upon the kang were a tangle of quilts and a Chinese paperback book on the cover of which were portrayed a man and a woman kissing. On a shelf below the shrine was a row of Chinese scent bottles.
‘You go in,’ Lau instructed. ‘Sit down.’
I perched on the rim of the kang. The young woman sat next to me, talking to Lau through the door but all the while watching me. The air – and the young woman – smelt of orange blossom slightly tainted with sweat.
‘You know this place?’ Lau enquired at length.
‘No know,’ I admitted.
‘This old place,’ Lau continued. ‘Maybe more one hundred year. Long time before place for rich man come jig-a-jig. Fam’us
place. Man come long way from Canton jig-a-jig here. Fam’us girl stay here long time before.’ To lend meaning to his words, he put his thumb between his index and middle finger and wiggled it. The young woman giggled. I was lost as to the meaning.
‘You lo know jig-a-jig?’ Lau asked.
I shook my head.
‘Lo ploblum,’ he replied dismissively. ‘Come! We go now.’
He said goodbye to the young woman. I added my own choi kin. She burst into a peal of giggles, put her hand demurely to her mouth to stifle them and closed the doors on us.
Whenever I visited Kowloon Walled City, Lau was always there, ready to guide me around, drink tea with me and talk. When, after a few months, the place started to lose its appeal and I stopped visiting, I never saw him again.
It was some years before I realized that he and Ho had been Triad members – Chinese mafiosi – infamous for their utter ruthlessness, whose secret fraternity ran the opium dens and brothels, and held Kowloon Walled City in its thrall. The semi-subterranean room had been their meeting place.
My growing penchant for reading gave me a new reason to seek permission to range farther afield than I had previously. Both my parents agreed that I should be permitted to go to Tsim Sha Tsui where, in the next street to Mr Chan’s jewellery and curio company, there stood the Swindon Bookshop. The only stipulation placed upon this extension of my legitimate borders was that I did not, under any circumstance, take the Star Ferry to Hong Kong island.
Tsim Sha Tsui was a completely different world from Mong
Kok. The latter was the world of dai pai dongs and whole roast pigs whilst the former was camera-toting, rubber-necking tourist country, banker and briefcased businessman territory.
I had been there on a number of occasions with my mother. Indeed, my first night in Hong Kong had been spent there, for the Grand Hotel was in the heart of the district. However, apart from Tkachenko’s, Hing Loon and the bookshop, I hardly knew it and savoured discovering it on my own.
Using Hing Loon as an informal Coke-provisioning station, I wandered the streets. Here, the shopkeepers stayed behind closed doors. If they were jewellers, their doors were sometimes guarded by bearded, be-turbaned Sikhs in old British military uniforms and carrying blunderbusses or shotguns. The only vendors to appear on the pavement were Indian tailors vying for custom. The Chinese tailors viewed this flagrant touting with distaste. They were never so pushy and their workmanship was far superior.
Apart from the tailors’ window displays of lengths of cloth and suits hanging off mannequins, every shop window was a glittering tableau of expensive watches, men’s and women’s jewellery, pens, cameras, lenses and binoculars.
I knew I could not just walk into one of these shops so I worked the obvious ploy, waiting until a tourist couple entered and tagging along camouflaged as their child. It worked time and again and I got to study – close up – such marvels as Audemars Piguet, Longines and Vacheron et Constantin gold watches, emeralds as green as still water and as big as peas, and Rolleiflex and Leica cameras with a shutter movement so silent you could not hear it. All of these I gazed at with the avidity of a magpie. At times, the palms of my hands actually itched with temptation and desire.
Yet the crimes of Tsim Sha Tsui were not conducted by me but by the wily shopkeepers and even more artful pickpockets.
One of the shopkeepers’ scams was brilliant in its simplicity and succeeded because of the arrogance and gullibility of, particularly, American tourists. Be they civilians or sailors on shore leave all were open to it, from well-heeled world cruisers and senior United States Navy officers down to ratings and stewards off the liners. The first time I saw it happen was in a watch shop. I was lingering by the counter when I overheard a conversation that went something like this:
‘OK, buddy, I’ll take this one.’ (Tourist)
‘V’wy good choice. Suit you good.’ (Shopkeeper)
‘How much is it?’
‘Fi’e hund‘ed dollar.’
A few minutes of haggling followed, culminating in an agreed price of $450, the shopkeeper declaiming with a disarming smile, ‘You too cleffer for me. Beat me down too much. Now my p’ofit only small.’
At this point, it must be appreciated that all the prices were shown in Hong Kong dollars and the price label on the item marked up by at least 100 per cent over the wholesale buy-in cost.
Then came the question bolstered by a belief in the universal power of the US greenback.
‘Say, buddy, is that American or Hong Kong dollars?’ Hong Kong was always spoken with a slight air of condescension.
The shopkeeper, after a brief pause as well timed as the best comic actor’s, would always reply, ‘Ame’ican dollars.’
Out would come the wallet of American Express traveller’s cheques, the customer grinning broadly at his bargaining skill.
In 1953, when I first saw this trick pulled, the foreign exchange rate was approximately HK$6: US$1. Even my elementary school arithmetic, at which I was a resoundingly poor pupil, told me the customer had paid HK$2700, over five times the original, and already much inflated, asking price.
I could never feel any sympathy for these dupes. In my puerile opinion, they asked for it. Besides, I was a gweilo on the shopkeepers’ side. With the victims of Tsim Sha Tsui’s other tourist crime, who could be of any nationality, I felt considerable empathy but, whereas I could have exposed the exchange rate scam, I could do nothing about their plight.
The pickpockets of Tsim Sha Tsui must have been the slickest in the world. They mostly operated in pairs, keeping in the crowds. Once a worthwhile target had been spotted, they would move in, one bumping hard into the victim, knocking them slightly off balance. The other, with lightning speed, would slip their hand into bag or pocket, grab a wallet, purse or billfold and immediately pass it to the barger who would disappear in the crowd. This was a failsafe. If the victim found they had been pickpocketed, had a suspicion who had done it and accosted him, he could plead innocence. The proof – the wallet or purse – would already be three streets away and moving fast towards a fence who dealt in traveller’s cheques.
Another form of theft was considerably less clandestine. A number of urchins would accost a target under the pretence of begging. Once the target’s attention was distracted, one of the urchins would produce a pair of very sharp tailor’s scissors, slide a blade under the victim’s leather watch strap and cut it free, catching it and disappearing in the crowd. If the target was aware of what had happened, they could not give chase for the obstruction of the throng.
Only one class of person was completely pickpocket proof: the US Navy ratings who carried their wallets folded over the front of the very tight waistbands of their uniform trousers. They were in full view of any pickpocket but not one could pull a wallet clear without the owner knowing.
Although these kinds of street theft must have ruined many
a holiday, I could not bring myself to condemn them. The perpetrators were often boys even younger than myself, street urchins, the children of squatter shack dwellers and pavement sleepers. They were doing the best they could to stay alive and I could not help wondering whether some of their fathers had owned cars and horses in China and were now reduced to sweeping out offices or serving in restaurants. Or worse.
Despite their criminality, I felt at one with them. They were expatriates who had made their home here. So was I. There were even moments when I wondered how I might join them in their illegality, but I realized I would not have had the stomach for it. And that was the difference between a gweilo and a Chinese: we were bound by the rules that ruled the rulers and they were not.
One sweltering day, the humidity over 90 per cent, my mother and I went shopping, our mission to buy a wedding anniversary gift for my paternal grandparents.
Under normal circumstances, I would have strenuously attempted to avoid this outing. Traipsing in my mother’s wake round shops containing little of interest to me, in streets I had explored and which were now fairly sterile to me, was not my idea of an ideal morning. However, I wanted to take part in the choice of a gift for Grampy.
With a military methodology, my mother went up and down the streets, traversing Tsim Sha Tsui in a mental grid, but she could find nothing suitable. It was either tourist tat or too fragile to post, or too expensive and therefore likely to cost my grandparents inordinately high customs duties. Finally, having exhausted most of Tsim Sha Tsui – and me – we had a Coke each at a
pavement stall and headed up Nathan Road at a brisk pace. My shirt clung to my back: through my mother’s sweat-soaked blouse I could see her bra strap and felt very embarrassed that it was so prominent. None of the Chinese women seemed to be even lightly perspiring.
My mother’s intention was, if she could find nothing in an area catering mostly for European taste, she would have a go in that providing for the Chinese. Turning into Shanghai Street, we started to patrol the shops selling crockery. It was utilitarian stuff but one variety caught my mother’s attention. Known as rice-patterned ware, neither of us could understand how it was mass-produced. Each dish, bowl or cup was made of white porcelain with a patterned blue border and base, between which the porcelain was speckled with what looked like rice grains fired in the matrix. If the bowl was held to the light, each grain appeared translucent.
‘This is it,’ my mother declared as she held up a large serving bowl to the light. ‘Bugger the fragility! This is the one, don’t you think?’
I agreed. My grandmother would regard it as a nice bowl to put on the dresser but my grandfather would see it for what it was – an exotic piece sent from a far-off land with all my love brimming out of it. It cost only a few dollars.
‘It’s a bit on the cheap side,’ she commented as the shopkeeper wrapped the bowl in wood straw and newspaper.
‘It’s the thought that counts,’ I remarked.
She smiled and sauntered round the shop, picking up a piece here and a piece there. I sat on a stool and sweated. The shopkeeper did not offer me a drink for he no longer had reason to keep us in the place. We had parted with our money and the cost of a Green Spot would simply erode his profit margin.
Finally, my mother returned to the counter, said, ‘Sod it!’
and ordered a six-setting complete dinner service of the same sort, asking for it all to be delivered to the Boundary Street address.
The shopkeeper beamed, shouted for an assistant, relieved my mother of $110 (about £6) and gave us each a chilled bottle of Watson’s lemonade.
‘I don’t think,’ my mother said as we walked at a leisurely speed towards Nathan Road, ‘that we need to mention this to your father.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘How can you hide ninety plates and bowls and things?’
My mother took my hand and jauntily swung it back and forth as we walked on.
‘I’m a wife,’ she answered obtusely.
The arcaded pavement ahead was obstructed by a row of barrels being off-loaded from a green lorry with a canvas awning. As we entered the restricted space, we were ambushed by a young Chinese woman. She wore the clothes of a coolie – a stiff black cotton jacket and matching baggy trousers. She was barefoot, her hair awry and her face, as my mother would put it, in need of a kiss from Mr Flannel. In her arms she carried a baby about a month old. There was no way we could avoid her without turning heel.
‘Missee! Missee!’ she said as she approached us.
My mother opened her handbag, snapped the catch on her purse and took out a violet-coloured dollar bill. To my mother’s surprise, the young woman refused it.
‘No kumshaw, missee. No kumshaw!’
The woman held the baby out. It gurgled with infantile pleasure and kicked the air. Its legs were podgy. I could see it was a girl.
‘You tek, missee, pleas’.’
My mother stopped dead in her tracks. The look on her face was one of sheer bemusement.
‘Missee! You tek. You tek.’
She reached forward with the baby, trying to convince my mother to accept it in her arms.
‘You tek, pleas’.’
The woman was pleading now. The pain in her soul tainted each of the only four English words she knew, had learnt especially for just such a confrontation.
‘Pleas’, missee. Pleas’, missee.’
I looked at my mother. Tears ran down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them and they dripped on to her already sweat-dampened blouse. She shook her head.
The Chinese woman made one last attempt, as if she was a stallholder pressing my mother to buy something she did not need.
‘M’ho,’ my mother murmured.
At that, the woman turned and disappeared down a narrow and fetid hutong from which blew the stench of open drains.
We walked on in silence until we reached a rickshaw rank. My mother hailed one and we travelled home together. Once in the apartment, my mother poured herself a gin and tonic and sat heavily in a chair.
‘What did that woman want?’ I enquired.
‘She wanted to give me her baby.’
‘Why?’ I replied, taken aback at this information.
‘Who knows,’ said my mother with a sigh. ‘Perhaps she can’t afford to feed it. Perhaps the father told her to get rid of it. It was a girl …’
‘So what?’ I came back.
‘In China, boy children are precious. They are even sometimes called little emperors. Girls are not.’
I could see no difference between a girl baby and a boy baby, other than the obvious anatomical one, and said so.
She took a big swig of her gin and tonic. ‘To the Chinese, nothing is more important than keeping the family name going. So sons are important and daughters, who will marry and take another name, aren’t.’
‘But what will happen to the baby girl?’ I half-wondered aloud.
My mother was silent for at least a minute before speaking.
‘She will die. Either her parents will smother her or they’ll take her into the Kowloon foothills and leave her to die of exposure.’
‘But that’s murder!’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes,’ my mother agreed dully, ‘and this is China.’
‘Can’t we go back again?’ I began. ‘I don’t mind if …’
The appeal of an adopted Chinese sister was suddenly growing on me. And it was now of paramount importance to me that we did something.
‘No,’ my mother said, ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that …’
She patted the cushion on the settee beside her. I sat down and she put her arm around me.
‘It is terrible, but it has been going on for centuries in China. There’s nothing we can do about it. You cannot change a culture overnight.’
‘What about calling the police … ?’ I suggested.
My mother sadly shook her head and said, ‘She’s long gone now.
That night, lying in bed with the lights of Boundary Street barred by the venetian blinds on the ceiling, I wondered if the baby was already dead. I wanted to cry – and felt I should – but found I could not. I had already accepted the inevitable cruelty of life in the Orient. It was, I considered as I drifted warily to sleep, no surprise China was so full of ghosts.
By early May 1953, Hong Kong was gripped by Coronation fever. A vast pi lau, a sort of Chinese triumphal arch, was erected across Nathan Road near the Alhambra cinema. Made entirely of bamboo poles lashed together by bamboo twine, it looked like the scaffolding on a building site, within which it was intended to construct a pagoda-cum-watchtower. By the week before the Coronation, it was festooned with gold and scarlet decorations, a row of lanterns, a picture of the new Queen and the letters EIIR. These also appeared on virtually every lamppost on every major thoroughfare. Shops displayed framed pictures of the Queen, sometimes next to ones of Chiang Kai-shek. It was a brave shopkeeper who displayed the Queen next to Chairman Mao. Even if he had Communist sympathies, which some had, discretion was deemed the better part of colonial valour and he joined in with the festivities.
On Coronation Day itself, there was a huge parade on Hong Kong-side. Keeping to Queen’s Road, it wound its way through the city for six miles, the pavements jammed with tens of thousands of spectators. The queues for the Star Ferry on Kowloon-side stretched for well over a mile but we avoided these by crossing the harbour on a Royal Navy launch from which we were ushered into a dockyard office building overlooking Queen’s Road and allotted seats at a window.
The parade was interminable. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marching military bands, St John Ambulance volunteers, Boy Scouts, kai fong associations, nurses from the Bowen Road and Mount Kellett military hospitals, police and fire brigade marched by in dizzying, monotonous ranks, flags flying, pennants whipping the warm air. The tedium was only relieved by a drive
past of tanks, howitzers, scout cars and other military paraphernalia. Several times, I tried to make my escape to explore the dockyard but had my collar felt by my father and was forced back into my seat.
It was just as well. After the pageant of imperial militarism, and a break of a quarter of an hour during which I managed to get my father to buy me a Coke, came the Chinese half of the parade.
At the head were two stilt-walkers and a classical marching orchestra – and it did not play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ but stirring melodies and lilting airs. Other Chinese bands followed, instilling in me that day a lifelong love of Chinese classical music. Between each of them were several flatbed trucks decked out as floats with tableaux being enacted on them by children dressed as characters out of Chinese mythology. They wore pancake make-up, as detailed and as stark as a Chinese opera singer’s. My mother commented several times on how uncomfortable it must have been for them under the hot sun.
The highlight of the whole parade, however, were the lion and dragon dances.
Their approach could be guessed at by the increasing agitation of the crowds on the pavement opposite us. They began to grow restless, craning their necks and pointing. Finally, to the clashing of cymbals and striking of hand gongs, the lion appeared. It consisted of a brightly coloured stylized head on a bamboo frame, with fur-lined jaws and bulbous eyes. As big as a barrel, it was held aloft by a dancer who swung it to and fro, ducked it down and lunged forward with it, shook it from side to side and generally acted in a ferocious fashion. Behind him was the lion’s body, a covering of less decorated cloth under which another dancer jostled and jived. The movements of the head were dictated by the cymbals and gongs. It was, for all intents and purposes, a sort of legendary Oriental pantomime horse.
Stilt-walkers and jugglers followed the lion, there was a gap and then the dragon arrived on the scene.
It was magnificent. Its head was at least nine feet high, excluding the horns on top. Its mouth – red-mawed and lined with white teeth – was big enough for me to have sat in. The mouth was operated by a man walking in front of the dragon with a pole connected to the dragon’s lower lip, whilst the remainder of the head was held high by one man. As with the lion, he swung it to and fro, lowered it to the ground then looked at the sky, in time to the percussion instruments. Several yards in front of the dragon pranced a man with a paper fish almost as big as himself on a pole, with which he teased the beast. Behind the head was a one-hundred-yard-long reptilian body constructed of coloured cloth painted in scales and stretched over a series of bamboo hoops. Under this danced several dozen men, only their legs showing and giving the dragon’s body the appearance of a multicoloured circus centipede. The body curled in on itself, twisting across the road and generally behaving in a serpentine fashion. The crowds applauded, the cymbals clashed, the gongs clanged and then, with two police wagons driving side by side, it was all suddenly over.
‘What did you think of that?’ my father asked as we lined up for the launch on the wall of the dockyard basin.
‘Very impressive,’ I replied noncommittally, having just heard someone else in the queue make the same remark.
‘Just think,’ my father went on, ‘all over the Empire, these celebrations will be going on today. All for one young woman, our new Queen.’
For a moment, I thought he was going to cry. Whatever else he was, my father was definitely a monarchist.