Golden Boy Read online

On the walk back, we determined to call it Timmy, my mother not knowing the Cantonese for terrapin.

  ‘It’s a shame we couldn’t have a puppy,’ she mused. ‘I don’t like to dwell on their fate …’

  ‘They’ll be all right,’ I said to placate her. ‘The Chinese only eat black dogs.’

  My mother stared at me. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I just heard it. One of the room boys …’ I replied innocently. ‘Besides, it’s against the law in Hong Kong to eat dogs.’

  My mother looked relieved. I did not admit to having seen the black chow.

  Timmy and his tank were delivered an hour later. Convinced that terrapins did not exist on a diet of rice and bloodworms, my mother telephoned the University of Hong Kong Biology Department to get the truth, which was that red-eared terrapins were carnivorous and ate fish. They could also grow to twelve inches in length. Our tank was about fifteen inches by ten. My mother hung up with a thoughtful look on her face. Luckily for us, but unluckily for Timmy, he was dead in three months despite a diet of fresh boiled fish which stank out my mother’s room, even when the tank was placed on the balcony so, as my mother put it, he could feel the warmth of the sun on his back. Her reptilian consideration may have been what put paid to him. In the wild, terrapins avoided the sun and took to deep water. Timmy’s tank water was barely an inch deep and contained pieces of uneaten fish and terrapin droppings.

  Timmy’s death did not, however, occur before my father’s first return from Japan and his presence, when discovered, caused ructions.

  On the second morning of his shore leave, my father stepped out on to the balcony of my mother’s room to be confronted by Timmy the terrapin.

  ‘Martin!’

  I came running.

  ‘What, for Pete’s sake, is this ruddy thing?’ He pointed at the noxious tank in which Timmy was perching on his rock.

  ‘It’s Timmy,’ I replied.

  ‘I didn’t ask what its bloody name was. Get rid of it.’

  ‘He’s Mum’s,’ I said defensively.

  ‘What?’ my father replied.

  ‘He’s Mum’s,’ I repeated. ‘She bought him in a pet shop in Nathan Road.’

  At that moment, my mother entered the room.

  ‘Joyce, what is this benighted thing?’

  ‘That’s Timmy.’

  ‘Dad doesn’t want to know his name,’ I said.

  ‘Timmy the terrapin.’

  ‘Get rid of it. It smells to high heaven.’

  ‘That’s only because his tank needs cleaning. I’m doing it later. He doesn’t smell at all.’

  She reached into the tank, picked Timmy up and held him level to her face. His head came out from under his shell, his legs treading air.

  ‘Get rid of it,’ my father again commanded.

  My mother looked from him to the terrapin, as if she were a young girl deciding which suitor to date.

  ‘He means no harm,’ she remarked and tickled his throat with her fingernail. ‘Do you, Timmy?’

  ‘I’m going back on board,’ my father declared, bringing the argument to an abrupt conclusion. ‘You’ve got the ship-to-shore number.’

  With that, he left, not to return until nightfall.

  ‘We could sell Timmy back to the pet shop,’ I suggested.

  ‘I don’t think we would make much of a profit on a second-hand terrapin,’ my mother said. ‘Besides, he isn’t going anywhere and your father sails back to Japan in a week.’ She paused. ‘Maybe I should’ve listened to you and bought a snake. On the other hand, one poisonous viper in this family is, I think, sufficient. Don’t you?’

  Despite the escape of Joey and the demise of Timmy, fortuitously before my father’s next return, my mother had still not learnt her lesson. On another trip to Mr Lee, she purchased a cute lop-eared rabbit, naming it To Jai which, entirely predictably, meant Rabbit. It too succumbed in a matter of months. By then, my mother had made a number of new friends amongst the members of the United Services Recreation Club and no longer felt lonely. The cavalcade of pets mercifully ceased.

  I had only been at school a matter of weeks when the summer holidays began, which posed my mother a problem. She was loathe to take me everywhere with her but, on the other hand, she was just as loathe to leave me to my own devices. Consequently, a compromise was reached. I was given a crossing-the-road examination and restricted to the areas bounded by Nathan Road in Mong Kok to the west, Prince Edward Road to the north and the far side of the hill opposite the hotel to the south. To the east, where there was no obvious boundary, I was told to use my discretion. From my mother’s viewpoint, there was little risk involved – except from the traffic – for Hong Kong was famously street-safe. Muggings were unheard of, child molesters non-existent and street violence usually restricted to a territorial fight amongst hawkers and stallholders. The nearest a European was likely to come to crime was when he had his pocket picked.

  In exchange for this liberty, I was to accompany my mother at any time she requested without ‘whining, whingeing, binding or generally being a little bugger’. I consented with alacrity. The restriction cut off Yau Ma Tei but I felt I had seen all there was on offer there: and there were dai pai dongs in Mong Kok.

  A day or two into the holidays, my mother tested my submissiveness. She was going to Tsim Sha Tsui that afternoon and I was going with her.

  ‘Are we going to tea at the Pen?’ I asked hopefully as we waited for a number 7 bus at the stop opposite the hotel.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Somewhere far better.’

  The Pen, I considered, would take a bit of bettering.

  The bus pulled up, the gate of silver-painted bars slid open and we boarded. The conductor rang the bell twice by pulling on a cord running the length of the roof and we set off. We disembarked in Tsim Sha Tsui, an area at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula filled with watch and camera shops, restaurants and tailors who would make a three-piece suit in twelve hours. This was where the tourists from the big liners or staying in the better hotels unwittingly mingled with touts, pickpockets and other ne’er-do-wells.

  When we alighted, it was to head through the streets behind the Pen and into a small baker’s shop with a display bow window such as one might have found on any Edwardian street that had survived the Second World War. The window glass was flawed, the frame darkly varnished. Above was the establishment’s name – Tkachenko’s. Inside were a number of rattan chairs and tables, also darkly stained. Along one wall ran a glass-fronted cool cabinet which contained a cornucopia of cakes and pastries the likes – and sumptuousness – of which I had never seen: gateaux covered in flaked dark chocolate, puff pastry slices filled with fresh cream and cherries, white chocolate-coated eclairs with segments of glace fruit and angelica embedded in them and tortes containing fresh fruit slices.

  My mother and I sat opposite each other at a table. The rattan scratched the backs of my legs. She ordered a pot of Assam tea, a tumbler of cold milk and four cakes.

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked in tones of wonderment.

  ‘A long time ago,’ my mother began obtusely, ‘there was an uprising in Russia called the Bolshevik Revolution. Many people were killed. Others lost their homes and businesses and had to flee.’

  ‘Like Ching?’ I suggested. My mother glanced at me, surprised I knew of his past.

  ‘Yes, much like that,’ she confirmed. ‘Some fled to France, a few to London even, but most came east, through Siberia to Manchuria and on to Shanghai, always being forced to move along by war. Finally, they settled here in Hong Kong. And where they went, they took their skills with them. And the Russians are famous for their cakes and pastries.’

  An elderly European woman, her grey hair in a dishevelled and disintegrating bun at the back of her neck, approached our table with a tray.

  ‘Herrre iss your orderrr, madame,’ she announced in a thick accent, sliding the tray between us.

  The milk was fresh, chilled and tasted quite unlike that served
in the Fourseas. The cakes were summed up by my mother, her upper lip moustachioed with cream.

  ‘If God was a baker,’ she said, ‘this is what he’d bake.’

  When the bill came, she ordered a box of cakes to go and paid with ease.

  As we walked to the bus terminus at the Star Ferry, I felt somehow uneasy. It was not that I had over-indulged at Tkachenko’s but more a feeling of unaccountable foreboding, as if something was not quite right, not just with me but with the whole world. The air seemed heavy, more humid than usual. Blustery breezes blew along the street, peppering my legs with fine gravel. An old man who usually made lucky grasshoppers out of woven bamboo strips by the fire station had packed up his pitch and gone. Glancing down Salisbury Road towards Signal Hill, I could see the observatory tower on its hill. From the signal mast hung a black symbol like an inverted T. In the harbour, the sea was choppy. The sampans and walla-wallas were conspicuous by their absence and the ferries were having difficulty coming alongside their pier.

  In fifteen minutes, we were back in the Fourseas. Even in that short time, the sky had darkened. When we arrived, the room boys were busy in the first-floor lounge, fitting strips of towelling into the french window frames whilst the gardener was occupied removing the pots of flowers from the lounge balcony and the sides of the driveway.

  ‘There’s a typhoon coming,’ my mother told me.

  ‘What’s a typhoon?’ I asked.

  ‘The word is English but it comes from the Cantonese, tai fung, which means a big wind. It’s the Chinese equivalent of a hurricane.

  Throughout the evening, the wind increased. When I went to bed, it whistled through the window frame. Ching came in just before I fell asleep and stopped it with lengths of rag. At intervals during the night, I woke to the sound of the wind but fell asleep again. Just before dawn, the pelt of rain on the windows finally woke me. I got out of bed and raised the venetian blinds. The street lights were still on, the thirty-foot-high concrete lampposts swaying like saplings. The rain came by in sheets. Under an overhang in the wall separating the Fourseas from the next building was gathered a crush of small birds, different breeds all huddled together. The bushes lining the hotel drive thrashed and shed leaves as if an invisible hand was stripping them. Across Waterloo Road, a waterfall was roaring down the fissure in the hillside, gushing on to the road in a torrent of orange, muddy water. No traffic drove by, no pedestrians were about. I wondered where Ah Sam and the other rickshaw coolies might be sheltering.

  By noon the rain had abated somewhat, so I sneaked out of the hotel rear gate and made my way to Soares Avenue. The streets were strewn with paper, twigs, leaves and a sheet of galvanized steel. The shops were all boarded up. Pressed against them were the rickshaws in a line, their awnings raised, the shafts of one fitted under the rear of the next. The coolies were hunched up inside, with the tarpaulin covering that protected the passengers’ legs pulled tight. Only the drift of smoke eking out from under the tarpaulins alerted me to their presence. By mid-afternoon, the sun began to break through, the wind dropped and life slowly returned to normal. The flowerpots reappeared, the waterfall ceased and the buses started running. So did the rickshaws.

  ‘It didn’t last long,’ I observed to my mother.

  ‘That wasn’t a direct hit,’ she replied laconically. ‘The centre passed over seventy miles away. All we had was a tropical storm. You don’t want to see a direct hit.’

  But I did.

  The residents of the Fourseas were a mixed bunch. There was a small contingent of British forces wives with their children, whose spouses were either involved in the Korean War or waiting to be allocated permanent quarters. There was a fluid population of troops temporarily billeted in the hotel whilst in transit to the war. On the rear top storey of one of the wings, four rooms were occupied on a rotational basis by a dozen Chinese whores who worked a twenty-four-hour shift pattern. The rest of their floor was taken up by itinerant American or Canadian salesmen who visited Hong Kong from time to time to buy cheap goods to ship home.

  It was not unusual to see boxes of samples in the corridor outside the salesmen’s rooms. When they had decided what to buy, they gave the remaining samples to me and another boy of my age whose father, like mine, was in Japan. I quickly became the proud owner of three torches that changed colour, a pair of magnificent six-guns and an eight-bladed penknife with a multitude of hidden tools. It was only a matter of time before I took to trading my surplus and was involved in selling torches, cap guns, penknives, manicure sets, nail clippers, pocket staplers, plastic hair clips set with paste diamonds and Zippo-style cigarette lighters to the shopkeepers of Soares Avenue at well under the wholesale price. This led one day to my having a stand-up row with a real wholesaler, from which I was rescued by Ching, who pointed out to the man that Hong Kong survived on free enterprise and always would.

  The expatriate wives were not always a docile clientele. Under my mother’s leadership, they forced the hotel manager, a tall, inoffensive and highly educated Chinese man called Mr Peng, to instigate a special children’s menu, and to place a large Kelvinator refrigerator in the third-floor lobby for their use: my mother kept New Zealand butter, jam and Tkachenko’s cakes in it. She also tried to have the whores evicted, but in vain. They paid well over the going room rate, the troops in transit keeping them busy twenty hours a day at what I came to know as bouncey-bouncey or jig-a-jig, although I did not know exactly what this entailed. Mr Peng no doubt received a percentage not to report their presence to the hotel owner, a stern, grim-faced Chinese who appeared monthly with his accountant and hovered behind the reception desk as the books were checked in the back office. Even if he had known of the whores, it was unlikely they would have been removed: an occupied room was an occupied room. So long as they turned a buck, the owner was satisfied and probably regarded them as an asset, for they kept the troops in the hotel buying beers and eating food there rather than wandering off to bars on Hong Kong-side. In short, they were an in-house attraction.

  This disparate community was catered for by the room boys. By and large, they were happy young men despite the fact that many, like Ching, were refugees from Communism and had had to abandon their families back in China. They were efficient, thorough and paid a pittance. Yet they were grateful for a job. Thousands had none and they each knew only a tweak of fate’s tail lay between them and sleeping on the pavement. Or pulling a rickshaw.

  My mother befriended them all. Perhaps because she was an expatriate like them, perhaps because she had lost her father and her widowed mother lived 7,000 miles away, she identified with them and, over the years, as they improved their lot, she remained in touch with them, attending their weddings, becoming godmother to their first born, giving them advice and loaning them money.

  One member of the hotel staff was my especial friend and not infrequent enemy. My mother called him Half-pint (abbreviated to Halfie) because he was short and wore a white uniform with a pillbox hat that made him look like a bottle of milk. His real name was Ah Kee and he was the bellboy. I learnt much from Halfie: how to roll tight, aerodynamic (and therefore accurate and painful) rubber-band-propelled pellets and fold paper planes out of PanAm timetables, flying them off the hotel roof to see if we could get one over the hill opposite. We never did succeed.

  Halfie also played on my gweilo gullibility. One day, he persuaded me to eat a chilli from one of the ornamental bushes growing in the hotel grounds. I thought he had eaten one first but, by sleight of hand, he had avoided it and secreted it in his pocket. I spent three hours eating sugar lumps, drinking cold water, chewing on ice cubes and, ultimately, retching my stomach inside out. For a week, we were sworn enemies. Mr Peng was of a mind to sack him but my mother interceded on his behalf. A week later we were friends again, our camaraderie cemented by our jointly dropping a dead Atlas moth covered with stinging ants into the jacket pocket of a passing coolie then following him to see how far he went before the ants started in on him. As they abandone
d the moth for living flesh, he began to prance and cavort along the street, a man with St Vitus’s dance and no way to relieve himself of it.

  The third-floor captain was Ah Kwan. My grandfather would have described him as a leery fellow. He spoke English and Cantonese fluently and was the de facto manager of the whores’ rooms. He also collected their rent, paying it into the front desk after doubtlessly taking a cut. Although married with several children, Ah Kwan had a favourite trick. He would think himself up an erection, placing his penis along the inside of his thigh in his trouser leg. Then, seated on his stool behind the floor captain’s desk, he would invite the hotel children to try to squeeze it to judge how firm it was. It was some time before any of us realized exactly what it was he kept in his trousers. We did not report him to our parents. It seemed a harmless activity, did not occur frequently and, besides, we liked him. He was funny.

  Every fortnight or so throughout the second half of 1952, drafts of Australian servicemen passed through the Fourseas en route for Korea. They arrived by sea or military transport aircraft and marched from Kai Tak airport to the hotel, carrying their kitbags over their shoulders. Once there, they were ‘processed’ by officers seated in the lounge. I hung around the door and fell into conversation with them. They were mostly in their late teens or early twenties, wore the ubiquitous Aussie cocked hat and had a kangaroo on their brass badges. Some gave me pennies with kangaroos on them. One gave me his hat badge and address in Japan. A few years older than most of his comrades, his name was Frank Martin and he was a Flight Sergeant in the Royal Australian Air Force. I wrote to him every month: he replied with stamps for my stamp collection until, late in 1953, an official communication arrived. My mother opened the envelope while I was at school. On my return that afternoon, she took me aside.

  ‘Your Aussie friend who writes to you …’ she began. ‘He’s been lost in action.’

  She handed me the letter. It was succinct in the extreme and gave no details other than to assure me he had been courageous and honourable. It was signed by his unit officer.