Gweilo (6 page)

THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS WERE FILLED WITH ACTIVITY. MY
father prepared to join his ship at the Sasebo naval base in Japan. I was enrolled in Kowloon Junior School, and kitted out with several pairs of khaki shorts and white short-sleeved shirts, on to the pockets of which were attached a chocolate-brown and yellow school badge, held in place by press studs. My mother frantically wrote letters to inform her many correspondents of our change of address.

During this time, we stayed with a colleague of my father's in a spacious bungalow at Mount Nicholson halfway up a mountain on Hong Kong Island, which I was told was known as Hong Kong-side, the peninsula upon which we were to live being referred to as Kowloon-side. Indeed, many places were suffixed with -side: I'm going shopping was I go shop-side, beach-side (swimming), office-side (work), school-side (school) and so on.

A car collected us from the Grand Hotel and drove us over the harbour by way of a vehicular ferry.
En route
, we saw the
Corfu
departing on its return journey to Southampton.

'Just think,' my mother said, 'in a month that'll be back in England.'

I could not tell if she was wistfully yearning for England's shores or horrified at the thought of returning to austere, drab British towns filled with dowdy-looking people, strikes, grey skies and snow.

The air was much cooler at the bungalow. The only sounds were birdsong and, in the evenings, the metallic click of the geckoes encircling the ceiling lights to pick off mosquitoes, gnats and small moths. The proliferation of mosquitoes demanded we sleep under mosquito nets: the bungalow was above the Wong Nei Chong valley, an infamously malarial area in the early days of the colony. One could pick up the high-pitched whine of these minuscule insect fighter bombers approaching only to hear it abruptly halt when they hit the netting. This would then agitate as a gecko ran down the muslin to consume the insect, returning to the top of the net to await the next one. My mother wondered aloud that if evolution moved any faster, geckoes would soon learn to weave webs as spiders did.

The lantana bushes on the edge of the lawn were in full multicoloured blossom and frequently visited by black-and-emerald-green butterflies the size of sparrows. The verdant undergrowth of the hillsides coming right down to the edge of the bungalow garden and a border of azaleas and bougainvillaea bushes did more than encourage merely insects into the house. On our third morning, the houseboy entered my bedroom and woke me with a gentle shake.

'Young master,' he addressed me in hushed tones, 'you come. Slowly, slowly. No makee noise.'

With that, he took me by the hand and headed for the french windows to my bedroom. Cautiously, he led me out on to the veranda where everyone else in the house – servants and residents – were gathered in a silent group.

'No talkee,' he whispered. 'No makee quick.'

To lend weight to his instructions, the man who lived in the bungalow with his wife and a son six years my senior, muttered, 'Don't make a sound or move a muscle, old boy.'

In the sitting room, the gardener and another Chinese man seemed to be rearranging the furniture. Suddenly, one of them darted behind a rattan settee and scrabbled about unseen on the parquet flooring. When he stood up, all the Chinese muttered
Ayarh!
in unison.

In his hand, held by its neck between a long thumb nail and index finger, was a cobra over four feet long, its hood expanding and contracting against the man's palm. He carried it out on to the lawn and killed it by cracking it once, like a whip. The tenant of the bungalow gave the gardener and his companion a purple dollar bill each before the former walked off with the reptile's carcass.

'That'll make a nice purse,' my mother remarked.

'I doubt they'll take the snake to a tanner,' came the answer. 'They'll cook it. The Chinese'll eat anything that can move under its own locomotion.'

Remembering my promise, I decided to assiduously avoid the gardener until after the next main meal.

Five days after arriving in Hong Kong, we booked into two adjacent rooms with a connecting door on the third floor of the Fourseas Hotel at 75 Waterloo Road, Kowloon.

Built on one of the main thoroughfares running down the Kowloon peninsula, it was a modern, E-shaped three-storeyed block with a flat, tiled roof, modest gardens and a short, sloping, crescent-shaped driveway leading to a covered entrance. Beneath the front lawn and giving directly on to the pavement was the hotel garage. My parents' room had a balcony: mine did not. On either side of the hotel were low-rise apartment buildings whilst opposite, across the wide road, was the steep bare dome of a hillside rising about a hundred feet from the street. It contained a deep fissure I was sure, in my romantic imagination, was an old volcanic vent just waiting to erupt.

'This is definitely a leg-up,' my mother declared as, for the third time in a week, she unpacked our cases.

'How long will we be staying here?' I asked, having grown used to a peripatetic existence.

'At least until Christmas,' she replied. 'Now,' she continued, 'if you ever get lost, this hotel is called
sei hoi jau dim
in Cantonese. It means
four seas hotel
. You say that to a taxi driver and he'll bring you home safe and sound and the receptionist will pay him. Repeat it.'

These were my first words in Cantonese and I was not slow in realizing that as many Chinese did not speak English, if I wanted to explore as I had on my first night, I would need a command of their language. In next to no time, I possessed a substantial vocabulary ranging from a polite
Net wui mui gong ying mun?
(Do you speak English?) to such commonly used colloquialisms as
Diu nei lo mo
which, I discovered, implied anything from You don't say! to Well, I never did! to Bugger me! to Don't bullshit me, you sonofabitch! And worse. Much worse . . .

Early the following Monday, my father reported to Kai Tak airport to depart for Japan. My mother was very anxious, not because my father was in effect heading for a theatre of war – Korea – but because he was flying out of Hong Kong. According to my father, who was never loath to dramatize if it boosted his ego, the wind direction was crucial to a successful landing or take-off. If at all possible, he declared, aircraft took off towards the south-east, the runway aiming for the sea. However, rarely, aircraft had to take off facing inland. This meant that as soon as it was clear of the ground the aircraft had to veer sharp left to avoid crashing into the Kowloon hills. These rose to nearly 1,900 feet at a distance from the end of the runway of not much more than two miles. Pilots regarded it as one of the most dangerous and demanding airports in the world.

Standing at the steps of an RAF twin-engined MacDonald Douglas 'Dakota' DC3, my parents atypically hugged each other for several minutes. My father then bent down, gave me a cursory embrace and shook my hand.

'While I'm away,' he ordered, 'look after your mother. You're the man of the family now.'

It was a pure Hollywood moment, my father handsome enough to have been played by James Stewart, his wife petite and blond enough for the part to have gone to Doris Day. I suppose I would have been played by Mickey Rooney: it would have been my luck.

'Yes,' I replied noncommittally but, as usual with my father, I had been instructed to do something without any guidance as to how to do it. Was I, for example, to see my mother across the road, ensure she washed behind her ears, went punctually to bed and so on? I was about to enquire but my father was already at the aircraft door and stooping to step aboard. A moment of fear swept through me. I had been given a serious task, yet how could I, in my ignorance, hope to do it efficiently? There was, I saw, only one outcome – a slippering for failure. Even before the DC3 took off, I was already dreading my father's return.

The engines started with billows of black smoke and the plane moved away. My mother crossed her fingers. The gesture failed. The Dakota turned right and taxied to the very south-eastern extremity of the runway. It was to be a take-off into the mountains.

At this point, my mother noticed a main road crossed the runway at about three-quarters of its length, the traffic controlled by a set of lights. This added hazard unsettled her further. I saw her watching avidly to ensure the traffic lights were working and the drivers obeying them.

The Dakota rumbled forwards. As it passed by us, its tail wheel lifted off the runway, the plane taking to the air at the road crossing. Its ascent seemed excruciatingly slow. For a moment, I was quite certain it was heading straight for the mountains and followed its progress with terror mingled with fascination.

'I can't watch,' my mother declared and she studied her shoes. Her hands shook.

At what seemed the last minute, the DC3 banked so sharply to the left I could see both wings as if I were looking down on top of it. It flew along the face of the hills, climbing slowly, levelled out and began its gradual ascent until it disappeared in the haze of the day, the sound of its engines suddenly dying.

'What's happened?' my mother asked, almost in tears and still not daring to look.

'Nothing,' I said, exercising my licence as head of the family for the first time. 'It's flown so far away we can't see or hear it.'

A Royal Navy saloon car took us back to the Fourseas Hotel.

'When does Daddy come back?' I enquired.

'In about twelve weeks,' my mother replied. 'On his ship,' she added with evident relief.

'What happens if I don't look after you very well?' I said anxiously.

'Don't you worry,' my mother answered, sensing my concern and putting her arm around me. 'You'll do just fine.'

A telegram arrived that evening from my father. Opening it, my mother visibly relaxed. It had been an uneventful flight. She poured herself a gin and tonic.

The Thursday after my father's departure, I started school.

Kowloon Junior, as it was known, bore as much resemblance to my previous school as a cat did to a caterpillar.

Since beginning my education at the age of five, I had attended a small dame school in Brentwood, Essex. Owned and operated by a kindly, elderly spinster called Miss Hutt, Rose Valley School provided a very sound basic schooling from the huge, dark front room of a mid-Victorian terraced house. A noxious lavatory, the floorboards irredeemably stained by years of small boys with a poor aim, was in the basement and the rear garden had been flattened, surrounded by a picket fence and covered with cinders to make a playground of sorts. Beyond the fence were vegetable allotments in which the citizens of Brentwood attempted to supplement their rations. Every lunchtime, the pupils – there were about a dozen of us aged from five to twelve – were marched in single file to Brentwood High Street where we were fed in a café with oil-cloth-covered tables. The monotony of the menu never varied – scrag end of beef or mutton stew with boiled potatoes, mashed swedes and cabbage, helped down with a glass of milk. Dessert was invariably a bowl of semi-liquid, lumpy custard. Sometimes this was supplemented by an apple or, on one occasion, a banana the skin of which was turning black.

By contrast, my new school was a long, two-storeyed building with veranda corridors, bright, airy classrooms with ceiling fans and individual desks: at Rose Valley, we had hunched round two old dining tables. Everyone wore a uniform which somehow gave the place an added appeal. Outside, the playground was beaten earth with patches of grass surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence on the other side of which was a steep drop to the dusty football field of another school. In one place, the fence stopped at a vertical earth bank into which the boys had cut mountain roadways for Dinky cars.

The school was less than a mile from the Fourseas and so I walked there most days, my mother at first seeing me across Waterloo Road. If it was raining, I was sent in a scarlet-painted rickshaw with a green pram-like hood and two huge spoked wheels with solid rubber tyres.

Riding in a rickshaw was a strange sensation. The coolie lowered the shafts to the ground, one stepped between them on to a footboard in front of a padded seat covered in a loose white cloth and sat down. At this stage, the whole contraption was sloping forwards and downwards. I had to hold on to the sides to stop sliding off– the cloth didn't help. The coolie then picked up the shafts, his elbows bent at right angles. This meant the rickshaw suddenly tipped backwards and the passenger fell to the rear of the seat.

The coolie set off at a walk, building to a steady trot. His bent arms acted like leaf-springs on a vehicle, reducing the shock of the road bumps for his body.

The coolies were usually bare to the waist, except in winter, and one could see their muscles flexing across their shoulders, the tendons tightening and relaxing under their skin. Most of them were sallow, with sunken chests, gaunt faces and drawn skin on their necks: and when they sweated, they exuded a faint, strangely sweet body odour. They all looked old enough to be Confucian sages, but they were almost all certainly no older than their late twenties. A rickshaw coolie's lifespan seldom reached thirty-five. It was not long before I realized virtually every one of them was an opium addict.