Outposts

by Simon Winchester

  And so today the rulers of Hong Kong—the new rulers—are the Chinese. The drivers of the 600 Rolls-Royces registered in the colony are, invariably, wealthy men from Canton or Shanghai. (There are only fourteen registered rickshaws, also driven by Chinese, but for tourists coming off the Star Ferry.) The big names, the new taipans, are the Run Run Shaws and the Y. K. Paos and the Woo Hon Fais—hard-working, shrewd, ruthless, merchant venturers. And in the background, the Triads—the Chinese version of the Mafia, controlling and manipulating and directing the seamier side of the colony, with all its curious needs and desires. It was a supreme irony, a policeman said to me one evening over a drink in a Wanchai bar, that the British gained Hong Kong as the result of a war that stemmed from British attempts to force opium on the Chinese market; the Triads were now the principal target of the Royal Hong Kong police for trafficking in derivatives of the very same substance, and trying to ship it, and sell it, back to the British.

  A few days after the excitements of the signing ceremonies, and once the colony appeared to have accustomed herself to the harsh fact that the British were no longer going to rule and the Han Chinese would be taking over in the Year of the Rat, 5,000 days hence—once all was settled, and the arguments were stilled, I took a morning ferry ride to Lantau Island, on the western perimeter of the colony.

  I went with a friend, a beautiful young Chinese girl. We sat together on the prow of the ferry, the early sun warming our backs, and watched the wall of great skyscrapers slip past, and the junks dip through the waves, and the great ocean freighters flying their flags from Panama and Liberia, Greece and India. This was indeed the engine of Eastern commerce, a key to the lock of the world! Sir John Fisher had been right; Lord Curzon was correct in assuming that all foreigners would bow in mute respect at the sight of Hong Kong, this perpetual exhibition of British might and main.

  But then the skyscrapers were behind us, and the green hills of Lantau rose ahead, and my friend was chatting to a neighbour in the shrill singsong of her old Canton, and the waters were busy with small fishing boats, and a sort of peace had settled all around. We took a car to the very western tip of the island, and up among the hills and the tea plantations to the Po Lin monastery, where the Buddhists pray and teach and find their sanctuary. I had come because an English friend had a son there. He was learning to be a priest, and I had come to give him his mother’s love.

  We walked through a different world. The monks, silent and shuffling in their deep brown robes, went about their holy business in a rich silence. The air was heavy with incense, and thin blue eddies of smoke rose from the incense sticks before an effigy of the Lord Buddha. Offerings of oranges and figs, bananas and papayas and freshly gathered tea lay on the altars. Old women would approach the statue, bow, kneel, make wordless prayers and offer silent supplication.

  I found my Englishman, shaven-headed and serene, learning to fold a robe made of red silk. He was on a three-day vow of silence; but my friend asked the abbot if he might speak to me for a few moments, and permission was given, with a smile. ‘Come to see the real Hong Kong?’ was his first question. He said he loved the island, its feeling of one-ness with China, its timelessness, its immemorial qualities. He did not know where the abbot would send him, and he was naturally content to do as he was bidden; but he would love to stay here, among the clouds and the fragrance of the tea bushes, and on the edge of China. And my friend nodded happily, and she was silent on the ferry boat back to Hong Kong Island, and when we said goodbye—for I had to fly on to another country, and another island, even more remote—she said she hoped the Hong Kong that arose after the British left was more like Lantau, less like Wanchai, Central, and the streaming shops of Tsim Sha Tsui.

  This is the only British colony of whose constitutional future we can now be sure. It is the only colony that, on being freed from British rule, becomes subsumed into a neighbour nation (Northern Ireland is the single remaining possession that awaits a similar fate). At one second after midnight on 1st July 1997 the Crown colony of Hong Kong will be retitled the Special Administrative Region of Xianggang—Hong Kong, China.

  A few moments before there will have been a sorry little ceremony. A small detachment of British troops, all in Number One dress and gleaming brass, will have wheeled, clattered and saluted, and a blare of trumpets will have sounded the familiar anthem. The Governor, all in white, with the plumes of his hat fluttering white and scarlet in the night-time breeze, will have stepped forward to the dais. Drums will have rolled; the distant chimes from the cathedral church of St John will sound the midnight hour; a marine will have lowered, with infinite slowness, the Union flag from the white jackstaff.

  And then, jauntily, up will go the red and gold flag of the People’s Republic and, perhaps, a new banner for Xianggang. A small man in a modest brown suit will step forward from the shadows and shake the Governor’s hand; the Governor will slip into those same shadows, and be borne off to a waiting warship on which the troops have already started to embark. Someone in the watching crowd will start to sob quietly; another will mutter the line about the captain and the kings departing, the tumult and the shouting dying…

  And British rule will all be over, just as it is predestined and preordained. That small but precious jewel in the Imperial crown will have passed back to its rightful owners to the north; Hong Kong, China, will stand ready to do business with the world in the name of the massed proletariat of the People’s Republic, rather than the House of Windsor and the taipans of Great Britain. Whether or not it will continue to be a success cannot be known; Britons assume that without the wisdom of their direction, the Chinese cannot hope to succeed as they have been allowed to do since Captain Elliot did his deal in 1841. The condition of Hong Kong? remarked a wit—a British, Imperially minded wit—in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club one evening. Past imperfect, present tense, future conditional.

  8

  Bermuda

  8

  Bermuda

  The telephone rang shortly before six, startling me from what I had supposed the night before would be a long, deserved and comfortable Sunday lie-in. It was March 1973 and I was in Chevy Chase, a pleasant suburb of Washington; the caller was in London, and seemed, through my sleep-fogged mind, to have but a single question: ‘Do you think you ought to go?’

  He said it again. ‘Do you think you ought to go?’ I had no idea what the Foreign Editor was talking about, and for a few further seconds I was too fuddled with sleep to care. But then, in a flash of sudden realisation, it occurred to me that my editor in London knew more about something—moreover something that had evidently happened in my parish—than I did. Considering that I was the man on the spot, and had only recently arrived there, such an imbalance of knowledge could prove embarrassing. I muttered something about holding on, shot out of bed, raced to the front door and found outside, on the doorstep, the rolled copy of that Sunday morning’s Washington Post.

  I scanned it with a frantic urgency. Nothing at the top of the page. Nothing below—no, wait a minute, here was a small paragraph, inserted late in the night. ‘Governor Shot Dead’ read the headline. And underneath, a one-word dateline. ‘Bermuda’. This, surely, must be the story—something that had happened while I was asleep, and must have already been broadcast back home, on the BBC.

  I hurtled back to the phone. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ I said, and then tried to assume a tone of sage and languid authority, as though I had known about the shooting all along. ‘Yes—I suppose I should wander over. Could make a decent piece.’ ‘Fine,’ returned the voice on the other end. ‘There’s a plane from Baltimore in an hour. I’ve booked you on it already. Should get in to Hamilton by lunchtime. Talk to you later.’ And he hung up.

  Sir Richard Sharples had been Colonial Governor for six months. He had arrived, in the proper style for an island that makes its living from holidaymakers, aboard a cruise liner. He had made himself reasonably popular—he had the Imperial bearing that Bermudians like their
Governors to have, and he gave pleasant parties, and he mixed well. But now, astonishingly, he was dead. He, his ADC, and his dog had all been shot as they walked between the rose bushes after dinner. A state of emergency had been declared. A frigate had been dispatched. The well-oiled machinery for dealing with native insurrections was swung into place, on the off-chance it might be needed, as in Malaya, or British Guiana, or Cyprus, or those dozen other sites of old Imperial trouble.

  I remember less than I should. The visit was too hurried, the images too compressed, the story too confusing. No one knew who might have fired the shots, or why. There was a great pall of bewildered sadness over the island, and yet I remember the sun shining and the blue sea looking particularly exquisite, and the tiny pink houses in their neat gardens, and the fields of Easter lilies being picked for delivery to the New York flower markets. I had to hire a scooter to get me around the island—visitors were not allowed to drive cars—and this only added to the strange feeling I had about the place. It should have been grey and stormy, or perhaps steamily hot and crawling with snakes and leeches, and I should have had to make my calls in a black car, being talked to by a gloomily pessimistic taxi driver. Instead I was zipping along narrow lanes between bushes of oleander and bougainvillaea, humming above white coral beaches, feeling fit and well and getting a handsome tan in one of the prettiest places in creation. I was glad to get away, and back to the real world.

  Bermuda then gave me the feeling that it was a sort of Disneyland, and that the shootings were the local equivalent of a tourist having a heart-attack inside the plastic Matterhorn—smiling young men with shrouds would clear everything up within seconds and hustle the cadaver away through a back door, and then the whirligigs would start up again and the crowds would re-form, like waters briefly parted, and the music would start, and the smiling young men would resume their cries of ‘Have a nice day!’ and all would seem well once more. It had all been just a brief interruption to the placid rhythms of paradise.

  It was more than a decade before I went back. I seemed to be on opposite sides of the world whenever Bermuda crept into the headlines. The police did, eventually, find the murderers—two young hoodlums—and a jury convicted them. They were hanged, after the Foreign Secretary in London reported that he was ‘unable to advise the Queen to intervene’. The hangings triggered riots, and, in true Imperial style, soldiers of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were sent in to restore order, and a Royal Commission had to be set up to find out how it had happened. But before long the tranquil blue waters closed over these events, too. The ‘still-vex’d Bermoothes’ may have inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest—but so far as the public relations firm who acted for the Bermudian Government were concerned the murders and the mayhem, the rioting and the Royal Regiments were as nothing. The islands were delightfully and permanently unvex’d, the atmosphere anything but Tempestuous, and for everyone’s sake, long may the cruise ships call, the lilies bloom and the invading armies of suburban Americans come each year from honeymoon to retirement, to enjoy the peace and beauty of it all.

  When I next went back to Bermuda it was to see the first girl I ever kissed. Gillian was the daughter of my boarding house-master at school. I was fourteen and she thirteen when, as I think I recall, we exchanged a tentative brushing of lips outside the fourth form bathroom. Thus committed to one another we had gone for a few walks together in the Dorset countryside, had pledged all kinds of lifetime troths and trysts, but had then parted and, eventually and inevitably, lost touch. I heard that she had moved to Paris, and then to Amsterdam. Rumour said she was in Boston in the early 1980s, and finally a chance letter from her father mentioned that she now lived in Bermuda, married to a man who had made a fortune in computer programs. She was, her father said enviously, ‘more or less retired’.

  She met me at the airport, and it was both curious and enchanting how little had changed. It had been twenty-six years since we had last smiled conspiratorially at each other across the dining hall—for even the thought of romance was forbidden—and yet we recognised each other in an instant, and by the end of the first day were talking just as we had done on those walks to Beaminster and Upwey all those summers ago. Her husband must have felt a little left out, for the first day of reminiscence; but after a while the pleasantness of the memories became subsumed in the idyllic realities of daily life in Bermuda and that, I confess, began to weary me, and I began to feel left out, a stranger in a place that was in some unfathomable way most peculiar and, as I had felt a decade before, still oddly unreal.

  They lived in a quiet apartment two miles away from the capital, beside a small cove where they kept the yacht they were only just learning how to sail. One room was reserved for their computer and its telephone links with the outside world—Boston, particularly, where the wealth from the magic invention cascaded into their bank account in a steady stream, and could be monitored at the touch of a button. There was a collection of other electronic wizardry, and there were soft carpets and soft sofas and cushions, all in pastel colours, easy on the eye, deliberately unexciting, inducing a permanent feeling of relaxation. Once in a while a telephone would purr its summons, and arrangements would be made for a tennis game, or a squash tournament, or a dinner in a nearby restaurant. But otherwise, nothing ever seemed to happen.

  Days slipped into nights with measured ease. The weather was sunny, the skies and the seas were blue, the beaches were pink and white, the sunsets were soft and salmon-coloured, people wore cotton clothes that were white or vaguely tinted with lemon or cerise or eggshell. It was like living in an ashram, amid an atmosphere of studied perfection, as though everything that had been created, from the sky to the carpets, and whether natural or made by man, had been designed to promote a feeling of inner well-being among everyone who lived on the island, or had come there for a holiday. It was Disneyland, I was certain—or perhaps it should have been called England-land, a caricature of an always-sunny part of Cornwall, fashioned in polychrome and vinyl, and served up daily for the affluent East Coasters.

  And then I began to have a nightmare—that Bermuda was like the village in an old television series called The Prisoner, and while everything was perfect and lovely to look at, it was impossible to get away, and you were stuck in its sticky sweetness, walled into a pastel cell and hummed at by the Muzak machine, smiled at and bowed to eternally by humanoids who wished you would have a nice day and wasn’t the weather grand and wasn’t the sea warm and the beaches pretty and the flowers nice? Sartre had written a play about being trapped in a room in a luxury hotel for all eternity. I had this feeling about Bermuda, and began, after only a very few days, to look around for the way out. And it was only then that I began to discover some of the reality of the island, and found it a good deal more curious than I had ever imagined.

  One afternoon I was at the airport. A friend had told me that there were interesting things to see—it was an American military base, for one thing, and probably held some secrets—and so I begged permission for a tour. The control tower, while not exactly an Imperial monument, proved most interesting.

  The air traffic controllers who talk down the jumbo jets bound for Kindley Field, as the base is called, are all members of the United States Navy. The ones I met were all attractive young women; for hours at a time each one sits, hunched over the green glow of her radar screen, a half-cold Pepsi-Cola beside her, a half-smoked Kent between her lips, the rasp of fatigue and concentration heavy in her voice, bringing some order to the apparent chaos of the mid-Atlantic flight paths.

  Once in a while, if the inbound pilot is a cheery sort, she’ll purr up at him, suggesting he may like to take his passengers along what she’ll call ‘the tourist route’ down to her island. ‘Okay, Delta six-five heavy,’ she’ll say, talking to a Tri-Star droning in from Atlanta, 800 miles west, ‘make a heading of one-five-zero and come down to flight level five-zero and show your folks where they’re coming for their vacation.’

  And down the
plane will swoop, a long and lazy right-hand turn, a slow and gentle dive through the creamy lather of clouds. The controller, taking another sip of Pepsi, sucking once again on her crumpled tube of tobacco and murmuring some item of arcana to a crossbound long-haul plane which has strayed into her control zone while en route for somewhere else, forgets the Delta Airline passengers, turns her attention to another blip on her screen, sees that it is an Eastern charter inbound from Newark, New Jersey, and prepares to say good day to the pilot, although she well knows that Eastern pilots are a lot less friendly than the good men from Delta and the Deep South.

  Up in the sky, twenty miles west of her and coming down fast, the Delta passengers—the 300 ‘souls’ reported by the pilot as being on board and sitting, quite probably entranced, behind him—are about to get their first impressions of the islands on which they will probably have spent, in advance, so many dollars, and for which they have spent so many months awaiting. They will have heard the pilot’s breezy account of the islands’ history and present status (‘Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth is Queen of Bermuda, you know,’ he will have announced, to a delighted gasp from some of the more impressionable members of his audience), and now they want to see the reality of this little chunk of Britain set so near to their home.