Honourable Schoolboy (36 page)

‘But you did return to Shanghai,’ Connie reminded him eventually, shuffling her notes to call him back. ‘The Japanese were defeated, Shanghai was reopened and back you went. Without your wife, of course, but you returned all the same.’

‘Oh ay, we went.’

‘So you saw the Ko’s again. You all met up and you had a marvellous old natter, I’m sure. Is that what happened, Mr Hibbert?’

For a moment it seemed he hadn’t taken in the question, but suddenly with a delayed action he laughed. ‘By Jove and weren’t they real little men by then, too. Fly as fly they were! And after the girls, saving your presence, Doris. I always say Drake would have married you, dear, if you’d given him any hope.’

‘Oh honestly, Dad,’ Doris muttered and scowled at the floor.

‘And Nelson, oh my he was the firebrand!’ He drank his tea with the spoon, carefully, as if he were feeding a bird. ‘ Where Missie? His first question that was, Drake’s. He wanted your mother. Where Missie? He’d forgotten all his English, so’d Nelson. I’d to give them lessons later. So I told him. He’d seen enough of death by then, that was for sure. Wasn’t as if he didn’t believe in it. Missie dead, I said. Nothing else to say. She’s dead, Drake, and she’s with God. I never saw him weep before or since, but he wept then and I loved him for it. I lose two mothers, he says to me. Mother dead, now Missie dead. We prayed for her, what else can you do? Little Nelson now, he didn’t cry or pray. Not him. He never took to her the way Drake did. Nothing personal. She was enemy. We all were.’

‘We being who precisely, Mr Hibbert?’ di Salis asked coaxingly.

‘Europeans, capitalists, missionaries: all of us carpetbaggers who were there for their souls, or their labour, or their silver. All of us,’ Mr Hibbert repeated, without the least hint of rancour. ‘Exploiters. That’s how he saw us. Right, in a way, too.’ The conversation hung awkwardly for a moment till Connie carefully retrieved it.

‘So anyway, you reopened the mission, and you stayed till the Communist takeover of forty-nine, I assume, and for those four years at least you were able to keep a fatherly eye on Drake and Nelson. Is that how it went, Mr Hibbert?’ she asked, pen poised.

‘Oh, we hung the lamp on the door again, yes. In forty-five, we were jubilant, same as anyone else. The fighting had stopped, the Japs were beaten, the refugees could come home. Hugging in the street, there was, the usual. We’d money, reparation I suppose, a grant. Daisy Fong came back, but not for long. For the first year or two the surface held, but not really, even then. We were there as long as Chiang Kai-shek could govern - well, he was never much of a one for that, was he? By forty-seven we’d the Communism out on the streets - and by forty-nine it was there to stay. International Settlement long gone, of course, concessions too, and a good thing. The rest went slowly. You got the blind ones, as usual, who said the old Shanghai would go on for ever, same as you did with the Japs. Shanghai had corrupted the Manchus, they said; the warlords, the Kuomintang, the Japanese, the British. Now she’d corrupt the Communists. They were wrong of course. Doris and me - well, we didn’t believe in corruption, did we, not as a solution to China’s problems, nor did your mother. So we came home.’

‘And the Ko’s?’ Connie reminded him, while Doris noisily hauled some knitting out of a brown paper bag.

The old man hesitated, and this time it was not senility, perhaps, which slowed his narrative, but doubt. ‘Well, yes,’ he conceded, after an awkward gap. ‘Yes, rare adventures those two had, I can tell you.’

‘Adventures,’ Doris echoed angrily, as she clicked her knitting needles. ‘Rampages more like.’

The light was clinging to the sea, but inside the room it was dying and the gas fire puttered like a distant motor.

Several times, escaping from Shanghai, Drake and Nelson were separated, the old man said. When they couldn’t find each other they ate their hearts out till they did. Nelson, the young one, he got all the way to Chungking without a scratch, surviving starvation, exhaustion and hellish air bombardments which killed thousands of civilians. But Drake, being older, was drafted into Chiang’s army, though Chiang did nothing but run away, hoping that the Communists and the Japanese would kill each other.

‘Charged all over the shop, Drake did, trying to find the front and worrying himself to death about Nelson. And of course Nelson, well, he was twiddling his thumbs in Chungking wasn’t he, boning up on his ideological reading. They’d even the New China Daily there, he told me afterwards, and published with Chiang’s agreement. Fancy that! There was a few others of his mind around, and in Chungking they got their heads together rebuilding the world for when the war ended, and one day, thank God, it did.’

In nineteen forty-five, said Mr Hibbert simply, their separation was ended by a miracle: ‘One chance in thousands, it was, millions. That road back littered with streams of lorries, carts, troops, guns, all pouring toward the coast, and there was Drake running up and down like a madman: Have you seen my brother? ‘

The drama of the instant suddenly touched the preacher in him, and his voice lifted.

‘And one little dirty fellow put his arm on Drake’s elbow. Here. You. Ko. Like he’s asking for a light. Your brother’s two trucks back, talking the hindlegs off a bunch of Hakka Communists. Next thing, they’re in each other’s arms and Drake won’t let Nelson out of his sight till they’re back in Shanghai and then not!’

‘So they came to see you,’ Connie suggested cosily.

‘When Drake got back to Shanghai, he’d one thing in his mind and one only. Brother Nelson should have a formal education. Nothing else on God’s good earth mattered to Drake except Nelson’s schooling. Nothing. Nelson must go to school.’ The old man’s hand thudded on the chair arm. ‘One of the brothers at least would make the grade. Oh, he was adamant, Drake was! And he did it,’ said the old man. ‘Drake swung it. He would. He was a real fixer by then. Drake was nineteen years of age, odd, when he came back from the war. Nelson was going on seventeen, and worked night and day too - on his studies, of course. Same as Drake did, but Drake worked with his body.’

‘He was a crook,’ Doris said under her breath. ‘He joined a gang and stole. When he wasn’t pawing me.’

Whether Mr Hibbert heard her, or whether he was simply answering a standard objection in her was not clear.

‘Now Doris, you must see those Triads in perspective,’ he corrected her. ‘Shanghai was a city state. It was run by a bunch of merchant princes, robber barons and worse. There were no unions, no law and order, life was cheap and hard and I doubt Hong Kong’s that different today once you scratch the surface. Some of those so-called English gentlemen would have made your Lancashire mill-owner into a shining example of Christian charity by comparison.’ The mild rebuke administered, he returned to Connie and his narrative. Connie was familiar to him: the archetypal lady in the front pew: big, attentive, in a hat, listening indulgently to the old man’s every word.

‘They’d come round to tea, see, five o’clock, the brothers. I’d to have everything ready, the food on the table, lemonade they liked, called it soda. Drake came in from the docks, Nelson from his books, and they’d eat not hardly talking, then back to work, wouldn’t they, Doris? They’d dug out some legendary hero, the scholar Che Yin. Che Yin was so poor he’d had to teach himself to read and write by the light of the fireflies. They’d go on about how Nelson was to emulate him. Come on Che Yin, I’d say, have another bun to keep your strength up. They’d laugh a bit and away they’d go again. Bye bye, Che Yin, off you go. Now and then when his mouth wasn’t too full, Nelson would have a go at me on the politics. My, he’d some ideas! Nothing we could have taught him, I can tell you, we didn’t know enough. Money the root of all evil, well I’d never deny that! I’d been preaching it myself for years! Brotherly love, comradeship, religion the opiate of the masses, well I couldn’t go along with that, but clericalism, high church baloney, popery, idolatry - well, he wasn’t too far wrong there either, the way I saw it. He’d a few bad words against us British too, not but what we deserved them, I dare say.’

‘Didn’t stop him eating your food, did it?’ Doris said in another low-toned aside. ‘0r renouncing his religious background. Or smashing the mission to pieces.’

But the old man only smiled patiently. ‘Doris, my dear, I have told you before and I’11 tell you again. The Lord reveals himself in many ways. So long as good men are prepared to go out and seek for truth and justice and brotherly love, He’ll not be kept waiting too long outside the door.’

Colouring, Doris dug away at her knitting.

‘She’s right of course. Nelson did smash up the mission. Renounced his religion too.’ A cloud of grief threatened his old face for a moment, till laughter suddenly triumphed. ‘And my billy-oh didn’t Drake make him smart for it! Didn’t he give him a dressing down though! Oh dear, oh dear! Politics, says Drake. You can’t eat them, you can’t sell them and saving Doris’s presence you can’t sleep with them! All you can do with them is smash temples and kill the innocent! I’ve never seen him so angry. And gave Nelson a hiding, he did! Drake had learned a thing or two down in the docks, I can tell you!’

‘And you must,’ di Salis hissed, snakelike in the gloom. ‘You must tell us everything. It’s your duty.’

‘A student procession,’ Mr Hibbert resumed. ‘Torchlight, after the curfew, group of Communists out on the streets for a shindy. Early forty-nine, spring it would have been I suppose, things were just beginning to hot up.’ In contrast to his earlier ramblings, Mr Hibbert’s narrative style had become unexpectedly concise. ‘We were sitting by the fire, weren’t we, Doris? Fourteen, Doris was, or was it fifteen? We used to love a fire, even when there wasn’t the need, took us home to Macclesfield. And we hear this clattering and chanting outside. Cymbals, whistles, gongs, bells, drums, oh, a shocking din. I’d a notion something like this might have been happening. Little Nelson, he was forever warning me in his English lessons. You go home, Mr Hibbert. You’re a good man, he used to say, bless him. You’re a good man but when the floodgates burst, the water will cover the good and the bad alike. He’d a lovely turn of phrase, Nelson, when he wanted. It went with his faith. Not invented. Felt. Daisy, I said - Daisy Fong, that was, she was sitting with us, her as rang the bell - Daisy, you and Doris go to the back courtyard, I think we’re about to have company. Next thing I knew, smash, someone had tossed a stone through the window. We heard voices, of course, shouting, and I picked out young Nelson even then, just from his voice. He’d the Chiu Chow and the Shanghainese, of course, but he was using Shanghainese to the lads, naturally. Condemn the imperialist running dogs! he’s yelling. Down with the religious hyenas! Oh, the slogans they dream up! They sound all right in Chinese but shove’em into English and they’re rubbish. Then the door goes and in they come.’

‘They smashed the cross,’ said Doris, pausing to glare at her pattern.

It was Hibbert this time, not his daughter, who startled his audience with his earthiness.

‘They smashed a damn sight more than that, Doris!’ Mr Hibbert rejoined cheerfully. ‘They smashed the lot. Pews, the Table, the piano, chairs, lamps, hymn books, Bibles. Oh, they’d a real old go. I can tell you. Proper little pigs, they were. Go on, I says. Help yourselves. What man hath put together will perish, but you’ll not destroy God’s word, not if you chop the whole place up for matchwood. Nelson, he wouldn’t look at me, poor lad. I could have wept for him. When they’d gone, I looked round and I saw old Daisy Fong standing there in the doorway and Doris behind her. She’d been watching, had Daisy. Enjoying it. I could see it in her eyes. She was one of them, at heart. Happy. Daisy, I said. Pack your things and go. In this life you can give yourself or withhold yourself as you please, my dear. But never lend yourself. That way, you’re worse than a spy. ‘

While Connie beamed her agreement, di Salis gave a squeaky, offended wheeze. But the old man was really enjoying himself.

‘Well, so we sat down, me and Doris here, and we’d a bit of a cry together, I don’t mind admitting, hadn’t we, Doris? I’m not ashamed of tears, never have been. We missed your mother sorely. Knelt down, had a pray. Then we started clearing up. Difficult to know where to begin. Then in comes Drake!’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘ Good evening, Mr Hibbert, he says, in that deep voice of his, plus a bit of my North Country that always made us laugh. And behind him, there’s little Nelson standing with a brush and pan in his hand. He’d still that crooked arm, I suppose he has now, smashed in the bombs when he was little, but it didn’t stop him brushing. I can tell you. That’s when Drake went for him, oh cursing him like a navvy! I’d never heard him like it. Well, he was a navvy wasn’t he, in a manner of speaking?’ He smiled serenely at his daughter. ‘Lucky he spoke the Chiu Chow, eh, Doris? I only understand the half of it myself, not that, but my hat! F-ing and blinding like I don’t know what.’

He paused, and closed his eyes a moment, either in prayer or tiredness.

‘It wasn’t Nelson’s fault, of course. Well we knew that already. He was a leader. Face was involved. They’d started marching, nowhere much in mind. then somebody calls to him: Hey! Mission boy! Show us where your loyalties are now! So he did. He had to. Didn’t stop Drake lamming into him, all the same. They cleaned up, we went to bed, and the two lads slept on the chapel floor in case the mob came back. Came down in the morning, there were the hymn books all piled up neatly, those that had survived, same with the Bibles. They’d fixed a cross up, fashioned it theirselves. Even patched up the piano, though not to tune it, naturally.’

Winding himself into a fresh knot, di Salis put a question. Like Connie, he had a notebook open, but he had not yet written anything in it.

‘What was Nelson’s discipline at this time?’ he demanded, in his nasal indignant way, and held his pen ready to write.

Mr Hibbert gave a puzzled frown.

‘Why, the Communist Party, naturally.’

As Doris whispered ‘Oh Daddy’ into her knitting, Connie hastily translated.

‘What was Nelson studying, Mr Hibbert, and where?’