On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (30 page)

I would soon learn what it was like to be an army wife, now that our roles were reversed. As a dependant I would have to get my captain spouse to sign that I could have a library ticket. I would not be a member of the Osborne Barracks Officers’ Mess as she was, but would only be allowed to use the bar if she was present and accompanying me. In fact I had few rights or privileges that were not endorsed by her. She was indeed the master of the house, the boss, the rent-payer and the layer down of rules and regulations. The army would not listen to me for a moment, if I had any complaints about our accommodation. I barely existed so far as they were concerned. Only Captain AJ was important.

Phoooeeey, I didn’t like that at all.

The only good part about this new arrangement was that if we signed the inventory for a ‘Hangars aircraft’ instead of a ‘Hangers coat’ by mistake, Annette would be the one responsible and not me.

Hong Kong is an amazing city. In 1988 it had eight million people living in an area not much bigger than Southend-on-Sea. It hummed, banged and bustled with commerce and business, from the man beating out pots and pans on the pavement outside an open-fronted shop in Mong Kok, Kowloon-side, to the mighty Jardine-Matheson building on the island. Even as we were landing on the long jetty that pretended to be a runway for Kai Tak Airport, I could see down below the Star Ferries going between Kowloon and the island; the tall buildings dominated by the new triangular Bank of China; the reticulated railway rising from Midlevels to the Peak; buses, cars, motorcycles, bikes, foot passengers and most impressive of all, the thousands of junks, between-island ferries and boats, sampans, ocean-going ships, smacks, motor boats and other craft that were criss-crossing the harbour and skirting Stonecutter’s Island.

It did indeed look like a colony that never slept.

Yet Hong Kong is not just a city. Kowloon is a triangular-shaped peninsula. Halfway up that peninsula is a row of hills which the Chinese call ‘dragons’. Indeed, the word Kowloon (Gau Lung) in Cantonese means ‘Nine Dragons’ and this refers to those hills, though one of the dragons has been excavated for building materials. Beyond the eight-and-a-half dragons, reached by the Lion Rock Pass, or round one of the two ends of the range, is the New Territories, which is mostly countryside. There are huge parks up there, and mountains like Tai Mo Shan, and yes one or two big towns like Shatin, Tai Po and the port of Sai Kung, but it is abundant with greenery and was once full of duck farms, and small banana plantations, and piggeries, and other such rural establishments. There you will find ‘spirit trees’ covered in ribbons and rags, and long tough walks on the trails, and hidden restaurants that serve the most delicious dishes.

Hong Kong is without question, magical, especially if you live there long enough to find all its pockets and seams.

The moment we landed and I smelled the old familiar smells of Singapore, I knew this was going to be a wonderful tour of duty. Not
my
tour of duty, but nevertheless, I was along for the ride. We were picked up by Robin Moseley, Annette’s new boss, and his wife Glynis. We liked them both immediately. They were affable, friendly and gave us plenty of information. The usual things had to be sorted almost immediately: bank account, work-place, accommodation, bus time-tables, etc. I seem to remember these were all done in a day. Miraculous.

This seems like a good place to put in an anecdote, a warning on the perils of travel as related by Robin Moseley, Esquire.

When Robin and Glynis lived in Cyprus they decided to go on holiday to Egypt with another couple we knew in Hong Kong, Fiona and Howard. Howard was a major in the army at the time and was convinced that if he stuck to drinking beer and avoided water in Egypt, he wouldn’t suffer from Pharaoh’s revenge. What actually happened was – yes – he became dangerously dehydrated. The quartet were staying in a Cairo hotel which they later described as horrendously dirty, with unusable bathroom facilities, but that is by-the-by. The couples’ rooms were separated by a long u-shaped corridor. In the middle of the night there was a terrible screaming and then a hammering on the door to Robin and Glynis’s room. Robin woke in a panicky, fuzzy state, got up and opened the door to be confronted by a distraught Fiona.

‘Quick, quick,’ screeched Fiona, ‘I think Howard’s dying.’

She then fled back down the corridor with Robin some yards behind, she in her nightdress, he in his pyjamas. Lining the corridor were the off-duty staff of the hotel, sleeping against the walls (presumably having no rooms of their own) who woke to see this hysterical European woman in her nightie being pursued by a gentleman trying to hold up his pyjama bottoms. Some of them rose to chase after the would-be rapist and his victim. When Robin reached the room of his friends, he had a number of hotel staff close on his heels.

Howard, however, was aware enough to know that his room was suddenly crowding with strange people and he pulled the sheet up to his eyes, crying, ‘I’m all right! I’m all right. Leave me alone.’

Next morning it was Robin’s job to scour the backstreets of Cairo looking for glucose for Howard. He entered a dingy-looking chemist shop which was not much more than a hole in the wall, indeed without much hope, but the chemist turned out to speak perfect Oxford English and disappeared into the back of his shop. He emerged with a large package and when it was unravelled he proudly presented the curious Robin with a stand, rubber tubes and bottle full of glucose complete with a nice long needle for treating a patient intravenously.

Robin said later he would dearly have loved to have gone back to Howard and begun to set up the equipment, saying, ‘You’ll be fine – I’ve just had a quick lesson on how to use this!’ However, he settled for some glucose tablets, vowing to get even with Howard some other way.

~

Our flat – there are very few houses in Hong Kong – was on the seventh floor of a building named Vista Panorama, which the military residents had swiftly nicknamed Vista Paranoia. It stood on a slope above the main highway through the Lion Rock Tunnel, and in the path of the aircraft that were heading towards a chequer-board that indicated the flight path to the Kai Tak Airport runway. From our balcony we could see the faces of the passengers on the jumbo jets. During a typhoon those faces would be chalk white with fear and who could blame their owners? Below the balcony was a steeply-sloping dual-carriageway that was the Waterloo Road and on wet days there would be at least two or three crashes. On the first day there we witnessed a glazier’s lorry carrying dozens of panes of glass spinning out of control and smashing into the central barrier. The reader surely has the imagination to envisage the outcome.

The civilian rent for a flat in Vista Panorama in 1988 was around £3000 per month, but we imagined that the armed services got special discounts or something. The car park underneath the flats was full of Rolls Royces owned by Chinese occupants of the building. Our twelve-year-old Honda sat quietly among them, saying nothing.

The water system in Hong Kong was interesting. Toilets, and any appliances that did not need fresh water, were flushed with sea water. Thus our bathroom smelled of the ocean briny and the toilet pan was always encrusted with shining crystals of salt. There were no hot water washing machines in Hong Kong. All machines were cold water. Indeed the clothes seemed just as clean there as they do in UK. The washing was hung out of the back windows on long bamboo poles and a fine sight it made, rivalling the hundreds of flags that had fluttered from Lord Nelson’s fleet of ships after the British victory at Trafalgar.

Annette’s salary was more than adequate and I was earning substantial advances for my books by this time. We soon settled back into military life, with its long round of Officer’s Mess occasions – formal dinners, informal dinners, modest dances, full-blooded balls, films and many other entertainments. If we were not going to our own mess we were going to one on another military base, such as Tamar Naval Base, or the Ghurkha Mess. Civilian restaurants in Hong Kong were, and I imagine still are, the best in the world. Schezwan, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, French, Peking. All were available in their numbers and all were excellent. If one was short of cash for any reason, there were always the ‘clubs’ and ‘messes’ of Chung King Mansions, a huge slum building in the heart of Kowloon, beloved of penny-poor backpackers, which were just as good but because they had no fire exits or adequate kitchens were not allowed to call themselves restaurants. These clubs and messes served mostly Indian food, sometimes Ghurkha curries, very cheaply.

During the day, while Annette was at work, and sometimes when the two of us were together, there were a multitude of parks and other interesting places to visit. Bonsai parks, grown-up-tree parks, Japanese gardens, rock gardens. The open-air food markets were something else, selling snakes for the pot, frogs, newts and their cousin amphibians, always live fish cut open and laid out so that you could see their hearts pulsing, vegetables of strange shapes and designs, weird fungi, crunchy-looking insects, barrels boiling with eels, ancient black eggs, severed horse’s heads, every kind of mammal – in fact it was said, and I believe it to be true, that the Cantonese eat anything that walks or swims with its back to the sky. Sadly they are not into cannibalism, which is a shame, because that would have rounded off things very nicely.

We quickly learned that
face
was very important to our fellow citizens. No Canton man or woman wishes to lose face by saying ‘no’. Early on I went into a record shop and asked if they had a particular jazz number. ‘Yes,’ said the assistant, and disappeared into the back of the shop, never to be seen again. He did not have it, but he wasn’t going to give us the satisfaction of knowing that fact. A woman friend got in a taxi and asked to be taken to a particular school in a remote section of Kowloon Tong. The taxi driver had not understood her, but did not want to lose face by asking for the destination again, so he drove her to where he thought she wanted to go, a pig farm in the New Territories.

What I loved to do most, while Annette was at work, was visit Cat Street on Hong Kong Island, which was lined with antique and junk shops. There I would happily spend our money on bird cages (minus the birds of course), ancient clocks, carpets, Korean tansus, strange boxes, brass ornaments, pieces of jade, Chinese rosewood chairs of antique design, carved figures, masks. When I was not in Cat Street, Bird Street or the Jade Market, I was in Overjoys, who made ceramics. There I purchased beautiful porcelain bowls, lazy susans, Canton Rose vases and lots of lamps with wonderful oriental bases. Annette would come home of an evening and groan. ‘Not
another
clock? What are we going to do with them all? Where are we going to put them when we go home?’ True, that has been a problem and most of them have had to be given away to relatives and friends, leaving just my favourites to gloat over.

~

Annette spent a week in her army car, an old small Vauxhall with no air conditioning, getting used to the routes which she would have to take around Hong Kong. Twice she went illegally into mainland China by mistake, the border guards waving her through both ways, probably due to the fact that she had a crest on the doors of the car. They surely must have wondered why this pretty blonde lady obviously of Western origin, wanted to drive back and forth into the economic zone of Shenzen?

The problem with driving in Hong Kong was that there were no roundabouts and if you got into the wrong lane you were doomed. Whenever I did that, and Annette said it was the same for her, I always ended up in the maze of back streets in the most populated area of the planet – Mong Kok. Mong Kok was a densely peopled section of Hong Kong with tall buildings containing thousands of tiny flats and a multitude of small businesses such as pot-and-pan makers, paper makers, furniture makers, boiler makers, bicycle makers, every kind of makers. The noise level, of small strong men beating various metals, was horrendous.

Mong Kok also had Bird Street, with its wonderful bamboo cages of all shapes and designs. I hate the idea of wild birds in cages, even if they are taken for walks through the park on a Sunday, but the cages were works of art. The Jade Market was there too, with its dozens of stalls selling carved jade objects and simply lumps of the stuff. Some pieces of jade are worth thousands of Hong Kong dollars, others a few cents, and Gweilos like me have no idea what a Chinese person is looking for in a piece of jade. Patterns? Colours? Clarity? Probably all those, but the likelihood of a
gweilo
guessing right is down below zero somewhere.

Gweilo
(often spelt
gwailo
).

The word means something like
ghost person.
Whether it was meant originally to be derogatory, or was simply a neutral description of the pale invaders from the West, I have no idea. Having lived in more than one colony I can tell you that the expats almost always happily embrace such nicknames. In the case of
gweilo
, it was used both orally and in print. The English-language newspaper, the
South China Morning Post
, always referred to expats as
gweilos
, as did books and magazines. We used the word as if we had invented it for ourselves. We may have conquered distant lands without conscience, but no one could accuse expatriate Westerners of being unable to laugh at themselves.

Annette then, learned to drive around the Crown Colony. It was winter when we arrived, just a week or two before Christmas, so the lack of air conditioning in the car was not important. Hong Kong has a chilly, very very humid winter, which needs light bulbs burning permanently in wardrobes to keep clothes from going mouldy and causes photographs to wrinkle in their frames. However, the summers are stiflingly hot. Not a wonderful climate, but bearable for one who was brought up in Aden and Singapore, both of which are unbelievably hot and humid.

Annette adjusts herself to extreme climates almost immediately. She has this strange internal thermostat which drives me crazy. Any change in temperature outside a building is coped with without a murmur of complaint. Any small variation within a building has her declaring it has ‘suddenly’ got extremely hot or insufferably cold.