Gweilo

by Martin Booth

  MY MOTHER AND I HAD PLANNED TO GO SWIMMING AT Repulse Bay on the afternoon of Sunday, 27 August 1954. My father reluctantly said that he would drive us there, returning home to indulge in his usual weekend pastime of pink gin and sleeping. As Wong set the table for an early lunch, my father stood legs apart on the veranda as if on the rolling deck of his own battleship, surveying the harbour through his binoculars.

  'Lunch 'edy, missee, master,' Wong announced.

  My father stepped into the lounge and announced, 'Beach is off, Joyce. Number One signal's up.'

  By this, he meant that he had looked at the Hong Kong Observatory on Kowloon through his binoculars and seen a storm warning on the signal mast.

  My mother, not to be done out of an afternoon's swimming, replied, 'Are you sure? It's a lovely day and One is only a stand-by . . .'

  'Tropical storms can gather very quickly,' my father opined.

  'Surely not between now and five o'clock,' my mother came back. 'I don't think we need to be concerned.'

  To win the argument, my father telephoned HMS Tamar. The meteorological officer on duty confirmed it: they expected to raise the Number Five some time in the early evening. We sat down for lunch.

  'What do the signals actually mean?' I asked.

  My father, ever the knowledgeable maritime obfuscator, replied, 'Number One is a standby signal, Number Five to Eight predicts winds up to sixty miles per hour and designates the direction they will come from, Number Nine is winds up to gale or storm force and Number Ten hurricane force, over sixty with gusts up to a hundred and thirty.'

  'What's this one going to be ?'

  'Tamar says a near hit, so Nine, possibly Ten.'

  My mother called Wong and gave him the news. He immediately went out on to the veranda and brought in my mother's potted plants. After lunch, we prepared for what was coming, removing ornaments from window sills, parking the car well under the adjacent block of apartments, putting old towels along window sills and external door lintels. In her bedroom, my mother stored away all her make-up jars, hairbrushes, ring stand and my father's cufflink tray. Wong, meantime, emptied the bathroom shelves and placed the contents – and the glass shelves – in the dry room. In my bedroom, I removed my ornaments from the window sill – a pile of High West bullets, my carved wooden camel and a detailed model of a junk – placing them in my cupboard with my books.

  I had experienced several severe tropical storms and one typhoon before, but we had been living in the Fourseas or Boundary Street at the time and only suffered a few leaking windows. Now we were positioned on the fourth floor of a block of apartments erected on the very pinnacle of a summit secondary only to the Peak. With no protection on all sides, we were perched at about fifteen hundred feet above sea level.

  'What's this typhoon called?' I enquired.

  Every typhoon was allotted a girl's name, for a reason I could not fathom but which Philip Bryant had confided was because all females were like typhoons: impulsive, destructive, exciting, dangerous, single-minded, determined and immovable.

  This one was called Ida. We had a spinster relative of the same name, but she was a mousy, quiet woman who lived in a rural shire town, spent her life baking scones and lovingly scolding an old cat. Perhaps we were not in for a bad typhoon after all.

  I was wrong.

  By the time I went to bed, the sky was covered with dense cloud, the lights of the city reflecting off it. I read my comics, recently arrived, and went to sleep to be woken just after dawn by the booming gusts of wind. Each time one hit the building, the air within seemed to contract. I could feel the pressure on my ears. It was like living inside a bass drum.

  I switched on my bedside light and crossed to the window. The cloud base had dropped to not much above the roof of our building. I could still see the city below in a monochromatic dawn light but under a metallic sky that seemed to glower with rage and rob the view of colour. Kowloon was invisible. Intermittently, squalls of heavy rain blew by. They did not strike the window full on but sprayed off the corner of the stonework as if it were the bow of a ship. A substantial tree branch blew by – vertically.

  Yet what was most frightening, although at first I did not recognize its significance, was my reflection in the window. When a gust hit the glass, it distorted like a circus Hall of Mirrors, the distortion lasting only seconds.

  'Martin, get away from the window!' It was my mother in her nightie and dressing gown. 'Now!'

  'Why? I was only looking—'

  'The glass is bending. If we get a really hard knock, it'll implode and you'll be cut to shreds. Go to the front door.'

  Suddenly, I felt vulnerable. This, I imagined, was what it must have been like in the war, never knowing if a bomb was going to hit your house. In the entrance hall to the apartment were piled suitcases filled with everything moveable and of value.

  'Are we going away?' I asked.

  'Don't be so bloody stupid!' my father retorted.

  He was fully dressed and ready for action. By his side was Wong, armed with a mop, his weapon at the barricade in the battle against the typhoon.

  'Use your bloody brain,' my father continued. 'How the hell do you think we'll get down the bloody drive?'

  I had to admit he had a point. The curving driveway up to the building was completely exposed. We were marooned.

  Over the morning, the wind increased. It howled, fizzed, whined, whistled and hummed. Water seeped in through the galvanized steel Crittal window frames which were allegedly typhoon proof, keeping Wong busy soaking it up with his mop to prevent the parquet floor from getting sodden and warping. My mother helped him, emptying the bucket and wringing out the old towels. All Hong Kong business was suspended, the ferries were in the typhoon shelters and radio messages warned everyone to stay inside. Scaffolding was blowing down, live electricity cables were lying in urban roads, shop signs were falling like ninepins, there were a number of landslides blocking major roads and flooding was reported in the New Territories. Social events – the Hong Kong Cricket Club whist night, Such-and-such a company's annual dinner at the Pen – were postponed by radio announcements.

  Nevertheless, my father still thought he should be at work. The Royal Navy, he insisted, counted on people like him to keep things going. That there was not a single warship in the harbour, all of them having put to sea to ride out the storm, was neither here nor there. It was Monday: he should be at work. Consequently, he spent two hours on the telephone trying to organize supplies for a destroyer that had sailed to safety in international waters. Then the line went dead. He slammed the receiver down and cracked it.

  'Intelligent,' my mother remarked bluntly. 'We're stranded on a mountain top in a typhoon and you break the bloody phone.'

  'The perishing line's down,' he replied sourly. 'Fat lot of bloody use the phone is.'

  'Yes,' my mother agreed, 'but they'll soon fix the line. It'll take days to get a replacement phone.'

  'I'm military, an essential user,' my father said. 'They'll bring us a new one PDQ.'

  The telephone line was operational by late the following morning. The telephone, which my mother fixed with Elastoplast strips, worked. A new telephone arrived four weeks later, when my mother remarked caustically it was a good job China had not invaded since Ida.

  The Number Nine signal was raised at half-past eleven. By now, the wind was terrifying. Each gust curved the windows. The building creaked like a galleon under sail. According to the radio, the sustained wind speed was reaching sixty-five miles per hour with gusts at 130. The rain turned squally, lashing the windows. The veranda became an inch-deep pool. In the servants' quarters, rain sprayed through the lattice brickwork as if the building were forging ahead through a heavy sea.

  Suddenly, over the space of fifteen minutes, the wind died to less than a summer zephyr and the rain let up.

  'Eye of the storm,' my father announced. 'You come with me.'

  He and I left the building and made our way down the drive. Leaves
and branches were littered everywhere. At the bottom, we turned left and went beneath the next block of apartments. There, at the back, was my father's car, bespattered with leaves that were adhering to the entire surface. It might have been custom decorated by a miscreant sylvan elf or a wallpaper designer with a naturalistic bent.

  'Get those leaves off the paintwork,' my father ordered. 'They'll discolour it.'

  I started at the trunk. It seemed an utterly pointless exercise. I knew all tropical cyclones – we had done the topic in geography – were circular and that, in the middle, was the eye, a place of calm around which the storm revolved. Once that passed by, the winds would blow again, but from the opposite quarter. The leaves we removed would soon be replaced.

  'Not the bloody windows, cloth ears!' my father said, breaking into my thoughts. 'The glass won't discolour, will it? We haven't got all bloody day.'

  Indeed, the wind was already beginning to pick up again so we made our way back up the drive. It took my breath away. I could feel the gusts tugging at my lungs as it had the window glass. By the time we reached our apartment block my father – as he was keen to prove – could physically lean on the wind. Behind him, struggling up the drive, was one of our neighbours who had taken advantage of the eye to walk his wife's dachshund. The dog was being lifted as much as four inches off the concrete, a bemused look on its face. But for its lead, it could have blown away.

  In the early evening, the Number Eight signal was raised and remained in force through the night. By noon the following day, the typhoon was gone, leaving behind squally showers and a gunmetal sky, and the clear-up began. My father revisited his car. It was, as before, heavily bestrewn with leaves. Worse, another car in the parking space had been blown against the rear of my father's, denting the bumper and nicking the paintwork.

  'Bloody hell!' my father fumed. 'Why can't other benighted drivers . . . ? That one over there tied his car to the bloody pillars. Why couldn't this cloth-eared individual . . . ?'

  I set about removing the leaves but the bonnet and front of the car were devoid of them. A downpipe had broken free and sprayed rainwater continuously over the car for hours. My father unlocked the door, got in and attempted to start the engine. The starter motor turned over asthmatically but nothing else happened. My father opened the bonnet. The engine was sodden, a deep puddle beneath it covered in a rainbow film of oil.

  'Buggeration!' my father exclaimed and slammed the bonnet down. A piece of trim fell off.

  We had got off comparatively unscathed. An apartment at the top of the adjacent building had lost a window, setting off a chain reaction with three or four others. The wind sucked out anything lighter and smaller than a coffee table, splintering them to pieces as they struck the window frames.

  The wind having died down a good deal, I walked up the road to the police post. The bushes in some places had been stripped of leaves as if attacked by locusts. All the hibiscus bushes had lost their blooms, which lay in the road like sodden purple scraps of tissue paper. And yet the birds were singing and, when the sun came out between the squalls, the tarmac was alive with all manner of butterflies drying their wings in the warmth. I wondered where they had weathered the storm.

  My mother and I went to the Peak School for an interview with the headmistress. I had been playing hookey from games lessons and she wanted to know why. So did my mother. Education was important to her because her own had been so minimal. I had my argument ready and expressed anathema for the concept of team sports because they destroyed one's individuality. This left both women momentarily flabbergasted. I was told to join in more, in lessons, in sports, in the social extra-curricular life of the school. I could hardly reply I preferred a dai pai dong to country dancing.

  On the walk back, my mother was silent. Several times, she started to speak then thought the better of it. I guessed she felt torn. On the one hand, she had to back the school. On the other, she would rather have had an independently minded sinophile than a soccer player for a son.

  We entered the apartment to find Ah Shun sitting on the settee, a duster in her hand and Tuppence disconsolately perched by her side. This was, to put it mildly, unusual. If servants ever did sit down on the furniture, they were sure to be swift in getting to their feet as soon as the key rattled in the lock.

  'Are you all right, Ah Shun?' my mother enquired with a concerned look on her face.

  'Lo, missee,' Ah Shun replied. It was about as far as her knowledge of English went.

  'Go and get Wong,' my mother ordered me.

  'Wong go,' Ah Shun said.

  'Wong go? Go where?'

  It was no use speaking Cantonese to Ah Shun. She only spoke Shanghainese.

  'Go, missee.'

  Wong was not in the kitchen or the servants' quarter. I reported his absence, admitting selfishly to myself that this diversion could not have come at a handier time.

  'Oh, my God!' my mother exclaimed, jumping to conclusions. 'He's left her.'

  A frantic phone call to my father drew a blank. Predictably, he could not get away. Looking out of the window, I could see an aircraft carrier riding at a buoy off Tamar. He would try and return early that evening.

  My mother sat next to Ah Shun and put her arm round her. A short time later, we heard a movement in the kitchen. My mother rushed out to find Wong depositing the shopping bags on the floor.

  'Thank God!' she said. 'Wong, Ah Shun is sick.'

  'Lo sick, missee,' he answered calmly.

  'Wong, she can barely get up. She's tired. I'm going to call the doctor.'

  'Lo call, missee. Ah Shun no sick. Ah Shun got baby come.'

  My mother stared at him for a long moment. I looked at Ah Shun. By now, I knew a fair amount about the birds, the bees and babies. She certainly did not look fat but then the uniform she wore was hardly close fitting.

  'When?' my mother asked.

  'Lo long time,' Wong replied. 'Maybe wung week.'

  'One week!' my mother exclaimed. 'Wong, you cannot let Ah Shun carry on cleaning, doing the laundry.'

  'Lo p'oblum, missee. Ah Shun can do.'

  'Ah Shun cannot do!' my mother replied.

  'Must do,' Wong said. 'Dis her job. Mus' work for money.'

  'Never mind the money!' my mother replied. 'You help Ah Shun to her bed. I'll call a doctor and then put the shopping away. You find another amah to help you.'

  It didn't occur to my mother until later that, in China, Ah Shun had probably delivered herself of her other children. I was told to ring my father and tell him what was happening.

  'Ah Shun's having a baby,' I stated bluntly.

  'Jolly good!' my father replied offhandedly.

  'Now,' I added, feeling he had missed the point.

  'Now? You mean this very bloody moment?'

  'Soon. The doctor's coming.'

  'Oh, bloody hell! Can't your mother cope? I've got HMS—'

  'Can you cope?' I called out.

  'Is that what he said?'

  I nodded. She stomped over to the telephone table.

  'Give me the phone. Ken? Yes, I can cope. Marriage to you is all about bloody coping. It's also supposed to be about sharing bloody problems.' She held the receiver three inches above the cradle and let it drop. 'I hope that's given him a bloody headache.'

  An hour later, a naval midwife in attendance, Ah Shun's waters broke. I was told to stay in my room and amuse Tuppence. He had never, at least not to my knowledge, been in my room and we played with my toy soldiers and military Dinky toys.

  Ah Shun gave birth to a little girl whom they named Su Yin. My mother was appointed 'godmother' and relished the role. Not only was she proud to be asked, but here was another link to China.

  My father, who never broke any law, by-law, rule or regulation that might even vaguely apply to him, read his tenancy agreement and informed the naval quartering officer of the event. A month or so later, a letter came to the effect that the servants' quarters did not cater for four, that babies were not allowed
in quarters as their crying might discommode other residents, that fire regulations were being breached and that, in general, the Royal Navy did not approve. It was tactfully but firmly stated that either the servants be dismissed or the amah be let go, or the infant be sent to live with relatives.

  My mother went incandescent with rage.

  'Sack my servants! Put them out on the streets! With a new-born baby! Remember, Ken, they've already got children lodging elsewhere.'

  'Wong shouldn't be so fecund,' my father answered.

  'What does fecund mean?' I enquired.

  'You keep your bloody nose out of this.'

  'They're not going, Ken.'

  'I mean, don't the Chinese take precautions?'

  'Against what?' I asked.

  My mother went into the bedroom and slammed the door. The key turned in the lock. My father poured himself a pink gin. I decided it politic to keep my mouth shut.

  An hour later, my mother reappeared, poured herself a gin and tonic, sat down and announced, 'Ken, get me an interview with the Commodore.'

  'Under no circumstance whatever,' he answered.

  'Either I have an interview or I have a ticket for myself and Martin on the next P&O liner to come into port.'

  I knew this was a bluff – my mother would pull her own teeth out rather than leave Hong Kong before she had to – but my father begrudgingly said he would see what he could do. The outcome was that it was not a naval matter but a civilian one to do with fire regulations and suchlike.

  'In that case,' my mother declared, 'I'm going to see the Governor.'

  'That, Joyce, I certainly will not allow.'

  'Allow?' my mother responded, her eyes narrowing. 'I'm not asking your bloody permission. I'm telling you what I'm going to do. Out of bloody courtesy.'

  An exchange of letters with Government House followed, culminating in my mother being granted an audience with His Excellency, Sir Alexander Grantham KCMG. She demanded I accompany her partly, I suspect, because she was scared witless now that her persistence had paid off and I was acting as a sort of hip flask of Dutch courage, or perhaps she wanted me along to demonstrate that she was also a mother who would not be parted from her offspring.