by Martin Booth
'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 over a 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 spyhole. 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.'
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 Café 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 café, 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 northwestern 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 h
is good luck to live and work in a comparatively nonflammable 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.
