Gweilo (11 page)

This disparate community was catered for by the room boys. By and large, they were happy young men despite the fact that many, like Ching, were refugees from Communism and had had to abandon their families back in China. They were efficient, thorough and paid a pittance. Yet they were grateful for a job. Thousands had none and they each knew only a tweak of fate's tail lay between them and sleeping on the pavement. Or pulling a rickshaw.

My mother befriended them all. Perhaps because she was an expatriate like them, perhaps because she had lost her father and her widowed mother lived 7,000 miles away, she identified with them and, over the years, as they improved their lot, she remained in touch with them, attending their weddings, becoming godmother to their first born, giving them advice and loaning them money.

One member of the hotel staff was my especial friend and not infrequent enemy. My mother called him Half-pint (abbreviated to Halfie) because he was short and wore a white uniform with a pillbox hat that made him look like a bottle of milk. His real name was Ah Kee and he was the bellboy. I learnt much from Halfie: how to roll tight, aerodynamic (and therefore accurate and painful) rubber-band-propelled pellets and fold paper planes out of PanAm timetables, flying them off the hotel roof to see if we could get one over the hill opposite. We never did succeed.

Halfie also played on my
gweilo
gullibility. One day, he persuaded me to eat a chilli from one of the ornamental bushes growing in the hotel grounds. I thought he had eaten one first but, by sleight of hand, he had avoided it and secreted it in his pocket. I spent three hours eating sugar lumps, drinking cold water, chewing on ice cubes and, ultimately, retching my stomach inside out. For a week, we were sworn enemies. Mr Peng was of a mind to sack him but my mother interceded on his behalf. A week later we were friends again, our camaraderie cemented by our jointly dropping a dead Atlas moth covered with stinging ants into the jacket pocket of a passing coolie then following him to see how far he went before the ants started in on him. As they abandoned the moth for living flesh, he began to prance and cavort along the street, a man with St Vitus's dance and no way to relieve himself of it.

The third-floor captain was Ah Kwan. My grandfather would have described him as a leery fellow. He spoke English and Cantonese fluently and was the
de facto
manager of the whores' rooms. He also collected their rent, paying it into the front desk after doubtlessly taking a cut. Although married with several children, Ah Kwan had a favourite trick. He would think himself up an erection, placing his penis along the inside of his thigh in his trouser leg. Then, seated on his stool behind the floor captain's desk, he would invite the hotel children to try to squeeze it to judge how firm it was. It was some time before any of us realized exactly what it was he kept in his trousers. We did not report him to our parents. It seemed a harmless activity, did not occur frequently and, besides, we liked him. He was funny.

Every fortnight or so throughout the second half of 1952, drafts of Australian servicemen passed through the Fourseas
en route
for Korea. They arrived by sea or military transport aircraft and marched from Kai Tak airport to the hotel, carrying their kitbags over their shoulders. Once there, they were 'processed' by officers seated in the lounge. I hung around the door and fell into conversation with them. They were mostly in their late teens or early twenties, wore the ubiquitous Aussie cocked hat and had a kangaroo on their brass badges. Some gave me pennies with kangaroos on them. One gave me his hat badge and address in Japan. A few years older than most of his comrades, his name was Frank Martin and he was a Flight Sergeant in the Royal Australian Air Force. I wrote to him every month: he replied with stamps for my stamp collection until, late in 1953, an official communication arrived. My mother opened the envelope while I was at school. On my return that afternoon, she took me aside.

'Your Aussie friend who writes to you . . .' she began. 'He's been lost in action.'

She handed me the letter. It was succinct in the extreme and gave no details other than to assure me he had been courageous and honourable. It was signed by his unit officer.

I thought for a minute and said, 'What does that mean?'

'It means he's dead,' my mother explained solemnly.

I did not cry. It somehow seemed like an inevitability. You went to war, you died.

American troops passing through the Fourseas were mostly non-commissioned and junior commissioned officers. They were aloof, handing out packets of Wrigley's PK chewing gum with almost divine largesse. I was never a chewing-gum person. It seemed pointless to me to chew on a sweet then spit it out to stick to the side of the waste-paper bin or lavatory pan in which if it did not hit the water first go, any number of flushings would not shift it.

Regardless of nationality or rank, they all visited the third-floor in-house entertainment area.

The system ran like this: one innocent would be given a 'ride for
kumshaw
'. In other words, a free ten-minute tumble. This was a loss-leader and the whores took it in turns to provide it. Once the word got round, those seeking servicing waited in the hotel bar to be ushered discreetly upstairs to their fifteen minutes of carnal release. I, of course, had no idea what went on in the rooms but I was aware that it was secret, private and out of bounds. Ah Kwan had said as much and that was good enough for me.

The bar, where I chatted to and drank Coke with the soldiers and, on occasion, flyers while they waited, was a vaguely art-deco counter in the reception lobby to the left of the main entrance. The back wall – and the ceiling above – consisted of lime-green plastic panels with strip lights behind them. To the right was the entrance to the hotel dining room. Grandly named
Grill
, it had clearly been designed by the architect with a penchant for art deco and lime-green, back-lit plastic. Next to that were the main stairs: there was no lift. On the other side of these was the reception desk and back office with a reception lounge area.

It was not long before I knew every corner of the Fourseas. The minuscule gardens drew little interest other than to provide a place to play and a supply of tart kumquats which I occasionally ate. The fire escape staircases to the rear of every floor were a mild distraction but only for their contents.

Had there been a fire, we would all have been burnt to death, for the staircases were piled high with stores. Catering-size tins of fruit, tomatoes and peas, drums of cooking oil, packs of Heinz sauces, boxes of jars of jams and marmalades, cans of Brasso, Mansion House floor polish and shoe blacking were balanced on the steps, five or more high. The passing space beside them was at best one thin person wide. What's more, the hotel gardener had made the tiny landing at the top of one flight of steps his own. Every night, he went on to the hotel roof, washed himself at the tap from which he watered the rows of plants he nurtured there, then spread out a quilt on the landing and laid his head on a large tin of fruit which he tucked into his neck shot-putt fashion.

He was fiercely territorial about the top of his staircase. The same applied to the kumquat bushes and a stand of paw-paw trees in front of the hotel. If he caught me or one of the other child residents even approaching them, he came at us with a vicious-looking curved pruning knife, moving with the mobility of a mongoose. He did not shout but grunted unintelligibly at us in a bestial language all his own. Had he caught us, we were certain he would have maimed or killed us. His face like that of a skull, the skin drawn tightly over the bones and his eyes sunken, he had the temper of a demon. There were effigies of him in temples, guardians of the underworld.

Some way down Waterloo Road from the hotel, a dirt track ran up behind the hill opposite. It was rutted from rain water and unsuitable for motorized vehicles. Despite this fact, people always seemed to be going up and down it, laden with bundles. Coolies with heavy loads suspended from their poles were frequent pedestrians. Rickshaws went up empty but returned loaded with packages. Curious, I followed the track one sweltering day in August.

For a few hundred yards, it rose steeply before coming out on a mildly sloping plateau upon which there was an area of about fifteen acres crammed with shanties. Most were made of wood with tin roofs constructed of flattened oil drums and any other metal to be had, whilst a few had scraps of tarpaulin patch-worked over them in lieu of metal. Doors fitted loosely and windows were shuttered without glass. A thin pall of smoke hung over them.

At first, I thought they were residential shacks for there were dogs wandering about, laundry drying on poles, women attending to domestic chores with babies strapped to their backs and infants staggering here and there with no seats to their pants as was the Chinese way. However, I soon found out at least half the shacks were thriving industrial units. Men and women toiled over paraffin or charcoal stoves. In one shack, a man was cooking up what smelt like Brylcreem hair tonic. In another, a woman was stooped over a vat of bubbling sugar making boiled sweets. A third was steaming the flesh off fish to shape into fishballs. I saw two men roasting a whole pig over a pit of charcoal, turning it on a spit and cooking it in its own fat, which fell spitting into the fire, bursting into puffs of flame like tiny meteors hitting the surface of a burning star. By the time I arrived on the scene, the pig was almost done, its whole carcass, including the head and feet, golden brown and shining.

I sauntered on through what I now realized was officially called a squatter area. These people were on the bottom rung of Hong Kong's social ladder, only the street sleepers below them. All of them refugees, they were setting out to rebuild their lives and here was where they were starting.

My presence caused no little curiosity. Men laughed a greeting, women smiled and the boiled-sweet maker offered me one of her wares. I took it. It was flavoured with cinnamon and was a cough sweet. The infants generally took one look at me and fled, screaming. To them I really was a
gweilo
.

The shanties had no sewage. That flowed away down the hill in a network of shallow ditches to soak into a stinking gully. The only water supply was provided by a standpipe down near the school on Waterloo Road and had to be fetched in a bucket. That one tap had to cater for several thousand people.

I continued through the squatter area and up on to the ridge of the hill. The ground was dry and covered in loose volcanic gravel which glittered like discarded gemstones. It sloped steeply like a dome down towards Waterloo Road, with very little plant life other than a few nondescript bushes. I kept well back from the edge of the slope. One slip would certainly have been fatal.

On the far side of the plateau, as far away as it could have been from the squatter area, was a small cemetery. The graves were unlike those in a Christian graveyard, being low, oblong stone plinths with a headstone at each end bearing inscriptions that were in neither English nor Chinese. They were old and looked untended. Desiccated grass grew between them. I was pondering these when a strange pattern materialized in the soil beside one of them. I knelt to discover, half buried, the skeleton of a snake about three feet long.

It was exquisitely beautiful, delicate and graceful. With my penknife, I carefully excavated it but as soon as I tried to lift the bones, they broke. All I was able to retrieve was the skull and mandible but these, cosseted in my cupped hands, shattered into white dust before I had gone twenty steps.

When I returned to the Fourseas, I asked Ching about the graveyard.

'The graves are those of people of Islam,' he informed me. 'They did not worship God or Buddha, but Allah. Many of them were Indian soldiers in the British Army a long time ago when the soldiers camped on the hills of Kowloon. Some were merchants. It is a very unlucky place,' he continued. 'You see how the squatters do not build near there? There are many restless ghosts.'

Over the summer, I frequently went up the hill, sitting on a huge boulder that must have been its summit. From there, I could see most of Kowloon, the Kowloon hills, Kowloon Bay, the island of Hong Kong and the western harbour. It was a breathtaking panorama and always set me humming one of my mother's favourite songs, 'I'm sitting on top of the world'.

Early one afternoon as I was sitting on the boulder, I heard a faint droning coming from the direction of Lei Yue Mun, the narrow strait of water the
Corfu
had sailed through to enter Hong Kong harbour. As the sound grew in volume, I could make out a dot in the sky. It became bigger and descended until its shape was obvious: it was a Short Sunderland flying boat like the ones I had watched with Grampy, taking off from Poole harbour not thirty miles from my grandparents' homes.

Very slowly indeed it lost altitude, its four engines by now thundering. Had it not been for the noise that echoed off the mountains, it could have been taken for a huge lumbering sea bird. Its flight almost horizontal, it dropped slowly but surely to the water, a huge spray suddenly clouding out behind it as it touched down. At last, it settled on the sea, a hatch opening near the nose. A crew member moored the aircraft to a buoy even as the propellers were still turning under their own momentum. In a minute or so, a motor launch pulled alongside and the passengers started to disembark. It was, I thought, strange to think that just five days before, it had been in England.