Gweilo (30 page)

The shoe-shine boys shared the pavements with a small coterie of beggars. One was a tall, thin man who was totally blind, his face always turned up to the sky, his hand holding a begging cup and a length of bamboo painted as white as his sightless eyes. He was invariably accompanied by a child whose role was not to induce sympathy in passers-by but to act as a guide dog might, seeing him across the road or on to a tram. Another beggar was a woman whose body and limbs were twisted by deformity into a grotesque embryonic crouch. She got about on a small wooden platform to which had been affixed the wheels of an old baby's pram. For her, in her miserable condition, beggary must have been particularly demeaning, for every day she sold newspapers by Blake Pier, cradling her limited stock of copies of the
China Mail
and
Wah Kiu Yat Po
in her arms like the baby she would never have.

Perhaps the most obvious intrusion of ancient Cathay into modern Hong Kong were the coolies. Throughout the day, swarthy Hakka women from the rural hinterland dressed in black, often wearing dust caps made out of folded newspaper, appeared down the street with bamboo poles over their shoulders from which were suspended anything from baskets of building rubble and bundles of waste paper to discarded wooden filing cabinets and office chairs. If it could be re-used, re-cycled or re-sold, it was.

These women were not restricted to carting debris. I once came to a hillside being blasted with dynamite and watched as the charges were laid by women, the detonator wire run out by women and the warning given by a woman with a gong. When the dust settled, it was women who carried away the dislodged rocks and earth. Not one man seemed to be involved.

Only one place in Central held me in awe and I visited it over and over again, like a rubber-necking tourist. It was the main banking hall of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters. I had gone there first with my mother. Reluctantly.

On either side of the entrance was a life-size bronze lion. The left-hand one was growling.

'They're called Stephen and Stitt,' my mother said as we waited to cross the road.

'Which is which?'

'Stephen's growling,' was her reply.

'What's a stitt ?'

'They're named after two bank managers, Mr Stephen and Mr Stitt.'

On reaching the lions, I was struck by their size, yet this was not all. They had bullet holes in them from the war and Stephen had a lump of shrapnel embedded in him. Both were covered in a dark brown patina except that Stitt's front paw shone like gold. I soon saw why. People walking by touched it. For luck.

'This', my mother announced as we entered the bank and turned to climb a flight of stairs, 'is actually the back door. The front door, and the address, are on the other side.'

This seemed nonsensical and I said so.

'It's to do with the laws of necromancy,' my mother replied. 'The main door has to face the hills, away from the harbour, to keep the sea dragon out and to stop the money flowing out into the ocean.'

Explained thus, it made perfect sense to me.

The banking hall was vast. The sound of voices was muffled by its immensity. Huge, square, dark brown marble pillars held up the ceiling – and what a ceiling it was: barrel vaulted and covered in a gargantuan mosaic. In the centre was an elaborate golden starburst set against an azure backdrop, around the sides was a multicoloured frieze of figures engaged in all manner of Oriental and Occidental craftwork and industry. The ceiling never failed to stun me. I would often take a detour through the bank on my way from the Peak Tram to the Star Ferry just to pass under the reflected glow of the mosaic.

Once, accompanying my father to the bank, I announced my determination to be an artist.

'What on earth prompted that ridiculous idea?' he exclaimed, busying himself at the counter with his cheque book.

'That did,' I said, staring mosaicwards.

He did not look up.

'Well, put that notion out of your head. No-one gets rich by being an artist.'

'There's more to being rich than having a lot of money,' I answered.

The teller accepted his cheque. He turned to face me.

'No, there isn't,' he said succinctly, 'and anyone who says there is is a bloody fool.'

'Mum told me there is,' I said.

'Yes, well your mother doesn't have to earn it,' he rejoined.

When he had collected his money and put it in his wallet, I said, 'Look up at the ceiling, Dad.'

He did so, briefly.

'Very impressive,' he remarked offhandedly.

Once outside, as we walked to the car parked in Statue Square, I mused, 'I bet the artist was paid a lot of money to make that ceiling.'

'Probably drank it all and never did another thing in the rest of his life.'

That, I considered, was ripe coming from an experienced pink gin downer but refrained from saying as much. I was fast learning the art of knowing when, as my father put it, to keep my trap shut.

Not long after the forced-labour day on Chow Kung Chau, another trip was arranged by launch to the adjacent island of Hei Ling Chau. It was sparsely populated and consequently the location of a leper colony – and it was this we were to visit.

My mother heard of the trip from a newsletter sent out to naval wives and immediately announced we were going. My father was reluctant in the extreme. He and disease were not close relations, he declared, and he was damned if he was going to spend his Sunday leisure time wandering around staring at those who were.

'What's a leper colony?' I asked.

'It's where they lock away the poor buggers who've caught leprosy,' my father replied, hoping this would deter me from joining my mother.

I asked what leprosy was.

'Leprosy', my mother answered, giving my father a look that precluded his interrupting, 'is a disease caused by bacteria. There are two kinds – dry leprosy and wet leprosy. If you have the dry sort, your nerves die off bit by bit and you become paralysed. Or, because they have no nerves in them, parts of your body wither and drop off. Most common is you lose your nose and fingers and toes, but you can have a whole arm drop off. If you have wet leprosy, your entire body is covered in running sores and ulcers. That kind is dangerously contagious, meaning you can get it just by touching someone with it, but the dry is very hard to catch indeed—'

'And your mother wants to take you to meet some people who've got it,' my father butted in, no longer able to contain himself. 'Really, Joyce, sometimes you take the bloody biscuit. Anyway, you're not going. I shall simply refuse to allow it. I'm not having our son exposed—'

'Don't talk such bloody bosh. We'll be perfectly safe. You think the people who run the leprosarium will put visitors at risk?'

'Why do you think they lock all the poor bastards away on a ruddy island ?'

'They don't lock them away. They look after them and cure them.'

'And once they're cured, they just become beggars,' my father retorted. 'You can't do much with only one arm and half a leg. Better to let them die.'

My mother pursed her lips and replied, 'Sometimes, Ken, I wonder what I saw in you.'

A fortnight later, on a Sunday of bright sun and high scudding clouds, we were all three of us cutting through a choppy sea aboard a naval launch heading for Hei Ling Chau. On arrival at a short jetty, we were met by a Chinese man who helped us to disembark under an archway of gold and scarlet bunting. A dozen other private launches rode at anchor.

'Welcome to our fete!' the Chinese man said as we stepped on to dry land.

'How do you spell that?' my father muttered. '
Fate
or
fête
. I really do not see why they don't just have a bloody flag day like anybody else. This really is bloody madness, Joyce.'

Ahead of us were some low buildings surrounded by stalls. Everything was decorated with strips and banners of gold and scarlet crepe paper, catching the sunlight as they rippled in the breeze. Several hundred people milled about, trying their luck at a coconut shy, a roll-a-ten-cent-coin table and other attractions such as might have been found at any church bazaar anywhere in rural Britain. The only difference was that some of the helpers were British Army privates and naval ratings and there was a .22 rifle range set up for those who fancied their hand as a dab shot.

'Well,' my mother replied, 'it seems to be a pretty bloody widespread madness.'

We joined the crowd, tried the lucky dip, bought some raffle tickets and visited the tombola stall. My father hung back, smoking his pipe, his teeth clenched in anger on the stem. I wondered if he smoked to enjoy the tobacco or to fumigate the air around him. After a short time, we saw him strolling off southwards.

'Wouldn't it be funny,' my mother mused, 'if he missed the boat back? Marooned on a desert island with a colony of lepers and that bloody pipe . . .'

It was then I saw my first leper. He was sitting behind a trestle table upon which were arranged a number of home-made wooden objects such as bookends, desktop pen holders and paperweights shaped like the outline of the island, its name burnt into the surface with a hot poker. From the front of the table hung a sign in English and Chinese stating
Woodworks made by inmats. Please by. Garuntee very clean.

As my mother had predicted, the leper had no nose, only a ragged hole surrounded by flaps of skin. He had also lost several fingers and an ear. Apart from this, he looked quite normal and healthy, certainly in better shape than many of the beggars I saw on the streets. I searched my pockets. I had ten dollars left from a postal order sent by Nanny for my birthday.

Walking up to the stall, I studied the wares on offer. They were simple items but very well made. The leper smiled at me but did not speak, his upper lip curling like a snarling dog's, his lower hanging loose. I picked up a pair of bookends.

'We get our wood from a timber yard,' a voice said over my shoulder. 'They're left-overs. Mahogany, teak, sandalwood.'

I turned. A European man stood behind me dressed in slacks and an open-neck cotton shirt. He only differed from the rest of the Sunday crowd in that a stethoscope hung round his neck to denote his office.

'Having fun?' he enquired.

'Yes, sir,' I answered then, seizing the moment, asked him a question that had been bothering me for days. 'Is it true you only cure the lepers so they can become beggars?'

'Who on earth told you that nonsense?' he exclaimed, quite clearly taken aback. 'We don't just cure their illness, we cure their souls, too. We train them to do jobs. This man here's going to be a carpenter. Once he has a job, which we'll find for him, he'll get his dignity and his life back.' He smiled down at me. 'You don't want to believe everything you hear, sonny Jim.'

I pointed to the book ends and asked,
'Gai doh cheen?'

The leper sort-of chortled and raised five assorted digits.

'Ng mun?'
I questioned, to be sure of the price.

He nodded, his eyes bright at the thought of a sale. I gave him five dollar notes and he handed me the book-ends, bound together by several rubber bands. As I parted with the money, our hands met, his skin blotched, warped and stretched by leprosy, mine smooth with health.

'Dor jei,'
I thanked him. He chortled again and I saw he had only half a tongue.

As I was about to go, he reached out with one hand, nodding enthusiastically at me, his eyes pleading for something. His index and middle finger were missing. Going round the back of his stall, I stood next to him. Fleetingly, so that I hardly felt it, he touched my hair.

On the return launch trip, I took my mother aside, out of my father's earshot. 'I let a leper touch my hair,' I admitted, hurriedly adding, 'but he was a dry one.'

I expected a scolding, or at least an admonishing, but neither materialized.

'Well then,' my mother replied with a smile, 'let's hope to God it brings the poor man luck, shall we?'

When we got home, however, I accidentally mentioned my encounter with the leper to my father. He went apoplectic.

'You did what?' he bellowed. 'Joyce! Do you know what this stupid little sod has done?'

'Lots of things, I expect,' my mother urbanely replied.

'He allowed a bloody leper to stroke his hair. It's bad enough in the bloody street with the entire bloody population of China, but in a benighted leper colony . . .' His face was red with anger, going towards puce. He put down his pink gin. 'Go into your bedroom and stay there.'

I did as I was told. There were raised voices in the sitting room followed by a slammed door. My father entered my room carrying a red leather slipper.

'Bend over the side of the bed.'

'Why? I haven't done anything wrong.'

I was amazed at my defiance. Always in the past, I had meekly succumbed to a beating, accepting it much as a miscreant dog might a kick or a rolled-up newspaper. Yet now, I thought, I would not. I had not been disobedient or insolent, the usual crimes levelled at me, not always without reason. A paddling now would be an injustice. My father clenched his teeth.