Enchanted Evening (2 page)

The
Conte Rosso
was to stay in Singapore for two days, and Tacklow had booked rooms for us at Raffles Hotel. We went there in rickshaws, which in those days outnumbered taxis by twenty to one, if not more, and I remember that the open sea was on our right for the whole way. When we reached Raffles, it seemed a very big building in contrast to the small wooden shacks of the fisher-folk and shopkeepers that clustered along the left-hand side of our road. I remember too, very clearly, a young Chinese woman standing on the dock looking up at the faces of the passengers who lined the deck rails of the
Conte Rosso,
as they waited to disembark. She was wearing a plain white
cheong-sam
and black silk Chinese-style slippers, and she stays in my mind as one of the four most beautiful women I have ever seen.
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In those days the garden of Raffles Hotel ended in a large swimming-pool that lay between the green lawns and the open sea, and I remember being told a horror-story about it by one of the local inhabitants. Singapore had recently been badly battered by the tail-end of a hurricane that had sent huge waves crashing over the sea wall at the far side of the swimming-pool. One of them had carried with it a large shark, which found itself trapped in the pool once the storm had passed. Because of the damage to the trees and flower-beds and the endless debris to be cleared away, no one had gone near the pool for at least a week, and the shark had got hungrier and hungrier. And when at last the sun rose in a cloudless sky, the ravenous creature discovered that there was only one place where it could hide from the glare – in the black shadow thrown by the diving-boards. It was lying there when the first swimmer, a young woman off one of the tourist ships, came down for a pre-breakfast dip, and jumped in off the high diving-board straight into the jaws of the shark. ‘She hadn't got a chance, poor girl,' said my informant with an eloquent shudder.

I don't know if that story was true, or merely invented to take the mickey out of me; if so, he had a very nasty imagination, for his horrifying tale gave me nightmares for months afterwards, and it was years before I stopped myself instinctively checking any shadow in a swimming-pool in case it harboured a hungry shark. The pool has vanished long ago, and with it all but the façade of the old Raffles Hotel, which now looks out on a mile or more of houses, roads and skyscrapers galore, where once there was open sea. None of the distinguished visitors who stayed there in Victorian and Edwardian days, and throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, would recognize much of the old Singapore.

The Governor, who was a friend of Tacklow's, sent an invitation to lunch and a car, and in the afternoon we were given a tour of the island and its famous and beautiful Botanical Gardens, which, in those days, no car except the Governor's was allowed to enter. I remember it as being green and scented – and full of shade and orchids and brightly coloured birds. Towards evening it rained, and I was told that this was a feature of Singapore's climate, that nearly every day ended with a tropical shower which not only saved people having to water their gardens, but made the evenings pleasantly cool.

The
Conte Rosso
sailed next day at sunset. And as the ship threaded its way out between the tiny islets that lie scattered round the harbour, we saw a graceful white steam-yacht coming in to anchor offshore in the lee of one of the islets, and were told by the pilot that it belonged to that world-famous clown of the silver screen, Charlie Chaplin, who was on a honeymoon cruise, following his marriage to the second (or was it third?) Mrs Chaplin, the beautiful Paulette Goddard. And instantly the quiet, opal-coloured evening became drenched with romance, and I thought with envy how heavenly it must be to marry the man of your dreams and be able to sail away with him to such enchanting places as this. Lucky, lucky Paulette; what wouldn't I give to be in her shoes! Provided, of course, that I could choose a different bridegroom. For at that time, having never seen the famous comic except on screen, I could only think of him as a funny little man in baggy trousers with an absurd moustache.

The weather changed as we turned northward into the South China Sea, and it was there that I saw my first water-spouts, thin, dark columns, very far away, racing across a slate-grey sea. Tacklow called us out on deck to see them and the Captain told us that they might look interesting enough from a distance, but could be lethal if they struck a ship broadside on. The wind driving them had not yet reached us (I would have been prone in my bunk if it had!) and the horizon was a jet-black line dividing the ink-dark sea from a long bar of almost white sky. Above this lay a dark pall of cloud that had the appearance of being held up by the pillars of the water-spouts. The whole enormous seascape looked like a steel engraving of one of Gustave Doré's illustrations to Dante's
Purgatory.
But though the wind was beginning to reach us in little whining gusts, I made no attempt to go below, for another water-spout was forming right in front of us.

It was the most uncanny thing I have ever seen. It began with that ominous pall of clouds turning darker and darker, and then beginning to sag down at one point towards the sea until it seemed that it must burst at any moment and empty its load of rainwater into the sea. Instead of which, it was sucking the sea up towards it. We saw the sea pucker up, as though drawn up by a gigantic suction-pump towards the cloud-bank above it, which by now had formed itself into a long funnel that was swirling round at a ferocious speed and drawing the sea remorselessly into it. Another few seconds and the two columns would have joined and gone racing away, sucking up more and more salt water as they went. But the wind had been too quick for it. The sinister, swirling funnel of clouds had barely touched when it hit them with what must have been the speed of an express train and blew them apart, and the great hill of water fell back into the sea with an enormous splash.

I'm glad I saw it. Even though the very thought of it still gives me a shiver down the spine, because both the grey, foam-flecked water that appeared to be lifting itself up and the black, groping funnel reaching down for it seemed to be alive and know what they were doing. That must have been the way the Red Sea looked when it lifted up and drew back to let the Israelites pass over – and when it fell back on the pursuing army of Egypt.

The
Conte Rosso
left the bad weather behind, and the skies were once again blue and cloudless by the time we reached Hong Kong, where we were met on the dock by one of Mother's sisters, Aunt Lilian, and her husband, Uncle David Evans-Thomas (at that time the manager of the local branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank), who drove us up to the Bank House on the Peak, and from there to lunch at the Repulse Bay Hotel.

Hong Kong, like Port Taufic on the Suez canal,
4
was one of the places that I fell in love with on sight. You have no idea how green and glittering and beautiful it was, back in the decade which was fated to end with the Second World War. There were few skyscrapers in those days and I remember (probably inaccurately) the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building as being much the tallest on the waterfront. There were sampans and sea-going Chinese junks among the ships reflected in the clear blue and green waters of the uncluttered harbour, and the hillsides that surrounded it were thick with flowering shrubs: yellow, red and coral-pink hibiscus and acres of heliotrope, that sweet-smelling plant that at one time used to grow in every cottage garden in England, and which the country-folk nicknamed ‘cherry-pie'. The air was heavy with its scent – and full of butterflies, more brilliant than any I had seen in India, and so large that at first I thought they must be brightly coloured birds until their lilting flight betrayed them.

Our next stop was Shanghai, where, on a cold day, we parted with regret from the
Conte Rosso
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and her friendly crew. Their next call was Japan, while ours was in the North China Treaty Port of Tientsin. The business of disembarkation took a great deal longer than we had expected, and Bets and I, after having our faces checked against our passport photographs, were left to our own devices for what seemed like hours, while our parents queued patiently to be interviewed by a number of Chinese port officials, explaining to the satisfaction of passport officers their reasons for wishing to enter China and how long they expected to stay, answering endless questions put to them by customs officials and health inspectors, and finally signing any number of papers. All this meant that I had plenty of time in which to take my first look at China proper. Frankly, I thought nothing of it.

I had not counted the Treaty Port of Hong Kong as ‘China proper', because in those days it was still part of the British Empire, with the date on which it was due to be handed back to China so far in the future that it did not even occur to me that I might live to see it. But Shanghai, despite its impressive Western-style buildings and the fact that it was at that time a truly international city, was also unmistakably Chinese. The swarming crowds on the dockside, the coolies and dock-workers, the stevedores who were loading or unloading cargoes or coaling the ships and, almost without exception, the merchants and educated middle-class men and women who had come to greet or wave goodbye to passengers were Chinese, dressed as their nation had dressed for many centuries past, and would, all too soon, never dress again.

Looking down at them from the deck of the
Conte Rosso,
I did not realize that I was seeing the very last of that Old China, the fabled country which many of its citizens refer to as the ‘Middle Kingdom', because to them it occupies the centre of the world, and who had dressed in this self-same fashion when the British were living in caves and painting their bodies with woad. Had I known, I might have been less critical of the scene below me. And for the first time since we left Delhi, I was afraid. Deadly afraid that I was never going to see India again, doomed to spend the rest of my life in this chilly, colourless country whose people spoke a language that had no alphabet but only picture-symbols – thousands of them, a different one for each word.

It was all very well for Tacklow, who acquired languages as other people collect stamps or matchboxes, and for Mother, who had been born in China and had spoken the language from her babyhood – as I had spoken Hindustani. But I could not see myself at my age learning a new and very complicated language. Besides, I didn't want to, because I had no intention of staying in this country for longer than I could help.

Perhaps if the sun had been shining I would have taken a kinder view of Shanghai. But the day was grey and lowering, and a chilly wind was sweeping along the decks and singing through the funnel stays. And ominously, in the far distance beyond and behind the crowded rooftops that stretched to the horizon, the grey of the overcast sky was smudged here and there with darker stains of smoke that rose up sluggishly into the cold air and were, had I but known it, a grim reminder that below them lay the ruins of what had once been the overcrowded Chinese workers' suburb of Chapei, which was still burning.

Barely two months before, and without warning, the Japanese had attacked it, and, as I was to learn later, on the night when the attack was launched the firing had brought the Westerners in the International Settlements, who were streaming out of theatres and cinemas, crowding into the streets in evening dress to see what was going on, and staying there to watch. They were quite confident that because they were foreigners and this was nothing to do with them, no one would harm them.

That story of an interested crowd watching without realizing it the death of Shanghai as an International City and the birth pangs of the Second World War reminded me of a tale about the early days of the American Civil War, when the crinolined ladies of a Southern city were so confident of victory that they put on their prettiest bonnets, took their parasols and picnic baskets, and drove out to watch the progress of a decisive battle – which the South lost. It took the obliteration of Chapei to show the West that the Japanese would stop at nothing.

Standing on the deck of the
Conte Rosso,
and looking at those smoke-stains on the sky, all I thought was that there must be a house on fire somewhere out there. It never occurred to me to ask questions. It was just another dreary smudge on a dreary view, and I missed the colour of the Indian crowds. Here the only colour was the blue of the picture on willow-pattern plates, which I learned was the cheapest of dyes: indigo. This vegetable dye had been used for centuries and made the fortunes of successive generations of indigo planters until some intelligent inventor came up with a synthetic dye of the same colour, with the added bonus that it did not fade. Whereupon the indigo planters all went broke. Almost every working man or woman I could see from my vantage point on the top deck was wearing clothes that had been dyed willow-pattern blue with indigo, in every shade of that colour. The new clothes were dark blue, while the less new, down to worn-to-rags raiment that was a pale dingy grey-blue, rang all the changes in between.

The more affluent middle class wore sober street-wear in black or slate grey – long coats with high collars fastening with elaborately designed loops and toggles over slightly longer skirts that were slit at one side. The outfit was completed by thick-soled shoes of black silk, and topped by a small round cap with a button on top. Many of the older men sported long, thin mustachios and a long narrow beard; exactly as they do in the pictures and paintings of grey-haired family elders in bygone China.

There were a good many alarming incidents taking place in China at that time, but I was soon to discover that not only Shanghai but the world in general had chosen to refer to the most serious of them – the Japanese takeover of Manchuria and the recent bombing and total destruction of Chapei – as ‘the China Incident' and refused to take it seriously. The trouble was that Shanghai considered itself to be unique among the cities of the world, in that it was truly ‘international'. This was because back in the nineteenth century the Chinese had been pressured into granting settlements or ‘concessions' of land to the merchants and traders of a large number of foreign countries – among them Japan. The Japanese settlement of Hondew lay on the far side of Garden Bridge, and its market was said to be the largest in Asia, while its population had swollen to such proportions that it was nicknamed ‘Little Tokyo'.