Gweilo (5 page)

'They'll be rabid!' shouted the umbrella lunger's wife, a plump, middle-aged woman in a sun dress. She turned to my mother. 'I lost my firstborn to rabies at a tin mine up-country from Ipoh.'

My mother hugged me to her bosom in much the same fashion as a female monkey balancing on the window frame clutched its own infant. As she did so, nimble fingers skilfully plucked a handkerchief from her blouse pocket not two inches from my eye and I found myself face-to-face with a big-eared monkey. It bared two rows of yellowed teeth at me and promptly vanished.

Meanwhile, my father was engaged in his own tussle, retaining his binoculars only because, being wartime Royal Navy issue, they were too heavy for the monkey to carry off. Another man was not so lucky and watched as a monkey snatched his Kodak camera and started to rip open the bellows. Throughout this attack, the monkeys uttered not a sound. It was as if they were working with military precision to a set plan requiring no orders.

In less than a minute, the raiding party of hirsute imps retreated into the jungle to be followed by a hail of pebbles hurled inaccurately and far too late by the funicular brake-man. Once in the cover, they chattered and screamed and howled. Victory was theirs and they knew it.

On our way back down the mountain, I caught a brief glimpse of my detested sun hat hanging from a thorny creeper, shredded. There were, I subsequently discovered with ill-disguised glee, none left in the ship's shop.

Whereas the monkeys' ambush had been pure pantomime, our next excursion ashore lacked any potential to degenerate into farce.

In Singapore, our next port of call, we were greeted by a friend of my father's who whisked us off in a large black Cadillac, through Singapore to the causeway crossing to Johor Baharu, where we had to halt at a military checkpoint. Once through it and across the causeway, our host drove at breakneck speed. It was then I noticed, with a certain quiver of excitement, that there was a submachine-gun propped against the front seat between the driver and my father, with a number of spare magazines on the top of the dashboard. Tucked into the crease of the seat was an automatic pistol. At intervals along the road were stationed Bren gun carriers or armoured scout cars with soldiers sitting in them.

After half an hour of driving through serried rows of what I knew from my mother's shipboard lessons were rubber trees, we turned off down a gravelled drive at the gates to which were posted several British soldiers in a sandbagged emplacement. They wore steel helmets covered in camouflage netting stuck through with leafy twigs, the muzzle of a heavy machine-gun protruding through a gap in the sandbags. To one side, a soldier in his shirt-sleeves was boiling a dixie of water over a tiny solid-fuel stove.

I asked why there were so many soldiers. I thought it impolite to enquire why we had a veritable arsenal in the car.

'It's the Emergency,' our host told me.

'What's the Emergency?' I replied.

'It's a war between the British and the Malayan Communist Party,' came the reply.

I wanted to ask why but my father cast me a keep-your-mouth-shut look so I kept quiet.

We had arrived at an extensive bungalow raised on brick piles under a wide tiled roof and surrounded by trim gardens of huge, fan-like travellers' palms, elephant-eared banana trees and what I later discovered were cycads, a plant dating back to the times of the dinosaurs. Thorny bougainvillaea bushes grew supported on bamboo trestles. By the veranda was a virtually leafless tree in full blossom, the exquisite perfume unlike anything I had ever come across. When I asked what it was, my father abruptly told me not to interrupt and our host informed me it was called a frangipani.

The entire garden was surrounded by intermeshing coils of barbed wire. We had a hurried lunch, after which I was permitted to play in the garden – so long as two Chinese men oversaw me – and an equally hurried tea and then we were driven once more at speed back to Singapore and the
Corfu
.

'Why did we have guns in the car?' I asked my mother that night as she brought me my gherkins and crisps.

'We could have been ambushed by terrorists,' she answered matter-of-factly.

At that moment it dawned on me that what I had previously taken to be a safe existence was quite possibly going to be anything but from then on.

The following night, my parents attended a formal end-of-voyage dinner, my mother dressed in a long evening gown, my father in a tuxedo. They cut a dashing couple. If there had been an adults' fancy dress party, he could have gone as a thirties matinee idol or a jazz band leader.

The next day, the steward returned our suitcases from the store and we spent the day packing. I realized all I had to show for my voyage halfway around the world was a collection of multi-coloured cocktail sticks, the small wooden camel and a coconut. My mother persuaded me to abandon the latter which I did with reluctance, but not until the cabin steward had drained the juice from it which I sipped slowly, as if it were ambrosia.

The morning of 2 June dawned overcast. I woke to find the
Corfu
barely vibrating, the sea outside my porthole hardly moving by. I dressed quickly and went up on deck to find my mother standing at the rail. A hundred yards off, a red and white launch bobbed on a low swell, the word
Pilot
emblazoned on its hull. As we watched, it edged alongside the
Corfu's
hull, a rope ladder was flung over the side from one of the gangway ports and a man in a white uniform clambered up it. A short time later, the
Corfu
picked up a little speed and sailed slowly into a channel only two or three hundred yards wide. On the starboard side were scrub-covered mountains descending to a treacherous rock-strewn shore against which a light swell broke. To port were more steep hillsides covered in grass and intersected by several bays containing sandy beaches. The shoreline otherwise consisted of more sharp rocks. On a stubby headland was a small village and some low houses set apart in trees beside, to my astonishment, a golf course. The summits of the mountains were lost in a thick fog. The air was warm and humid.

'That's Hong Kong,' my mother remarked. 'Our home for the next three years.'

My father joined us wearing starched white shorts and a white shirt with long white socks and brown brogues. It was tropical kit for a naval officer save that his shoulders were not adorned by 'scrambled egg', as my father termed gold braid.

'And who are we today, Ken?' my mother enquired amiably.

Ignoring her, my father raised his binoculars to his face and scanned the shore for dangerous rocks and underwater sand bars.

'Which one?' I asked.

'Which one what?' my father replied, lowering his binoculars and peeved by my mother's gentle sarcasm.

'Which one?' I repeated. 'Mummy says this is Hong Kong where we're going to live for three years. Which of the houses is ours?'

'You blithering idiot!' my father responded, yet he typically made no attempt to elucidate.

'No,' my mother said tenderly, 'we aren't living in one of those exact houses. We don't know where our quarters are yet. Just wait and see.'

The
Corfu
steamed slowly to port round a headland lined with warehouses, a shipyard and a large factory complex with the word
Taikoo
painted on its roof.

'What does
Taikoo
mean?' I enquired.

'I have absolutely no earthly idea,' my mother replied. 'Not the foggiest.'

I crossed to the starboard rail. A peninsula of land culminating in some docks, a large cube of a grey stone building and a railway station with an ornate clock tower jutted out towards the ship. Behind them was a city of low buildings. In the distance was an undulating range of mountains, free of mist. One of the summits was, in profile, vaguely like the lions around the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Rejoining my mother at the port rail, I discovered the
Corfu
was moving slowly past a city which extended up the slopes of the mountains close behind. In the centre were two tall buildings and a Royal Naval dockyard, the basin and quays lined with grey-painted warships.

'That's HMS
Tamar
,' my father said.

'Which one?' I asked.

'What do you mean?' my father snapped back.

'Which ship is HMS
Tamar
?'

'None of them. That's the name of the dockyard,' he answered tersely. 'That ship there', he pointed to a grey vessel devoid of armaments, 'is a Royal Fleet Auxiliary. An RFA.' He lowered his voice in case there were any shiv-carrying Communist Chinese spies loitering near us. 'I'll be on one of them. She's called RFA
Fort Charlotte
.'

Aided by nudging tugs, the
Corfu
very gradually eased round to moor alongside a substantial jetty on the western side of the peninsula. Immigration and health officials came on board and we were obliged to congregate in a passenger lounge to go through the disembarkation formalities. These completed, my father met a naval officer dressed as he was in a tropical white uniform but with his rank in black and gold braid epaulettes on his shoulders. He also wore a peaked cap with a white cover on it and the naval anchor and crown badge. Our cabin baggage was collected from our cabins by two naval ratings. Both were Chinese. Neither, to my relief, had his hair in a pigtail: similarly, none of the Chinese stevedores or the men pulling rickshaws along the jetty, laden with baggage, had theirs plaited either.

At exactly noon, as signified by the dull boom of a cannon somewhere across the harbour, we walked down the gangway and into a large, dark blue saloon car with the letters
RN
painted on the side in white.

We had arrived.

THE DRIVE TO OUR LODGINGS, THE SOMEWHAT
ostentatiously named Grand Hotel, took but minutes. My room was on the third floor next to my parents'. It had a narrow balcony on to which I stepped the moment the door was opened, to look down upon a street lined with wrist watch, jewellery, camera, curio and tailors' shops. Directly below me was a rickshaw stand, the coolies who pulled them squatting or lying between the shafts of their scarlet-painted vehicles. Those not asleep smoked short pipes, the sweetly pungent, cloying fumes rising up to tease my nostrils.

Before I could begin to unpack my suitcase, my mother entered. She ran a damp flannel over my face and a wet comb through my hair, then hustled me down to the hotel lobby and out into the dark blue saloon once again.

'BB,' my mother whispered as I got into the car. It was her code for
Best Behaviour
.

'Where are we going?' I murmured.

'Lunch,' my father replied sternly. 'And mind your Ps and Qs.'

The saloon drove through a gateway guarded by two army sentries and pulled up in front of a large, long Nissen hut with very un-military gingham curtains hanging in the windows. Along the walls were prim flowerbeds of low, pendulous scarlet and orange blossomed bushes being watered by a barefoot Chinese man in a conical rattan hat with two watering cans suspended from a bamboo pole balanced over his left shoulder. His hair was not tied in a cue either.

Inside the building was a large dining room with a bar at one end. The tables and chairs were made of rattan, the cushions, tablecloths and napkins matching the curtains. We were joined by the officer who had met us on the
Corfu
. He handed his peaked cap to a Chinese waiter and we sat at a table. Another waiter dressed in loose black trousers, a white jacket fastened with cloth buttons and black felt slippers took our order for drinks. I requested the usual east-of-Gibraltar lemonade, but this was countermanded by the officer who ordered me a brown-coloured drink in a green fluted bottle with a waxed paper straw in it. The glass was running with condensation.

'What is it, sir ?' I enquired, heedful of the Ps and Qs – whatever they were – and my father's previous instruction that I was henceforth to address all men as
sir
unless I knew them very well indeed. Or else . . . That veiled threat implied a succession of brief consecutive meetings between the sole of his slipper or the back of my mother's silver hairbrush and my nether regions.

'It's called Coca Cola. If you don't like it,' the officer replied, 'you don't have to drink it and I'll get you that lemonade.'

He was not to know it but that first day in Hong Kong, he started me on a lifelong addiction as effectively as if he had been peddling dope.

The same thing happened when we came to order our meal. To be on the safe side, I asked for an egg and cress salad. What appeared before me was a salad with, arranged around it, some bizarre, pink, curled objects with long feelers, a battery of legs and black shoe-button eyes. Each of these weird creatures was about four inches long.

'Prawns,' the officer said, leaning across the table to me in a conspiratorial fashion. 'Have you ever eaten crab?'

I nodded, a little overwhelmed at his paying me so much attention, not to mention his forthcoming and amicable manner: to him I was not a child so much as an adult-in-training. My father certainly never treated me in such a fashion.

'These are first cousins to the crab,' the officer went on. 'Much nicer and without the stringy bits and chips of shell.' He picked one up and deftly stripped off its carapace with his thumbnail, dipping it in a ramekin of mayonnaise and holding it out to me. I bit it in half and another addiction was given its first rush. He then showed me how to shell one, rinsed his fingers in a bowl of warm water with a segment of lime floating in it and turned his attention back towards my parents.

At the end of the meal, which was punctuated by steam locomotives periodically hauling trains along a railway track not thirty feet from the Nissen hut, the officer shook my hand.

'A word of advice, my lad,' he said. 'So long as you are in Hong Kong, whenever someone offers you something to eat, accept it. That's being polite. If you don't find it to your fancy, don't have any more. But', he looked me straight in the eye, 'always try it. No matter what. Besides,' he went on, 'Hong Kong is the best place in the world to eat. Promise?'

My mother listened to this counsel with an ill-suppressed look of maternal anxiety but she did not protest: assuming the officer to be superior to my father, she was perhaps afraid to speak out for fear of disregarding naval protocol. I never knew the officer's name, nor ever saw him again, but I was never to break my promise.

As dusk fell, the street below my balcony at the Grand Hotel underwent a remarkable transformation. Drab hoardings and shop signs erupted in numerous shades of neon colour. Peering over the balcony was like looking down on a fairground: even the lights of the circus or the seaside funfair in Southsea could not compare. There, the lighting had been provided by ordinary light bulbs. These were fashioned out of thin neon tubes shaped into Chinese characters, English letters, watches, diamonds, suit jackets, cameras and even animals. Just down the road was a restaurant bearing a red and yellow dragon ten feet high. The illuminated words were strange, too: Rolex, Chan, Leica, Fung, Choi, Tuk . . .

That evening, my parents were invited to a welcoming cocktail party and I was left in the care of the hotel child-minding service, which consisted of a middle-aged Chinese woman with her black oiled hair severely scraped into a tight bun. I was introduced to her by my mother.

'This is Ah Choo,' she said.

I collapsed into paroxysms of laughter which were promptly silenced by a stern maternal grimace.

'Ah Choo is the hotel baby amah,' my mother went on.

'What's an amah?' I enquired to defuse the situation, ignoring the deprecatory implication that I was a baby.

'A female servant,' my mother replied, 'and you'll do exactly as she tells you. Exactly!' She turned to the amah standing in the door. 'Ah Choo, this is my son, Martin.'

'Huwwo, Mahtung,' the amah replied, then, looking at my mother, said, 'You can go, missee, I look-see Mahtung. He good boy for me.'

'Behave yourself,' my father said pointedly as my parents bade me goodnight. 'If I hear from Ah Choo that you've been monkeying about. . .' He left the rest unsaid. I caught a brief vision of a leather slipper.

The first thing Ah Choo attempted to do after my parents had departed was undress me. I had not been undressed before by anyone in my life save my mother and grandmothers and I wasn't going to let this diminutive, alien stranger called Sneeze be the first.

As soon as she unfastened one button and turned to the next, I did the first up again. Finally, unable to undo more than three shirt buttons at a time, she gave up, informing me, 'You bafu w'eddy.' Going out of the room, she left me to disrobe and wash myself.

I gave her a few minutes, wet the bar of foul-scented hotel soap, pulled the bath plug and glanced outside the bathroom. I had expected to find her in my bedroom. She was not there. The door to the corridor was open. Leaving the room, I headed nimbly along it and down the stairs, into the lobby and out on to the street. I knew this excursion came under the 'monkeying about' heading yet I could not resist it. The street called to me as a gold nugget must beckon to a prospector. Until then, my life had been bounded by my parents' small suburban garden, a nearby playing field, an ancient tractor and, more recently, a ship's rail. Now, it was colourfully lit, boundless, unknown, exciting and throbbing with adventurous potential.

No-one paid me any attention. The hotel doorman completely ignored me. Reasoning that I would not get lost if, at every corner, I turned left and would therefore end up where I started, I turned left.

Buzzing with the frisson of an explorer stepping into unmapped territory, I made off down the street. The first shop I stopped at was a jeweller's. In the brightly illuminated window, gold bracelets, necklaces and chains glistened enticingly. Strings of pearls glowed with a matt marbled lustre. A black velvet-lined tray of diamonds sparkled like eyes in a jungle night. Inside the shop stood a sailor, his arm round the waist of a young Chinese woman wearing a very tight dress that shimmered under the shop lights. The sides of the garment were slit from the bottom hem to the top of her thigh. When she moved, almost her entire leg was visible. I had never seen anything like it – the dress or the female limb.

The sailor's uniform was very different from a British naval rating's. It was all white with thin blue edging and insignia, topped off with a pill-box-shaped hat that made me think of Popeye. His sleeves were rolled up tightly to his armpits showing the tattoo of an anchor, a palm tree and the words
San Diego
. As my grandfather had several faded tattoos, these did not surprise me. What did take me aback was that, as I watched him, he slid his hand in one of the slits in the dress and squeezed the young woman's buttocks. She made no sign of complaint and I wondered if this was how one greeted all Chinese women.

I was still contemplating the social manners of the Orient when the shop door opened and the pair came out, the young woman admiring a gold bangle on her wrist.

'Hey, kid!' the sailor addressed me. 'How yah doin'?'

Not quite understanding him, I answered defensively, 'I'm not doing anything, sir.'

'Why you out late time?' the young woman asked. She stroked my hair. Her fingernails were long and painted vermilion. So were her toenails, visible through the ends of her high-heeled sandals.

'Where d'yah live, kid?' asked the sailor. I pointed down the street. 'Well, y' come along now, y' hear? Ain't right for yah to be out so late.'

They took a hand each and walked me back to the Grand Hotel, passing me into the custody of the desk clerk who was given an earful of invective by the young woman. A brief but heated argument ensued at the end of which the hotel doorman arrived. An uncharacteristically burly Chinese, the sailor took a swing at him. It did not meet its intended target. More invective followed before the sailor, holding the young woman's hand, grinned at me and said, 'Stay lucky, kid!' and with that they were gone.

Back in my room, Ah Choo had run another bath. I closed the door, undressed, washed and put on my pyjamas. I had just pulled up the bottoms and was tying a bow in the cord when Ah Choo came in without so much as a brief knock, bending down to gather up my clothing. I seized the moment to test my rudimentary understanding of local etiquette and squeezed one of her buttocks. It was soft and pliable like a semi-deflated balloon.

She stood bolt upright as if a lightning shaft had run along her spine.

Turning sharply to face me, she exclaimed, 'You v'wy lautee boy, Mahtung!' Yet, behind her castigation and indignation there lingered a smile.

She put me to bed, switched on a pedestal fan, lowered the slatted blinds and left. I slid out of bed and went on to the balcony. The rickshaw coolies were sharing a saucepan of rice on top of which was a complete boiled fish – head, fins and all. I watched as they dissected it with their chopsticks, spitting the bones on to the street. Opposite my balcony was a tenement building which housed a workshop over a tailor's establishment. Under the blaze of strip lights, a dozen men deftly cut and sewed suits. Next door, four Chinese men shuffled what looked to me to be cream-coloured dominoes. They rattled loudly on the metal table top as they were mixed up, sounding with a report as they were slammed down. From a window higher than mine, a small boy was peering out through metal bars. I waved to him but he did not respond: instead, he disappeared and I heard him calling out. A shirt on a hanger hung from the bars of another window. In yet another was a dark blue glazed pot holding a single, red lily. The illuminated windows reminded me of an advent calendar except that this was secular and alive.

I climbed into bed. My cotton pyjamas were sticking to me with the heat so I removed them and fell asleep to the staccato rattle of the game tiles, the passing traffic, the occasional raised voice or laugh from the rickshaw coolies and the drone of the fan.

The next morning, I woke with a nagging headache. So did my parents.

Sitting at breakfast in the hotel dining room, my mother remarked, 'I only had two G 'n' Ts last night. I hope we're not all coming down with something.'

'You didn't sleep well, Joyce,' my father observed. 'Tossing and turning.'

'Well,' she answered, 'what with the whine of the fan, the clatter of that infernal mahjong game opposite and the stench of the rickshaw coolies' pipes, is it any wonder? I really don't think, Ken,' she went on, 'we can go on staying here.'

I was not a little dismayed at this turn of events. I wanted to explore more of the streets. Furthermore, Ah Choo had not ratted on me. I wondered why until it dawned on me that to do so would have been to bring her job into jeopardy.

'I like it here,' I chipped in. Then, hoping to justify my statement, added, 'I like the smell of the coolies' pipes.'

For a long moment, my parents looked at each other.

'That does it!' my father agreed. 'We move as soon as we can. Another week here and we'll all be ruddy opium addicts.'