Gweilo

by Martin Booth

  '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 wan tee 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 house-keeping 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. Som
etimes, 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 extraterrestrial 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 t
he 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.