Gweilo Read online

  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. Icecream, 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.

  Every evening, I lay in my bunk watching the sea speed by and reading or pondering what lay ahead of me. At least I knew the pigtail was unlikely, for my mother had insisted I had a haircut from the ship's barber soon after departing Algiers. But for the rest,
I could only let my imagination wander. My father refused point blank to discuss anything about his job, claiming it was top secret. I considered the chances of him being a spy and asked my mother one night as I got ready for bed if this was his role in the Navy.

  'A spy!' she retorted. 'In the Navy? What gave you that idea?'

  'Daddy said his job was secret.'

  'Your father could no more be a spy than I could be a spanner,' she replied, always keen to find an alliterative metaphor. 'He's a Deputy Naval Stores Officer. A naval grocer! It's his job to see ships get fresh supplies of lettuces and eggs. Secret!' She laughed. 'I'm sure the Commies're not interested in how many tins of sardines HMS Ark Royal is carrying.'

  At seven o'clock – or nineteen hundred hours, as my father preferred – my mother, having seen me into my bunk, would join my father on deck for cocktails and dinner. Although, once in the tropics, the formal evening dress code for the dining room was waived unless there was a dinner dance or the like being held, my father insisted on wearing a lounge suit when all that was demanded was a tie. This greatly embarrassed my mother and, one afternoon between Aden and Bombay, it created an argument conducted sotto voce in my cabin. I only heard a part of it, eavesdropping at the door.

  '. . . but it's unnecessary, Ken,' I heard my mother say insistently. 'You stand out like . . . like . . . like a daffodil in a daisy field.'

  'Just because the mercury touches eighty, Joyce, it doesn't mean we have to abandon all our bloody standards.'

  There was a pause.

  'You know what they call you, don't you?' She did not wait for a response. 'Commodore Blimp.'

  'I don't give a bloody damn,' my father answered, yet I could tell his anger had been goaded.

  'And that knotted hankie. I mean! That's setting a standard? You'll be rolling your trouser legs up next. You could at least buy a panama in the shop.'

  'I'll wear what I bloody like, when I bloody like, where I bloody like. It's a free bloody country, thanks to the likes of me.'

  'Here we go,' I heard my mother say with an air of well-tried boredom. 'Tell me, Ken, I forget: which submarine did you serve on? Which Atlantic convoy did you escort? Which landing craft did you command on D-Day?' She fell silent for a moment. 'None. And whose father was imprisoned for three years in Germany after his ship went down under him at the Battle of Jutland? Mine. And whose mother snubs mine because her husband was only a Chief Petty Officer? And you talk of standards. Double standards in your case, Ken. Double standards.'

  There followed a brief scuffling at the end of which there was a loud bang as my father slammed his hand on the wardrobe door. I later saw the dent his signet ring had made in the veneer.

  'Don't you ever speak like that to me again, Joyce, or . . .

  'Or? Or what, Ken? A divorce? My! That would look good on your record sheet, wouldn't it? A real blot rather than a splat of ink. Set tongues wagging in the wardroom. And what about Martin?'

  'What about him ?' my father answered.

  It was then I decided to make myself scarce and scurried away down the corridor. An hour later, my father appeared on the deck wearing a straw panama hat with a dark blue band.

  Shortly before eight o'clock every evening, and the sounding of the chimes for dinner, my mother would return to the cabin with two silver-plated bowls. One contained salted potato crisps, the other small, pickled gherkins speared by variously coloured satinized aluminium cocktail sticks shaped like arrows and bearing the ship's name. I had never come across either delicacy in England and saw them as harbingers of a new and wondrously strange life to come.

  My mother detested Bombay. The streets were dirty, the beggars persistent and frequently mutilated, either by accident, design or disease. Like the beggars, the buildings were in various states of decrepitude. Even the monkeys in the public gardens were a ragged, flea-ridden lot. The liberty with which cattle wandered about, dunging where they chose, also disturbed her, not because they left steaming piles behind them but because no-one bothered to clean it up.

  'It would not have happened before independence,' my father declared in hushed tones, perhaps in case the Algerian assassin had a cousin who had migrated eastwards. 'Standards were maintained.'

  I asked what cows were doing wandering in the city and sitting in the middle of the road. In my experience, they lived in fields, slept in barns and ate grass.

  'They're considered holy,' my mother said. 'People here worship them.'

  This struck me as too bizarre to be true. She had to be pulling my leg. Yet, with each port of call, I was realizing the world was not as I had previously anticipated it.

  'What about the elephants?' I enquired, having seen several walking sedately down a wide street, their mahouts balanced cross-legged on their necks and armed with a vicious-looking iron spike with which they intermittently jabbed their mount behind its ears. 'They mess in the road, too.'

  'That, too, is disgusting, but in India,' she went on, 'elephants are beasts of burden. Like Nanny's milkman's horse.'

  By my mother's reasoning mind, this somehow allowed the elephants their defecatory habits and expunged them of all lavatorial responsibility.

  'Doesn't anyone grow roses in India?' I asked.

  'What?' my father, who had not been following the conversation, responded sharply.

  'Nanny puts the milkman's horse dung on her roses.'

  My parents exchanged glances and we crossed the road. A passing car ran through a particularly fresh and fluid cow pat which spattered my father's shoes and indelibly stained his socks.

  Later, I was shown – from a discreet distance – the Parsee death tower. My father explained to me that the Parsees did not bury their dead but left them for the vultures to eat. No sooner had I been told this than a flurry of plump crows took to the wing from the tower, several of them trailing ribbons of flesh from their beaks. They flew into a nearby park to squabble over their bounty, tugging it between them. One of them tossed a finger into the air for another to catch and fly off with, cawing jubilantly. Meanwhile, the vultures with their vulgar naked necks and hooked beaks perched in the flame-of-the-forest trees laden with scarlet blossoms, preening themselves and letting go pressurized streams of excrement on to the flowerbeds and monkeys below.

  Yet the memory of Bombay that was to linger was that of a scrawny cat on the dock. It came each of the two evenings the Corfu was berthed alongside. Slinking out of the shadows, it moved with its belly flat to the ground like a leopard stalking a gazelle. Its ribs and shoulder blades protruded through its skin and it had a bloody, torn ear. I tossed it a gherkin which it ignored but it relished the potato crisps. The night before we were due to sail, I spent a long while trying to persuade my mother we should give it a good home but she resolutely refused to cave in. Finally, she allowed me one concession. In the warm dusk air, she led me down the gangway and along the quay where I placed two cocktail sausages and a pile of crisps on the quayside, to keep the cat going at least until its ear healed. I was then given my bath and climbed into my bunk just in time to watch through the porthole as an urchin detached himself from the shadows of the warehouse, ran to the food, crammed it into his mouth and fled.

  In contrast, Colombo was paradisiacal. We arrived in the early afternoon, tying up to a mooring about a mile out. In the distance were beaches of coral sand fringed with palms. No sooner were the ship's engines shut down than a plethora of small naked boys no older than I was appeared in the sea off the starboard side. Bronzed and lithe, they must have swum out from the shore, for they had no boat. Like marine nymphs they cavorted in the sea, oblivious to the dangers of jelly fish or sharks. Shouting up to the passengers, they invited us to throw money down to them. As each coin struck the surface, it quickly sank. The boys, thrusting their bare brown bottoms into the air like ducks did their tails, dived after them. They missed not a coin but, as they were stark naked, I could not understand where they stored their booty.

  'They put the coins in their mouths,' my
mother said.

  'What if they swallow them?' I asked, aghast at the thought.

  'They don't,' my father said perfunctorily. 'If they do, they get beaten.'

  After half an hour, a canoe arrived on the scene sculled by a wizened old Fagin and a girl of about twelve. The passengers, sensing the show was over, drifted away. The boys clambered into the boat, arched themselves forward and either spat out or retched up – I was not sure which – a substantial amount of small change. The old man rowed back to shore, the boys following him like brown porpoises.

  That evening, we went ashore in a motorboat to a wooden jetty.

  'Who are we going to see?' I enquired as the wavelets lapped against the side of the boat.

  'Uncle Bud and Auntie Cis,' my father replied.

  'But I don't have any uncles and aunts,' I remonstrated.

  'Out here you call a man "uncle" if he is older and wiser than you,' my mother informed me. 'It's a term of respect.'

  This seemed to me to be as bizarre as worshipping cows but I decided to keep that opinion to myself.

  We were met by my newfound 'uncle' and 'aunt' who were, in fact, my father's cousin Cis and her husband, Bud. They piled us into a vast black Humber saloon and drove us to their home at Mount Lavinia, on the coast south of Colombo. It was, I realized as we made our way along a tree-lined road in the tropical twilight, swerving to avoid potholes, the first time I had set foot in a foreign land at night.

  Our destination was a rambling bungalow with a wide veranda on three sides. The pillars supporting the roof were ornately carved with glaring, snarling demons. Upon the veranda stood rattan furniture and a number of collapsible roorkee chairs. Oil lamps hung from hooks or stood on the table. Drinks were served by an almost black-skinned, barefoot man in a patterned sarong. The whites of his eyes shone in the lamplight. My parents drank gin and tonic but I was given a tall glass filled with an opaque liquid in which were suspended small white flecks. I tentatively sipped it. It was exquisite, cooling and strangely sweet. I asked Uncle Bud what it was.