Gweilo Read online

  'Coconut juice,' he replied.

  'Where do you buy it?' I enquired, hoping I might successfully implore my mother to purchase a supply.

  'We don't,' Uncle Bud answered. A ripple of night breeze teasing the lanterns was followed by a dense thud in the darkness. 'There's your answer.'

  Uncle Bud called the manservant who led me into the night to pick up a coconut the size of my head.

  'Now you know why we don't park the cars under palm trees,' Uncle Bud declared. 'When I first came out, I did so. Once. Didn't think. Had to get a new bonnet shipped out from the UK. Terrible cost. . .'

  When we had eaten, I sat on one of the roorkee chairs and looked out into the night. Bats the size of English thrushes wove their shadowy flight through the darkness, issuing barely audible squeaks. Atlas moths as large as my outspread hand, with antennae like feathers and translucent windows in their forewings, fluttered round the lamps. Tiny grasshopper-like insects no bigger than a grain of rice scorched themselves to death on the hot lamp glass while beetles the size of my first thumb joint flew into the circles of lamplight with a whirring clockwork sound but were wise to the heat and avoided it.

  The most fascinating creatures to be drawn to the lamplight were the geckoes. No more than a finger long, these tiny lizards gathered round the ring of light to pick off any insect they felt they could handle. They stalked their prey, made a headlong dash at the last moment and delicately chewed on their quarry, a bulbous tongue folding wings and legs into their maws. When they swallowed, one could see the insect they had eaten in their stomachs, sometimes twitching to escape. Fascinated by them, I caught one in my cupped hands. It quickly escaped, however, shedding its tail which, for a minute or so, thrashed to and fro on the floorboards between my feet.

  Sitting there, the adults talking in the background, I gradually became aware of someone standing just over my shoulder and turned. Beside my chair stood a beautiful Singhalese girl of about my age. Her eyes were as wide and as black as a starless night, her hair long and cascading like threads of jet upon her shoulders.

  'Hello,' I said. 'I'm Martin.'

  Her response was to put her hands together as if in prayer and bow to me. This formality over, she sat on the floor by my side and remained there unspeaking until we left for the ship. I tried several times to take her hand for I was utterly smitten by her, but she demurely shunned any physical contact with me.

  Returning to the Corfu in the motorboat, I watched the shore recede with a curiously heavy heart. The quayside lights rippled on the sea with a clarity that I had never before seen. It was as if the balmy tropical air transformed it into something magical and I was leaving behind a singular, mystical place I knew I would never find again.

  Two days out of Colombo, we sailed past the Great Nicobar Island, changed course, skirted the northern tip of Sumatra and headed east across the Strait of Malacca, bound for Penang. A small British colony founded in 1786, it consisted of an island bearing the main settlement of Georgetown and a parcel of the Malayan mainland opposite. Once again, we went ashore to walk along an esplanade, drink a lemonade that was ubiquitous east of Gibraltar and look at a number of sedately squat nineteenth-century colonial buildings, one with a tower, the only building above three storeys in the town. Sated with colonial architecture, my parents then decided we should take the funicular railway to the summit of Flagstaff Hill from which, my father declared, one was afforded a panoramic view of Georgetown. Quite why one should particularly seek out this vista escaped me but my father had his binoculars round his neck so perhaps he intended to ensure that the Imperial Japanese Navy was not poised for a sneak attack, as – he informed us several times – it had been in 1941.

  The funicular consisted of a single carriage resembling the hybrid of a horse-box and a guard's tender with open windows. Moving at not much more than a walking pace, it took twenty minutes to arrive at its destination, passing over viaducts and through dense expanses of jungle.

  Halfway up the mountain, the carriage slowed. As it did so, a troop of several dozen macaques materialized out of the luxuriant undergrowth and invaded it. The first we knew of this simian assault was the patter of their hands and feet on the roof: then they swung in through the windows into the carriage. Pandemonium broke loose. The monkeys grabbed what they could with the well-rehearsed proficiency of an experienced pirate boarding party. One seized on my father's binoculars and, finding them attached to him by a strap, proceeded to chew through the leather. My father batted it away with the back of his hand only to have a second monkey take its place. Another, to my considerable gratitude, grabbed my sombrero lampshade hat and made off with it into the tropical undergrowth.

  'Let him have it!' my mother wailed. 'Let him have it!'

  I willingly complied.

  'Don't resist! Don't let them bite!' one of the other passengers from the Corfu yelled whilst at the same time lashing out with a black furled umbrella at a large male, and swearing in what I took to be a local language.

  'They'll be rabid!' shouted the umbrella lunger's wife, a plump, middle-aged woman in a sun dress. She turned to my mother. 'I lost my firstborn to rabies at a tin mine up-country from Ipoh.'

  My mother hugged me to her bosom in much the same fashion as a female monkey balancing on the window frame clutched its own infant. As she did so, nimble fingers skilfully plucked a handkerchief from her blouse pocket not two inches from my eye and I found myself face-to-face with a big-eared monkey. It bared two rows of yellowed teeth at me and promptly vanished.

  Meanwhile, my father was engaged in his own tussle, retaining his binoculars only because, being wartime Royal Navy issue, they were too heavy for the monkey to carry off. Another man was not so lucky and watched as a monkey snatched his Kodak camera and started to rip open the bellows. Throughout this attack, the monkeys uttered not a sound. It was as if they were working with military precision to a set plan requiring no orders.

  In less than a minute, the raiding party of hirsute imps retreated into the jungle to be followed by a hail of pebbles hurled inaccurately and far too late by the funicular brake-man. Once in the cover, they chattered and screamed and howled. Victory was theirs and they knew it.

  On our way back down the mountain, I caught a brief glimpse of my detested sun hat hanging from a thorny creeper, shredded. There were, I subsequently discovered with ill-disguised glee, none left in the ship's shop.

  Whereas the monkeys' ambush had been pure pantomime, our next excursion ashore lacked any potential to degenerate into farce.

  In Singapore, our next port of call, we were greeted by a friend of my father's who whisked us off in a large black Cadillac, through Singapore to the causeway crossing to Johor Baharu, where we had to halt at a military checkpoint. Once through it and across the causeway, our host drove at breakneck speed. It was then I noticed, with a certain quiver of excitement, that there was a submachine-gun propped against the front seat between the driver and my father, with a number of spare magazines on the top of the dashboard. Tucked into the crease of the seat was an automatic pistol. At intervals along the road were stationed Bren gun carriers or armoured scout cars with soldiers sitting in them.

  After half an hour of driving through serried rows of what I knew from my mother's shipboard lessons were rubber trees, we turned off down a gravelled drive at the gates to which were posted several British soldiers in a sandbagged emplacement. They wore steel helmets covered in camouflage netting stuck through with leafy twigs, the muzzle of a heavy machine-gun protruding through a gap in the sandbags. To one side, a soldier in his shirt-sleeves was boiling a dixie of water over a tiny solid-fuel stove.

  I asked why there were so many soldiers. I thought it impolite to enquire why we had a veritable arsenal in the car.

  'It's the Emergency,' our host told me.

  'What's the Emergency?' I replied.

  'It's a war between the British and the Malayan Communist Party,' came the reply.

  I wanted to ask wh
y but my father cast me a keep-your-mouth-shut look so I kept quiet.

  We had arrived at an extensive bungalow raised on brick piles under a wide tiled roof and surrounded by trim gardens of huge, fan-like travellers' palms, elephant-eared banana trees and what I later discovered were cycads, a plant dating back to the times of the dinosaurs. Thorny bougainvillaea bushes grew supported on bamboo trestles. By the veranda was a virtually leafless tree in full blossom, the exquisite perfume unlike anything I had ever come across. When I asked what it was, my father abruptly told me not to interrupt and our host informed me it was called a frangipani.

  The entire garden was surrounded by intermeshing coils of barbed wire. We had a hurried lunch, after which I was permitted to play in the garden – so long as two Chinese men oversaw me – and an equally hurried tea and then we were driven once more at speed back to Singapore and the Corfu.

  'Why did we have guns in the car?' I asked my mother that night as she brought me my gherkins and crisps.

  'We could have been ambushed by terrorists,' she answered matter-of-factly.

  At that moment it dawned on me that what I had previously taken to be a safe existence was quite possibly going to be anything but from then on.

  The following night, my parents attended a formal end-of-voyage dinner, my mother dressed in a long evening gown, my father in a tuxedo. They cut a dashing couple. If there had been an adults' fancy dress party, he could have gone as a thirties matinee idol or a jazz band leader.

  The next day, the steward returned our suitcases from the store and we spent the day packing. I realized all I had to show for my voyage halfway around the world was a collection of multi-coloured cocktail sticks, the small wooden camel and a coconut. My mother persuaded me to abandon the latter which I did with reluctance, but not until the cabin steward had drained the juice from it which I sipped slowly, as if it were ambrosia.

  The morning of 2 June dawned overcast. I woke to find the Corfu barely vibrating, the sea outside my porthole hardly moving by. I dressed quickly and went up on deck to find my mother standing at the rail. A hundred yards off, a red and white launch bobbed on a low swell, the word Pilot emblazoned on its hull. As we watched, it edged alongside the Corfu's hull, a rope ladder was flung over the side from one of the gangway ports and a man in a white uniform clambered up it. A short time later, the Corfu picked up a little speed and sailed slowly into a channel only two or three hundred yards wide. On the starboard side were scrub-covered mountains descending to a treacherous rock-strewn shore against which a light swell broke. To port were more steep hillsides covered in grass and intersected by several bays containing sandy beaches. The shoreline otherwise consisted of more sharp rocks. On a stubby headland was a small village and some low houses set apart in trees beside, to my astonishment, a golf course. The summits of the mountains were lost in a thick fog. The air was warm and humid.

  'That's Hong Kong,' my mother remarked. 'Our home for the next three years.'

  My father joined us wearing starched white shorts and a white shirt with long white socks and brown brogues. It was tropical kit for a naval officer save that his shoulders were not adorned by 'scrambled egg', as my father termed gold braid.

  'And who are we today, Ken?' my mother enquired amiably.

  Ignoring her, my father raised his binoculars to his face and scanned the shore for dangerous rocks and underwater sand bars.

  'Which one?' I asked.

  'Which one what?' my father replied, lowering his binoculars and peeved by my mother's gentle sarcasm.

  'Which one?' I repeated. 'Mummy says this is Hong Kong where we're going to live for three years. Which of the houses is ours?'

  'You blithering idiot!' my father responded, yet he typically made no attempt to elucidate.

  'No,' my mother said tenderly, 'we aren't living in one of those exact houses. We don't know where our quarters are yet. Just wait and see.'

  The Corfu steamed slowly to port round a headland lined with warehouses, a shipyard and a large factory complex with the word Taikoo painted on its roof.

  'What does Taikoo mean?' I enquired.

  'I have absolutely no earthly idea,' my mother replied. 'Not the foggiest.'

  I crossed to the starboard rail. A peninsula of land culminating in some docks, a large cube of a grey stone building and a railway station with an ornate clock tower jutted out towards the ship. Behind them was a city of low buildings. In the distance was an undulating range of mountains, free of mist. One of the summits was, in profile, vaguely like the lions around the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Rejoining my mother at the port rail, I discovered the Corfu was moving slowly past a city which extended up the slopes of the mountains close behind. In the centre were two tall buildings and a Royal Naval dockyard, the basin and quays lined with grey-painted warships.

  'That's HMS Tamar,' my father said.

  'Which one?' I asked.

  'What do you mean?' my father snapped back.

  'Which ship is HMS Tamar?'

  'None of them. That's the name of the dockyard,' he answered tersely. 'That ship there', he pointed to a grey vessel devoid of armaments, 'is a Royal Fleet Auxiliary. An RFA.' He lowered his voice in case there were any shiv-carrying Communist Chinese spies loitering near us. 'I'll be on one of them. She's called RFA Fort Charlotte.'

  Aided by nudging tugs, the Corfu very gradually eased round to moor alongside a substantial jetty on the western side of the peninsula. Immigration and health officials came on board and we were obliged to congregate in a passenger lounge to go through the disembarkation formalities. These completed, my father met a naval officer dressed as he was in a tropical white uniform but with his rank in black and gold braid epaulettes on his shoulders. He also wore a peaked cap with a white cover on it and the naval anchor and crown badge. Our cabin baggage was collected from our cabins by two naval ratings. Both were Chinese. Neither, to my relief, had his hair in a pigtail: similarly, none of the Chinese stevedores or the men pulling rickshaws along the jetty, laden with baggage, had theirs plaited either.

  At exactly noon, as signified by the dull boom of a cannon somewhere across the harbour, we walked down the gangway and into a large, dark blue saloon car with the letters RN painted on the side in white.

  We had arrived.

  2

  THE FRAGRANT HARBOUR

  THE DRIVE TO OUR LODGINGS, THE SOMEWHAT ostentatiously named Grand Hotel, took but minutes. My room was on the third floor next to my parents'. It had a narrow balcony on to which I stepped the moment the door was opened, to look down upon a street lined with wrist watch, jewellery, camera, curio and tailors' shops. Directly below me was a rickshaw stand, the coolies who pulled them squatting or lying between the shafts of their scarlet-painted vehicles. Those not asleep smoked short pipes, the sweetly pungent, cloying fumes rising up to tease my nostrils.

  Before I could begin to unpack my suitcase, my mother entered. She ran a damp flannel over my face and a wet comb through my hair, then hustled me down to the hotel lobby and out into the dark blue saloon once again.

  'BB,' my mother whispered as I got into the car. It was her code for Best Behaviour.

  'Where are we going?' I murmured.

  'Lunch,' my father replied sternly. 'And mind your Ps and Qs.'

  The saloon drove through a gateway guarded by two army sentries and pulled up in front of a large, long Nissen hut with very un-military gingham curtains hanging in the windows. Along the walls were prim flowerbeds of low, pendulous scarlet and orange blossomed bushes being watered by a barefoot Chinese man in a conical rattan hat with two watering cans suspended from a bamboo pole balanced over his left shoulder. His hair was not tied in a cue either.

  Inside the building was a large dining room with a bar at one end. The tables and chairs were made of rattan, the cushions, tablecloths and napkins matching the curtains. We were joined by the officer who had met us on the Corfu. He handed his peaked cap to a Chinese waiter and we sat at a tabl
e. Another waiter dressed in loose black trousers, a white jacket fastened with cloth buttons and black felt slippers took our order for drinks. I requested the usual east-of-Gibraltar lemonade, but this was countermanded by the officer who ordered me a brown-coloured drink in a green fluted bottle with a waxed paper straw in it. The glass was running with condensation.

  'What is it, sir ?' I enquired, heedful of the Ps and Qs – whatever they were – and my father's previous instruction that I was henceforth to address all men as sir unless I knew them very well indeed. Or else . . . That veiled threat implied a succession of brief consecutive meetings between the sole of his slipper or the back of my mother's silver hairbrush and my nether regions.

  'It's called Coca Cola. If you don't like it,' the officer replied, 'you don't have to drink it and I'll get you that lemonade.'

  He was not to know it but that first day in Hong Kong, he started me on a lifelong addiction as effectively as if he had been peddling dope.

  The same thing happened when we came to order our meal. To be on the safe side, I asked for an egg and cress salad. What appeared before me was a salad with, arranged around it, some bizarre, pink, curled objects with long feelers, a battery of legs and black shoe-button eyes. Each of these weird creatures was about four inches long.

  'Prawns,' the officer said, leaning across the table to me in a conspiratorial fashion. 'Have you ever eaten crab?'

  I nodded, a little overwhelmed at his paying me so much attention, not to mention his forthcoming and amicable manner: to him I was not a child so much as an adult-in-training. My father certainly never treated me in such a fashion.