Gweilo (19 page)

One sweltering day, the humidity over 90 per cent, my mother and I went shopping, our mission to buy a wedding anniversary gift for my paternal grandparents.

Under normal circumstances, I would have strenuously attempted to avoid this outing. Traipsing in my mother's wake round shops containing little of interest to me, in streets I had explored and which were now fairly sterile to me, was not my idea of an ideal morning. However, I wanted to take part in the choice of a gift for Grampy.

With a military methodology, my mother went up and down the streets, traversing Tsim Sha Tsui in a mental grid, but she could find nothing suitable. It was either tourist tat or too fragile to post, or too expensive and therefore likely to cost my grandparents inordinately high customs duties. Finally, having exhausted most of Tsim Sha Tsui – and me – we had a Coke each at a pavement stall and headed up Nathan Road at a brisk pace. My shirt clung to my back: through my mother's sweat-soaked blouse I could see her bra strap and felt very embarrassed that it was so prominent. None of the Chinese women seemed to be even lightly perspiring.

My mother's intention was, if she could find nothing in an area catering mostly for European taste, she would have a go in that providing for the Chinese. Turning into Shanghai Street, we started to patrol the shops selling crockery. It was utilitarian stuff but one variety caught my mother's attention. Known as rice-patterned ware, neither of us could understand how it was mass-produced. Each dish, bowl or cup was made of white porcelain with a patterned blue border and base, between which the porcelain was speckled with what looked like rice grains fired in the matrix. If the bowl was held to the light, each grain appeared translucent.

'This is it,' my mother declared as she held up a large serving bowl to the light. 'Bugger the fragility! This is the one, don't you think?'

I agreed. My grandmother would regard it as a nice bowl to put on the dresser but my grandfather would see it for what it was – an exotic piece sent from a far-off land with all my love brimming out of it. It cost only a few dollars.

'It's a bit on the cheap side,' she commented as the shopkeeper wrapped the bowl in wood straw and newspaper.

'It's the thought that counts,' I remarked.

She smiled and sauntered round the shop, picking up a piece here and a piece there. I sat on a stool and sweated. The shopkeeper did not offer me a drink for he no longer had reason to keep us in the place. We had parted with our money and the cost of a Green Spot would simply erode his profit margin.

Finally, my mother returned to the counter, said, 'Sod it!' and ordered a six-setting complete dinner service of the same sort, asking for it all to be delivered to the Boundary Street address.

The shopkeeper beamed, shouted for an assistant, relieved my mother of $110 (about £6) and gave us each a chilled bottle of Watson's lemonade.

'I don't think', my mother said as we walked at a leisurely speed towards Nathan Road, 'that we need to mention this to your father.'

'Why not?' I asked. 'How can you hide ninety plates and bowls and things?'

My mother took my hand and jauntily swung it back and forth as we walked on.

'I'm a wife,' she answered obtusely.

The arcaded pavement ahead was obstructed by a row of barrels being off-loaded from a green lorry with a canvas awning. As we entered the restricted space, we were ambushed by a young Chinese woman. She wore the clothes of a coolie – a stiff black cotton jacket and matching baggy trousers. She was barefoot, her hair awry and her face, as my mother would put it, in need of a kiss from Mr Flannel. In her arms she carried a baby about a month old. There was no way we could avoid her without turning heel.

'Missee! Missee!' she said as she approached us.

My mother opened her handbag, snapped the catch on her purse and took out a violet-coloured dollar bill. To my mother's surprise, the young woman refused it.

'No
kumshaw
, missee. No
kumshaw
!'

The woman held the baby out. It gurgled with infantile pleasure and kicked the air. Its legs were podgy. I could see it was a girl.

'You tek, missee, pleas'.'

My mother stopped dead in her tracks. The look on her face was one of sheer bemusement.

'Missee! You tek. You tek.'

She reached forward with the baby, trying to convince my mother to accept it in her arms.

'You tek, pleas'.'

The woman was pleading now. The pain in her soul tainted each of the only four English words she knew, had learnt especially for just such a confrontation.

'Pleas', missee. Pleas', missee.'

I looked at my mother. Tears ran down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them and they dripped on to her already sweat-dampened blouse. She shook her head.

The Chinese woman made one last attempt, as if she was a stallholder pressing my mother to buy something she did not need.

'
M'ho
,' my mother murmured.

At that, the woman turned and disappeared down a narrow and fetid
hutong
from which blew the stench of open drains.

We walked on in silence until we reached a rickshaw rank. My mother hailed one and we travelled home together. Once in the apartment, my mother poured herself a gin and tonic and sat heavily in a chair.

'What did that woman want?' I enquired.

'She wanted to give me her baby.'

'Why?' I replied, taken aback at this information.

'Who knows,' said my mother with a sigh. 'Perhaps she can't afford to feed it. Perhaps the father told her to get rid of it. It was a girl. . .'

'So what?' I came back.

'In China, boy children are precious. They are even sometimes called little emperors. Girls are not.'

I could see no difference between a girl baby and a boy baby, other than the obvious anatomical one, and said so.

She took a big swig of her gin and tonic. 'To the Chinese, nothing is more important than keeping the family name going. So sons are important and daughters, who will marry and take another name, aren't.'

'But what will happen to the baby girl?' I half-wondered aloud.

My mother was silent for at least a minute before speaking.

'She will die. Either her parents will smother her or they'll take her into the Kowloon foothills and leave her to die of exposure.'

'But that's murder!' I exclaimed.

'Yes,' my mother agreed dully, 'and this is China.'

'Can't we go back again?' I began. 'I don't mind if . . .'

The appeal of an adopted Chinese sister was suddenly growing on me. And it was now of paramount importance to me that we did something.

'No,' my mother said, 'I'm afraid it doesn't work like that . . .'

She patted the cushion on the settee beside her. I sat down and she put her arm around me.

'It is terrible, but it has been going on for centuries in China. There's nothing we can do about it. You cannot change a culture overnight.'

'What about calling the police . . . ?' I suggested.

My mother sadly shook her head and said, 'She's long gone now.'

That night, lying in bed with the lights of Boundary Street barred by the Venetian blinds on the ceiling, I wondered if the baby was already dead. I wanted to cry -and felt I should - but found I could not. I had already accepted the inevitable cruelty of life in the Orient. It was, I considered as I drifted wearily to sleep, no surprise China was so full of ghosts.

By early May 1953, Hong Kong was gripped by Coronation fever. A vast
pi lau
, a sort of Chinese triumphal arch, was erected across Nathan Road near the Alhambra cinema. Made entirely of bamboo poles lashed together by bamboo twine, it looked like the scaffolding on a building site, within which it was intended to construct a pagoda-cum-watchtower. By the week before the Coronation, it was festooned with gold and scarlet decorations, a row of lanterns, a picture of the new Queen and the letters
EIIR
. These also appeared on virtually every lamppost on every major thoroughfare. Shops displayed framed pictures of the Queen, sometimes next to ones of Chiang Kai-shek. It was a brave shopkeeper who displayed the Queen next to Chairman Mao. Even if he had Communist sympathies, which some had, discretion was deemed the better part of colonial valour and he joined in with the festivities.

On Coronation Day itself, there was a huge parade on Hong Kong-side. Keeping to Queen's Road, it wound its way through the city for six miles, the pavements jammed with tens of thousands of spectators. The queues for the Star Ferry on Kowloon-side stretched for well over a mile but we avoided these by crossing the harbour on a Royal Navy launch from which we were ushered into a dockyard office building overlooking Queen's Road and allotted seats at a window.

The parade was interminable. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marching military bands, St John Ambulance volunteers, Boy Scouts,
kai fong
associations, nurses from the Bowen Road and Mount Kellett military hospitals, police and fire brigade marched by in dizzying, monotonous ranks, flags flying, pennants whipping the warm air. The tedium was only relieved by a drive past of tanks, howitzers, scout cars and other military paraphernalia. Several times, I tried to make my escape to explore the dockyard but had my collar felt by my father and was forced back into my seat.

It was just as well. After the pageant of imperial militarism, and a break of a quarter of an hour during which I managed to get my father to buy me a Coke, came the Chinese half of the parade.

At the head were two stilt-walkers and a classical marching orchestra – and it did not play 'When the Saints Go Marching In' but stirring melodies and lilting airs. Other Chinese bands followed, instilling in me that day a lifelong love of Chinese classical music. Between each of them were several flatbed trucks decked out as floats with tableaux being enacted on them by children dressed as characters out of Chinese mythology. They wore pancake make-up, as detailed and as stark as a Chinese opera singer's. My mother commented several times on how uncomfortable it must have been for them under the hot sun.

The highlight of the whole parade, however, were the lion and dragon dances.

Their approach could be guessed at by the increasing agitation of the crowds on the pavement opposite us. They began to grow restless, craning their necks and pointing. Finally, to the clashing of cymbals and striking of hand gongs, the lion appeared. It consisted of a brightly coloured stylized head on a bamboo frame, with fur-lined jaws and bulbous eyes. As big as a barrel, it was held aloft by a dancer who swung it to and fro, ducked it down and lunged forward with it, shook it from side to side and generally acted in a ferocious fashion. Behind him was the lion's body, a covering of less decorated cloth under which another dancer jostled and jived. The movements of the head were dictated by the cymbals and gongs. It was, for all intents and purposes, a sort of legendary Oriental pantomime horse.

Stilt-walkers and jugglers followed the lion, there was a gap and then the dragon arrived on the scene.

It was magnificent. Its head was at least nine feet high, excluding the horns on top. Its mouth – red-mawed and lined with white teeth – was big enough for me to have sat in. The mouth was operated by a man walking in front of the dragon with a pole connected to the dragon's lower lip, whilst the remainder of the head was held high by one man. As with the lion, he swung it to and fro, lowered it to the ground then looked at the sky, in time to the percussion instruments. Several yards in front of the dragon pranced a man with a paper fish almost as big as himself on a pole, with which he teased the beast. Behind the head was a one-hundred-yard-long reptilian body constructed of coloured cloth painted in scales and stretched over a series of bamboo hoops. Under this danced several dozen men, only their legs showing and giving the dragon's body the appearance of a multicoloured circus centipede. The body curled in on itself, twisting across the road and generally behaving in a serpentine fashion. The crowds applauded, the cymbals clashed, the gongs clanged and then, with two police wagons driving side by side, it was all suddenly over.

'What did you think of that?' my father asked as we lined up for the launch on the wall of the dockyard basin.

'Very impressive,' I replied noncommittally, having just heard someone else in the queue make the same remark.

'Just think,' my father went on, 'all over the Empire, these celebrations will be going on today. All for one young woman, our new Queen.'

For a moment, I thought he was going to cry. Whatever else he was, my father was definitely a monarchist.

WE DROVE ON TO THE VEHICULAR FERRY AT YAU MA TEI, THE
ramp was raised and the vessel headed out across the harbour. My mother and I stood at the front, a light spume blowing over us. My father remained with the car at the back of the deck, industriously wiping any hint of spray from the paintwork with a chamois leather.

'Where are we going?' I asked insistently and not for the first time.

'I've told you, I'm not telling you,' she retorted impishly.

Living in Kowloon, I rarely crossed the harbour to the island of Hong Kong. My parents frequently visited friends for dinner there, went to HMS
Tamar
for a mess night or to dine on a visiting warship – and, of course, my father crossed the harbour daily to go to his office in the dockyard – but I only accompanied them on select occasions, such as an Open Day on an aircraft carrier or submarine, or the annual Dockyard Fete, at one of which I won first prize in the .22 rifle shooting competition, with a score of 97/100. The first prize was a fully stocked blue-and-white woven rattan and plastic picnic hamper which my mother used for ten years before it finally unravelled. My success, over adults as well as children, had infuriated my father who scored only seventy-something, yet who regarded himself as a top shot. In front of his colleagues and inferiors, he had lost considerable face: Commodore Blimp had been beaten by his boy. At home that night, my father had roundly derided the prize, although I noticed he removed the two bottles of wine it contained as well as the cashew nuts to which he was – as was I – more than partial. I never got to eat a single one of them. That, my mother told me, was my punishment for being a crack shot.

On Hong Kong-side, we drove off the ferry and a short distance through the city streets before skirting the Bank of China building and starting to ascend a steep wide road. Ahead was verdant mountainside with low blocks of apartments on the gentler slopes but, as the mountain rose more precipitously, houses half hidden in trees. My father had to change down to third gear and then to second for the first corner on a junction. The car remained in a low gear to negotiate two sinuous hairpin bends and a long straight to a four-way junction in a pass.

'Magazine Gap,' my mother said as my ears popped and, looking out the rear window, I caught a glimpse of the harbour and Kowloon beyond and well below.

The car continued to climb through luxuriant forest, plants with leaves as big as elephants' ears crowding each other out in the shade. Lianas and aerial roots hung down like ropes while butterflies flitted through the shadows and dappled light. Through gaps in the trees I caught snatches of open sea: at Magazine Gap we had crossed on to the south side of Hong Kong island.

Still we climbed. Edging the car into first gear, my father gunned the engine and we set off up an incline of at least 30 degrees called Mount Austin Road, moved round a right-hand corner in second gear and turned up another steep road that looked as if it ran along a knife-edge ridge. At the end of this was a four-storey block of apartments. My father parked the car and we entered the building, climbing the wide stairs.

'Who lives here?' I asked my mother.

'We do,' she replied. 'From the day after tomorrow.'

On the top floor, my father produced a key and we entered Apartment 8, Mount Austin Mansions. Despite a few pieces of furniture, it echoed like a cathedral.

'Close your eyes,' my mother said as we went in.

I did so. She led me through the apartment. I heard another door open then the faint sound of birdsong, a cicada and the gentle shush of a mountain breeze.

'Open them.'

I was on the veranda. At my feet lay Hong Kong.

The view left me speechless. Down below was the central business district, the Bank of China and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank next door little more than a child's building bricks. The harbour was a pool with small boats moving across it. Alongside HMS
Tamar
were two grey warships whilst, in mid-harbour, several others swung at anchor. Beyond lay the peninsula of Kowloon. A P&O liner was berthed in Tsim Sha Tsui, cargo vessels unloading at jetties further along the waterfront. The Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter was a mere rectangle of water partly crammed with a brown wedge of junks and sampans. In the distance were the Kowloon hills and, further away still, a progression of hills disappearing towards China. Looking east was a sylvan ridge dotted with houses. Below them, beyond the eastern urban areas, were more hills and, far away, a scatter of islands.

The sun was now low and hidden behind a summit surmounted by a copse of radio aerials: the riot of neon in the streets to the east and on Kowloon-side started to come alive in readiness for the approaching twilight. The last rays of the sun tinged the top of the Nine Dragons. In fifteen minutes, it was night, the lights of the colony shimmering in the heat. The walla-wallas and ferries were now trails of light upon blackened water, the warships decorated with white bulbs strung between their masts or lining their sides.

'So?' my mother asked.

'I don't know,' I replied.

'What do you mean, "I don't know"?' my father snapped. 'This is one of the most famous panoramas in the world and you are going to live on top of it. People would commit murder to live here. People sail halfway round the world to see this view for fifteen minutes and you're going to have it twenty-four hours—'

'Do stop harping on, Ken,' my mother muttered.

'Well, honestly . . .' my father replied, determined to have the last word. 'We give him the earth and—'

'We have not given him the earth,' my mother retorted. 'We have been allotted this as our quarters and he – and we – are bloody lucky. You had nothing to do with it.'

'I had nothing to do with it? My job – my rank – played no part in it?'

'You're a DNSO, Ken, not the First Sea Lord. You have a wife and son. That gives you X amount of housing points. This is an X-points quarter. It has been vacated. We were next in line for allocation. Now shut up!'

In truth, I was fully appreciative of the view. It was just that the enormity, the grandeur of it did not match my eight-year-old vocabulary. Fantastic or incredible or even stupendous seemed utterly devoid of the emotion I felt. It was, like the song, as if I really was sitting on top of the world.

As if that view were not enough, crossing through to the dining room, we looked south, out over the South China Sea. A fairly substantial island lay between Hong Kong and the horizon on which there were other low strips of land with pinpricks of light bunched in one spot on them.

'The island close to is called Lamma,' my mother said. 'Those in the distance are Communist Chinese.'

Yet I was not looking that far. On the sea around and beyond Lamma twinkled tiny lights. There were perhaps a hundred of them. They did not seem to move but were drifting on the tide.

'What're those lights?' I asked, but I realized the answer before being told.

'Fishing sampans,' my mother explained.

We headed back to Boundary Street. As the ferry edged across the harbour, I asked my mother to show me the building in which we had just been. Distinguished by the lights in its windows, it was perched on the very top of a secondary promontory to the east of the Peak, the mountain that stood guardian over the colony.

'What's it called?'

'The little summit is called Mount Austin and we have Apartment 8, Block A.'

'That's lucky,' I declared.

'What do you mean?' my father asked, folding his chamois leather into a wad.

'Eight's a lucky number,' I said. 'The Chinese think eight brings riches.'

'He does pick up some drivel,' my father remarked to my mother.

Yet she winked at me. She was by now well down the
hutong
to becoming a dedicated sinophile: unbeknownst to my father, she had even enrolled herself in Cantonese classes.

Life on the Peak had as much in common with that in Kowloon as a bowl of fish soup at a
dai pai dong
had to a traditional English fried breakfast, with or without salad cream. First, there were no shops except for a small Dairy Farm general store. Second, there were hardly any people about except around an observation point where tourists with cameras mingled with touts trying to sell them packs of photographs of what they were themselves about to photograph. Third, there were no eating places except the Peak Café, a low, red-roofed building that I had spotted as my father halted to change gear on our first visit. Finally, there were very few buildings and those that did exist were either the houses of the rich
taipans
, secure behind walls topped with barbed wire or broken glass, or apartment buildings.

From a busy urban existence, I was suddenly catapulted into a pacific rural one, with a gamut of new experiences to undergo and new lessons to be learnt.

The morning of the move, we arrived at Mount Austin shortly after two dark-blue Bedford lorries with RN painted in white upon the sides. Half a dozen Chinese ratings leapt out, lowered the tailgate and began to carry all our belongings up to Apartment 8. To complement the general-issue furniture provided by the Navy, my parents had purchased a low Chinese coffee table with bow legs, reminiscent of an English bull terrier's, a Chinese dining-room suite and a bar – an essential for my inabstinent father.

As soon as the unpacking commenced, it was diplomatically suggested that I might like to go outside and play. With whom or at what was not an issue. Hardly believing my good fortune, I left the building and set off down the curving ridge road. At the T-junction I turned right and started to ascend to the summit of the Peak.

The road was steep and passed a derelict lot where the foundations of a building were laid out in the ground with a few fragments of wall remaining. It was, in effect, a cleared bomb site: I had seen enough of those in Portsmouth to recognize it. Higher up, several rather fine houses stood to the right of the road with magnificent views of the city below. I walked on, my legs beginning to ache. A few hundred yards on there appeared at the side of the road a small stone building not much bigger than my grandfather's garden shed. The door was open and the sound of voices emanated from within. I knocked and looked in. Sitting at a desk was a policeman. Another sat to one side, his chair tilted back. In a corner, a kettle simmered on an electric ring. They nodded a greeting. I expected to be invited in for a bowl of tea. That would have been Mong Kok protocol. I wasn't.

Beside the police post were some stone steps. I descended them and found myself on a path that, after fifty yards, crossed a small tumbling stream. Tiny fish darted in the sandy-bottomed pools. It seemed amazing that, not three hundred feet from the top of a mountain, there was a flowing stream filled with fish. I stepped over the water by a small stone bridge and walked on. The path was narrow and clung to the not-quite-sheer side of the hill, keeping to more or less the same contour. It was obvious few people came this way, for the undergrowth met over the path and my legs were soon scratched and bleeding. Yet it was worth it. The views were breathtaking. Below me was a pale azure reservoir, Lamma Island across a narrow channel and the South China Sea beyond it. To the west, beyond the next, conical hill, were the distant islands of western Hong Kong and, beyond them, Lan Tau Island, the biggest in the territory. I did not realize quite how high I was until a kite, rising on a thermal, briefly hovered near me. It swivelled its head from side to side with avian wonderment at finding someone so close on the normally deserted mountainside.

The following morning, I woke to find my room bathed in an eerie, soft light. Getting out of bed, I opened the curtains to discover we were in the clouds. Unlatching the metal-framed window, a warm and invisible dampness drifted in, touching my face as a ghost might. It occurred to me that perhaps I was allowing demons to enter so I closed it quickly.

At breakfast, my mother announced, 'You're going to go to the Peak School now. It's much too far to go to Kowloon Junior every day. We've an appointment with the headmistress at eleven o'clock.'

By the time we set off for the school, the sun had burnt off the clouds and we began our walk under a blazing sky. The air, however, was cool, with zephyrs tickling the tall, sparse grass and wild flowers on the bomb site.

'What building stood there?' I asked my mother as we passed it.

'I don't know,' she said, 'but you'll find ruins here and there on the Peak, of buildings destroyed by the Japanese in the war.'

The Peak School was about twenty minutes' walk away on Plunkett's Road, but to get there meant descending the very steep hill to the café. My mother, wearing a smart cotton print dress and high-heeled shoes, attempted the descent, stopped after a few yards, removed her shoes and continued barefoot. We arrived at the school hot and harried. The headmistress showed us into her office, a few formalities were undergone, I was taken to a classroom and obliged to stand in front of my future classmates, declare my name and then sit down at a desk next to another
gweilo
with pre-pubescent acne and breath that smelt as if he had breakfasted on hundred-year-old eggs. It did not bode well.