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  ‘What?’ he asked, catching the look.

  ‘You’re an unfeeling bastard, Ken.’

  My father, having no direct response to this, replied, ‘I’ve had a hell of a day in Tamar, Joyce, and I didn’t come home to have to take this display of petulance.’

  He put his half-finished drink down and walked to the door.

  ‘Off to the wardroom?’ my mother called out to his receding back.

  He slammed the door and returned at midnight.

  My preparations for leaving Hong Kong consisted of stocking up on wah mui, packets of joss-sticks and dried melon seeds, and buying presents for my grandparents. For my father’s mother, I bought a table linen set embroidered with Chinese scenes, whilst for Nanny, who had stocked up on table linen during her visit, I bought a folding octagonal waste-paper basket with little Chinese figures of playing children appliqued to its sides. For Grampy, a seafaring man, I bought a rosewood model of a sampan which cost me three weeks’ pocket money.

  My mother was invited by her Chinese friends to a number of farewell banquets as the date of our departure drew nearer. My father was not always invited and, when he was, he more often than not declined.

  ‘Silly old sod!’ my mother said to me one day after he had rejected yet another invitation. ‘He’s not happy unless he’s bloody miserable.’

  I accompanied my mother to a few of these banquets, the best of which was given by the hotel room boys. We met at a restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui just as night fell. The neon shop signs were coming on, the air was warm and moths were beginning to flicker around the lights. In the trees that lined Nathan Road, birds squabbled noisily over roosting perches.

  The banquet was superb and went on well past midnight, the dishes appearing with a mouth-watering regularity: sharks’ fin soup, abalone, quails’ eggs and hundred-year-old duck eggs (which my mother tasted for the first time and was amazed to discover I not only knew of but also liked), chickens’ feet, braised duck, soft-shelled hairy crabs cooked in salt and sugar, chicken wrapped in pickled cabbage and baked in clay, various fish, pork and beef with chillies and garlic … We were showered with farewell gifts. They were simple things, like sets of chopsticks, chopstick rests, decorated porcelain bowls and soapstone figurines, but to my mother they were as precious as gems and she prized them for the rest of her life.

  After the banquet my father, who had attended on this occasion, returned to the Fourseas in a taxi, but my mother elected to walk. It was at least two miles but this did not deter her. I walked at her side, holding her hand despite the fact that I considered myself too mature now to do such a thing. In the circumstances, it just seemed right.

  The air was warm. From the windows of the tenements came the sounds of everyday Chinese life – the song of caged birds, the clack of mahjong tiles, the raucous chorus of a Cantonese opera playing on the radio. The shops were shuttered. Under the arcades sat old men in their pyjamas with the legs rolled up to the knee, reading Chinese comic books or the past day’s papers, talking to each other, smoking cigarettes of Chinese tobacco, some mixed with opium.

  My mother and I did not speak. In our own ways, we were letting Hong Kong impinge itself upon us.

  ‘Will you be sad to leave?’ she asked, finally breaking our silence as we turned into Waterloo Road.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘Very.’

  ‘Would you like to come back?’

  ‘For a holiday? Yes!’

  ‘No. For good.’

  I thought about it. I had been happy in Hong Kong. It had been an exciting place in which to live and I was sure it had much to offer that I had yet to uncover. However, there was more to it than that. I felt I had grown up in Hong Kong. I could recall little of my life prior to the Corfu. It was as if my memory – my actual existence – had begun the minute my foot had touched the dock in Algiers. England was as strange a place to me now as Hong Kong had been on that June morning in 1952. In short, I felt I belonged there.

  ‘Yes,’ I said at last. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘In that case,’ my mother replied, ‘we’d best see what we can do about it.’

  On my last night in Hong Kong, I went down Soares Avenue bidding farewell to the shopkeepers. Mr Deng, the seller of cherry bombs, gave me a ten-cent biro and ruffled my hair. Mr Tsang cut open a pomelo.

  ‘You can buy in Ing-lan’-side?’ he enquired, handing me a piece and taking one for himself.

  ‘Lo can buy Inglan’-side,’ I confirmed, biting into it and spitting the flat pips on to the pavement. This, I thought at the same moment, was a habit I would have to lose. And quick!

  ‘Ayarh!’ he exclaimed. ‘You mus’ come back Hong Kong-side!’ He too stroked my head for a last fix of luck. ‘You come back. I low. One day, no long time, you come see me one more time.’

  Halfway down Nathan Road, my mother said suddenly, ‘Ken … ! Stop the car!’

  My father, sitting in the front passenger seat next to a young naval rating with a flat Birmingham accent and a badly sunburnt neck, ordered the driver to pull into the kerb.

  ‘Give me the boarding passes, will you, Ken? Mine and Martin’s.’

  For the briefest of moments, I saw a sense of intense fear pass over my father’s face. My mother had always been an expert at timing. If she really were going to leave him, and I assumed it was possible, this would be the supremely appropriate moment. And he knew it. Yet he reached into his jacket pocket, removed his wallet and handed her two pieces of folded green-tinted paper.

  ‘How long will you be?’ he asked.

  ‘How long is a piece of string?’ she replied evasively.

  It was one of her stock answers and she knew it infuriated my father, whose life was filled with certainties to which there was never any string attached.

  ‘Depends on the size of the parcel,’ I said, aping my mother’s usual response to further interrogation.

  My father gave me a scathing look and went on, ‘Well don’t be long, that’s all.’

  We stepped out of the car and it drove away. I briefly saw my father’s face through the front passenger door window. He looked crestfallen, defeated and scared. I felt strangely, guiltily jubilant.

  Directly across Nathan Road was Whitfield Barracks, two sentries with cockades in their berets and Lee Enfield .303 rifles in their hands standing either side of a gateway. Through it I could see an armoured scout car of which I had an exact Dinky replica.

  Without any haste, my mother and I walked down Nathan Road. Ahead of us, between the buildings, rose the Peak, hazy in the mid-afternoon sun. It was hot, the humidity high. Rickshaws passed us, carrying people, boxes and bales of cloth. Red and cream Kowloon buses sped by, washing hot air over us. My mother looked at them and I wondered if she was watching out for Her Russian Majesty.

  At the southern end of the barracks, we crossed Nathan Road, entered Haiphong Road and took the second left into Hankow Road. Hing Loon Curio and Jewellery Company was open but we did not go in for a chat or a free drink. We had already said our goodbyes.

  My mother, who had not spoken twenty words since we got out of the car, said, ‘Well, what do you say?’

  I made no answer. We both had the same thought in mind and entered the Pen. We were shown to a table and my mother ordered tea for two. She specifically requested Chinese tea. It soon arrived at our table in a bone china teapot accompanied by wafer thin sandwiches and a silver stand of dainty cakes. On a balcony above, a string quartet started up, playing tunes from recent hit musicals.

  ‘This is living,’ my mother said after a long silence. ‘Really living …’ She looked about her. ‘Haven’t we been the lucky ones!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we certainly have. And,’ I added, ‘we will be again.’

  My mother reached across the table and took my hand in both of hers.

  ‘Too bloody right!’ she said with characteristic defiance. ‘You can bet your bottom dollar on it.’

  She looked at her watch and summoned a waiter Chinese st
yle, her palm downwards and all her fingers beckoning together.

  ‘Mai dan, m’goi,’ she said as he drew near. Her accent was almost perfect.

  The bill was presented. My mother paid it, smiling at me with the memory of our first tea here. We left through the grand front entrance as if we were minor royalty, a Chinese boy in the hotel livery holding the door open for us, another asking if we required a rickshaw or taxi. That tart – I understood the meaning of the word now – the Duchess of Windsor could not have been better treated.

  Beside the Tsim Sha Tsui fire station was a short concrete slope to the hillside on the top of which stood the marine police headquarters. A tree hung over it. In its shade, as usual, was the old grasshopper man seated on a folding stool, a rattan basket of bamboo splints and leaves by his side. With them, he skilfully wove grasshoppers, arranging them around his feet or along the top of a culvert. As we approached, he held one out.

  ‘You wan’ g‘asshoppah, missee? B’ing you plenty good luck. Only one dollar.’

  I bought two and gave my mother one.

  ‘You good boy for you muvver,’ the old man said and, getting up, stroked my hair.

  We walked on, past Sammy Shields’ dental surgery and into the Kowloon Docks. Alongside the first pier was the P&O liner Carthage, the sister ship of the Corfu. Her white hull towered over us, gleaming in the sunlight. Smoke drifted from her funnel. Signal flags flew from her mast. The Blue Peter announced she was soon to sail.

  The dock was crowded with baggage coolies, rickshaw pullers, cars, trucks and well-wishers. Along the hull, sampans bobbed on the waves. Junks sailed by out in the harbour and walla-wallas puttered about, tossing in the wake of a Star Ferry leaving its jetty. I glanced at the Peak across the shimmering water. Block A, Mount Austin stood out, silhouetted against the sub-tropical sky and I thought that, no matter what, I could always claim I once lived there.

  Plank by plank, hand in hand, clutching our lucky grasshoppers, we slowly climbed the gangway. My mother was crying.

  It was the afternoon of Monday, 2 May 1955, and I was ten.

  Four years later, exactly as my mother had predicted, my father was a colonial civil servant and we were back. For good.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It had never been my intention to write an autobiography. To do so smacked of arrogance: it was not as if I were a rock star, an explorer, a footballer or a member of the miscreant aristocracy. It is true that I have had an interesting and remarkably lucky life, but that is far from unique and I never thought to document it. I have never kept a diary, except when travelling, but I do have a very retentive memory, all the more so for its being permanently exercised by my being a writer.

  Then, in October 2002, I was diagnosed with the nastiest type of brain tumour around. A craniotomy did little but confirm I was suffering from a curiously named cancer known as a glioblastoma multiforma grade IV. It was incurable, essentially inoperable and immune to chemotherapy. Whilst I was convalescing, with a metal plate and half a dozen screws in my head, and most of the cancer still in situ, my two children – both in their twenties – asked me to tell them about my early life.

  Having tried, without even a smidgen of success, to persuade my father to do the same for me, and tell me about our forebears – he went to his grave in adamant silence on the matter and I had never thought to ask my mother, who had died suddenly and at a comparatively young age seven years earlier – I decided I would tackle the task of writing about my childhood, which was spent in Hong Kong.

  Once I had set out upon the task, the past began to unfold – perhaps it is better to say unravel – before me. I did have some assistance in the form of a scrapbook and several photograph albums my mother had compiled, yet these did not so much prompt as confirm certain memories, flesh out anecdotes that have spun in my mind for years, rekindle lost names and put faces to them.

  If the truth be told, I have never really left Hong Kong, its streets and hillsides, wooded valleys, myriad islands and deserted shores with which I was closely acquainted as a curious, sometimes devious, not unadventurous and streetwise seven-year-old. My life there has been forever repeating itself in the recesses of my mind, like films in wartime cartoon cinemas, showing over and over again as if on an endless loop.

  This is hardly surprising. Hong Kong was my home, was where I spent my formative years, is where my roots are, is where I grew up.

  Martin Booth

  Devon, 2003

  The colophon – – used in this book is of a dragon riding the waves. It dates to the pre-Christian Han dynasty and is thought to suggest that the legends of dragons were based upon saltwater crocodiles then extant in South China but now long extinct.

  Gweilo – Chinese slang for a European male – translates literally as ghost (or pale) fellow, but implies a ghost or devil. Once a derogatory or vulgar term, referring to a European’s pale skin, it is now a generic expression devoid of denigration. The feminine is gweipor.

  Also by Martin Booth

  NON-FICTION

  CARPET SAHIB: A Life of Jim Corbett

  THE TRIADS

  RHINO ROAD: The Natural History and Conservation of the African Rhino

  THE DRAGON AND THE PEARL: A HONG KONG NOTEBOOK

  OPIUM: A HISTORY

  THE DOCTOR, THE DETECTIVE AND ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE:

  A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  THE DRAGON SYNDICATES

  A MAGICK LIFE: A Biography of Aleister Crowley

  CANNABIS: A HISTORY

  FICTION

  HIROSHIMA JOE

  THE JADE PAVILION

  BLACK CHAMELEON

  DREAMING OF SAMARKAND

  A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN

  THE HUMBLE DISCIPLE

  THE IRON TREE

  TOYS OF GLASS

  ADRIFT IN THE OCEANS OF MERCY

  THE INDUSTRY OF SOULS

  ISLANDS OF SILENCE

  CHILDREN’S FICTION

  WAR DOG

  MUSIC ON THE BAMBOO RADIO

  PANTHER

  POW

  DR ILLUMINATUS

  SOUL STEALER

  AT SEVEN YEARS OLD, Martin Booth found himself with all of Hong Kong at his feet. His father was posted there in 1952, and this memoir is his telling of that youth, a time when he had access to the corners of a colony normally closed to a “Gweilo,” a “pale fellow” like him.

  His experiences were colorful and vast. Befriending rickshaw coolies and local stallholders, he learned Cantonese, sampled delicacies such as boiled water beetles and one-hundred-year-old eggs, and participated in vibrant festivals. He even entered the forbidden Kowloon Walled City, visited an opium den, and wandered into a secret lair of Triads.

  From the plink plonk man with his dancing monkey to the Queen of Kowloon (a crazed tramp who may have been a Romanov), Martin Booth saw it all—but his memoir also illustrates the deeper challenges he faced in his warring parents: a broad-minded mother who embraced all things Chinese and a bigoted father who was enraged by his family’s interest in “going native.”

  Martin Booth’s compelling memoir, the last book he completed before dying, glows with infectious curiosity and humor and is an intimate representation of the now extinct time and place of his growing up.

  GLOSSARY

  THE SPELLING OF CANTONESE WORDS DOES NOT NECESSARILY FOLLOW the accepted Pin Yin or other linguistic systems (such as Wade-Giles) but is the roughly phonetic spelling of how Cantonese was spoken by the average European (gweilo) at the time. It may well be inaccurate, for which I apologize. The spelling of pidgin English is also phonetic.

  atap a woven bamboo and/or rice straw matting used to cover bamboo windbreaks, peasant buildings and temporary structures

  ayarh! a common expletive: it has no literal meaning

  baksheesh alms (of Middle Eastern origin) cf. kumshaw

  cash ancient Chinese copper coins with round or square holes in the centre

  chau island

  cheen
money

  chop noun: an ivory carved seal; verb: to attack with a meat chopper or knife

  chop! chop! pidgin English for get a move on/hurry up

  chow food: a generic word (small chow means canapes)

  congee a form of rice gruel-cum-porridge eaten for breakfast

  dai big – e.g. dai fung (typhoon) means big wind

  dai pai dong a street-side cooked-food stall (not a fast-food purveyor)

  dim sum small steamed dumplings containing bite-sized lumps of shrimp, pork, beef and other ingredients

  diu nei lo mo Literally go fuck your mother but often used coarsely as an epithet the equivalent of You don’t say! or Well, I’ll be damned; also used vindictively or pejoratively

  dofu known in the West as tofu or soya bean curd

  dor jei thank you (for an item or gift)

  Fide! Fide! literally Quick! Quick! but implying the more impolite Get a move on!

  fung shui pronounced fong soy, it is the art (or science) of achieving harmony in one’s surroundings by balancing the influences of wind (fung) and water (soy)

  gai doh cheen how much? Literally, how much money?

  Gai duk toh a Christian

  garoupa a large sea fish, a delicacy frequently served in Chinese cuisine

  godown a warehouse

  golden pagoda an ossuary urn

  heui la! go!/let’s go!

  ho good or yes

  Ho! Ho! Nei ho ma? Good! Good! How are you? (a common polite greeting)

  ho pang yau good friend

  Ho sik! Good to eat/eating/food

  hutong alley or passageway

  kai fong associations Chinese social charities

  kam taap golden pagoda: see above

  kang a traditional Chinese sleeping bed or platform made of wood or stone, the latter often having a fire beneath it for warmth

  kukri an exceedingly sharp, curved fighting knife used by Nepalese Gurkha troops