Chasing the Dragon (3 page)

2

SLOW BOAT TO CHINA

I
mmigration control boarded the ship. I stood first in the queue, longing to disembark and get on with my adventure. Earlier that morning I had dressed, once again locked my bags ready for disembarkation, and gone up on deck. The sight took my breath away. All the places we had passed by earlier on the voyage seemed so flat by comparison. Here was perspective. Here were mountains shimmering and fading into the mist in an Oriental painting. I found myself filled with peace, and as I recognized that this was the place God had chosen, I said, “Thank You.”

So now I stood, waiting and looking across the South China Sea at the Pearl of the Orient, Hong Kong. Around us was the harbor, separating Victoria Island and the Kowloon Peninsula. It was thronged with small crafts: little fishing
sampans
bobbing up and down as they were sculled with peculiar skill by slant-eyed girls; lighters gaily painted in red, blue, yellow and green, hurrying to unload the freight ships anchored in the channel; and the
wallah wallahs
offloading their crew.

Ferry boats moved between outlying islands carrying shift workers, and crowding the waterfronts were the ancient junks bringing food to the Colony from mainland China. They looked oddly old-fashioned, for behind them, along the shoreline, rose row upon row of magnificent modern skyscrapers clinging to the sides of the mountain on Hong Kong Island, right up to the peak where they disappeared into ethereal clouds.

Close at hand, behind the dockyards with their warehouses (strangely named “godowns”), I saw glimpses of Chinese streets,
their signs displayed in large characters hanging horizontally from the buildings. They looked quaint, exciting, hinting of the exotic East acclaimed by tourist guides. As I lifted my eyes, I saw more mountains behind them in the distance on the Kowloon side. These were the hills of the Nine Dragons in the New Territories that stretched away to the border with Mao’s China, a mere 20 miles away. Hong Kong, from the water on a sunny morning, looked beautiful; but it was a façade.

The immigration officer did not echo my eagerness. He took from me my completed forms, which stated that I was entering the Colony to work, and settled down to question my replies. They did not make him happy.

“Where you live?”

“I don’t actually have anywhere to live yet.”

“Where your friends?”

“I haven’t got any of those here yet.”

“Where you work?”

“Well, no—I don’t have a job either.”

The young Cantonese looked at me darkly. His Hong Kong English had managed the interrogation fine so far, but my answers were not according to the book. He must have thought I looked a bit pathetic, so he tried some supplementary questions.

“Where your mother?” He was quite kind now.

“She’s in England.”

“Where your return ticket?”

“Oh, I haven’t got one of those.” I said this quite blithely. Having a one-way ticket had not worried me, and I could not see why he was so concerned.

Finally, he brightened—we were in a place where one commodity usually solves most problems. “How much money you got?”

I felt quite pleased, as I considered myself rather well off. By dint of limiting my soft drinks on the month’s journey out, I had arrived with almost what I had when I boarded the ship. “About HK $100,” I said proudly.

“Not enough,” the man snapped. “Hong Kong velly expensive place! That money not enough three days!” And he bustled
off importantly in his fine peaked cap and starched shorts to find his superior. They consulted a moment, and then came back at me in officialdom. “Even though you Blitish,” said the Chief, “we refuse you permission to leave the ship. Wait here.”

I gathered that they thought I was a prostitute looking for easy earnings from U.S. troops on “rest and recreation” trips from Vietnam. With no means of support, no home, no friends, no nothing, I was left to watch all the other passengers land, wondering what they were going to do with me. Into my mind flashed horrible visions of their locking me up in the ship’s hold and sending me back to England in disgrace. I would have to meet all my friends who would say, “Told you so! Fancy setting off round the world and leaving all the plans to God—very irresponsible!” What was I going to do? How had I landed here in the first place?

My mother had only been expecting one of us and when, as an end-of-war bonus, she gave birth to twins, my father was granted 48 hours compassionate leave. It must have been a disappointment for him, hoping for a rugby team and ending up with four girls instead. So I tried to make it up to him by behaving like a tomboy. I loved climbing and running, boys’ toys and bicycles, and later I developed a passionate interest in rugger and scrum halves.

One of my first memories is from when I was four. I was leaning against the radiator in our home in Sutton, outside London, thinking,
Is it really worth being good?
I knew there was a choice, but I wondered if it paid to be good. So I went on sitting on the radiator—it made a lovely hollow noise when you banged it—and thinking. I ended up deciding that whatever I did was bound to be found out by someone some day. There would be a reckoning.

About a year later, my twin, Gilly, and I were sitting in Sunday School when a proper missionary came to talk to us. She was dressed up like the pictures of missionaries in Victorian children’s books, complete with long dark skirt and hair pulled back in a
bun. Pointing at each one of us sitting on our baby chairs, she fluted, “And could God want you on the mission field?” I remember thinking the answer to that question could not be no because, of course, God wanted everyone on the mission field. What exactly a mission field was I had no idea; I had a dim picture of myself sitting at the door of a mud hut, a sort of White Queen in Africa, feeling worthy. There were people like that in a missionary booklet I had seen.

I later told a friend at our little junior school that I wanted to be a missionary. It was a disastrous mistake. I soon found that everyone expected me to be better than everyone else. “But I thought you were going to be a missionary?” they would say accusingly when I was naughty. I always felt this was cheating somehow—it did not seem quite fair. So I learned very early that in England it is better to keep quiet about these things.

So I invented a series of careers to throw people off the scent—a conductor, the first woman to climb Everest, a circus performer. But occasionally I was found out. Once when a school friend’s mother gushed, “So, you’re the one who’s going to be a missionary, aren’t you?” I went very pink and hoped no one would mention it again.

However, privately, some things still bothered me. One day Gilly and I were walking over the railway bridge on our way back from meeting Nellie, our friend and the family daily help. As usual we had scrounged lime green penny lollies off her, but I had hardly got past the bit where it stuck to your tongue when an awful thought appeared:
What are we doing on the earth? What is life all about?
It seemed to me that I was trapped. I could not live just how I pleased, because it was possible that God was there after all and that one day I would have to explain everything I had done to Him. This was not a happy thought.

Then there was the problem of sin. I had seen the school register and the mark the students got against their name every day. Lying on the tennis lawn, I looked up at the sky and imagined God was up there with a big book. It had all our names in it, and every time you did something wrong, you got a mark.
I had a look at my column, and it was terribly long. I think it went on for pages. Well, there was nothing to be done, because there was a song in Sunday School about being stuck with your sins:

God has blotted them out

I’m happy and glad and free!

God has blotted them out

let’s turn to Isaiah and see.
¹

I did not understand “blotting out,” so it wasn’t until years later that I knew what we were singing. I thought of that big book with all my sins stretching for lines and lines and God with a piece of blotting paper carefully blotting them in. At last a solution occurred to me. Because youth was in my favor, I decided,
If I never do anything wrong again, ever, ever, perhaps one day I will catch up to Winston Churchill! He is the goodest person on the earth, but he is very old, so if I stop sinning now maybe we will end up about equal!

I made another mistake during my first term at boarding school. My twin and I were sitting at the end of the table, eating the compulsory piece of brown bread for tea. The head of our table was a tall girl named Mirissa; she told me off for not cutting my bread in half before eating it. I thought I would try to atone for the brown bread by making polite conversation, but, unfortunately, I chose the wrong topic. Having heard the first Billy Graham broadcast a short time previously, I mentioned how impressed I had been with the evangelist. “Mass emotion!” she drawled disdainfully and dismissed the subject. (I was in such awe of the seniors that ever after when such matters cropped up in school, I would sneer, “Mass emotion!”)

Confirmation came around, and it was our grade’s turn to be “done.” I was rather serious about all this, feeling that I was one of the few who really believed in God. The others were only doing it for the dresses and the Confirmation Tea, to which we could invite relatives and godparents. My real fear was that the vicar would ask us individually what we believed before we
could get through, but I need not have worried—he never did. So that was all right. But I had to ask him a question first: “What should I think about when the bishop puts his hands upon my head?”

The vicar thought for a moment. “Ah—I should er … er—pray!” he concluded triumphantly. Gilly and I walked forward in our school-issue white dresses and knelt down. The bishop laid hands on us—I can only remember walking back to my seat filled with joy. Actually, I felt like laughing—like splitting my sides.
How improper—this was a confirmation service, and this was the solemn bit. Laughing was for the tea afterward
. I found my service sheet and covered up my face so that no one should see me smiling in the pew, and then quickly put my head down in an attitude of prayer. I had hoped to carry off the ceremony looking both reverent and graceful—there did not seem to be any connection between the service and this unseemly gladness. I was giving my life to God; I had expected nothing back.

My next move was to find the classified phone directory, look up missionary societies, take the address of the first one and write them a letter. “I’m thinking of becoming a missionary,” I wrote, “and I think I should start preparing now. What subjects should I take?” They responded by joining me to their postal youth fellowship. It was lovely getting extra mail at boarding school breakfast, but I had to make sure I leaned across the label on the brown envelopes so that no one would find out where my letters came from.

I worked during the holidays in Father’s factory, gave coaching lessons, or delivered letters for the Post Office at Christmas. For several years, I held the unofficial title of “our Number 1 Post-girl of the year,” and I was even elected Miss Croydon (South) 1960. My princely wage was US $.24 per hour, plus luncheon vouchers; these I exchanged at the Post Office Canteen for Woodbine cigarettes. I was a woman of the world!

I later moved on to the Royal College of Music, where I discovered very quickly that musicians regard love as the food of music and had a hard time eluding a persistent horn player.
I did have a great predilection for the brass section, however, and I spent an unfortunate amount of my time trailing them around from pub to rehearsal to concert to pub. I sat on their instrument cases in the train and did very little practice on my piano or oboe.

From time to time, I passed the Christian Union notice board and got a twinge of conscience. But those Christians looked wet, pimply and feeble and were mostly organists, anyway. Not my scene at all. They sat in a holy huddle by themselves in the canteen and looked unattractive, like those awful people who came up to me and asked if I was “saved” or “washed in the blood.” I did not know what they were talking about and did not want to, either. They looked grim—no makeup—and wore felt hats. Although they assured me I would change once I “knew Jesus,” I certainly did not want to change into one of them.

Instead, I went to a series of parties where the chosen forms of recreation were sordid or boring. “Well, what did you come for then?” The men flung this at me when I declined the alternatives. I always went, hoping to meet the man of my dreams, and it was a long time before I realized that he was not likely to be at such parties.

I was sitting drably on my commuter train dragging back home from college one day when I met two old school friends. They took one look at me and invited me to a London flat for coffee with a fabulous man who talked about the Bible. So I went. He was fabulous. But so was everyone there. I could not get over it—they looked quite normal like me! The girls were made-up, and one of them was talking about bikinis. The men were discussing car racing—and yet all of them were there because they wanted to study the Bible. It was the first time in my life that my toes did not curl up when someone talked to me about Jesus. I could discuss God easily in that flat.

I was upset to hear, though, about
heaven
and
hell
, which I had thrown out with the mass emotionalism years before. But more disturbing was hearing that no one could go to God except through Jesus.
²
The words themselves were not as much of a
shock as my discovery that it was Jesus who said them. I was constrained either to accept what Jesus said about Himself or to forget about the Christian faith. Among my social set, the worst sin was to be narrow, but Jesus’ words offered no compromise.
³

Reluctantly, I told Him I would believe what He had said—although I did not like it much. I was converted.

My life became fuller than I had believed possible. I had not entered a narrow life after all. Shortly after, a man on my suburban line leaned across the carriage and asked if I believed in God. “No,” I replied, “I know Him; it’s different. I know peace; I know where I’m going.”