Enchanted Evening (9 page)

The only tall buildings were the European-style hotels and some of the buildings in the Legation Quarter, itself yet another walled city tucked inside the walls of the Chinese city on the south and the Imperial City on the north. Or that's what it looks like on my exceedingly outdated map. Nowadays, any amount of European-style high-rise concrete horrors have apparently been built at the cost of pulling down and smashing centuries-old temples and historic buildings.

*   *   *

Peking turned out to be a very social place, and my impression of our first months there is a succession of parties. Embassy parties, where dinner was followed by games, the kind where each guest is provided with a pencil and a small block of paper and expected to pair up with one or more of the fellow guests (depending on whether it was a ‘team' affair or couples) and answer exhaustingly erudite questions, solve sophisticated puzzles or, on one occasion, identify by smell the contents of rows of little glass cups, each of which contained a wad of cotton-wool soaked in some scented or smelly substance. I wasn't too bad at that one. But oh, how I hated those games!

To begin with, I cannot and never have been able to spell, and I did not relish giving a public demonstration of this failing, or of my deplorably sketchy education. Although my nose was always glued to a book or drawing-board, I seldom if ever read a newspaper; so my knowledge of contemporary history and politics was nil, and my heart used to sink and my brain turn to a lump of cold suet-pudding whenever I saw those dreaded pencils and bits of paper being distributed at some party.

The British, I was thankful to discover, were the only ones addicted to this type of parlour game. I can't remember any of the other nationalities making their guests entertain themselves in this particular fashion. I suppose they made allowances for the fact that any party was likely to contain a certain number of dim ‘foreigners'. This too was another cause of mingled embarrassment and regret to me, for in those days the diplomatic language was, and had been for centuries, French. And since every sizeable party in Peking was likely to include anything up to twenty-three different nationalities, everyone spoke French as a matter of course. Everyone, that is, except Mother, Bets and myself.

Bets – who has a good musical ear and was the last to leave school – still retained enough schoolgirl French to be able to scrape along. But I had thankfully forgotten the little – the
very
little – that our useless (English) French mistress had managed to drum into my head. How could I have guessed that before many years had passed I would wind up in Peking of all places, a cosmopolitan city if ever there was one, where everyone spoke at least
some
French?

What with one thing and another, I have seldom felt so uneducated and so plain
stupid
as I did during those first few months in Peking.

Chapter 7

Peking was full of foreigners. Legations to the left of us, legations to the right of us! Consulates galore. Ambassadors by the dozen. All with their attendant staffs and legation guards, wives, families and language-students. Not forgetting businessmen, artists, writers, doctors, dentists and missionaries. There was also a surprising number of expatriates, men and women who had visited Peking on some package tour to the Far East and, having fallen in love with the place, had on reaching home sold their belongings and rushed back to Peking to buy a Chinese house, learn the language, and settle there, if not for life, then at least for part of each year. And all of them threw parties.

I had thought of life in Delhi as a whirl of gaiety, but compared with the social merry-go-round of Peking it was staid. There was always dancing at one or other of the hotels, the Hotel de Pekin, the Wagons-Lit or the Nord, as well as the French Club or the Peking Club. The legations gave balls and dinners and luncheon parties, and there were frequent picnics and expeditions to the Western Hills, and days at the racecourse out at Pa-ma-Chung. And for newcomers such as ourselves, there was sightseeing. Endless sight-seeing.

For the majority of the foreigners in Peking the city and all its sights had become familiar, and they had come to take it for granted. But to us it was all new and enthralling and I can never be sufficiently grateful to God for allowing me to see it before all the glamour was lost in a tidal wave of war and the West's idea of progress. There had been changes, of course. Many of them. The Legation Quarter was one, a fifth walled city inside the old four-walled city that was Peking. But so much of that old one was still there, and I never ceased to stare at it all, fascinated.

The Chinese babies who played in the streets, flying paper kites or chasing brightly coloured balls, still wore a one-piece blue cotton garment on the lines of the overalls worn by workmen in factories, from which the lower back had been removed, so that although from the front they appeared covered from neck to ankle, from the back a small pinky-beige bottom was on display – thereby eliminating the need for such things as diapers, nappy-pins and potty training.

The vendors of hot food who pushed their barrows through the narrow streets still served their wares to the public in enchanting green crackle-ware bowls with a throwaway pair of bamboo chopsticks on top. In season, the most popular street-food consisted of locusts dipped in a bright red sauce and deep-fried. They looked revolting – like a huge heap of red spiders – and though I was assured that they tasted delicious I could never bring myself to try one.

There were many stores where one could buy tea, but one sold nothing else. It was on the left-hand side of a wide street (I think the Hatamên) in the Tartar City; a small, dark shop whose walls were lined with shelves that held rows and rows of metal, wood and porcelain containers full of different varieties of tea. The proprietor and his assistant looked as though they had stepped off an ancient scroll, and I was told that this was one of the few remaining shops in which an older generation of customers still paid for their purchases in pure silver, shaved off a ‘shoe' of that metal and weighed against the tea in a pair of scales. The ‘shoes' were so named because heated raw silver was poured into ingots roughly the shape of a woman's shoe – one small enough to fit those terribly deformed feet known as ‘golden lilies'.

This appalling fashion, which predated the Manchus by several centuries, was still the norm among the upper classes in my grandmother's day. It consisted of binding the feet of a girl-child with narrow cotton bandages, in order to draw the heel and the great toe as near together as possible. The process began as soon as the child was six years old, the bandages being removed and tighter ones applied approximately every two weeks, and the whole agonizing business taking two or three years. According to my grandmother Isabella Bryson,
1
three inches was the correct length of the fashionable shoes in which Chinese ladies toddled and limped, supporting themselves on a child's shoulder or a strong staff. She added that the question that guests at a Chinese wedding asked about the bride was not ‘Is she good, clever or beautiful?' but ‘What is the size of her foot?'

Apparently there were still old ladies who tottered about on ‘golden lily' feet, though very few young ones, for the fashion had been frowned upon by the Old Empress, who early on in her reign had issued an edict forbidding any small-footed woman to enter the Imperial Palace. Yet one could still, if one wished, buy a pair of second-hand ‘golden lily' shoes. These tiny shoes were made of satin, covered with silk and most beautifully embroidered with birds, bats and flowers and graceful abstract dragons, and were tied on with ribbons.

There were a great many relics and customs belonging to an Imperial past still to be found in Peking. The Jade Market, for instance, which was open on only one day of every month. On another day, for only two hours in the early morning and held in one of the small side courtyards of the Imperial City, there was a sale of Tribute silk. If you arrived too late the door would be shut, and for nothing or nobody would it be opened. And if you had not allowed yourself enough time in which to decide on a particular purchase you would be arbitrarily hustled out in mid-transaction.

I only went once to the Jade Market. Tacklow took me, just to see it. It was well worth seeing, but of course we could not possibly afford the jade on offer. This was bought by the real connoisseurs and collectors. ‘Jewel-jade', the bright and intensely green stones, fetched the highest prices. In the end, having saved up for at least a year, Tacklow bought a pair of drop earrings in a second-grade jade and a necklace of mauve jade for Mother. The mauve jade is rare, though not to be compared with the true jewel-jade. But I didn't think much of it. It was a pale greyish mauve, flecked with small splashes of brown.

The Tribute silk was more my cup of tea, and Bets and I attended those sales as often as we could, even if we were penniless, because it was so well worth looking at.

Many of the Provinces used to pay part of the Imperial Tribute in kind rather than in cash, and a large part of this tribute was paid in silk – handwoven silk that was used for the robes of the Emperor and his Empresses, his concubines and various members of the court. The Empire had fallen in the autumn of 1911, and China had been declared a Republic. But though ever since then successive governments had looted the treasures and the tribute that had been collected by the occupants of the Dragon Throne, there were still enough left to be sold off in the monthly sales. Among them the Tribute silk …

This fabulous material was being sold at a price that even we could have afforded – if it hadn't been for a maddening, unexplained and typically Chinese rule that laid down that the silk could only be sold by the bolt, or as an already cut piece, never by the yard. If you wanted to buy, you must take whatever remained of the bolt. Bets was lucky, for having lost her heart to some heavy, cash-patterned satin, it turned out to be a piece that had been intended for a wide-sleeved, floor-length coat. The traditional ‘cash-pattern' that had been woven into it – a decorative circle roughly the size of a soup plate – was placed so as to ensure that the pattern would match when the pieces were sewn together. I think Bets got it for the equivalent of two pounds.

I was not so fortunate, for anything I yearned for invariably turned out to be part of a sixty-yard bolt at the very least, and I still remember one such bolt of heavy, dull-surfaced very pale blue silk, decorated with a cash-pattern in glinting silver. It was fabulous stuff, but its length put it way out of my reach. Mother struck lucky with a small length of plum-coloured satin, shadow-patterned with wisteria, which she had made into a short coat and wore until it fell to pieces.

For those who had the money, Peking was still a Tom-Tiddler's-Ground of treasures that dated back to its Imperial past. But we, worse luck, were not among them. We had to count every cent. The trouble was that I yearned to buy almost everything I saw, and began by buying beautiful junk whenever I could. When at last I got my eye in, and I began to appreciate the truly good things as opposed to the junk, I had spent my little all. So I ended up buying nothing more, something I now regret because compared with what one can buy these days, even the junkiest Peking-junk was an enchanting piece of art. I am sorry that I didn't settle for second-best while I had the chance!

Even China's third- or fourth-best could be charming, and all three of us ended up acquiring several exquisite mementoes of her Imperial days, almost by accident. The coat sleeves of the three-piece pyjama-style outfits that we ordered from a Peking tailor were finished off with beautifully embroidered satin sleeve-bands, nearly all of which included the famous ‘Peking stitch' which, I had been told, was becoming (some said it already had become) a lost art. When I commented on this, and congratulated the tailor on his skill, he shook his head regretfully and disclaimed all responsibility. He could not, he said, lay claim to such workmanship, or spare the time in which to do it. It was cheaper to buy the sleeve-bands, of which there were still very many for sale. He himself had laid in a large store of them, and he suggested that if we liked we could choose our own. Which we did – from a whole pile of them! He must have had hundreds of them, and when we asked him where they came from, he told us that they were the work of the Emperor's concubines.

All those poor, pretty creatures – most of whom would never attract the Emperor's attention – numbered embroidery among the lady-like skills they had been so painstakingly taught, using that skill to fill their endless, idle hours in producing exquisite sleeve-bands for their own and the court ladies' robes!

Looking back on the China years, I see Peking in a series of disconnected pictures. One is of stopping by the roadside to watch a Chinese funeral or a wedding procession go past. These were such every-day sights to the citizens that they hardly turned their heads to see one pass. But it was one that I never tired of, even though in a city like Peking there were so many of them. Presumably the riches and the social status of the family had a lot to do with the size of these processions. But even quite humble ones were celebrated in a colourful manner, and all appeared to be joyful occasions, since to display grief at the death of an adult is to suggest that the dead have not ‘filled the years of their life wisely'.

It is (or was) customary for those who could afford it to have the coffin stored in the nearest temple until the arrival of whatever date the priests declared to be the most auspicious for its burial. I gathered that if the corpse were that of some really rich person the auspicious date could often be months if not years ahead, because temples charged a fee for storing the coffins. One result of this (besides enriching the priests, of course) was that by the time the day of burial arrived the family's grief would have had time to subside, and the only sign of mourning would be the white clothing worn by the chief mourners – white being the East's sign of mourning and red the colour of rejoicing.