On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (32 page)

Weekends, we occasionally took the ferry to the Portuguese colony of Macau, which at that time was in elegant decay. The colonial buildings, the architecture, had once been beautifully painted, but by the late ’80s had faded colours and the signs were that the owners were allowing them to drift towards abandonment. In 1999, two years after Hong Kong was due to be handed back to the Chinese government, the Portuguese were also going to return their grabbed land to its original owners. Macau stood on the mouth of the Pearl River and the Portuguese had built an amazing bridge over the harbour. It curved steeply but gracefully in what was almost a semi-circle. Going over it one was tempted to reach up and touch the base of the sky. On the far side of the bridge, from where the ferry landed, were restaurants that served the most delicious
bacalao
meals. It was worth going to Macau just for the cuisine.

However, the main attraction for Hongkongers was the casino. Gambling in Hong Kong was only permitted at the race tracks, Happy Valley and Shatin, and then only through the state tote. Casinos and all other forms of gambling were illegal in Hong Kong. Macau then, attracted Hong Kong Chinese, many of whom loved to gamble. Through the History Society we had made friends with a judge and his wife. Peter Surmon was an ex-RAF officer who was called to the bar after leaving the service and had been appointed as a judge, first in Gilbert Islands in the Pacific, then in Hong Kong. Peter always said he would not have made a good judge in UK. ‘I have to have pause for thought and in Hong Kong the translator gives me that. It gives me time to reflect.’ We first went to Macau with the Surmons and played a casino’s machines with a set amount of dollars. We lost but I retained one dollar of the set $200. (At that time £1 equalled $10). I left the casino ‘solvent’.

So, a trip to Macau or to one of the many outlying islands belonging to Hong Kong, such as Lantau with its magnificent giant Buddha and wonderful Sunset Peak, or Lamma Island where the fish restaurants abound. John and Grace Chidlow came to stay with us and we took them for a walk in the mountains of Lantau, climbing Sunset Peak. On the way up we encountered a pit viper which was sleeping stretched across the path. Grace and Annette had already walked over it without seeing it, but before John and I got to it, it was rearing ready to strike. There was a sheer cliff face to our left and a drop of several hundred feet to our right, with the path ahead only three feet wide. There was nowhere else to go. We had to ask the women to distract the snake with small pebbles while we jumped over it one at a time, hoping not to get bitten in mid-air. The viper got very very angry, but missed his strike. Another couple some way behind us spent the next several hundred yards fearfully tiptoeing along, not knowing where on the track they were going to encounter an incensed serpent looking for payback.

That was only one of our several encounters with snakes in Hong Kong. It was usually Annette who found them.

‘I’m always up to my neck in vegetation,’ she complained once, after encountering a vivid green bamboo snake at eye level. ‘Can’t we go for a gentle walk, like we do at home?’

Another time, on track over the Nine Dragons behind our flat, she went to sit down on a rock and a snake suddenly rose up out of some dead leaves. Luckly there was no contact. The snake was a red-necked keelback, and it was – like the bamboo snake and the pit viper – poisonous enough to be a little worrying. Once the snake had retracted itself, Annette got interested in it and followed it along a gully until it disappeared. It was quite a handsome creature.

There are six deadly snakes in Hong Kong, the most dangerous of which is the king cobra. Kraits and coral snakes carry lethal venom but they – like humans – are not fond of casual meetings and usually head off in the opposite direction. King cobras however are aggressive and will attack if disturbed or confronted. They stand six feet tall when they rear to strike and thus are able to look a man directly in the eyes. A little unnerving, to be sure. However, I heard of only one snake-bite death while I was in Hong Kong. A jogger in one of the parks was bitten by an unknown snake as he ran past a bush. He never made it back to his car.

The only other animals that were of any concern to us, apart from rabid dogs, were the rhesus macaque monkeys. These lived in the same hills on which we met the red-necked keelback. The macaques weren’t particularly big animals, standing at half-a-metre tall, but like the king cobra, they were antagonistic and would rush at you, snapping their teeth. They looked fairly stocky and muscular too. We began carrying brightly-coloured automatics on those walks. When they came at us we would point our weapons and press the buttons. The sudden explosion of colour as the brollies flew open in the animal’s face caused the monkey to shriek with fright and run back in the opposite direction.

On Lantau Island there were some shacks on a patch of unkempt scrubland. Dusty bushes grew into each other, the ground was covered with creepers and there were one or two dwarf trees. It was said there were cobras in the undergrowth. These shacks were owned by the army and could be hired out for the weekend by army personnel. We used them several times, to entertain our guests. Rob and Sarah came with us, when they were in Hong Kong. Peter and Marti Beere were going to until Marti heard about the cobras and who can blame her. The last couple to come with us were Pete and Peggy Good, our old friends from Shoeburyness. We usually arrived on the six o’clock evening ferry. The time we went with Pete and Peggy was no exception. It was beginning to get dark and I swept the area outside the shack with torchlight before opening the screen door and stepping inside ushering Peggy in ahead of me. Pete and Annette were coming up behind.

I switched on the light and Peggy turned towards the doorway through which we had just entered. I was facing her and I saw her expression change to terror. She screamed high, long and loud, pointing with a shaking finger towards the door. I did not want to turn round and see what was there. I was absolutely positive there was a cobra behind me. But of course I did turn and it was not a cobra but a giant spider spread across the screen of the door. Peggy had a phobia of spiders and she didn’t stop screaming and pointing until Pete, coming through the doorway now, opened the screen and gave it a slam, sending the spider hurtling out into the night. By God it was a big one though. Ordinarily spiders don’t bother me, but I wouldn’t have wanted that one on my lap.

‘Everything’s all right now,’ Pete reassured, Peggy. ‘It’s fine. It’s halfway to Hong Kong by now. I gave it the fright of its life.’

‘It gave me the fright of my life, you mean,’ she replied.

Peggy sat down, lit a cigarette with shaking hands, and almost took the whole fag down in one draw, quick as a dynamite fuse. I fully expected that we would pick up the suitcases and catch the same ferry back to Hong Kong, but though I shouldn’t have been, I was surprised by Peggy’s courage. She said she would stay, even though I could see she was still quite scared. Pete gave her a big hug and told her how brave she was and Peggy screwed up her nose as if to say, yeah, and probably stupid for not obeying my instincts and running off home.

The big hairy eight-legged fellah never returned, but Pete told me later he had woken the next morning and on opening his eyes had seen an enormous black cockroach scuttling across the ceiling. Peggy was on the point of waking up too. She would have seen the monster, if he had not grabbed her and surprised her with a big good-morning kiss.

~

I had spent quite a few years in the Sergeants’ Mess during my time in the air force. In Hong Kong I got a taste of the Officers’ Mess. Our first formal regimental dinner at Osborne Barracks was quite something.

Before the dinner there was the ‘Beating Of The Retreat’ on the parade ground outside, performed by the band of the Royal Regiment of Wales along with their mascot goat, Taffy. Quite a moving experience at sunset, looking out over Kowloon Tong.

Then we went in to the evening meal.

I was in my new dinner jacket, purchased from Sam’s Tailor (sic) of Tsim Sha Choi, suit maker to celebrities and princes. Sam had photos lining his walls: Prince Phillip, Prince Charles, pop stars, film stars. I tried to tell him I was a famous writer and should have my phizzog up there with the best. He laughed and nudged me.

Annette had a new cocktail dress and looked stunning.

Once seated at the long oak table I looked around me. Army officers of all ranks up to colonel sat there in their military finery, medals glinting, mess dress immaculate. They scrubbed up well, those mostly young men, looking smooth and suave, full of élan. Waiters hovered in the background, assisting ladies with their chairs when there was no gallant officer handy. A regimental band smaller than the one which had beat the retreat was in the corner of the ballroom, playing something. On the table was the regimental silver, the crowning glory of which were the condiments. I had never seen such a huge and magnificent salt cellar. I can’t remember what it represented exactly, but I have a mind it was a silver St George slaying a silver dragon. I do remember it was about the size of wok and the salt lay like a glinting white desert in its bowl.

I had been warned to go to the toilet before sitting down at the table. There was an unwritten law that no one rose from their seat until after the toast to the Queen, which was quite a way through the dinner. A lieutenant who had been too drunk to remember had once got up and when he returned his chair was missing. He had to crouch down on his haunches for the rest of meal, talking to the lady beside him as if he were fine and dandy when he was actually in great pain.

The wait was a bit uncomfortable for me because it was during the ’80s/’90s period that my prostate began to bother me.

Once the dinner had started and we were happily chatting to our neighbours, the band began to play regimental tunes. Osborne was a services camp, not an infantry regiment base. The infantry regiment was on the island, at Stanley. At Osborne there were educationalists, dentists, doctors, quartermasters, family therapists (Annette), schoolteachers, youth workers, speech therapists, transport men, others. A whole Quality Street box of officers and civilians. However, all these people belonged to a corps, even though they were not cavalry or infantry regiments.

So, when the band in the corner played the Education Corps’ tune, there were those who stood smartly to attention. The next tune was for the Dentists and a neighbour of ours, an officer and a lady, Marie, actually stood on her chair before saluting. (Her husband had been a Ghurkha officer and had joined me and a few others as a male ‘dependants’.) And so on, throughout the dinner, men or women officers stood up when the band played their particular corps march. Then towards the end of the evening I heard ‘Paperback Writer’ being played and knew it my turn to acknowledge them. I stood up and gave everyone an embarrassed little nod of acknowledgement. Finally, it was the turn of the Royal Navy officers present. They do not stand for bands or even the Queen’s toast. It is an old tradition with them. Otherwise on board ship they would bang their heads on the low bulkhead and knock themselves silly.

At the end of the evening the port bottle was passed round to the right. I’d always wanted to take part in an after-dinner passing round of the port, as in the movie
Charge of the Light Brigade
. It seems to me like a fine tradition which shouldn’t be lost. Get rid of fox hunting, yeah, but don’t get rid of passing the port.

A footnote about the Welsh regiment and their mascot.

The Ghurkhas always celebrate the Hindu festival of Diwali. The evening before one such ceremony a Ghurkha officer rang the Welsh CO and asked if his regiment could borrow Taffy for the next day. The CO, probably up to his neck in paperwork, silently pondered the reason for this request. After a minute or two he got it and slammed down the phone. It is the custom for the Ghurkha regiment to decapitate a goat for the festival of Diwali.

While on the subject of decapitation and death, there were four killings that I know of while we lived in Hong Kong. The first was an officer who was supposed to have shot himself twice in the chest, but there were other factors that pointed away from suicide and towards murder. The second was a soldier found on the Chinese border, chopped to bits. Apparently he had been having an affaire with another man’s wife. The third was the killing of a Nepalese Ghurkha officer. Quite a dramatic murder. The officer had been bullying one of his soldiers who was of a
higher
caste than himself. On a public parade one day the bullied soldier suddenly stepped out of the ranks, drew his kukri, and neatly beheaded the officer in question. (He got three years inside and discharged from the army.) The fourth – bearing in mind that four is an unlucky number in Cantonese because it is the same word as ‘death’ – was a British army major who went into his office one morning, pulled open his desk draw only to find a grenade wired to the drawer handle. He died instantly of course, after losing most of his head. There was talk that the major had denied the Ghurkha regiment under his command an expected posting to UK, where they would usually earn more money than is normal for their Far East postings. Moral? Don’t screw with the Ghurkhas.

Back to the more pleasant subject of evening entertainment. Annette and I were once invited to a colonel’s house for a private dinner. The colonel enjoyed his alcohol and liked others to do the same. One of his party tricks was spiking the drinks with vodka.

There were about eight guests at the dinner, one of whom was a young lieutenant and his wife. Eager to please the young man had downed several drinks before the first course. We were halfway through the soup when he suddenly fell forward, his face in his soup bowl, completely senseless. His very cool young wife grabbed him by the hair and gently saved him from drowning.

‘David’s not been feeling well lately,’ she said to our host. ‘I think I’d better take him home. If you will excuse us?’

She was assisted to the door by servants and we heard her drive away just as the fish was being served.