A Fortunate Life (23 page)

On other occasions we would go walking as a family, catching one of the many ferries plying between the Hong Kong islands and returning at night, marvelling at the harbour sparkling with the great city’s myriad constellations of lights. One of our adventures, a two-day affair, involved climbing the three-thousand-foot Ngong Ping mountain on Lantau Island, at the top of which there is a Buddhist monastery called Po Lin. We spent the night there amongst the monks, and then watched the dawn come up next morning before descending the mountain and catching the ferry home from a little harbour now buried under Hong Kong’s new airport. Kate came with us on nearly all these trips. Simon, though, was too young and was looked after by our
amah
, Ah Moy, who soon became a close friend of the family as well as an indispensable source of advice, guidance and assistance.

Our other favourite pastime was boating. I crewed for a friend who raced dinghies most weekends, and we often hired a Chinese junk for family boating trips around the islands, anchoring overnight in some cove and returning the following morning.

And there were great parties, too. The sixties came late to Hong Kong but, when they did, they came with a rush. Almost overnight every woman under fifty was wearing a mini skirt, the colours of Mary Quant were everywhere on show, and the sound of the Beatles pounded out of every bar in Wanchai – at the time playing host to thousands of US servicemen, whose bleak desperation to enjoy every last second of their ‘R and R’
*
leave spoke almost as much of the horrors to which they would soon return in Vietnam as the pictures and reports we read daily in our papers.

Curiously, none of this was spoiled, or even much affected, by the dark storm of the Cultural Revolution raging just over the Chinese border, even though dead bodies, often bearing the marks of torture, were regularly washed down the Pearl River to end up on Hong Kong’s western shores. But, reading the Chinese papers every day, I was more than aware what was going on – and frightened for my family. Only thirty miles north of us huge mobs of young revolutionaries were on the rampage in a China that seemed to be dissolving into a series of fiefdoms of madness, uncontrolled by the authorities.

Hong Kong, I knew, could not be defended. It relied then (and does still) on China for the bulk of its food, and even most of its fresh water. I became at the time obsessed by the vulnerability of our little island of prosperity and gaiety amidst a sea of war, revolution and instability all round us, from Vietnam to China. Legend has it that Kowloon, across from Hong Kong island, got its name when one of the Sung Emperors sailed through the area and asked one of his court sages for the name of this magnificent harbour. The sage replied that it was called Jiu Lung (which becomes ‘Kowloon’ in the English corruption of the Cantonese, and means the ‘nine dragons’). Chinese folklore has it that every mountain has a dragon. The Emperor counted the mountains and saw that there were only eight. So he said to his sage, ‘You have it wrong – there are only eight mountains so it should be Ba Lung [eight dragons].’ To which the flattering sage replied, ‘No sire, for the Emperor, too is a dragon – so with you here, this is now Jiu Lung [nine dragons]. One day a thousand lights will burn here – but not for long.’

My constant fear (reflected in private, I later discovered, by the Colony’s authorities) was that, one day, the Chinese mobs would simply extend the revolution over the border and swamp us in insanity, too. If they did come over the border, I reasoned, then the first days would be the worst, after which things would calm down enough to get us out. So one weekend I went up into the mountains behind our block of flats and established a hide within easy distance of one of the best beach embarkation points I had recorded for London, when in the SBS two years earlier, and stocked it with enough food for my family to sit it out for a week, if we had to. I also took Jane to the Royal Navy small-arms range on Stonecutter Island, in the middle of Hong Kong Harbour, and taught her how to fire a pistol and a submachine-gun. In the event, of course, nothing happened, and everything stayed peaceful in Hong Kong, though I learned later that it was at one time touch and go. I suspect the cache of food and equipment I carefully hid in 1968 is probably still there today.

Typhoons, or the threat of typhoons, are part of the seasonal rhythm of Hong Kong life. Normally the typhoon period begins in June and ends in September. I had already been close to one typhoon (the great Wanda, which killed over 400 people in Hong Kong) when, on our way back to Singapore in 1962, we rode out the edge of the storm on board HMS
Bulwark.
Most of the typhoons during the season missed the island, though we often had strong winds and lashing rain as they brushed past us. In the summer of 1968, however, one typhoon hit us fair and square, with the eye of the storm passing right over the island. We were all sent home and told to sit away from plate-glass windows – for, if these shattered, the flying glass could kill. Jane and I put the kids in the sheltered back bedroom, pushed the furniture against our balcony picture window and barricaded ourselves, Tandy and the whisky bottle into a sheltered corner we had constructed in our living room. I remember very clearly watching the whisky in our glasses and the water in the lavatory slopping from side to side as the block of flats swayed in the wind. But the most extraordinary feature occurred not during the storm itself but when the eye passed over us. It lasted perhaps half an hour, during which the air was almost deathly still, before the wind came howling back at us, this time from completely the opposite direction.

But the dominant feature of my two-and-a-half years in Hong Kong was, of course, study, study and more study. I spent long hours in the Chinese Language School and at home listening to taped phrases and
endlessly repeating them until I had the cadences and rhythms of the language firmly locked into my head, and I sweated hour after hour learning vocabulary and script through the use of ‘flash cards’. These were small pieces of white cardboard, about the size of the old cigarette cards, which carried, on one side, the English word and on the other the Chinese character and its phonetic in
putonghua
. Everywhere I went I used to carry about two hundred of them, done up in a rubber band, and in every spare moment would pull them out and go through them, only removing a card from the pile when I was able to look at the English and instantly both say and write the Chinese – and vice versa.

Chinese is not, as it is often regarded, a difficult language from a grammatical point of view. In fact the grammar is relatively simple. What makes it difficult is the fact that Chinese is monosyllabic, with the difference between one word and another being conveyed by tone. There are four tones in
putonghua
(seven in Cantonese). The first tone is a steady tone which neither rises nor falls. The second tone rises. The third dips and then rises, and the fourth falls. It is essential to get these tones right if you wish to avoid saying something completely different from what you intended. For instance the word
mai
, said in the third tone, means to buy something. But the same word in the fourth tone means to sell it.

This provides not only many traps for the unwary, but it also gives almost inexhaustible scope for punning, which the Chinese love, especially when the pun is pornographic – and most particularly when a foreigner, trying to say something polite, ends up saying instead something completely disgusting. On one occasion, at a Chinese Language School dinner, during one of those moments of silence which always seem to attend a conversational catastrophe, I attempted polite small talk with a very refined Chinese lady sitting next to me by asking her if she had ever flown in an aircraft. I got my tones wrong and asked her, instead, if she had ever sat on a flying penis. I couldn’t understand why all my Chinese dinner companions collapsed in uproarious laughter. Which was hardly surprising: it was another six months before I finally got to that word in the Chinese lexicon!

The other means of distinguishing meaning is to string together a compound noun consisting of two monosyllabic words. So, for instance, an aircraft is
fei ji
, or flying machine, and a train is
huo che
, or fire car. The trap here is the order. Even if you get the tone right, reversing the order can still be catastrophic. On one occasion I did just this and found myself explaining to a full class which I had joined
late, that my tardiness was due to the fact that I had left in my car, not my briefcase, but my testicles.

All this means that to learn spoken Chinese you need a good ear, a capacity to pick up cadences and a thick enough skin not to mind a disaster or two. But what you need to learn written Chinese is a prodigious memory. There is no alphabet in Chinese. Each word is represented by a pictogram which has its own meaning and value, independent of its phonetic pronunciation. Arabic numerals have this quality in European languages. Take the figure 4: the English say ‘four’, the French say ‘quatre’ and the Germans say ‘vier’, but the written symbol is the same in all three languages. In Chinese, this principle extends across the whole language; thus, although two people speaking the local dialects of, say, Canton and Beijing will not be able to understand each other if they speak, they can if they resort to pen and paper. It also means that the Chinese written script is one of the major unifying forces of what is, in reality, a collection of peoples as disparate as the populations of Europe. A Cantonese is as different in physique, temperament, cuisine and habits from a Manchurian as a Sicilian is from an Aberdonian Scot. But in China they can all read the same newspapers and the same literature and, above all, appreciate the same calligraphers, the greatest of whom are much revered throughout the land. Indeed one of the things which made Mao so influential in China was not just that he was a great military commander and political leader, but also a much-admired calligrapher and poet.

For poor foreigners trying to learn the language, however, the written script is not a boon, but a torture. For it means that you have to learn each pictogram, individually and one by one. Instead of 26 letters in the alphabet, there are literally countless thousands. An educated Chinese is said to know in excess of forty thousand characters. To read the Chinese equivalent of
The Times
, you need perhaps fifteen thousand, and for a tabloid newspaper around ten thousand. Our task at the end of two-and-a-half years was to be able to read a broadsheet newspaper and write essays in Chinese script – requiring a knowledge of somewhere between thirteen and fifteen thousand characters.

In late 1968 Jane and the children left Hong Kong to visit my family in Australia, flying to Singapore and then picking up a passenger-carrying freighter to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, where the boat broke down. It was a pretty nightmarish journey for them all, as the ship had no
air-conditioning, with the result that Simon and Kate got very bad monsoon blisters. To make matters worse, the boat’s guard rails were completely inadequate for young children. But Jane, resourceful as ever, managed to cash in the rest of her ticket and bought an air passage to Melbourne where she was met by my father and mother, who were meeting their daughter-in-law and grandchildren for the first time. They spent a wonderful Christmas with the family, before returning to Hong Kong in March 1969.

It was about this time that one day, completely unannounced, I got a rather mysterious call from someone introducing himself as a member of the Hong Kong Government, who asked me if I would like to join him for lunch at an out-of-the-way but rather good Chinese restaurant. Intrigued, I agreed. He spoke good Chinese, but we conversed solely in English. He said he was a member of the Foreign Office, and that they were looking for people like me who had had what he described as ‘wide experience in some difficult circumstances’ and could speak Chinese. Would I be interested in joining? I knew perfectly what was going on. This was not the Foreign Office proper; if this led anywhere it would end with my being asked to go abroad, not to lie for my country (as the Elizabethan Sir Henry Wotton defined the diplomat’s role), but to spy for it. But I went along with the game, expressing wide-eyed surprise and, dissimulating enthusiastically, said that I had always wanted to ‘work for the Foreign Office’. Although I heard nothing further from my interlocutor, merely receiving an obscure form to fill in which had ‘Foreign and Commonwealth Office’ at the top, this strange lunch set in motion a train of events which I neither knew of nor had hints about at the time, but which would change my life completely when I returned to UK.