Gweilo (13 page)

'I liff herre.' She pointed vaguely to the sky and, stepping forward, stroked my hair before I could do anything about it. She then moved past me, her rags brushing against my face. I sprinted for the Fourseas and, to my mother's consternation, for it was the middle of the afternoon, immediately ran myself a bath and shampooed my hair twice. It was one thing to have the Chinese touch my golden hair for luck. They were clean. She was a different matter altogether.

A week or so later, I joined a gang of Chinese boys pelting her with gravel from the railway line. I felt no pity for her. She had defiled me.

In 1952, The Bank of China building on Hong Kong island was the tallest in the world between Cairo and San Francisco. As for the remainder of Hong Kong, most buildings were over fifty years old. The streets of Kowloon could have changed little in that time, the arcades bustling with shoppers then as they had at the time of the Q'ing empire when men really did wear their hair in waist-length cues and pirates were executed by the sword on the beach in Kowloon Bay.

True, Hong Kong was just beginning its metamorphosis into one of the financial powerhouses of Asia, but it was still essentially a very Chinese city with bicycles and a non-interventionist British administration.

Men in pigtails may have vanished but little else had changed. Rickshaws were commonplace. Coolies carried extraordinarily heavy loads on bamboo poles over their shoulders. Conical rattan hats were widely used whilst the Hakka women wore hats with black cloth fringes like curtains hanging from the rim. People ran like hell across the street through fast-moving traffic to shake off the demons they believed were perpetually following them: sometimes, someone walking along the pavement would suddenly dart into an alley, slip into a shop or board a departing bus at the last minute, in the hope of giving the slip to these malevolent supernatural entities. For the same reason, many Chinese assiduously avoided having their photo taken for fear the demons would see the picture and be able to track them down. Unlicensed street hawkers sold sweetmeats, sugar cane, melon seeds and
wah mui
. These were plums soaked for several days in sea water then dried in the sun. When one sucked them, they puckered the inside of one's cheek, the salt and the fruit sugars mingling together. Others carried braziers on poles, selling roasted peanuts or chestnuts, slices of hot roast pork with the crackled skin still on the meat, cut from a whole pig such as I had seen cooking in the Ho Man Tin squatter area.

These were everyday sights in the streets around the Fourseas. What were much less frequent were itinerant street entertainers. Few had survived the war years and the advent of Radio Hong Kong, but one who did was the plink-plonk man: and I was there for his final act.

My mother based his moniker upon the rosewood xylophone he played. His pitch was in Emma Avenue, directly behind the Fourseas, where he occasionally appeared to place his instrument on the pavement under the shade of the trees, squatting on his haunches behind it. After striking a few of the keys as if tuning up, but in fact to alert those in the buildings around to his arrival, he invariably launched into a Chinese classical arrangement of 'Tipperary'. Once this was over, he opened a wooden box he carried over his shoulder from which pranced a small monkey dressed in the clothing of a Ming dynasty mandarin. To prevent any escape, the monkey was tethered to the box by a long leather leash.

The plink-plonk man's second tune was usually a rendition of the Japanese song known in English as 'Rose, Rose, I love you' followed by 'Marching through Georgia' in an arrangement possibly conceived for a Cantonese opera. He finished with an embellished version of 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot'.

As he played, his monkey cavorted about in a haphazard jig that bore no rhythmical relationship whatsoever to the music, while people threw down ten-cent coins from windows and balconies. At the end of each tune, the plink-plonk man pitched a hard olive on to the balconies or through the windows of those who had tossed down money and at the end of the whole performance, musician and monkey collected up the coins.

All went well until one day when, halfway through 'Marching through Georgia', the monkey finally managed to bite through its leash. I was on the opposite side of the road and watched the whole drama unfold.

In a flash, the monkey was up the nearest tree. The music stopped abruptly and the plink-plonk man stood up to survey the situation. The monkey was out of reach, the tree too stout to bend and the remnant of the leash too short to be grabbed.

At first, the musician tried to sweet-talk the monkey down, holding up a piece of a bun. The monkey just peered down through the branches. Not to be hoodwinked by this, it then slowly, strip-tease fashion, divested itself of its ludicrous costume, letting each piece drift to the ground where the musician collected them up, folding them as he might those of a child. His attention taken by this task, the plink-plonk man's eye was briefly off the monkey which, holding on to its little cock, gave it a few masturbatory tugs before proceeding to urinate upon its erstwhile master.

It was a moment or two before the musician realized what was happening. He unwisely looked up to be hit in the face by the full stream. This not surprisingly drove him into an irate frenzy, cursing the monkey at the top of his voice, throwing the clothing at it and then pelting the monkey with unripe olives, some of which it caught and returned with considerable accuracy, the hard fruit bouncing off the musician's head.

Tiring of this game, the monkey headed off down the street, swinging Tarzan-like from tree to tree, always keeping just out of reach of the musician who ran below, jumping up to attempt to grab the dangling leash.

It was pure pantomime and, by now, had gathered a crowd far greater than any the plink-plonk man could ever have hoped to collect through his music. He ran along behind the escaping monkey, his face wet with urine, his fists clenched, pleading, cussing, cajoling and threatening the creature by turns. His swelling audience, meanwhile, hooted with laughter, shouted spurious advice and encouragement to the escapee.

At the junction of Emma Avenue and Soares Avenue, a network of electricity wires spanned out from a junction box. The monkey, blithely swinging through the foliage, was unaware of the danger. The plink-plonk man saw it and tried in desperation to turn the monkey back. Enjoying its liberty, it ignored him. There was a violent blue flash accompanied by an equally brief high-pitched squeak. The lights in the shops flickered. A few bulbs exploded. The monkey was instantly immolated. All that was left was a charred corpse stretched between two wires, a drift of smoke and the acrid smell of burnt hair.

The plink-plonk man sat on the curb, his feet in the gutter, and broke into tears. The crowd, now subdued, dispersed.

I never saw him again.

The single European man who lived in the cheapest room in the Fourseas was universally known as Nagasaki Jim.

My mother emphatically warned me against him. So did Ching, Ah Kwan, Halfie and all the other hotel staff with whom I was friends. Even the manager, Mr Peng, who was usually aloof unless remonstrating with me for misbehaving, told me to avoid him.

He was British, in his mid to late thirties, of average height with ginger-ish hair cut short and badly. His face and arms were freckled and he had watery blue eyes. Like the Queen of Kowloon, he also reeked of tobacco, alcohol and, not infrequently, opium. His clothes were always just the clean side of filthy although he laundered them himself once a week on the roof. He did not eat at the hotel but went every evening to a
dai pai dong
– always the same one – in Mong Kok.

I knew this because I followed him there on several occasions, keeping to the shadows, stalking him as one might a wild beast.

Indeed, he was like one. He could fly into a fit of anger at the drop of a chopstick, rushing at the object of his ire, his arms flailing. He seldom swore or shouted but breathed heavily. If he caught someone when in one of his rages, as I saw him do with one of the room boys, he would beat them about the head with clenched fists or slap them hard in the face. His assault over, he would speak rapidly and incomprehensibly in a high-pitched, faltering voice. Only later did I come to understand from my mother that Nagasaki Jim spoke Japanese in his raging.

He did not spend his whole time in the Fourseas but, when he was there, he tended to keep to himself in his room, looking out of his door every so often to peer down the corridor. His actions were tentative, guarded, like a hermit crab periodically glancing out of its shell to check there were no predators about. Where he went apart from the Mong Kok
dai pai dong
and the shops in Soares Avenue, I never discovered. His life was a mystery, closed behind his hotel-room door.

Over time, I gleaned the story of his past, as exotic and romantic and brutal as any of those of the other Europeans or White Russians who had run ashore in Hong Kong.

Nagasaki Jim was said to be the heir to a famous British biscuit manufacturer but the family had disinherited him save for a small monthly stipend. He had joined the British Army at the outbreak of war and, by 1940, was stationed in Hong Kong with the rank of Captain. When the Japanese overran the colony on Christmas Day 1941, Nagasaki Jim was taken prisoner and incarcerated in the Sham Shui Po prisoner-of-war camp.

Life in the camp was harsh in the extreme. Food was insufficient and barely edible. Diphtheria, dysentery and cholera were endemic and medical supplies exceedingly scarce. Escape was virtually impossible: of the few who managed to get away, most were rounded up, hideously tortured then shot or bayoneted to death on the seashore, in full view of the mustered lines of their comrades.

In September 1942, the Japanese prepared to take a draft of 1,800 Allied prisoners to Japan to use as slave labour in their war effort. The men, along with 2,000 Japanese soldiers returning on leave, were loaded aboard a cargo vessel, the
Lisbon Maru
. The prisoners were accommodated in the locked-down holds, the Japanese soldiers making do with the main deck spaces.

Early on the morning of 1 October, an American submarine called the USS
Grouper
came across the ship off the Chusan Islands. Seeing all the Japanese troops on board, it was assumed to be a troopship. The submarine torpedoed and sank it. The Japanese battened down the hatches. Hundreds of PoWs drowned in the holds. Some succeeded in getting out but were machine-gunned in the water by Japanese gunboats. In all, 846 perished. Nagasaki Jim was not amongst them.

Along with other survivors, he was trans-shipped to Japan and put to work. Conditions in the mines and factories were worse than they had been in Sham Shui Po but he still survived and was somehow to end up near Nagasaki when the Americans dropped the second atom bomb on the city on 9 August 1945. It was said Nagasaki Jim was near the city and not only saw the bomb fall but witnessed its horrific aftermath. This experience, I was told, turned his head.

When prisoners-of-war in Japan were repatriated, he wound up in Hong Kong and, upon his discharge from the Army, did not return to Britain. Quite why was unknown.

Of course, I knew little of this at the age of eight and yet I was well aware that Nagasaki Jim had more than a few loose screws: as my mother put it, he only had one chopstick. I was street-wise, too. What with Princess Anastasia and various deranged beggars who wandered the streets – not to mention the crazy hotel gardener with his pruning knife – I knew there were boundaries in life and roughly where they lay. Yet if, playing in the hotel corridors, one of us strayed in the direction of Nagasaki Jim's abode, one of the hotel staff would run towards us and admonish us.

'You lo go dis place. Dis Nagasaki Jim place.' A finger would sternly shake in our faces. 'You lo go! You savee? Lo go!'

One day in the spring of 1953, I was playing cowboys and indians with friends along the corridors of the Fourseas. Or cops 'n' robbers. Whichever. The salient point was that I was carrying a cap gun six-shooter and strayed towards Nagasaki Jim's place, intending to dodge down the stores-packed staircase to the floor below and come up on my enemies from behind. There were no hotel staff about: they were attending the monthly staff meeting with Mr Peng in the dining room.