A Fortunate Life (22 page)

My horizons were beginning to widen in other areas, too.

Having largely taught myself two Far Eastern languages (Malay and Bedayuh/Dayak), I now rather fancied myself as a linguist and decided to teach myself ‘Mandarin’ Chinese. I started with one of those standard ‘Teach Yourself’ books like the one I had used to learn Malay. But I soon found out that Chinese was much, much more difficult. So I enrolled in a Chinese evening class in downtown Singapore.

Here I discovered my second problem. I was the only non-Chinese in the class; all the others were Cantonese, Fukienese and Hakka, whose native spoken tongues are mutually incomprehensible and who were trying to learn Mandarin, which Mao Tse-tung had just declared to be China’s official mother tongue. This put me at a great disadvantage
because, although all of China’s local languages are verbally very different, they share a common written language, and this was already known to all my fellow students. So they only had one language – spoken Mandarin – to learn, whereas I had two – written Chinese and spoken Mandarin.

I made, I confess, slow progress. But in the process I became fascinated by the language, culture and history of China. By now my SBS posting was drawing to a close, so I applied to take a sabbatical from the Royal Marines and go on a full-time course to learn Chinese. Such a thing had never happened before, and certainly not in the SBS, so I was not at all confident that my application would be successful. To my delight, however, I heard in June 1967 that I was to go to Hong Kong to take a two-and-a-half-year course at the newly opened Chinese Language School in Lyemun, where I would train as a Royal Naval interpreter in Chinese.

We left Singapore as a family in August that year for home. There, after a couple of week’s leave, I started to prepare for my next trip out to the Far East, this time not as a soldier, but as a student.

I
ARRIVED IN
H
ONG
K
ONG
on 12 September 1967, after just a month’s leave back in the UK. Jane and I had decided that I should go to Hong Kong alone to start with, to begin my studies, while she, Kate and Simon would follow three months later. This enabled them to spend a bit of time with Jane’s parents and recover after what had been, for her, a very tough last year in Singapore. It would also give me a chance to spend three months immersing myself totally in Chinese language and culture.

Our Chinese
alma mater
was the Joint Services Chinese Language School, situated on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Lyemun gap at the eastern end of Hong Kong island. It was through this gap that all the aircraft flew after taking off from Kai Tak airport, and all the ships entering the harbour from the east sailed. Close by was the secret Sai Wan listening station, and it was here that most of the students from the language school would eventually work.

The school had just been opened, taking over as a service-run equivalent of the London University-based School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and we were to be its first students. It was run by a remarkable RAF Squadron Leader called Bob Sloss, whose looked like a somewhat eccentric academic but whose infectious passion for China, its people, culture and language, inspired us all. Our three main teachers were Mr Tang, a rather fierce northern Chinese, unremittingly demanding in what he expected of us (very much the traditional attitude to students in China; ‘yong gong’, or ‘studious effort’ was his constant exhortation to anyone he thought was slacking); Mrs Cheong, a five-foot powerhouse of dynamism and humour; and Mrs Chen, who was gentle, quiet, full of grace and loved by us all.

My eleven colleagues on the first course (including one Australian) were all serving officers, warrant officers and senior other ranks. Except for special occasions, we did not have to wear uniform and were encouraged to behave as students. After the rigours and responsibilities of SBS I loved this sense of freedom and the joy of being footloose and immersing myself in academic study. I was determined, at least until Jane and the children came out, to capitalise on this opportunity to cut
myself off as much as possible from service life and Hong Kong’s European community. So, instead of living in the service accommodation provided for us, I started to look for a Chinese family who would have me as a paying guest.

I soon found a very pleasant
putonghua
*
-speaking family called Liu. Mr Liu worked at a local factory making plastic flowers and was a rather taciturn and serious man, especially with his children. His wife, who was round, jolly and very voluble, worked as a cleaner in an office block occupied by one of Hong Kong’s major insurance companies. They had two children. The eight-year-old daughter, known always by her nickname Xiao Mao (little cat), had a delightful face framed by pigtails and an irrepressible giggle she found it impossible to control. Her brother Da Zhong
,
her elder by two years, was serious, studious and smiled little, like his father. They treated me, I think, as a kind of curious mascot which it was their duty to protect from my own stupidity and the consequences of my clumsy Western ways.

The family, who had been quite well-to-do in previous years, had fled Shanghai during the Communist revolution and now lived on the third floor of a five-storey apartment block which was crowded cheek by jowl with factories, bars and little restaurants in a teeming quarter of the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong. I used to eat with them morning and evening and then went off to my very small, very cramped, very hot bedroom to study. This had one window overlooking a round-the-clock, back-street ball-bearing factory, which proudly informed me – by way of a huge flashing green neon sign blasting into my window day and night – that it was ‘The Far Eastern Balls Company’.

When not studying, I wandered round the Causeway Bay district, engrossed in its constant, teeming, sleepless activity. In the morning, I often stopped by the market for a bowl of noodles at a Chinese stall on my way to work. At weekends I would go for lunch with some Chinese friends to one of the little restaurants in the area for a bowl of
wuntun
soup,
†
or buy a steaming corn on the cob from a street barrow, or a paper bag of ten little roasted birds (rice birds, like little sparrows), which are delicious and eaten whole, head and all. When I got back in the evening, if there was no studying to do, I wandered the streets, listening to the cacophony of Chinese languages, captivated by
all the refracted shards of culture, history and ethnicity swept into Hong Kong by war and revolution from the vastness of China, invisible but ever-present across the black water of the harbour and over the jagged rampart of the mountains to the north.

I fell in love with it all and threw myself with impatient zeal into learning the language. One of my teachers wrote of me at the time that I ‘match [ed] high aptitude for the study of Chinese with considerable, not to say ferocious application’. The ‘ferocious application’ part, at least, was right. I am an enthusiast by nature and wanted to gulp it all down as fast as I could.

At the time, the Cultural Revolution was just beginning in China, and its effects were already being felt in Hong Kong. There were a number of strikes and riots, including some in the area where I was living. These were accompanied by a spate of political murders, especially amongst those Chinese journalists regarded as being insufficiently sympathetic to the Communist cause, or who voiced their opposition to the violence. There was also a minor, but at the time quite disturbing, spate of bombings. What I did not know then, of course, was that, though things would quieten down in Hong Kong, they would get much worse in China, and that this so-called ‘Cultural Revolution’ would prevent me from doing what I wanted to do most – visit China itself. At one stage the service authorities got quite worried that I was living in what they regarded as one of the major hotbeds of the disturbance and suggested I should leave my little room for more salubrious accommodation in one of the local service bases. I refused, saying that I felt quite safe. And so I did – and so I was. I never hid from my hosts or their neighbours the fact that I was in the British services, and it would have been reasonable for them to assume that I was a British spy in their midst. But I never felt threatened and was never treated with anything other than courtesy and kindness, even when I once found myself caught on the edges of a rather nasty confrontation with the massed ranks of the Hong Kong riot police. I mentioned my puzzlement at this to one of my Chinese teachers and she told me that students have a special status in China, and doubtless I was benefiting from that – though she told me not to push it too far, as ‘these Communists don’t know the old traditions as well as they should’.

My nastiest moment came not in the Colony but on the mountains of the New Territories, which lie between Hong Kong and the Chinese frontier, where I frequently went on expeditions with a local Chinese
walking group. We would normally all meet up for these expeditions at the Star Ferry terminal on Hong Kong Island, cross on the ferry to Kowloon and then catch buses to our destination of the day. On this particular day, the group decided to visit the site of a new barrage being built at the time to close off the Plover Cove inlet, beneath the Ba Tsin (eight fairies) mountain range, in order to create a new freshwater reservoir for the Colony. We arrived at our destination to discover that it had become the scene of a major demonstration and strike against the construction. We had just decided to go elsewhere, when over the mountain, cutting off our retreat, came an army of Chinese youths carrying red banners, chanting ‘Long live Chairman Mao’ and each carrying a copy of Mao’s little red book. We were trapped and, as the only European, I stood out like a sore thumb – not just because of my mousy red hair (one of the Chinese words for a European foreigner is
hong tou fa
– ‘the red haired one’) but also because I was about half a foot taller than anyone else in the company. The Chinese friend I was with at the time told me to bend my knees and do exactly as he did. He then pulled out his Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank cheque book which, though twice as long as Mao’s little red book, had a plastic cover of exactly the same hue and, holding it halfway down to reduce its apparent size, started to shout ‘
Mao zhu xi, wan sui!’
(‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’) as lustily as everyone else. I bent my knees, rummaged for my cheque book in my pack, and started chanting with the rest as the red tide swarmed through us, too intent on their chanting to notice either me or the fact that we were wishing their Chairman a long life with the most powerful icon of the capitalist Hong Kong that they were dedicated to destroying!

At this time I met two couples who became special and lifelong friends. Both were mixed marriages. Mark Tang, one of life’s natural gentlemen, is a Hakka
*
Chinese married to a German wife, Heidi. And Bennie Wu, now sadly dead, was a Cantonese from one of Hong Kong’s richest families (but who lived extremely modestly himself) and was married to Sarah, an American. Together, they taught me about the customs of the ordinary people of China, some of its history, a bit of its culture, a smattering of its folklore, but mostly (and a lot) about the glorious treasure-house of Chinese cuisine. Every Friday
night we would go out to a different Chinese restaurant to taste the delicacy of the season – I used especially to love the early autumn, when we went to a nearby Causeway Bay restaurant to eat newly arrived Shanghai
da ja hai
or freshwater hairy crabs, washed down with
fa dew,
red Shanghai wine served hot, like
sake
. In spring we would visit a fishing village for seafood (the Chinese have a saying that if you eat seafood you should take a fat wallet), and in December we went to the Western District of Hong Kong to eat ‘three kinds of snake’ (good for heating the body, they say). Or we might seek out a little back-street restaurant at the back of Kowloon for spicy Szechuan food to ward off the winter cold (not that it ever got very cold in Hong Kong, though there were at least discernible seasons – which we had missed in Singapore). I have rather a large appetite, and this could sometimes grow to gargantuan proportions when it came to Chinese food – with the result that, around the restaurants we habitually visited, I earned the nickname
da fan tong
or ‘the big rice bucket’.

My Friday evening appetite was sharpened by the fact that, in order to keep fit (always something of an obsession with me) I used to go to Hong Kong squash club every Friday at 6 p.m. and play two hours of squash against all-comers. On one occasion an older man walked into the court and asked if he could play. I said ‘Of course’ without taking too close a look at him, and we began a pretty furious game. He was wilier than me and, if younger, would certainly have beaten me. Something about his voice, however, triggered a spark of recognition; I turned to look at him more closely and realised that I was playing James Mason, who was in Hong Kong to make a film.

Jane came out with the children just before Christmas 1967, and this marked the end of my living as a Chinese in the Chinese quarter. We moved into a service quarter on the seventh floor of a twelve-storey block of flats called Royden Court in Repulse Bay, where we spent the next two years. There was a beach nearby for the children and boating and walking at the weekends.

Since the start of our married life we have always had a dog chosen from a local animal refuge, and Kate was soon asking when our new dog would join us. We went to the Hong Kong RSPCA and found a splendid, scruffy little half-long-haired terrier mongrel we called Tandy, because he had the same squat determination and indomitable
cheerfulness as one of my ex-SBS colleagues. He quickly became the indispensable fifth member of our family, accompanying us everywhere, especially on our walks. He was a good guard dog, too – though his efforts were not always appreciated. One early morning in our second year, Jane and I were woken up at 2 a.m. by a furiously barking Tandy. I scolded him and told him to shut up, which, grumbling, he duly did. We woke up next morning to find the front door open and our money and many of our valuables gone. The thief had climbed seven storeys up the outside of the building to get in at the open window of the children’s room. I suspect we would have lost more had he not been scared off by our alert and unjustly admonished little dog.

I kept up my excursions with my Chinese walking group, who, to a man and woman, fell in love with my shining blonde daughter Kate, whom I carried on my shoulders up almost every major mountain in the Colony.

Expeditions on the mountains of Hong Kong remained one of my favourite pastimes, which blew away the cobwebs of the week’s study; even after Jane arrived I would occasionally take Tandy off for three days, walking by myself, staying out on the mountains overnight. My two favourite long walks were on a great saddle-backed mountain called Ma On Shan, with magnificent views of the coves and inlets of the New Territories on all sides and a shepherds’ hut at the top, and on Tai Mo Shan, Hong Kong’s highest peak, on whose slopes grew a single magnolia tree which was supposed to be of a genus unknown anywhere else in the world and had huge soup-plate-sized blossoms that burst out in profusion every spring.