by Gavin Young
‘Ha! Nutmeg!’
At 6.30 a.m. it was cold; the bronze sun glowed without warmth through a thick haze. Our wake trailed slowly behind us, luminously green like submerged coral, and lingered long after our passing in a level sea that looked oily and sluggish. A Liberian-registered tanker, the Fortune, lay hove to, a rusty Greek beyond her, and on our side a Panamanian ship called Fiji, well down in the water and her deck smothered in tree trunks.
The fishing boats danced impertinently around our bows, and men in windcheaters whistled and shouted, ‘Go away,’ at us from their sterns, as if they were legally blockading the harbour mouth, not simply obstructing it. Dead slow ahead. Kennet looked impatient, and the Hupeh hooted once like an exasperated whale.
Gun emplacements and blockhouses overlooked the narrow entrance to the harbour. Considering Taiwan’s mistrust of China, I imagined anti-submarine devices on the seabed. A sentry in a steel helmet made no response when I waved to him. Past the entrance, the grey skyline of the city formed a backdrop to rows of ships under the nodding cranes at the wharves.
We edged stern first into a berth next to the Vishva Amabar of Bombay. ‘Curry ship,’ explained Sajid Ali, the Pakistani radio officer, who stood on the wing of the bridge with me, watching the third mate – the young Pole, Komorowski – shirtless, marshalling the Hong Kong apprentices in the stern. (‘Curry ship’ means any ship from India.)
The day before, I had noticed that Ralph Kennet, seeing one of his officers taking his watch naked to the waist, had not rebuked him, although many captains would have fulminated against such slovenly dress on the bridge. Later I mentioned this to him. ‘No point in making a fuss on the bridge,’ said Kennet. ‘I had a quiet word later.’
*
Jimmy Granger murmured into his radio handset, ‘Send the heaving line from the stern.’
In the stern, Komorowski’s mouth moved, and his voice came out of Granger’s handset. ‘Come again?’
‘The heaving line.’
A line flew from the stern onto the concrete wharf; the Hupeh slid alongside, a bump sent a shiver through her deck, and then she was motionless. Komorowski peered at the Sovereign Ventura, the freighter just astern of us, and reported, ‘Fifty foot clear.’
‘Finished with engines.’
The Chinese were eager to go ashore; there were cheap clothes and esoteric items of food they wanted to buy. Next day the old laundryman with the violinist’s face said he had bought a lot of dried meat. ‘Hong Kong has, but velly expensive, so I buy here for cousins, childlen.’
Captain Kennet knocked on my cabin door and said, ‘The agent’s asked me to dinner tonight. Like to come? About six o’clock. Good Chinese food, I daresay.’
On an earlier visit to Taiwan, a few years before, I had particularly liked the food of the indigenous Taiwanese, but now our gastronomic ambitions were thwarted. The agent, a pleasant young Chinese in a dark suit, came aboard and said to Kennet, ‘I have a car waiting. What food do you like?’
‘Chinese,’ said Kennet. ‘In Taiwan, what else, eh?’
‘Certainly, Chinese, please,’ I said.
We bundled into the car and the agent unhesitatingly drove us to a Japanese restaurant; waitresses brought us sashimi. ‘Is this saké that I see before me?’ said Ralph Kennet. ‘Come, let me pour thee.’
At night Kao-hsiung had a gloomy, closed-down air; it seemed to consist of large grey warehouses. We were back on board by ten o’clock, the mystery of the Japanese food unsolved.
*
‘I know you want to see one, but you shouldn’t.’ Over a late-night rum and Coke, Ralph Kennet was answering my question about the chances of running into a typhoon in the China Sea.
In ‘Typhoon’, Captain MacWhirr, the master of the steamer Nanshan heading to Foo-chow, thinks to himself, ‘There’s some dirty weather knocking about,’ and soon that ‘ordinary, irresponsive and unruffled’ but experienced old salt is vouchsafed his first horrifying and unforgettable glimpse of the sea’s ‘immeasurable strength and immoderate wrath that passes exhausted but never appeased’. I wanted to see for myself what I had read about in Conrad: the swell increasing, the ship labouring extravagantly and taking water on her decks, the barometer inexorably falling; then, the great darkness lying upon a multitude of white flashes, the rain, the crushing weight of toppling waves, the howlings of the gale….
Kennet had seen typhoons, had seen ships anchored near the shore dragging their anchors. He’d known that uncontrolled yawing could wrench them out of the mud, turning them so that their teeth came upwards and couldn’t grip, so once he had had two anchors out and had put the helm over to port to prevent the yawing. His ship had held firm while others broke loose.
‘I wouldn’t want to go through that again, not if you gave me the moon between two slices of bread. The other wretched ships were sliding back past me and were washed up on the beach. Oh, yes, washed right up. One of our captains had an engine that broke down. It could have been repaired if he’d gone down to the engine room and said, “Get that bloody engine going.” But where was he? On the bridge, you’d think, right? But he was with the passengers conducting “Abide with Me”.’ He laughed. ‘Of course the passengers loved it, but the poor bloody ship was dumped so far inland that they had to dig a canal to get her into the water again. “Abide with Me” indeed! The chief engineer and engine-room staff were fired. By rights, he should have been fired too. What a nutmeg.’
By now, the Land Above the Wind was well below us. This was Typhoon Alley, said Kennet, an area embracing Guam, northern Luzon, Taiwan and eastern Japan. From here rogue typhoons ran amok to Saigon and Hong Kong. But we didn’t sail into, one, and now I realize how lucky we were. A day or two ago, as I was writing this chapter, the radio reported that a 190,000-ton British tanker, the Derbyshire, foundered with all hands in a typhoon in that area. When her owners confirmed her loss, other ships gathered to strew wreaths over the spot where she went down without a trace.
*
Sajid Ali, the radio officer, walked with me towards his radio room. Ralph Kennet had allowed me to communicate with a friend in Hong Kong; we would be there next morning.
A smell of curry filled the corridor. ‘Ah, ha. Now I see what you were up to in Kao-hsiung,’ said Jimmy Granger, coming the other way and pointing to Sajid’s hair, which had been blow-dried into a silky quiff. ‘Very pretty, Sparky.’
Sajid sniffed the air. ‘Umm, what a delicious smell. Curry.’
Granger grinned. ‘Too bad for you, Sparky. It’s pork.’
‘Hell.’
On the ship’s radio-telephone I talked to Donald Wise in Hong Kong, who told me he would book me into the Luk Kwok Hotel in the Wanchai district of the island. ‘It’s the world-of-Suzie-Wong district. You should be happy there.’ I could sense his leer across the airwaves.
Thirty Nine
There actually was a Suzie Wong Bar just behind the Luk Kwok Hotel, although I never passed through its doors. Nor did I visit the Pussy Cat topless nightclub announced by a tall neon sign next door, or a hotel that advertised ‘Rooms Purely for Let’ (I liked the ‘purely’). The Luk Kwok Hotel was not that sort of place. It was a modest Chinese hotel, where I seemed constantly to be meeting in the corridors elderly and dignified lady servants shuffling about in black silk slippers and carrying bowls of cornflakes.
The Luk Kwok wasn’t far from the offices of the China Navigation Company in the multi-storeyed Swire House, and I called in there to say thank you for their help, although, of course, it was John and Glen Swire in London I had to be grateful to.
I missed the Hupeh as soon as I left her at anchor in the western roadstead near Stonecutters Island. I sat unhappily on the hard bench of the launch that carried me and smiling crew members to the landing stage under the new towers of Kowloon. Most of them clutched plastic bags of duty-free goods from Kao-hsiung. I had seen them on Hupeh’s deck only in oily shorts, T-shirts and heavy rust-stained gloves; now, their hair neatly oiled, the
ir scrubbed bodies dressed in well-pressed blue serge, white shirts and sober ties, they waited in formal Chinese fashion to be reunited with their families. Suddenly I was conscious of my scruffy look, of uncombed hair, of the hole in my sports shirt and the oil and sweat stains that had become ineradically part of it since leaving Sandakan.
I missed the Hupeh partly because I was leaving the last big ship of my long odyssey. Captain Kennet would soon be leaving the Hupeh to take up command of China Navigation’s Coral Princess, and would begin shuttling Japanese passengers between Korea, Japan and China. If I could have continued on the Hupeh, I would have been able to see Madang, Lae, Kimbe, Rabaul and Kieta from her decks. Once more I had to remind myself that a voyage is not a marriage.
*
‘You took your time.’ At the Luk Kwok I was reunited with Donald Wise, and with the unexorcisable ghosts of Vietnam.
I had first met Donald’s tall, lean soldierly figure in the Congo (as Zaire was called then) during the bloody upheavals that month after month in 1960 and 1961 replaced rejoicing for independence in Kinshasa (then called Leopoldville after Leopold II, the despotic, colonizing king of the Belgians) when we both were war correspondents. The massacres and horrors of the Congo in 1960 and 1961 had been mirrored to some degree in an uprising in 1961 in the neighbouring Portuguese colony of Angola, and Donald had written from its capital, Luanda, a story that began so vividly that I have never forgotten it:
The first African to die before my eyes on this Black-and-White battleground nearly fell into my beer. A group of Whites had thrown him off the roof of a six-storey building, and he crashed to his death through the candy-striped umbrella of a main street café.
Thereafter we had run into each other on many battlefields, from Africa to Vietnam. In the days before the full-scale American military invasion of Vietnam, when the US involvement was still confined mainly to advisers, the marines and aerial bombardment, Donald had taken the trouble to look closely at a Vietcong guerrilla:
He is lying dead at my feet, trussed hand and foot and hung on a long pole like a wild pig. His skin, showing through his rumpled black pyjamas, is parchment-coloured. In life, he was the colour of butterscotch.
He was shot by US Marines…. He is about 5 ft. 2 in. tall, six inches shorter than model Jean Shrimpton, but weighing the same 120 lbs. He carried a week’s rations of glutinous rice – flavoured with a sauce made of rotting fish and sea water – in a cloth bandolier around his chest. He wears flip-flops on his feet – sandals made of worn rubber tyres.
Not only did Donald interest himself in communist (and other) Vietnamese, which most writers on Vietnam have failed to do even today (Graham Greene is one outstanding exception), but he also put, in that piece, a finger on a great truth about the Vietnam war, about the parochial psychology of America in the 1960s and about the unquenchable soul of Asia. In 1965 he wrote:
American planes will continue a fiery rain of napalm. But still the key to all this is the little man at my feet. Someone has to go into his shadowy country to convince him that he is not the world’s greatest jungle fighter. The Americans can bomb North Vietnam until the cows come home, but they will never win the war without doing this.
And they never did.
I registered at the Luk Kwok and then took a taxi with Donald to the Foreign Correspondents Club.
On the staircase to the fifth-floor dining room were reminders in photographs greatly enlarged: a Vietnamese soldier in a desolation of the spirit, his head in his hands in an empty room; an American gunner in a helicopter screaming across the dead body of his comrade; a Vietnamese family – mother, baby and three small children – swimming for dear life. They had been taken by Larry Burrows, of Life magazine, born 1925, died 1971; and Kyochi Sawada, of United Press International, born 1936, died 1970. Both were friends of mine, Larry a close one. People who saw it happen told me that, when a missile hit the helicopter Larry Burrows was riding in over Laos, it dropped into the jungle ‘like an egg’.
Grim memories, not easy to put out of mind in Hong Kong. Suddenly Vietnam seemed very close again. In this city, which is still a great press centre, one was aware of the comings and goings of journalists; of men and women working for the Red Cross, Save the Children, Oxfam or Caritas in the camps in Thailand for starving Cambodian refugees; of fifty-five thousand Vietnamese boat people in camps in Hong Kong.
In the atmosphere of the Foreign Correspondents Club it was impossible to forget the reports and colour pictures from the camps in Thailand; the reports from journalists in the interior of Cambodia; the interviews with Khmer Rouge leaders, who served whisky and wine and asked to be excused for the premeditated killing of half a million or one million (or was it a million and a half?) of their own people; the descriptions of fields of human skulls; the accounts of exhausted boat people, after many days at sea, raped, robbed or killed by Thai fishermen at the very moment when they seemed to have found safety for themselves and their children on the islands and shores of the Gulf of Siam. But they were as hard to think about as they were to forget. One could only summon up a monstrous revulsion against the perpetrators of these immeasurable miseries, and at the same time feel an overwhelming tenderness towards South-east Asians. The little soldier from Nha Trang muttering, ‘Hurt, me,’ and dying in the rain across my knees had been a hundred times luckier than some. What had my Khmer friends who gave me the dancing dolls suffered before they died?
‘Boys throw stones at frogs in sport,’ wrote Plutarch. ‘But frogs do not die in sport, they die in earnest.’
Were the politicians at their sport plotting similar horrors for Chandra, Sumar and Crazy Jan?
*
Donald Wise, now an editor on the Far Eastern Economic Review, loved Asia and wanted to stay in Hong Kong, perhaps for ever, but he hadn’t reached this decision thoughtlessly. He had seen the war in Vietnam; he had also been a prisoner of the Japanese and, as such, had worked on the notorious railway over the bridge on the River Kwai. Fifty thousand prisoners died on that railway building a line two hundred and fifty miles long. Over a drink in the club bar we talked about an amazing event a year or two before, when survivors and Japanese guards had arranged – at the suggestion of a guilt-ridden Japanese liberal businessman – a reunion on that bridge in Thailand.
‘I felt a twinge,’ Donald said, ‘when I saw those Japanese tumbling out of their airport bus in that follow-your-leader, don’t-push-just-shove way of Japanese tourists.’
‘Did they look like the brutal guards you remembered?’
‘Mostly farmers. Brutal? No, you couldn’t say that. Small and sunburned. In the old days, because of their size, they made all but the smallest prisoners kneel to be beaten.’
Up to then, the imperial Japanese army had used prisoners for live bayonet practice, but now the generals in Japan had ordered the railway to be built at whatever cost in prisoners or Japanese soldiers.
‘We’d seen Japanese officers kick and whip their own men, and at the reunion every ex-POW made a point of mentioning this. You see, it explained a lot, even though it didn’t excuse a damned thing.’
Memories. The memory, for example, of the two-minute anaesthesia under Thai liquor or amateur hypnosis for an amputation; of someone running to the guardhouse to plead for the wood saw when the water for sterilizing it had come to a boil; of the Japanese guards ineptly shooting a young prisoner who had contracted cholera – so ineptly that he lay screaming on the ground and a British officer in tears had seized a guard’s rifle and given him the coup de grâce.
‘I didn’t want to go berserk and assault anybody at that reunion. The Japanese who had organized the get-together told us how the British prisoners had buried cigarette tins with their dead mates, and in the tins were detailed reports on the behaviour of inhuman guards in the hope that eventually they would be punished. Which a lot of them were.’
When he wrote about the reunion for the Ear Eastern Economic Review, Donald concluded: ‘It seemed that by saying s
ayonara to the fallen together, we made some sort of step towards reality.’
*
Seen through the windows of the Foreign Correspondents Club, white multi-windowed buildings march like a forest of dragon’s teeth up the slopes of the Mid-Levels district and down to Star Ferry. One of the most obtrusive buildings on the waterfront had rows of circular windows. The Chinese called it the House of a Thousand Arseholes.
Sitting at a table by a dining-room window, two journalist friends looked up from their aperitifs and beckoned us over. They were Marsh Clark, the head of the Hong Kong bureau of Time, a quiet American with the face of a sad young senator, and Dick Hughes, the dean of all journalists in the Far East, Australian, in his seventies, his figure that of an arthritic Buddha, his face the colour of a cardinal’s robe, his hair the soft white fringe of a bishop. ‘Welcome, your Grace,’ Hughes boomed pontifically, raising a glass of vodka and ice in salute.
For years the Far East correspondent of the London Sunday Times, Hughes had written about his flamboyant life and times in a book called Foreign Devil. He had started out in Japan during the Second World War before Pearl Harbor, and since then few people or events of note had passed him by. In Tokyo, he had attended drinking sessions with Stalin’s ‘super-spy’ Richard Sorge, who had saved him from a beating at the hands of a Nazi diplomat, and he had talked exclusively with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean after they had defected to Moscow. He was a Sherlock Holmes addict and expert. Ian Fleming, author and creator of James Bond, had been his boss at the Sunday Times and a friend, and in Fleming’s novel You Only Live Twice Hughes had appeared in the fictional guise of Australia’s secret service boss in Tokyo. Later, John le Carré turned him into old Craw, a British agent, in The Honourable Schoolboy. I had seen Hughes easing his arthritic legs out of an American helicopter in the Central Highlands battle zone of Vietnam when he was well into his sixties. Now, ten years later, he showed few signs of wear.
