LIVING ON CLOUDS
WE DROVE ON TO THE VEHICULAR FERRY AT YAU MA TEI, THE RAMP was raised and the vessel headed out across the harbour. My mother and I stood at the front, a light spume blowing over us. My father remained with the car at the back of the deck, industriously wiping any hint of spray from the paintwork with a chamois leather.
âWhere are we going?' I asked insistently and not for the first time.
âI've told you, I'm not telling you,' she retorted impishly.
Living in Kowloon, I rarely crossed the harbour to the island of Hong Kong. My parents frequently visited friends for dinner there, went to HMS
Tamar
for a mess night or to dine on a visiting warship â and, of course, my father crossed the harbour daily to go to his office in the dockyard â but I only accompanied them on select occasions, such as an Open Day on an aircraft carrier or submarine, or the annual Dockyard Fete, at one of which I won first prize in the .22 rifle shooting competition, with a score of 97/100. The first prize was a fully stocked blue-and-white woven rattan and plastic picnic hamper which my mother
used for ten years before it finally unravelled. My success, over adults as well as children, had infuriated my father who scored only seventy-something, yet who regarded himself as a top shot. In front of his colleagues and inferiors, he had lost considerable face: Commodore Blimp had been beaten by his boy. At home that night, my father had roundly derided the prize, although I noticed he removed the two bottles of wine it contained as well as the cashew nuts to which he was â as was I â more than partial. I never got to eat a single one of them. That, my mother told me, was my punishment for being a crack shot.
On Hong Kong-side, we drove off the ferry and a short distance through the city streets before skirting the Bank of China building and starting to ascend a steep wide road. Ahead was verdant mountainside with low blocks of apartments on the gentler slopes but, as the mountain rose more precipitously, houses half hidden in trees. My father had to change down to third gear and then to second for the first corner on a junction. The car remained in a low gear to negotiate two sinuous hairpin bends and a long straight to a four-way junction in a pass.
âMagazine Gap,' my mother said as my ears popped and, looking out the rear window, I caught a glimpse of the harbour and Kowloon beyond and well below.
The car continued to climb through luxuriant forest, plants with leaves as big as elephants' ears crowding each other out in the shade. Lianas and aerial roots hung down like ropes while butterflies flitted through the shadows and dappled light. Through gaps in the trees I caught snatches of open sea: at Magazine Gap we had crossed on to the south side of Hong Kong island.
Still we climbed. Edging the car into first gear, my father gunned the engine and we set off up an incline of at least 30 degrees called Mount Austin Road, moved round a right-hand corner in second gear and turned up another steep road that
looked as if it ran along a knife-edge ridge. At the end of this was a four-storey block of apartments. My father parked the car and we entered the building, climbing the wide stairs.
âWho lives here?' I asked my mother.
âWe do,' she replied. âFrom the day after tomorrow.'
On the top floor, my father produced a key and we entered Apartment 8, Mount Austin Mansions. Despite a few pieces of furniture, it echoed like a cathedral.
âClose your eyes,' my mother said as we went in.
I did so. She led me through the apartment. I heard another door open then the faint sound of birdsong, a cicada and the gentle shush of a mountain breeze.
âOpen them.'
I was on the veranda. At my feet lay Hong Kong.
The view left me speechless. Down below was the central business district, the Bank of China and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank next door little more than a child's building bricks. The harbour was a pool with small boats moving across it. Alongside HMS
Tamar
were two grey warships whilst, in mid-harbour, several others swung at anchor. Beyond lay the peninsula of Kowloon. A P&O liner was berthed in Tsim Sha Tsui, cargo vessels unloading at jetties further along the waterfront. The Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter was a mere rectangle of water partly crammed with a brown wedge of junks and sampans. In the distance were the Kowloon hills and, further away still, a progression of hills disappearing towards China. Looking east was a sylvan ridge dotted with houses. Below them, beyond the eastern urban areas, were more hills and, far away, a scatter of islands.
The sun was now low and hidden behind a summit surmounted by a copse of radio aerials: the riot of neon in the streets to the east and on Kowloon-side started to come alive in readiness for the approaching twilight. The last rays of the sun
tinged the top of the Nine Dragons. In fifteen minutes, it was night, the lights of the colony shimmering in the heat. The walla-wallas and ferries were now trails of light upon blackened water, the warships decorated with white bulbs strung between their masts or lining their sides.
âSo?' my mother asked.
âI don't know,' I replied.
âWhat do you mean, “I don't know”?' my father snapped. âThis is one of the most famous panoramas in the world and you are going to live on top of it. People would commit murder to live here. People sail halfway round the world to see this view for fifteen minutes and you're going to have it twenty-four hoursâ'
âDo stop harping on, Ken,' my mother muttered.
âWell, honestly â¦' my father replied, determined to have the last word. âWe give him the earth andâ'
âWe have not given him the earth,' my mother retorted. âWe have been allotted this as our quarters and he â and we â are bloody lucky. You had nothing to do with it.'
âI had nothing to do with it? My job â my rank â played no part in it?'
âYou're a DNSO, Ken, not the First Sea Lord. You have a wife and son. That gives you X amount of housing points. This is an X-points quarter. It has been vacated. We were next in line for allocation. Now shut up!'
In truth, I was fully appreciative of the view. It was just that the enormity, the grandeur of it did not match my eight-year-old vocabulary. Fantastic or incredible or even stupendous seemed utterly devoid of the emotion I felt. It was, like the song, as if I really was sitting on top of the world.
As if that view were not enough, crossing through to the dining room, we looked south, out over the South China Sea. A fairly substantial island lay between Hong Kong and the horizon on
which there were other low strips of land with pinpricks of light bunched in one spot on them.
âThe island close to is called Lamma,' my mother said. âThose in the distance are Communist Chinese.'
Yet I was not looking that far. On the sea around and beyond Lamma twinkled tiny lights. There were perhaps a hundred of them. They did not seem to move but were drifting on the tide.
âWhat're those lights?' I asked, but I realized the answer before being told.
âFishing sampans,' my mother explained.
We headed back to Boundary Street. As the ferry edged across the harbour, I asked my mother to show me the building in which we had just been. Distinguished by the lights in its windows, it was perched on the very top of a secondary promontory to the east of the Peak, the mountain that stood guardian over the colony.
âWhat's it called?'
âThe little summit is called Mount Austin and we have Apartment 8, Block A.'
âThat's lucky,' I declared.
âWhat do you mean?' my father asked, folding his chamois leather into a wad.
âEight's a lucky number,' I said. âThe Chinese think eight brings riches.'
âHe does pick up some drivel,' my father remarked to my mother.
Yet she winked at me. She was by now well down the
hutong
to becoming a dedicated sinophile: unbeknownst to my father, she had even enrolled herself in Cantonese classes.
Â
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Life on the Peak had as much in common with that in Kowloon as a bowl of fish soup at a
dai pai dong
had to a traditional English fried breakfast, with or without salad cream. First, there were no shops except for a small Dairy Farm general store. Second, there were hardly any people about except around an observation point where tourists with cameras mingled with touts trying to sell them packs of photographs of what they were themselves about to photograph. Third, there were no eating places except the Peak Cafe, a low, red-roofed building that I had spotted as my father halted to change gear on our first visit. Finally, there were very few buildings and those that did exist were either the houses of the rich
taipans,
secure behind walls topped with barbed wire or broken glass, or apartment buildings.
From a busy urban existence, I was suddenly catapulted into a pacific rural one, with a gamut of new experiences to undergo and new lessons to be learnt.
The morning of the move, we arrived at Mount Austin shortly after two dark-blue Bedford lorries with RN painted in white upon the sides. Half a dozen Chinese ratings leapt out, lowered the tailgate and began to carry all our belongings up to Apartment 8. To complement the general-issue furniture provided by the Navy, my parents had purchased a low Chinese coffee table with bow legs, reminiscent of an English bull terrier's, a Chinese dining-room suite and a bar â an essential for my inabstinent father.
As soon as the unpacking commenced, it was diplomatically suggested that I might like to go outside and play. With whom or at what was not an issue. Hardly believing my good fortune, I left the building and set off down the curving ridge road. At the T-junction I turned right and started to ascend to the summit of the Peak.
The road was steep and passed a derelict lot where the
foundations of a building were laid out in the ground with a few fragments of wall remaining. It was, in effect, a cleared bomb site: I had seen enough of those in Portsmouth to recognize it. Higher up, several rather fine houses stood to the right of the road with magnificent views of the city below. I walked on, my legs beginning to ache. A few hundred yards on there appeared at the side of the road a small stone building not much bigger than my grandfather's garden shed. The door was open and the sound of voices emanated from within. I knocked and looked in. Sitting at a desk was a policeman. Another sat to one side, his chair tilted back. In a corner, a kettle simmered on an electric ring. They nodded a greeting. I expected to be invited in for a bowl of tea. That would have been Mong Kok protocol. I wasn't.
Beside the police post were some stone steps. I descended them and found myself on a path that, after fifty yards, crossed a small tumbling stream. Tiny fish darted in the sandy-bottomed pools. It seemed amazing that, not three hundred feet from the top of a mountain, there was a flowing stream filled with fish. I stepped over the water by a small stone bridge and walked on. The path was narrow and clung to the not-quite-sheer side of the hill, keeping to more or less the same contour. It was obvious few people came this way, for the undergrowth met over the path and my legs were soon scratched and bleeding. Yet it was worth it. The views were breathtaking. Below me was a pale azure reservoir, Lamma Island across a narrow channel and the South China Sea beyond it. To the west, beyond the next, conical hill, were the distant islands of western Hong Kong and, beyond them, Lan Tau Island, the biggest in the territory. I did not realize quite how high I was until a kite, rising on a thermal, briefly hovered near me. It swivelled its head from side to side with avian wonderment at finding someone so close on the normally deserted mountainside.
The following morning, I woke to find my room bathed in an eerie, soft light. Getting out of bed, I opened the curtains to discover we were in the clouds. Unlatching the metal-framed window, a warm and invisible dampness drifted in, touching my face as a ghost might. It occurred to me that perhaps I was allowing demons to enter so I closed it quickly.
At breakfast, my mother announced, âYou're going to go to the Peak School now. It's much too far to go to Kowloon Junior every day. We've an appointment with the headmistress at eleven o'clock.'
By the time we set off for the school, the sun had burnt off the clouds and we began our walk under a blazing sky. The air, however, was cool, with zephyrs tickling the tall, sparse grass and wild flowers on the bomb site.
âWhat building stood there?' I asked my mother as we passed it.
âI don't know,' she said, âbut you'll find ruins here and there on the Peak, of buildings destroyed by the Japanese in the war.'
The Peak School was about twenty minutes' walk away on Plunkett's Road, but to get there meant descending the very steep hill to the café. My mother, wearing a smart cotton print dress and high-heeled shoes, attempted the descent, stopped after a few yards, removed her shoes and continued barefoot. We arrived at the school hot and harried. The headmistress showed us into her office, a few formalities were undergone, I was taken to a classroom and obliged to stand in front of my future classmates, declare my name and then sit down at a desk next to another
gweilo
with pre-pubescent acne and breath that smelt as if he had breakfasted on hundred-year-old eggs. It did not bode well.