A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  All the more delightful that even in times of economic difficulty Australia, which has so long liked to think of itself as The Lucky Country, still feels the happiest place of all. Every morning I leave the Regent Hotel before breakfast and take my exercise in the Botanic Gardens, beyond the Opera House gleaming there in the early sun, along the edge of the harbour where the ferries are already foaming past Pinchgut Island to Manly. I speak to nearly everyone I meet. ‘What a marvellous day’, I throw at them in passing, or more often ‘What a marvellous country!’ And everyone seems to answer ‘Yes!’ Not only the stalwart joggers sweating by, and the anglers at the waterfront with their tangles of lines and buckets, and the occasional eccentrics ambling around in comical hats or gum-boots, and the man who practises his trumpet there before the day’s work begins, but the very egrets themselves, foraging spindlily under the foliage of the gardens. It is hard to find a Sydneysider who is not fond of his city, and glad to be an Australian.

  In this way it is like an older America. Your new immigrant here generally seems enviably laid-back and optimistic, as though he has fallen among friends. It is true that he may complain about racism among old-school Australians, but he can generally afford to ignore it, and may indeed indulge in a little racism himself, concerning Abos or Poms. The chances are that he has a thriving ethnic community of his own to support him, speaking his language, sharing his heritage and bolstering in him the conviction that he has chosen the right place to come – no problems, take it easy, sit back and enjoy yourself, as Sydney taxi-drivers sometimes say to me.

  During my present stay I have employed taxis six times, and I have kept a record of my drivers. One was born in Beirut, and showed me with pride the long row of Lebanese restaurants we passed. One was a Welshman from Bangor. One defied me to identify his origins, and turned out to be from Ecuador. One I rightly guessed to be from Lahore. One came out here on a £10 subsidized fare from England, and one was a Sydney-born financier, temporarily incommoded by the recession. All were helpful, merry and inquisitive (this is a very inquisitive city), offering me no grumbles and not much caring whether I tipped them or not; while the ex-financier, dropping me off for dinner at a private house, sent his kind regards to my hostess, an old acquaintance of his.

  I sense a certain unreality about all this, as though Sydney from the very start has been able to ignore unpalatable truths about itself. Even the earliest settlers, dumped on this inconceivably remote and awful shore in the most cheerless of circumstances, seem somehow to have been jolly enough, when they were not being flogged. Perhaps it is the Cockney strain that makes the citizenry so incorrigibly blithe, or perhaps the inherent improbability of the whole situation, the mere survival of this glittering city on the underside of the globe, makes for a kind of illusory existentialism.

  I find myself that after only a few days I am perfectly used to Sydney’s unlikely ambience – those recondite birds pecking and squawking about the gardens, the big black fruit-bats that flap out at night, trees which seem to be growing upside-down, bits of wild bush-land which penetrate the genteel suburbs, and are perfectly likely to have koalas and duck-billed platypuses in them. In no time everything seems perfectly normal, all co-existing easily with the life of a modern European city.

  I say ‘European’ advisedly, because the cosmopolitanism of contemporary Sydney is of a decidedly European kind. A century ago James Bryce called Manhattan ‘a European city, but of no particular country’, and the description now fits Sydney just as well. Of course its sub-stratum is aboriginal, its structure is still British, and like all English-speaking cities it has American overtones. More and more of its citizens are Asians. However, for the moment anyway its superficial flavour seems to me vaguely Mediterranean, Italianate, Greekish, Portuguesy, Lebanese-like – cappuccino after its oysters, street cafés, the lights of fishing boats passing beneath the Harbour Bridge in the dark – tinged, though, with the Irishness that has been so potent a part of it since the beginning.

  Sydney never strikes me as a very religious city, but largely because of the Irish, Catholicism is resilient here, and now and then, on a day that might be in the Aegean, to a Neapolitan smell of coffee, over a Provençal kind of meal, one is suddenly jerked back to Dublin or even to Knock. I had such a moment only yesterday, crossing the harbour on the elderly ferry-launch that runs between Blues Point and Circular Quay. A very Irish lady, sitting beside me as the boat chugged crab-like across the water, told me sadly that her car had just been stolen, and deliberately driven over a bluff. Never mind, I said, it was only a thing. ‘Only a thing!’ Her eyes misted. ‘Only a thing! Sure that’s the way to look at it. Only a thing! I must look at it that way. God bless you, God bless you for that!’ ‘God bless you too,’ I responded lamely, not knowing, as so often happens in discourse with the Irish, anything better to say.

  But that gladiatorial media executive offered me no blessings, nor did I want any from him. It was his hardness I relished, the touch of malevolence behind the charm. Nearly everybody likes modern Sydney, but nobody could call it nice. It is no place for the loser, even now, and if I were a stranger in trouble I would feel more sure of compassion in downtown Manhattan than I would in this fortunate city. Gossip in Sydney is by no means forgiving, still less discreet. Sometimes making dinner conversation can be like riding a roller-coaster, so dizzy are the revelations, and expressed with such ruthless and hilarious gusto.

  It is a city that brings out the reckless in me, and this is partly because I always feel it to be in some sense transitory. It never feels built to last. That gossip is particularly ephemeral and kaleidoscopic, and each time I come here the colours have changed, names in the news have shifted, and I am presented with a new cast of ‘identities’ – Sydney’s word for ‘personalities’.

  Identities! Doesn’t it sound like a police-station word? Sydneysiders, once so testily sensitive about the original purpose of their city, are now rather proud of its beginnings, and they will not be resentful when I say that for me one of the fascinations of the place is the feeling I sometimes get – in discourse with one of its more predatory brokers, say, or across the table from some appallingly overpaid and brilliant lawyer – that I am in touch with the irrepressible ebullience of the convicts.

  32

  Hong Kong: The End

  In June 1997 the British relinquished their sovereignty over Hong Kong, and after 150 years handed the colony to the communist People’s Republic of China, of which it would in future form a Special Administrative Region. This was in effect the end of the British Empire, and I was invited by the London Evening Standard to describe the concluding imperial ceremonial. It was my final exercise in reportage.

  The very moment they struck up ‘God Save The Queen’ at the British farewell ceremony in Hong Kong last night, the heavens opened and we all got soaked through. It did not matter. Soothsayers may say it was a bad omen, but the British took it on the chin. Down came the rain, the stands were a mass of umbrellas, water trickled down our necks, but the soldiers marched bravely on, the pipers piped, the singers sang, and Prince Charles, in his admiral’s white uniform, made his speech without a flinch as the rain poured all over him.

  The farewell programme was a mixture of show-biz and Aldershot, predictably offering Andrew Lloyd Webber, ‘The Last Rose Of Summer’, ‘Scotland The Brave’, a bit of Elgar and ‘I’ll See You Again’. As a Welsh nationalist republican I thought I had grown out of such flummery but I cannot deny an atavistic tug of the heart when, in the gathering dusk and the relentless rain, the Union Jack came gently down from its high flagpole to the grand old strain of ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’. Grant it them – nobody does it quite like the British. Nobody else has the swagger of the gloriously gilded drum-major who led last night’s parade. Nobody can play a lament quite like the lone piper who ended the ceremony. I would have had to wipe away a tear were it not that my face was awash with rain.

  For me the best and bravest part of the whol
e evening, all the same, was a noble performance by the massed bands of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. I doubt if they all knew they were playing the national anthem of the European Union, but I accepted it anyway as a gesture of liberation. Freed at last from their historical burdens of imperial tradition, the British must surely now move towards the next fulfilment of their astonishing historical destiny – final reconciliation with the rest of Europe.

  For them as for the Chinese, their departure from Hong Kong represents both an end and a fresh start. When the Union Jack came down the dignitaries moved on to the Convention Centre along the harbour shore, where the Chinese were about to assume authority over the Special Administrative Region. I, on the other hand, squelched back through the streets to my hotel on the opposite shore of the harbour. As I struggled through the immense excited crowds, illuminated by neon signs, noisy, laughing, merry, very wet and universally good-tempered, £325,000-worth of British-sponsored fireworks thundered into the sky. Up to my hotel bedroom then, open the curtains, and there before me was the harbour of Hong Kong, and at its heart the great glassy Convention Centre where at that moment diplomats and dignitaries from half the world were finishing a banquet, toasting the Queen and the President of China and preparing to move on at midnight to the official conclusion of British sovereignty in Hong Kong.

  This city is one great television set, and every screen in town was showing the scene. Every now and then I looked at mine, and it was a bewildering experience. Now we saw the yacht Britannia, waiting to take Prince Charles away when the ceremony was done. Now we saw the banqueters raising their champagne glasses. Faces strange and familiar succeeded one another in flashes – Deng Xiaoping’s widow, the Foreign Minister of Indonesia, the President of Colombia, Kofi Annan, Lady Thatcher, Richard Branson, Ted Heath, the Argentinian Foreign Minister, Chris Patten, Prince Charlie and all.

  A cut between cameras, and here was the advance guard of the People’s Liberation Army, crossing the border from China rigid as automatons in their buses and open trucks. Another cut, and it was Martin Lee the chief Democrat promising loyal opposition from the balcony of the Legislative Council building. Protests, troops, diplomats, champagne, Deng Xiaoping’s widow; all Hong Kong life was there, flickering on one or another of the thirty-two channels. But I spent most of the time till midnight drinking red wine, playing Wagner on the stereo and looking out of my window. There lay the marvellous city, awaiting the moment. Interminable crowds milled about the streets below. The incomparable skyline was ablaze. The sky was angry with storm clouds, reddened by the city lights, and all about the harbour the lights of police boats were winking, keeping the water-traffic away from the Convention building. What were the people of Hong Kong really thinking down there? Were they as happy as they appeared to be? Should we have doubts, in these last few minutes between the British goodbyes and the Chinese acceptance?

  It seemed to me, as I thought about it then, that the Hong Kong the British were leaving behind them was neither quite as good as the place might be, nor quite as bad. Economically, re-unification seemed to be, if anything, a shot in the arm. Socially the territory was free and mostly fair. But it was the political condition of the place that history would chiefly remember, and this was rather better than we feared it might be when Hong Kong was handed over, but rather worse than we hoped. On the one hand in a few moments the democratic structure so carefully put together during the last years of British rule was to be rudely dismantled in a few minutes. On the other hand there would remain a seed-core of libertarian instinct and purpose, a practised political society which will still form an able and determined opposition.

  And then, I thought – but hang on, it was very nearly midnight, and Hans Sachs of Der Meistersinger was on his last triumphant aria – empires might dissolve in mist, holy art would remain! Across the harbour the Convention Centre now seemed to be glowing rather than blazing, like a reactor. On the television screens, more speeches, more bands, more stamping honour guards until, on the stroke of midnight, we saw the Union Jack come down in Hong Kong for the very last time, and the flag of China go up for the very first.

  Car horns sounded through my windows, and a great cheering too, and down below the people still meandered in their thousands here and there. And presently, out there in the night, I saw the yacht Britannia, with its guardship HMS Chatham and the last three small warships of the Royal Navy’s Hong Kong flotilla, steal away from the quayside and sail slowly off to sea, slipping away beneath the skyscrapers with a certain glory after all.

  The British had gone.

  Whether the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong will preserve its liberties is still, as I write, open to question, but anyway that night’s vision of departing grandeur represented for me not only my final exercise in reportage, and the end of a lifetime’s preoccupation, but the conclusion of my own half-century.

  It signalled the end too of the incessant wanderings around the world that have provided the material for this book. I enjoyed almost every minute of these journeys – to be travelling alone on a job, all my antennae out, thinking about nothing but the work in hand, seemed to me one of life’s greatest pleasures. It did not always appear so to others. Visiting the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, to write an essay about it, I sat down at a café table beside a glistening bay with a plate of prawns, half a pint of Guinness and a book I had just bought about Manx folklore. I was in very heaven! Presently a lady handed me a pamphlet. Oh thank you, said I, what’s it about? ‘It is only to reassure you, my dear,’ she emolliently told me, ‘that God is always with the lonely …’

  Epilogue: Fulfilling a Long-Needed Want

  So my half-century came to an end. It took me far from home for the greater part of my life, treading ‘the shiny track’, as Robert Musil once put it, ‘that is left by the snail of history’; so it is perhaps only proper that its epilogue should concern a small happening in my own minute corner of the world.

  One drizzly morning in the summer of 2001, not long before my 75th birthday, I went to a political meeting at a village in the Llŷn Peninsula, at the top left corner of Wales, which is a legendary stronghold of Welshness. Several hundred people had assembled there to express their dismay at the whittling away of the Welsh culture and language by the influx of English settlers into their country.

  This was not a new anxiety. For a thousand years Welsh patriots had been resenting the intrusion of the English, sometimes violently. It seemed to me, though, that this meeting expressed something more profound. They were not hell-for-leather young nationalists who packed the village hall, and crowded outside listening to the speeches over loudspeakers. They were sober, courteous Welsh country people, of all ages, who sensed that their ancient way of life was in terminal crisis. Sadly and seriously they listened, and I felt they instinctively knew that their heritage was threatened not just by the flood of English retirees and second-homers, but by infinitely greater alien influences looming behind: huge, inchoate, almost unimaginable forces of finance, technology, globalization, homogenization, which were pressing down on them and beginning to make them no longer themselves.

  It seemed to me that this infinitesimal event, away up there on the fringe of Europe, concerning a language and a culture that most of the world has never heard of, marked more by disturbed foreboding than by any vehemence, was a symptom of a hazy malaise that was shadowing the new world of the twenty-first century. I had known where I was in my world, my fifty years of the century before. Heaven knows there had been horrors, squalors and miseries enough, from Cold War to Aids – when aren’t there? – but on the whole it had seemed to me a relatively straightforward time, a time of some promise. In fact I used to like to fancy, as I wandered the planet in my twentieth-century prime, that there was coming into existence a sort of Fourth World, a nation beyond frontiers, a diaspora and freemasonry of the decent whose values would one day emerge supreme.

  Those villagers of Llŷn were certainly potential citizens of any su
ch nation of goodwill, but it did not seem, that damp July summer morning in 2001, that they were about to inherit the earth. On the contrary, their anxious arguments, their intimations of despair, made me feel that at the start of the new century my own hopeful zeitgeist had faded, as spirits do: and accordingly soon afterwards I set out to circumnavigate the world one last time in search of its successor.

  *

  Almost at once, in St Petersburg in Russia, I met a former colonel of the Red Air Force living alone in a comfortless flat (bed unmade, crockery unwashed) in an apparently deserted and half-derelict tenement block. He seemed to me like a man floundering. The lost Soviet empire of the twentieth century, he told me, had been the rock of his life. He had come up the hard way, from the red bandanas of the Young Pioneers to the ridiculous floppy caps and huge epaulettes of the Red Air Force, and he had gone down the hard way too, abruptly from the absolute conviction of national mastery and privilege to the unmade bed high above the desolate courtyard. He was left wondering what it had all been about.

  He was an archetype, I presently realized. Everywhere people were similarly disturbed, with the same sense of rudderless betrayal. There was something febrile in the air of the world, like the start of a fever. There was something threatening and unwholesome about the emergence of the United States as a power that could do anything it liked. There was something ominous about science, which seemed to be tinkering with matters almost occult in their significance – it would not be long, an Egyptian student seriously assured me, before mankind mastered the creation of life itself. There was something creepy to the Internet, an ectoplasmic presence seeping into private homes.