Gweilo (37 page)

Suddenly, I sensed his hands were no longer touching my stomach. Indeed, he was at least ten feet away and treading water. I panicked, stopped kicking, tried to stand up and sank vertically. I was going to drown. I knew it. I opened my mouth to scream. At that moment, my head broke the surface, strong hands under my armpits.

'I want to get out!' I spluttered, clinging to his neck.

'If you want to get out,' he answered calmly, 'you'll have to swim to the beach. I'll come with you.'

'I can't swim,' I pleaded.

'Yes, you can,' he declared, smiling at me. 'The human body is less dense than seawater. It floats. Look at your mother and Ray.' Sure enough, they were holding hands and floating on their backs. 'Now, let's try again.'

I wanted to trust Philip. I liked him and I knew he would never let me come to harm, but . . . He put his hands on my stomach again, held me horizontal in the water and off we went. He removed his hands and, with much splashing and gasping, I made it to the beach.

My mother and Ray kissed me; Philip shook my hand, man to man.

'You see,' he said when the clamour of female congratulation had died down, 'in life we can do anything within our physical power if only we have the courage. You could climb Mount Everest if you genuinely wanted to.'

That hot Saturday in the South China Sea, I learnt more than how to swim. Philip had shown me that much more was possible if one pushed the limits a bit and, from then on, I did.

As my mother and Ray got changed behind a towel, Philip and I did the gentlemanly thing and looked out beyond Tweed Bay into the greater Ty Tarn Bay beyond.

'A good place to learn to swim,' he remarked offhandedly. 'Not much current, and if you knew about the place you'd never let your feet touch the bottom.'

'Why not?' I asked, picturing giant clams or beds of sea urchins.

'Do you know who Colonel Noma was?'

I shook my head.

'Well,' Philip told me, 'after the war, the Japanese in Hong Kong who had murdered a lot of our chaps – and local Chinese, too – were rounded up and tried in a court of law for what were called war crimes. That was not just killing people in the fighting, which is what happens in war, but afterwards. Killing wounded soldiers instead of treating them, unarmed prisoners, women and children. That sort of thing. Those that were found guilty were hanged in the prison behind us. There were nine of them in all. The most senior were Colonels Noma and Tamura. When they were dead their bodies were weighted with chains and dumped in the sea.'

'What did they do?' I asked.

'Noma was head of the gendarmerie. He killed and tortured many people.'

'How many ?'

'Certainly hundreds, probably thousands.'

'Why didn't they dig graves for them ?'

'Because the British and Chinese wanted to punish them for ever. The Japanese believe a man's soul cannot go to heaven if he is drowned or buried at sea.'

'Where did they dump them?' I asked.

'Here,' Philip answered, taking his pipe out of his mouth and pointing with it. 'In Ty Tarn Bay.'

Immediately, my toes curled into the damp sand.

'Touch bottom here and you might be standing on the bones of Colonels Noma and Tamura themselves.'

I am sure Philip told me this to make certain I continued to swim and, over the coming months, I came to do so quite well, but never again at Tweed Bay.

Not long after my grandmother's departure back to England, my mother's health had begun to deteriorate. She had previously contracted jaundice whilst my father was away in Japan. At the time, I was bundled off to stay with a Mr and Mrs Everett who lived at Magazine Gap and my mother was admitted to the Royal Naval Hospital at Mount Kellett. Now, a year or so later, her illness was less immediate but more insidious. She started to suffer pains in her joints, periods of weakness and migraine headaches. There seemed to be no apparent cause for this but the diagnosis was the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, the prognosis (which fortunately turned out to be erroneous) being that she would be crippled by the age of fifty and probably dead by fifty-five. As she was then thirty-four, this promised a bleak and brief future with considerable pain. It was noticed that she felt worse when our apartment was in the mist which, being the better part of fifteen hundred feet above sea level, it was quite frequently. Particularly during the hot season, the top of the Peak could become shrouded in warm mist. It was not polluted but simply water vapour that had condensed around the summits, cooled by the rising breezes and rock faces.

I found walking to school in this mist an exhilarating experience. When the mountain was in the mist, the pace of life slowed. Birds ceased to sing so much, people moved with a measured speed. In the servants' quarters, fingers of mist inveigled themselves through the lattice stone work and laundered clothes had to be brought in to the kitchen to dry. By the Peak Tram terminus, all would be quiet, no tourists thronging the observation point, no American sailors patronizing the Peak Café. Cars crept along in low gear, their headlights dipped, the drivers peering through the windscreen to follow the line of the road. Often I would not meet another living soul. It was as if I had the Peak to myself. Sounds were suppressed, my footsteps barely audible to me. Shadows loomed up in the mist, boulders and trees with which I was more than familiar taking on alien shapes. My over-active imagination tinkered with them. It was a scary time. On rare occasions, I woke in the morning to find the apartment above the mist. The view from the windows was much as I expected it might be from a high-flying aircraft, the solid-looking billows of cloud beneath bathed in pristine sunlight.

Due to my mother's adverse reaction to the mist, her doctors suggested we leave the Peak and move back down to the city or at least to Mid-Levels, the band of housing halfway up the mountain and usually below the cloud line. The problem was that there were no available quarters.

Throughout the summer term, I hurried home from school every day to be with my mother. Those few friends I had were obliged to come to my home to play. She liked meeting them but there were times when our boisterousness tired her quickly and we had to leave. She and I would also go for walks, my mother strolling rather than striding out as she was wont. I shared my places with her – the rifle range where she dug for bullets with me, Governor's Walk where she marvelled as had I at the fact that tiny fish lived at the top of a mountain and the ruins of Mountain Lodge and Pinewood Battery.

It was when we were sitting on the wall of one of the gun emplacements at Pinewood late one afternoon that she first broached the subject with me that had clearly been in her mind for a while.

'Martin,' she began, 'do you like living in Hong Kong?'

'Yes,' I answered, wondering where the conversation was going.

'More than England?'

'I think so,' I said. 'I can't really remember it except Nanny's house, and Granny and Grampy's house . . .'

'You know that in less than six months we have to go back to England, don't you?'

I had not really given this much thought.

'Your father's tour of overseas duty ends and he's being posted to a naval stores depot at Corsham, near Bath. You'll be going to a prep school to cram for the eleven-plus examination. If you pass, you'll go to the Royal City of Bath Boys' Grammar School.'

'And if I don't,' I said glumly, 'I suppose I'll be a dustman.'

'Like hell you will!' she retorted. 'Whatever you choose to do, you'll succeed. Isn't that what the fortune-teller predicted? Don't listen to your father. He's a plodder. Twenty years before the typewriter and he hasn't even made Commander . . .'

She fell silent for a while. I watched the kites soaring over Sai Ying Pun. On the slopes of Mount Davis, the most westerly high point of the island, the squatters' cooking fires were visible as sparks in the shadow of the hill.

'I don't want to go back,' my mother said emphatically, breaking our silence. 'England is dreary, colourless, down-in-the-mouth. Lifeless. Just look at this.' She turned and faced distant Lan Tau, the rays of the setting sun fingering between the mountains. 'How can I live in Romford or Woking or Basingstoke after this?'

'Or Bath,' I suggested.

She laughed ironically and stood up, suggesting, 'Let's go back via Lugard Road.'

As we walked slowly round the mountain, the city unfolding beneath us, my mother said, 'I want to stay here. In Hong Kong. And I've been thinking. Your father will have to resign from the Admiralty and get a job here. In the government, perhaps. Tax is much lower here than in Britain and the salaries are a good deal higher.'

I noticed she did not say 'Back home' as so many of her friends did.

'Will he change jobs?' I wondered aloud.

'Oh, yes!' my mother replied quietly and with a cast-iron confidence. 'Maybe not this week, maybe not next month, but he will. You mark my words!'

My mother adored the apartment at Mount Austin. It was spacious and had views from every window for which any Hollywood star would have inserted bamboo splinters under their fingernails, she had Wong and Ah Shun to attend to the chores, Su Yin to cosset and Tuppence to spoil. Her Chinese circle of friends, larger than her crowd of
gweipor
acquaintances, regularly visited for tea, often staying on into the evening, much to my father's chagrin: as long as my mother had guests he had to ease up on the pink gins and whisky sodas.

At other times, she continued to go for picnics with them, swimming parties or
chow
, which meant a meal in a Chinese restaurant. To her friends' children, she was universally known as Auntie Joy. When festivals came round, she was invited along to the celebrations as an ersatz relative.

The
gweipor
in her only came out in the mornings when she went to play canasta and drink coffee with other European women. She went swimming as much as she could, the exercise keeping her joints flexible. When that was not feasible, she wrote letters and poetry and knitted baby clothes either for Su Yin, the various new-born of friends or a squatter charity. Yet both she and I knew the time was coming when we would be presented with the opportunity to leave the Peak. And we would have to take it.

Finally, after six weeks of intermittent mist and continuous painkillers, with no quarters becoming available, my parents decided there was only one thing they could do. Just in time for the beginning of the new academic year in September, we packed up the apartment, put our furniture in store, reluctantly dismissed Wong and Ah Shun with much shedding of tears (but with references so glowing Wong could have landed a job in the Savoy or the Ritz had he so chosen), signed me off the roll at the Peak School and moved across to take up residency once more in the Fourseas Hotel.

LITTLE HAD CHANGED IN THE STREETS AROUND THE FOURSEAS
Hotel during my Peak-side sojourn. Mr Tsang, the shopkeeper, remembered me and greeted me with a stroke of my hair. The Communist Chinese school still held its patriotic morning assembly but with the stirring music now blaring from loudspeakers rather than the scratchy phonograph. The late-morning quayside at Yau Ma Tei was still slick with fish scales and entrails and the rickshaw coolies still slept with their machines in Soares Avenue at night. Ah Sam was not amongst them. I was told he had died of a weak heart, weakened no doubt by his rickshaw and the
nga pin
. His number 3 hat was being worn by another now.

When I went up there, I found the Ho Man Tin squatter area had been rebuilt but now it had a rudimentary sewage system and was provided with standpipes and a concrete laundry area. The thoroughfares between the houses were wider in order to serve as fire breaks.

The Queen of Kowloon still lived in her cockloft and was still tormented by the local children. Yet, now, I did not join in their mockery or railway gravel throwing. I had learnt much about the world since I had last seen her, learnt to differentiate between fun and cruelty, humour and contemptuous laughter, love and hate. On one occasion, I approached her with the intention of buying her a meal at a
dai pai dong
. I wanted to see if I could extract some of her life story. I knew enough of adults now to be aware that they all possessed incredible tales – if only one could get at them. I was taller now than when she had first seen me but, otherwise, I was little altered in appearance.

It was early one evening in Mong Kok that I saw her for the last time. She was being chased by a woman who owned a fruit stall, with a stiff bamboo broom. The Queen was shuffling along as fast as she could go, dropping apples and oranges in her wake. At the sight of me, the stallholder immediately gave up the chase and started to retrieve her stolen merchandise. I went up to the Queen and addressed her in Cantonese.

'Good evening, madam,' I began politely. 'You should not have to steal. I would like to buy you food.'

She squinted at me, her eyes beady slits under a fringe of dishevelled, badly trimmed and matted hair. For a moment, I thought I was going to get a lucid answer. I was wrong.

She recoiled from me. Her hands rose over her head to the complementary stench of her armpits and general rank body odour.

'Kwai! Kwai!'
she screamed in a falsetto voice that could have cracked a wine glass.

With that, she fled with far greater speed than she had to avoid the broom. A month later, I risked approaching her cockloft. It was occupied by a Chinese family. I felt guilty then. Had I, I thought, unwittingly driven her away? It was only later I realized she must have thought I was the ghost of the young heir to the Russian throne, returned from the dead to haunt her in her opium- and alcohol-befuddled dreams.

Things had changed, however, inside the Fourseas. Mr Peng was still the manager, but Ching had left, along with at least half the other room boys I had known. Ah Kwan was still the third-floor captain, but the whores had been moved out, the clientele now predominantly tourists or expatriates waiting for housing. The latter were exclusively British, the former almost exclusively American. The skull-faced gardener was no longer employed, his place taken by a kindly, elderly man who wore a battered trilby hat at all times and spoke to the plants in undertones of affection. Rumour had it that Skull-face had been 'chopped' – attacked with a meat cleaver – and done a runner for China. It was also discovered that he was more than just a card-carrying member of the Communist party. As such, he must have fallen foul of the fiercely patriotic and anti-Communist local Triad society and narrowly escaped a traditional execution of death by a thousand cuts.

Politics did not really enter into the lives of the Hong Kong Chinese. They were presided over by gods not governments. They had no vote, for elections were never held: members of the Legislative Council, Hong Kong's parliament, were appointed by the Governor. However, once a year, the spiritual world stepped aside momentarily and the population could display their political allegiances.

10 October was known as the Double Tenth, a public holiday celebrating the anniversary of the Wuhan uprising which sparked the 1911 Chinese Revolution and was the foundation of modern China. Strings of firecrackers were exploded. Buildings were decked out with huge and often badly executed portraits of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. They were surrounded by red and gold bunting and the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang flag, which was then the national flag of Taiwan, whence Chiang had fled on losing mainland China to the Communists. The flag also fluttered in squatter areas and from tenement roof tops, washing poles, trees and even bicycle handlebars.

Not every building was so decked out, however. Some carried defiant Communist Chinese flags and a picture of Chairman Mao. This sometimes resulted in scuffles and street fights, observed by a large crowd of detached onlookers until broken up by the riot squad which arrived on grey-painted, open-sided police vehicles. Armed with long truncheons and rattan shields, they formed a phalanx and moved into the fray in complete silence save for the thump of their boots and a
gweilo
officer barking orders in fluent Cantonese through a loudhailer. After a few skulls were cracked and arrests made, the remaining assailants melted away. The onlookers followed them in suppressed mood, like football fans leaving a stadium after their side had been trounced. The fun was over until another Chiang supporter tore down a red flag or a Mao supporter desecrated a picture of the Generalissimo.

Street fights in general were often spectacles to behold, little short of urban, outdoor theatre. Normally docile, when the Chinese lost their temper they did it in style, shouting abuse with astonishing intensity and originality before eventually resorting to blows. Sometimes, the fighting consisted of little more than face slaps and the occasional artless punch, but if the protagonists possessed even a modicum of martial arts knowledge, the fights would involve back kicks and short leaps, stabs with fingers, and rabbit punches with hands shaped into hard blades. The injuries in the
kung-fu
type fights were always the worst unless a knife appeared from a sleeve: then the pavement would be spattered with blood before the police arrived. After a bloody fight, the street dogs would lick the pavement clean.

I came to realize that the Chinese were a nation of spectators. From a full-scale riot to two rickshaw coolies squabbling over a parking space, they would gather to watch. On one occasion, I even saw bets being made on the outcome, with side bets being placed on spin-off likelihoods.

Gambling and being Chinese were synonymous. Apart from mahjong, they indulged in
tin gau
, a strategy game played with tiles vaguely similar to dominoes. It was the first Chinese game I learnt to play and, in time, I became sufficiently proficient as to risk a part of my pocket money on it with the rickshaw coolies and mechanics in the Fourseas garage. I seldom left a session down.

Other gaming pastimes included heads 'n' tails and coin tossing. Played with ten-cent coins, the players stood in a line facing a wall. The first player threw a coin at the wall. It bounced off and settled on the ground. The idea was to throw one's coin so that it would land as near to the bottom of the wall as possible, but not touching it. He who succeeded took all the money but there were strategies. One could hit another's coin away from the wall or one could partly cover it, in which case, your coin took its place.

Although by law gambling was illegal unless conducted in a licensed mahjong club or through official Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club horse betting offices, it went on everywhere. To eradicate gambling was akin to prohibiting the eating of rice. I not infrequently saw policemen on the beat call into a tea house for a bowl of gunpowder tea and a few hands of
tin gau
and, for all his gentility, the new Fourseas gardener kept a stable of fighting crickets in minute, ornate bamboo cages. He fed them grass and chrysanthemum sprouts but, despite my attempts to bribe him, he never took me to a match.

The fact that anyone in Hong Kong could support the Communist cause seemed beyond me. They had butchered, dispossessed and robbed millions. Not a single squatter had avoided Communist brutality and yet even some of the squatter shacks flew the scarlet flag of mainland China with its five gold stars.

One of the hotel staff, although not a Communist sympathizer, had fought as a partisan with them during the Japanese occupation. His name was Ah Lam. When I discovered his past, I sought him out and asked him why.

'Japanese more bad Communist,' was his pragmatic response.

'But why do people support the Communists now?'

'They wan' China one country. No like Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau. Wan' China be one place for all Chinese.'

This seemed reasonable to me but I could not equate it in my mind with the atrocities of the recent civil war.

'But the Communists were very bad to the people.'

'All pe'pul bad to all pe'pul in war,' Ah Lam stated bluntly.

'Were you bad in the war?' I enquired.

'Me ve'y bad in war. One day, I show you.'

A few days later, as I was in my room doing my homework, there came a knock at my parents' door. It was Ah Lam asking to see them. I put down my pen and went through the adjoining door into my parents' suite.

'Master and Missee Bo Fu,' Ah Lam began, 'I wan' ask you for me take Martin New Te'ito'ies-side, show him some t'ing from the wartime. In wartime, I fighting Japanese for English. I East 'iffer B'igade man. Not Communist. Fight for England.'

He fumbled in his pocket and took out a small, brown cardboard box. On the lid were printed the letters
OHMS
and a crown with the words
Official Paid
round it. He handed it to my father who opened it and took out a medal. Cast in silver and attached to a red, white and blue ribbon, one side showed a lion standing on a dragon whilst on the other was the head of King George VI.

'Governor give me,' he continued, 'for fight Japanese. If Martin can come, I look-see him ve'y good. No p'oblem.'

My father had a we'll-let-you-know look on his face but my mother immediately acceded to the request, saying, 'Yes, I'm sure that's fine, Ah Lam.'

That Saturday afternoon, Ah Lam and I set off in the hotel Studebaker bound for Sai Kung, a fishing village at the far eastern end of the New Territories famous for its seafood and the distinctly Communist leanings of its populace. Ah Lam told me that the narrow road to Sai Kung, known as Hiram's Highway, had been built by the British military but had been much improved by the Japanese, using allied and Chinese slave labour. It was the only road that penetrated the Sai Kung peninsula, an area of mountains, forests and isolated villages approached only by remote footpaths and known to the Japanese as a hotbed of sedition.

As we drove over the airport runway, he said, 'We go Sai Kung-side, you no talk-talk about Communist. You just no talk, boy.'

Sai Kung was quiet. Fishing junks lay three deep at the quayside. On a few, children or women were washing down the decks. The nets hung from the masts, drying in the sun like giant furled spiders' webs. Scattered here and there on the dock were dead fish or their remnants, the leftovers from the catch landed that morning. Outside the quayside buildings stood buckets of sea water containing live fish or lobsters, their massive claws secured by wedges rammed into the claw joints, jamming them closed. Crabs clicked in other buckets, ten deep, their claws manacled by pliable bamboo twine. Seated on a low stool, a fisherman was tying them in bunches of three with a loop to act as a carrying handle.

Ah Lam parked the Studebaker in the shade of a wide-spreading tree and we walked through the village to a tea house, sitting at an outside table under an awning. He entered into a long conversation with the proprietor whom he obviously knew well. I sipped my tea and kept quiet. At length, Ah Lam introduced me to the tea house owner.

'How do you do?' he said, shaking my hand.

'Ho! Ho! Nei ho ma?'
I replied.

He laughed at this, but I sensed the threat of malice hiding behind his laughter.

'You don't need to speak Cantonese with me. I speak English. So,' he went on, 'you are going with Lam here to see something in the hills. Do you know what you will see?' I said I did not. 'You will see what Lam and I did in the war. Lam is my good friend and old comrade.' He put his hand on my shoulder. 'Are you a strong boy?'

I considered the question and said, 'I think so. I can walk a long way. I walked from Tung Chung to Ngong Ping without—'

'I do not mean strong in your legs but . . .' his hand shifted to my head '. . . in your mind.'

I did not quite understand what he meant but answered that I thought I was. He grinned.

'It is a long walk. Maybe two miles. And it is a hot day.'

He put four bottles of Coke in a small string bag and handed me a tiny bottle opener in the shape of a Coke bottle. Thus provisioned, Lam and I set off along a wide path across paddyfields of waving green rice, the pale white grain hanging down like cascades of tiny opals, ready to ripen. As we walked, frogs leapt from the path into the paddy. Where there were stone bridges over watercourses, lizards ran helter-skelter ahead of us making for the security of a crevice.

'Who was that man?' I enquired.

'He my boss in war,' Ah Lam replied.

'Your boss?' I repeated.

'He East 'iffer B'gade off sser.'

'What is the East River Brigade?'

'In war,' Ah Lam explained, 'many Chinese pe'pul wan' fight Japanese but he no can do. Got no gun. But some pe'pul got gun. Communist got gun. They make small-small army, liff in mountungs . . .' He pointed to the east where the land was mountainous with narrow wooded valleys between grass- or bush-covered ridges. 'Dis mountungs. He call East 'iffer B'igade. He fighter, not sol-jer. Sometime Communist, sometime Kuomintang, sometime just man no like Japanese.'