Korea (32 page)

The countryside became lower and more meanly furnished as we headed west. Our destination was on the coastline of what looked like a hammerhead extending out to sea beyond the prevailing sweep of the west coast—two bays pinched at the shaft of the hammer—and where Mallipo and Chollipo lay was on the flat topside of the hammer, a coast of cliffs and tiny islands and long white beaches of pure sand. It looked exactly like Oregon: the islands were topped with fir trees, there were rain clouds on the horizon, the tidal currents traced steely patterns on the sea surface, and small fishing boats murmured distantly.

We took lunch in a small café on the Mallipo beach—the raw eel was vaguely disgusting, so I asked the owner to find me eggs, butter and milk, and I cooked sea salmon omelettes for the four of us, and we ate fresh bread and drank cold beer in the afternoon sun. Then another group of friends—a soldier from Scotland, his Korean wife and baby, and a young woman who was over on holiday from Battersea—arrived, and we drank more beer, and then set off for Ferris Miller’s place, five miles further down the coastal track.

His cottage, set on a rise beside the hamlet, was itself surrounded by wildflowers and curiously exotic bushes, all labelled. Ferris himself proved a magnificent figure—tall and dressed wholly in
hangbok
from his ornately embroidered silk
chogori
and his baggy
paji
, all connected by silk strings and loops and small amber buttons known as
hopak-dan chu
, to his neat
komusin
slippers, boatlike shoes with dainty upturned toes. His ‘family’ were with him and everyone spoke Korean—he seemed wholly assimilated into the country in which he had lived for the last four decades. We should wander around the arboretum, he said, for as long as the light and the weather held.

And so, for the remaining hours of the sun, we were beyond his fences and among his trees. Our new visitors set down a gingham picnic cloth under a magnolia tree and beside a huge bed of daffodils, and we all lay dreamily around in attitudes of Confucian idleness, drinking cool Burgundy and eating strawberries, listening to the pounding of the waves below and to the sighing of the breezes through the magnolias above, inhaling the scents of the jasmines and the sea, and feeling blessed at having entered heaven through the front door. And then our friends went back to Seoul, and Ferris came down and talked his way around three hundred varieties of magnolia and four hundred types of holly and about conifers and lobelias and the orchids he was just then trying to raise on a bank beside the potting shed.

He had just been over to England with the Magnolia Society and had toured eight country houses to see which
Magnoliaceae
they had and which cuttings he might supply for them. The society, now based in Louisiana, regarded Ferris Miller as having one of the finest stocks in the world, and he was the star of the Cornish visit: the following year the society planned to visit him, and he would show off the results of his fifteen years of labours. He rarely let strangers in beyond the fences; he did not care for people, he said, only for plants and animals. He would spend all his money, and as much of his remaining time as possible, tending to this little oasis of beauty and charm, and pass it on to his adopted son, and hope that it would remain no matter how
busily Korea continued with her headlong rush in pursuit of economic miracles.

We spent the night in an old Korean house at the top of a cliff. We watched the sunset from the terrace and saw the night fall on an island that Ferris had bought the year before, and on which he had built a cottage only to be ordered to have it taken away lest North Korean boatmen rest there on their way to infiltrate the South—you are never far from the memory of war, even in a place as beautiful and peaceful as this. We ate in a local shop—the owner cooked us rice and soup and fish, and we had apples and strawberries afterwards, and drank
makkoli
and beer, and from a bottle of Glenlivet that my Scottish soldier friend had left for us. And then we climbed up to our clifftop and slept on our
ondol
floors, more content than it is possible to imagine with a Korea preserved in all its old magnificence, by the sea and away from the crowds.

We rose at dawn and drove sadly back east. We took coffee at Dogo by noon and rang the Onyang man and gave him back his car, not much the worse for wear. The hostess girls from two nights before emerged from somewhere and insisted that a villager took our photographs—they had never seen foreigners before and wanted their boyfriends to see our gorilla-like arms clamped amiably around their shoulders, and we were naturally happy to oblige. And then my friends took off for Seoul by train, and I set off walking north again along the road to Pyongtaek, and the final run to the capital, now less than two days’ march away. I turned my atlas to its last page and the province of Kyonggi-do, tightened the grip on my walking stick, hitched my fardel to my back, and strode out for the last few miles.

This was American territory—a fact that became readily apparent when I was just a few miles south of Pyongtaek. I had been walking quite fast through deserted woodlands. I was, quite frankly, bored. The countryside was less interesting than it had been: I was hemmed in by tall trees, and the road, for some reason, had degenerated into a dirt track that was thick with
mud after the rains of the night before. Construction machinery churned past me, belching out diesel smoke and splashing mud in every direction. It was hot and sticky, and I felt liverish and wished at that moment I had clambered up onto the Seoul train as my friends had suggested. ‘It’s only an hour or so,’ they had beckoned. ‘No one’ll know.’

Thus I trekked on, hour after hour. I passed some signs of recent soldierly occupation—‘Headquarters, I Corps’ read a wooden sign ten yards into the woods, and I could see barbed wire fences and Quonset huts and wooden lean-tos and shadowy figures that moved along distant forest paths. They must have been relics of the spring exercises, for otherwise the woods were quiet, and the rutted roads were empty of the tanks and mobile howitzers that had been there days before. It could have been the woods at Versailles or the Thuringian—or great Gromboolian—plain: it looked not one whit Korean.

I came across a stretch where men were asphalting the road, and my boots were mired in thick, sweet-smelling blackness that it took a good mile to shake from between the cleats. The road snaked over a hill, and just as I was coming to its summit, two American children came flying on their bicycles from the other side. ‘Hey, Mister—whatcha doing here?’ They were straight from Norman Rockwell via Sears Roebuck, and suddenly the road might have been in Chevy Chase or Bel Air, no longer a Thuringian lane. There was a rational explanation, of course: there was an enormous infantry base here, one of the few where families are welcome from stateside, and the children were venturing briefly beyond the cyclone fence to see something of the country where they lived.

They may well have found it a likable place. The man I encountered no more than an hour later most certainly did not. He was American too, and he was driving a juggernaut of an old Chevrolet into the outskirts of Pyongtaek when he spotted me. He stopped to offer me a lift and then unlocked a sluice gate from somewhere in his brain and unleashed a waterfall of vitriol. ‘Goddam place, this Ko-rea,’ he began. (He was a construction
foreman from Kentucky.) ‘I jes’ hate it. Goddam dirt everywhere. Goddam people eating their goddam garlic and
kimchi
stuff all the time. I see’d people pissing in the streets. I see’d all kindsa stuff here you wouldn’t credit. Man, I hate the place.’ I told him I had seen some remarkable things and met some extraordinary men and women in the past weeks. ‘Oh sure, the people is okay. You gotta admire them, I admit that. No, it’s not the Korean people I can’t stomach, it’s their goddam country. The people, they work real hard, they get on and do things. Why, some of my workers are better than the guys back home.

‘But no sir, I ain’t gonna be taking no good memories of this place back to Tampa. Wife and kids gone down there. Got me a real nice condo, and I’m fixing to go into the aircon business in Florida. Make some real money, not like the shit contracts you get from the air force. My wife? Oh, sure, she’s been back there for ’bout a year now. Some of the gals here are pretty nice, so I haven’t been too lonesome.’ He chuckled evilly. ‘No, like I say, it’s not the people I can’t stand, it’s the goddam dirty country they live in. People’s fine, real fine folks. Won’t miss ’em, though. Not back in old Tampa.’

I spent the night in a hotel he suggested in Songtan. I should have known better. It was a grimy establishment a few hundred yards from the main gate of the Osan Air Base, which is in itself the main gate for GIs coming into Korea, and the plasterboard between the rooms creaked in disharmonious rhythms to the sound of commercial exertions. My room showed the spoils of its previous occupant, a pilot (said the room boy) who had checked in at three and checked out at six.

His flight plan was crumpled up in the wastepaper basket. It showed that he had flown his C141-B in from Hickam Air Base in Hawaii, and that before that he had been at Travis Air Base in California. He had carried forty thousand pounds of crew and cargo. He had flown across the Pacific through a dozen or so of those oddly named airway marker-points, Bebop and Bandy and Bambo and Gritl and the rest of them, before making Koko Head and Barbers Point and the top of his long gentle slide down to
base. And he had presumably taxied his giant plane into the holding area, had ‘locked and sealed the aircraft and left the key, combination and seal number with the Airlift Co-ordination Center’, as required by Osan’s laws, and then headed straight for this grim warehouse and 180 minutes of dubious and not inexpensive pleasure.

He had also been given a handout that suggested itself to be of the utmost importance. Officers of the United States Customs, it said, were presently giving their almost undivided attention to the importation from Korea of bogus versions of Cabbage Patch Dolls, Members Only T-shirts, Lacoste socks, Vuitton suitcases, Gucci shoes, and jackets by Polo. Cabbage Patch Dolls in particular would be regarded by the ever-vigilant officers with the greatest degree of suspicion, lest they be Korean-made counterfeits. Therefore be ye warned, pilots of America, that only one such beast would be permitted home per flier, and none could be sent stateside by post. This document had bitten the dust as well as the flight plan.

I spent an unmemorable night in Songtan and woke to a furious and ice-cold rainstorm. The whole day was a struggle: the wind blasted in from the east, the rain lashed down on me, and I was drenched and shivering and in some danger of developing a classic case of exposure, which would have made a dreary end to the venture. The road widened into another emergency airstrip, and the gale whistled mercilessly across it. It was like being at sea somewhere in a cold high latitude—doubling the Horn in August, maybe, or the Bering Strait in March. The towns that came and went were deserted, the wreckage of trees and collapsed fences blocking some smaller streets: the gale was almost typhoon strength, the last efforts of the Chinese winter hurling themselves against the hills of Korea.

At the top of one hill stood a monument and a café at its base, and—as much in search of a scalding cup of coffee as in seeing any history—I crossed the road and climbed its rain-slick steps. It turned out to be the site of the first major battle of the civil war—the site, fifty-odd miles south of the 38th Parallel, that in
1950 formed the boundary between the two Koreas, where the southern forces turned and started to fight back. The monument said little, but what it said minced no words:

‘As the vicious troops of the North Korean Army crossed the 38th Parallel, U.S. troops were ready to fight to preserve freedom, determined to punish the aggressors.

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Smith’s Special Task Force stood on Jukmi Pass supported by 17 Regiment, Republic of Korea Army—the first of the United Nations—Korean Joint Operations commenced.

‘Blood formed a stream after over six hours of fierce struggle—firing line stretched as far as the Makdong River.

‘While forlorn souls sleep on this hill, how can we forget our friendship with Allied nations created in blood?’

A police patrolman who had stopped by for a break bought me a cup of coffee. ‘Walking?’ he said. ‘You mad.’ I felt it but, not wanting to abandon the adventure, launched myself back into the stinging rain and marched on. The Dutchmen had been on horses, and they had journeyed during June; in probable consequence of this relative luxury they recorded no complaints about their journey. I cursed them silently.

Three hours later and I was sheltering miserably under an overpass near the proud city of Suwon: the name, which means ‘water field’, seemed singularly appropriate as the rain hurled itself down, and the bat-blind cars, their lights flickering through the thick grey mist of the downpour, ground slowly and painfully along the road. Suwon’s city walls rose before me—massive structures that had been built by King Chongjo at the end of the eighteenth century. The king had built the walls and a magnificent fortress—lately reconstructed, and just visible through the rain—in memory of his father, Crown Prince Changhon. The prince had been the cause of a curious court battle between two Yi Dynasty court factions known as the Party of Expediency (
Sipa
) and the Party of Principle (
Pyokpa
). Their battle had developed in the mid-1770s over whether or not each approved
of the prematurely senile buffoon who was then Korea’s king, Yongjo, and the extraordinary manner in which he treated his son, the crown prince.

Basically the king accused Changhon of some trifling misdemeanour and had him locked up inside a rice box until he died—in the same year as the American War of Independence, with which not quite
all
the world was then obsessed. The Party of Expediency thought the young man had been given a raw deal; the Party of Principle applauded the kingly act; the two sides fought bitterly. When the king himself died, and his grandson Chongjo assumed the Yis’ mantle royal, the prince was given a posthumous retrial and found innocent.