Encouraged by Masterson, I had developed a sideline in tours and talks. English visitors to Hong Kong often wanted to know more about Chinese culture. I constructed a tour: I would take people to the Kuan Ti and Tin Hau temples; to a graveyard near Fanling (which unfortunately was also near a tanning plant, whose smell I can still to this day recall without effort); and to the Luk Yu tea house, where I would supervise all the ordering, and nervous but undaunted visitors would tackle dishes like half-cooked chicken and thousand-year-old egg. (These taste like Brie, which did not stop people recoiling in happy dread when confronted with them. One woman even fainted. In truth they are only about a month old – not so very different from the pickled eggs we used to sell back at the Plough.) The thing visitors liked most was dim sum, which like many Chinese food names is a metaphor, meaning ‘touch the heart’ – a highly poetic name for dumplings.
On this day in February 1938 I was giving the tour to two English writers, on their way to China to cover the civil war. They were going by boat, because the Japanese, who now occupied the greater part of China, had begun strafing the Kowloon to Canton train. The Japanese fighters took off from an aircraft carrier stationed in extraterritorial waters near Hong Kong. They had been known to strafe the boat, too, but in a more desultory and occasional way.
The poet, Austen, was the taller and paler of the two men. He had a permanent short-sighted scowl and was a smoker in the Masterson class. He was in his early thirties, the type of Englishman who never entirely sheds the sense that he is an overgrown schoolboy. His sidekick, the playwright Charles Ingleby, was shorter, more tanned, friendlier, untrustworthy, and impish. They gave the feeling of being a two-man gang. They also made less secret of their homosexuality than anybody I had ever met.
Austen and Ingleby had been in the colony for a week and were due to sail for Canton the next day. As writers from England, they both exploited and mocked their semi-celebrity status. They had undergone a round of formal dinners about which they expressed, to me, open derision. Austen in particular was not impressed. ‘The intellectual level here is that of a Surrey golf club,’ he said. His favourite conversational modes were the monologue and the apophthegm. The two tended to overlap. Sex was a favourite topic.
‘All colonial life is essentially comic.’
‘Laughter is the first sign of sexual attraction.’
‘The Chinese are so much more intelligent and dignified than the expatriates, it’s positively embarrassing to be white.’
‘If it weren’t for gin and adultery, the Empire would have collapsed decades ago.’ (I passed this one on to Masterson, who immediately said, ‘I don’t know if that’s true about the British Empire, but it certainly goes for our hotel.’)
‘All Chinese art is quietistic.’
‘Red-headed men only come to the tropics if they want to die.’
‘I’ve never met an Englishwoman who didn’t want to be fucked by a Chinese.’
Here at the temple, however, he seemed, albeit momentarily, almost subdued. He had looked at the statues and altarpieces with close attention. I have to admit that I was pleased. The penetrating, heady perfume of joss sticks was thick in the air. A woman with a bamboo broom was making a whisking noise as she swept the floor. A Chinese goddess in jade and a fat Buddha sat companionably in the same niche.
In one corner of the temple, a fortune teller was touting for business. He was swinging a circular cylinder. When he found a customer he would invert the cylinder to drop a written slip on the ground. He would then interpret what was written on it. I am not superstitious, or perhaps I am – in any case, I have never had my fortune told.
‘It’s a bit chaotic though, isn’t it?’ Ingleby said. ‘Taoism sounds so pure and simple and above board, all about the Way and being like a stream of water and all that, but then you see their temples and it’s all this superstitious mishmash, everything thrown in all together. This god and that god and Buddhas and you name it.’
‘No no, quite wrong,’ Austen said. ‘Much too Protestant. There’s no contradiction between mysticism and superstition. It’s like Mediterranean Catholicism, full of local gods and beliefs and rituals and intercessors. Doesn’t at all contradict the true faith underneath. We must not fear encrustation.’
Austen noticed the fortune teller give up swinging his cylinder and light a cigarette. The poet took out a packet of Sweet Afton and lit one without offering them to anyone else.
*
Austen and Ingleby were harbingers. The war between China and Japan meant that the stream of tourists heading to Canton dried up, as did a great deal of business with, and travel to, Shanghai. But the war itself began to bring people. There was a growing traffic of journalists, profiteers, diplomats, businessmen of varying degrees of credibility and probity, war tourists, spies. They tended to drink more and spend more than peacetime visitors. Trade was not as good as it had been but was nonetheless, all things duly considered, surprisingly robust; the Depression meant that we were working from a fairly low base. People from other hotels were now starting to come to the Empire for Ah Wang’s Chinese banquets. Masterson talked about dropping prices but then decided that we didn’t need to. He was now, following the death of his German sleeping partner Munster earlier in the year, the sole owner of the Empire.
‘Nobody minds too much about the war as long as they aren’t killing white people,’ he said.
The civil war showed signs of bringing me, at least, one piece of good news. Maria’s letters had begun mentioning the possibility of her mission having to pack up and relocate – and if they did that, the likeliest place to move to would be Hong Kong. (‘Trouble in China …’)
‘We are torn between wanting to serve the Lord in China by helping His children here and the reality that our work is being made close to impossible by the war,’ she wrote. ‘If we are, for practical purposes, unable to fulfil our mission, and at the same time are putting all of our lives in danger, we should not be here. But the decision would be a very big one and I am glad that it is not mine to take.’
Our letters were more intimate than we had been in conversation. I often wondered what it would be like to meet again.
My conscience over Ho-Yan was now clear. Whatever I had been expecting to go wrong seemed not to have happened. He had left the Empire, saying that he wanted to work with his brother Man-Lee. He took a job first as a delivery boy and then as something more important in a food and drink distribution company. Before very long, he came to me with an offer: if we switched delivery contracts to him he could guarantee – guarantee – that our problem with missing inventory would go away. Our losses were still running at about a tenth of our purchasing. Although I remained irritated by this I was coming to see it as a fact of life, one more or less accepted by expatriates as an unofficial servants’ perk. Ho-Yan’s offer was to match our contractor’s price; by personally supervising the inventory, whatever that meant, he said he would make good the 10 per cent shortfall. This would translate into more than 10 per cent increased profit, since we would sell the missing alcohol at hotel prices; so the offer was too good to resist. I gave his company the contract for three months, and the inventories began to tally. I was delighted.
Many more people had come to Hong Kong in the way that Wo Ho-Yan, Wo Man-Lee and Ah Wang had done. There was also an influx from Shanghai. The Shanghai arrivals tended to be in some way exotic. I was particularly keen on the occasional White Russian, a type one quickly learnt to spot. There was something elegant and conceited and desperate about them. The arrival of these people, who were not in the strict sense refugees, but who also were not the opposite of refugees, brought the war closer to us. It became a constant topic.
‘The war’, however, meant several different things. There was the existing war in China, or rather the two wars, the civil war between the Communist and the Kuomintang – the received wisdom was that the Communists had been, for practical purposes, defeated – and the war between the Chinese and the Japanes
e invaders. There was also the war that everyone now seemed certain would come to Europe, a war whose name was spoken of with a physical sensation of dread in the stomach and which to many, myself included, seemed nearer than what was actually happening over the border in China. And then again there was our own war-to-be, loitering at the back of people’s minds. This was only spoken of openly by men in the company of other men. The Japs are going to take us on; the Japs won’t start on us till after they finish the Chinese; the Nips are jealous of Hong Kong; the Nips breed like mice, they won’t be happy until they’ve conquered Australia. The Navy will save us; the Americans will save us; no one can save us. Hong Kong is impregnable; Hong Kong is indefensible. We’ll all have to flee to Singapore; if it happens, we won’t have time to get to Singapore. The Japs can’t bomb. The Japs can’t fly. The evacuation boats will be sunk in the harbour; the Japs will let us go and will take the harbour for themselves. It’s not a well-known fact, old boy, but the simple truth is Japs can’t see in the dark. The word ‘war’ came to be one you picked out in conversations across the room.
It was in the summer of 1939, just before war with Germany was declared, that this became real for me. My great passion by now was walking, a solitary but energetic pastime I had taken to by way of counteracting the gregarious but sedentary life of the hotel. I spent more or less every weekend out on Lantau or in the New Territories. My friends the Higginses, a couple who ran a shop selling Chinese furniture on Des Voeux Road, had a stone house on the south shore of Lantau; Cooper and Porter, my friends at the Hong Kong Bank, let me come and stay with them when they had their alloted time-share in the Bank bungalow out near Fanling. I did as much hill walking as I could; I was fitter than I had believed possible – much more so than I had been back in flat Kent. I liked the heat, and although no one could like the humidity, I seemed to mind it less than most.
That day, I had packed a bottle of beer along with my usual two canteens of water. My leather rucksack, bought from a cobbler in Wanchai, had in it some sandwiches, an orange, a compass, and a map. The plan was to catch a lift from Fanling and spend the day walking in the Tai Mo mountains.
It was the beer that undid me. The night before, I stayed with Cooper and his friends in Fanling. We had too much to drink. I woke up late and a trifle hung over. The young bankers were heading off for a lunch party. I got a lift to the foothills. It usually took the first hour’s walking to begin to feel ready for the rest of the day – to get the week’s crampedness out of my limbs, and to have my lungs and legs start working properly together. I stopped at the top of a small rise, looking back down and north towards the border. It was a clear day for summer, with a trace of heat haze but none of the cloud cover which could be so humid and oppressive. Although it was only about noon, and I had a fair deal of walking ahead of me, I felt I deserved a treat. I sat down on a rock and drank the beer. The warmth and exertion gave me the feeling, pleasant at the time, that the alcohol was rushing straight to my head. Not to worry, I thought, the exercise will burn it off. I started out again for the top of Tai Mo Shan, taking a path marked with more confidence on my old map than it was on the actual ground.
It was early afternoon before I began to feel sleepy. I had climbed most of the way up the three-thousand-foot mountain and could see well into China in the north, past the paddies and villages of the New Territories. (The same view today would encompass several large new towns, very many high-rise buildings, and, over the border, one entirely new skyscraper-crowded city, Shenzen.) Going higher usually made one feel cooler and helped one to catch any breezes there might be, but on that still day I was only getting more and more hot. I hadn’t had a break since the beer, and decided now to have a rest. I leant against an Indian pod tree and ate my two ham sandwiches. The butter had half melted in the heat and its paper wrapper was hot and smeary. I tipped my hat down over my eyes. The stillness meant that it was eerily quiet. I thought I would rest for a moment and then take a drink of water to perk myself up.
When I woke the sun had gone far beyond the hills and Tai Mo Shan was in deep shadow. There could be very little time until sunset. I felt a jolt of apprehension at the thought of losing the track home and spending a night out on the mountain. No one would miss me until late Monday morning at the earliest. Swearing never to touch beer again, I swung my rucksack on my back and set out down the skimpy path.
Almost immediately, I was lost. I came to a fork in the track, one I had not noticed on the way up. One path seemed to curl back on itself before turning, presumably, downwards; the other was fainter and steeper but more direct. Neither looked at all familiar. After hemming and hawing, I took the steeper track. It soon became clear that was a mistake. The bushes on either side were denser than anything I had passed through on the way up, and by the time darkness fell I was badly scratched and had lost my bearings. The only idea was to keep plunging downwards. At many points I was holding onto bushes and trees and scrambling over the crumbly rock. No path was visible. There were moments when the hill was frighteningly steep.
After some time – I couldn’t see the hands on my watch – the ground began to flatten and although there was still no path, the going over the scrabbly uneven ground was less difficult. If I had to guess I would have thought I was heading more or less south, in the direction of Shek Kong. I decided that I would walk for what felt like an hour or two more and then, if I hadn’t come to a village, give up for the night. As I reached that conclusion, I felt the first fat drops of tropical rain fall on my face. It had clouded over without my noticing. I promised myself that I would never go for another walk and that I would make a point of remembering my vow, even when I felt safe and dry.
Then three things happened: I felt the ground give under me; I felt myself land on something soft but unyielding, unsteady, in fact alive; and I heard someone saying, loudly and at close quarters, ‘Ow! Fuck! Get off!’
The instruction was unnecessary. Whomever I had landed on twisted away, causing me to roll off, fall sideways, and smack my head against the earth. The next thing I knew a torch was being shone in my face, blinding me, and a cockney voice was saying:
‘Who the hell are you?’
In the background were other voices. I heard someone approach.
‘What’s going on, Sergeant?’ someone said in tones of command.
‘Some bugger’s just fallen into my foxhole, sir,’ said the nearby voice.
‘Could someone explain what is happening, please?’ I said.
‘Hoick him out, lads, and let’s have a shufti,’ said the in-charge voice. Two pairs of arms came over the side of the foxhole and I pulled myself up on them. The men were soldiers. Then the torch was in my face again and for a moment there was silence.
‘Well he doesn’t look like a Nip spy, I’ll say that for him,’ said the man in charge. Then in a harsher tone he said: ‘We’re the Royal Hong Kong Regiment and we are on exercises. Who are you and what are you doing?’
‘My name is Tom Stewart, I’m a civilian, and I’m on my way home from a walk up Tai Mo Shan.’
‘Do you often go walking up mountains in the dark, Mr Stewart?’
‘I fell asleep, it got dark, and I got lost. These things happen.’
‘Do you often go walking on your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you often get lost?’
‘It’s been known to happen. As you may know, civilian maps aren’t very good.’
‘What happens when you get lost?’
‘I ask directions.’
‘What happens when they don’t speak English?’
‘I ask again in Chinese.’
‘Do you now?’ said my interrogator, softer and more curious. He thought for a moment. ‘Sergeant, could you show Mr Stewart the way to the truck. The rest of us will carry on with the exercise. We’re due to finish at dawn, Mr Stewart. You can sit in the truck and have a brew, and then we’ll give you a lift. You’ll be back in town in time for work. Most of us have got our j
obs to go to in the morning. We can have a little chat on the way home. I’m Major Walter Marlowe, by the way.
*
‘How could you not have told me?’ said Maria. It wasn’t quite the very first thing she said to me after four years, but it was close. Her anger made me angry in return. I wanted to tell her to calm down, or grow up. But in fact she had already done both of those things. She looked the same only more so. Her face was unlined and her eyes were deeper and browner than I had remembered. She was no longer wearing her habit but a sort of mission uniform that made her look more like a nurse than a nun. Her cap exposed more of her hair than I could remember seeing; it was inky-black Cantonese hair, almost blue-black, in a short bubble cut that looked incongruously fashionable.
The subject of discussion was Wo Ho-Yan and his brother Wo Man-Lee. Her reaction was shock: as if my news about Ho-Yan was the worst possible welcome I could have given her. She looked as if she was struggling to control herself.
‘I know that you did me, us, a great service,’ she eventually said. ‘But … oh well, it is done.’
‘You never told me what the problem was.’
She sighed. ‘Trouble. Crime. Gangs. The brother has a – he has a reputation.’
‘Well he seemed all right to me. People don’t always stay the same.’
‘I do not believe you know him well.’
‘Then let’s not discuss it any further. I’ve said I’m sorry.’
This was not how I had envisaged my reunion with Maria. Her mission had decided to pack up and move in the autumn of 1939. They went to Canton, but there were difficulties of lodging and resources with the nuns already there, so they had continued on to Hong Kong, arriving at the end of the year. Their train had been strafed by the Japanese fighters from the aircraft carrier. Sister Benedicta had stayed behind in Canton and either would or would not be coming to join the mission soon. The community, as Maria called it when she was in her pulpit manner, was scattered among their friends and co-religionists in the colony. Maria was staying with Father Ignatius, their Irish priest, in Happy Valley.
Fragrant Harbour Page 12
