A Writer's World (62 page)

The very moment they struck up ‘God Save The Queen’ at the British farewell ceremony in Hong Kong last night, the heavens opened and we all got soaked through. It did not matter. Soothsayers may say it was a bad omen, but the British took it on the chin. Down came the rain, the stands were a mass of umbrellas, water trickled down our necks, but the soldiers marched bravely on, the pipers piped, the singers sang, and Prince Charles, in his admiral’s white uniform, made his speech without a flinch as the rain poured all over him.

The farewell programme was a mixture of show-biz and Aldershot, predictably offering Andrew Lloyd Webber, ‘The Last Rose Of Summer’, ‘Scotland The Brave’, a bit of Elgar and ‘I’ll See You Again’. As a Welsh nationalist republican I thought I had grown out of such flummery but I cannot deny an atavistic tug of the heart when, in the gathering dusk and the relentless rain, the Union Jack came gently down from its high flagpole to the grand old strain of ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’. Grant it them – nobody does it quite like the British. Nobody else has the swagger of the gloriously gilded drum-major who led last night’s parade. Nobody can play a lament quite like the lone piper who ended the ceremony. I would have had to wipe away a tear were it not that my face was awash with rain.

For me the best and bravest part of the whole evening, all the same, was a noble performance by the massed bands of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. I doubt if they all knew they were playing the national anthem of the European Union, but I accepted it anyway as a gesture of liberation. Freed
at last from their historical burdens of imperial tradition, the British must surely now move towards the next fulfilment of their astonishing historical destiny – final reconciliation with the rest of Europe.

For them as for the Chinese, their departure from Hong Kong represents both an end and a fresh start. When the Union Jack came down the dignitaries moved on to the Convention Centre along the harbour shore, where the Chinese were about to assume authority over the Special Administrative Region. I, on the other hand, squelched back through the streets to my hotel on the opposite shore of the harbour. As I struggled through the immense excited crowds, illuminated by neon signs, noisy, laughing, merry, very wet and universally good-tempered, £325,000-worth of British-sponsored fireworks thundered into the sky. Up to my hotel bedroom then, open the curtains, and there before me was the harbour of Hong Kong, and at its heart the great glassy Convention Centre where at that moment diplomats and dignitaries from half the world were finishing a banquet, toasting the Queen and the President of China and preparing to move on at midnight to the official conclusion of British sovereignty in Hong Kong.

This city is one great television set, and every screen in town was showing the scene. Every now and then I looked at mine, and it was a bewildering experience. Now we saw the yacht
Britannia
, waiting to take Prince Charles away when the ceremony was done. Now we saw the banqueters raising their champagne glasses. Faces strange and familiar succeeded one another in flashes – Deng Xiaoping’s widow, the Foreign Minister of Indonesia, the President of Colombia, Kofi Annan, Lady Thatcher, Richard Branson, Ted Heath, the Argentinian Foreign Minister, Chris Patten, Prince Charlie and all.

A cut between cameras, and here was the advance guard of the People’s Liberation Army, crossing the border from China rigid as automatons in their buses and open trucks. Another cut, and it was Martin Lee the chief Democrat promising loyal opposition from the balcony of the Legislative Council building. Protests, troops, diplomats, champagne, Deng Xiaoping’s widow; all Hong Kong life was there, flickering on one or another of the thirty-two channels. But I spent most of the time till midnight drinking red wine, playing Wagner on the stereo and looking out of my window. There lay the marvellous city, awaiting the moment. Interminable crowds milled about the streets below. The incomparable skyline was ablaze. The sky was angry with storm clouds, reddened by the city lights, and all about the harbour the lights of police boats were winking, keeping the water-traffic
away from the Convention building. What were the people of Hong Kong really thinking down there? Were they as happy as they appeared to be? Should we have doubts, in these last few minutes between the British goodbyes and the Chinese acceptance?

It seemed to me, as I thought about it then, that the Hong Kong the British were leaving behind them was neither quite as good as the place might be, nor quite as bad. Economically, re-unification seemed to be, if anything, a shot in the arm. Socially the territory was free and mostly fair. But it was the political condition of the place that history would chiefly remember, and this was rather better than we feared it might be when Hong Kong was handed over, but rather worse than we hoped. On the one hand in a few moments the democratic structure so carefully put together during the last years of British rule was to be rudely dismantled in a few minutes. On the other hand there would remain a seed-core of libertarian instinct and purpose, a practised political society which will still form an able and determined opposition.

And then, I thought – but hang on, it was very nearly midnight, and Hans Sachs of
Der
Meistersinger
was on his last triumphant aria – empires might dissolve in mist, holy art would remain! Across the harbour the Convention Centre now seemed to be glowing rather than blazing, like a reactor. On the television screens, more speeches, more bands, more stamping honour guards until, on the stroke of midnight, we saw the Union Jack come down in Hong Kong for the very last time, and the flag of China go up for the very first.

Car horns sounded through my windows, and a great cheering too, and down below the people still meandered in their thousands here and there. And presently, out there in the night, I saw the yacht
Britannia
, with its guardship HMS
Chatham
and the last three small warships of the Royal Navy’s Hong Kong flotilla, steal away from the quayside and sail slowly off to sea, slipping away beneath the skyscrapers with a certain glory after all.

The British had gone.

One drizzly morning in the summer of 2001, not long before my 75th birthday, I went to a political meeting at a village in the Llŷn Peninsula, at the top left corner of Wales, which is a legendary stronghold of Welshness. Several hundred people had assembled there to express their dismay at the whittling away of the Welsh culture and language by the influx of English settlers into their country.

This was not a new anxiety. For a thousand years Welsh patriots had been resenting the intrusion of the English, sometimes violently. It seemed to me, though, that this meeting expressed something more profound. They were not hell-for-leather young nationalists who packed the village hall, and crowded outside listening to the speeches over loudspeakers. They were sober, courteous Welsh country people, of all ages, who sensed that their ancient way of life was in terminal crisis. Sadly and seriously they listened, and I felt they instinctively knew that their heritage was threatened not just by the flood of English retirees and second-homers, but by infinitely greater alien influences looming behind: huge, inchoate, almost unimaginable forces of finance, technology, globalization, homogenization, which were pressing down on them and beginning to make them no longer themselves.

It seemed to me that this infinitesimal event, away up there on the fringe of Europe, concerning a language and a culture that most of the world has never heard of, marked more by disturbed foreboding than by any vehemence, was a symptom of a hazy malaise that was shadowing the new world of the twenty-first century. I had known where I was in my world, my fifty years of the century before. Heaven knows there had been
horrors, squalors and miseries enough, from Cold War to Aids – when aren’t there? – but on the whole it had seemed to me a relatively straightforward time, a time of some promise. In fact I used to like to fancy, as I wandered the planet in my twentieth-century prime, that there was coming into existence a sort of Fourth World, a nation beyond frontiers, a diaspora and freemasonry of the decent whose values would one day emerge supreme.

Those villagers of Llŷn were certainly potential citizens of any such nation of goodwill, but it did not seem, that damp July summer morning in 2001, that they were about to inherit the earth. On the contrary, their anxious arguments, their intimations of despair, made me feel that at the start of the new century my own hopeful zeitgeist had faded, as spirits do: and accordingly soon afterwards I set out to circumnavigate the world one last time in search of its successor.

Almost at once, in St Petersburg in Russia, I met a former colonel of the Red Air Force living alone in a comfortless flat (bed unmade, crockery unwashed) in an apparently deserted and half-derelict tenement block. He seemed to me like a man floundering. The lost Soviet empire of the twentieth century, he told me, had been the rock of his life. He had come up the hard way, from the red bandanas of the Young Pioneers to the ridiculous floppy caps and huge epaulettes of the Red Air Force, and he had gone down the hard way too, abruptly from the absolute conviction of national mastery and privilege to the unmade bed high above the desolate courtyard. He was left wondering what it had all been about.

He was an archetype, I presently realized. Everywhere people were similarly disturbed, with the same sense of rudderless betrayal. There was something febrile in the air of the world, like the start of a fever. There was something threatening and unwholesome about the emergence of the United States as a power that could do anything it liked. There was something ominous about science, which seemed to be tinkering with matters almost occult in their significance – it would not be long, an Egyptian student seriously assured me, before mankind mastered the creation of life itself. There was something creepy to the Internet, an ectoplasmic presence seeping into private homes.

‘What are men for?’ a man said to me in Trieste. ‘Tell me that – what are we for?’ He was bewildered by the mighty changes in relationship between men and women, leaving him as unsure about his new status as many women were about theirs. ‘Sure I’m a Christian,’ a woman at a café table in
San Francisco assured me, ‘but, I don’t know, I can’t believe in all that Jesus stuff any more.’ She was recognizing in herself, half-way through life, the desolating loss of innocence. ‘What’s happened to the frogs?’ a child asked me in England. She was already observing, so early in life, the universal degradation of nature.

The intermingling of peoples around the world, which had once seemed so happy a portent, was beginning to feel an oppression. In Hawaii I was told that you could park a canoe on a beach only if you could prove that your ancestors had lived in the island for more than a century, and when I arrived in Australia they had just turned away 450 Asian refugees who had been rescued from a sinking ship – ‘the people have had enough’, wrote Mr A. Prizibilla (
sic
) to the
Sydney
Daily
Telegraph
, ‘Australia is not a dumping ground for depressed citizens of the world.’ And disorienting the spirit of the new age most elementally was the baffling gulf, growing every minute of every day, between the rich and the poor, the well-fed and the hungry – between those who had plenty, and expected to have more, and those who had almost nothing, and could expect nothing better.

We were all mixed up, I came to think as I travelled on, all unsure, and it sometimes occurred to me that the condition was even blurring our thought at the edges, and making our very speech more imprecise. Somebody in America told me of a recent review he had read of a television series. ‘This series’, it said, ‘fulfils a long needed want’ – and it took me several moments, I confess, before I realized that while the syntax was OK, the sense was decidedly uncertain.

The lingering reproaches of imperialism, the mysteries of technology, the antipathies of race, shifts of balance, bewilderments of progress, corrosions of money and power – all, it seemed to me, were reaching some kind of dark climax. For years I had sneered at the old stiffs and farts who had been assuring us, down the generations, that the world was going to pot. Now at last I began to fear that they might have been right all along. It was not a rush towards apocalypse that I sensed, more a welter of discrete and contradictory forces throwing us about, tossing us here and there, rather as we are sometimes told the universe itself was whirled into existence out of a bouillabaisse of floating gases.

As I get old I realize more clearly than ever that to the ultimate question – what’s it all about? – there is not, and never will be, an answer. The truest and most brilliant brains down the centuries have fudged the issue with their various species of mumbo-jumbo, from High Mass at St Peter’s to
witch-doctors’ prancing spells. The best we can do, I have come to think, is to ignore the conundrum, as we move from one age to another, and to my mind there need be only one commandment to help us cope:
Be Kind
. This plain injunction embraces the highest teachings of all the religions. Flexible enough to allow for free will and human frailty, it is, at the core of it, solid as granite – firm as St Peter’s rock, mysterious as the Black Stone of the Kaaba, simple as Stonehenge, organic as the Buddha’s Bodhi Tree, authoritative as any Mosaic law.

Yes, I thought to myself as I ended my journey and boarded the last flight home, kindness is the one principle that can see us through, a rule of life so straightforward that we all know what it means, and need no theologians to explain it for us. Contemplating this simple discipline, I remembered the confused colonel of St Petersburg, the Cairo student, the canoe-owners of Hawaii, Mr Prizibilla, the disillusioned Triestino, the vanished frogs, the lost faiths and the worried villagers of Llyn so close to home; and imagining how a universal devotion to kindness might have comforted all their anxieties, thoughtfully I returned to Wales on 10 September 2001.

The very next day, far away in dear old Manhattan, the next zeitgeist declared itself.

TREFAN MORYS,
2003