Enchanted Evening (12 page)

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There is so much that I remember about our time in Peking: so many stories. So many fascinating festivals – quite as many as in India, if not more – festivals like the ‘Feast of Lanterns', and the one dedicated to the Kitchen God. Then there is the sweet, unearthly sound that is part of life in China, and that is caused by the charming habit of fastening little bamboo flutes under the wings of their pigeons which, when the birds take flight, fill the air with strange airy music. An
embarras de richesses
of gracious, centuries-old temples, gateways and palaces makes it impossible to choose one rather than another, though I suppose if I had to, I would choose the Lama Temple. Yet I am not even sure of that when I remember Fa-hai-ssu, which was one of the least important of the many temples and monasteries among the Western Hills, and had been rented as a holiday and weekend retreat by some of the British Embassy language students. Or, strangely enough, one very new building: a hospital built by the Rockefeller Institute, which I would not dream of including if Bets and I had not happened to walk past it late one evening, on our way back from visiting someone in Hatamên Street.

The exterior of the white-walled hospital had been built in the style of the country, with green-blue tiled roofs, tip-tilted in the Chinese fashion, and stone lanterns on the top of the gateposts flanking the walled courtyard. There were lilac trees in bloom in the courtyard, for it was spring, and the air was sweet with their scent. With sunset the lights in the stone lanterns had been turned on, and glowed apricot in the dusk. I remember Bets and me stopping simultaneously, and standing in the road to stare – and to sniff the scent of lilacs.

The sky behind the blue-tiled roofs was still tinged with the sunset and, seen through the branches of blossom, the twentieth-century building looked like something out of a Chinese fairy story illustrated by Edmund Dulac. I number it among the ‘white stones' – those brief glimpses of something you know you will never forget. Nor have either of us ever forgotten it, though it was by no means the only time I had seen the hospital. An American friend who was on the staff there had taken us round the maternity wing and I had been impressed by the size of the long, airy, glass-walled ward where the newborn babies lay, and enchanted by its occupants, who were without exception the most adorable things you ever laid eyes on. Not red and crumpled, but beautiful pink and ivory dolls with long silky-black eyelashes and short black hair cut in a fringe.

If the sight of that hospital in the dusk is the only ‘something new' in the list of memorable things that remind me of the China days, then the oldest has to be the Great Wall. This too we saw in the springtime, when all the almond trees were a spangle of pink blossom against the bare brown hills. We had been invited to join a party of friends to visit the Wall, and went part of the way by train and part by car. There were fourteen of us in the party including the Number-One-Boy of someone from the Embassy. Some of us did the last leg on the back of local donkeys, and we must have spent two or possibly three nights away from home.

Except for the almond blossom, the bare hillsides were still brown from the winter, with only touches of green where later on, if the rains did not fail, there would be new grass, and the Wall (which I am told has now been tidied up and re-pointed) looked as old as Time, older by far than the Pyramids. It took your breath away.

We are told that it is the only man-made object that is visible from the moon, and I don't doubt it. But what is really amazing about it is the fact that it was made by human hands, long before men had learned to harness steam and fashion engines of iron and steel to do the hard work for them. The men who built it made no attempt to take the easiest line, but just went straight ahead, up one side and down the other of every hill they met, so that from any high point of the Great Wall you can see it snaking ahead and behind you, climbing the steepest slopes and crowning the crests, to dip downward on the far side and up again. For mile after mile after mile … There is something terrifying about it, because it seems to epitomize all the ruthlessness and indifference to human suffering of those who ordered it to be built, and the terrible cost in lives of the thousands of slave-labourers who died in the making.

Historians say that work began on the Wall long before the birth of Christ, with the object of keeping the Mongol hordes out of China. And judging from what we saw of it – even after the passage of so many centuries and the depredation of men who used it as a quarry – when it was new it could have prevented even a mouse from invading Chinese soil. Nothing that one reads about it gives one an impression of its size or its height. Or its massiveness.

At least ten armed men could have walked along it abreast, and every quarter of a mile or so there is a block-house built above an archway in which there were once two massive doors, one leading into Chinese and the other into enemy territory.

Except where the block-houses stood, with quarters for the garrison and rooms for the officers in charge, the space between the inner and outer walls had been filled with rubble from the off-cuts of the great stones of which the walls are made; and this, together with earth and rubbish and anything else that came to hand, apparently settled down with the passing of the centuries into a solid filling that is far tougher than concrete. For when, in the 1930s, Japan invaded North China, her troops attempted to breach the Wall not far above where it ends in the sea at Chin-wang-tao. They were said to have used enough high explosives to sink the Acropolis and blow up Hong Kong. But when the dust and debris of the explosion settled, all it had done was to knock a small dent in the Wall. They didn't try again.

Chapter 9

In the spring of 1933, my brother Bill took advantage of a popular offer by one of the eastern shipping lines of a round trip from Calcutta to Yokohama and back, stopping briefly at Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo and returning by the same route. I imagine the line must have consisted of cargo-ships, for though comfortable, it was far from luxurious; while the price, which was not much above
£
20 for the round trip and included all meals, was within reach of even the most impecunious of young subalterns.

Since the offer, which was a flat rate for the trip, allowed passengers to do more or less what they liked within the terms of the prospectus, Bill elected to leave the ship at Shanghai and catch the Shanghai Express from there to Peking. By cutting the Japan bit out of his schedule, he could have a good ten days with us before returning by train to Shanghai and picking up the ship there on its return journey.

He had a marvellous holiday, seeing all the sights, which included the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. These have a long avenue of outsize marble guardians set in pairs, facing each other on either side of the wide dusty track that leads across a flat, treeless plain edged by a distant fringe of low hills, where the funerary temples and the tombs of the Emperors lie. We took him picnicking to the Summer Palace and the Jade Fountain Pagoda, and to lunch with friends who had rented temples among the Western Hills. People lent him ponies on which he went riding at Pa-Ta-Ch'u, and he dined and danced on the roof-top ballroom of the Peking Hotel and, being Bill, fell madly in love with Florise Chandless, our pretty American friend who was up in Peking from Tientsin for a short holiday.

He was fascinated by our Chinese house, and our Chinese staff were charmed by the ‘Young Master'. (They took a poor view of daughters: particularly unmarried ones, for this is a country in which one of the terms for describing a woman is ‘the mean one of the inner rooms'; and neither Bets nor myself had as yet justified our existence by producing a grandson for ‘the Master'.) Tacklow's stock went up considerably when they realized that there was a ‘Young Master' in the offing, though Bill's first day in No. 53 Pei-ho-yen led to some confusion.

Last thing at night, before locking up, the Number-One-Boy inquired of Bill what he would like for breakfast. When Bill wanted to know what there was on offer, the Number-One-Boy said grandly: ‘Everything,' and then added a few suggestions, among them prawns. Now Bill was very partial to prawns, so he nominated them, and was surprised when Number-One-Boy inquired how many Young Master would like. Young Master said: ‘Oh … er … I don't know. About a dozen, I suppose? Not much more.' ‘A
dozen
?' gasped Number-One, plainly awestruck. ‘Well … er … yes. That ought to be enough,' agreed Bill. Number-One retreated – probably to talk things over with the cook, for it hadn't occurred to any of us to explain to Bill, or the Number-One-Boy either, that in England a prawn is merely one up on a shrimp, while in China a prawn is its freshwater cousin, a really large one at that. Next morning, while the rest of his family was dealing with eggs and bacon, the Number-One-Boy appeared, looking anxious, with an outsize dish on which, when he removed the cover, were displayed on a bed of rice and water-cress three outsize crayfish, each one a meal in itself. The Number-One-Boy apologized on behalf of the cook and explained that although the kitchen boy had left early for the market, others had been before him and he had been unable to acquire a dozen prawns. These were the only three that were left. Mother, petrified for fear that we had landed ourselves in yet
another
walkout on the grounds of ‘face', frowned us down when we began to shriek with laughter, and hastily assured Number-One-Boy that three would do admirably, and that the Young Master would not make the same mistake again. Young Master didn't, though as far as I remember he chose prawns – or rather
a
prawn – for breakfast every day for the rest of his stay.

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China's festivals, like India's, peppered the country's calendar, and seemed, if nothing else, to provide the populace with endless excuses for taking a holiday. What's more, the majority of the holidays appeared to last for several days (the Chinese New Year being a case in point). Most, if not all of them, involved feasting and fireworks, dressing in traditional clothes and parading through the streets. Each change of season is celebrated by a festival. The Chinese New Year comes first, and is followed by ‘Welcome to Spring', the ‘Feast of Lanterns', ‘Get up Insects' (variously translated as ‘Wake up Insects' or, more charmingly, ‘Excited Insects'). Then comes the ‘Corn Rain', the ‘Beginning of Summer', the ‘Dragon Boat Festival', ‘Sprouting Seeds', the ‘Feast of Heavenly Gifts', the ‘Beginning of Autumn', ‘Autumn Divided in the Middle' or ‘Harvest Moon'; ‘White Dew', the ‘Frost's Descent', ‘Come Winter', ‘Little Cold' and ‘Great Snow'. And that was only a few of the calendar ones! There were any number of others, because weddings, funerals, births, deaths and kite-flying all merited colourful processions and pageantry. A walk through the streets of Peking invariably included a free and fascinating show.

I never could make up my mind at which season of the year the city looked its best. The red and yellow of autumn, with its ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness' and the harvest moon shimmering on the acres and acres of Imperial yellow tiles that roof the Forbidden City, and with it our little house by the Jade Canal, turning the man-made lakes and water-ways of Peking into liquid silver. Or ‘Come Winter', ‘Little Cold' and ‘Great Snow' – when the lakes and canals turned to solid ice under a carpet of snow, and every tree looked as though it had been fashioned from crystal and diamonds, and every house wore a six-inch-deep white duvet on its tip-tilted Tartar roof – and every guardian lion dog a cosy cap and shawl of snow. Or in springtime, when the dour, dark days of February, with its bitter winds and the sudden lashing storms of rain and sleet, have washed away the snow and helped to thaw the canals, although this unleashed the appalling stench of the city, including, alas, that of the Jade Canal, which ever since the time of ‘Frost's Descent' had been sealed in by ice (a circumstance that had not prevented the local citizens from continuing to use it as a main drain for the disposal of sewage and every form of household waste from cabbage stalks to fish-heads and a dead cat or two).

The reappearance of the Peking smells was the only drawback attached to ‘Welcome to Spring'. And fortunately, these were almost eliminated by the scent of blossoming fruit trees, lilacs and magnolias and all the flowers of spring. For several weeks at the end of winter, the
hutungs
and houses in the poorer quarters of the city looked as muddy and dour and dun-coloured as a huddle of toadstools, and while the cold lingered, so did innumerable dirty patches of snow, coated with the dust of the Gobi Desert and pitted with dark holes from rain or melting icicles. Any stranger visiting Peking for the first time would have written it off – as I had once written off Srinagar – as a grubby and hideous town, with nothing to be said in its favour. Yet that same stranger, arriving a week or so later, would have found a city scented with flowers and spangled with blossom. Almond and apricot, pear, peach and cherry, plum and apple-blossom, each took over in turn. The dust and the dirty snow patches were washed away by the spring rains and the whole place looked as though it had been through some supernatural car-wash.

But if it was difficult to decide at which season Peking looked its best, there was never any doubt as to which was the worst. Summer was plain horrid. India had accustomed me to the drawbacks of hot weather, but at least her people knew how to deal with soaring temperatures. Here there were no high-ceilinged rooms, thick walls and wide verandahs, and the courtyard system ensured that there was no question of a draught. Chinese houses were designed to keep one warm in winter, and to heck with summer: you can't have both.

The only attempt at keeping the place cool was to shade the entire courtyard with an outsize
pang
. These sunscreens certainly prevented the courtyards from turning into furnace-hot sun-traps. But they also helped to keep air out of the place, and anyone who could afford to do so made for the coast or the Western Hills. There the period between ‘Welcome Spring' and ‘Great Heat' was one of the pleasantest times of year, and we were lucky enough to spend several weekends as guests in Fa-hai-ssu, a temple in the Western Hills, part of which had for years been rented for the summer months by members of the British Embassy.