Golden Boy Read online

  After the war, our lives had seemed settled enough. We lived in a semi-detached house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Brentwood, Essex. My mother was a housewife in the outer suburbs of London, my father a daily commuter into London.

  Then, one day, my father came home to announce that he had been posted to Hong Kong, to serve upon a Royal Fleet Auxiliary naval supply ship plying between the British crown colony and the Japanese military dockyard of Sasebo. The Korean War was in full flood and he was, he claimed, to be a part of it.

  A debate followed as to what was to be done with me. My father was all for sending me to boarding school in England: I could spend my holidays with his parents. He and my mother, he pointed out, would only be gone three years. The quality of schooling in Hong Kong was an unknown and he would not have me educated in a school for children of military personnel.

  ‘In with Army children?’ he declared. ‘Out of the question! A rabble of East End brats with snot-besmirched faces and grimy fingernails, the spawn of bloody corporals and squaddies—’

  ‘I’m sure there are local schools,’ my mother said, with no foundation whatsoever for her optimism.

  ‘Full of Chinese,’ my father announced from an equally strong foundation of ignorance.

  ‘Well, I’m not leaving him here,’ my mother pronounced obdurately. ‘He’ll wind up like some poor child in a Kipling story. Parents in the Orient, boy in—’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Joyce! If he’s in England, he’ll be safe. The Far East isn’t Farnham. There are tropical diseases, civil unrest, an inclement climate, native—’

  ‘It’s a British colony, Ken. I’m sure they have hospitals and a police force.’

  ‘All the same, we leave him here. In the long run, it’s for the best.’ My father’s mind was made up. He had clearly worked it all out.

  ‘No, we bloody don’t,’ my mother exploded. ‘I didn’t go through nine months of pregnancy and twelve hours of labour – while you were swanning around in the Mediterranean – to leave the product behind. I had a child – a son – to raise him, foster him, shape him, not foist him off on a gaggle of minor public school masters, half of them as interested in the contents of his underpants as his mind.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, Joyce. The masters at Hilsea …’

  Hilsea College, an insignificant private boys’ school in Portsmouth, was my father’s Alma Mater, from which he had attained little but a basic matriculation and a few certificates for proficiency in Music.

  ‘Hilsea!’ my mother echoed in a voice verging on the falsetto. ‘You can have another think coming! Martin’s going to be with us. It’s a family posting. We’re a family. Fix it!’

  I overheard this conversation through a closed door and missed bits of it but the gist was clear and the outcome decided. I was going too.

  Life aboard ship quickly settled into a routine. It seemed to me that, for many passengers, the voyage was an extended and free holiday, away from the austerity of Britain. Mornings were spent reading in deckchairs, writing letters in the lounge or smoking room, both of which were forbidden to unaccompanied children, or walking briskly in circles round the promenade deck. Some joined in physical exercise classes on the boat deck. At mid-morning, a steward served beef tea in small china cups. According to my mother, it was supposed to give the white man salt and strength. After luncheon, most passengers either took to their cabins or lay supine in deckchairs. A few participated in deck sports, most of which seemed to involve quoits of tough rope that one threw over a net, shuttled across the deck or tossed from hand to hand frisbee-style. One passenger spent much of his time driving golf balls over the side, from what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply.

  As far as I was concerned, the voyage was also a prolonged vacation although, early on, a blot appeared on this landscape of bliss.

  Passengers under the age of twelve were expected to attend school lessons every morning in the ship’s nursery, a room decorated with poorly executed versions of Disney and nursery tale characters, furnished with chairs and desks of Lilliputian dimensions and overseen by a crabby-faced woman in a nanny’s uniform. The content of the instruction offered bore no relation to any syllabus and my mother, after visiting me shoe-horned into a desk, excused me from all future attendance. Thereafter, she taught me geography and history herself for an hour a day at a table in the lounge, her lessons anticipating the next port of call. My father attempted twice to teach me the basics of geometry but his patience expired before half time and he gave up in exasperation.

  The days at sea were euphoric, reading Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome in a deckchair, playing with the children of similarly educationally enlightened parents and painting watercolours of imaginary volcanic desert islands. A sub-tropical sun beat down from a cloudless sky, its heat deceptively cooled by a stiff sea breeze. I quickly acquired a tan with the aid of a noxious-smelling liquid my mother basted me with at every opportunity.

  To amuse the younger passengers, ‘diversions’ were arranged. The chief engineer conducted a trip to the engine room, a cathedral-sized cavern filled with mechanical noise, spinning fly-wheels and governors, polished copper and brass pipes and brackets, heaving piston rods, levers, taps and the vast propeller shafts which incessantly turned whilst being lubricated by a muscular man with a towelling rag tied round his neck, stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat. The air stank with the all-pervading odour of diesel and lubricating oil, which convinced me that whilst a life at sea might have suited my grandfathers, it was definitely not for me.

  Another excursion took us to the bridge, where we feigned interest in engine room telegraphs, radar screens, compasses and assorted nautical navigational aids. We were shown a blip on a green radar screen then given binoculars, identifying it as another P&O vessel heading west. On passing it at a mile, I was chosen to greet it with a blast on the ship’s horn, to which it responded. We were also permitted to steer the ship, keeping her on her bearing with the aid of a large gimbal-mounted compass and the officer of the watch whose hand did not once leave the wheel. This feat accomplished, we were each presented with a certificate to say we had taken the helm of the P&O liner Corfu off the north African coast on such-and-such a date.

  One morning I awoke to find the ship still and alongside a quay seething with activity. A quaint-looking railway engine passed by, its flat trucks laden with baggage. Men in white turbans mingled round the entrance to a warehouse, chivvied into order by a portly man in a bedraggled suit and red fez. Shouting stevedores pushing hand carts steered around each other with considerable alacrity.

  ‘Port Said,’ my mother announced, entering the cabin. ‘Egypt,’ she added, standing under the ceiling blower and towelling her hair. ‘This is where the pharaohs lived. Remember our history lesson?’ I nodded. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘this is where it all happened.’

  After breakfast, four or five elderly Arabs appeared squatting on the promenade deck, each with a lidded basket before him. None of them, it occurred to me, looked as if he might be even distantly related to monarchy. Their loose-fitting robes and turbans were grimy. They were barefoot, the underneath of their feet soiled, cracked and as thick as the soles of military boots. Their toenails were horny and ridged like a tortoise’s shell. As I walked past the first, he reached out, his fingers ruffling the hair behind my ear from which he produced a day-old yellow chick, showing it to me with a grin framed by yellow-stained teeth. The little bird cheeped dejectedly and the man dropped it into his basket. As he performed this magic, he muttered, ‘Gully-gully-gully,’ in a cracked, guttural voice.

  ‘They’re called gully-gully men,’ my mother explained unnecessarily and she put a coin into the man’s open hand. His fingers were calloused, his long, curved fingernails striated like an ancient nag’s hoof. He touched his forehead, secreted the coin in the folds of his clothing and produced a hen’s egg from inside my other ear. I felt his talon of a fingernail scrape against my ear hole.

  My
father decreed we could quite safely go ashore. He had been here during the war, had lost no friends to enemy agents or native collaborators and purportedly knew his way around. A decaying landau with faded cream leather seats, pulled by a gaunt pony with a hang-dog look, took us into the centre of town. Once there, we entered a museum of ancient Egyptian antiquities filled with glass display cases containing faded turquoise faience ushabtis, scarab beetle amulets, wooden and sandstone carved figurines, framed strips of linen and parchment upon which had been written dynastic poetry in hieroglyphs, bead necklaces, pottery oil lamps and bronze jewellery. The difference between this museum and those I had visited in England, however, was that everything here was for sale. Captivated by the ushabtis, I attempted to persuade my mother to buy me one, even desperately arguing that it might help me with my history lessons, but the price was too high and this was not, she told me in hushed tones, an emporium in which one haggled the price down.

  ‘What does haggled mean?’ I asked. My mother’s reply was a severe keep-your-mouth-shut look. I complied.

  Further along the same street we came upon a low, colonnaded building which seemed to be attracting passengers from the Corfu as a picnic did ants. The interior was dark and cool, large wooden and rattan-bladed ceiling fans spinning overhead, blue sparks dancing in their electric motors. This was the Simon Artz department store, almost as famous in Egypt as the Sphinx or the pyramids, alabaster replicas of both of which it sold in a variety of sizes. In addition, one could buy copies of ancient Greek amphorae; grotesque leather poufs decorated with hieroglyphs, high priests and heavy brass studs; camel saddles (labelled as being genooine Bedooine); beaten copper water jugs; wooden boxes inlaid with brass, lapis lazuli or ivory; carved camels, red felt fezes; brass salvers, alabaster ash trays and a working model of a water-raising system called a shadouf which I coveted but was forbidden to purchase by my father in case it harboured woodworm. That said, he purchased an alabaster ash tray. Without his knowing, my mother bought me a small wooden camel supposedly devoid of insect infestation.

  Wherever we went, my father was addressed as effendi, my mother as Mrs Simpson. This I found puzzling in the extreme.

  ‘Effendi is like saying Sir or Mister,’ my mother said when I questioned her.

  ‘But our name’s not Simpson,’ I went on.

  ‘That’s Mrs Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor.’

  ‘Are you related to the Duchess of Windsor?’ I enquired wondrously.

  ‘No!’ my mother replied tersely. ‘She’s a tart.’

  The look on my mother’s face precluded any further discussion of the duchess or her pastries.

  We took lunch in a small hotel overlooking the sea, which my father had frequented during the war. The meal consisted of cubes of nondescript gristle immolated on metal skewers and served on a bed of gummy rice mottled with dark brown objects that might have been unhusked grains, mouse droppings or steamed weevils. My mother ate one piece. I masticated another for the better part of ten minutes before swallowing it with difficulty. My father liberally soused his in Tabasco and ate the full portion. His face went red, his brow broke out in a sweat and he drank a number of glasses of pilsner. This, he declared, was an ideal prophylactic for malaria. (Nevertheless, he periodically suffered from a recurrence of the disease, regardless of this occasional medication, until he was in his late thirties.)

  As he ate, my father embarked upon a tale of his wartime exploits.

  ‘I was having dinner in this very room in 1942 – er 3 … It doesn’t matter – when an Arab approached my table. “Effendi,” he said, “I have some very fine dirty French postcards.” He started to open his jacket.’

  My father started to open his as if he, too, had something to offer.

  ‘Ken …’ my mother remonstrated in vain.

  ‘“I have fifty, effendi. Just one hundred piastres.”’

  My father gave me a salacious wink. His eyes were somewhat glazed as if, in his mind, he was back in early-forties Egypt.

  ‘That’s enough, Ken,’ my mother muttered sternly.

  ‘I bought them,’ my father continued unabashed, his voice now quite loud, having gradually increased in volume through the telling. ‘And do you know what they were? Fifty grubby identical photos of the bloody Eiffel Tower.’ He laughed loudly – a sort of braying sound – and drained his glass of pilsner.

  That evening, the Corfu left the dock to join a line of vessels waiting to sail in convoy through the Suez Canal; the following morning, she started down it. Along the west bank ran a road and a railway line. It seemed bizarre to be travelling on a ship through a desert landscape dotted with low, square houses and palm trees. Moving at only six or seven knots, it was not long before a train overtook the ship, cars and trucks continually passing it on the road. The only form of transport the ship overhauled were donkeys and camels plodding methodically in the merciless, shadowless landscape.

  By late morning, the dry heat was oppressive. My mother insisted I wore a white straw sun hat at all times. As it resembled a cross between a Mexican sombrero and a surrealist’s lampshade, I resisted, yet to no avail. Instead, I contrived to forget it whenever possible, eventually managing to engineer for the detestable thing to blow over the side, only to discover the ship’s shop had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them. At least, I placated myself, it was preferable to the absurdly embarrassing knotted cotton handkerchief my father sported, which made him look like a retired London bus driver on the beach at Margate on a Whitsun bank holiday. It gave him little solar protection. The following day, his face was as pink as a prawn. The day after that, it started to peel so that he looked as if he was sloughing his skin.

  ‘It’s your own silly fault, Ken,’ my mother chastised him as she rubbed calamine lotion on to his forehead, nose and cheeks. The lotion, being coloured faintly pink and drying to the texture of whitewash, did little to alleviate his general over-cooked appearance. ‘I mean, what did you do when you were stationed out here?’

  ‘Work,’ he replied sullenly. ‘I didn’t have time to sunbathe. There was a war on.’

  Despite the blowers being on full blast and the porthole wide open, our cabin on the port side (facing the supposedly cooler east bank) still reverberated with heat like the sides of a blast furnace. Luncheon consisted of a green salad in a bowl immersed in a tray of ice. Even the sliced roast beef was served on plates set in beds of ice. Ice-cream, provided in greased paper cups with a wooden spoon like a miniature canoe paddle, melted in minutes into a thick, warm, vanilla drink.

  My mother spent the afternoon wallowing in the ship’s minuscule swimming pool or lounging in a deckchair, ‘doing a reptile’, as she referred to it. She wore tight, brief shorts and a blouse with flounced sleeves: it was to become her informal norm for the rest of her life in the tropics. Meanwhile, my father pretended he was the officer of the watch. He busied himself with his binoculars, watching out for shipping coming the opposite way through the canal and dhows that looked as if they had recently set sail out of the pages of the child’s illustrated edition of the Old Testament which Granny had given me the previous Christmas. She was a Salvationist.

  Gradually, the Corfu edged by the town of Ismailia and entered the Bitter Lakes. The desert receded and the air cooled slightly. Around dusk, the lights of Port Suez twinkled in the hot night air and, shortly afterwards, we entered the Red Sea which, to my disappointment the following morning, was not in the least red.

  More on-board diversions were planned to stave off boredom. There was a gala and tombola night for the adults and a casino evening. Every day, a sweepstake was held to guess how far the ship had sailed in the previous twenty-four hours. My father addressed this with mathematical precision, filling several sheets of the ship’s notepaper with calculations every day. He did not win once. My mother, by pure guesswork and common nous, won three times, my father taking her success with such bad grace that, at the third win, he sulked and retired to his cabin claiming an upset stomach.
We did not set eyes on him again until the following day when he complained my mother had not visited him in his sick bed.

  ‘No, Ken,’ she replied, ‘I did not. A sick tummy I can fix with chlorodyne but a sick mind’s beyond my reach.’

  This did not improve matters and my father continued to brood for another day, his mood only being broken by an invitation from the captain to drinks that evening with a number of other male passengers in or connected with the Royal Navy. Women were excluded. He returned from this party with his plumage puffed up and his head held high.

  A fancy-dress tea party was thrown for the children. I was dressed by my mother as a pirate in a crepe paper cummerbund, one of her head scarves and an eye-patch borrowed from the ship’s doctor and painted black with a mixture of indian ink and mascara. A cardboard sword was tucked in the cummerbund and I carried an empty whisky bottle. I took home no prizes. First place was awarded to a tubby boy of twelve whose parents had seized their opportunity in Simon Artz. He wore a pair of round sunglasses, a real cummerbund, baggy pantaloons, Egyptian felt slippers and a fez. A long ivory cigarette holder completed his ensemble. He was King Farouk.

  The ocean provided its own diversions. Dolphins cavorted ahead of the bow wave and we were permitted, under the supervision of a parent and a deck officer, to go for’ard to the f’c’sle (as my father would have it) and look down on them. They were sleek and grey, the colour of torpedoes. On occasion, they swam on their sides, the better to look up at us with an almost human eye. Flying fish scudded over the waves, their fins outspread like grotesque, ribbed wings. Occasionally the wind took them and they glided up on to the deck to be spirited away by the Lascars, low-caste Indians who cleaned, painted and polished the ship, who ate them. Off the Horn of Africa, a vast pod of at least fifty whales was sighted, blowing and diving, the huge flukes of their tails rising into the air only to slide under the surface once more.