by Martin Booth
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 pat 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 multi-millionaire 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 H
ong 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 café 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 Café 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 Café 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 hunchbacked 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.
