Gweilo Read online

  'What's it called?'

  'The little summit is called Mount Austin and we have Apartment 8, Block A.'

  'That's lucky,' I declared.

  'What do you mean?' my father asked, folding his chamois leather into a wad.

  'Eight's a lucky number,' I said. 'The Chinese think eight brings riches.'

  'He does pick up some drivel,' my father remarked to my mother.

  Yet she winked at me. She was by now well down the hutong to becoming a dedicated sinophile: unbeknownst to my father, she had even enrolled herself in Cantonese classes.

  Life on the Peak had as much in common with that in Kowloon as a bowl of fish soup at a dai pai dong had to a traditional English fried breakfast, with or without salad cream. First, there were no shops except for a small Dairy Farm general store. Second, there were hardly any people about except around an observation point where tourists with cameras mingled with touts trying to sell them packs of photographs of what they were themselves about to photograph. Third, there were no eating places except the Peak Café, a low, red-roofed building that I had spotted as my father halted to change gear on our first visit. Finally, there were very few buildings and those that did exist were either the houses of the rich taipans, secure behind walls topped with barbed wire or broken glass, or apartment buildings.

  From a busy urban existence, I was suddenly catapulted into a pacific rural one, with a gamut of new experiences to undergo and new lessons to be learnt.

  The morning of the move, we arrived at Mount Austin shortly after two dark-blue Bedford lorries with RN painted in white upon the sides. Half a dozen Chinese ratings leapt out, lowered the tailgate and began to carry all our belongings up to Apartment 8. To complement the general-issue furniture provided by the Navy, my parents had purchased a low Chinese coffee table with bow legs, reminiscent of an English bull terrier's, a Chinese dining-room suite and a bar – an essential for my inabstinent father.

  As soon as the unpacking commenced, it was diplomatically suggested that I might like to go outside and play. With whom or at what was not an issue. Hardly believing my good fortune, I left the building and set off down the curving ridge road. At the T-junction I turned right and started to ascend to the summit of the Peak.

  The road was steep and passed a derelict lot where the foundations of a building were laid out in the ground with a few fragments of wall remaining. It was, in effect, a cleared bomb site: I had seen enough of those in Portsmouth to recognize it. Higher up, several rather fine houses stood to the right of the road with magnificent views of the city below. I walked on, my legs beginning to ache. A few hundred yards on there appeared at the side of the road a small stone building not much bigger than my grandfather's garden shed. The door was open and the sound of voices emanated from within. I knocked and looked in. Sitting at a desk was a policeman. Another sat to one side, his chair tilted back. In a corner, a kettle simmered on an electric ring. They nodded a greeting. I expected to be invited in for a bowl of tea. That would have been Mong Kok protocol. I wasn't.

  Beside the police post were some stone steps. I descended them and found myself on a path that, after fifty yards, crossed a small tumbling stream. Tiny fish darted in the sandy-bottomed pools. It seemed amazing that, not three hundred feet from the top of a mountain, there was a flowing stream filled with fish. I stepped over the water by a small stone bridge and walked on. The path was narrow and clung to the not-quite-sheer side of the hill, keeping to more or less the same contour. It was obvious few people came this way, for the undergrowth met over the path and my legs were soon scratched and bleeding. Yet it was worth it. The views were breathtaking. Below me was a pale azure reservoir, Lamma Island across a narrow channel and the South China Sea beyond it. To the west, beyond the next, conical hill, were the distant islands of western Hong Kong and, beyond them, Lan Tau Island, the biggest in the territory. I did not realize quite how high I was until a kite, rising on a thermal, briefly hovered near me. It swivelled its head from side to side with avian wonderment at finding someone so close on the normally deserted mountainside.

  The following morning, I woke to find my room bathed in an eerie, soft light. Getting out of bed, I opened the curtains to discover we were in the clouds. Unlatching the metal-framed window, a warm and invisible dampness drifted in, touching my face as a ghost might. It occurred to me that perhaps I was allowing demons to enter so I closed it quickly.

  At breakfast, my mother announced, 'You're going to go to the Peak School now. It's much too far to go to Kowloon Junior every day. We've an appointment with the headmistress at eleven o'clock.'

  By the time we set off for the school, the sun had burnt off the clouds and we began our walk under a blazing sky. The air, however, was cool, with zephyrs tickling the tall, sparse grass and wild flowers on the bomb site.

  'What building stood there?' I asked my mother as we passed it.

  'I don't know,' she said, 'but you'll find ruins here and there on the Peak, of buildings destroyed by the Japanese in the war.'

  The Peak School was about twenty minutes' walk away on Plunkett's Road, but to get there meant descending the very steep hill to the café. My mother, wearing a smart cotton print dress and high-heeled shoes, attempted the descent, stopped after a few yards, removed her shoes and continued barefoot. We arrived at the school hot and harried. The headmistress showed us into her office, a few formalities were undergone, I was taken to a classroom and obliged to stand in front of my future classmates, declare my name and then sit down at a desk next to another gweilo with pre-pubescent acne and breath that smelt as if he had breakfasted on hundred-year-old eggs. It did not bode well.

  The pupils were predominantly British with a few Chinese, Americans and others of European extraction. Many of them seemed particularly distant and snooty. I preferred to keep myself to myself, get on with my work, read in break times and head for the door at the first chime of the bell. I ate my lunch on my own, rebuffed most approaches of friendship and worried my form teacher. As a consequence, when the school play was being cast, I was auditioned under duress and given a lead part, perhaps to bring me out of my shell. The play was Toad of Toad Hall. I was Mole.

  The part was not too demanding. I learnt my lines with ease and only regretted being involved because it meant staying behind after school each day for over a month, rehearsing.

  Only one memorable facet of my thespian adventure remains – the costume.

  Each parent was asked to provide their child's outfit. My mother, not being adept with a needle and thread, asked Ah Shun if she could make it, but she admitted it was beyond her, too. My mother summoned her tailor.

  Mr Chuk was a soft-spoken, elderly Chinese gentleman who came on occasion to the apartment to measure my mother. When this was done, the two of them would sit and drink bowls of jasmine tea whilst she went through his pattern books and material samples. He could make a midnight blue silk cocktail dress in five days, a lady's two-piece suit in seven. A mole costume was another matter.

  I was taken into my parents' bedroom, stripped to my underpants and measured. My mother – no artist, she – then poured the tea and produced her drawing of a mole. The tailor studied it and shrugged.

  'I no look-see dis an'm'l,' he said. 'Maybe dis no an'm'l China-side.'

  'Maybe they've eaten them all,' my mother said to me as an aside.

  She tried sketching it again. The result looked like a tailless, earless, eyeless rat with copious whiskers and exaggeratedly large front feet.

  'He no can look-see?' the tailor enquired, noticing the sketch had no eyes.

  'He no can look-see,' my mother confirmed. 'Live underground.'

  'Loh siu liff unner groun'. Can see plentee good,' the tailor responded.

  'This is not loh sin,' my mother said, exasperation creeping into her voice. 'It is not a rat. It is a mole.'

  The tailor cupped his ear. 'He no can . . . ?'

  'Yes,' my mother declared firmly. 'Can hear very good.' She was
getting fed up with discussing the physical disabilities of a mole. 'You can make?'

  'Can do,' came the optimistic reply.

  It was deemed I did not require a fitting and so, two days before opening night, the tailor arrived at the apartment carrying a bundle containing a dark chocolate-brown, one-piece cross between a parachutist's jump-suit and a Glaswegian shipbuilder's boiler suit. I tried it on. It was as loose-fitting as a maternity smock and just as shapeless. My mother stifled a laugh, which was not a good sign.

  The tailor had sewn whiskers (made of thin bamboo strips taken from a broom) on the top of the head. My face peered out through the mouth which was lined by white cloth teeth, serrated like a dragon's. What was more, the tailor had clearly taken pity on the mole's disabilities and given it two shiny glass eyes and a pair of cat-like ears. My mother paid the bill. On opening night, Rat (grey hairy costume, tail, beady eyes, bowler hat, waistcoat), Toad (grey-green painted mottled rubber attire made from a frogman's wet suit, a pair of cut-down plus fours and a deerstalker), Badger (tweed jacket and cut-down tartan golfing trousers with a realistic black-and-white papier mâché head) appeared on stage alongside a mutant creature of indeterminate species and origin which, not wearing any human clothing, was, presumably, naked. At curtain call, I received resounding applause and was asked to step forward for an extra bow. It was not, I was certain, due to my acting abilities.

  Once a month, a cylindrical package arrived for me by sea mail. It was rolled up tightly, wrapped in brown paper and had twine tied round it and running through the middle. It had been mailed by my grandfather. When the string was cut, the rolled-up contents opened out to show the previous month's issues of the Eagle, Dandy and Beano. Tucked somewhere in them would always be a ten-shilling postal order. Unrolling the comics, I envisaged Grampy walking to the newsagent's once a week, an aroma of tobacco following him down the street like an invisible shadow, buying the comics, keeping them safe in the cupboard under the stairs that smelt of ale and stale bread, then once a month making his way to the Post Office. This was, to me, the height of love and I promptly wrote back by blue air mail lettergram to thank him and give him my news.

  I held no information back from him, telling him of all my escapades, even into Kowloon Walled City, in the sure and certain knowledge he would not report them to my grandmother and, through her, to my father. She could not be trusted with a pod full of peas. Not once did he betray my confidence and he always replied, although my questions were not always answered. He did not tell me what jig-a-jig meant so I assumed he did not know.

  My grandfather was not alone in sending parcels. The comics were certainly unobtainable in Hong Kong, but almost everything else was: in England, food, clothing, petrol and much more were in short supply and had been since the war. Some items were still on ration. An elderly maiden aunt called Olive assumed, despite many letters to the contrary, that we not only lived under rationing but also in pretty primitive conditions. Every two months for our first year in Hong Kong, a 'care' parcel arrived from her containing cotton handkerchiefs, soap, aspirin, adhesive and crepe bandages, safety pins, Dettol, Reckitts' Blue laundry starch, thick woollen socks for my father, a lipstick for my mother and a Dinky toy car for me. She fell short of sending toilet rolls, presumably assuming we had plants with leaves large and soft enough for the job. (We had.) Eventually, my mother made up a parcel for Olive containing intricately embroidered napkin sets, silk handkerchiefs, brocade cushion covers, a cotton blouse, a tourist book of the sights of Hong Kong, a hand-painted lacquer dragon, a set of chopsticks (with instructions for use), a packet of jasmine tea (also with instructions) and a small jar of Tiger Balm ointment, the ubiquitous Chinese cure-all containing tiny quantities of opium and morphine which could fix, my mother claimed, anything from a wart to an unwanted pregnancy. Parcels from Olive ceased forthwith.

  All expatriates referred to the country of their origin as 'home'. Even the old China Hands, those who had lived 'in-country' since the 1920s, did so. At first, my mother followed suit. However, by the winter of 1953, her outlook had subtly changed. She started to write to her mother that she wanted to remain in Hong Kong after my father's three-year-long tour of duty ended. In addition to learning Cantonese, she attended classes in Chinese history and culture, sought employment first on the local English-language radio station and then as a secondary school teacher of English and geography in a Chinese school, both without success. Her problem was that she lacked a formal higher education, yet she more than made up for it in intelligence and intellectual curiosity.

  Of the old China Hands, I was to come to know two.

  The first was a friend of my mother's, an English woman called Peggy who had married a Dutchman in the 1930s. When war broke out in 1939, her husband may have returned to Holland to fight for his homeland but he may have also stayed in Hong Kong and been killed when the Japanese invaded in 1941. Certainly, Peggy was rounded up and thrown into the civilian camp, the prewar high-security prison at Stanley. I think they had no children: whenever I met her, she spoiled me rotten. As every colonial housewife did, she employed servants. In her case, she had a traditional saw hei amah.

  This amah was one of those who had risked her life over and over again smuggling food and Chinese herbal medicines into the camp for her missee. Indubitably, her clandestine activities saved Peggy's life and probably those of several of her fellow prisoners-of-war. After the Japanese surrender, Peggy remained in Hong Kong and the amah returned to work for her but now they had a different relationship. Both of approximately the same age, they were no longer missee and amah but two spinsters living together and looking out for each other. Peggy obtained employment with the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and, in time, rose through its ranks to a position of authority and responsibility. The amah kept home for both of them in a small flat on Robinson Road which they shared with at least two dozen rescued stray cats that Peggy loved with almost religious intensity. She and the amah were to die in their late seventies within days of each other.

  The other China Hand, whom I came to both like and loathe, was Sammy Shields. As a man, I adored him, but he was also my dentist.

  His surgery was in Star House, a two-storey building facing the Kowloon Star Ferry pier across the bus terminal. In actual fact, Sammy was not a qualified dentist. Before the war, he had been a dental technician, making and fitting dentures or braces. When he, too, was incarcerated in Stanley, it was found that he was the only person in the camp with any real dental know-how, so he became the camp dentist by default. After the war, with a large number of patients on his books – most of them ex-civilian prisoners-of-war – he set up in practice, his reputation growing, as it were, by word of mouth.

  I visited his surgery with mixed feelings. The whine of his belt-driven drill could be heard in his tiny waiting room and was sure to send shivers of apprehension up the spine of the bravest man. His dentist's chair, the cantilevered arm of his drill and every other metal fitting were covered in cream enamel, chipped in places. It looked as if he had bought it second-hand, which was probably the case. It was certainly of pre-war vintage.

  Sammy had a special technique with small boys such as myself, whose mothers he refused to allow into his chamber of tortures. Whenever my mother left the room, I felt suddenly terrified, but Sammy would soon put me at my ease . . .

  'Right now, open wide. Ah! Let's see . . . a bit of plaque here . . . we'll chip that off in a tick . . . Good . . . wash out . . . Open wide again . . . a filling needed here, I'm afraid . . . just a little prick for the cocaine . . .' ('Aarrhh! Ah hurhs!') 'All done . . . wait for it to put your jaw to sleep . . . Did I ever tell you about my time as a guest of his Imperial Japanese Majesty?'

  From then on, the sound of his drill and the abrupt jab of pain as he hit the nerve were mere momentary interruptions in a narrative of roasting rats on shovels over a fire of dried cow dung collected on Stanley beach, of boiling barnacles and steaming giant snails which had to be purged first in
case they had been feeding on poisonous plants, of face-slappings and rifle buttings, of outbreaks of diphtheria, of men dying of disease or being shot on the beach, of removing fellow prisoners' molars without any anaesthetics, of the Americans' bombing of two prison buildings, killing the occupants.

  'Bloody fools, Americans,' Sammy would appendix this story. 'What I'd give for one of those pilots sitting where you are now . . .'

  I heard these stories every six months. They never lost their potency and never failed to take the edge off what I was undergoing. It was, I thought, nothing compared to what he must have endured for four years.

  A fortnight before my ninth birthday, Wong asked me, 'What you likee you burfday cake, young master?'

  'A cake,' I replied, puzzled by the enquiry, 'with nine candles.'

  'What shape you likee?'

  My consternation multiplied. As far as I was concerned, cakes were round and that was an end to it.

  'Maybe you likee house?' he suggested, seeing my bewilderment. 'Likee tempul? Wong can do tempul good for you.'

  Without really thinking about it, I answered, 'I'd like a battleship.'

  Several days later, I went to the kitchen to find my way barred. The swing door had had a wooden wedge jammed under it.

  'You lo can come kitchen-side now,' Wong declared with an authority I had not previously seen in him. 'You wantee somef'ing, makee bell.'

  'I only want a Coke,' I said, conscious of my parents' orders that I did not ring the servants' bell for petty demands.

  He took one out of the fridge, opened it and handed it to me through a crack in the door, adding, 'Two week, you lo go kitchen-side. You go, Wong v'wy ang'wee.'

  I complained to my mother. Her reply was that I was to obey Wong.

  On my birthday, which fell on the second day of the new academic year, I arrived home in eager anticipation as it had been decided that I should not receive my presents until teatime. I burst into the apartment to be confronted by my mother.