On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (34 page)

What always amazed me, when I passed the place in the mornings, was the children. They came out of this giant cube of dirt and squalor wearing pure white dresses and shirts, the boys’ hair cut and combed neatly, the girls’ in plaits with ribbons, ready for their day at school. They looked immaculate. Any middle class parent in Hampshire would have been proud to send their own children alongside them.

I once went inside the city, guided through its labyrinth of tunnels by a resident. I saw the conditions the people lived in. Some had no more than a few square feet of space for their living quarters. Indeed, those in the centre of the cube had to call out each morning to ask what the weather was like in the real world. I saw the rats, the cockroaches, and the dangerous mix of electricity and water. It was a hell-hole, that city, and people had been born there and had died there. If an adult went outside and was caught without papers, he or she would be arrested and returned to China. Their children appeared to be allowed to go to school unhindered and I’m not sure why that was the case. Kowloon city was demolished the day I left Hong Kong for the last time.

When typhoons were around though, the corrugated iron sheets and plywood walls that held the slum together might easily be ripped apart.

We had only been in Hong Kong a few months when Typhoon Brenda struck the colony. It was the most powerful typhoon in years. On the day that it raged at its worst a colleague of Annette’s was due to get married to her fiancée. Sue was a speech therapist who was to wed James who worked in the financial district of the island. All other weddings were cancelled, but Sue was determined to go through with hers, Typhoon Brenda or not. Sue arranged for coaches to take the guests from Kowloon Tong to a church on the island. We were on the first coach, which had a Chinese corporal driving it. I have never experience a ride like it, with screaming high winds buffeting the vehicle, trees and telephone poles crashing around us, and a myriad of objects flying through the air and hitting the sides of the coach like bullets.

We did make the church without being blown off the road or being crushed by a pole. However by that time the rain was coming down in torrents and flooding the church floor. The high church windows were flexing and threatening to implode and shower us with stained glass. Above me Noah’s Ark was warping and bending, the banshee wind squealing through the gaps in the lead seals. Water swilled around my best shoes and soaked the turnups on my trousers.

On the roof a thousand wet drumsticks beat a tattoo.

And while this pandemonium continued, Sue came down the aisle looking more lovely than most brides on wedding days that have taken place in calmer and more placid conditions. She was followed by James – I can’t remember the music, I probably couldn’t hear it – and they were married within a smarter time that was usual for the ceremony.

It was a great wedding, because no one would ever forget it. That wedding formed the basis of a short story I later wrote, which I called ‘Typhoon’ of course, parodying Joseph Conrad’s famous story. It was published recently in a collection of mine brought out by Peter Crowther of PS Publishing. The volume is entitled
Tales from the Fragrant Harbour
and Sue and James, if you ever read it, it is wild fiction. Please forgive me for taking your unforgettable day and embroidering it.

~

Halfway through our tour in Hong Kong we were visited by my
Omni
magazine editor and friend, Ellen Datlow, who was accompanied by the fiction editor of
Playboy
magazine, Alice Turner. These two lovely New Yorkers, who pronounce ‘coffee’ delightfully as ‘corfee’ arrived while Annette was away in England, looking at boarding schools for the army. They came by way of Japan and on arriving put away their constant companion for the previous week,
Born To Shop Tokyo
, and took out their companion for the coming week,
Born To Shop Hong Kong.

We had a great deal of fun while they were there, touring the jade market, Cat Street, Temple Street market, all the shops on the island and most of the shops on Kowloon-side. We went up the Peak, over the harbour on the Star Ferry, and ate at some nice restaurants. Then one day I decided it was time to show them the other side of Hong Kong.

‘We’re going up into the New Territories,’ I told this indefatigable pair of big spenders, ‘so that you can see some greenery.’

Their enthusiasm was a little tepid, but I felt sure I could interest them once I got them on the road. I pushed them into the back seat of the Honda and drove through the Lion Rock Tunnel and out into the wilderness before they could start thinking about the air conditioned malls of Hong Kong island. I steered clear of Sai Kung, which indeed had a few shops worth the visit if one was bored with countryside.

However, no sooner were we in green hills and wild fields, with copper-coloured snakes wriggling across the hot road and purple herons decorating the ponds and clouds of white egrets the skies, when they both fell fast asleep in the rear of the car. They remained in that comatose state until we reached the Chinese border, which on the Hong Kong side was lined with stalls selling trinkets and gee-gaws.

‘Oh, shops!’ they both cried, instantly waking, and leapt out of the car to tour the stalls, chattering animatedly among themselves and with the glint-eyed vendors. New Yorkers! I gave up at that point.

~

Not long before we left Hong Kong Charlie Brown, American editor of
Locus
, the science fiction news magazine, came on a visit. When such visitors came, we often used to take them to the Peninsula Hotel. If hotels were warm blooded creatures and had royalty flowing through their veins, the Peninsula would be a Persian emperor, just as the Raffles of old Singapore would be the King of Babylon. The Peninsula has gold-plated taps in the loos and a musicians’ balcony above the coffee shop floor where violinists play Albinoni and Schubert. The Peninsula is sumptuous, opulent. I tried to take Charlie into the coffee shop but the Sikh doorman pointed to Charlie’s sandals, obviously offensive to other coffee drinkers, and refused us entry. I pointed to a woman in silver sandals, entering right at that moment. The doorman shrugged and shook his head, indicating that a different set of rules applied to the female of the species.

After Charlie had been to Hong Kong, the science fiction writers Fred Pohl and James White came through. Fred Pohl was one of those authors I had read as a youth. He was famous for his collaborations with another writer, Kornbluth. Pohl of Pohl and Kornbluth! And James White! It was wonderful to meet such men. A local Chinese sf fan group rang me and invited me to a meal they were giving Fred and Jim at a Jumbo Jau Lau, one of those immensely busy, giant, noisy restaurants in Hong Kong where they serve
dim sum
from handcarts. We went and met the great men. As with other big-name writers I have met – James Blish, Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, William Golding, others – Fred and Jim were open, friendly and generous with their time. I very much enjoyed meeting them both. We had to shout at each other, the jau lau being full of Chinese speaking at the tops of their voices, but though they were elderly they were still full of enthusiasm for
science fiction
.

William Golding I met at a literary party in Charles Monteith’s office at Faber and Faber in Russell Square. I did not know what to say to the white-haired gentleman and asked Charles for advice.

‘Oh, he likes boats – ask him about yachting,’ Charles said, airily.

Armed with this I went up to the great author, not then yet a Nobel Prize Winner, but still awesome to a fledgling writer.

‘I hear you’re a sailor, Mr Golding,’ I said.

He stared at me for a minute, then looked over my shoulder at a wickedly-beaming Charles Monteith.

‘I
hate
boats,’ William Golding replied, firmly. ‘I almost drowned when the yacht I was on recently got into trouble.’

Thank you, Charles.

~

In one year, 1990, we had seventeen sets of visitors to our Hong Kong apartment. On average they stayed about two weeks, so you can see we were rarely alone that year. Fortunately the apartment was two-in-one and some visitors we hardly saw. Glen and Wilma Swaik, Australian friends, were out and about on their own and we only joined them for the odd trip. Aussies do tend to be more self-motivated than Brits. It was our habit to show our visitors how to use the MTR (the underground) and the buses, and a map, then leave them to their own devices if they so wished.

Two final sets of visitors deserve a mention.

We met Werner and Kathy Hartmann-Campbell on our trip to Bali. Werner is a Swiss architect and Kathy an American life coach. They live in Switzerland but are fond of the Far East. They came to stay with us on their way to a holiday in the Philippines and we took them for a walk in the hills of the New Territories. In one remote valley a man walked by us followed by his dog. The hound passed me, then passed the women without a glance. Werner was following a few yards in the rear when the dog suddenly turned and savagely attacked him. Werner was badly bitten on the leg, which he took phlegmatically, without fuss.

‘It’s my height,’ said Werner, who is indeed a very tall lean man. ‘It confuses animals.’

The problem was the possibility of rabies.

We took Werner to the Queen Elizabeth hospital where they gave him an anti-rabies jab. He would need several more at different intervals throughout the next few weeks and it was vitally important that he got them on the right days. Not only that, the complications of rabies jabs are compounded by the fact that the serum is manufactured in batches and subsequent injections have to be from the same batch.

Werner and Kathy were on their way to a trek through the Philippine jungles, where they would be lucky to meet with a village let alone a town with a hospital. The timing indicated he would need one injection on the flight to Manila and one a few days later when they were on their trek. The one on the flight could be handled by using freeze bags and the aircraft’s refrigerator, but rabies serum deteriorates rapidly and there was no way Werner could carry the third injection through the heat of the Philippines’ climate. He would have to hope to find a hospital with the right batch number somewhere on his journey.

Me? I would have got on the next plane back to Switzerland, abandoning the holiday. Death from rabies is one of the worst ways to leave this imperfect but precious world of ours. Madness, hydrophobia, agonising pain. A death to be avoided at all cost, I would say. But Werner Hartmann-Campbell is made of sterner material than Garry Kilworth. Werner decided that his trek was important to him and the pair of them boarded their flight for the Philippines with Werner saying, ‘Well, that nurse in the hospital taught me one thing – how to shoot up.’ He was treating it all as a joke, but I really did fear for him and was anxious for news of them over the next two weeks.

The story has a happy ending. On the day Werner needed his third injection they came across a small jungle hospital run by nuns. Incredibly, in the nuns’ fridge was anti-rabies serum bearing the batch number required by my intrepid Swiss friend. Well sir, I certainly had sleepless nights over that incident, but I have no idea whether Werner did. When he returned to Switzerland he was contacted by the Swiss tropical diseases department and asked to write an article on his experience.

Werner later wrote to me about a desire to visit Australia.

‘The trouble with Switzerland,’ he said, ‘is that the horizons all tend to curve upwards. I want to go the Outback where I’m told I will be able to see to infinity without the landscape pointing at the sky.’

I’ve not yet learned whether he got there, but I certainly did.

~

One evening I went to pick up Annette from Osborne Barracks after she had spent a long hot day in her non-air-conditioned beat-up Vauxhall getting lost in the streets of Mong Kok. We came back to the apartment on Rhonda Road to find a young couple sitting on the steps of Vista Panorama. They had fold-up bicycles with them. Their expressions registered weariness and mild depression.

On enquiry we found that they were an American pair cycling round the world and they had been expecting to stay in the apartment of Annette’s workmate, Sue. However, we knew that Sue and James were on holiday.

‘You can stay with us the night,’ said Annette, ‘then perhaps look for somewhere else tomorrow.’

It was our policy at that time to offer beds overnight to waifs and strays and to tell them we would help them to look for a cheap hotel the next day. If they turned out to be reasonable human beings we let them stay. If we found we couldn’t cope with them, we did indeed intend assisting them in finding alternative accommodation. We had already given a bed to a temporarily homeless army corporal and his new wife overnight and on that occasion we learned they were delightful people and we had no cause to tell them their was no further room at the inn. In fact we never needed to chuck anyone out into the hordes that swarmed in the streets of Hong Kong, a testament to the fact that most people are reasonable human beings.

So we let the American cyclists stay, and indeed, they were a charming couple and full of stories about their travels. They called themselves the
Roamin’ Wyomin’s
, hailing from that state. They lived by sending home printed newsletters about their adventures and the woman’s mother sold these to neighbours and friends to provide travelling money. These two stayed a week and then left their bikes with us while they went up into China. They promised to be back within two weeks, but three weeks later there was still no sign of them. In fact they had tried to argue with Chinese officials about Tibet and had ended up in jail. A letter of apology to the Chinese government was finally penned and they were allowed to leave China. They came to us rather bedraggled but still full of enthusiasm for their onward journey. Later we learned it took seven years for them to complete their circuit of the globe. They continued cycling. Where they are now I have no idea, but I’m sure it’s not in Wyoming.