Everyone read the Saturday supplement of the South China Morning Post. Most readers saved it up for Sunday afternoon. People saved up The Times crossword too. They had newsy and boozy picnics together. After the early service at the church, the papers were folded out on a rattan cane table or a fine mohair rug boasting a silver plate tray of gin slings or palm toddies. Everyone had their turn reading out items of interest or seeking assistance for a cryptic clue. It was quite fine to start drinking at 11 am but the older householders headed for the kitchen straight after church.
As the afternoon wore on, there was a flurry of checkers, the games of the children ended in tears and bridge hands were folded. All the grown-ups became stupefied and the amahs swung into action, taking the children to their baths and beds. A sunny afternoon of the family, neighbours and friends mucking in, drinking and sharing the supplements was a ritual moment of happiness in expatriate lives often abruptly soured by death and illness. The weekend fare was long essay accounts of local affairs or intrigues from across the border. The papers were the backcloth of isolated and tribal overseas lives. The Saturday supplement was a solid colonial suggestion when otherwise there would be confusion. It gave people reasons to go on with their life as a lowly shipping clerk or an exalted Colonial Secretary. It was highbrow but readable. Attitude-forming but not strictly quotable. The papers began an afternoon of diversion when the mice came out to play too.
After about 1925, members of the younger set home for boarding school holidays, or fading on a pier under the Asian sun until a suitable catch swam by, put in an obligatory hour or two under the pergola with the parents, kiddies and matronly aunts then repaired to a hotel or golf course veranda for a different kind of supervision. Their servants – Little Wu among them when she first came to the colony – embarked on what never failed to produce an adventure. A trip to the islands.
About three miles off shore, the islands of Repulse bay were beach crusted jewels of emerald floating on the edge of the South China Sea. For such adventures the young servant set had a rule, well, two rules actually. 1. The islands did not exist. 2. No-one went back dishevelled, telling tales or smelling of stolen Pimms. The second rule sounded like it invited more than a few breaches. But the timing of the trips was perfect, and no-one wanted to spoil a good thing. Just as the boozy hilarity of a humid afternoon hit the blanched restraint of unfulfilled foreign marriages, and the siesta was beginning its siren call, the older boys and girls in service made themselves scarce. They were all due for some time off by Sunday. Little Wu was usually back home by the time Sir Seth and Lady Edith woke up for a cold supper of ham and sliced hard-boiled eggs. Always ham and eggs. Always.
Sir Seth could not put his finger on it. Although he had hit the bottle on Sunday afternoon as hard as any of his guests, he had a reptilian awareness that there was something distant, something oddly unavailable, about his parlourmaid on a Sunday night. The wind on the dinghy across to the islands had blown Little Wu’s hair into crown and she was really rather pleased with the effect. She always did everything that was expected of her once she returned. Noiselessly putting the fans on high, straightening the barely creased siesta bed, and tidying up the pergola. Then she retired to her own attic rooms to shove out the roof window and, hunched on the slow slope of the slate roof, recounted in her thoughts the excitement of her afternoon on the islands, while cradling a quarter of a bottle of leftover Pimms to keep a buzz going.
The number of the island-hopping servant set was swollen in summer by a sprinkling of Eurasian boys. All in all, there was about ten of them going to the islands on a Sunday. Were one to tell tales of the islands, there may need to be a lifetime embargo on their release to save the reputations of its sojourners. Yet anyone who knew about that set forgave them happily and envied their freedom. For they were young and, pressing hard against adult lives, rude with desire and alive to the touch in a way one can only be at the age of eighteen or thereabouts. This was not a matinee dance for the maids at the Combined Services. No-one ever met their future wife or husband on a trip to the island. That was probably Rule No. 3.
Although there were plenty of fantasies, urgent and sticky, they could be washed away perfectly in a light brine of azure, and hung out to dry in the gusts of the afternoon refresher. These Sundays were known to them all as their Volcano Days. Although a full recount of their afternoons of secret adventure would fill a saucy tribute to the brim and beg it to trickle over, the imaginations of lovers are often conditioned by routine. It began sometimes with a slightly censorious giggle at the poor form, not of giving, but receiving, a yearning finger in the motorised dinghy over to the islands. Every bump of the waves added a random movement until the giver simply held firm the delighting digit to let nature take its thumping, splashy course. It ended often enough on a sunset shore on the next beach over from the taxi boat home, her guiding him with the pull and slappy deflection of a skinny crimson cheek higher, ever higher, high-eeeer, until laying back almost flat on the wave smoothed lava-caste to let the boy release, him quite unaware his real work had been done about a minute ago.
The Volcano Days would mean more to the servant set than any of them realised at the time. One Eurasian lad – Lau Kit Sai but known to them all as ‘Benny’ – lent a comic air to their proceedings and rather took the fancy of Little Wu. He suggested outrageous things like re-naming British cocktails after their adventures. As the servant set perched around a fire pit and toasted an afternoon tea of squid on sticks he asked:
“How better to remember sweet memories of the dinghy finger or the upward thrust of a lava drama?”
“Benny!” said Little Wu laughing with all the rest.
“You simply can’t say that!”
“Is someone respectable listening?” asked Benny his face in false gravity.
“Yes!” replied Little Wu “And you are as deaf as a post!”
Benny laughed harder than all of them put together. Something about Little Wu had broken through his insistence on absurdity and she had done so without telling him to stop joking around. What struck Little Wu was that when everyone shared the same moment of freedom, the options actually taken up were two or three in number, not a hundred. Yet when everyone was guilty of the same trysts, and the giggles of self-recognition faded away, they were neither free nor dreaming of the ninety-seven or ninety-eight other things they might have done. The hearty exchange between Benny and Little Wu put the pressure on them both to find at least a fourth option – to have imagination and daring enough to risk losing their way home for something special. These crazy plans always begin with a laugh between friends.
The Volcano Days formed a distinct phase of life, and like a season it had a noticeable beginning, a middle and end. The lives of servants and their suitors fetched markers of respectability from their employers but adapted them to their own lives. The servant set could avoid supervision once a week but courted danger and alienation in a way that gweilos of a similar age never knew. That absence of risk was advertised as a superiority in their choices. But it often led to chanceless lives consumed by resentment and close-to-the-surface peevishness about options that could be imagined but never explored. The alcoholic demise or the failure to make great art that befell the thespian lesbians and the boater toters were seen as proof of what happens if a sensible way is rejected in the name freedom.
Every social group needs an outsider. In the Repulse Bay servant crowd, Little Wu and her friend Su Ni Su played the role. Neither were more outrageous or less cautious than the rest. Su Ni Su took the lead and Little Wu followed. She simply believed that if her life was in the measured service she was under no obligation to be agreeable to anyone outside of the house or live in deference to their wishes. Su Ni Su started out by stealing the boyfriends of other servant girls, then they stopped inviting her out on Sundays so she and Little Wu simply shared their boat over to the islands without asking. Sir Seth had chosen them to serve in his house because he thought they would be discrete, and they were. It bothered Little Wu that, when she made light-hearted comments or flirty comments about Sir Seth, Su Ni Su would go quiet or change the topic or find a reason to leave the room to do other duties.
The Saturday supplement was written by the wives of judges or civil servants shaking their boredom by flexing their unrequited feature-piece credentials under a pseudonym as a kind of season ticket to local bohemia. Anything remotely intellectual had to grab every scrawny chance to rise above the suffocation of a British colony. The stories pursued a condescending interest in the affairs of China old and new. They were written to marvel at a relatable novelty believed to say something deep about the Chinese people without edging too far from the tepid shallows of their defaulting unconcern. Most of the writers had a BBC sing-song cadence down to a tee, but their authors had generally read too many novels and were florid. They wrote for the Saturday paper because weekday accounts required a minimalist craft. That required writers to switch off how they thought when they wrote, at least to some extent.
Only one person could write the colony’s coveted gossip column and she was usually related by blood to the Governor as a means of keeping the page within bounds. It was an amusing record of silly duffers and wrists broken by inebriation but explained in equestrian terms. Thus, the Saturday paper offered an outlet for a wider variety of colonial confidants and an amateur thrill of seeing one’s name in print.
On Saturday 10 October 1957 there appeared among the ten pages of the supplement what long-serving snobs generally disparaged as “a Chinese item”. It ran for a page and a half but was nearly crowded out by a one-year anniversary retrospective on the 1956 Hong Kong riots. There were photos of upturned cars, military reminiscence of who set fire to what and when, a series of condolences from the Swiss diplomatic corps and members of the refugee reception committee, and of course, the government’s view of who caused the riots and what had been done since to prevent them occurring again. Despite the item in question being tucked away in the supplement beginning on page four, and divided into sections across three pages, the story complemented the overall tone of the riot coverage: the need to be wary of the communists. Both their limitless confidence and their underhand ways. Although “a Chinese item” the story had a flavour of boy’s own adventure in the face of ruinous adversity. These are excerpts from the article published under the name “Millicent Spry”:
Miraculous Liberation in Communist Badlands
Li Ren, known to some as Ting Hao, is an ordinary-looking man. His hair recedes slightly and his gaunt forty-year old frame stoops slightly. His English is decidedly broken, if not quite shattered. On the day I met him, he was in the company of a youngish-looking woman, introduced to me as Wu Ping but going under the name Little Wu. The couple took turns nursing their small son, a smiling little chap dubbed if not christened, Li Yat. The story the couple regaled me with had the quality of a dream but it has been fully corroborated by more than one source in communist China. Had you picked up their story in a penny dreadful novel, one might find an afternoon of amusement in their tale of derring-do. Yet the fact that it happened, and that its happening has sent happy reverberations around the oppressed villages of Southern China, serves as a instruction on the importance of persistence and courage in the face of tyranny.
Li Ren crossed hundreds of kilometres of Red China by foot with Miss Wu on a special errand for Mr ‘Old Man’ Chan, a colourful local identity known well to any who frequent the gaming tables of Macau. Mr Chan once owned Villa de la Rosa on the Northern outskirts of Canton where he hosted hunting weekends for ship owners and big importers. There he had a rose garden of the English cottage-type and a profusion of bamboo stands offering shelter to his kitchen gardens and privacy to his exclusive garden parties. The house itself stood at two full stories, was made of brick and boasted internal plumbing— quite a feat for a Chinese built house twenty-five years ago! Mr Chan now leads the life of a retired Nationalist general and playboy though in his day he was one of the most fearsome and successful Northern warriors of old Generalissimo “Cash My Cheque’”. His reward finally came when he was made Customs Comptroller of the Port of Canton – only one cut of the tariff booty below that taken by the Commissioner himself.
Li and Wu travelled under, shall we say, ambiguously procured identity documents as a married couple. Wu intended to return to her mother for the birth of her first child and Li had Mr Chan’s clandestine business to complete at the Villa de la Rosa. He was charged with recovering certain precious old ancestral books from the villa’s library coveted but lost to Mr Chan in his haste to leave in 1949 as well as a rather more controversial assignment – exterminating an aviary of parrots. Chan reasoned that if he could not enjoy the calls and swoops of his feathery friends no confiscating communist family would either. The tale told here is partly about an errand of ill-will, but also one of old fashioned political revenge, because it was scheduled to occur on none other than the venerated Nationalist holiday, the Double Ten. Chan was reputed to have said to Li that there was no better day for hard working expatriate Chinese like him to remind the communist devils of the beauty and progress he had left behind than to snatch it away on the Kuomintang’s day of days.
Continued on page 56.
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