editors like Mr. Trebilcoe grew tired of the town and the inner trembling about their lives became external, they would move on. Such a life and the deprivations and internment of war had left these men preternaturally aged, tired and bibulous. At the time my perception of Mr. Trebilcoe varied between being picturesque and a pathetic nuisance. I was more than once dispatched at five in the afternoon to scour the bars for him. I found him in the back of the Seventh Heaven Restaurant on Wyndham Street, leaning over a triple and close to tears. “I didn’t work today,” he said, visibly shaking and hunched forward, “but I’m sure I would have if I had.” I guided him down the Wyndham Street sidewalk, a treachery of intermittently placed sloping steps, back to the China Telegraph, where he functioned for the remainder of the evening.
Hong Kong was sports-mad back then, and every day the China Telegraph featured two whole pages of local amateur sports round-ups: cricket, rugby, soccer, softball and field hockey. I was responsible for contributing hearty coverage of local matches.
| The China Telegraph |
| Sport and Sportsmen |
| The stands at the Police Sports Ground in Boundary Street were overflowing yesterday when South China B played Kowloon Motor Bus. KMB attacked from the start, and their finishing touches in front of goal were spectacular. Just before half-time, Lee Chun-fat of KMB held the shot but the ball rebounded into play. After the interval, South China B began attacking and in the eleventh minute Colin McLinn opened the scoring.... |
Beyond the sunshine world of Westerners in the colony there were darker things in 1948, stories I covered usually with a Cantonese-speaking interpreter and, as I learned more of the dialect myself, on my own. Far from British arrogance bred of easy accomplishment, and even further from the Chinese merchants and professionals who were, even then, quickly growing rich, were the refugees who huddled into Hong Kong from the endless turmoil in China. I could never have imagined, when I first arrived in the colony, the squalid depths to which people could sink on those hills covered with packing-board shacks. It is hard for young people in Hong Kong today to realize that their parents and grand-parents came close to extinction in those harsh years after the war. Husbands pimped their wives and daughters to make enough money to fend off starvation. A paternal nation, Father China, had collapsed and its spiritual casualties were those heads of households strewn over those hills, selling their wives, stealing food, killing one another and finally giving up and fleeing their families. It was at this time that the intolerable pressures of life drove many despairing men to one of the most hideous of fates, heroin. You would see them gathered up in police raids, starving stick men, unable to close their mouths, their eyes rolled up so only the whites showed.
I covered stories at the Criminal Sessions, including an all-too-frequent crime of “acid throwing.” Mrs. Cheung Mei was accused of tossing hydrochloric acid at another housewife in Kowloon City in a case of convoluted neighbourhood tensions gone out of control. It was hard to disentangle who had done what to whom. Then there was a high-class prostitute from Shanghai known obscurely to her clientele as “Coca-Cola,” who was found poisoned by an angry customer in her Happy Valley house. Mr. Trebilcoe instructed me to identify her discreetly as a “cabaret artiste.”
For the first few months I stayed at the Tsimshatsui YMCA, then known as the “European” Y. All winter I rode the Star Ferry every morning, travelling second class to save money, and freezing on the open decks. In my leather briefcase was a flattened roll of toilet paper for use in the ill-equipped China Telegraph wash-rooms. The newsroom usually smelled of rotting paper, even in chilly winters, when you had to wear fingerless gloves to type. The inmates of the European Y were much poorer and often far stranger than the Oriental idea of what a European was. Some were older men excessively preoccupied with Edwardian poets such as Siegfried Sassoon. And there were Anglophillic Chinese bachelors who had lived abroad and were capable of breaching the racial barrier by “taking rooms” at the European Y. They reincarnated themselves as cut-rate English gentlemen with authentic eccentricities. One man was fanatical about railways. His eyes actually blazed and he addressed me in an over-rich Anglo-Cantonese accent about the nature of mixed trains. “That is to say, trains that mix passenger carriages with goods vans. One never attaches livestock vans to mixed trains. It’s just not done because of the odour that would attend passengers. Yet in the evolution of mixed trains not all the world’s railways came to this realization quickly. Our own Burma Railways, for instance ...”
The British residents of the Y were no less inimitable, and at best distant, decrepit relations to more refined commercially important persons from Britain. These fatigued lower-downs in print dresses and serge pants gathered in the YMCA canteen and waited for their meals with a freckled poise, looking pretty shabby. Between them and the doddering, comedie Chinese waiters they called “boys,” it was difficult to assess who was more likely to drool over the plates of food. “Oh, Jess!” two women crowed in unison on the first morning of my residence. They were greeting a third who made her way into the canteen with the benefit of a cane. “How’dja sleep, luv? Poor Jess, you look all in already.” Jess, whose badly mottled skin reminded me of marbled cheese, came and sat down and began to enumerate all the miseries of trying to sleep in a tropical climate. What she and the other women were doing in Hong Kong I never found out. Probably visiting their sons in the British Forces garrison or, like my Mr. Trebilcoe, possibly castaways who had roamed from colony to colony until they were out of money and hope. Either way, here they lived and every morning discussed their miseries with the intensity of young sports reporters at KMB games.
Initially I was very lonely and still really very sad over my father’s dam-burst of hatred for me. He never, in the rest of his life, wrote me with any indication of reconciliation, and I guess I never made much of an attempt to seek forgiveness. It was over between us, and it was over completely. Even in 1967, almost two decades after, it still ate at me with regret and, increasingly, unfocused anger.
The first flat I rented was in Causeway Bay, then a sleepy neighbourhood on the edge of an extremely unsanitary typhoon shelter, a little basin of breakwaters stocked with decrepit fishing boats and excrement. My apartment toilet was criminally mischievous: it flushed efficiently enough but then several minutes later would suddenly regurgitate its contents up through the drain of the bathtub (this sometimes happened while I was entertaining guests). The apartments builder had prized privacy above views. He had fitted the windows with frosted glass, and I was left scratching my head as to what was going on around me. Wavy wrought-iron typhoon bars on the inside made it impossible to stick my head out the casements and see what was out there. At night I could hear mah-jong games clattering in the next flats and the voices of the players, but I never saw who the players were. The streets were often just as unyielding. I passed a pawn shop on Fleming Road in Wanchai which had saloon-style louvred doors just high enough so that I couldn’t see inside. I was too shy to go inside to look but I could hear clients haggling with the pawnbroker, their voices rocking off the green stone walls of the shop. When a deal was consummated, the pawnbroker brought his chop down on the sales agreement with a clap. Someone with a small treasure wrapped in an old smock once bustled in through the spring-loaded doors, affording me a momentary view of the brokers in their cages. But the doors swung back and hit me in the nose, bloodying it.
My loneliness amid the fusty wrecks who worked for the China Telegraph propelled me into making friends with a new generation of Hong Kong people. In need of company my own age, I went to a few bars in Wanchai where the matelots hung out, but the fighting and the bar girls made me uncomfortable.
Through the press club I met young Europeans and Chinese who mixed freely at inter-racial parties. This was considered brazen and unwise by our European and Oriental elders so we felt stimulated even more to flout their expectations. Being young.
I started one evening with some work-mates from the China Telegraph and the South China Morning Post. We had drinks at the Press Club in Central, watching the tinhorn society come and go. An American who did a music program on radio station ZBW came in wearing a navy blazer on his shoulders, affecting a European look that took some imagination to appreciate. He came with a young woman named Arden Davis who worked in the public relations firm of Feltus and