Slow Boats to China
Page 56
With not much to look at and a young man in the next seat who was little disposed to chat – after telling me that the giant pandas in the Canton zoo were ‘very interest’, he had lapsed into silence – I had little to occupy myself with but my thoughts. To ease the softly nagging ache in my temples, I ordered a can of Pabst beer from the steward and let my mind wander back.
It had been more difficult to travel by sea from Europe to China than I had imagined. I recalled the moments of despair in Jedda, Dubai and Colombo when I had almost convinced myself that I was going to be stopped once and for all. I remembered the malevolent agent’s representative in Jedda, who had forced me to leave the Patrick Vieljeux, and the tourist official in Bombay who had hung up on me when I mentioned a permit for the Andaman Islands.
But when I was halfway through my second beer and my headache had faded, I remembered the compensating angels. Tom Abraham had plucked my Andaman permit out of a sea of red tape; Captain Bill Nelson, who indirectly had found me the launch Al Raza, Chris Pooley, John Swire’s man in the Gulf, and the helpful Pakistani consul general, between them, had launched me towards Karachi from Dubai. Captain Choudhuri and the ebullient Bala, who had introduced me to their old shipmate Dennis Beale in Port Blair, had become my friends; so had Tony Blatch, who saw me off from Singapore in the little Perak, and William and Victor Chiongbian, who watched their mighty Doña Virginia bear me away from Cebu. From Sandakan Captain Amin had provided me with one of the best adventures of my life, and at Port Said Captain Visbecq had saved me from the humiliation of having to negotiate the Isthmus of Suez by desert road.
And there had been others….
*
Now, as I type this, Walid writes from Dubai; to his extreme anguish, the doctor he consulted after severe stomach pains has diagnosed an ulcer. The doctor has told him to stop working, and he may have to go home to Pakistan. If so, he thinks he will lose his job and his foothold in Dubai, and be unable to leave Pakistan ever again. His letter is a cry of anguish from the ranks of hopefuls straining toward the West.
Francis, the teacher at the government college in Port Blair, has written from the shadow of the Cellular Jail to say that he has just married a Protestant girl from Madhya Pradesh, and that in time he hopes his Catholic parents will come to accept her Protestantism. Metin has written a letter from the ancient barracks of Scutari complaining about the humiliation of his shaven head. And Mr Missier, that noble old man who put me on board the Herman Mary to Tuticorin, has sent me a five-hundred-gram packet of Ceylon’s finest tea and an invitation in silver lettering embossed on a white folding card. It reads:
The Bells of St Lucia’s Cathedral Will Chime for
PUNEETHA
Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. R. Missier, and
BERNARD
Son of Mrs. Ignatiusammal and Late Mr. J. Leo Fernando
On Monday, 15th September at 10.00 a.m.
We cordially solicit the presence of Mr. Gavin Young
to share their happiness and ours
at the above solemnization
I am very sorry I won’t be there, but I intend to see Mr Missier again one day.
Hentry has used the services of a professional letter-writer – to judge from the florid style – to announce the death of his baby sister, and to inform me that he has changed schooners; he is now beating up and down the Malabar coast of India and across to Colombo, in a three-master. Hentry, his friends and relatives have a hard, precarious life, no doubt, but at least no politician promising universal salvation has yet appeared to lead them to the madness, blood and destruction to which my two Cambodian dancing dolls stand memorial.
*
Higher up the Pearl river the water grew choppier, and the hydrofoil advanced between denser wings of spray. As the twin shorelines converged, the shipping thickened: freighters, trawlers, and junks with brown autumnal sails that had the brittle beauty of dead leaves. At one point a Chinese police launch came alongside, and three young Chinese with red stars on their uniforms glanced in as we sat staring in front of us like people in a cinema where the film had broken down. The launch soon sheered away, its engine fading, and we moved on through the rain and cloud of our own spray.
*
Seven months of travel, irritation, anxiety and near despair had got me here. Now, after only a few miles more, by the time the silent young man on my right finished the cigarette he had just lit, I would have arrived in Canton.
*
I stepped ashore at Zhoutouju Pier in Canton carrying the old zip-bag that now bore dark oil stains at each corner, red smears of Borneo tanbark and a sticky label, turned up at its edges like a piece of stale bacon, that said ‘Sealord Hotel, Cochin’. A nondescript Chinese official of the China Travel Agency shook my hand (‘So happy’) and, leading me to a car where a driver waited, asked me what I wanted to see in the city. The museum? Certainly. A tour of the city? Very good. The giant pandas in the zoo? Unquestionably. The people’s supermarket? Well, umm….
In the pouring rain, Mr Chong led me about, but left me to eat my midday meal alone, although I asked him to accompany me, in the dining room of the Tung Fang Hotel, where all the tourists stayed and where there was television and Western Muzak in all the bedrooms. We saw everything he had proposed and, perhaps as a consolation for the fact that the city was not looking its best in the rain, he even added an evening at a school for acrobats. Luckily, the pandas ignored the rain, and lay on their backs in the open sucking long bamboo canes like fat men playing the recorder. In the cut-rate supermarket I bought two miniature bottles of whisky for the driver and a red umbrella for a delighted Mr Chong, who said that red was his wife’s favourite colour.
Mr Chong seldom drew breath; as a guide he was expert and indefatigable, but I fear he may have found me inattentive. I was conscious of a light-headed feeling of end-of-term. I wanted to see China and would return, I hoped. For the moment I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering back to the last thirty weeks of travel.
I walked the glum, wet streets of Canton, ate alone in the hotel dining room and gazed at the rare vultures and the tigers in the zoo while half my mind loitered in the immediate past. Stared at in the museum by brown-skinned Cantonese, I couldn’t help imagining them dripping and shivering on the deck of a British launch in Hong Kong’s Deep Bay. Whatever I did, images of Asia whirled about in my brain.
I wasn’t going to stay in Canton more than one night now that I had made it ‘home’ there in my private game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Next morning Mr Chong drove me to the railway station, and from the platform I watched him hurry away to meet the next incoming hydrofoil from Hong Kong.
The train wriggled its way across the border of China and into the green hills of Hong Kong’s New Territories. An hour later I saw, between an escarpment and Kowloon’s high-rise towers, a silver crescent of sea. It recalled the gleam of water I had first glimpsed as a boy across the rooftops of Bude, and the graveyards of drowned sailors and the battered cliffs of that coast halfway around the world where the dream of this journey had been born.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2016
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Gavin Young, 1981
Illustrations © Hutchinson & Co., 1981
The right of Gavin Young to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher�
�s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–32446–0