Gweilo (26 page)

As the ferry set sail for the mile-long crossing, a mist of spume blew across the deck. Amahs carrying babies on their backs in cotton slings faced into the wind to protect their infants. Coolies removed the lengths of cloth they customarily wore like grubby cravats and rubbed their glistening muscles with them. My mother closed her eyes and let the spray cool her face. I, heedful of a bi-lingual notice on the bulkhead, watched out for pickpockets.

Another notice bluntly stated,
No Spitting
. The 'other half' had a habit of spitting to clear their throats of phlegm or catarrh. They also blew their noses by thumbing one nostril shut and then, leaning forward over the gutter, blowing hard. Consequently, it was commonplace to see gobs of pale green snot lying by the side of the road alongside cracked melon seed shells and chewed wedges of sugar cane. The concept of a handkerchief was alien to the Chinese. It seemed utterly ridiculous to them to blow one's nose then put the contents in one's pocket. Whilst spitting and hawking were disgusting habits, I had to agree with their logic and tried blowing my own nose in a similar fashion, yet I never mastered the knack. The snot came out all right but it dribbled as slime down to my lips and chin instead of flying free.

Once, I tried to get my father to see how the common man travelled on the ferry but he steadfastly refused. I asked why.

'If God had intended me to be a coolie,' he replied tersely, 'he'd've given me a bamboo pole.'

'But God doesn't give the coolies poles. They buy them.'

'It's a metaphor,' my father replied.

'What's a metaphor?' I answered.

'Do shut up, Martin,' was my father's response. 'Remember, it's better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than open your mouth and prove it.'

I shut up, boarded the top deck and moved the seat back over so we were facing forwards. The seating was designed so that whichever way the ferry was going, one could face the direction of travel.

Several weeks later, I informed a guest at one of my parents' cocktail parties that a coolie's pole was called a metaphor. He kindly put me right and I vowed henceforth not to trust my father's sketchy knowledge of matters Oriental.

Although there was both the local and BBC World Service radio, and the cinema, I tended to make my own entertainment. My imagination was sharp and I had the whole of the Peak on which to ramble. As long as I kept clear of steep drops, rock faces and slippery surfaces, I was safe. No-one would molest me or accost me unless it was to pass the time of day. One of the constables who did duty in the police post took to engaging me in conversation. He was keen to learn English in order, I presumed, to get a red number flash on his shoulder, which indicated he was reasonably fluent in it. Everyone else I met would greet me, from the coolies carrying massive sacks suspended from their poles to the briefcase-toting
taipans
walking down in the damp morning mist to the Peak Tram.

One elderly European, always dressed in a grey suit with a gold watch chain, would be carried to the Peak Tram in a sedan chair, probably the last to be used in Hong Kong. It was a curious-looking contraption, a sort of mockery of an ecclesiastical throne made out of dark varnished rattan. If it was raining, the rattan was encased in a black custom-made canvas cover. The square roof, rather like those found on small shrines, was curled at the corners. Supported on two long bamboo poles, the chair was carried by two coolies. They had to walk in step to prevent their passenger rocking from side to side. At each step, the rattan creaked rhythmically, the occupant moving slightly up and down as the poles bent. Arriving at the Peak Tram terminus, the coolies knelt on the road, the rear coolie first, and lowered the poles. Their passenger stepped out and, without a word to the two men who had just transported him, walked off to catch the tram. He would, however, greet everyone else who was not Chinese, including me, with a gruff, almost begrudging, good morning. The Chinese he ignored as if they were made of vapour.

This I considered the height of ill manners and was of a mind to address the man on the subject, but he carried a gold-topped cane and I knew, from experience at home, what that could do to my buttocks or the backs of my thighs. And, on the other hand, the coolies seemed inured to his rudeness. Once, I followed them to see if I could have a ride and find out where they spent their day, but they disappeared through an imposing gate which was closed behind them. They were not for hire.

Public entertainment was limited, not through any law but because most people were too busy earning a living. Yet every Chinese New Year, temporary stages were erected on waste ground around Hong Kong for the presentation of Chinese operas.

The stages were marvels of Oriental ingenuity. Made of thousands of bamboo poles lashed together with strips of the same material, they could be a hundred feet wide, forty deep, fully roofed with canvas or
atap
panels and equipped with electric lights. The audience remained in the open, unprotected from the elements. Rather like the theatre in Shakespeare's day, the clientele talked, drank, ate (even cooked) during the performance, which could last six hours. The actors dressed in flamboyant classical Chinese costumes in primary colours and wore heavy, stylized make-up. They sang in very high-pitched voices, their movements exaggerated and carefully choreographed.

I enjoyed these spectacles, but not for too long. The falsetto singing prompted a headache in fifteen minutes and a migraine in thirty. What six hours would do beggared even my imagination. What I really enjoyed were the fights. Swords, pikestaffs and other weapons of bodily pain and torture were flashed and swung, the combatants whirling and ducking, thrusting and slicing while all the time the orchestra was going frantic, cymbals clashing as swords met, gongs booming when the main protagonists struck each other a mortal blow. It was controlled mayhem and I loved it.

Bedlam could also be experienced, admittedly for a shorter period, at my favourite entertainment venue, The China Fleet Club in Wanchai, an infamous area of tenements, cheap hotels, tattoo parlours, Triad gangsters, bars and bordellos. It was the land of Suzie Wong.

Close to the naval dockyard, The China Fleet Club was a social club established, as the title page of its programme proudly stated,
with funds contributed by the men of the lower deck – to whom this club belongs
. It was operated by Royal Navy sailors for their comrades and incorporated several bars, a restaurant, sleeping accommodation, a barber's shop, billiards room and a cinema. As the offspring of a parent attached to the armed forces, albeit as a civilian worker, I was permitted to go to the club cinema for Saturday matinees.

The main feature seldom interested me. What I went for were the cartoon preliminaries, and one in particular –
Tom and Jerry
. I was not alone. Sailors, many of them hung-over from a night on the Wanchai tiles, crammed into the seats, jostling, arm-punching and ribbing each other. As soon as the lights went down, the National Anthem was played. They all stood up. It ended. They sat down and the noise and kerfuffle began again. The screen came alive with the Pathé news. For this, the audience fell silent. Newsreels showed the colonial uprisings Britain was facing – Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya – soldiers fighting, struggling through jungle, advancing through rubber plantations or sun-baked rocky hills, dying. The screen went black. For a minute or two, the memory of the pictures of war kept the peace. Then someone would shout out.

'Where's Fred?'

Other voices would join in.

'Give us Fred!'

'We want Fred! We want Fred!'

Feet would start to stamp, hands clap and mouths hoot like owls or bay like wolves.

If the screen lit up with a Donald Duck or Woody the Woodpecker cartoon, all hell would break loose. The floor would vibrate as if an army were marching over it, the air thick with whistles and indignation. If, however, the cartoon was
Tom and Jerry
, the sailors would fall silent until the captions gave the name of the producer, then they all yelled 'Good old Fred!' in unison. The producer's name was Fred Quimby. Throughout the cartoon, guttural, masculine, lower-deck mess laughter greeted every twist in the tale.

About noon, after the matinée ended, I sometimes strolled through Wanchai, passing the bars with their bamboo bead curtains, young women standing in the doorways with bottles of Coke, smoking Lucky Strikes. Once or twice, I tried to enter one of these bars but was rebuffed by the girls at the door, never mind the barmen within. Either they were brusque and ordered me out, sometimes all but manhandling me to the door, or they accepted my presence, asking me if I
wanted jig-a-jig
, which sent everyone but myself into paroxysms of hilarity. I thought it all a bit of a liberty. I meant no harm, only wanted a drink and a bit of conversation but found myself either an outcast or the butt of incomprehensible humour. What was more, they all touched my hair. I gave them luck. Yet they would not so much as sell me a Green Spot. It was some years before I understood how the young women in the beaded curtain doorways of Wanchai made their living.

This aside, Wanchai did not appeal to me. The streets were sombre and lacked the vivacity of the rest of Hong Kong. Certainly, they were usually crowded, but there were few
dai pat dongs
, the streets were laid out in a severe, American-style grid pattern, the newer buildings square and characterless concrete blocks. There were no dried prawn or fish shops, no vendors of preserved eggs or rice, no little temples tucked away in back streets.

I mentioned to my mother that Wanchai seemed to lack soul.

'Maybe it's because it's on reclaimed land,' she remarked.

'Reclaimed land?'

'They knock a mountain down, pour it into the sea, let it settle and then build on it. Hong Kong hasn't got much land space, so they make more of it in this way.'

I could only wonder how they knocked down a mountain.

From the time my mother's mother was widowed in 1947, she had not left Portsmouth or, save to go to the shops, her tiny terraced house, and was living on a very meagre state pension. To give her a much needed holiday, my parents arranged for her to visit us, 'indulging' on an RFA vessel.

'Indulgence' was a quaint military arrangement dating back to the days when naval spouses accompanied their husbands aboard ship. By 1953, it meant that, if there was a spare cabin on a ship, it could be rented to a close relative of a serving officer for a nominal sum. The passenger had to take pot luck, however: departure and arrival dates were speculative. If the vessel was diverted
en route
, the passenger went with it. It was a potential military magical mystery tour.

My mother decided it would be best if my grandmother visited in the spring. She was sixty-four and it was considered that she would find the heat and humidity of the high summer debilitating. A request was put in to the Admiralty in London and my grandmother was found a berth upon the RFA
Bacchus
, a tiny, shallow-draft ship with a crew of about forty, which had been built as a sea water distilling vessel but was now used as a freighter carrying naval stores. My grandmother was listed on the ship's manifest as super-cargo.

The
Bacchus
arrived alongside HMS
Tamar
on the morning of 14 March 1954. My grandmother walked unsteadily down the gangplank, holding on to both side ropes. She looked a lot older and more frail than when I had seen her last. She was wearing a dark blue dress, a cardigan, an overcoat and heavy, flat shoes. Even her leather handbag looked cumbersome. All the elderly women I had met in Hong Kong – even my headmistress – dressed in light clothing, in bright colours, and walked with a spring in their step.

'Nanny's not sick, is she?' I enquired of my father as my mother ran to the foot of the gangplank, tripping like a little girl and embracing her mother.

'No,' replied my father, who intensely disliked his mother-in-law. 'She's as fit as an old fiddle.' I detected a slight hint of wishful thinking.