Golden Boy Page 9

  I thought for a minute and said, ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means he’s dead,’ my mother explained solemnly.

  I did not cry. It somehow seemed like an inevitability. You went to war, you died.

  American troops passing through the Fourseas were mostly non-commissioned and junior commissioned officers. They were aloof, handing out packets of Wrigley’s PK chewing gum with almost divine largesse. I was never a chewing-gum person. It seemed pointless to me to chew on a sweet then spit it out to stick to the side of the waste-paper bin or lavatory pan in which if it did not hit the water first go, any number of flushings would not shift it.

  Regardless of nationality or rank, they all visited the third-floor in-house entertainment area.

  The system ran like this: one innocent would be given a ‘ride for kumshaw’. In other words, a free ten-minute tumble. This was a loss-leader and the whores took it in turns to provide it. Once the word got round, those seeking servicing waited in the hotel bar to be ushered discreetly upstairs to their fifteen minutes of carnal release. I, of course, had no idea what went on in the rooms but I was aware that it was secret, private and out of bounds. Ah Kwan had said as much and that was good enough for me.

  The bar, where I chatted to and drank Coke with the soldiers and, on occasion, flyers while they waited, was a vaguely art-deco counter in the reception lobby to the left of the main entrance. The back wall – and the ceiling above – consisted of lime-green plastic panels with strip lights behind them. To the right was the entrance to the hotel dining room. Grandly named Grill, it had clearly been designed by the architect with a penchant for art deco and lime-green, back-lit plastic. Next to that were the main stairs: there was no lift. On the other side of these was the reception desk and back office with a reception lounge area.

  It was not long before I knew every corner of the Fourseas. The minuscule gardens drew little interest other than to provide a place to play and a supply of tart kumquats which I occasionally ate. The fire escape staircases to the rear of every floor were a mild distraction but only for their contents.

  Had there been a fire, we would all have been burnt to death, for the staircases were piled high with stores. Catering-size tins of fruit, tomatoes and peas, drums of cooking oil, packs of Heinz sauces, boxes of jars of jams and marmalades, cans of Brasso, Mansion House floor polish and shoe blacking were balanced on the steps, five or more high. The passing space beside them was at best one thin person wide. What’s more, the hotel gardener had made the tiny landing at the top of one flight of steps his own. Every night, he went on to the hotel roof, washed himself at the tap from which he watered the rows of plants he nurtured there, then spread out a quilt on the landing and laid his head on a large tin of fruit which he tucked into his neck shot-putt fashion.

  He was fiercely territorial about the top of his staircase. The same applied to the kumquat bushes and a stand of paw-paw trees in front of the hotel. If he caught me or one of the other child residents even approaching them, he came at us with a vicious-looking curved pruning knife, moving with the mobility of a mongoose. He did not shout but grunted unintelligibly at us in a bestial language all his own. Had he caught us, we were certain he would have maimed or killed us. His face like that of a skull, the skin drawn tightly over the bones and his eyes sunken, he had the temper of a demon. There were effigies of him in temples, guardians of the underworld.

  Some way down Waterloo Road from the hotel, a dirt track ran up behind the hill opposite. It was rutted from rain water and unsuitable for motorized vehicles. Despite this fact, people always seemed to be going up and down it, laden with bundles. Coolies with heavy loads suspended from their poles were frequent pedestrians. Rickshaws went up empty but returned loaded with packages. Curious, I followed the track one sweltering day in August.

  For a few hundred yards, it rose steeply before coming out on a mildly sloping plateau upon which there was an area of about fifteen acres crammed with shanties. Most were made of wood with tin roofs constructed of flattened oil drums and any other metal to be had, whilst a few had scraps of tarpaulin patchworked over them in lieu of metal. Doors fitted loosely and windows were shuttered without glass. A thin pall of smoke hung over them.

  At first, I thought they were residential shacks for there were dogs wandering about, laundry drying on poles, women attending to domestic chores with babies strapped to their backs and infants staggering here and there with no seats to their pants as was the Chinese way. However, I soon found out at least half the shacks were thriving industrial units. Men and women toiled over paraffin or charcoal stoves. In one shack, a man was cooking up what smelt like Brylcreem hair tonic. In another, a woman was stooped over a vat of bubbling sugar making boiled sweets. A third was steaming the flesh off fish to shape into fishballs. I saw two men roasting a whole pig over a pit of charcoal, turning it on a spit and cooking it in its own fat, which fell spitting into the fire, bursting into puffs of flame like tiny meteors hitting the surface of a burning star. By the time I arrived on the scene, the pig was almost done, its whole carcass, including the head and feet, golden brown and shining.

  I sauntered on through what I now realized was officially called a squatter area. These people were on the bottom rung of Hong Kong’s social ladder, only the street sleepers below them. All of them refugees, they were setting out to rebuild their lives and here was where they were starting.

  My presence caused no little curiosity. Men laughed a greeting, women smiled and the boiled-sweet maker offered me one of her wares. I took it. It was flavoured with cinnamon and was a cough sweet. The infants generally took one look at me and fled, screaming. To them I really was a gweilo.

  The shanties had no sewage. That flowed away down the hill in a network of shallow ditches to soak into a stinking gully. The only water supply was provided by a standpipe down near the school on Waterloo Road and had to be fetched in a bucket. That one tap had to cater for several thousand people.

  I continued through the squatter area and up on to the ridge of the hill. The ground was dry and covered in loose volcanic gravel which glittered like discarded gemstones. It sloped steeply like a dome down towards Waterloo Road, with very little plant life other than a few nondescript bushes. I kept well back from the edge of the slope. One slip would certainly have been fatal.

  On the far side of the plateau, as far away as it could have been from the squatter area, was a small cemetery. The graves were unlike those in a Christian graveyard, being low, oblong stone plinths with a headstone at each end bearing inscriptions that were in neither English nor Chinese. They were old and looked untended. Desiccated grass grew between them. I was pondering these when a strange pattern materialized in the soil beside one of them. I knelt to discover, half buried, the skeleton of a snake about three feet long.

  It was exquisitely beautiful, delicate and graceful. With my penknife, I carefully excavated it but as soon as I tried to lift the bones, they broke. All I was able to retrieve was the skull and mandible but these, cosseted in my cupped hands, shattered into white dust before I had gone twenty steps.

  When I returned to the Fourseas, I asked Ching about the graveyard.

  ‘The graves are those of people of Islam,’ he informed me. ‘They did not worship God or Buddha, but Allah. Many of them were Indian soldiers in the British Army a long time ago when the soldiers camped on the hills of Kowloon. Some were merchants. It is a very unlucky place,’ he continued. ‘You see how the squatters do not build near there? There are many restless ghosts.’

  Over the summer, I frequently went up the hill, sitting on a huge boulder that must have been its summit. From there, I could see most of Kowloon, the Kowloon hills, Kowloon Bay, the island of Hong Kong and the western harbour. It was a breathtaking panorama and always set me humming one of my mother’s favourite songs, ‘I’m sitting on top of the world’.

  Early one afternoon as I was sitting on the boulder, I heard a faint droning coming from the direc
tion of Lei Yue Mun, the narrow strait of water the Corfu had sailed through to enter Hong Kong harbour. As the sound grew in volume, I could make out a dot in the sky. It became bigger and descended until its shape was obvious: it was a Short Sunderland flying boat like the ones I had watched with Grampy, taking off from Poole harbour not thirty miles from my grandparents’ homes.

  Very slowly indeed it lost altitude, its four engines by now thundering. Had it not been for the noise that echoed off the mountains, it could have been taken for a huge lumbering sea bird. Its flight almost horizontal, it dropped slowly but surely to the water, a huge spray suddenly clouding out behind it as it touched down. At last, it settled on the sea, a hatch opening near the nose. A crew member moored the aircraft to a buoy even as the propellers were still turning under their own momentum. In a minute or so, a motor launch pulled alongside and the passengers started to disembark. It was, I thought, strange to think that just five days before, it had been in England.

  For a moment, I felt homesick for England. I wanted to be back in my grandfather’s garden shed with him, surrounded by worm-eaten, Gallipoli souvenir Turkish rifles, a huge pedal car my father had owned as a boy, biscuit tins of straightened nails and rusty, obsolete tools. I wanted to go with Nanny to the fish ‘n’ chip shop in Powerscourt Road and order a plaice and six penn’orth. It soon passed. Here the sun shone, you could buy cherry bombs and go to Tkachenko’s: no-one made cakes like that in Portsmouth.

  Dissatisfied with the rudimentary hotel laundry service, which really only catered for bed linen, my mother decided to employ a wash amah. This entailed a new experience for her: interviewing for a servant.

  ‘I want you to be with me, Martin,’ she declared. If she used my Christian name in such a way I knew something serious was going on. Just before the first applicant arrived, my mother grinned nervously and said, ‘Isn’t this funny? Nanny used to be in service. She was a maid in a big country estate in Sussex. Now here’s me, a proper madam of the house—’

  There was a knock on the door and a middle-aged Chinese woman entered. Her black hair was scraped into a bun and she wore a white tunic jacket and baggy black trousers – the same uniform as the hotel room boys and amahs. On her feet were black slippers.

  ‘Me name Ah Choy,’ she said softly. ‘I good wash-sew amah for you, missee.’ She saw me standing by the window. ‘You young master?’ My mother introduced me. ‘Ve’y han’sum boy,’ Ah Choy replied, no doubt perceiving my blond hair and anticipating many brief daily encounters with good fortune. ‘Good, st’ong boy. Be plentee luckee.’ At that point she produced some sheets of paper bearing references from previous employers dating back to the late 1930s with a gap from 1941 to ’45.

  ‘Where did you go in the war?’ my mother enquired.

  ‘I go quick-quick China-side,’ she replied. ‘Master go soljer p’ison Kowloon-side. Missee and young missee go war p‘ison Hong Kong-side. Japan man no good for Chinese peopul.’

  She got the job, my mother paying her $100 (about £6) a month.

  A gentle soul, Ah Choy arrived at nine in the morning, collected the laundry and took it on to the hotel roof where the wash amahs of other long-term residents congregated around the tap. They chattered like hens as they worked, squatting at basins with their sleeves and trouser legs rolled up and their shoes off. When the laundry was done, they hung it to dry from lines strung across the roof. At midday, they vanished in the direction of Soares Avenue, returning at two o’clock to collect the laundry. This was bundled up and taken away, I never knew where to but it returned three hours later ironed, starched, as pristine as the day it was made. Missing buttons had been replaced and rents sewn. A pair of shorts I had torn in the school playground returned invisibly mended. My mother couldn’t believe it.

  Ah Choy was one of a group known as saw hei amahs: saw hei meant combed and referred to the way they kept their hair in taut buns. Originally from Kwangtung province, they were members of a sorority of single Chinese women who had sworn to each other strictly to maintain a vow of celibacy. Traditionally, they were silk factory workers from the Three Districts of the Pearl River delta but, in the thirties, they had been displaced by the advancing Japanese forces during the Sino-Japanese War, most fleeing for British Hong Kong, where they became servants, particularly to Western families.

  During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, many saw hei amahs remained in the colony, at very great risk to themselves. It was not unknown for them to smuggle food into their former employers in prisoner-of-war camps, sometimes tossing it over the wire by night. Others fled into China, crossed north of the Japanese lines and somehow eked out an existence. When Japan capitulated in 1945, they returned to Hong Kong, sought out their former employers and took up where they had left off.

  It was not long before Ah Choy started to assign herself other duties than washing and sewing. She insisted on seeing me over the road to school, even though Ching had long since given up the task as I was now considered traffic-wise. At the end of the day, or if I returned home at lunchtime, she would waylay me halfway to school in order to carry my Hong Kong basket for me. I found this agonizingly embarrassing. Should I not feel well, she would come into my room and curl up on the floor by my bed. If I woke in the night, she would too, to fetch me a glass of milk from the Kelvinator or call my mother. Many years later, my mother told me how Ah Choy had once walked in on her and my father as they were making love in the middle of the night. Not fazed in the least, she walked straight to the bed, shook my mother’s shoulder and said, ‘Come quick, missee. Young master …’ She then did a passable imitation of vomiting and rushed back to my room.

  I came to love Ah Choy and even permitted her to undress and wash me. She was kind, tolerant and loyal. Yet, in three months, she was gone, employed by someone with an apartment and servants’ quarters. We could hardly blame her.

  There followed a succession of interviews, culminating in the appointment of Ah Fong. She was the antithesis of Ah Choy. A young, smiling woman, she wore her hair in a perm and lacked the devotion to service of her celibate compatriots. She could be brusque and determined to brook no nonsense from me. I consequently led her a merry chase, especially at her evening call of ‘Barfu, Martung!’

  It was a matter of principle.

  Beneath the main hotel staircase was a snug hideaway in which Halfie and the luggage porter huddled whilst waiting for their services to be called upon. In this little den was a telephone, a shoeshine box, a shelf of telephone directories, three stools and an electric ring on which they boiled tea for themselves and the office staff.

  Returning from school one September afternoon not long after the beginning of the new academic year, I walked up the hotel drive to see Halfie twirling something round his head on the end of a six-foot length of cotton. When he stopped swinging it round, it flew of its own volition.

  ‘I wan’ one,’ I said.

  Halfie tantalizingly hid the object in his pocket and, pointing to the lobby clock, answered, ‘You wan’, you get. Light-time, I show you.’

  At six thirty that evening, I met him and the porter in their den and followed them out into Waterloo Road. We stood under one of the neon street lights and waited. Twilight fell. We were joined by several more people. Beneath the other street lights, small groups of three or four were gathering. I was about to ask what we were waiting for when the street lights came on. In a few minutes, once they had reached full brilliance, something hard hit me on the head. Before I could react, Halfie ran his fingers through my hair and showed me a beetle nestling in his palm.

  The insect was the size and shape of a large plum stone, its glossy carapace smooth and a dark green which was almost black. A bright yellow stripe lined the edges. Its underside was deep yellow, its two hindmost legs at least as long as its body and jointed in the mid-point.

  ‘What is it?’ I enquired.

  ‘Wartar bee-chew,’ Halfie answered.

  Suddenly, more began to fall around us. They wer
e attracted to the street light, flew into the bulb, knocked themselves senseless and fell to the pavement. Halfie and the porter collected the dazed water beetles and put them in a saucepan. As soon as they gained consciousness, they took to the wing inside it, banging against the lid and sides. In thirty minutes, we must have collected a hundred.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked.

  ‘Tomowwow,’ Halfie answered.

  The following morning, as I left for school, Halfie presented me with my beetle-on-a-line. He had tied a length of cotton to the insect’s two hind legs and showed me how to swing it round.

  ‘No too fas’,’ he warned. ‘You do too fas’, leg b’okun.’

  I gently swung the beetle round my head. It took to the wing and flew above me like a miniaturized motor-powered kite. All the way to school, I was accompanied by its whirring flight as it kept ahead of me. It was a wonder to behold. Inevitably, however, it was confiscated and given its liberty the moment I entered the school premises. My liberty that lunchtime was sequestered and I was given a hundred lines to write on the topic of cruelty to animals.

  As soon as I reached the Fourseas that afternoon, I went straight to the niche under the stairs. Halfie and the porter were hunched over a pan on the electric ring.

  ‘Bee-chew gone,’ I said, miming its supposed escape. I was loathe to lose face by admitting what had actually happened.

  ‘Lo ploblum,’ said Halfie. ‘Can get wung more light-time.’ He opened the lid on the pan. Inside, the remainder of the water beetles were gently simmering. ‘You wan?’

  This was, I considered, the severest test of my promise to the naval officer so far. Halfie removed a beetle from the pan with a spoon, blew on it to cool it then split the carapace open with his thumbnail, flicking the wing casing, wings and legs into a rice bowl already containing other beetle parts.