Golden Boy Page 12

  As all this went on, a low-toned bell sounded, striking once every time a worshipper made a donation of real money to the idol. The temple staff hurried between the devotees, removing the burnt-out joss-stick and candle splints, pushing aside the last round of offerings, the food by now inedible as a result of the cascade of ash falling from the incense coils. One man replaced candles on the altar, two others trimmed wicks and cursorily removed ash from the effigy with a duster made of ginger cockerel’s feathers fixed to a long bamboo cane.

  Pushing through the crowd of worshippers, I purchased a fifty-cent pack of joss-sticks from an elderly man by the door, lit them all from a candle and stuck them in the urn full of sand provided. It was not that I was a devotee of Kwun Yum but that I was bent on doing what everyone else present was – hedging their bets for the coming twelvemonth by getting on the good side of the gods.

  The general stores in Soares Avenue opened on a self-agreed rota throughout the first five days of the festivities. There was a purpose to this: not only did they open for the convenience of their customers but also to collect debts and settle tabs unaddressed before the new moon. By the time the new year started in earnest, all outstanding debts should have been paid. The day before the holiday commenced, Ching and I went into one of the shops to buy a packet of wah mui. The shopkeeper and his family were standing before a shrine positioned in a scarlet-painted box at the rear of their shop. I watched for a while in silence.

  ‘What are they doing?’ I whispered to Ching.

  ‘This is the shrine of the kitchen god,’ he explained.

  The family kow-towed several times to the shrine then the shopkeeper’s wife smeared the god’s face with something in a bowl.

  ‘What is that?’ I murmured.

  ‘Sweet food,’ Ching replied. ‘Soon, the kitchen god will go to heaven and tell the Jade Emperor if this has been a good family for a year. To make sure he says good words, they give him rice and honey. Make him talk sweet.’

  This done, the shopkeeper tore out from the shrine the picture of the god, printed on red paper and faded over the year. He then took it outside on to the pavement and set light to it.

  ‘Now the god goes to heaven,’ Ching said.

  This act smacked to me of writing a wish list to Father Christmas, whose non-existence I no longer questioned, and sending it up the chimney, but I kept my thoughts to myself. When the ashes had drifted down the street to mingle with the firecracker confetti, a new picture was pasted into the shrine and the shopkeeper stepped back behind his counter.

  The lighting of firecrackers was not restricted to Chinese New Year. Whenever a new shop or business opened, the front of the building was decorated with bamboo scaffolding covered in paper flowers and characters propitiating good fortune. Long strings of firecrackers suspended from roof to pavement would be lit, the street soon filling with choking smoke and the continuous cacophony of explosions. If the building was over five storeys high, they could last an hour.

  At only one event were firecrackers not let off – funerals.

  When I saw my first Chinese funeral procession, I thought the circus had come to town. The initial indications of the approaching funeral procession were the muted sounds of inharmonious music. I went out on to the communal balcony of the hotel to watch.

  Soon, a small truck appeared further down Waterloo Road. A large bamboo frame had been fixed to the front of the truck and adorned with paper flowers, gold and scarlet bunting and, I presumed, the name of the departed in huge characters. In the centre of this was a large monochrome photograph of the deceased. This vehicle was followed by a two-hundred-yard procession containing delivery tricycles similarly decorated. Interspersed between these were men carrying tall poles topped by Chinese fringed umbrellas, a large paper orb with a ladder rising through it and a number of other incomprehensible ceremonial items. At the rear of this came the coffin. I had expected a hearse but it was in fact carried in a sort of palanquin between eight perspiring coolies. The sides were decorated with white and yellow flowers. The coffin itself was highly polished and of a curious shape, in section rather like a four-leafed clover. To the rear of the coffin walked the relatives of the deceased, the foremost being a small boy of about my age wearing a white cloak. Every so often, he wiped his eyes and nose on the sleeve of his coat.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked a room boy standing beside me.

  ‘He dead man son. Now he Number One man for him family. Big job for him.’

  The other primary mourners also wore white cloaks whilst everyone else was soberly dressed, with the men sporting black arm bands. It was all most dignified – except for the music.

  Just behind the leading truck walked a small classical Chinese band of about eight musicians. They wore white bandsmen’s uniforms with peaked caps and looked like a rather run-down English seaside town band. The music they played was doleful, the woodwind instruments high-pitched and keening, the small gong cracked and discordant. Not far behind them came a band equipped with Western brass instruments. They played ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ – badly. Three other bands in the procession played ‘Doin’ What Comes Naturally’ (from Annie, Get Your Gun, a recent cinema hit), ‘Greensleeves’ and finally, on the correct instruments, Chinese classical music once again. Each band played in apparent ignorance of the others so the whole musical contribution to the event was a raucous medley of disconnected tunes from three cultures.

  My mother, who watched this procession with me, remarked that she preferred firecrackers to the assassination of music but she had by then forgotten the five-day migraine that marked Chinese New Year.

  My father returned for good from Japan in the early summer of 1953. The Korean War was winding down, truce talks had been held and his job at the Sasebo naval base near Nagasaki was becoming redundant.

  Immediately after my father’s return, moves were put underway for us to leave the Fourseas. It was deemed an unsuitable billet for a family. There was, however, a shortage of quarters due to the pull-back from Japan, so we were tabled to move temporarily into a flat on the top floor of a building in Boundary Street, pending a more suitable quarter falling vacant.

  Although less than a mile or two from the Fourseas, I was, at first, reluctant to go. I had many friends and acquaintances amongst the hotel room boys and in the streets of Mong Kok, with which I was as familiar as a rickshaw coolie or a pedlar. It would seem strange living in a self-contained home once again, without them around.

  As the name implied, Boundary Street marked the periphery between British Kowloon and the hinterland of the New Territories, ceded to the British for ninety-nine years from 1898. As our flat was on the northern side of the street, this worried me. We were being housed in a no man’s land that was only provisionally British. For several weeks, I had nightmares of being overrun in my sleep by Communist Chinese troops, bayoneted in my bed or sent to a slave labour camp, nevermore to see my mother.

  In spite of my misgivings, I was beginning to feel excited by the impending move. It meant new horizons, new challenges and, more importantly, a new area to explore. Yet, two weeks before the move, the most dramatic event of the months I lived in the Fourseas occurred on Ho Man Tin hill.

  Late one afternoon, I was walking back from school alone when I saw a thin wisp of smoke rising from over the hill. I gave it no thought and trudged on down Waterloo Road. As I reached the hotel, I saw the wisp was now a column. People were running down the track by the school and spilling out on to the main road, blocking the traffic. In a few minutes, the smoke was denser, rising faster with sparks glimmering in it, despite the sunlight. Then I heard the far-off bells of fire engines.

  I ran into the hotel garage, dumped my Hong Kong basket and headed for the hill. Hordes of squatters were pouring off it, every one carrying something. Even toddlers, one hand held by their mother, clumsily dragged a cooking pot or enamel basin. Adults laden with bedding – men with complete beds – struggled down the track, slipping on the loo
se gravel. Laden rickshaws wove between them. The exodus was orderly but noisy. Everyone was shouting.

  The police and the fire brigade turned up simultaneously. In minutes, hoses were snaking up the track and the police had instigated a cordon to prevent squatters returning to the fire to rescue more belongings. This, however, was soon considered futile so they took to directing the flow of people and getting the traffic moving again.

  I hurried to the bottom of the track. The smoke was by now hundreds of feet high but, the squatter area being over a ridge, I could not see the seat of the blaze. Consequently, I joined the throng of people returning to save their belongings.

  Cresting the ridge, I was so shocked by the scene before me I just stood still in stunned wonderment. In my naïvety, I had assumed a squatter shack had caught fire and those running away with their belongings were simply being cautious. What lay before me was an inferno. At least half the squatters’ shacks had been reduced to piles of smouldering ashes with, here and there, uprights burning brightly. The conflagration was moving through the area like a forest fire through a plantation of pines. The noise was terrifying, with tin sheeting cracking as it warped, explosions caused by tinned food and the incessant hiss and spit of burning wood accompanied by the crash of shacks caving in. A strong wind blew towards the fire, sucking in paper and scraps of cloth, feeding it with oxygen and peppering my legs with fine gravel. As the fire progressed, it instantly ignited whole shacks at a time. One moment, a flimsy building looked intact, the next it was alight. Before my eyes a shanty exploded as if an artillery shell had hit it. A fountain of flame rose from it only to die in the rising smoke.

  Ahead of the fire, people were running in and out of their shacks, piling their belongings on the ground, on handcarts, on their children. I circumnavigated the blaze, upon which the fire brigade were preparing to play their hoses, and started to gather up armfuls of clothing from a pile, folding them in on themselves to make a tight bundle. A young Chinese man ran out of a shack to accost me, stopped and went back in. I tumbled the rest of the pile into a sheet, tying the corners together, using them to pad out some rice bowls and other crockery. The young man appeared and added a framed sepia photo to the bundle. It showed a family group seated on upright chairs. In the centre sat an ancient woman with a baby on her knee, her feet tiny where they projected from under an old-fashioned long gown.

  I waited. The fire was moving nearer, and quickly. I could feel its intensity on my bare arms and legs. My eyes began to weep from the heat and smoke.

  ‘Wei!’ I shouted. ‘Ché! Ché! Fide! Fide!’ (Hey! Go! Go! Quick! Quick!)

  My pronunciation and the grammatical accuracy of this dog-Cantonese were doubtless atrocious but more than sufficient. The man came out of the shack followed by a woman carrying a babe-in-arms. He was laden down with a very battered suitcase and a wooden box. I gathered up the pile of linen and crockery and, hugging it to my chest, started down the track. I could not see my feet and frequently stumbled. Once, I fell, but my burden broke my fall. In a crowd of others, I reached the police line and was allowed through by an English inspector.

  ‘Got a squatter hut, have we?’ he enquired with a wry smile.

  ‘I’m just helping,’ I answered.

  He looked at me for a moment and said, ‘Where do you live, son?’

  ‘Down the road, sir,’ I replied, jutting my chin in the direction of the Fourseas and hoping my politeness would deflect the ticking off likely to be coming next.

  ‘Well done, son,’ he said and he patted my head. ‘Go up that road over there.’ He indicated Soares Avenue which, closed to traffic, was now a sort of squatter holding pen.

  Once there, the young man gave his name to an official and we were guided into Emma Avenue where the pavements were filling up with groups of squatters. They sat chattering and tidying their belongings. To my astonishment, no-one was looking miserable or crying or showing any real sign of distress.

  There was a touch on my head. It was the young man.

  ‘You luckee boy for me,’ he said in pidgin English. ‘T’ankee you plentee plentee.’

  ‘Martin,’ another voice remonstrated, ‘you’re filthy.’

  My mother stood before me, arms akimbo. I put the pile of clothes and bedding down at my feet and studied myself. My legs and arms were covered in ash: no doubt my face and hair were, too.

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Dis you littul boy?’ the young man asked my mother. ‘He plentee good littul boy. Plentee good for me. You no beatee, missee. No beatee.’

  At this point, it came to my mother what I had done. She hugged me, ash and all. The young man touched my hair again, either for luck or in gratitude. His wife did likewise. I was sent in for a bath and my mother offered her assistance to a Red Cross worker.

  Lying in the warm water smelling of my mother’s perfumed salts, I realized just how fragile life was, that everything one counted upon could come crashing down in less than the time it took for a double maths class. I also learnt that whilst it was one thing to live in a large box, a shack, a cockloft or between the shafts of a rickshaw, it was quite another to lose everything.

  6

  DENS, DUCKS AND DIVES

  133 BOUNDARY STREET HAD BEEN BUILT IN THE 1920S AS A BIJOU residence on the edge of the countryside. By the time we moved in, it had gone down in the world. The exterior stonework was blotched with dead lichen and algae, the kitchen was dark and dank, the servants’ quarters smelt of mould and the flat roof leaked into the bathroom. The city had reached out to it and the countryside was no more, although the barren foothills of the Kowloon hills did come down to within a hundred yards of the garden of the ground-floor flat.

  Moving to a flat necessitated my mother employing more servants. As it was usual to employ a husband and wife wherever possible, the wash amah who had replaced Ah Fong was let go. She was genuinely sad at leaving us but my mother secured her a good job with an Army major and his wife who preferred to do her own cooking so only required an amah. That they had a blond-haired daughter no doubt helped to sweeten the bitterness of parting.

  After an in-depth culinary interview, my mother took on Wong and his wife, Ah Shun. With them came their four-year-old son, Chan-tuk, to whom my mother took an instant liking and nicknamed Tuppence.

  So far as we knew, Wong – whose references gave his name as Hwong Cheng-kwee – was a Shanghainese who, like so many others, was a refugee from Communism. He and Ah Shun had several other children whom they lodged in the New Territories or had had to leave with relatives in China. A tall, round-faced man, Wong had apparently worked in a top-class hotel in Shanghai as a pastry chef. At least, that was what one of his well-thumbed references stated. My mother gave him a month’s probation. This ended after a day when he made his first sponge cake. It did not so much sit on the plate as float over it. We had never tasted anything like it. He had a permanent job from my mother’s first mouthful. Ah Shun became the wash and sew-sew amah and the two of them shared the chores of keeping house.

  To say that Wong was a one-in-a-thousand cook-houseboy was not to be guilty of hyperbole. He was utterly superb, with the attentiveness of a high-class butler, the culinary skills if not of Escoffier then certainly of his sous chef, the attention to detail of a water-colourist and the mien of a true gentleman’s gentleman. He and Ah Shun wore the customary sam fu white jacket and black, loose-fitting trousers with felt slippers, in which they glided across parquet floors they had so highly polished you could see the reflection of the windows in them. They also served at table, which at first I found most peculiar. I had been served in restaurants, on the Corfu and the like, but in our own home … It was like being a member of the aristocracy.

  There were some teething problems. Ah Shun starched my father’s white shorts which he wore to the office. The hems chafed his legs raw. Thereafter, she artfully starched only the crease. When the monthly provisions bill came, my mother found Wong had used six dozen eggs, which ac
counted for the levitatory sponges. My mother asked him to cut down: then she saw he had used nine bottles of Heinz Salad Cream. As Wong did all the basic shopping, only discussing the matter of provisions or menus with my mother if she were holding a drinks or dinner party, this wanton purchase of salad cream seemed not only extravagant but suspicious. Wong was called into my mother’s presence. It was not long before I was summoned too.

  ‘What is this?’ my mother muttered, glowering at me as she held out the invoice.

  I was inclined to tell her it was the bill, but kept my peace.

  ‘This!’ she repeated, indicating an item on the bill. ‘And this. And this. Wong tells me this is your doing.’

  I had no idea why she was cross but I admitted I ate salad cream.

  ‘Eat it!’ my mother replied. ‘Wong tells me you put it on your bloody breakfast!’

  Every morning, I ate breakfast alone, after my father had departed for work in HMS Tamar and whilst my mother was still preening herself for a hard day at the canasta table. Wong always provided a fried egg on crisp fried bread, a fried tomato and stiff rashers of brittle, grilled bacon. I ate the bacon first with my fingers then waded into the remainder which I smothered with salad cream. How I first discovered this curious amalgam of tastes I do not know, but I loved it. Indeed, I could go through a bottle in three days, especially if I asked Wong for salad cream instead of Marmite and lettuce sandwiches to take to school. My father being at the office, I was not punished for my abnormal gourmandizing but that avenue of pleasure was promptly closed.

  Wong was paid $300 (approximately £19) a month plus an allowance of $75 for food. He lived with Ah Shun and Tuppence in the servants’ quarters beyond the kitchen: a closed-in balcony and laundry sink, two small bedrooms equipped with cast-iron bunks and a shower room with a squat-down toilet which my father referred to (in what he claimed to be submariners’ slang) as the shit-shave-shower-shampoo-and-shoeshine. Wong and his family used our kitchen to prepare their food but they ate it squatting on the balcony until my mother found out. Thereafter, they ate at the kitchen table.