Gweilo (16 page)

To the rear was a staircase beneath which a door opened and an old hunched woman entered, walking with the aid of a stick. She took one look at me and grinned toothlessly, hobbled to my side and, inevitably, stroked my hair. This put me at ease. First, Fu Manchu was hardly likely to employ crones (unless, god forbid, this was his mother) and second, my golden hair was a passport to my security. No-one would risk harming such a harbinger of good fortune.

'You come.' Ho beckoned me up the stairs.

I followed him into a room along three sides of which were placed wooden
kangs
. Upon one of these lay a supine man asleep upon a woven bamboo mat, his head on a hard Chinese headrest, his legs drawn up, his hands twitching like a dog's paws in a dream of chasing rabbits.

'Nga pin,'
Ho announced and beckoned me further towards the fourth wall, the whole length of which was shuttered. I refrained from asking him what
nga pin
was for fear of seeming ignorant. Again, the last thing I wanted to do was lose face with him. He unlatched one of the shutters and we stepped out on to the balcony, which sloped forwards alarmingly towards a crumbling balustrade.

From here, I was afforded a panoramic view of the walled city. The shacks were so tightly packed, it was well nigh impossible to see where the
hutongs
ran between them. Yet the real surprise was the few larger buildings tucked between them. One stood in a wide rectangular courtyard with a number of outbuildings close by; from another rose a faint cloud of bluish smoke which meant it had to be a temple. Three or four were in a row suggesting that, in olden days, they had stood upon a street. In the distance was Kowloon Bay, a cargo ship riding at a quarantine buoy. Over to my left was the bulk of Fei Ngo Shan, the most easterly of the Kowloon hills, the slopes sharp and clear in the late sun. To the south-west, indistinct in the haze, was Hong Kong Island.

Ho took me back inside. We passed the sleeping man, who was beginning to wake, and descended the stairs which creaked loudly. Once outside, Ho bade me farewell and went back into the house, closing the door. I set off along the way I had come, considering to myself that I had taken a terrible risk. Other than a shop, I had never accepted an invitation into a building. Reaching the edge of the squatter shacks, and stepping out on to a road with traffic going by, I resolved not to be so foolhardy again. Yet, where Kowloon Walled City was concerned, I knew I had to return to investigate the temple and the building in the courtyard.

When I returned to our apartment, I went into the kitchen where Wong was preparing supper and asked him what
nga pin
meant. He stopped stirring a pan for a moment, looked quizzically at me and replied, 'Opium.'

On his return to Hong Kong, my father had taken delivery of a Ford Consul saloon which he promptly had resprayed two-tone grey with white walled tyres: my mother, with her penchant for Chinese names, called it
Ch'ing Yan
, which translated as
Lover. Ch'ing Yan
opened up a wide horizon for all three of us. It also gave my father a pastime. Never a man for a hobby, the car became the centre of his leisure activities. Having never owned a car before, he mollycoddled it as much as he might have done a mistress. The interior was kept pristine: no food or drink might be consumed therein. He checked the oil and tyres at least weekly and spent hours polishing the bodywork, dusting the interior and hoovering the carpets and seats. No-one was allowed to help in this endeavour. He rejected all the approaches of the itinerant car washers-and-waxers who did the rounds of residential areas every Saturday afternoon. When he saw Wong knocking dead leaves off the bonnet with a feather duster, he hurtled downstairs to stop him: the ends of the feathers, he explained, might be scratching the paint.

The first Sunday after the delivery of the car, my father announced we were going for a drive around the New Territories. And so, after a hearty breakfast which Wong insisted on cooking although it was his day off, we departed.

My father had decided to take a circular route without deviation, digression or diversion. My mother had been hoping we might have a look at a few places on the way, but my father was adamant and my mother did not drive. I really did not care. For the first time, I was going to find out what lay the other side of the Kowloon hills.

We crossed them by way of a pass on the Tai Po road next to a deep blue reservoir and descended to Sha Tin, a small fishing village on the shores of a large inlet. The tide was out, leaving mudflats upon which sampans lay settled on their hulls. Across on the other shore, on the northern slopes of the Kowloon hills, was a rock outcrop that, if the imagination was stretched, looked in silhouette like a woman with a baby in a carrier on her back.

'Amah Rock,' my mother declared, reading from a notebook she was compiling in the hope that, one day, she might write a Hong Kong guide and history. She went on to relate a story about a fisherman lost at sea, his loyal wife who waited on the outcrop for his junk to return and the gods who changed her into stone so she could wait for ever. The story I had heard was that the stone was a childless baby amah who had stolen her mistress's baby and been frozen in stone by punishing gods, but I said nothing.

We drove along the shore until my mother's eye alighted on a small isolated building ahead between the road and the sea wall, surrounded by paper bark trees. It had an awning and a few car parking spaces, but little else.

'Pull in, Ken,' she said as imperiously as she dared. 'I fancy a coffee.'

'You've only just had breakfast, Joyce,' he replied peevishly, edging his pride and joy into a parking space. He checked there were no boughs likely to become detached from the tree overhead in the next hour and led us inside.

The Sha Tin Dairy Farm Restaurant (aka The Shatin Roadhouse) was a small American-style diner with considerable pretensions. The menu was designed to be mailed to friends and it referred to itself as
the magic kiosk by the side of the magic Tidal Cove
, which bore reference to the fact that the Sha Tin inlet had four tides a day. At the top of the menu, in small print, were the words
Please let us service your car while you eat
. ('Fat chance!' my father remarked on reading it.) We sat at a table overlooking the inlet. The mountains were just beginning to shimmer in the day's heat. On the other side of the inlet, a cluster of ancient houses stood between woods and the water's edge. A junk sailed sedately but slowly by, heading for the open sea. My father studied them all with his binoculars.

'The rice grown in Sha Tin was so good it was reserved for the emperor alone,' my mother remarked, reading from her notes.

I studied the menu. All the main dishes – even salads – were served with rice or toast. My parents ordered a coffee each and I requested a Chocolate Soldier, a sickly sweet bottle of thick, cold cocoa made with cow and soya milk. All three were automatically accompanied by toast.

As my parents drank their coffee, I read the blurb on the menu which outlined the attractions of the roadhouse:
This is the only place you can watch and feel a roaring train while you eat . . . Occasionally you'll be thrilled by the shooting vampires smacking out of the Blue . . . Your junior folks may enjoy fishing, fording, boating, ferrying, crabbing, clamming or simply playing around in the shallow mangroves. This is the place you'll enjoy most! Please come again and save a trip to Miami or Geneva!
I gazed out at the mudflats and tried to envisage my car-proud father's response to a request to go crabbing in the mangroves (whatever they were: all I could see was an expanse of mud). I saw no vampires.

Leaving Sha Tin, the road more or less followed the coast and the railway, grass-covered hills rising on the left with heavily wooded valleys. The next town was another fishing community called Tai Po. My father, having lost time over the enforced coffee stop, drove straight through it. My mother attempted to take some photos from the moving car but had to give up.

Just beyond the town, the road divided. Left went through the Lam Tsuen valley to the market town of Yuen Long, right took a longer route to the same destination. My father signalled left. My mother wanted the scenic route. We drove three hundred yards towards the Lam Tsuen valley, my father swore a lot, reversed into a farm track, muddied one wheel arch, got out, wiped the mud off with a rag and a bottle of water provided for just such an emergency and took the other road. We scowlingly bypassed Fanling and Sheung Shui, not stopping save for petrol. Then we entered old China.

The land became a patchwork of rice paddies separated by low dykes, the rice beginning to sprout above the water, bright green and pristine. The villages and farmhouses were ancient and could have changed little in two centuries. Farmers walked slowly along the side of the road wearing wide-brimmed conical hats, their trousers rolled up to the knee, leading docile-looking buffaloes. Man and beast had mud caked on their legs. Hakka women with coolie poles over their shoulders carried heavy loads of fodder or bundles of
pak choi
. It was my favourite Chinese vegetable, delicious when steamed and served at most
dai pai dongs
. Dogs ambled along just off the tarmac, moving from the shade of one eucalyptus or paper bark tree to the next.

Every now and then, my mother demanded my father stop for her to take a photo. Inevitably, every time she requested a halt, it was twenty yards before we came to a standstill so my father had to back up. Before long he was seething. When my mother suggested turning into a side road into the countryside, he lost it completely.

'Joyce!' he said through gritted teeth. 'We've come to drive round the New Territories. Not into them. I am
not
driving into the blithering hills. For all I know, we could wind up in Communist China.'

'That's not likely,' I injudiciously piped up. 'If we take a road on the left we'll stay in Hong Kong. China's to the right. Anyway, you can't drive into China because there's a border and a river to cross and the river's only got one bridge for the train and the police and the army—'

'Shut up!' my father exploded.

Several hundred yards further on, his patience was again tested by a duck farmer moving his gaggle of about two hundred birds from one pond to another, driving them ahead of him by means of two long, thin and very flexible bamboo poles. The ducks and a few geese waddled down the middle of the road. My father tentatively beeped his horn. The duck farmer turned. My father signalled curtly with his hand for the man to get a move on. At this, he turned and walked towards the car. My father unwisely wound his window down.

'
Mat yeh?
' the farmer said, somewhat belligerently. This translated roughly as: What d'you want? The added sub-text was: Damn your eyes, foreign devil.

My father, who spoke barely a word of Cantonese, looked blank.

'Mat yeh?'
the farmer repeated, more antagonistically.

My father, still with a vacant look on his face, then suggested, 'Martin, you're always playing in the street. What's he saying?'

'I don't know,' I lied.

At this juncture, the farmer shrugged and turned. The ducks had meantime broken ranks and were all over the road and grass verge. The farmer picked up his herding poles. Taking his time, he rounded them up and continued to make his steady way ahead of us. We edged forward in a grinding first gear accompanied by my father's grinding teeth.

At the next left junction, we turned up a narrow road towards a steep hill, the road eventually petering out in a grassy bank. We stopped and got out. My mother took photos of the view, my father stood wondering how he was going to do a three-point turn. Whilst he pondered, my mother and I set off up a path.

In a short distance, we came to a semi-circular stone platform with a horseshoe-shaped wall about two feet high running round half its circumference. In the wall was a tiny stone door upon which some characters had been written in red paint. In front of the door were two rice bowls containing a sludge of dead leaves and rainwater and a stone weighing down a wad of faded Hell's Banknotes.

'What is this?' I asked.

'It's a grave,' my mother answered. 'Behind that door is the coffin.'

I looked at it with a feeling of suppressed terror. I had visited my maternal grandfather's grave in a municipal cemetery in Portsmouth but had never really come to terms with his body lying six feet under an oblong of stone chippings. Here, there was a man reclining in death just behind a door.

Higher up the slope we came upon a narrow terrace cut into the hillside. It was overgrown with grass and held a row of very large urns with lids like inverted plates. The view was spectacular, a vista of wetlands over which soared flights of ducks and, beyond, the sea.

My mother busying herself with her camera, I decided to look in one of the urns. It seemed strange that they had been left there, in the middle of nowhere, on a bleak and windswept mountainside. I took hold of one of the lids and lifted it clear. Inside, neatly packed away so that it might all fit in, was a human skeleton, the skull on top. The bones were brown and looked as if they had been lightly varnished. I quickly replaced the lid.