A Prince Charmed at the Fair by a Hong Kong Steam Roller

Trade posters from British Iindustries Fairs in the 1930s - 1932, 1934 and 1937

If you’ve read my memoir, The Hong Kong Letters, you’ll be familiar with my boss, Betty Church, the larger-than-life character who ran an advertising agency in Hong Kong.  I was 21, she was 64 and we had never met when I arrived in the Colony to start work in 1968 as her secretary.

Mrs Church wanted a lively young companion with a good ear to listen to her extraordinary stockpile of anecdotes.  Her energy and vitality were legendary, her opinions, blunt and her praise of Empire, absolute. Although initially, I was captivated, it did not end well!

Yet over time my grudging deference has changed to outright admiration – she was a truly remarkable woman, sharp, a savvy strategist and a crack manipulator. Always ahead of the pack, her hypnotic charm had the effect of a runaway steam-roller descending an alpine pass.

Models paraded this grand stairway at Olympia each year at the BIF for a fabulous show of British fashion.

Betty Church set sail each year for London and the British Industries Fair.  One of the best was in 1933 when King George V and his wife, Queen Mary, an enthusiastic supporter of the event, paused to applaud the huge Chinese lanterns outside the Hong Kong and Singapore pavillion. Intrigued, the Queen cast her eye over the stand where Betty had reproduced the elegant study of a wealthy Chinese gentleman - fine rosewood chairs and joss tables, silk rugs and porcelain, orchestrated in hues of scarlet, jade-green and gold.

All the exhibitors had strict instructions not to engage with the royal party. Not to speak, unless spoken too. Yet when Queen Mary complimented her on the warm colouring of her wonderful display, Betty Church could not help herself. If the King and Queen lingered at the stand, that was  good enough for the press.

Queen Mary visited the British Industries Fair every year and was a keen supporter of stands from the dominions, colonies and territories of the British Empire.

This is a picture of Betty in 1937. It is the first time I found a picture of her young and engaging and determined. Later she was so formidable I found it difficult to see how she had charmed them all. This picture says it all.

The Observer’s reporter wrote: “In one of the jewel boxes of the Exhibition is a bureau from Hong Kong and Singapore, at which the visitor will learn how a marvellous underdeveloped market is awaiting our manufacturers in China and Malaya.” Betty had made headlines.  

Next it was the turn of the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, to drop by and congratulate Betty on her endeavours to develop British trade in China.

Finally, when the Prince of Wales made his visit to the exhibition, Betty’s pièce de résistance, worked exactly to plan. She had attired her two assistants in closely fitting silk cheongsams - the high necked, short-sleeved Manchu style dress with a slit skirt guaranteed to captivate a man’s attention.

It was not surprising HRH Prince Edward, lingered to speak to the lovely ladies. Neither should we be incredulous that Betty had a bottle of champagne on ice, just in case.  The Prince was delighted and happily accepted a glass of bubbles.

Betty roared with laughter fifty years later when she recounted how everyone was furious at her disgraceful behaviour at the Fair and how she was severely rapped over the knuckles. And I expect she roared with laughter at the time.

The Prince of Wales ascended the throne in January 1936 when George V died. The first public engagement for the new king was the British Industries Fair. Newsreel coverage of his visit to the Fair says his priority was to visit the Empire section.  I am sure Betty had the champagne ready although by that time Edward had his sights firmly set on his mistress, Mrs Wallace Simpson, an American divorcée and was probably more conscious of decorum in his new role. I am sure she would have told us if there had been a second round!

This is the 1939 stand, sadly I cannot find an image of the famous 1933 stand where Queen Mary stopped to stare and Betty toasted the Prince of Wales with champagne.

Betty spoke of another memorable Fair in 1939. That year she was selected as the only woman to broadcast for the BBC on a round-the-Empire hook-up to explore developing trade between the colonies.

No surprises really as she had single-handedly established herself as the virtuoso whiz on Far East trade. She rolled over politicians, taipans and industry VIPs with vim, vigour and hyperbole. 

Part 3 : The Sister Ships

This poster is undated - probably around 1915.. The ship in the distance is one of the Egypt Class sister ships. My grandfather, Jimmy, sailed from Tilbury to India on one of them, the SS Arabia. The poster powerfully suggests the enchantment of heading East at the beginning of a new millennium.

THIS POST FOLLOWS ON FROM PREVIOUS POSTS recording a 1907 trip that took my grandfather, Jimmy Steven, around the world.

I expected to put my grandfather Jimmy on his ship and start the voyage, until my shoulder-dwelling left-ear muse, insisted that first, I check out the SS Arabia.

Boarding ship is an uncanny transition. Stepping off terra firma overrides our innate sense of self-preservation. And historically, long sea voyages to Britain’s burgeoning Empire had not been without peril and were certainly uncomfortable.

Yet the 20th Century brought confidence afloat as steel and steam took over from wood and sail; while on land, growing prosperity made life a lot more comfortable and convenient.

Well-being wrought a change of sea-psyche; pilgrims and explorers might have relished starting their hardships from the moment they set foot on board, not so travellers in the new millennium who did not wish to make too many sacrifices.

The SS Arabia in the Thames near Tilbury. “She was elegant - long and sleek. Her hull, twin funnels and masts were fashionably painted all in black.”

The SS Arabia was not a broad or big ship - she was elegant, long and sleek. Her hull, twin funnels and masts were fashionably painted all in black.

P&O was proud of the quality of its passenger list. There were only two classes on the SS Arabia – wealthy tourists, businessmen, Indian Army officers and colonial officials, travelled in First; while clergymen, missionaries, schoolteachers and Indian retainers travelled in Second.

SS Arabia was the fourth of a sister ship quintette. The five P&O ‘Egypt Class’ liners were launched between 1896 and 1900 to service the line’s India and Australia routes. SS Arabia came after SS India, SS China and SS Egypt and before SS Persia. The SS Arabia and three of her sister ships were built by Caird & Co, a shipyard at Greenock on the Clyde. Jimmy would have known that – his firm might even have supplied some of the fittings. The odd-man out, SS China, was built in Belfast by the same yard that launched the ill-fated SS Titanic, 15 years later.

Launch of SS India in 1896, the first of the Egypt Class sister ships - built by Caird & Co, Greenock on the Clyde.

P&O were confident in a competitive market knowing their ships were fitted with the most modern conveniences of the day – electricity and refrigeration, a huge improvement in on-board convenience. And P&O had gone a step further – they’d ‘domesticated’ shipboard interiors. Typically, marine quarters were crafted by skilled shipbuilder’s carpenters – who, as we might expect - produced fine and practical, solid workmanship.

The company resolved that a more flamboyant, yet elegant, approach to décor would impart a sense of normality to life on the ocean waves. Comfortable passengers would be feel-safe passengers. And creating stylish surroundings in the era’s art-nouveau style would significantly enhance the reputation P&O fostered as the clear choice for the discerning traveller. Nothing too ostentatious, style and discreet elegance were the go.

Thomas Edward Collcutt, English architect 1840-1924 - He designed several iconic London buildings

The company turned to a leading architect of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Thomas Edward Collcutt. The famous designer was renowned for his rich and sumptuous interiors in public spaces. Just choosing Collcutt was a publicity coup.

The assignment didn’t come out-of-the-blue, Collcutt had worked with P&O for years, designing their offices and exhibition exhibits, so we can guess at many a conversation about the possibilities of floating his skills!

Collcutt’s concepts flowed through dining rooms, saloons, connecting corridors and stairways of the blueprints. Master craftsmen fashioned plasterwork, honed wood balustrades and panelling, fired ceramic tiles, constructed unique furniture and stitched upholstery to his vision. Every element in harmony. Every skill of the masterclass. Stained glass skylights, light-fittings, piano stools, armchairs and grand pianos – nothing was incidental to the vision.

P&O wanted each ship to differ enough to be distinctive, yet not lose the bond of sisterhood. They set the decorative theme. Stability from which to anticipate the promise of enticing encounters en route. Departing England’s green and pleasant land through the Suez Canal to India and the Orient, past smoking volcanos, stormy weather and pastoral bliss, the tigers and elephants of India and beyond the shimmering promise of exotic fruit, palm fronds, sailing junks and picturesque Chinese panoramas.

William De Morgan - 1839-1917 - the most important ceramic artist of The Arts and Crafts Movement.. Look up his work, and you may find it familiar! I delight in his images.

“De Morgan has a progressive and resourceful mind, accepting the ancient and simple traditions of the crafts, but not content to rest there” – May Morris (Daughter of designer William Morris who followed in her father’s footsteps designing embroidery and jewellery.

Collcutt’s master stroke was engaging William De Morgan*, designer of tiles and ceramics whose vivid portrayal of nature, heavily influenced by Turkish and Islamic art, was strongly trending. To fulfil his brief from Collcutt, he composed individual ceramic panels and tiles for the sisterships – carefully glazed, wonderful works of art to depict the voyage theme. They were not just delightful but practical – especially for the smoking room and corridors, and seamlessly connected with the rest of Collcutt’s design.

(Seamlessly perhaps but not soundly according to one account – I am not sure from which ship for De Morgan’s ceramics featured on twelve P&O liners - of an executive being showered with De Morgan’s tiles when the ship was buffeted in a fierce storm!)

P&O were on the money for history looks back to the period between the 1900s and the end of the 1930s as the golden age of ocean travel when the pleasure of the journey became as important as the destination. The ratio of ladies to gentlemen increased along with a raft of shipboard conventions and dress codes. Yet, everyone knew, moonlight, wind in the hair and salt in the air, were conducive to amour, enchantment and shipboard flirtations which often left decorum as far behind as the disappearing shoreline.

It was when I first came across the tilework of De Morgan that I wanted to look inside SS Arabia. Once I was in, I felt intoxicated – all at sea. I longed to trail my hands along carved banisters, put my palms on the cool tiles and run my fingers through the velvety pile of the moquette upholstery. I craved a deckchair in the moonlight, the flicker of a lighter and, yes, a warm caress.

One of the De Morgan panels from the SS Arabia

See – as a phantom, I’ll never bother you and freak out your future, I’ll go the other way, back to the golden age of ocean travel, or even further, to sailing barques and brigs, clippers and carracks. I’ll kick up my heels, befriend the ship’s cat, raise hell. And when the going get’s rough, well, I can cut loose and visit you.

And now reading over Jimmy’s letters, I can imagine him at dinner in a saloon of magnificent appearance – spacious with cathedral loftiness…, or walking the deck greeting ladies in deckchairs, or in the smoking room, which some said was the loveliest place on the ship.

This is the smoking room of the SS India, a sister ship to the SS Arabia.

A passageway on the SS Arabia. Note De Morgan’s tile panel in the background.

I like to think that Jimmy appreciated all of it and I am fairly confident that he did, given that Glasgow was a prominent centre of decorative design – and had developed its own ‘Glasgow Style’ at the time. Who knows, perhaps the very attention to detail on the SS Arabia, influenced how he saw his destinations and piqued his interest in the curios and antiques he collected.

Dining room on SS India - sister ship of SS Arabia. The dining chairs were fixed to the deck with rotating seats. Dining was at long communal tables. It was the same in many restaurants of the day.

Alas those marvellous interiors have all but been lost to us. Only a few contemporary photographs and descriptions remain. In 1916, during WW1, SS Arabia, still plying passengers back and forth from India, was sunk in the Mediterranean in broad daylight by a German torpedo. The sinking of a passenger liner, Germany conceded, was a regrettable mistake. The commander of the U-boat explained he expected passenger liners to be painted white, not black, and that the bright clothes (Of the women and children lining the railings) suggested to him "workmen soldiers… coloured persons in their national costumes," By implication, a troop ship from the British Empire, so he, "considered himself justified in attacking the steamer without delay and sank it."

Eleven seamen were killed but miraculously, all the passengers survived. One eyewitness watched hundreds of wooden deck-chairs float to the surface as the SS Arabia slipped stern first into a tranquil sea.

Of the five sister-ships, three were torpedoed during WW1.** SS Egypt sank in the English Channel after being rammed by a French freighter in thick fog in 1922 with the loss of 87 Lives and a £1 million in gold bullion, the recovery of which is really good read!*** Only SS China made it to a ships graveyard when she was scrapped in Japan in 1928.

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*De Morgan’s first commission for a ship interior was, I think, to supply tiles for the Tsar of Russia’s yacht, Livadia, launched in Glasgow in 1880. Although perhaps De Morgan was happy to leave that fame behind for while the interiors look gorgeous, the radically-novel ship was a complete lemon and the Tsar was assassinated ten months later.

** SS Persia- another of the sister ships torpedoed in the Mediterranean - features in Alan Wren’s book, ‘The Ambush of the SS Persia’ . Nick Messinger of The Old P&O Line website (See link below) recommends it as an excellent read.

***https://www.maritimequest.com/daily_event_archive/2005/may/20_egypt.htm

http://www.shipwreckfilms.co.uk/page47.html



My thanks for information and photographs for this blog go to:

Claire Longsworth, The Sister Ships,

The De Morgan Foundation https://www.demorgan.org.uk/

Nick Messinger of The Old P&O Line - http://pandosnco.co.uk/

www.poheritage.com/

Part 2 : Jimmy Sets Sail

In spite of the many times I’ve shuffled his footprints, I only remember my grandfather, Jimmy, because he briefly lived in a turret. My Mum had done a good job on me. Together we’d turned the pages of Edmund Dulac’s exquisite picture books and I knew my stuff - mythical characters, sorcerers and little-folk resided in turrets.

I’d actually met my grandparents each year I’m told, but that year was different for a memory got laid. We’d arrived in Scotland after a very long drive and as I got out the car, grumbling and tired, Mum distracted me, calling, “Look!” and pointed up. A white handkerchief waved from a widow high in a turret and I was transfixed… agog. After a few brief and feverishly exciting moments scampering up a curving staircase, Mum embraced an elderly couple in tweedy clothes and all traces of heady alchemy disappeared. I was ushered into the turret – a sitting room where heavy drapes masked the curved walls and chintz sofas made it mundane. I was mute – crushed by the letdown. Dad chided me to be polite to the thin little man by his side. Jimmy had round glasses, big ears and a smiley face. A year later, after my grandparents had moved from the Cairngorm Hotel in Aviemore, he was dead. Following his footsteps supplements that imperfect memory.

You must agree that Edmund Dulac’s castle and The Cairngorm Hotel could look very similar to a five-year old. On the far right of the black & white photo is the turret where my grandparents stayed .

The two bottom Dulac illustrations are perhaps more of what I expected when I got to look inside the turret…

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My maternal education didn’t end once I was past fairy tales. Much later, Mum confided that, as she’d once met a ghost, it was perfectly plausible that I too might encounter phantoms. Whatever the reason for their outing, she said, they had neither the means nor the desire to harm me. I should not be crass or scream, but rather remember my manners and behave as to any soul of greater substance. I haven’t ever had such a visceral encounter as Mum, but it was wonderful advice because when I do feel a dimension of the dead close by, I am comfortable with that. I suspect those are the buggers that lead me down rabbit holes whenever I sit down to write.

Mum was reserved, refined and well-read – not the sort you’d imagine given to dispensing advice on specters. She never spoke to me about sex, not once. Sex no, spooks yes. I appreciate my darling mother now more than ever, for such abnormal advice is hard to come by, whereas sex… well… I figured it out.

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Back to Jimmy, Mum’s father. He was born in 1874 and while he grew up in leaps and bounds, so too did technology. The Suez Canal had opened in 1869 and shortly afterwards, a network of telegraph cables – above ground and below the sea – linked the globe. Telegraph poles often strode along in tandem beside the ever-increasing web of railway tracks.  The construction of ships had finished changing from wood to iron in parallel with the switch from sail to steam. 

The British Empire - on which so famously the sun never set - was at its height and there was no reason to doubt its longevity. Fundamentally the Empire was a global trading enterprise, though territories with little commercial merit were added to secure Britain’s sea route to India. 

Rudyard Kipling, author of Just So Stories and Jungle Book, won the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. Kipling’s view and enthusiasm for Empire was shared by many a man and woman in the street. (Kipling doesn’t have such a good rap now with there being alternative views on Empire, but I think if his ghost is about, he’d probably have come a long way.)

The beautiful embossed cover of the first edition of The Jungle Book published in 1894 and a Just So Edition of 1902. We had a copy of this edition in the house when I was growing up.

Kipling actually has some marvellous quotes that have better stood the test of time and are worth looking up, but this one fitted better here.

And it was in 1907 that Jimmy, a young man of 33, well-established with his own firm, property and community-standing is ready to roll. There is posterity on the Clyde.

There had been trouble with unions and strikers a few years before but they went back to work without much gain.

The shipyards thrived – a fifth of all ships in the world came to be built on the Clyde - and that meant orders down the line to suppliers like Jimmy’s firm, Steven and Struthers. The foundry prospered suppling propellers, stem and stern posts, foghorns and steam-whistles to name but some.

Glasgow was at the forefront of new technology: the Titan Clydebank, the largest cantilever crane in the world, had been commissioned at a local shipyard that year.

The Tiitan on Clydeside is 150 ft tall and was the world’s first electrically powered cantilever crane. The shipyards are gone but the crane is still there. It’s a tourist attraction now and brightly lit at night.

The photo of the Steven & Struthers brochure is one produced around 1910, after Jimmy returned from his overseas trip.

Yet the real new technology of the era was not mechanical - the world had gone wireless.

Credit for wireless telegraphy – radio - is laid at the feet of Marconi, an Irish-Italian inventor, physicist and entrepreneurial genius, born in 1874, the same year as Jimmy. Marconi, sent the first wireless message across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901. The scientists of the day said it was impossible due to the curvature of the earth – he proved them wrong.

The remarkable feat of plucking morse code signals out of the air, without the need for wires and cables, was little short of miraculous as was the speed with which Marconi developed applications - ship to ship and ship to shore communications were invaluable – and followed a few years later by Marconi’s nightly world news service to ships at sea.

Marconi at work and his famous Marconigrams. Ship to Shore radio meant shipping could be warned of storms at sea, The applications of wireless telegraphy for peace and war were endless and were the precursors to all our internet communications today.

At the time when Jimmy started his journey, taking the train from Glasgow, wrapped up against a Scottish winter, with a porter managing his cabin trunks and suitcases, radio was transforming trade and finance, enabling transactions in ‘real time’. A ship’s newspaper compiled from Marconigrams sent by wireless the night before, would be ready to read with his breakfast on the high seas. At almost every port he’d be met by British administrators, agents and professionals. He would buy pictorial post-cards to send home – the Edwardian text-message – and his card would join many millions of others in postbags world wide. And he’d carry a camera to record his own images – probably the Brownie, the world’s first mass-produced camera. He’d be able to buy film at most ports at shops stocked with British goods, for each stop was already catering to the Empire’s well-heeled ocean-liner travellers.

Jimmy might well have felt pride and confidence in the accomplishments and achievements he saw around him. I am not suggesting my grandfather had a sense of arrogance or entitlement, for he was well known to be a mild and unassuming man. He’d have been well grounded by his father, John Steven, who had come up through the ranks of apprenticeship to build his own innovative and successful foundry business. According to a contemporary business article, John still used the dialect of the Gorbals and, had a “frank liking for his men”.  A paragraph added that Steven and Struthers provided working conditions, “far above both the requirements of the law and trade union regulations”.*

P&O’s ss Arabia was the ship that my grandfather, Jimmy, boarded at Tilbury docks on 16 November 1907.

It’s a cold, dull day when Jimmy steps onto the gang-plank of his P&O ocean liner, the SS Arabia, at Tilbury docks on the Thames. It is Saturday 16 November 1907. Like clockwork, each Saturday a P&O liner left Tilbury for India. Some seaman on board may perhaps have remembered when sailing times shifted – sometimes for days – dependent on the vagrancies of British weather.

When I started to explore what it must have been like on board the SS Arabia, my heart flipped for as travel by ocean liner had become commonplace, the demand encouraged competition – and publicity campaigns directed at the discerning passenger featured the elegance of the interiors. Décor – art – ambiance!

*Extract from ‘Captains of Industry’ by William S Murphy 1901 https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/John_Steven

I’m reading Marconi: the Man Who Networked the World by Marc Raboy, 2016 Oxford University Press and loving it!

 Next week: The Sister Ships

Part 1 : The pairing of phantoms and foot prints

My grandfather, James Steven, known to all as Jimmy, left Scotland in 1907 to take a round-the-world trip. He was 33. He’d served his apprenticeship as a brassfounder in his father’s firm, Steven & Struthers, and later, when his father retired, Jimmy together with his older brother and another partner, bought the firm’s assets and continued the business. At the end of that same year Jimmy set sail to travel East - presumably to drum up new orders for the foundry.  

My great-grandfather, John Steven, and his son Jimmy, my grandfather.

That voyage brought him alive to me while my three other grandees remain deceased and distant, sealed in sepia. Of their milestones and foibles, I know almost nothing. Perhaps oral history took a hit when telephones, telegrams and technology took off. The dates of hatches, matches and dispatches, as my Mum called newspaper announcements of Births, Deaths and Marriage, and a few anecdotes fading like the photos, are all I have.

Jimmy and his journey might have slipped beneath the tides of time too had he not been a compulsive shopper and shipped an astonishing array of antiques and curios back to Glasgow. Because he was a third-generation brass-founder, many of the souvenirs were made of brass or bronze, thrilling examples of skilled artisanship, unyielding metal turned to shapely elegance.

Brassware, porcelain and ivory shipped back from Jimmy’s 1907 world tour and far from home in Sydney.

Eventually, after his death, Jimmy’s treasures followed my mother - his only child - to Oxfordshire.  I remember the day the removal truck reversed up to our huge Cotswold barn and unpacked stack upon stack of tea chests.

Those plywood crates had their own enchantment - stamped and stencilled, lids that splintered, sharp metal edges and a whiff of spice and tea.

My brother, David, prised them open with a jemmy, then tolerated my help with the unpacking. We didn’t have a lot to say to one another back then which was a shame for, although we played it cool, I know we both felt a thrill unwrapping classic statues, brass tables, musing Buddhas and multi-armed Hindu deities. Exquisite porcelain, small pieces of furniture, rugs and embroidery too. Mum scattered pieces round our rambling old house. Some seemed pleased with their new niche, while others were never to be comfortable. I acquired miniatures for my bedroom window-sill - intimations of a waiting wider world. Ivory from China and India, sandalwood from Shanghai and porcelain from Japan.

This piece of Chinese silk embroidery was the first of the treasures I ever saw from my grandfather’s trove. We were still living in Belfast so I was under eleven and found it scrunched up in a drawer. When I asked Mum what it was, tears came to her eyes. It had once been brilliantly coloured and hung on a screen placed in front of the fireplace during summer months when she was first married. A housemaid had washed it and all the colour disappeared. Mum said she was heartbroken but not angry - it was an honest error. But she could not bear to look it it again yet neither could she throw it away. She said I could keep it if I wanted and when I grew up I had it framed and delighted in its delicacy. It is a traditional piece made before marriage. Once I revived it, Mum came round and even found someone to translate the characters, but I don’t have that information any more.

Another reason why Jimmy’s travels live on is the survival of a thin sheath of letters he wrote to Mamie, his fiancé, in a spidery hand on onion-skin paper stamped with the names of hotels and ships. There is also a rather dull collection of postcards - black and white or strangely tinted - and a photo album of very bad snaps. The letters are hard to read, with whole paragraphs inked out by his censorious wife-to-be, my grandmother. 

Decades later when I typed out the letters, the ease of reading gave them a new energy and connection, as if the mail from Marseille, Aden, Bombay or Mandalay had arrived all over again. Mum was delighted and together we traced Jimmy’s route in my atlas.  And so I got acquainted with his world of Empire days and with the man – one who was up early to watch the ship go into port, was keen to see everything and who found the world a wonderous place, yet could think of nothing better than the prospect of being back home in Glasgow town.

My girls wonder why I keep this tattered parasol, but it too was one of the treasures and Mum gave it to me when my brother and I unpacked the tea chests which must have been early 1960s. It hangs from the ceiling in a dark nook in our house and I find strange comfort as we show our age together!

Afterwards, while my life stretched ahead, Jimmy’s journey faded back, until I relived his journey as I wrote my memoir, The Hong Kong Letters. I found myself startled to learn how many more of his stopovers I had visited after Hong Kong, oblivious of his first footfall.

Footprints are soon forgotten; swept away, rained out, built over or blown skyhigh, yet the phantom of that original spoor remains at the compass bearing and can’t be obliterated.

It’s a marvellous perk that goes with the third age when we muster footsteps, trace them, ponder upon them, and, if you are half as silly as me, find a visceral delight in the pairing of prints.

In this year’s blogs, I am going to look for where my footsteps crossed Jimmy’s. I can be so mad as to wonder if I am searching for Jimmy or him for me? It’s a spooky yet warm, fuzzy feeling, so I’ll just accept it.

Next Blog: Jimmy Sets Sail

Wishing you all a twist of chaos for 2022!

New year 2022! Everyone’s feeling it… A fresh start. A time to move forward – hugs still hampered, kisses only for knuckleheads in knickerbockers, while coughing is still definitely de rigueur, but then seriously, it always was a no-no.

My To-Do list is the same as last year’s – finish my African memoir – The Lion behind the Anthill.  I so enjoyed the writing journey that I dilly-dallied on the way, plunging into innumerable rabbit holes while wrestling to fathom the naïve and clumsy younger me. I also needed to revisit the way it was then – before big tech put us constantly in touch all the time – back when headlines were just that – a teaser for the news article – rather than the whole story in a word grab.  

My African memoir is an entirely different book when compared to The Hong Kong Letters, because it is written AM - After Marriage. I marvel at how carelessly both Mike and I threw away our autonomous freedoms to become a harnessed team. Yet talking to Mike about the extraordinary adventures we had, has been a highlight of 2021 and would never have happened had I not embarked on the manuscript… or got married in the first place.

Mike and I a few days before we got married practising being in harness. Barnstaple, Devon June 1972

I’m still having a lot of fun with The Hong Kong Letters. I had a lovely email mid-year from Russell, a Hong Kong reader, who sent me a picture of the bookshop in Sheung Wan, a district on HK island, where he’d found my book: “… two tiny rooms overflowing with books in shelves, on the floor, on chairs and in boxes.”

I looked and thought, ‘How on earth would anyone find anything in such chaos?! How random that The Hong Kong Letters landed on the top of the pile!’

And then I thought, we need more chaos. We’re channelled by the web that suggests books by an author, or in a genre, we have read before. It seems cute and caring to help us save time making choices. Yet, is it? I think back to literary discoveries at book sales or, as a backpacker, ferreting around hostel bookshelves for anything in English. Most searches left me feeling Germans were the largest cohort of reader-backpackers.  Now of course, I take my kindle. How convenient. It is, but oh, how tame, a little less of an adventure, not forced to read anything oddball... or consider learning German!

In 1973, Mike and I lived in Egypt. Newspapers were censored, as was our mail, and we quickly ran out of anything to read. We lived in a Mess with pilots and engineers, and exchanged what we had. So it was that I, a little priggish, discovered Playboy Magazine actually had good articles! Don’t ask me how the pilots got those well-thumbed editions through Customs, when my Penguin modern Russian classics were confiscated.

Thinking back on 2021, the lockdowns, restrictions and controls, pushed me out into the chaos of alternative news channels, threw my assumed allegiances into turmoil and forced me to devise my own fact-checking for fake news. Invigorating and surprisingly scary, I settled into a newfound emancipation, which is one of many positive aspects of the past year.

I wish you all a healthy, calm and peaceful New Year – with just a twist of comfortable chaos.

Meditative at Morpeth

Wildflowers on Morpeth Meadows

A couple of weeks ago, quite early in the day, I went for a walk near Morpeth, the historic town on the Hunter River not far from Maitland.

Morpeth Meadows

In Australia I seldom find myself in water-meadows alongside a river. There was a hint of manure in air, weighted-down under a heavy sky, threatening rain.  I doubt the locals call them water meadows – that’s very English - but then again, I possibly wasn’t walking anywhere they knew, for at the riverbank, as I wondered if the river ever flooded, my mind went to another time, another river.

Water Meadows near Eynsham, Oxfordshire, UK

The meadows on the edge of the river near the Oxford village of Eynsham, where I grew up, flooded most years. Liberated from the Thames’ staid path, the water crept out at first, wriggling through the grass until gaining confidence, it flowed, gliding over the green meadows to effect enormous shallow lakes. The floodwater mirrored the sky - wavering from grey to blue to silver, imitating moving clouds by fleeting shadows, as if revelling in its abandon, refusing to acknowledge the very course of the river itself which had disappeared.

Mrs Mops, was the name of my horse. A big-hearted bay mare. I enjoyed riding, exploring the byways and bridle-paths around the village.  Something I didn’t share with anyone was that riding  had taught me I had a limited appetite for physical danger.  

Mrs Mops and Me! Outside our house in Eynsham, Oxfordshire. Must have been on the way to a gymkhana. 1962. She was a sweet-hearted horse and we had many adventures together and I think she knew my limitations!

I was out riding with Catherine MacGregor. She was a few years older and had a confident seat on Velvet, her big, bold, black gelding. We were ambling along the road, chatting, when Catherine looked over my head and shouted, “Look, look at the meadows!”

I saw a silver sea glinting through the trees.

“Wow, let’s go for a gallop.” She turned in the saddle, black curly hair escaping her brown velvety riding hat, her dark eyes dancing with anticipation.

I said little, hoping that by the time we got to the gate, Catherine would see the idea of a gallop was pure folly. We could end up in the river that meandered in the shape of a horseshoe. Neither we nor our horses could see tussocks or rabbit holes. Bits of wood and debris floated on the flood. Sometimes farmers fenced off parts of the meadows and left bits of wire or threw the fences flat. I was sure she would change her mind, there were far too many hazards.

Catherine guided Velvet off the road, down the muddy track and through the open gate. As soon as he splashed into the water, his nostrils flared, ears pricked, sensing adventure. 

“Are you up for this?” she called.

“I’m not sure…” I confessed, trying to keep Mrs Mops on side for she had sensed Velvet’s lead and was dancing sideways, shying from the splashing water. My stomach turned, I knew it was too late.

“You’ll be fine, just give Mrs Mops her head,” said Catherine, “All’s well – carpe diem!”

Velvet took off like a war horse. His thundering hooves, spraying so much water that his massive haunches took to the air, surreal above a billowing fog of spritz. On and on we galloped. Hell for leather. Hell on hooves. Mrs Mops rushed full tilt after Velvet, for all I know, a little demented by the knot of blind terror clinging to her back.  Round Catherine went in a huge figure of eight and, blimey, she went for another eight.  We finished at the gate, dripping wet, the horses spent, snorting, high and happy. Catherine was shining. I saw something close to ecstasy written on her face.

“Oh,” she said, “Wasn’t that just terrific!” She dropped her reins, leaning down to pat Velvet’s coat, lathered with watermarks of white sweat and spray, “Well done Velvet. Well done Gill, Well done Mrs Mops. What a ride!”

This is a contemporary picture of the water meadows where we galloped. There were no kayakers then to chart the course of the river itself which was often unrecognisable from the surrounding flood.

Catherine died very young of breast cancer. When, I think of her, I remember that day. I see her, resilient and kind, generous and clever. I see Velvet’s haunches take off and fly her to the sky like a dark Pegasus. She needed her courage.



I broke my reverie by the river side where a dithering line of green-spined she-oaks stood on the bank. Tears pricked my eyes and I pulled my jacket close, my heavy heart suddenly scared of random calamities. The she-oaks were whispering, as they do all day. As I started back, their message came on the zephyr, “All’s well – carpe diem, All’s well…” 

The wind in my face brought the moist smell of spring. The odd white feather fluttered on the ground dancing with dandelion heads and Kelly-green clover that sprang bravely to invade patches of bare ground. I knitted together memories as I walked. The water meadows dried out in summer, buzzing with insects and I took the dogs there to chase hares and jump in the river.  Horses and dogs – growing up – leaving Oxford. Catherine had stayed with me in Hong Kong. We were both married in Oxford in 1972. Her wedding was two months after mine and Mike, my man, fell in a pond at her reception. Children. She had two before she was widowed. I had four and still have my man. Australia and all the in-betweens.

The she-oaks could have added, “You are one lucky bugger”, but Catherine was much more refined and she’d never speak like that.

Wildflowers on the watermeadows near Eynsham

PS: Morpeth Museum has taken over the former Courthouse built in 1862 with an eclectic display of exhibits. a whole room is dedicated to the floods of 1955. Certainly, the fields flooded and sadly caused loss of life and tremendous damage.  

The water meadows near Eynsham were bought by the Oxford Preservation Trust in 2000 to preserve the site of ridges and furrows made when the monks from Eynsham Abbey cultivated the meadows in the 15th and 16th Century. I am so glad. I expect they are much busier today. In my day, just a few walkers and the odd mad horsewomen.

Thoughts from Hong Kong's Ice House Street

Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong - Looking at the Bank of China Building from Battery Path, October 2019

Finding my bearings…

This year when I spent time in Hong Kong, I walked nostalgically along Battery Path to Queen’s Road Central. Fifty years ago it was my walk to work. Queen’s Road runs like a ribbon along what was once the island’s harbour-front, a narrow strip in front of a mountain.  While reclamation has distanced the foreshore, the mountain footing remains immovable.

Marina House, where The Advertising and Publicity Bureau had its offices, is long gone; in company with the landmark Hong Kong Hilton, the iconic HK Cricket grounds and the old Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building. I felt just a little cheated that my concrete past had been obliterated as I stood in a shady spot watching the traffic, unsure even where Marina House had once been.

Then I found my compass; The Bank of China. Ironic that the once-spooky building slap bang in the middle of colonial Hong Kong, outlived all the rest.  Each October during the Cultural Revolution, the bank building became a giant red billboard of propaganda for mainland China.

And then I saw another familiar, the black and white sign for Ice House Street.  A strange name.  English yet oddball.  I was sure of my bearings.

Ice House Street

A name so solid and descriptive, the street is stranded now, it does not even reach the waterfront.

Two years after the British colonised Hong Kong in 1841, the Government awarded the Ice House Company a plot of land in Central in return for supplying free ice to the colony’s hospitals.  A thick-walled storage godown was built to store ice blocks. Perhaps the small lane that ran past the site had once another name but Ice House Street soon fitted better.

When I read that the first shipments to the Ice House came from northern China that made sense for on my trip to Beijing’s Forbidden City last year, I’d seen the ice storehouses built during the Qianlong Emperor’s reign (1736-1795). They could hold 5,000 blocks of ice. The stores had vaulted-ceilings and were sunk into the ground. Each year, half a month after the winter solstice, they were filled with thick blocks of clean ice cut by quarrymen from the city’s moat.

Yet Hong Kong’s shipments of ice from China were short-lived - a supplier from the USA took over - an entrepreneur by the name of Tudor who was harvesting ice from the frozen ponds of New England. He’d developed a way of packing the blocks in sawdust for sale across America and around the world. Tudor streamlined harvesting by adopting new ice-cutter technology  - a knife-saw drawn across the ice by horses with studded horseshoes. He floated or skated the blocks downstream and established a chain of storage depots. Tudor nearly went bankrupt but his hard work and innovation paid off in the end. For his Hong Kong customer, the ice took a long and arduous journey by merchant clipper. Hong Kong got its ice from Tudor’s company for almost thirty years until 1874 when the colony began to produce its own ice in a Causeway Bay factory.

Ice Harvesting continued well into the 20th Century

When I got back to Sydney, I dug out one of my favourite books; Nora Waln’s The House of Exile. I was sure I had read something about harvesting ice early on in the book.

Nora, from a Pennsylvanian Quaker family, was 25 when she left America for China to stay with the aristocratic Lin family in the winter of 1920. She travelled by steam ship and train, and for the last leg of her long journey, she boarded the Lin’s canal boat fitted out for winter with sledge runners to take her along the frozen Grand Canal to The House of Exile.  The cabin warmed by foot-braziers and furnished with back rests padded with camel’s wool was warm and comfortable. 

‘In a nest of soft furs and gay quilts I was cosy between Shun-ko and her neice, Mai-da. Each held one of my hands under the coverlets.’

With delight Nora watched spirited children propel little sledge-boats past their barge, pushing off against the ice with pointed sticks and escaping collisions by fractions.  Skaters flew along on urgent errands and cursed those more joyful souls skimming the ice, practising rotations and twirls.

I flicked the pages until I found what I was looking for. Nora had written:

‘With care not to endanger the double track sledge path, men cut ice for summer use. They stacked it in flat baskets woven of stout twigs, and hung each basket by its strong handle from the middle of a carrying pole. A man at each end of the pole carried the ice to the canal side earthmounds, where they buried it away for summer use, exactly as explained in the annals of Wei, written thirty centuries ago. … Women wheeled hamper barrows down to the opened water and exchanged banter with the ice-cutter, while they let their ducks and geese out to swim.’

Who could not be delight at Nora’s gift for snatching such detail as she swept along the canal?  In our mind’s eye we can each ‘see’ the ducks and geese paddling the dark water in a newly excavated icy pond as their minders chatter to the workmen, each breath condensing into misty puffs in the bitter cold. And imagine downy plumage flipped up by the chill winds, fluff and feathers spiralling to jest with snow flakes and rival ice crystals.

Thinking about all this, it made my pique of time change over fifty years look pretty ropey when the three-thousand year technology of harvesting, shipping and storing ice, was snuffed out overnight as factories took over the job of making ice. And in no time, technology turned again and we all had refrigerators and could make our own.

Time and technology wait for no one.

Footnotes

Although refrigerators for home use were being introduced into modern homes in America as Nora grew up, she would have been familiar with the harvesting of ice - Prelinger Archives has a 1919 amateur video of ice harvesting using horses in Pennsylvania.

China’s Grand Canal is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the oldest and longest artificial waterway in the world.

Postscript

I started to talk to my aunt in Sydney about this post and she recalled that as a child there was an ice chest in her house. A man would deliver a block of ice which he put into a drawer at the bottom of the chest and goods that needed to be kept cool were stacked in the space above. I found that a fascinating link to the past!

Memories of The Sea Palace

The Sea Palace lights up Aberdeen Harbour in the 1960s. Hong Kong.

I’ve had two visits to Hong Kong this year, 2019, promoting the local edition of my memoir, The Hong Kong Letters, published by Hong Kong’s own Blacksmith Books.

I sank back into Hong Kong with a familiarity and an affection that really took me by surprise. Hong Kong has changed enormously as we all know and the pace of that change has accelerated with the current volatility. While its spectacular harbour and the march of high-rise up Victoria Peak is so iconic, Hong Kong’s real essence rests with the people. Polite and solicitous, Hongkongers have defined themselves as a brand. Over the course of its history, Chinese from the mainland arrived to join those already in the territory, and have adopted an unusual lineage as part of their own.

Aberdeen - the original ‘Fragrant Harbour’

There were many places that I wanted to get back to and one of those was Aberdeen. It was such an extraordinary place in the 1960s, I might have hesitated fearing the change. But on my visits this year I realised that I could not complain that the Hong Kong that I rememered was not the same for neither am I. And I found I could treasure my memories without sacrificing my curiosity for the present. I didn’t visit Aberdeen in the end because I simply ran out of time.

Aberdeen harbour, fishing port and home to the Tanka boat people, was one of the most colourful places to visit in the 1960s. The Tanka had perfected a long established and elaborate tradition of living well afloat.

Aberdeen Harbour scene from Love is a Many-Splendored Thing

The famous floating restaurants

Like many foreigners, my initial visit to Aberdeen was to dine on one of two famous floating restaurants. Film directors too could rarely resist that scene, where prosperity and paucity coincided with such picturesque charm. And that’s wonderful because unusually for the time, they shot the Aberdeen scenes on location and we can be transported back to visit the extraordinary lifestyle of the people who lived among the sprawling maze of planks and ropes that joined small junks and sampans moored in the shadow of the magnificent fishing fleet which swung at anchor in the deeper water.

It was October 1968 when I had my first dinner at The Sea Palace. The floating hulk had been built in the 1950s and was a restaurant for fifty years. It had been designed with the famous Marble Boat, at the Summer Palace in Peking*, in mind. My boss, Patrick O’Neil-Dunne, (known as P-O-D) insisted that The Sea Palace had better food as demonstrated by the greater number of Chinese patrons and fewer tourists than frequented its competitor, the Tai Pak Floating Restaurant.

The journey to The Sea Palace was part of the experience

It was early evening when a woman in black wearing her traditional straw Hakka hat, propelled us across Aberdeen harbour using a bamboo steering pole. The tiny sampan was home to her whole family. A small girl ignored us, concentrating on her homework, while washing hung on lines strung round the craft. When we reached The Sea Palace, completely covered in lights, its bulk dwarfed our sampan and its tiny lantern.  I watched while the sampan turned and soon was swallowed up in the busy harbour.

POD took my arm, “Come on, we’ll get another sampan ride home,” and ushered me toward the waiters, impatient for us to start make the selection for our meal. There was no menu, they simply hauled battered rattan baskets up over the side from the sea below. We had to select from fish, crabs, rainbow lobster, octopus, eels and crayfish. I was overwhelmed by that idea, so POD took charge and ordered our party an enormous quantity of seafood. His choices were tossed into a basket with our table number.

The whole meal was accompanied by warm rice wine. And afterwards POD, keen to make my first visit memorable, insisted that the restaurant’s time-honoured photos were taken, escorting me to the ‘throne’.

I put these up recently on a Hong Kong in the 60s Facebook page and received some wonderful comments including one where it was recommended never to wear the beard which never got washed!

I will go back to Hong Kong and next time I will visit Aberdeen. I’m not sure I will go to the new JUMBO Kingdom Floating Restaurant with it's seating for 700 diners. I might find somewhere a little less flamboyant without POD to call the shots.

* At the time The Sea Palace was designed, Beijing was still more commonly referred to by the old name Peking.

Renewing membership in Hong Kong

Hong Kong stopover

The Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong where I had one of my meetings. It has moved since I lived in Hong Kong but I can’t recall the old one. This location is delightful.

Two years ago I returned to Hong Kong with my daughter, Dale.  

So I was over the shock of a city that had changed so dramatically that had it not been for the harbor and The Peak to orientate myself, I would have been completely lost. And showing Dale “my” city helped me to see the modern Hong Kong as a new destination.

I have come back to promote my book, The Hong Kong Letters, and Pete Spurrier, who published the local edition, had media appointments lined up for me.  I was swept up into my first-ever radio gig on Radio 3’s Morning Brew and spent many hours with knowledgeable journalists in interviews where we talked as much about Hong Kong today as about my sojourn fifty years ago. I had a hilarious photo-shoot on the harbour-front with swirling rain and mist obliterating the view. I stood against the railings clutching an umbrella in one hand and, for dramatic effect, a life-buoy ring in the other.  My specs misted up as we’d emerged from an air-conditioned mall, the cameraman had to keep wiping rain off his lens and best of all we laughed long and hard together. The photographer then hurried off to join the press corp covering the demonstrations.

This time Hong Kong felt so much more familiar. Just the words, “I lived here fifty years ago”, became like a membership card, expired, but the Club Manager happy to forget the past dues.  It is a truly friendly city.

A walk down Battery Path retraces my route to work fifty years ago and looks over the road to where my office once was! Very different now. The Hong Kong shoreline used to be here!

In my book, The Hong Kong Letters, I describe the colony in 1968 being between shock and spectre - the shadow of the huge changes of WW2 and Chinese communist revolution behind and the idea of the handover ahead.

Today Hong Kong today stands in a similar intersection. This time it is the 1997 handover behind and ahead the change to one system with China within in another three decades.

And I arrived in Hong Kong just after the 1967 riots and here I am at the same time in the cycle with the current demonstrations. The mood is entirely different and these have been peaceful demonstrations albeit with the inevitable violent fringe, rumors of provocateurs and allegations of police brutality.

And just as last time life goes on while the world news focuses on the most dramatic moments of the demonstrations. A remarkable comradery draws everyone together. When I found it difficult to find my way back to where I was staying at The Helena May, I was glad the cityscape was not entirely foreign to me and ended up with a bird’s-eye view of the demonstration from an overpass. So many people walking - and not just young people – so many watching – and everyone wondering what would happen because this demonstration had not received permission. When the violence did start, it was not far away and people could see it in real-time on their phones.  “Look, look, this is what is happening, just over there, beyond that building.”

It was my eyes that sensed the tear gas before my nose and my new-found companions said, “You go now.”

As I watched them scramble over a barrier to hurry off towards the action, I said, “What about you?”

“We go to see and then if the police come, we run away, very fast.”

I decided they were right, it was time for me to go. I could not imagine running away, very fast. Moments later, someone gave me a mask for the gas. It was very feint but she said, “You don’t know what you find on the way.”

I “found” no more tear gas, just a riot squad outside where I was staying – standing on the hill looking down toward the harbour.  Someone asked the policeman who seemed to be in charge, “Are the demonstrators coming this way?”

“The demonstrators aren’t going anywhere,” came the laconic reply, which made me feel both glad for had they met that squad it would have been ugly and sad because that suggested they had already met a squad.

Peaceful, quiet and umbrellas will perhaps never be the same again…

David and Apollo

Fifty years ago at the time of the Apollo 11 Moon Mission, I had a job with an advertising agency in Hong Kong.

None of my friends had a TV, so we gathered on the roof garden terrace of the YMCA in Kowloon to watch the launch of Apollo 11 on an old cathode-ray black and white TV.  We were close pressed, cricking our necks and sweating in the heat through the build-up and count-down. You couldn’t see much on the fuzzy screen especially once Apollo had lifted-off nevertheless it felt important to be in the company of others at such a historic moment.

Apollo 11 Launch - broadcast live on 16 July, 1969

Four days later when the Apollo Lunar Module landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps, I was at huddled with most of the ad agency staff around a transistor radio to hear the epic live broadcast of the touchdown followed hours later by the news of the moonwalks.

We had a particular interest as one of our advertising accounts was the Swiss watchmaker, Omega.

When Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface, he was wearing an Omega Speedmaster Professional - a timepiece that has been known as the Moonwatch ever since.

For weeks, our agency had been booking space and working on scripts preparing for Omega’s print and TV advertising. The ad was to be simple, a picture of the moon from the space ship with an Omega watch superimposed. The film and photos were to be rushed to us by air courier.

 Everything was under control until a late call from Omega days before the Mission - to ensure there was no delay in getting advertising out, they wanted us to create a model of the moon to photograph for the advertisements.

Moon Modeller Required Immediately

That sent our little agency into a flat spin but David Dunlop who was in charge of TV commercials was nothing if not resourceful. After several telephone calls, he rushed off and came back to the office manoeuvring a large half-dome plaster cast left over from some hotel renovation. He set a blown-up map of the moon on an easel, covered the art studio in white sheets and started mixing buckets of white Plaster of Paris. All over the weekend and late into the night he measured the map, moulded and sculpted, modelling the volcanoes, craters and lava flows of the moon’s surface. David, dressed only in a pair of old shorts, for July is horribly hot and humid in Hong Kong, was soon covered head to toe in plaster. David was an artist and he touched up his finished work with a meticulous hand - highlighting crater tops and creating shadows. Once he’d hung a black cloth behind his moon and lit it with a floodlight, he called us all in to for a viewing. We all clapped. It really was a triumph and David, who spent a lot of time hating both Hong Kong and his job, was terribly proud.

My friend David was sometimes a force to be reckoned with…

The Telegram

An urgent telegram arrived from Switzerland: “SCRAP MODEL STOP FILM ARRIVING BY AIR STOP”

David had a legendary temper and so he did scrap the moon. He smashed his handiwork with a hammer until it lay in pieces. Once he was satisfied, he emerged from the art studio with flecks of white plaster sticking to the sweat on his face and stormed off to find a cold beer at the Cricket Club and some patrons to commiserate.

The final Omega ad… But not David’s Moon - this one belongs to Apollo…

 While David remained in the doldrums for days, the safe splash-down of the three astronauts, put most everyone else in a great mood. There were thousands of Americans in Hong Kong at that time – many on Rest and Recreation from the Vietnam War. They were terribly pleased with themselves.

And yet there was really was a genuine feeling not just that a Yankee had landed on the moon, but that one of us had stepped out there and that it was indeed a ‘giant leap for mankind.’

My generation all remember where we were when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

And for me, I have my own folklore from the Apollo saga and it is of my friend David - a misplaced immortal fury smashing the moon to smithereens.

Hong Kong - Spinning Back the Decades

Chinese Fishing Junk in Hong Kong Harbour. Copyright Greta Solly 1969

Finding my way back

I find it hard to get into my memoir-writing zone. I need props to push myself back in time.  I’m lucky that I always have letters and journals to hand when I’m writing about my travels, but sometimes I need more and reach for the photo albums.

When I visited my friend Greta last year, we talked about my recent memoir, The Hong Kong Letters, and looked at photographs that she had taken when we lived in Hong Kong in the 1960s. While I was busy writing home and taking the occasional snap, she was capturing the extraordinary magic of our surroundings in photographs. Greta’s portraits of people and scenes in Hong Kong quite took my breath away and she has kindly allowed me to use them.

I particularly love the way Greta has captured the shimmer of sunlight turning the fishing baskets to gold mesh. The Enterprise sailing dinghies in the background indicate how we did not have to go out looking for such magnificent shots., they were everyday life. Copyright Greta Solly 1969

Precious Footage

Films today do a wonderful job of recreating backdrop, bringing ambiance and history to life. The only problem is that the sets acquire a polish that wasn’t there. The streets are too clean, costume a little too fashionable and it is this slick finish that keeps me at arm’s length.  

So when I found that two classic Hong Kong melodramas: Love is a Many Splendored Thing and The World of Suzie Wong were shot on location in the 1950s - unusual for the time - it was like striking gold.

According to Wikipedia, the two stars loathed each other on set. Holden claimed that Jennifer Jones ate garlic before every love scene! The film made a lot of money for Han Suyin who wrote the original memoir.

Both films starred William Holden – the American big sexy star of the 1950s. To me he was terribly miscast, especially as the poor artist in The World of Suzie Wong, but then I’m taking the blockbusters out of their time and space.

The book title spawned innumerable Suzie Wong bars and it’s one of those titles that never dies!

Acting and dialogue aside, the backdrop that slides past and the precious footage that anchors both these films in real time, is well worth waiting for. 

I am so pleased that with written accounts, photo and film, I’m able to spin back in time and revisit the Hong Kong I knew.

Captured is that wonderful, Chinese togetherness, fleshpots and sweatshops, teeming, jostling, shouting, floating, squatting, pimping humanity crammed onto a postdated island.

Bright lights in neon and strains of Chinese Opera. London buses and rickshaws, sampans and the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet, typhoon warnings and a Governor who wore plumes in his hat.

Fifty years ago, Hong Kong, was a deliriously wacky place.

A final beautiful shot from Greta’s album. Copyright Greta Solly 1969

Proof Reading with Christmas Faeries

Writing is a lot of Waiting

Waiting for feedback from editors, waiting for literary agents, waiting for publishers and waiting for proofs. Beyond my control, each wait tinged with anxiety, the passing time was hard to take. I didn’t want my work published posthumously, I grumbled to myself.

Yet perversely, when the first proofs of The Hong Kong Letters arrived for correction at the beginning of December last year, I could not find the time to read them. My house is always full of paying guests and I have a quartet of gorgeous daughters. That combination triggers a multitude of dramas in a minor key that intervene to arrest all my best laid plans.

It was the proofs that now lay waiting for me and the clock was ticking – they had to be back by the end of the month.

A Daughter’s Solution

When the family arrived for Christmas, Kim, my eldest daughter, declared my stress was overshadowing the festivities. “If everyone takes a chapter or two”, she said, “the proofreading will be done in no time.”

I was aghast at that idea.

But Kim is a force to be reckoned with and soon all around the house they sat; family, guests and friends, drinking wine, reading bits out loud, tutting and laughing, their pens flashing across the pages, editing chapters taken out of sequence, each with different ideas on grammar, punctuation and all the rest.

My irritable interjections that they were not meant to be editing, just proofreading were ignored. Dale who’d been my first editor took my arm, “Just wait, Mum. It’ll all be OK. Go for a long walk or something.”

I sulked instead and prowled the house, ignored. I wanted desperately to hang each one up like tinsel and run off on my own to a Norman Rockwell Christmas where I could sit by a roaring log fire, chewing the end of my pencil while children and adults played wholesomely and silently under a huge Christmas tree and faithful retainers basted the stuffed turkey.

EVEN THE Christmas fairy JOINED THE SHOW!

And yet…

And yet… that crazy volatile wine-logged edit was marvellous. Pivotal. I sat down in the quiet when they had all left, and in the lull before the New Year, grateful and irritated in equal measure, accepting and rejecting, finally owed every word of my manuscript.

Nevertheless, I said nothing out loud when the second and final proofs appeared in my inbox. Instead I remembered an old acquaintance - one who lived far away - who’d once told me she’d done a proof-reading course.  She picked up typos that had fallen through so many reads - yet she too was desperate to edit… My grandmother who I’d described as a ‘thrifty, tall and vitreous stick of a woman’ became ‘virtuous’. I smiled at that, I am sure she was indeed virtuous, but that attribute was not one I cared about as a teenager.

When I Opened the Box…

Eventually the day came in mid-March when Emily and Alice called me. “Mum there’s a great big carton downstairs! Come quick.” It’s a great thing to hold your own book finally. The frustration of waiting fell away and I was left with just the pleasure of having brought together my own tale and the story of my old friends, with the help of great mentors, the encouragement of family and the enthusiasm of the many guests who have passed through my house over the years.

One author I learned about recently said it took her twenty-seven drafts to complete her manuscript. I’ve been thinking that when I finish the first draft of my next book, I’ll just wait until Christmas and look stressed again…

The Hong Kong Letters is published by Arcadia

Up-to-date with Addiction

For years now my daughters have been urging that I smoke weed

They can’t believe I missed out in the swinging sixties and feel there is still time to rectify such a glaring omission. I argue that my credentials are good – after all I did marry their father - a new-age hippie who smoked pot in a cave in Devon bedecked with beads in the days of flower-power. 

Nope, they said, I needed to try it personally.

One of my dearest friends recently gave in to her son’s similar urging and, under a starry sky, rode a dragon – a magnificent bleached tree trunk thrown up on a New Zealand beach by winter storms. She joined the chorus.

My answer has always been the same

I really have never wanted to try it; I might like it and the last thing I need is another addiction.  Wine and gin slings are surely enough. I staunchly fought off the suggestion that weed should be on my bucket list and felt confident that I’d finally reached an age of being able to hold my ground…  I was a little smug about my ability to rebuff addiction.

The addiction would turn out to be a different kind of buzz...

I got a smart phone.  Another 'girls’ idea'. I kept loyal for years to my little old Nokia but the girls wore me down and I succumbed.  I could not refuse, for I knew I was trying their patience, calling them from afar asking them about timetables or directions.

Well let me tell you, weed would have been a cinch compared to this!

This is addiction 101.  I grab my phone as I wake up and roll over jabbing at the keys. You’ll see me in supermarket queues, waiting rooms, on buses and trains, no longer engrossed in a paperback or indulging in a little contemplation, but checking the news or Facebook.  Ninety percent cute animals and small children that aren't mine. Posts to share for a million likes and every day a birthday that I never knew about before. 

Clickbait has me in its thrall...

I can feel my eyes glazing when I flick from Trump to Brexit and whizz past ScoMo. Had I missed out on the last six months of them and just picked up the news now, I would have missed nothing!

Maybe I could lose the phone and get stoned. Or get stoned and lose the phone!

It has made for an easy New Year’s Resolution - I’m following Lifehackers Ten Tips to reduce my addiction - Ten, isn’t it meant to be Twelve?

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/09/ten-tricks-for-checking-your-phone-less/

Fastnet Farewell

This is the second part of an account of my visit to Cape Clear Island - the southernmost inhabited part of Ireland in Co. Cork. Nearby is the iconic Fastnet Lighthouse.

All Clear - Part II

Eileen’s Bed & Breakfast - one of Ireland’s best

I slipped out from Eileen’s just before dawn to walk to the nearby headland. There I paused, held in thrall by the flashes of the Fastnet fading against the lightening sky.  After the night’s final sweep of light, the sky lay empty and I felt strangely disconnected and melancholy. 

I returned to Eileen’s to warm up by her fire while she prepared me a magnificent and immoderate breakfast. After our good-byes, my day’s walk back to the harbour took me past a small lough and then towards Dun-an-Oir, the Castle of Gold.

A Figment of Gold

Whispered tales sketched sightings of a galleon of gilded alabaster that once sailed the island’s coast. It would hove-to in the lee of the castle rock. Ghostly privateers slipped ashore to scale the cliffs and secrete gold within the castle vaults. The locals stayed away at night, deterred by sounds of spookish merrymaking. By day they could never find the stash. 

I would have been happy just to find the castle, for hours later, fighting the wind to keep my balance on all the highest spots, I couldn’t see a trace. Every drystone wall had an electric fence which made me nervous. I could roll under them, but what was I getting myself into? Highland cows are awesome beasts with horns. The weather closed in, seeping into my bones until the cold took my spirit. I gave up and followed the coast back towards the harbour. Had I not turned to watch a shearwater dart past, I would have carried on and spent an idle hour or two in the cafe waiting for the ferry. Yet, just that lifting my head, a curiosity for the flight of a vanished bird, changed all that. For there, behind me, was the castle silhouetted against high cliffs and sea. It vanished time and again before I reached it, by some trickery of coastline concealed. 

Dun-an-Oir

As Castles Go…

Dun-an-Oir was very small on a scale of castles, more of a stronghold but scored large for impact. It was built in the thirteenth Century by the O’Driscolls, a famous Cork family, loyal to their English overlords until a delinquent lapse saw them side with Irish rebels supported by the Spanish King. Although a close call, the English regained control and, in retaliation, they destroyed the O’Driscoll castles. And that was the end of Dun-an-Oir: in 1601, its top was blown away by English cannon.  

Built on a rounded bluff, it was once reached by a bridge of rock, so narrow that one early chronicler wrote, “few persons … will venture to walk over it”.

Winter storms pummelled the causeway and eventually, in 1940, it was swept away and the Castle of Gold was freed forever from the mainland.    

I lay flat on the clifftop, staring down at the swirling waters. I clutched handfuls of tussock to steady myself - the wind shafting under my anorak, my brain tumbling with the scudding seagulls below. All around, waves broke on rocky outcrops and in the distance, the sea lay like rolled lead, rattled by showers and scalded by shafts of sunshine.

I drew back from the unsettling edge to sit and imagine how tapestries shivered on the castle walls in the flicker of tallow candles and the comfortable glow of peat fires. I could smell the curls of smoke backing down the chimney in a gale, while down below, the sea bumped endlessly against the rocks.

As my eyes rested on the wider ocean, I saw it was flecked with bobbing black cormorants. I thought of those little black ink drawings on the chart at the pub; of the cargoes of treasure, steel, iron, coal and wool that all went to the bottom with the ships and seamen. And of the stuff of legend, the barrels of whisky that floated free and washed ashore or caught in fishermen’s nets.

Eventually, stiff from the cold, damp ground, I stirred myself and left the Castle of Gold to the wind and waves; the gulls and cormorants.

A turning

It was late afternoon when I caught the ferry back. I had kept going through Ireland, travelling by drift and in an uncertain frame of mind, putting off the turning point for my travels, for that point is not necessarily a halfway mark in time or geography. But when I took a last look at Fastnet, soft and grey in the haze, I felt my spirit-spindle move and, as if in acknowledgement, the light started its first sweep of another night’s watch.

I thought of all those who never went home: the victims of the raid on Baltimore, mariners, Spaniards, the crews of Fastnet, the Irish immigrants, the English intruders. 

The windswept cottage would need another buyer; the writer in me could make no further excuses. It was not a place I needed, neither was it solitude; it was self-mastery. I was ready for home, for family. Sydney’s summer beckoned.

Turning Point, Cape Clear Island Ferry about to leave for Baltimore

Solo time on Cape Clear Island

Introduction

Today’s blog is the first of two written about a journey I made to the southernmost part of Ireland a few years ago. I was travelling alone.

I didn’t make a conscious choice to become a solo-traveller, it was more that I’d exhausted my options. My soul-mate wasn’t fit for my kind of journeys, my daughters grew up and set off along their own paths, my friends needed too much information.

Now I can’t make up my mind which is best. Both of course. It’s super cool to have a companion as long as you are not responsible for them having a good time. And, with luck, for long years ahead, you’ll have fun reminiscing about the plane you missed, the awful hotel and the food poisoning – for unravelling travel is all about the mishaps.

Yet there is a side to solo travel that hooks you in…  It is the closest thing to freedom that I know. Freedom can be a challenge.

At first, I felt Ireland too tame, too close to childhood… the language, the food and gentle, emerald countryside. It was November and there were not many tourists about – they’d gone home, back to their jobs and families. I loitered. My return-ticket to Sydney still open. Not wanting to go forward or to go back.

Grand Irish Day!

ALL CLEAR - Part I

I took to Ireland for a month. Content, if I missed one bus, to take another.  But wafting doesn’t just happen; the breezes stir from within. Your familiar - child, seeker or pilgrim - scouts out the way.  In my case, each time I’m led to the edge, to the shore.

So it was inevitable that I’d reach the shredded coast of southern Cork. Its caves and coves were once the haunt of pirates and smugglers. Where I alighted, the small village of Baltimore, had an added fame. You may not know of the Sack of Baltimore; I confess, neither did I. 

The Sack of Baltimore

In 1631, led by a Dutch sea captain who had converted to Islam, Barbary pirates raided Baltimore, capturing white slaves for the markets of Algiers.  A crew of Janissaries, an elite militia, disciplined and deadly, crept ashore in the dark and took up position in front of each cottage.  At a signal, they fired thatched roofs, hollered obscenities and smashed down doors with metal staves. 

For me, walking down to the harbour in the sunshine nearly four centuries later, it was impossible to comprehend the terror of more than a hundred men, women and children herded down the same path under a crescent moon. 

A reminder of the most ruinous raid by Islamists ever made on British or Irish soil, swung above my path - the face of a fierce corsair, painted on the sign for The Algiers Inn.

Sign on the pub wall

I hurried on to book my ticket to Cape Clear Island, the southernmost inhabited point of Ireland. The Dún-an-Óir ferryboat had a storybook look with a bright orange hull and a jaunty cabin. 

Charting Marine Disasters

I had an hour before the morning sailing. I spent it in Bushe’s Pub on the Quay. It smelt of stale beer and the low winter sun slid in and did it no favours. Still it was warm and friendly, filled with marine memorabilia: brass fittings, barometers, lanterns and ships’ clocks, lined the walls. Pride-of-place went to a nautical chart on which, someone, with a steady hand and great care, had recorded every shipwreck thereabouts, each one annotated with name, date, cargo and souls lost. Each tiny ink drawing held a vessel evermore in the moment of calamity: capsizing, upended, breached or overwhelmed by the sea; a Glasgow coaster, yachts, steamships, a Spanish galleon, an American packet ship, local trawlers, French and Spanish too.

When it was nearly time for me to go for the ferry, I asked the barman about staying the night on Cape Clear. 

“You’ll not find a bed on Cléire.  Everything’s shut.  It’s winter!” 

Ferry waiting for me at Baltimore Harbour Wharf

The Dún-an-Óir in grand weather

As the Dún-an-Óir plied over the Atlantic swells of Roaringwater Bay under a capricious sky, the sun ran a wand along the sombre mountains of Cork, lighting swathes of bright green, purple and luminous yellow landfall. 

I wedged myself by the bridge instead of down below with the old salts, their dogs and their bundles.  The skipper chatted amicably while navigating powerful currents, islands, shoals and reefs.  He was sorry - no whales or dolphins for me to see but grand weather I must agree.  

I asked if he knew anywhere I could stay for the night. He pulled out a battered mobile and punched the keys. Then a brief shouted conversation, before he nodded, wrote ‘Eileen’ on my ferry ticket and said, “You’ll be right.”

Soon afterwards, he pointed ahead. Out to sea, a dramatic rock bore aloft a white minaret, radiant in sunshine. I gasped with astonishment. Was this some parting gift from the pirates?  My brain scrambled for a better explanation and remembered the BBC shipping forecasts of my childhood.  A litany of names for areas off costal Britain and Ireland: Viking, Forties, Dogger, Trafalgar, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet. 

I was surprised to hear myself say: “Fastnet?” voicing a subliminal knowledge.   

“Aye, that’s the rock,” came the reply.  

Fastnet Rock - the current Lighthouse became operational in 1904.

The Fastnet Rock was the last sight of Ireland for thousands of 19th Century Irish emigrants sailing to America.

Reuter’s News

Ships returning from the New World hove-to as they passed Fastnet, fired a signal and jettisoned a canister packed with news bulletins. Cape Clear Isle’s Telegraph Master waited impatiently for row-boats to recover the floating cache so he could tap out transatlantic tidings that would reach London days before the same ships entered the Thames. The scoop was the idea of a clever German newsman named Reuter.

A break in the rocks and we turned in to shelter

The entrance to Cape Clear’s harbour came suddenly, a narrow break in the rocks that could easily be missed. A few people waited on the pier for bundles of newspapers, mechanical parts and parcels to be thrown ashore and, within moments, everyone had gone, on foot or by banger – an island motor car sustained with bits of wire, tape and plywood panels.

Ferry from Baltimore in Clear Isle harbour

I bid the ferry crew farewell and walked up the path from the harbour. I passed a statue of the Virgin Mary in a grotto, garish in blue and pink. She struck me as incongruous and yet, I mused, only a short time before, an exotic minaret had seemed plausible and sublime.  

The only building was a café and general store.  A sign said, ‘Back in Five Minutes’.  Travelling around Ireland in November, I’d felt the draught of the doors shutting behind me.  I knew such a notice could mean, ‘Back in five months.’ 

Nevertheless I waited and, minutes later, a young woman ushered me in.  I asked for directions to Eileen’s.  She took my pack for someone to ‘take over’ and gave me coffee at a table littered with leaflets and a guidebook written by an American, an island resident for some twenty years.  He said that he wrote every morning and took his binoculars and walked the island every afternoon.  A deep cord lurched within me.

A whole island to walk around

The island was only three miles long and I set off to walk it; a seemingly deserted but homely patchwork of cottages and tiny green fields divided by drystone walls running over gentle hills.  The road dipped and ended in a slipway where workmen in fluorescent jackets manoeuvered a hefty barge, with two tractors on board. It belched, smelly and noisy, lifting and falling in the swell. I resented the interruption to my meditative amble - the whole sight, a bleak, disagreeable tangle of concrete, hawsers and exhaust fumes.

I waved and then turned back to retrace my steps until a fork in the road where I changed direction. Shortly afterwards I paused when I saw a For Sale sign outside the dearest little house. For a moment, I wanted it with all my heart and soul. Somewhere I too could write all morning and walk all afternoon. Because of the wind, I didn’t hear anyone approach and jumped when a voice behind me said, “Want to buy it?”

“Of course. And live happily ever after”, I said, turning to meet the stranger.

He laughed easily, he was my age, a pair of binoculars slung around his neck.

I said, “With that accent you must be the author”. 

He thrust out his hand: “Chuck’s the name”.

Over the next mile or so, Chuck filled my head with tales of the Castle of Gold, a rock called ‘Ship’s Bottom’, Bronze Age standing stones, blow holes and sea caves. 

I asked him about the derelict windmills I’d passed on the way to the slipway.

“It was an early experiment with wind power.  Incredibly successful until the Government did a deal with a utility company and, despite our protests, put in a subterranean cable.”

Each turn of the road gave us a different topic. Had I seen the memorial to the 1979 Fastnet Yacht Race? I remembered the tragedy well. Fifteen sailors died in the storm of the century. Chuck related the bravery of the Baltimore Lifeboat men who’d put into Cape Clear before being called to take part in the biggest sea rescue since Dunkirk.  

When we parted, Chuck directed me up to a Watchtower built by the British to dissuade Napoleon from using Ireland as a backdoor to England. I was up there when, out to sea, the Fastnet Lighthouse began to flash. So chivalrous, so thrilling. My ancestors were lighthouse builders and I indulge myself by revelling in the connection.

One of a series of towers built round the Irish Coast

In fact, a few hours later, when Eileen gave me tea and cake by the fire, I told her too of my lighthouse genetics. She nodded wisely; I sensed she’d had many a guest bewitched by Fastnet, a lighthouse that weathered monster waves.  It struck me she’d seen out many a storm herself. She was round like a smooth grey pebble, tumbled by sea and warmed by the sun; steadfast.

Part 2 of All Clear will be my next blog.

The Sack of Baltimore is well worth further reading. Google it and surprise yourself!

A Full Blown Bumpy Train Track in Burma

Happy Dale - she wrestled the windows to the floor and got the fresh air...

The runaway train came down the track and she blew… 

I hadn’t thought of that song since childhood but it flew into my mind as we rattled along on the train to Mandalay.

I was travelling in Burma with my daughters Dale and Alice, and Ben, Alice’s friend.  We arrived early at the station in Rangoon. I said I’d booked sleepers…  Oh well, my mistake, I must have booked reclining seats…  Surely?

I wanted to do this trip because my grandfather, Jimmy, did it in 1908. I'm sure he managed to organise a sleeper - I imagine him in a spartan but clean and comfortable teak carriage with brass fittings and plush curtains. He wrote precious little about it except that there were any amount of pagodas and rice paddies to be seen. That hadn't changed.

The carriages were gloomy and dilapidated, the seats decidedly fixed, but with nice clean seat covers.

I jumped when Dale unclicked her window and pushed hard to slide it down with a resounding bang. I shouldn't have been surprised - the first thing Dale does entering an enclosed space is make for any aperture and wrench it open as if she'd just entered a vacuum. I'm nervous with her in lifts in case she spies the emergency hatch.

The train took off with a hoot and a barrage of rapid-fire tortured metal crashes. The small neon tubes stopped flickering once we got going, the old-fashioned fans did an excellent job and the slip-stream quickly filled the chewing-gum-green polyester curtains and made them flutter madly; a theatrical touch as the train gathered speed - clickity-clack.

This was no pottering old train, we charged along, rolling and rattling, shaking and bouncing.

The doors at the end of the carriages alternately flapped open and banged shut the whole journey. The engine tore ahead, but the carriages were not letting up the chase. A change in engine tempo brought ear-shattering bangs and bonks as the carriages careened together. The carriages are old Chinese rolling stock originally made for a wider rail gauge which is why there is so much play and swing.

This was our upper class carriage. Chewing-gum-green is a local favourite. It was the colour of the curtains in the trains and of the squashy synthetic matting in pagodas.

Heave-ho! Smokers Go!

Clouds of pungent smoke curled over us from the thick cheroot of a portly local gent sitting behind us.  We pointed indignantly to the no-smoking signs and he signaled just one.  A little later the motion got to him and he was desperately in need of the sea-sickness pills that I'd read passengers sometimes needed on this trip. I wondered if we should have let him carry on smoking! Ben and Alice rapidly decamped to another seat.

Other than the woes of the poor old fellow behind, our fellow passengers were delightful. A monk watching boxing on his mobile-phone made us smile.

Dale likened it to flying on a wobble board.

I gave up trying to take photos or read my book.  Even more reason to admire the girls that cat-walked up the carriage with tin salvers of rice-filled wraps on their heads, calling out their wares. The food sellers changed at each station and brought different specialties. Durian, huge, spiky fruit bound up with pink ribbon for ease of handling; water and soft drinks. Little roasted birds on skewers made us all qualmish yet cellophane-wrapped strips of dried fish splayed out from the tail fin didn't evoke the same emotion. Huge lumpy guavas; rice and crayfish wrapped in bamboo leaves and hot cobs of corn.  A man with an enormous thermos waved sachets of Nescafé and others hawkers bristled with plastic pods of biscuits and chips.

Ben juggling hot corn cobs and a plastic bag with butter which was getting beyond its use-by-date.

Sleep wasn’t easy, we all had restless legs, whatever position we took up.  We got on the train drenched from monsoon rain and the question was whether to keep our soaking shoes on or reveal our water-logged feet, pale and creepy.  I recalled that it was terribly rude to point with  feet in parts of Asia and felt going to sleep with bare feet in the contorted positions we are adopting, we could easily make a cultural faux pas.

Yet even as the train bucked along - and at times I swore it left the track altogether - the clickity-clack beat a lullaby rhythm and rocked us to sleep. We woke now and then to stretch and peer into the darkness at a floodlit golden pagoda keeping watch over the flatness and blackness outside. Each body-stir excited the food vendors who never gave up trying.

Ben and Alice said they got no sleep.................

Once daylight had woken everyone up, two monks appeared at the front of our carriage. The first held before him a white and silver Buddha – the head sparkling with a battery-operated casino of led-lights -  blue, green and red. The monk stood, strangely still as the floor pranced beneath his leather sandals, and then began to walk slowly up the carriage, while his side-kick behind clanged rhythmically on a metal symbol.

“I think we’ve been blessed,” said Ben. 

Spot on Ben. I hope none of us had feet pointing his way.

The runaway train came down the track, her whistle wide and her throttle back, And she blew, blew,
blew, blew, blew.

Wet Lips and Wet Feet in Rangoon's Monsoon

Fabulous flower stalls in Rangoon shine however much mist and monsoon rain tumble down!

Delight’s guaranteed when I get to travel with any one of my daughter quartet. A couple of months back in Myanmar I scored a double - Dale and Alice joined me, as well as Ben, Alice’s boyfriend.

My travel companions, Alice, Dale and Ben

Our itinerary?

Our touring options were limited by the monsoon season and compounded by a dearth of planning. Dale wanted beaches, Ben the Himalayas and I, the Irrawaddy. We did none of these.  Alice didn’t want collision course road-trips in clapped-out cars, night buses and hiking.  We did all of those.

Footsteps

One reason I’d suggested we meet up in Burma was because it was one of the few places my maternal grandfather Jimmy had visited that I had not already, albeit inadvertently, visited too.

It was only recently that I re-read the letters he wrote home to Glasgow from a round-the-world trip in 1907 and realised how many times our footsteps had crossed. I thought it would be a great deal of fun to make them a connection point and continue to put my feet in his shoes, observing the then and now, associating events, paralleling and distinguishing experiences. It has led to a great deal of conversation with the dead man… which is rather nice, as I never got to know him when he was alive.

My maternal Grandfather, Jimmy

His father’s firm in Glasgow made bronze and brass marine and engine fittings for customers all over the British Empire and beyond.  When Jimmy visited Rangoon all he wrote was that he bumped into an old acquaintance in the lobby of his hotel and that there were "any amount of pagodas..." One was so large that, "covered from top to bottom with gold it can be seen from a great distance sparkling in the sun."

Rangoon

We only had one full day in Rangoon which the military junta renamed Yangon. I continue to call it Rangoon as do many Burmese as a way of thumbing their noses at the Generals and it sounds more musical to my ear. 

Rangoon in a monsoon - slippery pavements, downpours sheeting off conical bamboo hats, the scattered petals of rain-smashed flowers and business as usual. Every day rain drums on tin roofs, puddles on the top of plastic shelters and washes across the streets, heaping debris into low barricades and gurgling down the gutters. 

We walked the streets lined with crumbling colonial-era buildings. (I have to admit to being as fascinated as I am embarrassed by the remains of Empire.) 

Jimmy's visit coincided with the city's colonial heyday when its infrastructure and public services were every bit as good as in his Scottish home town.

Hundreds of buildings from that era survive near the river downtown. Survive is the operative word; many are abandoned and while the roots of the banyans smooch the sidewalks, disrupting paving stones and dismantling drains, above their branches curl up the once-stately buildings, creep through ruined window frames and finger crumbling balconies. Spongy emerald moss sneaks up another brick in the wall each day of the monsoon hosting the creeping decay.

We’d barely reached halfway on our colonial walk when the rain came sweeping in, swerving off the Bodi trees to pour its libation over the streetwalks. The locals have their umbrellas primed on a hair-trigger and, with an ageless hitch to their longyis, can, in a flash, flap open plastic tarps with a rewarding crack and drop them expertly over their market wares.  

Some shelter!

We made a mad dash for shelter and found ourselves under the portico of the Strand Hotel.

Alice trying to shake the rain out of her ear in the shelter of the Strand's portico.

First opened in 1901, like Raffles in Singapore and The Peninsula in Hong Kong, it was dubbed the finest hostelry east of the Suez. Jimmy? There’s little doubt that’s where he stayed – it was where every well-heeled business traveller headed.

The Strand Hotel

The iconic Strand Hotel has recently been renovated in a classic colonial style with an acquired panache which outstrips historic reality. Yet there is enough heritage to fool the gullible creative like me.  I loved the black rattan chairs and striped upholstery, the white marble flooring, ceiling fans and chandeliers. I asked the concierge in the Grand Lobby if the hotel had records going back to 1907 but of course they didn’t. Nothing much survived the WWII Japanese occupation and neglect thereafter.

Dale and Alice in the Strand lobby.

We were all jet-lagged and outside it still poured. So we repaired to the hotel’s legendary Sarkies Bar where adventurers and explorers have hung out for over a century. There we sank into comfortable chairs and took delight in our own company amid the carefully crafted teak-edged opulence.

“A toast to Jimmy is required.” I said.

“Cocktails,” said Alice.

Alice with the cocktail menu in Sarkies Bar

We spent a decadent afternoon working our way through the Strand’s Cocktail menu: Negroni, Margarita, Russians various and Ben’s tipple, Espresso Martini.

Next day we just got wet feet

It continued to pour when we visited the Shwedagon Paya – the pagoda that Jimmy mentioned that dominates the city. It is one of Buddhism’s most sacred sites and, legend says, the oldest Buddhist stupa in the world. It has survived divine and human insult, although the earthquakes and invaders took a toll. The British dug down attempting to turn it into a gunpowder magazine. Then they made it a military HQ for almost a century. And when they allowed the Burmese to return to their iconic site, European visitors and the British troops posted at the pagoda refused to accede to removing their shoes. What were the British thinking? I cringed and hoped Jimmy had removed his brogues.

Wet and shiny ...

The rain lashed the marble terraces and we squelched the circuit around the golden stupa on soggy foam mats spread over white marble slabs. It was hard to be reflective, with the paper pages of the tourist map disintegrating in our hands and creepy chewing-gum green sponge beneath our bare feet – but we stuck pretty closely to the route as going off-piste was fraught with danger for the wet marble was like a skating rink!

Clockwise from top left: Backs to Buddha - and another convert to social media. A more traditional interaction between a monk and a young girl and I stand by while Alice reads all about it before the paper map finally falls to pieces. All cycles!

We did not see the Shwedagon Paya sparkling in the sun as my grandfather encountered it, nevertheless, when we looked up the mist gave the gold a soft luster and it glowed softly biding its time yet again until the monsoon was over. 

And from there we went to catch our train to Mandalay... a tale for another day.

Photo Credits: Thanks Dale, Ben and Alice for sharing photos!

Threads of Hong Kong's past renewed

Neon Light - Courtesy of the artist Wattana Wattanapun. www.wattana-art.com. On display in the Wattana Gallery, Chiang Mai, Thailand. I found this portrait of a girl in neon quite haunting. It reminded me of a side of Hong Kong that I am glad is past, but it seems perhaps although the neon lights of the girlie-bars in Hong Kong have gone, the exploitation of young women continues relentlessly on.

I have just been visiting Hong Kong with my daughter, Dale...

I lived in Hong Kong in the 1960s. The Vietnam War was at its height and droves of American servicemen on R&R - Rest and Recreation - visited Hong Kong on furloughs of a few days. Snatched from the battlefield, hours later they were high on hormones, booze and pills in hedonistic Hong Kong.  As one patron explained to me, it wasn't that there was not sex-for-sale in Saigon, but the choice was much broader in Hong Kong; White Russians, Americans and Brits joined girls-on-the-game from all over South East Asia. There was no curfew either and no war to wake up to.

That clientele has long disappeared. The demand will always be there, but now the sex industry is heavily regulated and operates so discreetly I thought it really had disappeared. But of course it hasn't.

Nevertheless, another wave of exploitation followed after Vietnam. And again, the exploited were young women.

Uncomfortable meeting places...

In a pedestrian underpass in Central, Hong Kong’s CBD, Dale and I came across hundreds of women, sitting on sheets of cardboard, lining both sides of the long tunnel. We thought that there must be some kind of protest underway, but the groups were obviously social, centred around thermos flasks of tea and snacks. Nearby young women were handing out evangelical pamphlets.  

Further on, under a flyover, we found groups of young Muslim girls intent on studying religious scripts.  I was very surprised at the number of hijabs and headscarves I had seen around.  I just didn’t remember Hong Kong having a noticeable Muslim population. 

Original trams, KFC and a young girl on the streets of Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

A friend gave us the simple explanation...

The girls were imported domestic workers with no-where to go on their day off. 

In the late 1960s, a good Chinese amah was highly sought after. Competition from factories that paid higher wages was depleting the pool of domestic workers while the demand was rising as more well-paid women entered the workforce. My friend said that in the 1970s, the situation became critical and Hong Kong started recruiting young girls from far away as household maids. The first wave was from the Philippines - many were evangelical Christians. The second wave was from Indonesia. The ripples continue on with new generations of girls arriving. All are on short-term contracts and are not subject to Hong Kong’s labour laws. Stories of exploitation and abuse are rife.

The girls come to Hong Kong, full of hope and optimism - with expectations that are seldom met. They need to work for a couple of years just to pay off the debts they incur getting the job. And often they are kicked out before they have a chance to reap any benefit at all. In any case, any savings are remitted to their families.

No home to go to...

I felt saddened. The Chinese amahs I knew were part of the fabric of the family. Tough old birds who to a certain extent ruled the roost and certainly joined in the gossip. They had homes to go to – family members strung out over the Colony and the mainland.

For these new girls, it is very different.  They have no family, no homes to go to, nowhere to spend time off and they don't have enough disposable income to meet friends in comfort in a cafe. 

So they gather in the gloomy concrete underworld of an inhospitable city. 

They have a dream...

My friend told us it is said the girls dream of falling in love and being spirited out of their predicament. It virtually never happens yet folklore fuels the hope that a wealthy foreigner – unlike Hongkongers who give the girls a wide-berth - will fall for them.           

“It can happen, a young amah from the house of my great-grandmother married the son of a French diplomat,” my friend said. Anecdotes like that keep the flame alive.

Connections to The World of Suzie Wong...

A book published in the 1950s - The World of Suzie Wong, told of an improbable fifties romance between a penniless English artist and a Wanchai bar girl.  It became an iconic, though twisted, representation of Hong Kong's girlie bar culture.

In the 21 Century, religious house-maids imported into in a grown-up and rather prim Hong Kong share the same dreams.

Synchronicity...

I started writing this blog once I reached Chiang Mai, Thailand where I am staying for a couple of weeks.  Without any idea of the collection on view, I visited the Wattana Art Gallery, built especially to house the collection of Wattana Wattanapun, a Thai artist with an international reputation. I went, on a hot day, simply because it was around the corner from where I was staying, it would be air-conditioned and it was en route to a cafe. I was entranced from the moment I entered the door; no more than that: I was blown away - cool marble floors, natural light and a building that the artist himself designed to house his work certainly showcased it perfectly. 

Much of Wattana's art explores the beauty of women and the inherent vulnerability that goes with the appeal. I found it almost impossible to look at the images without also a fear that they were too exquisite to survive.

Wattana wraps the female form in traditional textiles. Somehow this heightens the tension. The textiles so perfectly compliment the beauty of these young girls yet we know that they are not enough to protect them from the ravages of modern greed and gratification. It is as if once stripped of these gorgeous textiles, they will be stripped of traditional values, skills and artisan-ship, youth and community and laid bare and wasted. 

I felt deeply moved by Wattana's work. I felt a sense of loss and a sense of joy. He contrasts painstakingly painted textile patterns with free bold brush-strokes for gorgeous sensual bodies. Both under threat and yet both offering some kind of redemption. The fragile culture of dress and textile diversity is hanging on by threads and the exploitation of women engulfs us all. Both need our help.  His work is a call to arms. 

I have used Neon Light by Wattana Wattanapun at the start of my blog. It is acrylic on paper. The image was unlike his other work and it seemed to encapsulate the waves of exploitation that are the sad side of all the other positive aspects of the legacy of Hong Kong.

www.wattana-art.com

Hong Kong Revisited

Hard to get my bearings in Hong Kong! The Law Courts and iconic Bank of China building look like toy-town nestled in the middle of all the skyscrapers.

I landed in Hong Kong last week, to take a trip down memory lane

I’d lived there half-a-century ago.  It wasn't that I wasn't prepared for change but I was travelling with Dale, my daughter, and initially there was nothing I could show her, it was all bloody gone.

The years had wrought havoc. Like a botched facelift, Hong Kong was stretched and shiny with a touch of zombie. For a start, they’d shrunk the harbour! 

I couldn’t work it out until someone explained The Star Ferry Wharf had moved, rebuilt on the edge of reclaimed land.  Dale asked me how land could be reclaimed if it wasn’t there before.  I said I didn’t know, but I thought it made everybody feel better to call it that, as if it really was theirs in the first place.

In another fifty years it is doubtful whether there will be a harbour at all… 

I remembered chickening out of the annual cross-harbour swim in 1969 as it looked a bloody long way, but the way things are going, I’ll be able to come back and swim it when I’m a hundred years old and I’ll smash it. 

Who needs a harbour anyway these days?

Why bother... tunnels burrow under it, bridges connect islands to the mainland, flyovers do their thing. The harbour, my quintessential Hong Kong, has become emasculated. The last of the old junks have long gone along with the lighters, water taxis, sampans and all the other craft that constantly plied back and forward between the island and mainland; the waterway reduced to a bland irrelevance.

I took a deep breath...

Actually Dale told me to take a deep breath.  She could see I felt overwhelmed and it was all new to Dale so she felt a magic that still lingered on. And I mused that was the real change, you could take a deep breath - no Hong Kong pong, although like an idiot, I put my nose in the air trying to scent that awful smell as if I was missing some elixir from my youth!

We took the Peak Tram. That was familiar and so too was the restaurant at the top. We stopped for lunch and my old love affair with Hong Kong rekindled - it is still stunning.

Lunch on the Peak

A friend took us out to Sham Shiu Po by the MTR - a rapid-transit underground system that was new to me.  He also said Sham Shiu Po was one of Hong Kong's poorest areas although there were more Westerners than any other area we visited because of a new art college. So that put my nostalgia in its place - the poverty and the foreigners making it familiar!

I started to feel more at home

On the second day, I spotted the iconic Bank of China building, albeit now dwarfed by skyscrapers and bereft of its spooky Red China cloak and dagger atmospheric. And I found other familiars: in Causeway Bay where we stayed, air conditioners lodged in high-rise windows above, still dripped onto the pavements and onto our heads, Chinese girls still loved to wear pink and I still wondered why. Hong Kong still wakes up late - I always liked that - a lull before the frenetic activity of the day. It's a grotty bleary time of half-shuttered doors; sudden sloshing water- buckets; hawking, horrible spit and absolutely no polish. If it's all too much, look up and still there is one of Hong Kong's wonders - bamboo scaffolding.

Dale and I watched these guys for ages...

And on the far side...

We took off for the other side of the island.  The bus twisted past Deep Bay and Repulse Bay on narrow roads that I drove so often in my beat-up cream-coloured mini – a car that would be very out of place in present day affluent Hong Kong - and at last we reached St Stephen’s Beach at Stanley and most of it remained steadfast to my memory.

I walked out along the old pier looking over the bay where I learned to swim, water ski and sail in quick succession. All the capsizes, all the immersions, weekend races and even a half-hearted attempt to train for that damned cross-harbour swim.

The clock is ticking for Hong Kong again

In thirty years the agreement that maintains Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region will end and finally, it will be integrated into China. The Hongkongers I spoke to were resigned to that. The clock cannot be turned back they said. When I lived there it was thirty years until the British left the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. We could not believe that the clock would move forward.

And in thirty years, I’ll be back for my cross-harbour swim!

Baby – the new millennials most popular name

Is it just me? 

Or is it a generational thing?  As soon as I got pregnant, Mike and I started thinking about names.  Boy or girl?  We hadn’t a clue. We just knew whatever the sex, we'd need a name.

Some thought we were ahead of the pack when we choose unisex names, although Kim and Dale have suggested a certain laxity, convinced – incorrectly – that we economised.

Our girls were named at their first gasp and hit the breast identified – names penned on pink wristbands. 

Whereas...

My grandchildren, their sex no secret, date of arrival perfectly pinpointed,  are just “Baby” for days or, in the case of our first grandchild, for weeks - or maybe it just seemed like that. 

So that painful business of tossing names around; recalling ex-romances, nasty friends at school, suicides, embittered relatives or business partners, takes place AB – after birth!  

I don’t get it – how can you expect a child for nine months and not have that organised!

My girls hoot with laughter at the thought.  How, they say, could anyone name a newborn before meeting him or her?  How could Mike and I have done that? 

It seems to me that if everyone did that, there’d be a sudden increase in names like Ginger, Scarlett, Angel, Beau, Hello Sailor, or maybe Hello Tiger, and Holy Moses.  Or if the name rolled off the cuff too early, perhaps a whole new lexicon like Ouch, Hallelujah or Never Again.

When I had Alice in South Africa, a lovely Zulu nurse told me her own name translated to English was “Enough” and it was her Dad that named her!  She was the eighth and last-born in her family.

Well done Emily and Tom – and welcome Ashton Fox – our 5th grandchild - that only took ten days!