7
LIVING ON CLOUDS
WE DROVE ON TO THE VEHICULAR FERRY AT YAU MA TEI, THE RAMP was raised and the vessel headed out across the harbour. My mother and I stood at the front, a light spume blowing over us. My father remained with the car at the back of the deck, industriously wiping any hint of spray from the paintwork with a chamois leather.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked insistently and not for the first time.
‘I’ve told you, I’m not telling you,’ she retorted impishly.
Living in Kowloon, I rarely crossed the harbour to the island of Hong Kong. My parents frequently visited friends for dinner there, went to HMS Tamar for a mess night or to dine on a visiting warship – and, of course, my father crossed the harbour daily to go to his office in the dockyard – but I only accompanied them on select occasions, such as an Open Day on an aircraft carrier or submarine, or the annual Dockyard Fete, at one of which I won first prize in the .22 rifle shooting competition, with a score of 97/100. The first prize was a fully stocked blue-and-white woven rattan and plastic picnic hamper which my mother used for ten years before it finally unravelled. My success, over adults as well as children, had infuriated my father who scored only seventy-something, yet who regarded himself as a top shot. In front of his colleagues and inferiors, he had lost considerable face: Commodore Blimp had been beaten by his boy. At home that night, my father had roundly derided the prize, although I noticed he removed the two bottles of wine it contained as well as the cashew nuts to which he was – as was I – more than partial. I never got to eat a single one of them. That, my mother told me, was my punishment for being a crack shot.
On Hong Kong-side, we drove off the ferry and a short distance through the city streets before skirting the Bank of China building and starting to ascend a steep wide road. Ahead was verdant mountainside with low blocks of apartments on the gentler slopes but, as the mountain rose more precipitously, houses half hidden in trees. My father had to change down to third gear and then to second for the first corner on a junction. The car remained in a low gear to negotiate two sinuous hairpin bends and a long straight to a four-way junction in a pass.
‘Magazine Gap,’ my mother said as my ears popped and, looking out the rear window, I caught a glimpse of the harbour and Kowloon beyond and well below.
The car continued to climb through luxuriant forest, plants with leaves as big as elephants’ ears crowding each other out in the shade. Lianas and aerial roots hung down like ropes while butterflies flitted through the shadows and dappled light. Through gaps in the trees I caught snatches of open sea: at Magazine Gap we had crossed on to the south side of Hong Kong island.
Still we climbed. Edging the car into first gear, my father gunned the engine and we set off up an incline of at least 30 degrees called Mount Austin Road, moved round a right-hand corner in second gear and turned up another steep road that looked as if it ran along a knife-edge ridge. At the end of this was a four-storey block of apartments. My father parked the car and we entered the building, climbing the wide stairs.
‘Who lives here?’ I asked my mother.
‘We do,’ she replied. ‘From the day after tomorrow.’
On the top floor, my father produced a key and we entered Apartment 8, Mount Austin Mansions. Despite a few pieces of furniture, it echoed like a cathedral.
‘Close your eyes,’ my mother said as we went in.
I did so. She led me through the apartment. I heard another door open then the faint sound of birdsong, a cicada and the gentle shush of a mountain breeze.
‘Open them.’
I was on the veranda. At my feet lay Hong Kong.
The view left me speechless. Down below was the central business district, the Bank of China and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank next door little more than a child’s building bricks. The harbour was a pool with small boats moving across it. Alongside HMS Tamar were two grey warships whilst, in mid-harbour, several others swung at anchor. Beyond lay the peninsula of Kowloon. A P&O liner was berthed in Tsim Sha Tsui, cargo vessels unloading at jetties further along the waterfront. The Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter was a mere rectangle of water partly crammed with a brown wedge of junks and sampans. In the distance were the Kowloon hills and, further away still, a progression of hills disappearing towards China. Looking east was a sylvan ridge dotted with houses. Below them, beyond the eastern urban areas, were more hills and, far away, a scatter of islands.
The sun was now low and hidden behind a summit surmounted by a copse of radio aerials: the riot of neon in the streets to the east and on Kowloon-side started to come alive in readiness for the approaching twilight. The last rays of the sun tinged the top of the Nine Dragons. In fifteen minutes, it was night, the lights of the colony shimmering in the heat. The walla-wallas and ferries were now trails of light upon blackened water, the warships decorated with white bulbs strung between their masts or lining their sides.
‘So?’ my mother asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
‘What do you mean, “I don’t know”?’ my father snapped. ‘This is one of the most famous panoramas in the world and you are going to live on top of it. People would commit murder to live here. People sail halfway round the world to see this view for fifteen minutes and you’re going to have it twenty-four hours—’
‘Do stop harping on, Ken,’ my mother muttered.
‘Well, honestly …’ my father replied, determined to have the last word. ‘We give him the earth and—’
‘We have not given him the earth,’ my mother retorted. ‘We have been allotted this as our quarters and he – and we – are bloody lucky. You had nothing to do with it.’
‘I had nothing to do with it? My job – my rank – played no part in it?’
‘You’re a DNSO, Ken, not the First Sea Lord. You have a wife and son. That gives you X amount of housing points. This is an X-points quarter. It has been vacated. We were next in line for allocation. Now shut up!’
In truth, I was fully appreciative of the view. It was just that the enormity, the grandeur of it did not match my eight-year-old vocabulary. Fantastic or incredible or even stupendous seemed utterly devoid of the emotion I felt. It was, like the song, as if I really was sitting on top of the world.
As if that view were not enough, crossing through to the dining room, we looked south, out over the South China Sea. A fairly substantial island lay between Hong Kong and the horizon on which there were other low strips of land with pinpricks of light bunched in one spot on them.
‘The island close to is called Lamma,’ my mother said. ‘Those in the distance are Communist Chinese.’
Yet I was not looking that far. On the sea around and beyond Lamma twinkled tiny lights. There were perhaps a hundred of them. They did not seem to move but were drifting on the tide.
‘What’re those lights?’ I asked, but I realized the answer before being told.
‘Fishing sampans,’ my mother explained.
We headed back to Boundary Street. As the ferry edged across the harbour, I asked my mother to show me the building in which we had just been. Distinguished by the lights in its windows, it was perched on the very top of a secondary promontory to the east of the Peak, the mountain that stood guardian over the colony.
‘What’s it called?’
‘The little summit is called Mount Austin and we have Apartment 8, Block A.’
‘That’s lucky,’ I declared.
‘What do you mean?’ my father asked, folding his chamois leather into a wad.
‘Eight’s a lucky number,’ I said. ‘The Chinese think eight brings riches.’
‘He does pick up some drivel,’ my father remarked to my mother.
Yet she winked at me. She was by now well down the hutong to becoming a dedicated sinophile: unbeknownst to my father, she had even enrolled herself in Cantonese classes.
 
 
Life on the Peak had as much in common with that in Kowloon as a bowl of fish soup at a dai pai dong had to a traditional English fried breakfast, with or without salad cream. First, there were no shops except for a small Dairy Farm general store. Second, there were hardly any people about except around an observation point where tourists with cameras mingled with touts trying to sell them packs of photographs of what they were themselves about to photograph. Third, there were no eating places except the Peak Cafe, a low, red-roofed building that I had spotted as my father halted to change gear on our first visit. Finally, there were very few buildings and those that did exist were either the houses of the rich taipans, secure behind walls topped with barbed wire or broken glass, or apartment buildings.
From a busy urban existence, I was suddenly catapulted into a pacific rural one, with a gamut of new experiences to undergo and new lessons to be learnt.
The morning of the move, we arrived at Mount Austin shortly after two dark-blue Bedford lorries with RN painted in white upon the sides. Half a dozen Chinese ratings leapt out, lowered the tailgate and began to carry all our belongings up to Apartment 8. To complement the general-issue furniture provided by the Navy, my parents had purchased a low Chinese coffee table with bow legs, reminiscent of an English bull terrier’s, a Chinese dining-room suite and a bar – an essential for my inabstinent father.
As soon as the unpacking commenced, it was diplomatically suggested that I might like to go outside and play. With whom or at what was not an issue. Hardly believing my good fortune, I left the building and set off down the curving ridge road. At the T-junction I turned right and started to ascend to the summit of the Peak.
The road was steep and passed a derelict lot where the foundations of a building were laid out in the ground with a few fragments of wall remaining. It was, in effect, a cleared bomb site: I had seen enough of those in Portsmouth to recognize it. Higher up, several rather fine houses stood to the right of the road with magnificent views of the city below. I walked on, my legs beginning to ache. A few hundred yards on there appeared at the side of the road a small stone building not much bigger than my grandfather’s garden shed. The door was open and the sound of voices emanated from within. I knocked and looked in. Sitting at a desk was a policeman. Another sat to one side, his chair tilted back. In a corner, a kettle simmered on an electric ring. They nodded a greeting. I expected to be invited in for a bowl of tea. That would have been Mong Kok protocol. I wasn’t.
Beside the police post were some stone steps. I descended them and found myself on a path that, after fifty yards, crossed a small tumbling stream. Tiny fish darted in the sandy-bottomed pools. It seemed amazing that, not three hundred feet from the top of a mountain, there was a flowing stream filled with fish. I stepped over the water by a small stone bridge and walked on. The path was narrow and clung to the not-quite-sheer side of the hill, keeping to more or less the same contour. It was obvious few people came this way, for the undergrowth met over the path and my legs were soon scratched and bleeding. Yet it was worth it. The views were breathtaking. Below me was a pale azure reservoir, Lamma Island across a narrow channel and the South China Sea beyond it. To the west, beyond the next, conical hill, were the distant islands of western Hong Kong and, beyond them, Lan Tau Island, the biggest in the territory. I did not realize quite how high I was until a kite, rising on a thermal, briefly hovered near me. It swivelled its head from side to side with avian wonderment at finding someone so close on the normally deserted mountainside.
The following morning, I woke to find my room bathed in an eerie, soft light. Getting out of bed, I opened the curtains to discover we were in the clouds. Unlatching the metal-framed window, a warm and invisible dampness drifted in, touching my face as a ghost might. It occurred to me that perhaps I was allowing demons to enter so I closed it quickly.
At breakfast, my mother announced, ‘You’re going to go to the Peak School now. It’s much too far to go to Kowloon Junior every day. We’ve an appointment with the headmistress at eleven o’clock.’
By the time we set off for the school, the sun had burnt off the clouds and we began our walk under a blazing sky. The air, however, was cool, with zephyrs tickling the tall, sparse grass and wild flowers on the bomb site.
‘What building stood there?’ I asked my mother as we passed it.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but you’ll find ruins here and there on the Peak, of buildings destroyed by the Japanese in the war.’
The Peak School was about twenty minutes’ walk away on Plunkett’s Road, but to get there meant descending the very steep hill to the café. My mother, wearing a smart cotton print dress and high-heeled shoes, attempted the descent, stopped after a few yards, removed her shoes and continued barefoot. We arrived at the school hot and harried. The headmistress showed us into her office, a few formalities were undergone, I was taken to a classroom and obliged to stand in front of my future classmates, declare my name and then sit down at a desk next to another gweilo with pre-pubescent acne and breath that smelt as if he had breakfasted on hundred-year-old eggs. It did not bode well.
The pupils were predominantly British with a few Chinese, Americans and others of European extraction. Many of them seemed particularly distant and snooty. I preferred to keep myself to myself, get on with my work, read in break times and head for the door at the first chime of the bell. I ate my lunch on my own, rebuffed most approaches of friendship and worried my form teacher. As a consequence, when the school play was being cast, I was auditioned under duress and given a lead part, perhaps to bring me out of my shell. The play was Toad of Toad Hall. I was Mole.
The part was not too demanding. I learnt my lines with ease and only regretted being involved because it meant staying behind after school each day for over a month, rehearsing.
Only one memorable facet of my thespian adventure remains – the costume.
Each parent was asked to provide their child’s outfit. My mother, not being adept with a needle and thread, asked Ah Shun if she could make it, but she admitted it was beyond her, too. My mother summoned her tailor.
Mr Chuk was a soft-spoken, elderly Chinese gentleman who came on occasion to the apartment to measure my mother. When this was done, the two of them would sit and drink bowls of jasmine tea whilst she went through his pattern books and material samples. He could make a midnight blue silk cocktail dress in five days, a lady’s two-piece suit in seven. A mole costume was another matter.
I was taken into my parents’ bedroom, stripped to my underpants and measured. My mother – no artist, she – then poured the tea and produced her drawing of a mole. The tailor studied it and shrugged.
‘I no look-see dis an’m’l,’ he said. ‘Maybe dis no an’m’l China-side.’
‘Maybe they’ve eaten them all,’ my mother said to me as an aside.
She tried sketching it again. The result looked like a tailless, earless, eyeless rat with copious whiskers and exaggeratedly large front feet.
‘He no can look-see?’ the tailor enquired, noticing the sketch had no eyes.
‘He no can look-see,’ my mother confirmed. ‘Live underground.’
Loh siu liff unner groun’. Can see plentee good,’ the tailor responded.
‘This is not loh siu,’ my mother said, exasperation creeping into her voice. ‘It is not a rat. It is a mole.’
The tailor cupped his ear. ‘He no can … ?’
‘Yes,’ my mother declared firmly. ‘Can hear very good.’ She was getting fed up with discussing the physical disabilities of a mole. ‘You can make?’
‘Can do,’ came the optimistic reply.
It was deemed I did not require a fitting and so, two days before opening night, the tailor arrived at the apartment carrying a bundle containing a dark chocolate-brown, one-piece cross between a parachutist’s jump-suit and a Glaswegian shipbuilder’s boiler suit. I tried it on. It was as loose-fitting as a maternity smock and just as shapeless. My mother stifled a laugh, which was not a good sign.
The tailor had sewn whiskers (made of thin bamboo strips taken from a broom) on the top of the head. My face peered out through the mouth which was lined by white cloth teeth, serrated like a dragon’s. What was more, the tailor had clearly taken pity on the mole’s disabilities and given it two shiny glass eyes and a pair of cat-like ears. My mother paid the bill. On opening night, Rat (grey hairy costume, tail, beady eyes, bowler hat, waistcoat), Toad (grey-green painted mottled rubber attire made from a frogman’s wet suit, a pair of cut-down plus fours and a deerstalker), Badger (tweed jacket and cut-down tartan golfing trousers with a realistic black-and-white papier mâché head) appeared on stage alongside a mutant creature of indeterminate species and origin which, not wearing any human clothing, was, presumably, naked. At curtain call, I received resounding applause and was asked to step forward for an extra bow. It was not, I was certain, due to my acting abilities.
 
 
Once a month, a cylindrical package arrived for me by sea mail. It was rolled up tightly, wrapped in brown paper and had twine tied round it and running through the middle. It had been mailed by my grandfather. When the string was cut, the rolled-up contents opened out to show the previous month’s issues of the Eagle, Dandy and Beano. Tucked somewhere in them would always be a ten-shilling postal order. Unrolling the comics, I envisaged Grampy walking to the newsagent’s once a week, an aroma of tobacco following him down the street like an invisible shadow, buying the comics, keeping them safe in the cupboard under the stairs that smelt of ale and stale bread, then once a month making his way to the Post Office. This was, to me, the height of love and I promptly wrote back by blue air mail lettergram to thank him and give him my news.
I held no information back from him, telling him of all my escapades, even into Kowloon Walled City, in the sure and certain knowledge he would not report them to my grandmother and, through her, to my father. She could not be trusted with a pod full of peas. Not once did he betray my confidence and he always replied, although my questions were not always answered. He did not tell me what jig-a-jig meant so I assumed he did not know.
My grandfather was not alone in sending parcels. The comics were certainly unobtainable in Hong Kong, but almost everything else was: in England, food, clothing, petrol and much more were in short supply and had been since the war. Some items were still on ration. An elderly maiden aunt called Olive assumed, despite many letters to the contrary, that we not only lived under rationing but also in pretty primitive conditions. Every two months for our first year in Hong Kong, a ‘care’ parcel arrived from her containing cotton handkerchiefs, soap, aspirin, adhesive and crêpe bandages, safety pins, Dettol, Reckitts’ Blue laundry starch, thick woollen socks for my father, a lipstick for my mother and a Dinky toy car for me. She fell short of sending toilet rolls, presumably assuming we had plants with leaves large and soft enough for the job. (We had.) Eventually, my mother made up a parcel for Olive containing intricately embroidered napkin sets, silk handkerchiefs, brocade cushion covers, a cotton blouse, a tourist book of the sights of Hong Kong, a hand-painted lacquer dragon, a set of chopsticks (with instructions for use), a packet of jasmine tea (also with instructions) and a small jar of Tiger Balm ointment, the ubiquitous Chinese cure-all containing tiny quantities of opium and morphine which could fix, my mother claimed, anything from a wart to an unwanted pregnancy. Parcels from Olive ceased forthwith.
All expatriates referred to the country of their origin as ‘home’. Even the old China Hands, those who had lived ‘in-country’ since the 1920s, did so. At first, my mother followed suit. However, by the winter of 1953, her outlook had subtly changed. She started to write to her mother that she wanted to remain in Hong Kong after my father’s three-year-long tour of duty ended. In addition to learning Cantonese, she attended classes in Chinese history and culture, sought employment first on the local English-language radio station and then as a secondary school teacher of English and geography in a Chinese school, both without success. Her problem was that she lacked a formal higher education, yet she more than made up for it in intelligence and intellectual curiosity.
Of the old China Hands, I was to come to know two.
The first was a friend of my mother’s, an English woman called Peggy who had married a Dutchman in the 1930s. When war broke out in 1939, her husband may have returned to Holland to fight for his homeland but he may have also stayed in Hong Kong and been killed when the Japanese invaded in 1941. Certainly, Peggy was rounded up and thrown into the civilian camp, the pre-war high-security prison at Stanley. I think they had no children: whenever I met her, she spoiled me rotten. As every colonial housewife did, she employed servants. In her case, she had a traditional saw hei amah.
This amah was one of those who had risked her life over and over again smuggling food and Chinese herbal medicines into the camp for her missee. Indubitably, her clandestine activities saved Peggy’s life and probably those of several of her fellow prisoners-of-war. After the Japanese surrender, Peggy remained in Hong Kong and the amah returned to work for her but now they had a different relationship. Both of approximately the same age, they were no longer missee and amah but two spinsters living together and looking out for each other. Peggy obtained employment with the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and, in time, rose through its ranks to a position of authority and responsibility. The amah kept home for both of them in a small flat on Robinson Road which they shared with at least two dozen rescued stray cats that Peggy loved with almost religious intensity. She and the amah were to die in their late seventies within days of each other.
The other China Hand, whom I came to both like and loathe, was Sammy Shields. As a man, I adored him, but he was also my dentist.
His surgery was in Star House, a two-storey building facing the Kowloon Star Ferry pier across the bus terminal. In actual fact, Sammy was not a qualified dentist. Before the war, he had been a dental technician, making and fitting dentures or braces. When he, too, was incarcerated in Stanley, it was found that he was the only person in the camp with any real dental know-how, so he became the camp dentist by default. After the war, with a large number of patients on his books – most of them ex-civilian prisoners-of-war – he set up in practice, his reputation growing, as it were, by word of mouth.
I visited his surgery with mixed feelings. The whine of his belt-driven drill could be heard in his tiny waiting room and was sure to send shivers of apprehension up the spine of the bravest man. His dentist’s chair, the cantilevered arm of his drill and every other metal fitting were covered in cream enamel, chipped in places. It looked as if he had bought it second-hand, which was probably the case. It was certainly of pre-war vintage.
Sammy had a special technique with small boys such as myself, whose mothers he refused to allow into his chamber of tortures. Whenever my mother left the room, I felt suddenly terrified, but Sammy would soon put me at my ease …
‘Right now, open wide. Ah! Let’s see … a bit of plaque here … we’ll chip that off in a tick … Good … wash out … Open wide again … a filling needed here, I’m afraid … just a little prick for the cocaine …’ (‘Aarrhh! Ah hurhs!’) ‘All done … wait for it to put your jaw to sleep … Did I ever tell you about my time as a guest of his Imperial Japanese Majesty?’
From then on, the sound of his drill and the abrupt jab of pain as he hit the nerve were mere momentary interruptions in a narrative of roasting rats on shovels over a fire of dried cow dung collected on Stanley beach, of boiling barnacles and steaming giant snails which had to be purged first in case they had been feeding on poisonous plants, of face-slappings and rifle buttings, of outbreaks of diphtheria, of men dying of disease or being shot on the beach, of removing fellow prisoners’ molars without any anaesthetics, of the Americans’ bombing of two prison buildings, killing the occupants.
‘Bloody fools, Americans,’ Sammy would appendix this story. ‘What I’d give for one of those pilots sitting where you are now …’
I heard these stories every six months. They never lost their potency and never failed to take the edge off what I was undergoing. It was, I thought, nothing compared to what he must have endured for four years.
 
 
A fortnight before my ninth birthday, Wong asked me, ‘What you likee you burfday cake, young master?’ ‘A cake,’ I replied, puzzled by the enquiry, ‘with nine candles.’
‘What shape you likee?’
My consternation multiplied. As far as I was concerned, cakes were round and that was an end to it.
‘Maybe you likee house?’ he suggested, seeing my bewilderment. ‘Likee tempul? Wong can do tempul good for you.’
Without really thinking about it, I answered, ‘I’d like a battleship.’
Several days later, I went to the kitchen to find my way barred. The swing door had had a wooden wedge jammed under it.
‘You lo can come kitchen-side now,’ Wong declared with an authority I had not previously seen in him. ‘You wantee somef’ing, makee bell.’
‘I only want a Coke,’ I said, conscious of my parents’ orders that I did not ring the servants’ bell for petty demands.
He took one out of the fridge, opened it and handed it to me through a crack in the door, adding, ‘Two week, you lo go kitchen-side. You go, Wong v’wy ang‘wee.’
I complained to my mother. Her reply was that I was to obey Wong.
On my birthday, which fell on the second day of the new academic year, I arrived home in eager anticipation as it had been decided that I should not receive my presents until teatime. I burst into the apartment to be confronted by my mother.
‘Tea first, prezzies second,’ she announced.
I should have guessed something was up. Most unusually, my father was home two hours before normal. I was led into the dining room where Wong had laid out tea – sandwiches, bread and butter, scones, the teapot … Yet the moment I saw the table all thought of gifts and food evaporated.
In the centre of the table was a two-and-a-half-foot-long model of a Royal Navy destroyer, exact in every detail. It was painted battleship grey with its identification letter and numbers on the hull. At the bow hung the Union Jack, at the stern the White Ensign. On the bridge were the Aldiss lamp and searchlights, the wheel and a brass compass and engine room telegraph. On deck, the guns pointed fore and aft, the anchor chain lay on the deck and there were rope loops on the Carley floats and lifeboats. Even the rigging existed, thin lines of what I assumed to be fuse wire running from deck to mast.
Models such as this were only to be found in maritime museums. I was speechless. Wong stood by my side.
‘Dis you cake, young master. Happy burfday for you.’ In the background, Ah Shun smiled, bemused by the whole affair.
‘Cake?’ I replied.
‘You say you wantee warship cake. Wong do for you.’
I just hugged him.
The cake had taken Wong a fortnight. He had worked every spare moment he could afford, often late into the night. The hull and superstructure were a rich fruit cake chock-full of glace cherries and sultanas and covered in hard royal icing, the lifeboats made of marzipan and icing, the main armament and gun turrets of solid icing. Most astonishing of all was the rigging, made of spun sugar. To keep the cake as it was assembled, it had been hidden in the windowless dry room off my parents’ bedroom where clothes and shoes were kept to avoid them going mouldy in the humid tropical air. Despite this precaution, they still quickly grew a hazy fur of fungus, and the cake would have grown a microscopic lawn in hours, but Wong knew a trick. A small charcoal burner was kept alight in the room which absorbed any humidity that got in.
I did not want to cut into it. Neither did my mother. At the end of the table was a smaller ordinary cake with candles on it. We ate that instead but, the following day, we started on the destroyer. I forget what presents I received.
The destroyer was not Wong’s only artistic culinary masterpiece. He could carve chrysanthemum blooms out of raw carrots and decorative leaves out of cucumbers. Mashed potato was always served in small volcano shapes with the tops slightly browned under the grill. Crown roast New Zealand lamb arrived on the table with the rib ends culminating in parsnip, not paper, decorations. For cocktail parties, Wong prepared what was known as small chow, but which my father preferred to refer to as finger fodder, possibly a naval term. Mushrooms stuffed with anchovies, cheese and soy sauce sticks, thinly sliced fresh pineapple and shrimps on toast with home-made mayonnaise and a scattering of sesame seeds – his repertoire and penchant for experimentation seemed inexhaustible.
At drinks parties, Wong being occupied in the kitchen, my father delegated me to help him wait on the guests. My responsibilities were to see that no-one’s glass was empty and to serve the trays of small chow.
At first, I regarded this as an onerous chore but I came to look forward to it. My father taught me how to mix drinks, I was able to consume Wong’s delicacies on the sly and I became privy to the world of adult conversation which, on occasion, I found fascinating. It was by such eavesdropping that I learnt the true story of HMS Amethyst, attacked by Chinese forces on the Yangtze River in 1949 and the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese in the winter of 1937. Such parties also had their lighter side. On Christmas Eve morning, 1953, I went into my parents’ bathroom to get a new tube of toothpaste only to discover a Royal Navy Commander, resplendent in mess uniform with gold braid and medals, asleep on his back in the bath, gently snoring, his arms crossed over his chest with a tiger lily thrust between his fingers. I tip-toed out and never saw him again.
That same winter, my father returned home in the early hours from a mess night with the Royal Air Force at Kai Tak airport. He was well oiled and humming tunelessly. This was most unusual, for my father was typically morose and self-pitying when the worse for booze. His dinner suit was caked in congealed blood.
I stood by as my mother, simultaneously concerned and furious, stripped my father to his vest and Y-fronts, sat him in the bath and washed him down. He had a nasty gash on the inside of his arm but it was insufficient to account for the quantity of blood all over him, even matted in his hair. When he was clean, my mother pulled the plug, sent him into the spare room, covered him with a sheet and went back to her own bed. I withdrew to mine.
In the morning, my mother held a breakfast inquisition.
‘What the hell were you doing last night, Ken? Your dinner jacket’s ruined. So’s your shirt. And you’ve lost two of the gold studs your father gave you.’
My father made no reply.
‘That’s not a rhetorical question, Ken.’
‘Fan cricket,’ my father admitted at length. He looked down at his arm, his wound covered by a large adhesive bandage.
What had happened was that, after the formal dinner, the RAF officers’ mess members had decided on a game of fan cricket, mess vs. guests, which involved everyone present forming a circle around a ceiling fan. This was set at maximum speed and an empty beer can tossed into it. Wherever it flew out from the spinning propeller, it had to be caught. Of course, after the first toss, the metal was mangled into pieces as sharp as razor blades.
‘You’d better visit the Tamar MO and have a tetanus shot,’ my mother stated. ‘God knows what bacteria were breeding on the can.’
My father got up to leave the table, his breakfast untouched.
‘Sit down!’ my mother commanded imperiously.
My father obeyed. I had never seen him so docile and compliant.
‘What’s more, your trousers are torn and the remnants of your jacket smell of petrol.’
‘Better than perfume,’ my father answered back, smiling sheepishly and hoping to bring some sense of levity to the breakfast table.
‘What … !’ said my mother, her jaw set and her eyes wide with rage.
My father confessed how the evening’s jollity had ended. The mess piano had been carried outside and placed at the rear of a Hawker Hunter jet fighter parked on the apron. The engine was then fired up and the piano incinerated.
My mother listened to this in silence then commented, ‘A fine example for Martin. Now eat your bloody breakfast.’
My father prodded his fried egg with his fork and made to stand up again.
‘Wong gets up before six to see you have a breakfast,’ my mother remarked, ‘so kindly show him the respect he deserves and eat the bloody thing. And one more matter,’ she continued, ‘when the mess bill comes in, the cost doesn’t come out of my housekeeping money.’
This was the second occasion during our years in Hong Kong when my father’s drunken escapades had cost my mother dear. When stationed in Japan, one night he and a friend had gone into a saloon in Sasebo where there was an American naval rating shooting his mouth off about the Royal Navy, the Queen and the British in general. He made it abundantly clear that the Royal Navy was not worth the water it sailed on, the Queen was ‘a nice piece of ass’ and the British as a nation were spineless, gutless and worth less than their navy. My father and his friend agreed with him and kept his glass full until he was paralytic. They then carried him out of the bar and down the street to a tattoo artist who tattooed his entire chest in full colour with the White Ensign, the Union Jack and God Save the Queen. My mother’s housekeeping allowance was somewhat short that month.
As time went by, my father’s increasing delight in and reliance upon the company of Johnnie Walker, Messrs Justerini and Brooks and his namesake (but no relation) Mr Booth – not to mention his friend, Mr Gordon – grew. When he arrived home from the office, his first visit was to the drinks cabinet, Wong running in from the kitchen with a jug of water, a container of ice and a cold bottle of tonic, covering all the angles with them. Sometimes, my father returned late having, as he put it, just popped into the wardroom. His favourite snifter was pink gin, popular in officers’ messes on every warship afloat. It consisted of gin diluted with water, with a dash of Angostura bitters. My father took it without the water.
My father’s drinking never got him truly, staggeringly, equilibriumly challenged, sad-song-singingly, punch-flingingly, bosom-friend-makingly drunk. Furthermore, he never suffered from a hangover. Consequently, my father never felt himself to be sozzled, as my mother termed it, trying to make light of the situation for her own sanity and self-respect. Worse still, he would never admit to being under the influence. No matter how much alcohol slid down his gullet, my father remained vertical, comparatively lucid and even able to drive without incident. The only obvious sign of intoxication other than his breath was his attitude towards my mother and me. He was psychologically abusive, skilfully criticizing or belittling us in front of our friends. His attacks were never short, sharp, soon-to-be-forgotten, even forgiven, episodes. They were calculated, long-term personal projects bent on undermining his subject’s spirit and, as his drinking increased, these melded together into a continuous animosity which drove people – my mother, myself, my parents’ friends – away in disgust. As a result, my father was tolerated rather than liked and became a lonely, disenchanted and bitter man.
He never praised but only criticized or admonished, muttering through clenched teeth that my mother and I did not come up to his standard – but then he never told us where the benchmark lay. After one confrontation with him, my mother declared to me that we had already exceeded his standard and that that was the problem, but I did not understand what she meant.
One Saturday lunchtime, not long after we moved to the Peak, my father arrived home in a foul temper. Something had gone wrong at the office.
‘What’s the matter, Ken?’ my mother enquired, coming in from the kitchen.
‘Don’t you start!’ he snapped as he mixed himself a quadruple pink gin.
‘I was only asking—’
‘Well bloody well don’t!’
My mother let this roll over her and said, ‘Let’s have lunch. Philip and Ray’ll be here at two.’
‘I’m not going swimming,’ my father replied. ‘Bloody waste of time.’
Normally, this would have upset my mother. She did not drive and we were therefore reliant upon my father or public transport to take us everywhere. But Philip and Ray Bryant were close friends of my mother’s and owned a huge pre-war grey Jaguar saloon with massive headlights and leather seats. I sensed Philip was critical of my father’s naval pretensions and despised his treatment of my mother. A handsome and jovial man, he was a Royal Navy Commander, Ray a vivacious and pretty woman with black hair and the refined movement of a ballet dancer. They had met in Egypt during the war.
‘Well, we’re going swimming,’ my mother rejoined firmly. ‘You can do what you like. You can sleep all bloody day for all I care.
At this, my father grabbed a cushion off the settee and hurled it at the glass doors to the balcony. It was a hot day. They were open. The cushion spun through them without touching the sides and sailed, like a brocade extra-terrestrial craft, out into the air. It disappeared from view on its way down the steep mountainside towards the city below. My mother and I rushed downstairs and out on to the lawn that surrounded the building. Arriving at the retaining wall, we looked down. Hong Kong and the harbour, with Kowloon in the distance, lay at our feet. The cushion was lodged in some bushes about fifty yards down on a not quite sheer slope. A short distance beyond it, the angle of the hillside sharpened before dropping into a band of trees.
‘You’re right, Ken,’ she said as we returned to the apartment, ‘you’re not coming. You’re going down the bloody hillside and you’re going to retrieve my bloody cushion.’
As we drove to the beach in Philip’s Jaguar, my mother recounted what had come to pass. I asked what would happen if my father slipped.
‘No need to worry,’ Philip answered. ‘Lugard Road’ll break his fall.’
When we returned at dusk, the cushion was back on the settee, cleaned by Ah Shun. A filthy white shirt, shredded by thorns, lay on my mother’s bed, a sort of trophy of war.
At home, when my father threw things, they were always items – books, the newspaper, cushions – that were sure not to make a dent in the wall or parquet flooring. In the office, it was a different matter. There, midway through berating a Chinese clerk or typist standing trembling before him, he would, to emphasize a point in his tirade, grab the black bakelite telephone and hurl it at the wall. It would smash to pieces. Women would burst into tears. The men would keep on quaking. If the telephone was not handy, he threw the office wall clock. In the end someone fitted a shorter cord to the telephone so that, when he flung it, it reached the extent of its flex and fell harmlessly on to the carpet. The Chinese staff called him mok tau (blockhead) and worse. They often used these names to his face but as he spoke no Cantonese, they were safe. I once heard a clerk call him gai lun jai (chicken penis boy): the clerk must have assumed that, as I was my father’s son, I spoke no Cantonese either.
Having met one or two at school, I came to the conclusion that my father was a natural-born bully. On the other hand, I did grow up mixing a mean cocktail. Maybe that was one of his benchmarks of a good son.
 
 
Although we now lived on the Peak, across the harbour from and over a thousand feet above all my mother’s Chinese friends, she remained in constant touch with them, meeting the room boys from the Fourseas on their days off, going to tea houses with them, sometimes spending an afternoon with them and their girlfriends or wives at the beach. At other times, she went on picnics with them. These frequently took place on school days but when they occurred at a weekend or in the school holidays, I was invited along.
My father took a dim view of these outings. My mother ignored his opinion completely until one Saturday when she announced she was going out with ‘the boys and girls’, as she put it, the following day.
‘I see,’ my father remarked shirtily. ‘So I’m left here with Martin.’
‘No!’ I chirped up. ‘I’m going, too.’
‘If you ask me, Joyce,’ my father went on, giving me a filthy look, ‘you should stay home at the weekends. To go off midweek is one thing, but … All this gallivanting about will get you a reputation.’
‘Gallivanting with the natives will get me a reputation, will it, Ken?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’m sure I don’t.’
‘Well, you should. Tongues’ll wag.’
‘I don’t care if they flap in the wind like flags,’ my mother rejoined. ‘And neither should you. If some old biddy with nothing better to do starts bad-mouthing me, it’s up to you to defend my honour.’
‘Drawn cutlasses at dawn?’ my father replied ironically.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ken. Besides, what’s the alternative? Spend the weekend watching you snore. Some live spark you are, Ken. About as bright as a NAAFI candle.’
For some reason I could never fathom, my mother assumed that candles purchased from the Navy Army and Air Force Institutes were always incapable of burning brightly and frequently used this metaphor.
‘I work hard all week and—’
‘So does everybody else, Ken, but they don’t spend the weekend sleeping and snorting like a grampus.’
Half an hour later, we met up with Ching, Halfie and some of the other Fourseas staff at the Outlying Islands ferry pier in Central District. A black-and-white Hongkong Yaumatei Ferry company vessel pulled alongside and we boarded it with a throng of boisterous Chinese weekend picniceers, all bound for Cheung Chau and carrying rattan baskets or bags.
No sooner was the ferry underway than everyone produced an array of snacks – chicken’s feet, pork spare ribs, wah mui, crystallized ginger, pomeloes, oranges and melon seeds. Vendors travelled the deck selling bottled drinks and sweetmeats. The bones, peel and shells were thrown over the side, as in any Hong Kong street, with scant regard for those below: the ferry had a bottom passenger deck.
After an hour, the ferry turned into the harbour of Cheung Chau, a dumb-bell-shaped island with an ancient village in the centre. Deepwater fishing junks rode at anchor, with sampans weaving between them like agile aquatic insects. A drift of joss-stick smoke indicated the location of a large temple.
As soon as the gangplank hit the jetty, a phalanx of passengers ran ashore to claim the best tables in a nearby restaurant. We followed but by-passed the eating place with its tanks of live fish and crabs destined for the table.
‘What is the temple?’ I asked Ah Tang, one of the room boys.
‘Pak Tai,’ he answered. ‘Sea god temple. More old all Hong Kong.’
I wanted to visit it but it was not on our itinerary. Instead, we went south along the praya, passing fish vendors, sleeping cats and vociferous dogs, fishermen mending nets or baiting lines and houses with their windows shuttered against the fierce sunlight. At the periphery of the village, we struck out along a path running through a tunnel of trees and rocks.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked my mother.
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ she replied. ‘I’m just going with the general flow.’
The path was alive with tawny Rajah and delicate cream-and-black dragontail butterflies supping on fallen fruit. In the dry leaves, smooth skinks with black side stripes rustled and flashed out of sight. Birds sang and flitted through the branches of a sacred banyan tree upon which pictures of the gods had been pinned. Joss-sticks smouldered in the roots. Here and there were groves of yellow and green striped bamboo, many of the stems substantial enough to make a coolie’s pole. All the while, the sea glinted away to my right through sparsely needled pine trees.
My mother was happy, walking with a jaunty step, swinging our picnic basket. Where the path widened, she took my hand.
‘This is fun, isn’t it?’ she asked.
I agreed that it was but, after a short distance, posed a question that had long been bothering me.
‘Why doesn’t Dad come to places with us?’
She looked down at me.
‘He’s a stick-in-the-mud,’ she responded. ‘And he’s got a chip on his shoulder.’
I asked what that meant.
‘It’s hard to explain. It’s just – well, he thinks he’s better than everyone else but they don’t agree.’
‘Was he always a stick-in-the-mud?’ I enquired.
‘No! We used to go for cycle rides in the country and go to the pictures or for walks on the Downs, and we’d have lunch in a little village pub at Cowplain …’ She paused. I sensed she was sad but then she perked up. ‘What the hell! It was all a long time ago.’
Up ahead, our companions were singing a Chinese song in time with their steps. My mother joined in.
The path descended a hillside towards the sea. We halted by a group of boulders. Within minutes, someone had a small primus alight and was boiling water for tea. A cloth was spread over a flat rock and weighted down with stones. With the others, my mother set about laying out our picnic.
I settled myself on a slab of pinkish granite, the sunlight dancing on the mica fragments as if on tinsel. To my left was a cove surrounded by low cliffs, gentle waves sucking at the rocks. My mother approached with Ah Tang.
‘Martin, come and see this!’
We followed Ah Tang along a cliffside path and down towards the shore where there was a tumble of huge boulders.
‘You come all same me,’ he said beckoning to us.
We slithered down the boulders to find several of them had formed a sort of cave. He gestured us in. The entrance was narrow, the roof low and the floor sand.
Squatting on his haunches, Ah Tang said, ‘This place for Cheung Po Tsai. He live here.’
‘Who is Cheung Po Tsai?’ I enquired.
‘Long time before, more four hund’ed year, Cheung Po Tsai big time py-rat. Got many junk, many men work for him, all same py-rat. He also got gweipor wife. Catch her on one ship one time. She love Cheung Po Tsai, no wan’ go back Inglun’-side. Stay here.’
My mother gazed out of the entrance to the sea.
‘Just imagine,’ she said, ‘living here with a pirate chief, thousands of miles from home and knowing you could never return.’
The romantic in her was working double-speed.
When the picnic was over, some of the room boys’ girlfriends started to dance. It was a Chinese dance that involved tiny steps, moving in a circle, singing a song and, with arms raised, making a twisting motion with the hand, as if one were screwing in a light bulb. My mother was invited to join in, being taught the words and motions. I watched as she danced with these young Chinese women. She did not look, I thought, very different from them, except that her hair was blond not black. She was, as she would have put it, as happy as a sand boy.
We walked slowly back to the ferry jetty, the lowering sun warm on our faces. The butterflies on the path made no effort to fly off at our approach: Ching said they were drunk.
‘How can a butterfly get drunk?’ I said.
‘The juice,’ Ching explained, ‘can make alcohol in the hot sun.’
As we sailed back to Hong Kong, my mother leant out of the ferry window, the warm wind ruffling her hair. The gleaming sun reflected gold off the sea and on to the ferry cabin ceiling. The Chinese day-trippers were mostly quiet now. A few played cards but most dozed or read a newspaper or magazine. Ching and Halfie faced each other over a set of tin gau tiles.
At the HYF pier in Central, we said our goodbyes and took a taxi home. My father was sitting with a gin and tonic listening to the BBC World News on the radio. I went out on to the veranda and looked down on the city. The first neon lights were coming on, bright as coloured stars in the shadow of the Peak.
‘Have a good time?’ my mother asked.
I nodded.
‘It’s days like this you never forget, no matter how old you get,’ she advised me. ‘It’s what life’s all about. Warm sun, friendship and music.’
She did a little twirl, miming fitting a light bulb in the sky and went inside.
 
 
What first prompted the thought in my mother’s mind I have no idea, but a fortnight after my ninth birthday, she warned me not to make any arrangements for the following Saturday morning. When I asked why not, she was uncharacteristically equivocal.
‘Just wait and see,’ she said, ‘and don’t – I repeat, don’t – mention it to your father.’
On the morning in question, my mother waited until my father departed for the office then took me to the top terminus of the Peak Tram, the famous funicular mountain tramway. We descended nearly two thousand feet to the bottom terminus, hurriedly made our way past the cathedral and by banks and shipping line offices, crossing Statue Square to the Star Ferry pier. All this way, my mother hardly spoke, ignoring my enquiries as to our destination.
Once over the harbour and off the ferry, our pace slowed to a normal walk.
‘What was all that rush about?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t want to bump into your father. He thinks I’m having coffee with Biddy Binns.’
‘So what we’re doing—’ I began to suggest.
‘Is a secret,’ my mother interrupted, confirming my thoughts. ‘You must never tell your father. It’s not that what we’re doing is wrong but, if he found out, I’d never hear the last of it. And neither would you.’
Finally, we arrived at a tenement building, the ground floor of which was occupied by a camera and binocular shop. To one side was a narrow doorway closed by a galvanized metal door. My mother opened it and we started to ascend a staircase that smelt of cats and boiled rice. At last, we arrived at a door with a number painted upon it and a picture of Kwan Ti pasted beneath a spy-hole. On the wall to one side was a brass plate in Chinese characters such as one might find outside a doctor’s surgery.
Immediately, my anxiety grew. I was in for some kind of treatment: but I was not ill. A boy I’d known at school had recently been circumcised and told all in graphic detail to his friends. Was this my fate? I felt my penis and testicles shrink with fear. Then it occurred to me: was my mother ill? A shiver went down my back. She looked healthy enough, yet … What if she died? A future of Dickensian proportions and misery spread ahead of me.
My mother knocked on the door. The spy-hole momentarily darkened before several bolts were drawn and we were confronted by a middle-aged Chinese woman wearing Western clothes.
‘Good morning, Mrs Booth,’ she greeted us in a slightly American accent. ‘Please come in.’
She stepped aside and we entered a small and sparsely furnished tenement flat. Upon one wall were a number of mathematical charts and tables. In the window hung the almost obligatory bird cage containing a lone zebra finch. A door opened and an elderly Chinese man entered wearing a long, dark-blue brocade gown, the character sow, meaning long life, woven into an almost invisible pattern. His face was lined and the nail of his left index finger was at least two inches long. This, I knew, signified he was a man of learning who never involved himself with manual work.
‘Good morning. I am Mr Zhou,’ he introduced himself. He shook my mother’s hand then looked at me. ‘And this is the subject?’
I felt instantly more apprehensive and wondered if I was here to receive some maths tutoring: the charts suggested that this might be the case and, indeed, I hoped that it was, preferring even maths coaching to circumcision. But then my father would have approved of maths coaching. This visit was to be kept secret. I was in a quandary.
‘May I introduce my son, Martin?’ my mother said.
‘Hello, Martin,’ Mr Zhou said without a trace of an accent. ‘Tell me, when is your birthday?’
‘I’ve just had it,’ I replied.
‘This I know,’ said Mr Zhou, pulling over a stool, ‘but tell me the date.’
‘The seventh of September 1944.’
‘You were born in the Year of the Monkey. It is a good year for you.’ He started now to speak more to my mother. ‘A male born in this year is very intelligent and good at solving mysteries or problems. Like a monkey, he can be devious or cunning. Very big-headed, I think you say. Maybe arrogant. Those born under this animal are always moving, have a quick mind. Now,’ he positioned his stool directly before me, ‘relax yourself.’
For the next five minutes, Mr Zhou thoroughly felt my head, studied my palms and looked intently at my face. All the while, he muttered in an undertone, the lady taking notes. This done, he produced a highly polished tortoise shell from a drawer. It was complete except for the tortoise. He studied this, muttered some more then put it away.
Upon a writing desk, Mr Zhou set out a fan of cards with pictures on them. Taking down the bird cage, he stood it on the end of the desk and opened the door. The tenement window was open, the sounds of the street below and the warm, diesel-tinged air wafting in. The chances of the zebra finch doing a Joey were, I thought, pretty high.
Instead, the bird flew out of its cage, strutted along the cards, picked one out with its beak and flew straight back into the cage. Mr Zhou closed the door and gave the bird a small berry from a jar.
He studied the card and the lady’s notes. We watched as he wrote a long document in black ink on coarse, buff-coloured Chinese paper. His brushstrokes were rapid. Every so often, he used another brush to draw a red circle. Finally, he waited for the ink to dry, folded the oblong sheet and slipped it in an envelope on which he wrote my name.
‘In summary,’ he announced as he handed it to me, ‘you will be a clever man but sometimes very lazy. You will be a leader, a famous man in what you do. You will live to be sixty-four years old and you will be prosperous and have sons. You will have a good marriage. In your fifty-seventh year, you will have much illness but in the remainder of your life you will be healthy.’
With that, he stood up, shook my mother’s hand, briefly put his hand in mine and left the room, closing the door behind him. My mother paid the lady with a cheque.
‘So now we know,’ my mother remarked as we reached the street. ‘You’ll have a good life.’
She seemed relieved, as if prior to this she had had her doubts.
‘Mr Zhou is highly respected,’ she continued. ‘He’s considered the best fortune-teller in the colony. They say the Governor’s wife goes to him.’
I did not comment, but I saw little difference between him and those I saw outside the Tin Hau temple in Yau Ma Tei, except that he spoke English and operated from a tenement flat.
We walked to Tkachenko’s for a mid-morning coffee and Black Forest gateau.
‘Remember,’ my mother warned me, ‘not a single, solitary word to your father.’ I nodded my agreement. ‘If he finds out,’ she went on, ‘I’ll be branded a witch, given a broomstick and sent to Coventry.’
‘Why would he send you there?’ I asked.
‘It’s just an expression.’
I sipped my drink and said, ‘Well, at least I’m not going to be a dustman.’
My mother looked at me for a moment then broke out laughing. I liked it when she laughed. It was not that often that she did.
 
 
Christmas Day 1953 dawned bright. The sky was cloudless and blue, the air chill. At nine o’clock, we embarked upon the Christmas-morning ritual of present giving.
In the lounge, we had a Christmas tree, of sorts. Imported from California, it was about three feet high and had started to lose its needles somewhere around Hawaii. By now it was a tinsel-hung, glass-ball-strewn, fairy-lights-lit skeleton of near twigs with an embarrassed-looking angel on top. We gathered before it, shortly to be joined by Wong and his family. Tuppence held back. The master’s side of the house was unequivocally out of bounds to him and any excursion into it was bewildering. My mother took him by the hand and led him in. Whilst she appreciated the exclusion rule and agreed it was necessary, the egalitarian in her disapproved of it. Tuppence was seated on an armchair and showered with small presents which included clothing as well as Chinese sweets and toys. Wong and Ah Shun received their presents, coffee was served and then we got on with opening ours.
Lunch that day could have graced a monarch’s table. The turkey, a gift from The Asia Provision Company, which presented all its customers with a hamper of gratitude every Christmas, was raised in Australia. Its skin, as highly polished and varnished as the table upon which it stood, looked like that on a whole Ho Man Tin pig. It was stuffed with cranberry, sage and thyme and the flesh fell apart like fish. The pudding was traditionally round and the size of a football, with a sprig of holly on top. We wondered where Wong had got it: holly was not indigenous to southern China. Then we found out. It was made of icing sugar. As for the pudding, it was so big we were still eating it fried in butter in the first week of January. The only thing that marred the meal was my father’s half-hour fit of pique when he found out the thing had been set alight with his best armagnac.
Christmas afternoon was spent playing Dover Patrol on the lounge carpet, listening to the Queen’s Speech (which my father considered obligatory) and settling the surfeit of food. Late in the afternoon, I walked down to a block of 1920s apartments near the Peak Cafe to visit a friend. We messed around a bit and I set off for home just before dark. It was a cool South China winter’s night. A stiff breeze blew by the cafe, rippling the creepers on its roof.
Reaching the tourist observation point, I stood alone, the updraft of wind from the harbour below making my eyes water. The lights of the city glistened in the cold air. A lone vehicular ferry made its way towards Yau Ma Tei. In the middle of the Kowloon peninsula, I imagined I could see the red, blue and green neon sign on the front of the Fourseas and immediately felt homesick for Soares Avenue and the dai pai dongs of Mong Kok: I doubted there was a single hundred-year-old egg anywhere on the Peak. Especially on Christmas night.
Feeling, as my mother would have put it, a little blue, I trudged on up the steep hill to Mount Austin, hauling myself along on the railing. My parents were playing canasta at the bull terrier coffee table when I arrived home. My mother had a gin and tonic at her side, my father a tumbler more than half full of neat whisky. I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Wong immediately appeared and poured me a glass of milk. Without asking, he then set to making turkey sandwiches. I took my milk into the lounge and settled down in an armchair to read the latest Eagle album, a Christmas present from Grampy, along with a five-pound postal order.
After a while, my father put a 78 record on the phonograph: the Original Dixieland Jazz Band playing ‘Tiger Rag’. It was tentatively suggested that I might go to bed, but I pleaded turkey sandwiches and Christmas night and the subject was dropped.
At about half-past ten, my mother went out onto the veranda. This was a nightly ritual. She would stand there sometimes for fifteen minutes, just taking in the panorama. I was not to know it, and nor was my father, but she was beginning to scheme secretly how she might make Hong Kong her home for the rest of her life.
‘Ken,’ she called a few minutes later, her voice tight with urgency, ‘get your binoculars.’
‘What is it?’ I enquired, joining my mother on the veranda.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, pointing across to the north-western end of Kowloon. ‘What do you make of it?’
A dull ruddy blush glowed behind some low hills. My father arrived and put his binoculars to his eyes, turning the focusing ring.
‘Oh, my God!’ he murmured.
My mother snatched them from his face.
‘Can I see?’ I insisted. I had to ask several times before she would relinquish them.
I adjusted the focus. It seemed as if a whole hillside was ablaze. It was the Shek Kip Mei squatter area going up in flames. The fire was intense. Even from a distance of five miles, individual flames could clearly be seen licking into the air. The highest must have reached fifty feet. I thought of my experience at Ho Man Tin, of the young man with only the photo of his family to link him to his former life back in China, before the Communists destroyed it.
My mother turned into the lounge, calling for Wong.
‘Yes, you wanchee, missee?’ he asked, expecting an order for more sandwiches or a fresh bottle of tonic water.
‘Look!’ she exclaimed, pointing once more at Kowloon.
He stepped on to the veranda and looked at the distant fire through the binoculars. His face showed no emotion whatsoever. To the Chinese, this was fate and it was his good luck to live and work in a comparatively non-flammable building, and the squatters’ ill luck not to.
‘No good for plenty people, missee,’ he said.
My mother set to work.
‘Wong, get all the blankets out of the camphor wood chest. Martin, you—’
‘What are you doing, Joyce?’ my father asked.
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ she snapped back. ‘Go and get the car.’
‘Get the car … ?’ my father repeated. ‘It’s after eleven, Joyce! On Christmas night—’
‘I know! Get the bloody car, cloth ears!’ It was a derogatory expression my father often used on her.
In thirty minutes, all the bedding in the house was tied into individual bundles of one blanket and two sheets. My school Hong Kong basket was full of turkey sandwiches and there were two cardboard boxes of tonic and soda water. This was all loaded into the car and we set off. My father was all for leaving me behind but my mother would not have it.
We drove down the Peak and on to the vehicular ferry. There were only two other private vehicles on board, both large American saloon cars filled with raucous party-goers returning home. The remainder of the deck was occupied by several fire engines and ambulances.
Once landed at Yau Ma Tei, it was only a matter of a mile or so to Shek Kip Mei but we were halted by a road block at Prince Edward Road and forced to turn right. My father drove a short way and parked in the forecourt of an apartment block. My mother got out, piled me high with blanket and sheet bundles and, with as many as she could carry herself, set off in the direction of the fire. I followed. My father was forgotten in her rush: maybe she thought he would rather guard and polish the car.
We had not gone three hundred yards when a British police officer stopped us. Beyond him, crowds were gathering in the streets.
‘You can’t go beyond here,’ he ordered my mother.
‘St John Ambulance,’ she replied, adding unnecessarily, ‘blankets. More coming.’
Her bluff worked. He let us through. The side streets were thronged with hordes of people sitting down. What was unnerving was that they were virtually silent, unlike most Chinese crowds which usually chattered like a flock of migrating starlings. My mother handed out bundles to the first families she came across. They took them, smiling at her. One man stood up, said, ‘T’ankee you, missee,’ and touched my hair. For his family, at least, things were not going to be so bad after all.
The air was contaminated with the foul smell of burning rubber and cloth. Ash blew past us like grey snow, some of the flakes still alight. A fire engine pumped water down a fat undulating hose from a street hydrant but it could not have had much effect. The sky was alight with sparks and flames, a thick column of smoke rising into the night sky then bending away on the wind. Spotlights played upon the havoc.
Next, we distributed the turkey sandwiches but carrying the boxes of bottles was beyond us so we returned home with them.
‘Bloody long way to come to give away a dozen blankets and a picnic,’ my father remarked irritably as we halted at the vehicular ferry pier.
‘Shut up, Ken,’ my mother said tartly and, curling up on the back seat, promptly fell asleep.
My father and I settled down to drink the tonic and wait at the car ramp for the next ferry departure, scheduled for two o’clock.
The following day, the full extent of the fire was broadcast on the radio. Ten thousand huts over an area of forty-five acres had been totally destroyed; sixty thousand people had been made homeless. The blaze, which had developed into a fire storm, had reached such high temperatures that aluminium cooking vessels had been completely burnt away. Incredibly, no-one was killed. This prompted the conjecture that the fire had been set deliberately to force the government into speeding up the squatter re-housing and rehabilitation programme. If this were the case, it worked. Within a year, the site of the Shek Kip Mei blaze was a brand-new refugee housing estate.
 
 
In weeks I had become more or less au fait with the geography of the Peak. The path I had taken that first day was called Governor’s Walk. The near conical mountain was called Sai Ko Shan (or, in English, High West), shan meaning mountain. I attempted to climb it but it was too steep for me. At its base was a rifle range where I collected deformed .303 bullets, digging them out of the butts with my penknife.
To reach the rifle range, I had to take what must be one of the most spectacular walks on earth. It began – and ended – at the foot of Mount Austin Road and circumnavigated the Peak.
I would always set off clockwise, walking beneath overhanging trees alive with butterflies and the birds that ate them, passing a waterfall and arriving at the place where the soldiers lay down to shoot across a valley at the butts. On one occasion, my walk was halted by a police barrier. A young woman had been murdered on the shooting platform, which I thereafter avoided for fear of ghosts.
After visiting the butts, my pocket full of spent ordnance, I carried on around the mountain. At first, the road wound its way by several houses, one of which was empty because no servants would work there. It was, according to Wong, haunted by the spirits of previous amahs who had been raped and murdered there by Japanese troops in 1942. A short distance further on, the road narrowed and became unsuitable for vehicles.
Holding more or less to the same contour, it continued around the mountain, sometimes as a viaduct, at others cut into the rock. Bit by bit, an incredible vista unfolded, first the western harbour approaches with merchant vessels awaiting a docking berth or discharging cargo into junks and flat barges called lighters. In the distance was Stonecutters’ Island, a military signals base. Further on, Kowloon came into sight, the peninsula crammed with buildings, ships lying along the jetties, ferries ploughing across to the island, walla-walla boats little more than aquatic insects. In another hundred yards, the central business district and the eastern suburbs came into view, the lower slopes of the hills dotted with houses and the red-brick block of the Bowen Road military hospital. Beyond Kowloon were the nine dragon hills.
Yet it was not the view that captivated me. I took that for granted. My bedroom window afforded me the same panorama. It was the sound. At first, I did not hear it but, gradually, it impinged itself upon me. It was a faint humming noise, as a wild bee hive might make. One weekend, walking the two roads with my mother, I asked her if she could hear it.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I can hear it. Do you know what it is?’
‘It’s the city,’ I replied, surprised that she did not realize it.
‘No,’ she answered, ‘it’s the sound of a million people working hard.’
Halfway down the western flank of the Peak, on a promontory 1,100 feet above sea level and approached by a cracked and overgrown concrete track called Hatton Road, was a large gun emplacement known as Pinewood Battery. During the war, it had been equipped with two 3-inch anti-aircraft guns but had been destroyed on the morning of 15 December 1941, during the battle for Hong Kong. The gun platforms still existed, as did the subterranean block houses, the command post, ammunition bunkers and sleeping quarters. The concrete walls of the buildings were still decorated with their camouflage paint, whilst in the sleeping quarters, the metal-frame bunk beds remained standing, the remnants of palliasses draped upon them.
Pinewood was a special place for me. The ruins were a purpose-built adventure playground in which a few friends and I could enact the Japanese storming it and the British defending it, the latter always winning in strict contradiction of history. Yet it was when I went there alone that it was the most exciting. Just walking down to the battery made my spine creep and the hair on my neck rise. A man had died there during the four-hour-long bombardment of 15 December. Now, it was as if his ghost still inhabited the place, rode the breezes coming up the mountain, sighed in the stunted pine trees and whispered in the azalea bushes.
I would sit on one of the emplacement walls and watch the ferries far below me, heading for Lan Tau or Lamma islands or the smaller outlying islands of Cheung Chau and Peng Chau. They carefully avoided Green Island directly in front of me where, as red warning notices on the shore stated, Hong Kong stored its explosives. Only fishing sampans risked passing through Sulphur Channel between Green and Hong Kong islands. The shoreline was strewn with treacherous rocks, the currents fast and unreliable.
Tiring of the view, I would then start hunting for wartime relics. Most of all, I wanted a British cap badge or uniform button. The battery had been manned by Indian Army troops when it fell and a Rajput regimental emblem would have been a find indeed. My wish list also included a Japanese shell from a Zero fighter – I was sure the place must have been strafed and knew that bullets hitting soft earth did not necessarily deform – machine-gun cartridge cases and, best of all, a shell case from one of the AA guns. What I actually found outdid the lot.
I was working through the low, dense scrub below the battery, about twenty yards out from the concrete skirt, when I came upon a piece of khaki material sticking up from the ground. Hoping it might be a fragment of discarded uniform with a button on it, I grabbed it and tugged. It was firmly embedded in the earth so I pulled harder. It would not shift. Kneeling, I set to work excavating it with my penknife. In less than a minute, I discovered the edge of a collar. Just beneath it was the smooth side of a skull, an eye socket filled with earth staring up at me.
Immediately, I knew what I had found and jumped backwards as if it had been a reared cobra, ready to strike. Scrambling through the undergrowth, I reached the battery, ran through it and headed up Hatton Road. It was a steep climb to Harlech Road. My legs ached as never before. I paused to gather my breath and wits and then ran on to the Peak Cafe where I asked someone to telephone the police for me.
An hour later, I was back at Pinewood with a dozen police officers and some coolies. They started to dig up the skeleton as I was asked questions by a British police officer who then took me home in a police car. My father was summoned from his office. I thought I was going to be for the high jump when he arrived, yet he was surprisingly mellow.
We were informed that the skeleton I had found was that of a Japanese soldier who had been shot in the back of the head. He had not, I was told, died in the war but afterwards, captured by local Chinese who had probably murdered him in retribution for what the Japanese had done to the local population.
‘What’s going to happen to him?’ I asked. I toyed with the idea of asking if he had any badges on him but decided that was pushing my luck.
‘His remains will be handed over to the Japanese authorities for return to Japan,’ the police officer answered, ‘where he can rest in peace.’
The next time I walked down Hatton Road, the hair on my neck did not prickle and I felt utterly alone.
This was not always the case during my Peak wanderings.
Whilst some of the mountain was covered in thick scrub, much of it was densely forested. Where there was a road, path or clearing, the fringes of the forest were heavily overgrown with plants seeking the sunlight but, under the canopy of the trees, the undergrowth was comparatively open. In this universe of dappled light existed creatures rarely seen.
The first wild animal I saw appeared fleetingly to me about a month after we moved to Mount Austin. It was early dusk and I was returning from the rifle range. A little way ahead of me, there was a rustle in the undergrowth and what I took to be a miniature deer stepped daintily out into full view. I froze.
Not much bigger than a large dog, it was reddish-brown in colour, had a short tail, two swept-back antlers and, to my astonishment, tusks. I was enchanted by it. The only other deer I had seen were in England, in the New Forest, where they seemed as tame as the feral ponies. This one was different. It was a truly wild animal that had chosen to show itself to me. Except for its disproportionately big ears, it too did not move: then it uttered a brief dog-like yelp and vanished.
‘It must have been a muntjak,’ my mother explained when I got home. ‘They’re also known as barking deer because their call is like a dog’s yap. You were very lucky. Few people ever see one. They only come out at night.’
Discovering that such creatures existed, I started to explore the forests. Several evenings later, I saw a bushy-tailed, cat-sized animal appear quite suddenly out of a burrow. With a badger-like striped face, the rest of it was otherwise a nondescript brown. It stood at the burrow entrance, sniffed the air then, spinning round, vanished back down the way it had come. It did not reappear and I was later told it was a ferret badger.
I soon realized that entering the forest was pointless. With the ground covered in dry leaves and twigs, walking silently would have been hard work for an experienced hunter, never mind me. The denizens of the forest could see, hear, smell and locate me long before I did them. Furthermore, most of them were nocturnal, and I could not stay out after dark.
At the bottom of the valley that dropped away to the south of Mount Austin was Pokfulam reservoir, the first ever built in Hong Kong to provide water for the embryonic city. As 1953 had been the driest year on record, by December and the school holidays the reservoir was very low indeed. This implied two things to me: first, that whatever lived in the valley would probably have to visit it to drink and, second, that whatever lived in the reservoir was now restricted to shallow water and therefore easily seen.
Supplied by Wong with a picnic lunch, I set off one Saturday morning and settled myself down on the cracked-mud periphery of the reservoir, as near as I dared to the water’s edge and the soft mud. To my surprise, there were very few footprints pressed into the softer mud. I pondered this, found a stone and tossed it down to the water’s edge. It struck the mud and disappeared with a sucking noise. The muntjak knew what I had not: the mud was quick. I shivered at the thought of what might have happened had I stepped another ten feet across the reservoir bottom. There was no-one about who would have heard my calls for help. I took up my picnic, left the mud and sat on the dam wall.
The water lay below me, as still and transparent as green bottle glass. I could make out every detail of the bottom. Schools of tiny fish occasionally darted by. A frog swam along. Suddenly, there was a large flurry of mud. It took a while to settle but I knew that something had put paid to the frog. As the water cleared, I noticed an oval outline in the mud about the size of a large meat-serving dish. Very slowly, it detached itself from the bottom and rose towards the surface, trailing mud that spiralled down from it. It was a grey-coloured turtle. From one end, a white and grey mottled head appeared, stretching out on a long neck which curved upwards towards me. It culminated in a prehensile nose that broke the surface for a moment before the head was retracted and the creature drifted back down to the mud. If I had not seen where it settled, I would never have known it was there.
Over the winter months, I also stumbled upon a pangolin feeding at an ants’ nest in a wide crack in the concrete on Hatton Road, any number of giant African snails with shells the size of a whelk’s, a dozing owl and, in a cave high up on the Peak, a colony of hibernating Japanese pipistrelle bats. Even the pangolin, normally nocturnal, paid me scant attention, feeding until I was almost upon it and even then just scurrying off.
Other encounters were not quite so benign.
The one warning my mother frequently issued was to beware of snakes. Hong Kong was home to over two dozen species of which at least four were venomous to man and potentially if not actually fatal. I kept an eye out for snakes but rarely saw one and, if I did, it was invariably heading away from me as fast as it might. Snakes in China appeared to know instinctively that there was a better than evens chance they might end up in a wok.
Walking to and from school, I daily passed along comically named Plunketts Road, at the side of which ran an open drain, or nullah, designed to shed heavy rainfall off the mountain as quickly as possible to prevent landslides. One afternoon, taking the path beside it, I heard what sounded like a hissing water leak. As a main water line ran along the side of the nullah and the public was being exhorted to save water and report wastage, I exercised my civic duty and went to investigate. The nullah was about eighteen inches wide and two and a half feet deep, sloping downhill in a series of steps.
In it was a common rat snake. Approximately three feet long, it was dark brown for its entire length with no pattern. A fangless constrictor, I had seen them often enough in snake restaurants and had once watched as one crushed then swallowed a small bird on the Peak. This snake must have fallen into the smooth-sided nullah and could not get out. If it continued down the nullah it would reach a storm culvert and escape. If it headed uphill, it would arrive at several blocks of apartments and, I was certain, a place on the supper table in one of the servants’ quarters. It was facing uphill.
A stick was needed to turn the snake. I found one of a sufficient length in the undergrowth, knelt down on the edge of the nullah and attempted to force the snake’s head round to face the way to safety. I had given it a few prods when it reared up, spread its hood and spat at me.
This was no common rat snake. It was a cobra.
I recoiled, a smear of slimy venom on my shirt. Very carefully, so as not to touch it, I removed the garment and dropped it on the path. At this moment, two boys from my class arrived on the scene. We debated what to do. The primitive and illogical fear of snakes welled up in us. That cobras fed on rats and rats spread disease to humans was forgotten. This was the devil in serpent form, the creature that had tempted Adam – we had had Bible Studies in school – and seduced Eve, whatever that meant.
A decision was made. Like Stephen in the Bible, we would stone it to death.
Gathering as many large stones as we could find, we commenced hurling them at the snake. Some found their mark, most did not. All the while, the snake raised its head, the hood spread to show the black-and-white ghost-like pattern of a face on its surface.
We had been at this endeavour for five minutes or so when two coolies carrying poles over their shoulders came trotting down the hill. They looked over the edge of the nullah. The cobra seemed slightly wounded. One coolie dangled a coil of rope in front of the cobra’s head. It struck at it then pressed its head to the nullah floor. The other coolie, signalling us to stand back, reached down into the nullah, grabbed the cobra by its tail, swung it up in the air and slammed it down on the concrete pathway. It was dead. They coiled it up, tied it with twine, hung it from one of their poles and set off down the hill. I walked home, ashamed that I had taken part in this assassination and vowing never to kill a snake again. Except in self defence.
My only other dangerous and somewhat farcical encounter occurred one evening on the Old Peak Road, a very steep footpath that wound down the mountain to the city below. Until the Second World War, it had been used extensively by sedan chairs and coolies but had fallen into disuse, the undergrowth on either side encroaching upon it, sometimes covering it completely. My reason for going down it was that someone had told me a Tokay gecko lived in the vicinity of the junction with Barker Road and was best seen at sunset when it appeared to go hunting.
The world’s biggest gecko, at seven inches in length when fully grown, the Tokay gecko was spectacular, a light brown with red, white and black spots. Its call, a distinctive tock-aye, gave it its name. It was also very rare, mainly because it was a highly prized local entree.
I had descended as far as Barker Road when I heard a noise behind me that sounded like someone rattling several half-empty boxes of matches. Turning, I found a fully grown porcupine coming at me in reverse, all its quills upright and a-quiver. I stood my ground, not thinking it would press home its advance. Yet it did, accelerating in my direction. I clapped my hands and shouted —to no avail. I fled. The porcupine, although not overhauling me, at least kept pace. The angle of ascent soon told on me. I slowed. The porcupine continued its attack. Moving backwards up a 1 in 3 slope seemed not to bother it. I found a new lease of fear and reached the level ground by the observation point. The porcupine stopped at the roadside and faced me. Now that I could see it clearly, it was huge, three feet long and bulky. Its nose was blunt, like a beaver’s, its quills black and white. It shivered. The quills rattled. Then it was off, running clumsily down Harlech Road and into the twilight. It was only later that a Chinese friend of my mother’s told me that porcupines could kill a leopard cat with their quills.
I was not only grateful to have avoided a leopard cat’s fate but also glad no-one had witnessed the confrontation. The loss of face would have been mortifying.
 
 
There were only two ways to reach the top of the Peak, discounting walking up the Old Peak Road which would test the stamina of a marine. One was by car or bus, the other by the Peak Tram.
Built in 1888, this was the world’s steepest funicular railway and it operated on the simplest of systems. A long and well-greased steel cable was wrapped around a massive drum in the engine house at the top. On each end was a tram car. As one travelled down the mountain, so the other rose up it. At the halfway point, the track divided in two so that the cars might pass each other. The only snag was that there were more stations in the lower half of the route than the upper. Consequently, when the lower car stopped at one of the stations, the upper car would halt in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by sub-tropical forest and birdsong.
The tram car was of unique design. Constructed of varnished wood on a steel frame and chassis, the uphill portion was an enclosed cabin. This was where Europeans or wealthy Chinese travelled. Other Chinese passengers, with the exception of baby amahs and their charges, were obliged to ride in the rear half which, although it was roofed, was otherwise open to the elements.
Whenever I could, I chose the rear portion. One just climbed on and sat down. There were no side walls, no restraining ropes, no safety bars. The only thing to hold on to was an armrest. Just before leaving the lower terminus on Garden Road, a tinny bell rang three times, there was a pause and the car edged forwards, running alongside a nullah and the Helena May Institute where, my mother frequently and convincingly but inaccurately remarked, Margot Fonteyn had taken her first ballet lesson. The single track then started to climb more steeply. To request it to stop, one pressed a labelled button; for boarding, one just put one’s hand out to hail the brakeman.
All the while, the gradient increased. Above Bowen Road the angle of ascent was at least forty-five degrees. The May Road station, just below the halfway passing place, was at the steepest point. Here, when the car stopped, it yo-yo-ed alarmingly as the long steel cable flexed. Of necessity, it was elastic. This bouncing always set tourists chattering or American sailors chortling with alcohol-fuelled hilarity. Boarding or dismounting was difficult and one had to wait until the car stopped moving. Uphill from the May Road platform was a small signal box in which a man changed the points at the passing place. From here the tram car trundled steadily upwards, entering a cutting and turning a long bend in the middle of what was essentially sub-tropical jungle. This is where it would sometimes stop to accommodate the other car in a lower station. Huge butterflies would flit through the open rear, birds dance and jump in the tree branches. I once saw a small python sliding through the undergrowth, much to the frustration of my fellow amah and coolie passengers who could not disembark and catch it for the pot.
I grew blase about the Peak Tram, for I took it as commonly as most people might a bus. The view, the harbour a backdrop at the top of the windows, the slopes of the Peak and the buildings apparently leaning backwards at a bizarre angle, were everyday phenomena.
The comments made by the tourists and American sailors were as predictable as sunrise: ‘Hey, you guys! You bin on the rides at Coney Island?’ At a mid-jungle halt: ‘OK! Y’all out ’n’ push!’ At the elastic stage: ‘How many times you reckon this baby’s snapped?’ To the brakeman leaning on a dead man’s handle, who spoke not a word of even pidgin English: ‘Ya hold that baby real tight now, y’hear?’ On any number of occasions, I was asked if I was the British Ambassador’s son, to which I replied haughtily that Britain did not need a Hong Kong embassy because we owned the place.
The Peak Tram being one of Hong Kong’s tourist attractions, it was also frequented by celebrities. I rode it with The Ink Spots, a famous black American jazz quartet; the film star Danny Kaye and the English actor Jon Pertwee who later became Dr Who. They never really impressed me: they were just people whose autographs my mother insisted I request. One day in 1954, however, was different. My mother met me after school at the Peak Tram terminus to take me down to the city. I forget why. As we waited for the next tram, a notice declared that Barker Road station was temporarily closed. When the car arrived, we boarded it, sitting in the open coolie section at my request, which was at the front of the car on its descent. My mother did not complain. It was a hot afternoon.
The tram set off. Barker Road station approached. It was thronged with people. A bright light switched on as we drew near. The car stopped in the station. Someone appeared briefly with a clapper board. Another called, ‘Action!’ A man in a light-coloured suit detached himself from the crowd, walked down the platform and entered the cabin. The tram set off. The powerful light switched off. My mother put her hand on mine. It was quivering.
‘That’s Clark Gable!’ she whispered.
And it was. He was shooting a film called Soldier of Fortune.
She scrabbled in my school bag, took out an exercise book, tore a page from it, fumbled in her handbag for a pen, then said the obvious.
‘Martin, get his autograph.’
‘You get his autograph.’
‘I can’t,’ she fumed. ‘I’m a grown up. You get it.’
‘You tore a page out of my exercise book,’ I complained. ‘I’ll get into trouble for that.’
‘I’ll square it with your teacher. Now get his autograph.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘He’s one of the biggest film stars in the world.’
I remained unmoved. She grabbed my arm.
‘Get his bloody autograph,’ she threatened sotto voce, her lips tight. ‘If you don’t …’
‘What if I do?’ I parried. It seemed I might as well take advantage of the situation.
The Peak Tram reached May Road station and bounced on its cable for a minute. Clark Gable stood up, disembarked and walked off into a crowd of film people. The tram carried on down the mountain.
‘Just for that,’ my mother said peevishly, ‘we’re not going to Tkachenko’s.’ A thought then occurred to her. ‘Maybe we’ll be in the background as he got on.’
When it was released, we went to the cinema several times to see the film. We did not feature in it.
 
 
Apart from the vehicular ferry, and the walla-walla boats which were expensive, the only way to reach Hong Kong island from the mainland of Kowloon was by the Star Ferry, universally known as ‘the ferry’, which plied, every fifteen minutes for eighteen hours a day, across the mile-wide harbour from Tsim Sha Tsui to Central District, as the heart of Hong Kong’s business world was called. As on the Peak Tram, the passengers were segregated, the wealthy and well-to-do – Chinese and European – travelling on the enclosed top deck, the rabble of coolies, amahs and others on the bottom – open to the elements – with their poles, boxes, bales and large, circular baskets of complaining chickens. To cross the harbour on the upper deck cost ten cents one way: the lower cost five.
I looked forward to taking the ferry. The craft would have to weave between warships at anchor, with Chinese women in rocking sampans painting the hulls or collecting the garbage. Cargo ships under a harbour pilot’s control slid by like mobile cliffs of black metal, eager faces at open portholes. The ferry had to give way to sail and oar so it was common for it to slow to a crawl or change course mid-harbour to allow passage to an ocean-going junk in full sail heading for the open sea. On one occasion, the ferry on which I was riding had to stop for a massive junk flying the Communist Chinese flag and armed with two small cannon mounted on her stern. It really was a case of the eighteenth meeting the twentieth century.
Whilst the ferries themselves were perfectly safe, I had my doubts about the ferry piers. Constructed of a wooden deck on wooden piles, they creaked and swayed dizzily as a vessel came alongside. The piles screeched, the deck planking moaned like lost souls and everyone waiting to board swayed unsteadily. What was more toe-curling was the fact that there were gaps between the planks. Twice, I accidentally dropped my pocket money down them, only to see the coins hit the water below and sink without trace. Not that I would have accepted them back, for the harbour was notoriously dirty – the Kowloon sewers emptied into it – and, one day, pushing through a crowd of Chinese peering down through the cracks between the planks, I saw a dead coolie floating under the pier. He was face down, bare to the waist, his arms rising and falling with the rhythm of the wavelets. In the centre of his back, halfway down his spine, was a hole, washed clean of blood by the sea. I could see his vertebrae. Schools of small fish hovered around him. A small crab rode on his shoulder. According to the Radio Hong Kong news that evening, he had been murdered with a baling hook.
My mother and I frequently rode the bottom deck.
‘Let’s rough it,’ she would say, approaching the coolie turnstile. ‘See how the other half live.’
We boarded the ferry, the gangplank moving to and fro as the vessel rocked on the waves. There were few seats on the lower deck and invariably, these were occupied by amahs who ran for them the minute they stepped on the deck. A running amah, dressed in her white jacket and black trousers, looked for all the world like an intoxicated penguin.
As the ferry set sail for the mile-long crossing, a mist of spume blew across the deck. Amahs carrying babies on their backs in cotton slings faced into the wind to protect their infants. Coolies removed the lengths of cloth they customarily wore like grubby cravats and rubbed their glistening muscles with them. My mother closed her eyes and let the spray cool her face. I, heedful of a bi-lingual notice on the bulkhead, watched out for pickpockets.
Another notice bluntly stated, No Spitting. The ‘other half’ had a habit of spitting to clear their throats of phlegm or catarrh. They also blew their noses by thumbing one nostril shut and then, leaning forward over the gutter, blowing hard. Consequently, it was commonplace to see gobs of pale green snot lying by the side of the road alongside cracked melon seed shells and chewed wedges of sugar cane. The concept of a handkerchief was alien to the Chinese. It seemed utterly ridiculous to them to blow one’s nose then put the contents in one’s pocket. Whilst spitting and hawking were disgusting habits, I had to agree with their logic and tried blowing my own nose in a similar fashion, yet I never mastered the knack. The snot came out all right but it dribbled as slime down to my lips and chin instead of flying free.
Once, I tried to get my father to see how the common man travelled on the ferry but he steadfastly refused. I asked why.
‘If God had intended me to be a coolie,’ he replied tersely, ‘he’d’ve given me a bamboo pole.’
‘But God doesn’t give the coolies poles. They buy them.’
‘It’s a metaphor,’ my father replied.
‘What’s a metaphor?’ I answered.
‘Do shut up, Martin,’ was my father’s response. ‘Remember, it’s better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than open your mouth and prove it.’
I shut up, boarded the top deck and moved the seat back over so we were facing forwards. The seating was designed so that whichever way the ferry was going, one could face the direction of travel.
Several weeks later, I informed a guest at one of my parents’ cocktail parties that a coolie’s pole was called a metaphor. He kindly put me right and I vowed henceforth not to trust my father’s sketchy knowledge of matters Oriental.
 
 
Although there was both the local and BBC World Service radio, and the cinema, I tended to make my own entertainment. My imagination was sharp and I had the whole of the Peak on which to ramble. As long as I kept clear of steep drops, rock faces and slippery surfaces, I was safe. No-one would molest me or accost me unless it was to pass the time of day. One of the constables who did duty in the police post took to engaging me in conversation. He was keen to learn English in order, I presumed, to get a red number flash on his shoulder, which indicated he was reasonably fluent in it. Everyone else I met would greet me, from the coolies carrying massive sacks suspended from their poles to the briefcase-toting taipans walking down in the damp morning mist to the Peak Tram.
One elderly European, always dressed in a grey suit with a gold watch chain, would be carried to the Peak Tram in a sedan chair, probably the last to be used in Hong Kong. It was a curious-looking contraption, a sort of mockery of an ecclesiastical throne made out of dark varnished rattan. If it was raining, the rattan was encased in a black custom-made canvas cover. The square roof, rather like those found on small shrines, was curled at the corners. Supported on two long bamboo poles, the chair was carried by two coolies. They had to walk in step to prevent their passenger rocking from side to side. At each step, the rattan creaked rhythmically, the occupant moving slightly up and down as the poles bent. Arriving at the Peak Tram terminus, the coolies knelt on the road, the rear coolie first, and lowered the poles. Their passenger stepped out and, without a word to the two men who had just transported him, walked off to catch the tram. He would, however, greet everyone else who was not Chinese, including me, with a gruff, almost begrudging, good morning. The Chinese he ignored as if they were made of vapour.
This I considered the height of ill manners and was of a mind to address the man on the subject, but he carried a gold-topped cane and I knew, from experience at home, what that could do to my buttocks or the backs of my thighs. And, on the other hand, the coolies seemed inured to his rudeness. Once, I followed them to see if I could have a ride and find out where they spent their day, but they disappeared through an imposing gate which was closed behind them. They were not for hire.
Public entertainment was limited, not through any law but because most people were too busy earning a living. Yet every Chinese New Year, temporary stages were erected on waste ground around Hong Kong for the presentation of Chinese operas.
The stages were marvels of Oriental ingenuity. Made of thousands of bamboo poles lashed together with strips of the same material, they could be a hundred feet wide, forty deep, fully roofed with canvas or atap panels and equipped with electric lights. The audience remained in the open, unprotected from the elements. Rather like the theatre in Shakespeare’s day, the clientele talked, drank, ate (even cooked) during the performance, which could last six hours. The actors dressed in flamboyant classical Chinese costumes in primary colours and wore heavy, stylized make-up. They sang in very high-pitched voices, their movements exaggerated and carefully choreographed.
I enjoyed these spectacles, but not for too long. The falsetto singing prompted a headache in fifteen minutes and a migraine in thirty. What six hours would do beggared even my imagination. What I really enjoyed were the fights. Swords, pikestaffs and other weapons of bodily pain and torture were flashed and swung, the combatants whirling and ducking, thrusting and slicing while all the time the orchestra was going frantic, cymbals clashing as swords met, gongs booming when the main protagonists struck each other a mortal blow. It was controlled mayhem and I loved it.
Bedlam could also be experienced, admittedly for a shorter period, at my favourite entertainment venue, The China Fleet Club in Wanchai, an infamous area of tenements, cheap hotels, tattoo parlours, Triad gangsters, bars and bordellos. It was the land of Suzie Wong.
Close to the naval dockyard, The China Fleet Club was a social club established, as the title page of its programme proudly stated, with funds contributed by the men of the lower deck – to whom this club belongs. It was operated by Royal Navy sailors for their comrades and incorporated several bars, a restaurant, sleeping accommodation, a barber’s shop, billiards room and a cinema. As the offspring of a parent attached to the armed forces, albeit as a civilian worker, I was permitted to go to the club cinema for Saturday matinees.
The main feature seldom interested me. What I went for were the cartoon preliminaries, and one in particular – Tom and Jerry. I was not alone. Sailors, many of them hung-over from a night on the Wanchai tiles, crammed into the seats, jostling, arm-punching and ribbing each other. As soon as the lights went down, the National Anthem was played. They all stood up. It ended. They sat down and the noise and kerfuffle began again. The screen came alive with the Pathé news. For this, the audience fell silent. Newsreels showed the colonial uprisings Britain was facing – Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya – soldiers fighting, struggling through jungle, advancing through rubber plantations or sun-baked rocky hills, dying. The screen went black. For a minute or two, the memory of the pictures of war kept the peace. Then someone would shout out.
‘Where’s Fred?’
Other voices would join in.
‘Give us Fred!’
‘We want Fred! We want Fred!’
Feet would start to stamp, hands clap and mouths hoot like owls or bay like wolves.
If the screen lit up with a Donald Duck or Woody the Woodpecker cartoon, all hell would break loose. The floor would vibrate as if an army were marching over it, the air thick with whistles and indignation. If, however, the cartoon was Tom and Jerry, the sailors would fall silent until the captions gave the name of the producer, then they all yelled ‘Good old Fred!’ in unison. The producer’s name was Fred Quimby. Throughout the cartoon, guttural, masculine, lower-deck mess laughter greeted every twist in the tale.
About noon, after the matinee ended, I sometimes strolled through Wanchai, passing the bars with their bamboo bead curtains, young women standing in the doorways with bottles of Coke, smoking Lucky Strikes. Once or twice, I tried to enter one of these bars but was rebuffed by the girls at the door, never mind the barmen within. Either they were brusque and ordered me out, sometimes all but manhandling me to the door, or they accepted my presence, asking me if I wanted jig-a jig, which sent everyone but myself into paroxysms of hilarity. I thought it all a bit of a liberty. I meant no harm, only wanted a drink and a bit of conversation but found myself either an outcast or the butt of incomprehensible humour. What was more, they all touched my hair. I gave them luck. Yet they would not so much as sell me a Green Spot. It was some years before I understood how the young women in the beaded curtain doorways of Wanchai made their living.
This aside, Wanchai did not appeal to me. The streets were sombre and lacked the vivacity of the rest of Hong Kong. Certainly, they were usually crowded, but there were few dai pai dongs, the streets were laid out in a severe, American-style grid pattern, the newer buildings square and characterless concrete blocks. There were no dried prawn or fish shops, no vendors of preserved eggs or rice, no little temples tucked away in back streets.
I mentioned to my mother that Wanchai seemed to lack soul.
‘Maybe it’s because it’s on reclaimed land,’ she remarked.
‘Reclaimed land?’
‘They knock a mountain down, pour it into the sea, let it settle and then build on it. Hong Kong hasn’t got much land space, so they make more of it in this way.’
I could only wonder how they knocked down a mountain.
 
 
From the time my mother’s mother was widowed in 1947, she had not left Portsmouth or, save to go to the shops, her tiny terraced house, and was living on a very meagre state pension. To give her a much needed holiday, my parents arranged for her to visit us, ‘indulging’ on an RFA vessel.
‘Indulgence’ was a quaint military arrangement dating back to the days when naval spouses accompanied their husbands aboard ship. By 1953, it meant that, if there was a spare cabin on a ship, it could be rented to a close relative of a serving officer for a nominal sum. The passenger had to take pot luck, however: departure and arrival dates were speculative. If the vessel was diverted en route, the passenger went with it. It was a potential military magical mystery tour.
My mother decided it would be best if my grandmother visited in the spring. She was sixty-four and it was considered that she would find the heat and humidity of the high summer debilitating. A request was put in to the Admiralty in London and my grandmother was found a berth upon the RFA Bacchus, a tiny, shallow-draft ship with a crew of about forty, which had been built as a sea water distilling vessel but was now used as a freighter carrying naval stores. My grandmother was listed on the ship’s manifest as super-cargo.
The Bacchus arrived alongside HMS Tamar on the morning of 14 March 1954. My grandmother walked unsteadily down the gangplank, holding on to both side ropes. She looked a lot older and more frail than when I had seen her last. She was wearing a dark blue dress, a cardigan, an overcoat and heavy, flat shoes. Even her leather handbag looked cumbersome. All the elderly women I had met in Hong Kong – even my headmistress – dressed in light clothing, in bright colours, and walked with a spring in their step.
‘Nanny’s not sick, is she?’ I enquired of my father as my mother ran to the foot of the gangplank, tripping like a little girl and embracing her mother.
‘No,’ replied my father, who intensely disliked his mother-in-law. ‘She’s as fit as an old fiddle.’ I detected a slight hint of wishful thinking.
‘But she looks so old and ill,’ I said.
‘That’s what England does to you,’ he retorted bitterly.
For all his imperial, monarchist jingoism, my father loathed Britain – ‘the lousy benighted weather … the bloody taxes … the blithering idiots running the unions … the bloody strikes … the blithering idiots running the government, the country …’ – with a vengeance and yet he never felt really at home in Hong Kong.
Later that day, as my grandmother unpacked her suitcase, I related our brief conversation to my mother.
‘Nanny’s not ill,’ she told me, ‘but she’s very tired. Living in England is not easy …’ Her voice trailed off and she kissed me. ‘Be nice to Nanny. She’s had a rough time of it since Dan-Dan died.’
Staying for just under three weeks, my grandmother’s time was filled with cocktail parties, Chinese banquets, shopping outings (which bedazzled her, coming from utilitarian Britain) and a drive round the New Territories, on which there was a near replay of my father’s encounter with the duck farmer incident, this time involving a man with two huge sway-backed pigs, who refused to chivvy them on to the grass verge. I showed my grandmother the ancient Dragon Inn tortoise whilst the Dragon Inn monkey showed us a sizeable and bright pink erection which brought tears of mirth to my grandmother’s eyes. My mother also took her in a rickshaw to Hing Loon where Mr Chan gave her a beer and she bought a string of pearls, to tea in the Pen (with sufficient funds this time), to Mr Chuk’s establishment for new clothes, to the United Services Recreation Club for lunch, to the dockyard mess for dinner. It was a social whirl the likes of which my grandmother had never known.
One afternoon’s excursion was to the Tiger Balm Gardens. These had been created in the 1930s by a Chinese multimillionaire called Aw Boon Haw who had made his fortune from inventing and manufacturing Tiger Balm. What my grandmother had expected – as, indeed, had I – was a formal garden of flowerbeds, fountains, trees, lawns and notices keeping visitors off the grass. Instead, paths wound through rock grottoes, passing caves hacked out of the mountainside. Each cave housed a fantastical tableau featuring life-sized figures fashioned out of plaster or concrete and painted in garish colours. What made these tableaux even more bizarre was the fact that many of them depicted men being cast into Hell, their stomachs ripped open, their hands cut off, the stumps of their wrists scarlet with blood, as well as executions and scenes of the most vile torture imaginable. In one, a man was being consumed by a tiger, his face contorted with pain.
‘Why do they want to portray such beastly happenings?’ my grandmother mused.
My mother shrugged and said, ‘I suppose they’re a warning of what will happen if you stray from the straight and narrow. And the Chinese can be a very brutal people.’
‘And you’ve chosen to live amongst these people?’ my grandmother finally asked, passing a larger-than-life statue of a man with a dog’s head and huge ears.
‘Don’t be silly, Mum,’ my mother retorted. ‘All mankind’s like that. Think of the Germans and the concentration camps. Think of the Brandenburg PoW camp Dad was held in during the first war.’
‘I don’t choose to live in Germany,’ my grandmother replied tersely.
Towering over the gardens, and an opulent mansion once the home of Aw Boon Haw, was an exquisite white pagoda. Seven storeys high, it was visible from virtually anywhere in the harbour.
‘And look at that,’ my grandmother continued. ‘Such beauty next to such an abhorrence.’
‘Maybe that’s to emphasize how beautiful life can be if you don’t sin,’ my mother suggested.
My mother greatly enjoyed sharing her colonial life with her mother. It was not that she wanted to brag about her new existence, in which she felt so at ease, but that she wanted to share it with someone she loved. For my father, Hong Kong was just another place in which to work: he might just as well have been posted to a supplies office in Chatham as China.
I too revelled in showing my grandmother the Hong Kong I knew. Walking round Harlech and Lugard roads, I was quick to point out a butterfly, a blue-tailed skink, a giant snail. I took her to the rifle range and dug out a bullet for her. It had been my intention to take her to Pinewood Battery, but the walk was too much for her. I also took her on the Peak Tram, sitting in the open section. To my surprise, this frightened her. My parents drew the line at my taking her to eat out at a dai pai dong.
My grandmother’s brief visit made me aware of how much I had changed. Sitting beside her on a bench along Harlech Road one afternoon, I recalled my life ‘back home’ in England, the cinder playground at Rose Valley School, the compost heap at the bottom of our garden which was my castle, the antiquated tractor that drew the gang mower on the nearby playing fields, the incessantly grey skies and that damp dog smell of drizzle-sodden pullovers. When a coolie trotted by and I returned his greeting in Cantonese, and my grandmother commented that I was now ‘a proper little Chinese boy’, I felt strangely proud. This was, I now understood, where I wanted to be. For me, ‘back home’ meant an apartment on the Peak with a world-famous view, not a semi-detached at the end of a cul-de-sac on the eastern fringes of London.
When the time came for my grandmother to depart, my mother was sad yet her mother was, I am sure, perplexed. She had arrived in Hong Kong to discover her daughter and grandson had in her eyes ‘gone native’ in all but clothing – and, even then, my mother occasionally wore a brocade cheongsam with modest side slits as a cocktail dress. It was light blue with pale green bamboo designs upon it, finches perching on the stems. I felt full of pride seeing her wear it. Most European women looked like a sack of sago pudding in a Chinese dress, with prominent bulges where there should most definitely not have been any, but my mother was petite, lithe and slim and fitted such clothing better than most gweipor.
I imagine that my grandmother realized, as the ship edged away from the dock, that she would rarely see her only child and grandchild again. Such was the lot of the colonial family whose existence was punctuated by partings. She knew that she was condemned to a lonely widowhood, looking out for the postman delivering a blue aerogramme or an envelope with exotic stamps upon it.
 
 
As the months went by, I came to learn a great deal more about the Peak, which for many years had been exclusively set aside as a European residential area. No Chinese was permitted to buy, rent or live there and the only Chinese allowed access were those who served the Europeans. By the time we lived there this law had been relaxed, but one clause, which forbade a Chinese from owning or operating a business on the Peak, was still in force.
There was, however, one exception to it. A Chinese lady owned and ran the cafe opposite the Peak Tram terminus.
A low, single-storey stone building with a tiled roof, originally erected in 1901 as a shelter for the sedan chair and rickshaw coolies, the Peak Cafe was an unpretentious place consisting of one large dining room under a roof criss-crossed with old wooden beams. The menu was unassuming, offering toast (naturally), sandwiches and eggs and bacon as well as Chinese food, soft drinks, sundaes, beer and tea and coffee, ice-creams and popsicles. The latter could also be purchased from itinerant Dairy Farm ice-cream sellers riding silver-painted bicycles with cold boxes mounted over the front wheel. The popsicles were made in fruit flavours as well as milk, soya milk and red bean paste, which looked enticing but was an acquired taste which I never acquired.
Every day during term time, my mother gave me a dollar bill with which to buy a drink on my way back from school. The temperature was often in the eighties Fahrenheit, the heat bouncing off the mirage-liquid road surface, so I frequently forewent a Coke and had two ten-cent ‘popsies’ instead, thereby saving eighty cents a day. However, by artful manipulation of human character, I was frequently able to save the money completely.
Although the Korean War was all but over, Hong Kong was still experiencing a very large through-put of military personnel, especially Americans. Like all tourists, they would head up the Peak Tram to marvel at the view.
The Peak Café did a roaring trade when the US fleet was in. As soon as the sailors had taken in the panorama, they seemed programmed to need a beer and there was only one place to go. Yet before they could order a bottle of the local San Miguel beer, I would ambush them, leaning on the wall by the entrance to the café and panting with thirst. My face would be conveniently flushed from the heat and the walk from my school, my shirt sticking to my back. Within a few minutes, an American sailor would pause at my side and say something like, ‘Hey, kid! How ya doin’?’
‘Tuckered,’ I would reply, using a word picked up in the Fourseas with which they would be familiar. I wiped my brow with my forearm.
‘Sure is hot! Ya wanna Coke, kid?’
And I was in, seated at a table under a ceiling fan with a condensation-coated bottle of Coke, a waxed straw and the dollar bill still secure in my pocket. Our conversation ranged widely. They wanted to know where I came from, where I lived, what my father did for a job and had I any big sisters. These preliminaries over, they would embark upon their own life stories. I listened avidly. The sailors came from all over America, from every background. A black sailor told me how his grandfather had been a slave. A lieutenant – he pronounced it lootenant – from New York made me believe he was the son of a gangster. A Texan remembered the corrida and the remuda, and pined for the open range. Many may have told me tall stories, but I came to appreciate that a man may tell a stranger far more than he could his best friend.
This was not my only lesson in human nature. Ordinary sailors and non-commissioned officers were far more generous than commissioned officers who were usually only good for a drink – if that. Americans were by far the most generous. Next came the Australians, then Canadians and, finally, the British, who ignored me. No army squaddie ever offered me so much as a glass of water.
My sojourns at the Peak Cafe came to an abrupt end one day when the proprietor came out and shoo-ed me away.
‘You no good boy,’ she criticized me in very competent English. ‘You like a beggar, always hanging round to get something from the sailors.’ She shook her finger at me. ‘But no more. You come here again, I tell your mother. I know where you live,’ she threatened unnecessarily. The Peak community was not much more than a few thousand people and most of them used the Peak Tram on a very frequent basis. Accosting my mother would have been easy.
I apologized to her in Cantonese and thereafter took to buying a drink or a ten-cent popsy, if I needed one, from one of the bicycle vendors. She lost out on my custom yet I had saved over forty dollars in two terms.
 
 
My father’s principal hobby, as my mother frequently declared with no small display of chagrin, was sleeping. He would return from the office at noon on Saturday and then, except for meals, the BBC World News and to replenish his glass of whisky or pink gin, he would essentially stay in bed until Monday morning. At first, my mother tried hard to get him to take an interest in life outside his work, but without success. On only a few occasions did he surrender to my mother’s sense of adventure.
One of these was her desire to visit Sunshine Island, or Chow Kung Chau. To reach it, one had to take a ferry to Peng Chau then hire a kai doh, a sampan with a hunch-backed old woman and a long oar or a superannuated walla-walla past its best. Audacious my mother may have been but to risk life and limb drifting without a walkie-talkie in the open sea, towards a Communist Chinese-held shore, was another matter.
However, one winter Sunday, a naval launch was requisitioned by a party of my father’s dockyard colleagues to visit Sunshine Island and have a picnic. Or so I was informed …
A hilly island about three-quarters of a mile long by a third wide, Sunshine Island had been settled by a few farmers, fishermen and, in the nineteenth century, pirates, but abandoned since 1941. It was now home to two European families, one headed by an eccentric, the other by a China Hand driven by God to help his fellow man.
I was reluctant to go but my mother persuaded me with embroidered tales of the pirates. My father was enticed along by the prospect of being on a boat, which brought out the sailor in him.
At the appointed time, we stepped on to the launch in the dockyard basin and cast off. The harbour was fairly calm but we had to cross open sea which was choppy. One or two of our party of fifteen started to look green about the gills but managed to retain the coffee and biscuits that were served as we rounded Green Island.
My mother, dressed in an old shirt of my father’s, a large pullover and a pair of jeans, enjoyed the crossing, as did my father, who, wearing a pair of neatly creased trousers with a cravat at his throat, persuaded the Chinese coxswain to relinquish the wheel to him once we were out of the harbour. The coxswain, assuming a naval gweilo would be familiar with the manoeuvring of a launch, agreed but soon regretted it when he noticed my father was heading straight for the wrong island. Not having the courage to admonish him, the coxswain mentioned it to Alec Borrie, a thin, tall, friendly man who was not only the trip’s organizer but also my father’s divisional superior – his Old Man.
‘I think we need to go a few degrees to port, Ken,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re on a heading for Peng Chau.’
My father looked extremely sheepish and altered course. A few minutes later, he surrendered the wheel once more to the coxswain and busied himself with his binoculars.
I noticed on these occasions that my father was often left out of the conversation and he seldom sought to join in. Sometimes, I felt sorry for him and wanted to go over and talk to him but, at the last moment, I would decide against it, knowing that I would be put down, dismissed or derided.
An hour out, we swung in to a small beach on the leeward side of a windswept, treeless island. The coxswain ran the bow of the launch up on the shore and a crew member sent out a gangplank. Boxes were unloaded and placed at the top of the beach. We all then went ashore and the launch reversed away. I felt marooned.
Carrying our boxes, we set off along a hint of a footpath across the island, coming first to an atap, a wood and straw hut. This was the home of Jack Shepherd, aka Jonathan Sly, of whom I had read in the newspaper. Formerly one of the managers of the Kowloon YMCA, he now lived with his wife in this hovel, making a meagre living writing short stories for the local press. As we drew near, he appeared at the door. Skinny, with short hair and a trim beard, he was barefoot and wearing an ordinary shirt with a dark blue Chinese padded silk jacket. Wrapped around his waist was a multi-hued Malay sarong. This was a man who had really ‘gone native’. Compared to him, I thought, the Queen of Kowloon was verging on normality. He greeted us in a gruff, monosyllabic voice and closed the door.
My father looked disparagingly at the figure as it disappeared.
‘He’s certainly letting the side down,’ he remarked to no-one in particular. ‘Thank God he’s doing it out of sight.’
‘Frankly,’ piped up one of the women who had overheard him, ‘I think individuality is a trait to be encouraged.’
My father was about to remonstrate but my mother got him first.
‘You do realize, don’t you, Ken,’ she said, looking pointedly at his feet, ‘that you’ve got on one of your best pairs of shoes? I hope you’ve got some others with you,’ she added, knowing full well he had not.
‘Standards,’ he responded, glancing at what the rest of us were wearing. ‘I’m not wearing pumps or clodhoppers. Or jeans trousers, come to that,’ he added: there had been an argument over those before we left the apartment.
‘On your own head be it, Ken.’ My mother shrugged.
My father, determined to have the last word, said, ‘This isn’t the Western Front, Joyce.’
‘I don’t think our brave Tommies in either war wore denim jeans,’ my mother retorted, grabbing the last word for herself.
My father silenced, we walked on, descending into the valley between the two hills where more atap huts stood amid some newly tilled plots. This, my mother informed me, was the home and dream-child of a remarkable Christian activist called Gus Borgeest.
Like so many in Hong Kong, Borgeest, his Chinese wife and their small daughter had arrived in 1951 as penniless refugees, in their case from Hangzhou. A Quaker, he was a humanist, which is what had endeared him to my mother who was not religiously inclined at all. At first, Borgeest had worked for the Hong Kong government social services department and came to appreciate first-hand the plight of the thousands of squatters and street-sleepers. It dawned on him that many had been farmers in China who had lost their land and livelihoods to communization. In them, he reasoned, was a workforce that merely required a chance to rise up above poverty and contribute to society.
Agricultural land being at a premium in Hong Kong, Borgeest turned his attention to the outlying islands. Chow Kung Chau provided what he required. He took out a lease upon it from the government at an annual rent of $180, less than the average servant’s monthly wage, moving there and renaming it Sunshine Island. By the time we walked into the valley, the embryonic community consisted of the Borgeests, two Chinese associates and several families of impoverished Chinese farmers.
We were all introduced to Borgeest and given a short talk on his aims and ambitions. This over, we were taken on a quick tour of the centre of the island, interrupted by such expressions as ‘Here will be the piggery’ or ‘This is the site of the fish ponds’. All I could see was a bleak, rock-strewn, grassy hillside with, here and there, plots marked out with white-painted stakes.
Pondering on the contents of the picnic, not to mention evidence of the pirates’ occupation, my day-dreaming was interrupted when two of the launch crew strode over the crest of the hill carrying shining new hoes, spades, forks and other implements of manual labour.
They put them down and returned to the launch. Mr Borrie assumed charge and briskly divided us into work parties. It was then I realized my mother had brought me to the island under false pretences. I spent the remainder of the day helping to dig a ditch, carting the soil away in a bucket. The only relief from this toil was a sparse supply of sandwiches and a bottle of lukewarm Coke. We left the island at five o’clock. My back ached, my arms and legs were sore, I had a blister on my palm the size of a ten-cent coin and another to match on my heel, which had burst.
‘The strain of honest toil,’ my mother remarked, rubbing the base of her spine as we waited for my father, who was limping, to bring the car. He had spent the afternoon in charge of a wheelbarrow. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel good?’
‘No,’ I replied pointedly. It was not just that my every muscle ached. I had been duped by talk of piracy into becoming a forced labourer. ‘And I didn’t see any trace of pirates.’
‘But think of the good you’ve done. You’ve helped those far less fortunate than yourself to start rebuilding their lives.’
Put that way, I felt smugly self-righteous.
‘You have to realize this,’ my mother continued. ‘We do not own Hong Kong. It’s a crown colony. We merely administer it. A hundred and something years ago, we stole this land from the Chinese. Because of that, we owe an obligation to the people who live here. And think. Many of them have fled here from Communism. They are refugees. We must help them. In a tiny way, that’s what you’ve done today. And,’ she went on, ‘even if you don’t agree with me, at least we’ve ruined a pair of your father’s best shoes.’
She put her arm round me and gave me a hug. It hurt.
 
 
I began to range further afield than the Peak. My mother’s life was filled with Cantonese classes and her usual daily social whirl. My father, of course, was engaged in his office, often not returning until well into the evening.
Having been rebuffed from Wanchai, I decided to head in the opposite direction and see what Western District had to offer.
The oldest part of the city, it clung to the lower slopes of the Peak beneath an almost sheer rock face that glistened with water in all but the hottest and driest of summers. Many of the streets were narrow, built for coolie rather than car traffic, whilst many of those that ran north to south up the mountainside consisted of steps. Those vehicular roads that ran parallel to them were very steep indeed with sharp corners that tested many a clutch and burnt out not a few. The ladder streets, as the stepped thoroughfares were called, tested the calf muscles. Along all the streets, the buildings were ancient, some a century old, with ornate balconies from which projected the ubiquitous bamboo poles of dripping, freshly laundered clothes or from which hung tresses of plants. Some were almost entirely hidden by garishly painted shop signs hanging out over the pavement.
My first visit to the area was prompted by my wish to see a famous temple which stood on the curiously named Hollywood Road. Claiming to be the son of a guest, I acquired a tourist-guide map from the concierge of a hotel and made my way along Queen’s Road West. At first, the buildings were modern office blocks and stores but, gradually, as if by some strange natural metamorphosis, they changed into narrow nineteenth-century buildings.
Dodging coolies slogging up the ladder streets with full loads hanging from their poles, I reached the temple. It was roofed in green-glazed tiles with a decorated ridge of warriors, gods, dragons and demons. I stepped into the forecourt to be surrounded by a gaggle of wizened crones, with arms outstretched for kumshaw. My claim that I had no money – indeed, I only had my Peak Tram fare and enough for a drink – cut no ice with them. I was a gweilo. Gweilos were rich. They closed ranks. A few hands tugged at my shirt. Then one of them tentatively touched my hair, much as one might risk a quick stroke of a dog the temperament of which one was not quite sure. Seeing I did not react, they all started touching my head, giggling and cackling and wheezing amongst themselves.
I gave them a minute to build up their stock of good fortune, which, by their appearance, was pretty reduced, then, extricating myself from their company, entered the temple through two massive red-painted wooden doors.
Inside, it was sumptuous, rich scarlet banners hanging down with thick, black, dramatic characters upon them. The altar was pristine and the deities most impressive. On the right, just inside the door, sat an old man selling joss-sticks and candles: on the left were a table of lai see packets and some shelves of dusty books. The air was heavy with incense smoke. Apart from its grandeur, however, it was no different from any other temple I had visited.
I was about to leave when a voice asked, ‘Do you like it?’
Turning, I came face to face with an elderly Chinese man wearing a long black robe to his ankles and a skull cap with a red button on the top. He sported a wispy beard and, in one hand, he held a closed fan. He resembled a character from a biography of Confucius. I just stared at him, dumbstruck, sure that he was either an apparition or a wizard.
‘Can you not speak?’ he went on. He spoke slowly, pronouncing each word exactly, as if imitating a teacher.
‘Yes,’ I stammered, ‘and I like the temple very much.’
‘But do you understand it?’
I shook my head and answered, ‘No, sir. Not really.’
‘So I will teach you.’
He led me up to the altar, joss-stick ash falling from one of the spiral coils hanging from the roof beams. This he brushed off with his fan which he then flicked open, quivering it in front of his face like the half wing of a huge black butterfly.
‘This temple,’ he enunciated slowly, ‘is called the Man Mo temple. Man means literature and Mo means war. As you can see, there are two gods. Man Cheung, the god of literature, wears a green robe and Kwan Yu, who is also called Kwan Ti, wears a red robe. He is the god of war.’
I gazed up at their faces. They were powerful but impassive.
‘Kwan Yu,’ the man went on, ‘was a real man. He lived two thousand years ago in the time of the Han dynasty when he was a general in the emperor’s army. Now he is the saint of brotherhoods, especially policemen and gangsters.’
That cops and robbers worshipped the same god seemed obtuse in the extreme but I made no comment. China was, I had learnt well, a land of extremes and contradictions.
‘Who is Man Cheung the saint of?’ I asked.
‘He is the god of civil servants,’ the old man answered.
I bit my cheek to stop myself laughing. The thought that my father had a god looking specifically over him and his kind was too much to bear.
The elderly man then showed me the side altar to Pao Kung, the black-faced god of justice, and, to the right, that of Shing Wong, the god of the city. Elsewhere were several heavy sedan chairs used in religious processions, a huge bronze temple bell shaped like an inverted tulip and a massive drum.
‘Now I must pay my respects,’ the old man announced.
He walked unsteadily to the altar and bowed to the god of literature. I left the temple, wondering who he might be. He looked like one of the letter writers at the Tin Hau temple in Yau Ma Tei yet there was somehow something more to him. He seemed to have the bearing of a learned man, rather than one who merely took down coolies’ dictation. Who – or what – he really was I would never know. Perhaps he was a phantom after all.
Now that I had achieved my aim of finding the temple, I dropped the map in a drain grid. From here on, I was to wander without direction, discovering what I could. It was like being an explorer.
For two hours, I sauntered through the streets where Hong Kong had first begun, at least as far as the gweilo population was concerned. Many of the early buildings remained standing, in a dilapidated sort of way, their plaster cracked by the sun and eroded by typhoons.
From the narrow balconies projected the ubiquitous bamboo poles of laundry, small bamboo cages of song birds and, here or there, a larger cage containing a cockerel. Dogs slept out of the way under the arcades, cats slinking cautiously past them to investigate the latest fish bone thrown from an upstairs window. Some of the buildings had sprouted bushes from cracks in the walls. Bougainvillaea or jasmine trailed down from pots on balconies. All this was part and parcel of any Chinese street scene. What made this place different were the shops and businesses.
Whereas Mong Kok had its pavement dai pai dongs, Tai Ping Shan (as the Chinese called the area) had little cafés and restaurants inside the shop spaces under the buildings. They mostly sold noodles, won ton, soups and dim sum, the ingredients of some of which I could not identify, despite having attended and graduated from the Yau Ma Tei School of Street-Eating.
The ladder streets contained stalls balanced on the steps or constructed on platforms. These precarious entrepreneurial adventures sold buttons, thread and zips, cut keys or sharpened knives, repaired wok handles and swapped or sold secondhand domestic appliances. One stall sold ancient Imperial Chinese dynastic bronze coins with square holes in the middle. Dating back in some cases several centuries, people bought them to ensure fiscal good fortune. The coins cost only a few cents each and, if one had a spare dollar or three, one could buy a hundred coins tied with red twine into the shape of a short sword, the better for fighting off ill luck and malevolent spirits.
I passed a door guarded by a be-turbaned Sikh armed with a shotgun. Behind him, the shop window was filled with gold, brilliantly illuminated by spotlights. It was all 24k fine gold – as near to pure as one could get it, soft, pliable and unsuitable for jewellery. Its colour was brash and it was not sold in blocks of bullion. Most of it had been fashioned into something – a crouching tiger, a fat Buddha, a Ming warrior or mandarin, a writhing dragon. I even saw intricate, solid gold sampans, junks, cars, pagodas, pandas and phoenixes. I knew the metal was sold by weight with only a nominal charge being added on for the exquisite workmanship. It seemed a waste of effort to me to fashion the metal into something when I knew the Chinese regarded it as merely an investment to be sold when times got tough. And, presumably, melted down. When I mentioned this to my mother, however, she gave me the explanation. To put a gold block on show in your house was in poor taste and arrogant, but to put on display a beautiful object not only indicated the owner’s refinement but, at the same time, his wealth.
A short distance further on I came across a coffin-maker’s workshop, open to the street. A carpenter was at work as I walked by, shaping the side of a coffin from a wide plank, curls of reddish wood peeling off from the blade. Another man was rounding off the clover-leaf end of a coffin, rubbing it with sandpaper. In the gloomy rear of the premises, completed coffins stood on racks. As I watched, the carpenter spied me and suddenly ran at me with a chisel. I fled to shouts of rage behind me. A wood off-cut bounced on the road at my side. Once in the next street, I stopped to get my breath back and to glance round the corner to check I was not being followed. He was nowhere in sight.
This episode of sudden, wild rage was not only terrifying but also incomprehensible. I had blond hair. I was lucky. I brought good fortune. Apart from the skull-faced gardener at the Fourseas, who was in any case verging on the certifiable, I had never before seen the legendary sudden wrath to which the Chinese were prone. Later, I asked Wong if this had happened because it was considered bad luck for the dead to have their coffins peered at by a gweilo.
‘No,’ Wong replied. ‘This man jus’ no like you. Maybe he Communist.’
To gain my composure, I walked down the street to a tea shop. Entering it was akin to stepping back a hundred years. The walls were panelled, the sides lined with cubicles divided from each other by latticed screens, the fretwork cut in patterns of the characters for prosperity and longevity, and containing a dark wood table and benches. The brass tea urns steamed at the rear of the shop, next to a shrine and an elderly man sitting at a table with a cash box, an abacus and a book of receipts. I appeared to be the only customer.
A waiter approached me and jutted his chin at me.
‘Yum cha,’ I replied.
He looked at me for a moment then signalled me to sit in one of the cubicles. A minute later, he brought me a pot of gunpowder tea and a tea bowl. I filled the bowl and took a sip.
‘Ho sik!’ I exclaimed, adding in English, ‘Very good!’
The waiter made no response whatsoever but walked away.
Although at first I was the only customer, over the next half hour, the place began to fill with elderly men, every one of them carrying a small bird cage containing a finch. They were tiny birds, some striped black, white and red, some yellow, some green, some a nondescript fawn. As they sat down, the men hung the cages from hooks suspended from beams in the ceiling directly over their seats. Tea was served. More arrived until every seat was occupied except the three in my cubicle.
Sipping their tea, the men conversed avidly amongst themselves. Overhead, the birds twittered and sang at each other. There were, it dawned on me, two different sets of conversation going on, human below and avian above. The tea house was like a social club for both species.
The waiter came over to me, signalling that I should leave. He was not antagonistic, but four men had entered with bird cages and wanted my cubicle. I nodded and asked for the bill. He shook his head and waved his hand from side to side, dismissing payment. I placed a fifty-cent coin under the teapot and left. I had not gone ten yards when the waiter came running down the street after me waving it.
‘Tipsee,’ I said. ‘kumshaw.’
He looked at me and smiled broadly. It was then I saw his silence was because he had no tongue. I made an effort to ignore his infirmity. He made a throaty sort of laugh, pocketed the coin and stroked my hair. I wished, as his hand touched my head, that somehow I would not bring him wealth but return to him the power of speech. When I got home, I told Wong about him.
‘Japanese cut plentee tongue wartime,’ he said stoically.
As I walked along the street, a faint and unidentifiable herbal smell reached me. The further on I walked, the stronger it became until, finally, I arrived at the source. It was a shop unlike any ordinary Chinese store, with a shop-front window and a glass door bearing vermilion Chinese characters. A neon sign of a six-foot-high snake coiling itself around a bamboo stake hung outside over the street.
The window display was most curious. It included bowls of seeds, what appeared to be bits of dry twig, desiccated bark, dried leaves, dehydrated roots, shrivelled fungi and flowers. Behind them were a dozen or so large ground-glass stoppered bottles containing preserved frogs, lizards, snakes and other less easily recognized pieces of flesh. Other reptiles lay on trays in front, dried out and stretched on frames of bamboo splints. Beside them were trays of what looked like black dried turds.
Going in, I found there was only one other customer, a woman with a florid birthmark on her neck the size of my outstretched hand. Behind the counter a man was busy writing on sheets of plain paper and opening drawers in a cabinet that reached to the ceiling and ran the length of the shop. From each he took a pinch or a handful of the contents, putting them into the sheets of paper. Every so often, he studied an old book. This done, he skilfully folded each sheet into a small, self-sealing parcel and placed it in the woman’s rattan basket. When she had paid and left, the man turned his attention to me.
‘Wha’ you wan’?’ he asked in pidgin English.
‘What dis shop?’ I replied.
‘Dis Chilese med’sin shop,’ he replied. ‘Can do for gweilo, too. You sick by ‘n’ by, you come. I see you lo more sick.’ He looked me up and down. ‘You lo sick now?’ he enquired optimistically.
‘I lo sick.’
‘You wan’ see med’sin? Lo all same like gweilo med’sin.’
Never one to turn down an opportunity, I said I did and he showed me round the shop. In addition to a vast array of dried plant and fungal material, there were velvet-covered deers’ antlers, tiny birds’ nests, powdered pearls like grey talc shot through with stardust, the ghostly pale exoskeletons of sea-horses, dried bears’ spleens (the ‘turds’ in the window), an assortment of dried insects, a mummified tiger’s penis (’ … make you good wif you lady fr‘en’ …’) and his pièce de résistance, a rhino’s horn. When I asked for what these were cures, he reeled off a list of ailments, most of which I was ignorant of and hoped to so remain. When he was unable to give the English name, he mimed the symptoms, reminding me of the grotesque tableaux in the Tiger Balm Gardens.
Before I could leave, he mixed up a packet of dried plant matter for me.
‘Good gen’ral med‘sin for you. Like tonic. You put water, boiloo wung hour. Drink wung cup wung day. Make you st’ong.’ He flexed his biceps and felt them. ‘Lo ill for maybe t’ee mumf.’
When I got home, I gave the packet to my mother who was in the kitchen making a light supper, it being Wong’s day off. She tipped the contents into a saucepan and boiled it for an hour. The apartment filled with such a noxious odour it woke my father, asleep in the bedroom. It also brought a shine to the interior of the saucepan not seen since it was new.
My mother and I let it cool then poured a cup. It tasted execrable. We left the remainder for Wong. When he returned, he was most grateful for it. As far as he was concerned, this was only a few drops short of being the elixir of life, its cost prohibitive on his wages.
 
 
The main mercantile district of Hong Kong, the city of Victoria, referred to by everyone as Central District – or just Central – held little interest for me. Most of the buildings were the offices of banks, shipping lines, lawyers, insurance companies and import/ export firms. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank towered over the parked cars in what was known as Statue Square. To one side were the law courts, a classical colonnaded building with a dome on top. It could have been transported there from any European city. Yet, for all that, the old China still impinged itself upon the mid-twentieth century.
In rush hour, the chances of a rickshaw jam were greater than one composed of vehicles, for many office workers and businessmen coming from Kowloon took rickshaws from the ferry pier to their offices. Of those who chose to walk, many paused at the shoe-shine ‘boys’.
I could not understand why grown men were referred to as boys. The Fourseas had had room boys: only the bellboy, Halfie, had actually been a boy. Wong was our house boy; my father employed a Chinese office boy who was at least twice his age.
The shoe-shine boys bucked the trend. Half of them were indeed boys, some of them my age, who squatted on the pavement under the shade of an arcade, a box before them. If a customer halted, tins of polish, brushes and cloths would appear from within the box. Deft fingers rolled up trouser legs and, within minutes, the shoes would appear pristine, scuff marks and dust removed.
On one occasion, my father having withheld my pocket money for some misdemeanour, I toyed with making a shoe-shine box of my own, stocking it with polish and brushes from the kitchen and setting up my pitch. At fifty cents a polish – the going rate – I could earn a week’s pocket money thrice over in a morning. I mentioned my plan to my mother.
‘You want to do what!’ For a moment she looked at me, then burst out laughing.
‘It’s not funny,’ I defended myself. ‘I’ve got to earn some pocket money.’
‘Can you imagine your father coming along the street … ?’ She grinned broadly at the prospect. ‘Now that would be “going native” in no small measure. A definite plunge in standards. You’d be in the paper! Photo and all!’ She extrapolated further. ‘Gweilo Boy Sets New Trend. The Shoe-shine Entrepreneur. Son Sets Up Shoe-shine Box: Father Commits Hari-kiri.’
‘So, can I do it?’ I asked, sensing the wind blowing my way and wondering what hari-kiri was.
‘No,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not because you’d cause a scandal. That would be hilarious. It’s that, if you were to set up in business, you would be taking earnings from the other shoe-shine boys and they need all they can get.’
As usual, my mother’s common sense prevailed and I put the idea out of my head. She surreptitiously reinstated my weekly allowance.
The shoe-shine boys shared the pavements with a small coterie of beggars. One was a tall, thin man who was totally blind, his face always turned up to the sky, his hand holding a begging cup and a length of bamboo painted as white as his sightless eyes. He was invariably accompanied by a child whose role was not to induce sympathy in passers-by but to act as a guide dog might, seeing him across the road or on to a tram. Another beggar was a woman whose body and limbs were twisted by deformity into a grotesque embryonic crouch. She got about on a small wooden platform to which had been affixed the wheels of an old baby’s pram. For her, in her miserable condition, beggary must have been particularly demeaning, for every day she sold newspapers by Blake Pier, cradling her limited stock of copies of the China Mail and Wah Kiu Yat Po in her arms like the baby she would never have.
Perhaps the most obvious intrusion of ancient Cathay into modern Hong Kong were the coolies. Throughout the day, swarthy Hakka women from the rural hinterland dressed in black, often wearing dust caps made out of folded newspaper, appeared down the street with bamboo poles over their shoulders from which were suspended anything from baskets of building rubble and bundles of waste paper to discarded wooden filing cabinets and office chairs. If it could be re-used, re-cycled or re-sold, it was.
These women were not restricted to carting debris. I once came to a hillside being blasted with dynamite and watched as the charges were laid by women, the detonator wire run out by women and the warning given by a woman with a gong. When the dust settled, it was women who carried away the dislodged rocks and earth. Not one man seemed to be involved.
Only one place in Central held me in awe and I visited it over and over again, like a rubber-necking tourist. It was the main banking hall of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters. I had gone there first with my mother. Reluctantly.
On either side of the entrance was a life-size bronze lion. The left-hand one was growling.
‘They’re called Stephen and Stitt,’ my mother said as we waited to cross the road.
‘Which is which?’
‘Stephen’s growling,’ was her reply.
‘What’s a stitt?’
‘They’re named after two bank managers, Mr Stephen and Mr Stitt.’
On reaching the lions, I was struck by their size, yet this was not all. They had bullet holes in them from the war and Stephen had a lump of shrapnel embedded in him. Both were covered in a dark brown patina except that Stitt’s front paw shone like gold. I soon saw why. People walking by touched it. For luck.
‘This,’ my mother announced as we entered the bank and turned to climb a flight of stairs, ‘is actually the back door. The front door, and the address, are on the other side.’
This seemed nonsensical and I said so.
‘It’s to do with the laws of necromancy,’ my mother replied.
‘The main door has to face the hills, away from the harbour, to keep the sea dragon out and to stop the money flowing out into the ocean.’
Explained thus, it made perfect sense to me.
The banking hall was vast. The sound of voices was muffled by its immensity. Huge, square, dark brown marble pillars held up the ceiling – and what a ceiling it was: barrel vaulted and covered in a gargantuan mosaic. In the centre was an elaborate golden starburst set against an azure backdrop, around the sides was a multicoloured frieze of figures engaged in all manner of Oriental and Occidental craftwork and industry. The ceiling never failed to stun me. I would often take a detour through the bank on my way from the Peak Tram to the Star Ferry just to pass under the reflected glow of the mosaic.
Once, accompanying my father to the bank, I announced my determination to be an artist.
‘What on earth prompted that ridiculous idea?’ he exclaimed, busying himself at the counter with his cheque book.
‘That did,’ I said, staring mosaicwards.
He did not look up.
‘Well, put that notion out of your head. No-one gets rich by being an artist.’
‘There’s more to being rich than having a lot of money,’ I answered.
The teller accepted his cheque. He turned to face me.
‘No, there isn’t,’ he said succinctly, ‘and anyone who says there is is a bloody fool.’
‘Mum told me there is,’ I said.
‘Yes, well your mother doesn’t have to earn it,’ he rejoined.
When he had collected his money and put it in his wallet, I said, ‘Look up at the ceiling, Dad.’
He did so, briefly.
‘Very impressive,’ he remarked offhandedly.
Once outside, as we walked to the car parked in Statue Square, I mused, ‘I bet the artist was paid a lot of money to make that ceiling.’
‘Probably drank it all and never did another thing in the rest of his life.’
That, I considered, was ripe coming from an experienced pink gin downer but refrained from saying as much. I was fast learning the art of knowing when, as my father put it, to keep my trap shut.
 
 
Not long after the forced-labour day on Chow Kung Chau, another trip was arranged by launch to the adjacent island of Hei Ling Chau. It was sparsely populated and consequently the location of a leper colony – and it was this we were to visit.
My mother heard of the trip from a newsletter sent out to naval wives and immediately announced we were going. My father was reluctant in the extreme. He and disease were not close relations, he declared, and he was damned if he was going to spend his Sunday leisure time wandering around staring at those who were.
‘What’s a leper colony?’ I asked.
‘It’s where they lock away the poor buggers who’ve caught leprosy,’ my father replied, hoping this would deter me from joining my mother.
I asked what leprosy was.
‘Leprosy,’ my mother answered, giving my father a look that precluded his interrupting, ‘is a disease caused by bacteria. There are two kinds – dry leprosy and wet leprosy. If you have the dry sort, your nerves die off bit by bit and you become paralysed. Or, because they have no nerves in them, parts of your body wither and drop off. Most common is you lose your nose and fingers and toes, but you can have a whole arm drop off. If you have wet leprosy, your entire body is covered in running sores and ulcers. That kind is dangerously contagious, meaning you can get it just by touching someone with it, but the dry is very hard to catch indeed—’
‘And your mother wants to take you to meet some people who’ve got it,’ my father butted in, no longer able to contain himself. ‘Really, Joyce, sometimes you take the bloody biscuit. Anyway, you’re not going. I shall simply refuse to allow it. I’m not having our son exposed—’
‘Don’t talk such bloody bosh. We’ll be perfectly safe. You think the people who run the leprosarium will put visitors at risk?’
‘Why do you think they lock all the poor bastards away on a ruddy island?’
‘They don’t lock them away. They look after them and cure them.’
‘And once they’re cured, they just become beggars,’ my father retorted. ‘You can’t do much with only one arm and half a leg. Better to let them die.’
My mother pursed her lips and replied, ‘Sometimes, Ken, I wonder what I saw in you.’
A fortnight later, on a Sunday of bright sun and high scudding clouds, we were all three of us cutting through a choppy sea aboard a naval launch heading for Hei Ling Chau. On arrival at a short jetty, we were met by a Chinese man who helped us to disembark under an archway of gold and scarlet bunting. A dozen other private launches rode at anchor.
‘Welcome to our fete!’ the Chinese man said as we stepped on to dry land.
‘How do you spell that?’ my father muttered. ‘Fate or fête. I really do not see why they don’t just have a bloody flag day like anybody else. This really is bloody madness, Joyce.’
Ahead of us were some low buildings surrounded by stalls. Everything was decorated with strips and banners of gold and scarlet crêpe paper, catching the sunlight as they rippled in the breeze. Several hundred people milled about, trying their luck at a coconut shy, a roll-a-ten-cent-coin table and other attractions such as might have been found at any church bazaar anywhere in rural Britain. The only difference was that some of the helpers were British Army privates and naval ratings and there was a .22 rifle range set up for those who fancied their hand as a dab shot.
‘Well,’ my mother replied, ‘it seems to be a pretty bloody widespread madness.’
We joined the crowd, tried the lucky dip, bought some raffle tickets and visited the tombola stall. My father hung back, smoking his pipe, his teeth clenched in anger on the stem. I wondered if he smoked to enjoy the tobacco or to fumigate the air around him. After a short time, we saw him strolling off southwards.
‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ my mother mused, ‘if he missed the boat back? Marooned on a desert island with a colony of lepers and that bloody pipe …’
It was then I saw my first leper. He was sitting behind a trestle table upon which were arranged a number of home-made wooden objects such as bookends, desktop pen holders and paperweights shaped like the outline of the island, its name burnt into the surface with a hot poker. From the front of the table hung a sign in English and Chinese stating Woodworks made by inmats. Please by. Garuntee very clean.
As my mother had predicted, the leper had no nose, only a ragged hole surrounded by flaps of skin. He had also lost several fingers and an ear. Apart from this, he looked quite normal and healthy, certainly in better shape than many of the beggars I saw on the streets. I searched my pockets. I had ten dollars left from a postal order sent by Nanny for my birthday.
Walking up to the stall, I studied the wares on offer. They were simple items but very well made. The leper smiled at me but did not speak, his upper lip curling like a snarling dog’s, his lower hanging loose. I picked up a pair of bookends.
‘We get our wood from a timber yard,’ a voice said over my shoulder. ‘They’re left-overs. Mahogany, teak, sandalwood.’
I turned. A European man stood behind me dressed in slacks and an open-neck cotton shirt. He only differed from the rest of the Sunday crowd in that a stethoscope hung round his neck to denote his office.
‘Having fun?’ he enquired.
‘Yes, sir,’ I answered then, seizing the moment, asked him a question that had been bothering me for days. ‘Is it true you only cure the lepers so they can become beggars?’
‘Who on earth told you that nonsense?’ he exclaimed, quite clearly taken aback. ‘We don’t just cure their illness, we cure their souls, too. We train them to do jobs. This man here’s going to be a carpenter. Once he has a job, which we’ll find for him, he’ll get his dignity and his life back.’ He smiled down at me. ‘You don’t want to believe everything you hear, sonny Jim.’
I pointed to the bookends and asked, ‘Gai doh cheen?’
The leper sort-of chortled and raised five assorted digits.
Ng mun?’ I questioned, to be sure of the price.
He nodded, his eyes bright at the thought of a sale. I gave him five dollar notes and he handed me the bookends, bound together by several rubber bands. As I parted with the money, our hands met, his skin blotched, warped and stretched by leprosy, mine smooth with health.
Dor jei,’ I thanked him. He chortled again and I saw he had only half a tongue.
As I was about to go, he reached out with one hand, nodding enthusiastically at me, his eyes pleading for something. His index and middle finger were missing. Going round the back of his stall, I stood next to him. Fleetingly, so that I hardly felt it, he touched my hair.
On the return launch trip, I took my mother aside, out of my father’s earshot. ‘I let a leper touch my hair,’ I admitted, hurriedly adding, ‘but he was a dry one.’
I expected a scolding, or at least an admonishing, but neither materialized.
‘Well then,’ my mother replied with a smile, ‘let’s hope to God it brings the poor man luck, shall we?’
When we got home, however, I accidentally mentioned my encounter with the leper to my father. He went apoplectic.
‘You did what?’ he bellowed. ‘Joyce! Do you know what this stupid little sod has done?’
‘Lots of things, I expect,’ my mother urbanely replied.
‘He allowed a bloody leper to stroke his hair. It’s bad enough in the bloody street with the entire bloody population of China, but in a benighted leper colony …’ His face was red with anger, going towards puce. He put down his pink gin. ‘Go into your bedroom and stay there.’
I did as I was told. There were raised voices in the sitting room followed by a slammed door. My father entered my room carrying a red leather slipper.
‘Bend over the side of the bed.’
‘Why? I haven’t done anything wrong.’
I was amazed at my defiance. Always in the past, I had meekly succumbed to a beating, accepting it much as a miscreant dog might a kick or a rolled-up newspaper. Yet now, I thought, I would not. I had not been disobedient or insolent, the usual crimes levelled at me, not always without reason. A paddling now would be an injustice. My father clenched his teeth.
‘Bend over, damn you—’
‘No.’
He swung the slipper at my buttocks. I side-stepped.
‘And they don’t cure them to be beggars. You were wrong. They find them proper jobs so they get their dignity back.’
I had no idea what dignity was but it had to be a good thing.
‘What?’ my father exploded.
‘The leper doctor told me.’
‘I’ll give you bloody dignity, you little sod!’
My father’s left hand struck quicker than a cobra. Grabbing me by the back of the neck, he forced me to bend over, then, with all his might, he hit me four times in quick succession on the buttocks. I did not cry: I would not give him the satisfaction.
‘Now get into bloody bed.’ He was grinding his teeth with rage. It was from that moment that I hated my father, truly abhorred him with a loathing that deepened as time went by and was to sour the rest of both our lives.