Category Archives: colonial life

April 18, 2022 · 6:59 pm

The Cancel Culture

Will I be cancelled?
One of my first geography – or was it history – lessons when I was about six, consisted of our teacher pulling down a map of the world and pointing to all the pink bits scattered plentifully around the globe. ‘This is the British Empire’, she said. I remember feeling very impressed.

I write this knowing how much cancelling, triggering, no-platforming and all the other latest cliches for being sent to Coventry will rain down upon my unapologetic, white privileged, cis, Silent Generation head ( I’m a proud pre-Boomer)

Later, I was even more impressed when I discovered that this vast network of territories around the world was administered by a tiny island whose tiny army was smaller than Serbia’s at the start of World War One. This must mean, I thought, that most people must be happy with the status quo, law and order, and the opportunity to live peaceful lives.

But judging by the torrent of constant aggrieved and angry condemnation of Colonialism which is now the daily ration of news in most media outlets, and by so many woke and anti-racist groups, I was hopelessly wrong. Even Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of WHO, accuses the west of racism because we’re upset about Ukraine, but we weren’t about Syria and Afghanistan. He’s right, we are concerned about Ukraine because it’s much nearer home, and could affect and is affecting the whole world. But has he also forgotten, or never knew that the British army liberated his country Ethiopia in 1941, when Mussolini’s Italians had invaded it and perpetrated terrible atrocities?

As their Emperor Haile Selassie told the world : “Special sprayers were installed on board aircraft so that they could vaporize, over vast areas of territory, a fine, death-dealing rain. Groups of nine, fifteen, eighteen aircraft followed one another so that the fog issuing from them formed a continuous sheet. It was thus that, as from the end of January 1936, soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes, and pastures were drenched continually with this deadly rain. In order to kill off systematically all living creatures, in order to more surely poison waters and pastures, the Italian command made its aircraft pass over and over again. That was its chief method of warfare.

^{“When it comes to racism, the woke- racism weapon against the past is to see only the West’s part in the terrible historical centuries old crime of slavery and the apparent miseries of colonialism. Even a search of the internet, in entries about Africa, only mention the Atlantic West coast slavery,}

^.But Tidiiana N’Diaye, the Senegalese anthropologist, says that what happened in East Africa over the centuries should also be openly discussed.

“Most of the African authors have not yet published a book on the Arab-Muslim slave trade out of religious solidarity. There are 500 million Muslims in Africa, and it is better to blame the West than talk about the past crimes of Arab Muslims. Initially, the Arab Muslims in Eastern and Central Europe took white slaves to sell them to Arabia,” Tidiane N’Diaye said in an interview. “But the growing military power of Europe put an end to Islamic expansion and now that there was a shortage of slaves, Arab Muslims were looking massively to black Africa.”

When missionary David Livingstone was exploring central Africa, and based at Zanzibar, one of the centres of the slave trade , he estimated that 80,00 to 100,00 Africans were captured by Muslim Arab traders every year. He wrote: “The strangest disease in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves”. And out of those huge numbers of slaves captured to be sold and transported from Zanzibar, only one in four survived the journey, most of them died from hunger and exhaustion. A stick was chained to their neck and linked to the next man in the long chain of desolate captives.

It was not until 1873 that Sultan Seyyid Barghash of Zanzibar, under pressure from Great Britain, signed a treaty that made the slave trade in his territories illegal. But that decree was not enforced effectively. It was not until 1909 that slavery was finally abolished in East Africa. It was the mid thirties before it ended in Ethiopia.

According to author N’Diaye, slavery still exists, albeit in a different form. It is estimated that nearly 40 million people worldwide still live in slavery. In Africa there are hundreds of thousands. “In Mauretania they say they have abolished slavery, but in reality the situation in North Africa has not changed much. Young people are enslaved against their will, forced to work and sexually exploited”

Between the late 1870’s to the 1960’s, Colonialism took over from tribal warfare throughout most African kingdoms, tribes, provinces. The tales of the atrocities and tortures and massacres that were visited previously on defenceless peoples, or on the beaten armies, or revolting tribes, are horrendous. James Bruce, the British explorer who traced the source of the Blue Nile in 1770, spent two years at the Ethiopian court, and described not only the dreadful fates of the king’s constantly warring enemies, but the Ethiopian habit of enjoying fresh meat cut from a living beast, describing one horrible victory feast when a bull was tethered and steaks systematically carved from the bellowing desperate creature.

The accounts of other explorers over the hundred years before western rule, tell of the same brutalities and cruelties by psychopathic rulers who inherited bloody tribal rites and continued them to practise them. In spite of ancient civilisations which had risen and fallen in other ages on this continent, the Africa the explorers found was primitive and bloodthirsty. In 1861, explorer Christopher Speke described King Rumanika of Karagwe’s harem, whose wives were force fed milk through pipes from a gourd, to become so horrendously fat that they couldn’t stand, but rolled around like seals, he said. Men with whips stood by to enforce the endless fattening up.

While Speke was detained at his court for months in 1860, he described King Mutesa of Buganda killing people at his court daily, for trivial reasons such as a girl speaking too loudly, or a page neglecting to open or close a door, innocent people burned alive, tortured and murdered in all manner of ways.,

So was the advent of colonial rule for that hundred years, really such a tyranny? In Nigeria for example, the governor, Sir Evelyn Lugard having brought peace to the warring north, ‘set out the same principles of the administrative system subsequently institutionalized as ‘indirect rule’. Essentially, local government was to be left in the hands of the traditional chiefs, subject to the guidance of European officers.

‘ Native institutions were utilized and interference with local customs kept to a minimum, although the British did not always understand the local customs. While this system had built-in contradictions, over the years the Nigerian system developed into a sophisticated form of local government, especially in the emirates and under the banner of “native administration,” which became the hallmark of British colonial rule in Africa. ‘

The colonial authorities of most nationalities, French, Portuguese, German, as well as British, left behind the rule of law, plus roads, hospitals, schools, railways, drains, and most of the advantages of western civilization. Since these countries gained independence, many have ignored ‘due process’ of law, press freedom, individual liberty and human rights’, in the words of Amnesty International. Systems of democratic government established at independence, have been dismantled, and corrupt authoritarian regimes imposed, with many presidents declaring themselves in office for life.

Since Independence there have been unspeakable massacres, tribal wars, repression of any dissent, and previously prosperous countries like Zimbabwe reduced to bankruptcy – though to read the internet, you would think it was a thriving happy prosperous society, untroubled by violence, famine, corruption, unemployment, and bulging prisons filled with people from the wrong tribe. ( I know, I have a close relative who was matron of the hospital in Harare. I have two friends who worked in Kenya for a few years, where they had to have an iron door fitted to their bedroom like everyone else so that they wouldn’t be murdered in their sleep by robbers. When they left, they left all their possessions, being allowed only enough cash to buy a coffee and bun at the airport.)

Human rights groups have gone on record as describing ‘extensive political repression, including illegal and arbitrary detention, threats or other forms of intimidation, disappearances, politically motivated trials, and the massacre of peacefully protesting civilians ‘ in many countries.

None of these regimes are castigated by the critics of the West. Both the crimes of the past, and the crimes of the present are ignored, overlooked or unknown to those pulling down statues and condemning European and American slave owners. Slave owners who were also philanthropists whose generosity sustains the very colleges and schools, hospitals and libraries, art galleries, orphanages, that today’s woke critics benefit from. And apart from all their other crimes, these were mostly old white dead males – an unbeatable combination if you’re inclined to find a good whipping boy… while woke culture requires that we change our minds and our beliefs about these men and about the past, and think as they do.

The philanthropy of many traders and owners, which contributed to the great civilization of the west, their gifts to the arts, to medicine, to science, to music, to literature, to architecture, to good government and a decent society may be forgotten in this present orgy of righteous indignation and judgement, but let us hope that the pendulum swings back before all that they gave and achieved is obliterated.

Those lovely words from the book of Ecclesiastes honour these sort of men,
‘Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begot us’… Some of the most famous and indispensable men in history have been slave owners – men who reflected the customs of their times and place. Like most of us they all had gifts and they all had flaws, and they were men of their time. They didn’t think like us. In time to come we may be abhorred too, by more advanced societies for the way we treat and eat other species, and exploit the natural world

These slave-owners include men like the Prophet Muhammad, William Penn, the great Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, and influenced Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the unforgettable words of the Declaration of Independence, Demosthenes, influential ancient Greek statesman, many US presidents, including George Washington, most rich Romans and ancient Greeks, not many British, they tended to have money invested in trading, and so we come to wonderful William Wilberforce, and his supporters who battled so long to abolish the slave trade.

Many of their descendants have been proud of the achievements of such men, others have been influenced by them, or inspired by them, while others have followed them – as in the case of Muhammad. So perhaps their critics could try to forgive them, leave their statues where grateful people erected them, and remember that it is because so many of them worked for a decent humane society, that we have the freedom to say what we think without the fear of criticism, or of being ‘cancelled – a freedom which applies to us all, white, privileged, Bame, Terf or transgender.
“I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls,” said Elizabeth I back in the 1550 ‘s, and I think she had the right idea.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

I discovered this wonderful lemon tart recipe in a gardening magazine, and with a few tweaks have made it my own !
Prepare a pastry case. Place a large chopped and de-seeded lemon ( I have also added half an orange or another lemon) in the stick whizzer. Add four eggs, 100gms melted butter, a generous cup of sugar, 2 teaspoons of vanilla and blend it all together. Put into the pastry case and bake at 180 for 30 minutes or more. When cooked, dust with icing sugar and serve with whipped cream. Divine !

Food for Thought

‘In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.’Czeslaw Milosz, poet and writer, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who “voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts”.
He wrote The Captive Mind, a book about Stalinism

(

15 Comments

Filed under colonial life, cookery/recipes, history, slavery

Tagged as africa, B oomer, history

June 12, 2020 · 1:27 pm

Letter to a Protesting Grandson in London

100_0106 Thank you for your letter darling. As a veteran of pro-peace, Anti-Vietnam marches, Anti-Apartheid protests, even walking for Save the Whales, it’s good to know that you’re following in your grandmother’s and mother’s footsteps!

And thank you too…. will go and follow up your Wiki research on BLM… you have set my mind at rest somewhat. There seemed so much destruction and hate, and though I can understand how bitter and sad black people and their families are, who have suffered both in the present and in the past, it doesn’t help the cause when white people join in the vandalism and add to the hate and divisiveness on both sides of the ‘divide’. Martin Luther King said: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”

Of course I whole-heartedly agree with what you say about the dreadful injustices both past and present…I’ve always thought it was abominable that the film ‘Gone With The Wind’ was written, filmed, and enjoyed – when it was actually a hymn of praise to the South and slavery … But I just wish the protestors would stop tampering with British history which is not as black as they paint it!

Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice ruled in, I think it was 1772, that any slave who set foot in Britain was automatically free – slavery had no part in English law, he said. (The case of Somersett, a slave – I wrote about it in my book ‘The Sound of Water’). This was nearly a hundred years before it was abolished in the US.

For sixty years between 1800 and 1860 the Royal Navy maintained a permanent anti-slavery squadron, which cost not just millions of pounds, but more importantly, the lives of over two thousand sailors as they battled traders and rescued captives on slave transports all over the Atlantic. The RN rescued at least 150,000 Africans who they re-settled in Liberia. Britain was the first nation to propose a motion calling on all European nations to end slavery at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

During the American Civil War, in 1862-6, cotton workers at the mills in Manchester and around, refused to buy cotton from the South, thereby aiding the North, and plunging themselves into penury… just as when Britain voted to abolish slavery in all its colonies, this caused a huge rise in prices for everything for people all over Britain… Dear old William Wilberforce, who campaigned all his life against slavery (remember that film I took you to – ‘Amazing Grace’) – was also one of the founders of the RSPCA….

The Indian writer, VS Naipul, went on record as saying that for every year since the British left India, the country has gone back ten years… as a woman, I feel that one of the best things the Brits did was to abolish suttee – the burning of widows on their husband’s funeral pyre!!!

And when I was researching China’s slow march to world domination about eight years ago, I read of some African leader whose country has been infiltrated by China and Chinese workers, (he had of course been in prison in the last years of British rule, for sedition – most African rulers seemed to do a stint in prison as part of their careers as activists back then!) wishing the British were back, they employed us and built hospitals and schools and roads, he said….The really brutal colonists were the Dutch and Belgian….

I suppose because I actually lived in a colony- Malaya- during the last years of colonial rule – before they achieved Merdeka -freedom, the year after I left, and seeing the intelligent, humane and decent rule of law there, and the respect for the Muslim culture and way of life, I feel sad at the distorted and one-sided view of history which so many un-informed people have.

Ulysses Grant, the great US Civil War General, one of my heroes, and whose diaries I have, wrote that of all the colonial nations Britain seemed to have achieved the best balance, and relationship with the peoples they ruled – (He was another animal lover, an amazing horse-rider, punished his soldiers if they ill-treated their horses, and refused to attend a bull fight put on in his honour in Mexico when he was President…)

One protestor, as he defaced the statue of Winston Churchill, was reported as saying Churchill didn’t fight for blacks – he fought for colonialism, whereas he actually fought to save Britain and the world from one of the most evil regimes in the history of the world

Reading the English newspapers this morning, I see that another of my heroes, Captain James, Cook, a straight up and down working class Yorkshire lad, who rose to become not just a captain in the British Navy, but also one of the greatest explorers and cartographers in history, whose explorations also saw him initiate a new science of anthropology, is also on the list of statues threatened with demolition by British BLM protestors.

Cook had nothing to do with slavery, though his discoveries did have a lot to do with the eventual expansion of the British Empire. In their sealed instructions, the Royal Navy told Cook not only to map the coastline of any new land, but also “to observe the genius, temper, disposition and number of the natives, if there be any, and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them… You are also with the consent of the natives to take possession of convenient situations in the country, in the name of the King of Great Britain.”

Which is why we all now live in New Zealand. When your mother was six, I decided after living in the horrendously crowded island of Hongkong for four years, I didn’t want to go back to another crowded island, England. So we came here to a country the same size as the UK, but with only three million inhabitants. After fifty years we now have four million people, but we still have plenty of space!

In that fifty years, the population in my beloved birthplace, has grown from fifty-five million to over sixty-six million. And maybe that’s why we’ve been able to beat Covid 19 in this country. We all banded together and observed lockdown scrupulously, with only twenty-two deaths, and have had no more cases for nearly three weeks.

I continue to be shocked by the way both young doctors and nurses are treated by our health system… the huge rewards for different workers, – like Ceo’s and lawyers, seem so unfair compared with the under-paid, essential and self-sacrificing people like health workers and others…I admire your brother’s beautiful doctor girlfriend enormously for her persistence, dedication and intelligence, and sticking with such a demanding and difficult calling…

Love talking to you darling, you give me fresh viewpoints and lots to think about…

Much love Grannie

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

With my bad back still dogging me – in a manner of speaking – I’ve perfected a number of dishes for a hungry man without too much angst for the cook.

Take for example, half a dozen chicken drumsticks, and brown them on both sides in the frying pan. Then arrange them on a bed of chopped onions. Pour some olive oil over the chicken, and a little water among the onions. Salt and pepper.

Cook them in a hot oven for about an hour. When the chicken is ready, put in the microwave a packet of pre-cooked rice for the prescribed minute and a half. Pour the juices from the pan over the rice, and if you have the energy, rustle up some broccoli, peas, or salad to eat with the chicken, onions and rice…

Food for Thought

The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. …

I don’t know who said this, but after re-watching Band of Brothers for the last few nights, it rings very true.

30 Comments

Filed under army, colonial life, cookery/recipes, culture, history, slavery, The Sound of Water, Uncategorized

Tagged as anti-apartheid, BLM, Captain James Cook, china, colonialism, Gone with the wind, history, Hongkong, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, Malaya, slavery

August 10, 2018 · 6:03 pm

A Good Man Does Something

Another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

In the first few weeks after arriving in New Zealand, before starting my new job, I listened to the radio in John’s little home, trying to get the hang of this new society. I heard one item which seemed to rivet the whole crime-free nation… about a farmer and his wife, Harvey and Jeannette Crewe who had disappeared, and now their bodies had been found in the Waikato river.

Some time later, I learned with everyone else, that another farmer had been arrested for their murders. I never read crime pages, so knew no more. In the meant- time I was settling into my new life and my new job, and eventually, new relationship. I learned later that the Assistant Editor had said to himself at the end of my surprisingly long job interview – “Watch it Booth,”

But he hadn’t, and we became – I thought – good friends on the strength of his frequent trips to my typewriter bearing cables from all over the world that he thought would interest me. Everyone else was apparently aware of the situation, but I counted him among my other visitors.

But when at the end of my first year in the job, I heard that he was leaving to go and try to resurrect a rather boring Catholic newspaper, I felt a sudden sense of abandonment, and realised that I’d come to rely on his support and friendship. When I told him how I felt, the friendship moved to another level, except that I also told him that if he didn’t feel he could tell his wife about meeting me, then it wasn’t ok.

I had no intention of breaking up a marriage, even though I knew it had limped on since a drama five years before I arrived in the country. My words, plus domestic dramas, the stress of his newspaper, and collision with the Bishop and Catholic church, caused him to end up in the heart unit of Auckland hospital. During the next ten days, as he struggled with life, I realised I loved him, and that he might die and I’d never even held hands with him.

When he came out of hospital we came to an agreement. He’d decided to separate from his wife and we would eventually marry. So we did. He resigned from the Catholic newspaper and the Auckland Star took him back with open arms. At the same time, the news item I’d heard on the radio two years before suddenly assumed significance. Arthur Thomas, the farmer convicted of the double murder had many supporters who were convinced that he was innocent.

They had formed what was called The Arthur Thomas Re-Trial Committee, and had managed to get the case re-heard by several judges, and finally won a second trial for Arthur Thomas. On the strength of the evidence, Pat Booth was convinced that he would be found not- guilty, and released. He decided to get Thomas’s story and negotiate for it himself, so attended some days at the Supreme Court.

He began to feel troubled by the atmosphere in the court – prosecution versus Thomas supporters. The day the verdict was due, he was going home, and decided if he saw a parking space, he’d stop and go in.

There was. He did. He arrived as the jury delivered their verdict of Guilty. The uproar that broke out, rage, despair, wails, screams, shouts, tears, Vivien Thomas, his wife, running down the court to face the jury crying “What sort of people are you? he’s innocent,” and Arthur Thomas’s mother’s anguished cry “There is no justice here” shocked him profoundly. He came home very upset, and said he would have to investigate what was behind all this.

As he’d watched and listened in the last few days of the trial he’d become convinced that this was no impartial justice involving police, lawyers and judges, but an un-equal struggle between the power of the State and an individual with one hand tied behind his back. He’d watched the way the family were victimised, their seats in the public gallery taken from them and a burly policeman sitting in the seat where Arthur’s mother sat so she could see him.

Arthur was bullied and harassed in cross questioning – instructed to answer yes or no when neither response was correct, and when to answer that way would be to fall into a carefully prepared trap which Thomas could see for himself, but got no protection from his pleasant but bumbling lawyer.

So began seven years of study, investigation, travel all over the world, interviews, police harassment, hostility from many sections of society especially the police and the legal profession, and even phone-tapping.

The police soon realised that Patrick was investigating their work, and strange things began to happen. The first was my beautiful leather brief case being stolen from my parked car… the thieves obviously thought it was Patrick’s, having discovered where we lived. The next thing was waking in the night, and seeing a tall man in a grey suit with a stocking over his head at the foot of our bed, as he reached into where Patrick’s suit jacket was hanging in the wardrobe. I sat up and cried out: “there’s a man in the room” and he bolted, blundering into my daughter’s bedroom on the way to the front door.

Patrick raced after him, but the man disappeared into the Domain. I was just ringing the police, when he returned. Don’t bother he said – that WAS the police. In the mean-time, Patrick had contacted the forensic scientist for the defence, Dr Jim Sprott, who had had his theory about the bullets that killed the Crewe husband and wife, shot down in court.

Patrick had the cartridge cases that were supposed to be from bullets which had killed the couple blown up in the newspaper darkroom. The photos showed that the cartridge cases had different markings stamped on the base. This was crucial, because these markings showed the date the cartridge cases had been made, and they didn’t match the year when the No 8 bullets found in the bodies had been made. This proved that it was impossible for the cartridge cases and the bullets ever to have been together . This discrepancy was at the heart of the case.

The cartridge cases had been found in the murdered couple’s garden three months after it had been strip-searched, and so it was something of a ‘miracle’ when the police found them. By ‘finding’ them they were able to match them to the marks made by Arthur Thomas’ rifle, the person they’d already decided was the guilty man.

He lived happily on his farm with his wife Vivien, ten miles away. In his youth he had had a crush on Jeanette Crewe, and the police had decided that over ten years later, maddened by jealousy of her husband of several years, he’d travelled across country on a bitter rainy winter’s night, and shot them both through the window. He then returned to his wife’s warm bed ! His alibi was that he was in his cow-shed tending to a sick cow, and his wife’s testimony was discounted.

Patrick’s investigations showed that many small but incriminating details had been tweaked, altered or omitted between the first and second trials by both police and crown prosecutor in order to secure a guilty verdict. The collaboration between Patrick and Jim Sprott whose professional reputation was at stake, was an intricate detective story in itself.

It took them to the ICI ammunition factory in Melbourne where, by tracing ten- year- old manufacturing records, they demonstrated to the company the distinctive wear marks of the stamps on the bottom of the cartridge cases which could chart the dates of their manufacture. ICI became fascinated by the course of the story, as were many others.

Patrick had already written a damning book in a few weeks, but his publisher’s legal counsel advised against publishing the manuscript. So in a couple of days he reduced the incriminating story to ten newspaper articles which were then taken up and published all over the country. They caused an uproar. No-one had ever queried or criticised the legal profession or the police in this peaceful law-abiding country, and many people were now shocked and disquieted.

The legal profession and the judges were up in arms, protecting their profession, but the attorney general ordered the case to go to the Court of Appeal while Patrick and Jim were in Australia. It looked like a victory and I rang to tell him. Then it was disclosed that the police had removed the vital cartridge cases from the Police Museum and buried them outside Auckland in a rubbish tip of several hundred acres. Strangely they were never called to account for this obstructive action.

By now we had moved to the country, and we discovered that both our phones, and Jim Sprott’s were being tapped. When a technician checked our lines for repair and found a double jumper on them at the exchange, we knew we had been spied on. We felt we were under constant surveillance. Witnesses who Patrick interviewed were also visited by the police afterwards and told their evidence was not needed and therefore they did not have to go to the Court of Appeal.

Every visit Patrick made to CAC, the ammunition manufacturers in Auckland, was followed by a visit from the police, attempting to silence them, while obstacles were continually put in Patrick’s way, even when they went to Australia. And twenty-six thousand cartridges from all over the country were sent to him and Jim Sprott for them to verify their theory by inspecting the bases of the cartridges cases. Even I became an expert, and could look at the bottom and identify them – Big C, Little C, depending on the date of manufacture.

The case dominated our family life for the next eight years. Even the children were caught up in fall-out at school, where other children parroted their parent’s responses to Patrick’s ‘trouble- making’ work’, while at a Royal garden party, a judge cut us dead, turned his back and walked away when we were introduced as we chatted on the lawns of Government House.

Most disheartening of all was to discover that the Crown Law Office had framed the questions to be answered at the new Court of Appeal in such a way that Patrick and the Re-Trial Committee and lawyers had no way of making their points. It looked as though the Establishment were once again conspiring to make sure that Arthur Thomas would continue serving his unjust life sentence.

To be continued

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Still wanting nice hot puddings during our winter chill, I decided on that wonderful easy self-saucing chocolate pudding. Beat three -quarters of a cup of castor sugar with a hundred gms of butter, and then add the yolks of three eggs one at a time. Add three level tablespoons of SR flour and two hundred gms of melted chocolate. Gently stir in two cups of milk. Beat three egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff and gently fold into the chocolate mixture. Pour into a buttered two litre pie dish and cook in the centre of the oven at 180 degrees for forty- five minutes.

It rises like a soufle, and underneath the dark chocolate top is a soft sauce. Good with cream and poached pears too, if you feel like pushing the boat out!

Food for Thought

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Edmund Burke*

I’d always thought that Burke said these words…. but apparently not according to one of my readers. However, Burke does imply the same thing in some of his writing …

34 Comments

Filed under colonial life, cookery/recipes, history, Media and interviews, Thoughts on writing and life, uncategorised, Uncategorized

Tagged as Arthur Thomas, bullets, cartridge cases, conspiracy, corruption, food, Injustice, justice, murder

August 2, 2018 · 2:50 pm

Another Bright Beautiful Spirit

The chapel at Oi’s home

A life – another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

My friend Oi (pronounced O-ee) had ideas so advanced that even Quaker Meeting – that most liberal and open- minded Christian group – threw her out.

With no family around us, friends of all ages were always important and she mattered to us as much as Philippa. Edith Oiroa was born in 1900- called Edith by conventional people but Oi by kindred spirits. She was the youngest of ten, born to a father who was sixty years old, and she died when she was a hundred and two – so the two life-times covered a hundred and sixty- two years, and went back to 1840. Her father had been a cabin boy on a ship that was wrecked on the NZ coast in 1856.

Local Maoris formed a human chain to rescue him, and he stayed with them for some time, becoming very close to the chief. After returning to England, he came back with a seventeen-year-old bride, and the Maori chief gave him land with which to start his life here.

Robert Batley, Oi’s father, established a huge sheep farm, built a big beautiful house, cottages for his shepherds, barns, wool-sheds and an exquisite little chapel, where Oi and her nine brothers and sisters played the organ and helped hand out prayer books to the shepherds and their families as they entered. As each child was born, the generous chief had given them some Maori land.

He ceremonially adopted Oi, and gave her the Maori name Oiroa, which roughly translated, means: ‘compassion for those in need’. Though it was shortened to Oi, she lived up to her name always, and when I met her was beloved by many people for very good reasons.

She married a distinguished Auckland architect – William Gummer – who worked with the famous Edwin Lutyens in England, and is sometimes known as NZ’s Frank Lloyd Wright. He created many of Auckland’s great buildings, and beautiful private homes including some famous ones in the Hawkes Bay. Oi herself was very musical, and played the piano, and was so deeply involved in the musical life of her adopted city, that in the early thirties she and another musical aficionado, started the first orchestra in the city, whose descendant is still thriving.

She was beautiful – and open-hearted and sweet-natured. She was also unhappily married to a much older controlling, jealous and angry man. Other men loved her, and I picked up hints over the years of tempestuous scenes and dramatic confrontations, one in which her loyal cleaning lady divested a desperate suitor of his shotgun at the front door. Oi received and declined her last proposal in her eighties.

Her zest for life never diminished, in spite of a son’s suicide, a difficult life, and much loneliness. Neither did her kindness fail, or her energy, for that matter. I was sure her inner life kept her young. She was often busy driving “old ladies” shopping until well into her nineties. She obviously didn’t feel she qualified for that label – yet! Her spontaneity and authenticity, happiness and serenity, endeared her to all ages.

I met her at Quaker meeting, where we were both what is called attenders, as opposed to members. On occasion when the beautiful and mystical silence was gently broken by a deeply felt message, if it was Oi, as she was known for short, it would be a profoundly mystical and eminently practical thought.

Throughout her life she was drawn to mysticism, a branch of the spiritual life which has always been mistrusted by organised religion, as its devotees seek union with the Source, whatever it is called, thus bypassing the need for priests, mullahs, rabbis, gurus or whatever. Whether these mystics were Muslim, as in the case of Rumi and the Sufis, or Christians like Master Eckhart, Mother Julian or St John of the Cross, they often came to a sticky end at the hands of their respective religions.

Luckily in the twentieth century, this fate is not so common, and Oi escaped lightly by just being blackballed by Quakers! She explored most branches of both Western and Eastern mysticism, and in her thirties, became a lover of Ramakrishna’s teachings, keeping a photo of him by her bed-side always. He practised several religions, including Hindu, Islam and Christianity, and taught that in spite of the differences, all religions are valid and true, and they lead to the same ultimate goal- God.

After Oi introduced herself to me, and invited me to her beautiful house (I had not been long in NZ then), we became close, and she became my mentor. My two small children looked on her as a grandparent and we loved going to her serene and peaceful home.

Though it was in the city, it sat among mature trees and a rambling, flowery garden with a stream. Her architect son had designed it for her. Music, in her mid-seventies, was still her passion. Sometimes I would arrive at the garden entrance, and hear the glorious sounds of a trio or a quartet streaming out of the windows, and I’d stand silently outside under the persimmon tree, listening to Mozart or Mahler.

When the children and I were there, we‘d often end up singing round the piano with the student who boarded with her, and was a brilliant pianist and lovely tenor. We’d all sing favourites as diverse as Handel’s, ‘Where e’er you walk”, to: “Feed the birds,” from Mary Poppins. My other musical friend, Phillipa, whose unbearable life was slightly improved by taking clarinet lessons, and who longed to play in an orchestra, needed practice playing with others.

Hearing about her, typically, Oi offered to play with her, and through music-making, they learned to love each other too. I was spending the day with Oi when I learned that the ship Phillipa was sailing on had caught fire, and she and the children, plus her six-month-old baby, were adrift in a lifeboat in a violent storm. I spent all day praying and imagining her anguish and exhaustion trying to keep the children warm in an open boat, never realising that they were already dead.

Oi’s unorthodox thinking, which of course, was not confined to spiritual practises, but spread into all areas of her life, alienated her family who were very religious and ultra- conservative. She rarely saw them, so she began spending Christmas with us until one son who disapproved of us too, was shamed into inviting her for Christmas after many years.

Their loss was our gain, and in some ways Oi became a part of our family. She gave me many of the books which had sustained her and influenced her thinking, and which had helped her find her path to expanded consciousness and freedom. One of the joys of reading them was that she’d underlined or marked the passages which sang to her.

Not only did I find this a wonderful aid to a deeper understanding, both of the texts and of Oi, but it also taught me the pleasure of marking and making my books my own, which I had never dared to do before.

I’d grown up learning that books should be treated as sacred, and never marked, turned down, or in any way treated as familiar friends. I do it all the time now, knowing that others who eventually find their way to them will – or might – enjoy the same pleasures of insight and intimacy as I have done.

Oi’s words still remain in my mind, and often come back to me. When there was a problem she would close her eyes, and focus for a minute, then open them and say firmly: “You cannot know the solution. You can only pray that the situation evolves for the highest good of you, and everyone else involved. And know that this will happen, and let it go.”

She’d quote T.S. Eliot: “It is not our business what others may think of us,” or: “God wastes nothing”. She’d say: “Let go and let God.” – and, “Happiness is like water in the palm of your hand. If you gently hold your palm open, it will stay. But if you clutch it and try to hang onto it, you lose it.” She died at over a hundred, fourteen years ago, but her loving wisdom sustains me still.

When my life began taking some strange turns, becoming involved with an innocent man accused of a double murder, our phone being tapped, death threats, drug lords, and other frightening developments, Oi was always there encouraging us and supporting us.

To be continued

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

I love puddings – hot, cold, chocolate, lemon, fruit, baked, steamed, chilled – you name it. I haven’t made clafoutis for ages, but decided, it being winter, we could do with a hot pudding, and dug out this old recipe from my clippings. It has more eggs in it than some clafoutis recipes, but when I was worried about the children getting enough protein when we were vegetarian, this was one of the dishes that stilled my anxieties.

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Butter a pie dish or oven proof dish. In a large bowl, whisk together six eggs, eight tablespoons of sugar, a teasp of vanilla, until the sugar is dissolved. Add twelve tablespoons of flour and whisk until smooth. Pour the batter into the pie dish.

Now add two and a half cups of pitted cherries, fresh or frozen if you have them – or any other berries. If using frozen don’t melt them, but toss them in frozen. You can also use plums, or tinned peaches. Sprinkle some sugar over the top and bake until the clafoutis is beautifully puffed and golden, 35–40 minutes. Serve immediately – with cream or even good ice-cream.

Food for Thought

Lovers of God do not belong to any caste.

Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa

29 Comments

Filed under colonial life, cookery/recipes, culture, human potential, life/style, love, philosophy, The Sound of Water, uncategorised, Uncategorized

Tagged as architecture, Edith Oiroa Gummer, food, Moehanga Homestead, music, mysticism, quakers, Ramakrishna, William Gummer

July 6, 2018 · 10:14 am

Land of the long white cloud

Auckland, with volcanic island Rangitoto across the harbour

A Life – Another instalment of my autobiography until I revert to my normal blogs

I searched the world for an egalitarian English- speaking country. Canada was too cold. Australia meant living in another large crowded city in order to find a job. So I explored New Zealand – reading its history written by well- known historian Keith Sinclair. On learning from it that women had had the vote since 1893, that back then employers were required to provide a seat for shop girls to sit on if they needed to, and that the two- day weekend for everyone to spend with their families was the norm, I decided this was the place.

It sounded a kind and old- fashioned society. Which it was, and that didn’t seem a dis-advantage. I began reading NZ newspapers at the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) trying to get a feel for this new country. I found that the city nearest the equator which would be big enough to have a newspaper that would employ women was Auckland.

I had no money for our air fares so went to see the Dean of S John’s Cathedral to see if their fund for distressed gentlewomen could help. He directed me to the British Legion, who generously covered all our fares and expenses. It galled me that they did so because my father and ex-husband had been in the army rather than because I had been, but I swallowed my pride, and thanked them for their largesse.

Just before we left, my ex-husband back in England, placed an injunction on me to prevent me leaving with the children. This involved another expensive legal action and employing an enormously expensive counsel this time.

At a conference before the case, the pompous and rather arrogant counsel began by telling me not to speak unless spoken to, and to answer his questions with a yes or no. Towards the end, he had picked up so many false trails that I broke his rules and butted in and put the facts chronologically as he needed them. He sounded irritated and asked why I hadn’t said all this in the first place and couldn’t see that he’d created the situation by treating me like a half-wit.

The case was heard in chambers, with the same judge from my divorce, who once again decided the course of my life without even looking in my direction as I sat at the other end of the table. Unusually he gave me custody, care and control, a rare decision which the British High Commission in Wellington declined to believe a few years later when I applied for a separate passport for the children so they could visit their father back in England. The logic of applying for a passport to send them to their father if I’d kidnapped them in the first place defied me. But harassment was such a normal state of affairs for women in those days that many, like me, took it for granted, and just worked around it.

I could only afford to pay for the minimum sized box, four cubic feet, in which to pack our belongings. I ordered it five foot by four by three, to accommodate a favourite picture, painted by Chinese school children. It was called ‘House Under the Moon’, and later, a friend who was curator of various well- known art galleries said that if an adult had painted it, it would have been a masterpiece.

Besides this treasured picture which I couldn’t bear to leave behind, I packed a pair of Bokhara rugs, a black lacquer Chinese box containing our china, some silver, an antique mirror, a few other pictures, two Chinese lamps, some carefully culled books, and a pair of bamboo Chinese collapsible bookcases that looked like Hepplewhite designs. I was so ruthless that I’ve since regretted many small things that would easily have fitted in – treasured pieces of china, an art nouveau pewter goblet, good linen. But then, the burning of boats suited my mood.

So I packed up my life, and spent the last day with Pat Hangen. Our plane was delayed by eight hours while another plane was fished out of the harbour at the end of the runway at Kaitak. Landing or leaving this fabled island was always dangerous – flying between tenement blocks and drying laundry to land or take -off.

I had never really come to terms with life here. In Victoria, the heart of the rich bustling city, a newspaper seller had a pitch outside Lane Crawford, the Harrods of Hong King. The windows just behind him were tastefully arranged with fabulous diamond encrusted jewellery; and I discovered that he and his wife and children lived and slept on the pavement under his newspaper stall.

Yes, I tried to assuage my western conscience by delivering clothes and blankets. But the shocking gaps between haves and have-nots, especially in the cold winters, bothered me as much as cruelty to children and animals still do… Now, as we flew out on the second of August 1970, I peered down at the lights of Hong Kong and the places we’d grown to know so well in the last four years.

Deepwater Bay, Repulse Bay, Stanley Bay. These were the places in which we had lived. In each one, I was always conscious, over twenty years after the events, of the battles fought in these places by the defenders against the terrifying Japanese army. Deepwater Bay was where the Japanese landed to cut off the defenders from each other on Hong Kong island. I knew the very spot at Repulse Bay, where two British soldiers swam for it, and got to Stanley Point, only to be killed in the massacres there.

I used to look up at the woods behind the Repulse Bay Hotel and wonder where the drain was where the women and children had tried to seek safety from the bullets. And I never drove to Stanley Point and past the site of St Stephen’s College without remembering the slaughter of the patients and doctors there, the rape and murder of the nurses.

Wongneichong Gap no longer exists. The cliff face and rock formation have long since been demolished to make way for a wider road. But whenever I drove through it then, either forking right to Deepwater Bay or straight ahead for Repulse Bay I paid homage to the Canadians who made their last stand against the Japanese there, and fought with such incredible bravery to the last man. It felt sometimes as though they were still there, I was so conscious of their ghostly presence.

The memories of the signing of the surrender on Christmas Day had been briskly banished from the unchanging Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon across the harbour. Yet the few trees left in Victoria, on Hong Kong island, still bore the marks of the dreadful barrage of artillery from the Japanese across the water. They were riddled still with shrapnel, but somehow were bravely surviving a worse battle now against traffic and fumes.

We landed in our new country among green fields dotted with white sheep. Driving into Auckland in the middle of the antipodean winter, gardens were blooming with daffodils and camellias, jasmine and purple lasiandra bushes. It seemed like paradise.

The journey had been an unexpected ordeal. My friendly doctor had given us all our injections but had forgotten to sign the documents. When we landed in Brisbane in the freezing dawn at six o clock, the elderly and obstructive airport doctor discovered this – but refusing to even look at our weeping smallpox vaccinations as proof, sent us back to the plane under armed guard, to the astonishment not only of me, but the other passengers.

At Sydney I thought I’d avoid the hassle and stay on the plane for the stopover. Alas, it was not to be… after a long delay on landing, a posse of armed police boarded the plane, and announced over the loudspeaker that I was to report to them with my children. Struggling through the now irritable standing passengers with their luggage, waiting to leave the plane, we were marched off and put in a freezing room.

August in Hong Kong is hot, hot and this was frosty mid-winter in Sydney. In spite of our warm clothes we were all shivering with cold – and in my case with fear. Finally, after nearly half an hour I opened the door in a rage, and found an armed guard standing in front of me. How long am I going to be kept here I asked. It’s not my business to say he replied. I have never felt so utterly powerless.

Then a doctor arrived, young and reasonable, looked at our arms and sores, laughed and said it was all a storm in a tea-cup, and we were allowed to board the plane, this time unescorted. Halfway across the Tasman, checking our documents for arrival in Auckland, I realised that the Sydney doctor hadn’t signed the medical documents either.

It never crossed my law-abiding mind to sign them myself, so positioning myself at the back of the queue this time, I went through another hostile interrogation on landing in Auckland, and ended up bursting into tears when one of the truculent officials demanded “Well, where’s your husband?” “I haven’t got one,” I wept and they let me through.

More trials awaited me at customs, where our three suitcases contained not just clothes but sheets and towels and cutlery! Coming from Hong Kong, customs were sure I must have muddy shoes or other dangerous items covered in bacteria which would pollute this pristine place. Finally, a friend of a Hong Kong friend who had said he’d meet my plane, was actually waiting for us, even though I’d only met him once.

The tired children were as good as gold and sat in the back seat of his car amid the eight fringed legs, two fiercely wagging tails and the panting jaws of his two golden retrievers. John was a bachelor, and it never crossed his mind that we were exhausted, so he drove us all over his city in the fading twilight, to show us beauty spots and architectural delights, before taking us to his flat on the fringes of the city. His father had just died, so instead of leaving us at a hotel as I’d expected, he lent us his flat while he stayed with his bereaved stepmother.

Frightened though I was by the experience of landing in a new country, with no money, no home, no job, and no friends, it felt as though the tide was turning. I seemed to have found a generous and kind friend already.

The next day, having lit the fire, switched on the lamps, got the children settled at the dining table, enjoying a properly cooked supper, and a low happy babble of conversation filling the comfortable room, John arrived. I could see he just loved the idea of being welcomed home, offered a drink, and entertained by two lively children. He stayed for hours, with me once again on the brink of exhaustion. Meanwhile his dogs had begun what became a regular routine for some years. They trotted through to the bedroom where the children were tucked up, and checked they were alright before rejoining us. Life began to seem rather sweet.

The next day, his neighbour, who was a journalist, gave me the names of the people to apply to for a job at the two main Auckland newspapers. I still have the envelope on which she scrawled the names and phone numbers. One of the names eventually became my second husband. After meeting the children, she also asked to use them for a television programme about taking children to the zoo, as their clear articulate voices meant they were ideal for her purposes – local children mumbled, she said!

John’s best friend also arrived with John and being in the car business helped me buy a second- hand car on hire purchase, a necessity in a huge city with minimal public transport. Thus equipped, I turned up for my two job interviews. The worst part of this was knowing no-one with whom to leave the two five and six- year- old children. So I parked on the top floor of a quiet car park.

Torn between the fear of them being kidnapped if I left the car door unlocked, or trapped inside the car if I locked it and there was a fire, I straddled both nightmares. I left them with a picnic- cream buns and chocolate biscuits- and left the car unlocked, telling them if there was a fire, to go to the edge of the car park, lean over and yell fire. I then made my way un-easily to my job interviews.

To be continued

Food for threadbare gourmets

Friends arrived unexpectedly for drinks, one of them allergic to gluten in a big way. My usual standby – rice crackers – seemed stale, so I had to improvise. I sliced a potato very thinly, fried the slices in olive oil, and used them as a base for smoked salmon and cream cheese, while the rest of us consumed gluten packed blinis. I made a good helping of garlicky aoli, to eat with sticks of celery, courgettes and carrots -that did for us all – and along with a plate of olives, gherkins, and cubes of cheddar cheese and a lovely bottle of Reisling, we managed !

Food for thought

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Richard Wilber

24 Comments

Filed under colonial life, cookery/recipes, family, history, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, travel, uncategorised, Uncategorized, world war two

Tagged as angels, emigration, food, gluten, golden retrievers, Hong Kong, Japanese, journalism, kindness, New Zealand

June 28, 2018 · 3:22 pm

Diamonds and dysentery

J.J.’s intriguing home…

Another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

Can’t you find some nice man to marry and look after you, Annette, a diminutive blue-eyed brunette asked me as she joined me on the beach with the children. She’d already given me food for thought by telling me her first husband had died of hepatitis. Since then she had struck gold, and married illustrious journalist, Stanley Karnow who was now working on his definitive book on Vietnam and was a friend of Welles and Pat Hangen.

There were actually plenty of people, but I wasn’t interested in any of them, my whole focus being on the children. The only person I did fancy didn’t want children, whereas all the others enjoyed my four and five- year- olds. I also attracted the lesbian wife of Larry Adler, who left him, and pursued me for three months or more, with me so anxious about her bouts of depression and weekly delivery of pills sent from England that I was too frightened to be too fierce in my rejection of her.

I was perpetually anxious about the next stunt she would pull to entrap me. The following year, her husband, Larry Adler, the famous harmonica player, flew back to Hong Kong and proposed to me over lunch at the Foreign Correspondents Club where he too was rejected. I had met them both when I went to interview Larry, and they both made a great fuss of me, and I was so naïve that I didn’t recognise all the undercurrents.

And then I developed a plague of boils… when I was up and running again, I interviewed Andrew Grima, the Queen’s jeweller, a charming, gentle bear of a man, who having been an engineer during the war, had discovered a talent for creating fabulous jewellery when he joined his father-in- law’s firm to run the books. He straddled the worlds of royalty and high society, and the pop world of Carnaby Street, models, musicians and fashion designers. (His gorgeous designs have just some back into fashion again)

We became friends, and he introduced me to the high society of Hong Kong. I suddenly found myself enjoying balls in the marble halls of houses of Victorian colonial splendour, and grand dinners in the homes of Hong Kong’s movers and shakers. One Saturday at the home on the Peak of the Governor’s number two, after a lunch with witty clever conversation and much laughter, we sat on the veranda looking down over Hong Kong below. Andrew emptied out his exquisite jewellery from a big jewel box for us to see.

All the ladies tried on necklaces, earrings and bracelets, with gorgeous designs using Andrew’s signature of chunky unpolished semi- precious stones, set in hammered, textured gold – also his invention. To me, the most beautiful designs of all were a series of brooches of delicate gold ivy leaves with diamonds sprinkled across them like drops of dew . ” Have you got something to suit Valerie?” asked my elegant patrician host, as we gasped over this treasure. ” Nothing beautiful enough for her,” replied the jeweller to my astonishment and disappointment.

All this was heady stuff. My neighbour at the lunch table had been J.J. Killough, an elegant young interior designer and we became firm friends. A week later, sitting in his flat at midnight having coffee after a party at the Mandarin, I listened to his life story. I was wearing a black satin, long – sleeved mini dress with white cuffs and collar, long string of pearls and sheer black stockings. As I lounged in one of his wonderful, worn, highbacked leather chairs with carved arms in his fascinating apartment, I felt as glamorous as a Vogue photograph, and savoured this borrowed beauty and splendour.

J.J. – short for James Julius – came from an American family, and adored his mother, and disappointed his father. Doing his compulsory military service, he fetched up in the office of a famously gruff Admiral. He barked at J.J. : “Why would a pansy like you choose the navy?” “Because I liked the colour of the uniform”, replied J.J. undaunted. He said he and the Admiral hammered out a working relationship in spite of this unpromising start.

From the navy he went to London, and into interior decorating, and a love affair which had lasted for some years until the other half found someone else. J.J. was still recovering from a broken heart. Though he’d mentioned the word pansy, I supposed it was just a figure of speech. I was also surprised to discover that the impression of youth which he gave, slipped late at night when he was feeling lonely and unloved, and he looked his full forty years. I had taken him for late twenties.

His fascinating home was a showcase for his interior decorating skills, and I was charmed by the mix of European and Asian artefacts and antiques, which forty years ago was not as common as it is today. The effect of the elegant, worn leather chairs teamed with a Chinese altar table, wonderful mother of pearl and black lacquer Chinese screens, Philippine carved saints and madonnas found in an abandoned church, huge blue and white Chinese vases, and Italian Renaissance architectural drawings grouped together, leaving other walls completely bare, was grand and satisfying.

Since then I’ve seen his homes in other parts of the world featured in Architectural Digest, and recognised the same furniture, and the same elements. He had great style, and I learned a lot simply by observing his rooms. He was waited on by a very small neat Chinese man servant, who only cooked Chinese food, so J.J. only ate Chinese at home, on fragile Chinese porcelain, with chop-sticks.

He gave a me a precious ivory frog with green malachite eyes for Christmas. As I got to know him, I found he was incredibly visual, and incredibly ignorant and naive about anything outside his decorative world. He struggled through his working relationships by guesswork and wicked intuition and seemed to be always having rows and makeups with his rich clients scattered round the world, who would fly him back to the States to do a room for them, or to transform their log-cabin.

Over Christmas he went to Tokyo, and when he came back, kept ringing me to ask me to go and see him, but I was unusually busy at my journalistic grindstone, and didn’t get there until one day, three weeks later, when he insisted I come for afternoon tea. It was a grey January day. I was wearing a black wool trouser suit, and the hairdresser had piled my long dark hair up into the fashionable Madam Butterfly style.

When I arrived J.J. wasn’t ready for me. The manservant showed me into the drawing room looking down over the wintry harbour, a wistful symphony of soft greys and misty greens, which matched my elegaic mood. Ferries were churning back and forth to Kowloon and Victoria, and junks chugging up and down in the wake of the stately white liner Canberra gliding slowly down the centre of the harbour to her mooring.

As I watched, his voice called out: ” Never do your hair any other way”, and I turned around to see J.J. standing in his bedroom door, with a long, black silk kimono embroidered in scarlet poppies draped around him. He invited me into his bedroom, where he sat on his astonishing, antique, Chinese opium bed to talk. It was a bed fit for a king, encrusted with gold leaf and intricate red painted carving. He was drying his fair hair with a hair-dryer, the first time, in those macho days that I had seen a man using a hair -dryer.

But why not, I inwardly chided myself. He bemoaned the fact that I could wear eye-shadow, and men couldn’t. I began to see what I hadn’t recognised before and began giggling inside at myself and him. The silk kimono was magnificent, and I told him so. “That’s why you’re here,” he replied.

He had brought one back for me, an antique Japanese wedding kimono, in mellow cream silk shot with silver, and embroidered in solid gold thread with cranes. It was immensely long, to tuck over an obi, and lined with red silk. It was the most precious gift anyone had ever given me. In the end it was such a responsibility that I felt I couldn’t look after it properly, and gave it to the Auckland War Memorial Museum, so that it would be cared for as it deserved.

A few weeks after the interlude with Andrew Grima and his Hong Kong friends I had to look for another place to live, as our year was nearly up. I found a charming one in a small block of four apartments, overlooking the sea below Stanley Bay, just around the corner from the bustling Chinese marketplace.

And then I was suddenly ambushed by severe dysentery. I shed eleven pounds in five days and remember thinking that this was how prisoners died like flies in Japanese prison camps during the war. A friend dropped in on the second day and found the children eating dry bread from the fridge. She rang my doctor, and when he arrived, he took my daughter to stay with him and my friend took my son.

The doctor said he knew I couldn’t afford to go to hospital, and he would let me stay at home if I got someone to be with me at night. I did. Ah Ping, who had left to try to qualify as a nurse a few months earlier – a terrible blow – came to see me. The mysterious Chinese grape vine had told her I was ill- how they knew I never discovered. She disclosed that the man who had a fruit and vegetable barrow on wheels which he pushed around Repulse Bay to make a scanty living, lived in a tiny pig shed with his wife and children, and who I’d supplied with blankets and clothes, had waved her down and ticked her off for leaving me.

After two weeks of hell, I tottered to my feet and began packing to move house. My lovely Swedish friend, married to an Englishman, wouldn’t return my son until I was stronger she said, and my daughter came home looking tired and a bit grubby, the doctor’s wife didn’t get the children into bed until late. We loved our new home with most of the big windows opening out onto the view of sea and beach below. We watched the junks of the fishing fleet sail out into the sunset, red sails unfurled, and then saw them stream back in the morning and unload their night’s catch on the beach below our window.

We loved exploring the market and narrow alleys crammed with cramped Chinese shops, crammed with strange foods, and pungent smelling condiments. I bought two big earthen-ware jars, about two feet high that stored sugar, and turned them upside down, to use as side tables by the sofa. A large rice wine jar made an unusual base for a lamp with a big shade fitted, and I bought Chinese bowls and pots and china for a song. One afternoon my son and I were meandering hand in hand through the market on our way to meet the school bus and my daughter, when I heard a low throaty roaring. It reminded me of the awful sound of the baying crowd when I’d been taken to a bullfight. I came on a mass of Chinese men in a tight circle, four or five people deep.

They were shouting and encouraging something, and as I craned to see what was going on, suddenly in a crack of space between the swaying bodies, I saw a tiny skinny six-year -old boy dodging around the tight circle and crying. A strong, crazed- looking youth of about fourteen was brandishing a length of piping which he was bringing down on the child who couldn’t escape as the men enjoying the spectacle barred his way.

Without thinking, I dropped my four -year -old’s hand, and pushed through the throng. I had no idea how I was going to stop it, but the solution appeared as I stepped into the circle. I grabbed the pipe as the youth, who seemed out of his mind and mentally handicapped, raised it above his head to bring it down again. He was so surprised that he stopped for a second, and the child seized his chance and darted away. There was a deep groan of disappointment and the crowd began to disperse.

And now I turned to gather up my son and he was nowhere to be seen. When I found him sometime later, he said he had no idea where I’d gone, so just went on plodding through the market and up the hill! As I put down the phone in the office after accepting another invitation for the children to spend the day with a friend and play in her big leafy garden — a rarity in Hongkong – my junior turned to me and said “You must have the most popular children in Hong Kong. You’re always getting invitations for them.”

It was true. From the day they were born I’d talked to them with the same courtesy that I spoke to my friends, and always checked how I would like to be treated if I was them. It had paid off. They were such co-operative good-natured children – articulate, well-mannered, and dressed in the beautiful clothes from places like Liberty’s sent from England by doting grand- parents, that many people found them irresistible.

Friends with children away at school in England would ‘borrow’ them to cheer themselves up, unmarried friends, both male and female would ask to take them to the ballet and pantomimes, while friends with children always wanted them to play with theirs. Sadly, my friend Pat who was always keen to have them, was now a broken- hearted woman hanging onto a thread of hope that her husband Welles was still alive in Cambodia. He’d been ambushed and beaten to death by the Khymer Rouge, which she didn’t learn for over twenty years, in 1993.

The only people who weren’t interested in the children were my ‘lodgers’! I had stopped doing an extra part-time job as PR for the Anglican church, because I felt like a hypocrite since I was anti-God then. The Bishop’s wife had asked me to take on the job, but in the end it felt all wrong. So then I tried to make ends meet by using the children as photographic models in ads and doing radio programmes and TV game shows myself. Finally, I hit on the idea of letting my spare room which was equipped with an en-suite bathroom.

I suppose it was inevitable that it was always odd bods who wanted a room, rather than socially competent achievers. The men were loners, one mummy’s boy who hung around my living area and wanted me to look after him or entertain him, another who had stormed out of his marriage, and was always attended by cohorts of righteous managing friends, or when he was alone, making vicious calls to his ex-wife on my phone. I didn’t need money so badly for them to stay. Three weeks for the first, one week for the second.

The girls were worse. They always had lovers, or fiancees, so I always ended up letting the room to two people instead of one. I could write a book about each one and their love affairs, broken engagements, car crashes, and strange personality quirks which impinged on my life. But I didn’t enjoy them.

I was Women’s Editor now and enjoyed crafting columns and writing about social issues like Hong Kong prisons, abortion, feminism, child care and such-like. My readers seemed to enjoy this mix along with fashion shoots, and makeup advice dished out by cosmetics advertisers, my recipes, and celebrity interviews. But the arithmetic of staying in Hong Kong became impossible when school fees went up, and I now had a second child ready to start school. We decided it was time to start a new life in a new place.

To be continued

Food for threadbare gourmets

Meeting two beloved friends for a celebration lunch, we ended our feast with crème brulee accompanied by banana and walnut bread. It was so delicious that I decided to try making some myself.

Sift one and quarter cups of SR flour, one teasp baking soda, and half a teasp salt into a medium bowl and set aside. Whisk two large eggs and half a teasp vanilla together in another container. Cream half a cup of butter and a cup of sugar until light and fluffy. Gradually pour the egg mixture into the butter and mix. Add three ripe mashed bananas – the mixture will look curdled, but don’t worry.

Gently mix in the flour mixture, fold in half a cup of walnuts and pour the batter into a buttered loaf tin. Bake for 55 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 350F or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the bread comes out clean. Cool the bread in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes then turn it out and let cool completely on the rack. Wrap in plastic wrap, it’s best served the next day, sliced with butter.

I roast the walnuts first, to avoid the danger of them being rancid.

Food for thought

This was the poem and beautiful words by Richard Wilbur that one of my friends copied into my birthday card:

‘Blow out the candles of your cake

they will not leave you in the dark

who round with grace this dusky arc

of the Grand Tour which souls must take’.

30 Comments

Filed under beauty, colonial life, cookery/recipes, fashion, great days, life/style, The Sound of Water, the sxities, Thoughts on writing and life, uncategorised, Uncategorized

Tagged as Andrew Grima, dysentery, food, Hong Kong, interior decorating, J.J.Killough III, jewellery, Richard Wilbur, school, Stanley Karnow, Vietnam

June 21, 2018 · 6:17 pm

World on Fire

South Vietnamese troops battling the Viet Cong in Saigon during TET offensive

A life- another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

My husband’s affairs – in every sense of the word – meant that he and his intended had stumbled into a mine field. When Candida, as I’ll call her, told her naval husband of her plans, he hit the roof. He had no intention of parting with his elegant sweet-natured wife. The thing began to take on diplomatic proportions, and the General and the local naval boss now got involved, and Candida and husband were posted hastily back to England to avoid further scandal.

This meant that my husband was storming tactlessly and angrily around the place, and the padre came to see this cold, unloving wife who had driven her handsome, charming husband out of his unloving home. There was probably more than a grain of truth in this by now, as I certainly didn’t love him any more!

It was that tense turbulent year of 1968 when the world seemed on the edge of drama month after month. After North Korea captured the US ship Pueblo, imprisoning and torturing all eighty- five of her crew at the end of January, the ripples of the surprise Viet Cong Tet offensive in Saigon then reached us. Friends from the office were holidaying in Saigon, and were caught up in that murderous mayhem which continued all through February.

When Martin Luther King was shot in April, I hurried up to see Pat Hangen to somehow try to comfort her. When Robert Kennedy was shot in June, it seemed unbelievable. I shall never forget the silent shock in the newspaper office, before I rushed up to see Pat again…it seemed a devastating thing to be American at this time…

This was also the time of the Prague Spring when another mid European country tried to throw off the Russian yoke. And now in August, we listened with anguish and watched television as the Russian tanks rolled into Prague to crush freedom, as they had done into Hungary nearly nine years before.

We were in the middle of a very destructive typhoon, and in spite of the wooden shutters over the windows, the towels laid along the window sills and carefully led into bowls, were soaking wet. I went from window to window wringing out wet towels and feeling intimidated by the storm while I watched the Czechs being intimidated by the tanks. My heart was wrung for Anton Dubjek as my hands wrung my wet towels!

A few weeks later, I went to the doctor who gave me some pills to check the constant nausea I’d been feeling, and taking one straight away, I only just managed to drive home. Tottering into bed, I woke to consciousness in the evening, having slipped into a coma with pills that had apparently knocked out my liver. The next day the doctor rang and said he was sending an ambulance round straight away – my tests had come back – and I had hepatitis with secondary infections of glandular fever and jaundice.

The children went to play school in the mornings, and before this happened, I’d just organised a gentle, friendly, eighteen-year-old school leaver out from England to come every afternoon to read to the children and play with them. I was worried that their vocabularies might stagnate with just their loving Chinese amah to talk to, and I hoped now that my husband would stay with them in the evenings.

In hospital in Kowloon, I lay in my room overlooking the harbour, and watched the glittering water sparkling in the magical light of the sun at the change of the season. I also put myself together and found my inner strength again. My doctor had given me a book of D.H. Lawrence’s poems, and ‘The Song of the man who has come through’ became a sort of prayer and affirmation.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!

If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!

If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed

By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world….

And his other words… ‘It is not easy to fall out of the hands of the living God…”

The Red Cross trolley with library books came round every day, and along with the biographies and books on travel and exploration I gobbled up, there were some Elizabeth Goudge. ‘The Dean’s Watch’, about the power of love, shifted me on from my little local world into a larger perception of all that is, and I was ready after five weeks to go back and transform my little world.

I wrote to my step-grandfather who was still writing to me, and asked him if he could loan me five hundred pounds to get started, but he replied rather pompously that he would have no hand in breaking up a family with young children. (Many years later, when an old man, he wrote to say he had a guilty, nagging feeling that he had let me down over something, and I spared him and wrote to say he had always been a loving friend)

Meanwhile my husband, who was still marking time over his enforced separation from his intended, every now and then suggested that we have another go with our marriage. Not convinced that leopards change their spots I told him that I would be gone in a month, after Christmas, and his response was that he would smash me mentally and physically before then.

Still feeling frail and ill I managed to find a flat for us. It was always hard to compete with Americans who had large housing allowances and lots of money compared to the rest of us. But I drove round Repulse Bay, hoping to find ‘flat to let’ signs. By a miracle I found one hanging outside twelve -foot high, brightly painted gates, with painted peacocks embossed on them, the mansion behind hidden by high walls. It had been built by a Chinese millionaire for his family to come and live with him, but they had refused.

When he showed me the flat, and told me the price, I said I couldn’t afford it. So he said, what can you afford? And when I told him, he said I could have it for a year. I lived for that first year of independence beneath the splendour of chandeliers, with an elegant panelled walnut entrance hall and an amazing, huge, pink marble en-suite bathroom.

Back home, my husband came to me in tears. His bank was threatening to foreclose on his debts, and this would mean being cashiered by the army, and no financial help at all from him for the children. I wrote him a cheque for half my savings and feeling sorry for his humiliation said he didn’t need to write an IOU as he offered, but that I would trust him. I never saw the money again.

I persuaded my husband to ring England and tell his parents what was happening, and the first response of my father-in-law was to ask if his son had got good legal advice. Yes, he’d been to see an old school friend who was a lawyer. As I listened, I felt a cold hand over my heart. No concern for me, it was going to be a power struggle aided by the law and family. I felt truly alone.

I thought I’d better get some legal advice too. But when I went to see the army legal services, my husband had been there first, so they would have no truck with me. It was the same at the navy and the RAF. All the free legal services were closed to me. My husband had been to see them all, and this debarred them from giving me advice, they each insisted.

The establishment had closed ranks. In those days male chauvinism was alive and well, and it felt as though all the men had ganged up on me. The army lawyer then sent me a letter telling me I was no longer allowed to set foot in the garrison. Being an army daughter, a serving officer and an army wife was a part of my heritage, and I was devastated by what felt like a gratuitous insult.

The result of these snubs was that I was driven to find expensive, civilian legal advice. I contacted a friendly solicitor who I’d met at a party. He felt there was some urgency when I rang him, so that Sunday I spent at his stylish flat, curled up in an elegant orange Arne Jacobson ‘Egg’ chair, dictating my divorce petition to him.

It was a cold winter’s day, and still feeling fragile a couple of weeks out of hospital, his warm, cosy flat in the Mid-levels seemed like a safe haven away from the stress of my own home. As I dictated, my eyes wandered over stacks of beautiful fabric -covered boxes on the bookshelves. They housed his collection of precious snuff bottles, but as a philistine, I thought then the boxes were prettier than the bottles.

He rang a few days later. There was an alarming hitch. It seemed that no woman had ever divorced her husband in Hongkong before – this was 1968 – and there were no legal precedents. He was at a standstill but would try a few other avenues. He came up with something from Indian and Colonial law. It was possible for an Englishwoman in India to get a divorce in that country if she had been resident there for at least three years.

Peter said he would try to get me a divorce quoting this Indian precedent. The element of uncertainty was unnerving. By the date of the hearing my husband had followed his intended wife back to England, so it was a very empty court I attended. I had already left the army quarters, packing all my belongings into the Red Cross ambulance the doctor lent me. I realised as I looked back that nearly every other army wife was standing on her veranda watching the astonishing sight of another wife leaving her husband under their very eyes.

Before the divorce Peter told me the judge was homosexual. I didn’t know how this would affect the outcome in which the custody of the children was at stake. I dressed very carefully in a demure, white dress with a hem at knee level, in this year of mini skirts. When the case began, the judge questioned the validity of it, and Peter provided him with the Indian and Colonial volumes.

I sat in suspense while the judge pored over the pages, and finally agreed the case could go ahead. Called into the witness box, for some routine questions, to my horror I could feel tears coming. I had left my handkerchief in my handbag on my seat, so had to sniff through my answers. The tears were pouring down my cheeks by the time I returned to my seat. And the white dress was wasted, the judge didn’t even look in my direction.

On the way home in my battered Morris Minor convertible – all I could afford after I’d given my husband half my savings – it broke down and ran out of control down the hill to Repulse Bay. Apparently, the rust which held the chassis together had finally weakened, and there was no connection between the steering and the wheels.

It took thirteen monthly instalments to pay the huge bill to patch it up. The floor in the back seat had rusted away, so I tucked cardboard over the holes, and the children would complain their feet were getting wet when it rained. I always had to drive over the Peak in wet weather, as low-lying Wanchai would have flooded it.

I discovered quite by chance that some of my rich American friends thought I’d chosen this broken-down form of transport as part of my English eccentricity. It never crossed their minds that the South China Morning Post paid women so badly that I earned two thirds what a cub reporter earned. Another subtle local distinction was that people recruited from overseas for their jobs earned far more than impecunious “locally employed”.

The first months were tough. The doctors hadn’t told me I would be depressed for six months after my illness, so I didn’t realise until my six- monthly check-up that the fatigue and depression I was felt was normal. Instead, when I thought longingly of walking into the sea and never coming back, it was only the thought of the children that had kept me going. I was so run down that my teeth packed up and I racked up big dentist bills, while my husband’s American bank – one of the many he had swapped around – wanted me to pay his debts.

I worried that I couldn’t afford my son’s play school anymore, and I worried when my husband’s small cheque didn’t arrive, which spelt disaster on my tiny salary. I kept a pocket diary which I filled in every day at the office. No words, just two colours – red for good red-letter days, blue for bad blue days… at first the blue days far outnumbered the red.

I had copied two quotations into it – one from William the Silent: ‘There is no need of hope in order to undertake, or of success in order to persevere’… and the other from Clement of Alexandria: ‘We may not be taken up and transported to our journey’s end, but must travel thither on foot, traversing the whole distance of the narrow way…’ I read these rather grim exhortations regularly to inspire me to ‘just get on with it!’

And with all the struggle, I would gloat to myself that I was an independent woman now. I had two beautiful children, a home through my own efforts, a car, and a job I enjoyed. I knew that life could only get better. And, of course, it did. The worst was behind me.

To be continued

Food for threadbare gourmets

When I make one of our favourites, feta cheese and courgette fritters, I usually serve them with chilli jelly, salad and hot rolls. But I really love beetroot relish with them too and decided to stop buying it from the supermarket and make my own.

Place in a pot three peeled and roughly grated beetroots, one finely chopped onion – red if you have it – a cup of brown sugar, half a cup of cider vinegar or balsamic, quarter of a cup of water, a table spoon of olive oil, half a teasp of ground cumin, salt and black pepper. Heat gently for thirty minutes or until the liquid has been absorbed. If it dries up, add enough water to keep it moist and juicy. Place in a jar or bowl and refrigerate until ready to use.

Food for thought

A certain percentage of those who have survived near-death experiences speak of a common insight which afforded a glimpse of life’s basic lesson plan. We are all here for a single purpose: to grow in wisdom and to learn to love better.

We can do this through losing as well as through winning, by having and by not having, by succeeding or by failing. All we need to do is to show up open-hearted for class. So fulfilling life’s purpose may depend more on how we play than what we are dealt… Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen

34 Comments

Filed under army, books, colonial life, consciousness, cookery/recipes, great days, happiness, history, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, uncategorised, Uncategorized

Tagged as Divorce, food, Hong Kong, Indian and Clonial Law, Morris minor, Repulse Bay, South China Morning Post

June 15, 2018 · 11:42 am

Life and loss, love and death

Deepwater Bay

Another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to writing my normal blogs

Ensconced in Deepwater Bay, life now took on the tone and routines that shaped our lives until the final disintegration of our marriage. My husband would go off to University every day and return home in time for dinner. After dinner he would take off back to Victoria – to the officers mess, he would say, to see Henry or Richard or whoever… I assumed for some time that he was bonding with the other people on his course, in spite of having spent all day with them.

Later he would say there was a party or a get together. And later still, when the whole saga had ended, friends would tell me that I had no idea of how many girl- friends there had been – “You didn’t know the half of it”….

I tried everything, and one night I remember in despair taking the car before he did and driving round to beautiful South Bay, an empty semi- circle of still water, ringed with flame trees, and where I watched the flaming sunset. The beauty was so moving, I felt I must share it with him, and drove back home, and persuaded him to come back to South Bay with me. He did, and then took the car and drove off- somewhat delayed – to whatever rendezvous he had in town.

Two things helped me through this time. I had found a wonderful amah, Ah Ping, a shy eighteen- year- old girl with very little English, and a lovely nature. She adored the children, and we had a little competition at bath-time over which of us was going to enjoy bathing the youngest, still very much a baby. She learned to speak English with my accent and tone, so that people thought it was me when she answered the phone. She helped to maintain the happy atmosphere for the children and they loved her.

The other thing that sustained me, was my first foray into writing. I studied the woman’s pages of the South China Morning Post, the main English speaking newspaper in Hong Kong, and realised that the one element missing was cookery.

Cheekily I offered my services to the woman’s editor, a childless and fashionable young woman, Jane, the same age as me. Feeling plain and boring by now, I somehow managed to keep my end up with her at my interview and got the go ahead to write a cookery column on Fridays. I had no qualifications for this of course, apart from an abiding love of food, but I managed to make it sound as though I knew what I was talking about.

After six weeks, I was offered another bite of the cherry, when Jane suggested I write a story to fill Thursday’s page – she wanted something about bringing up children, and now she had as it were, a captive mother, I filled the bill. This was meat and drink to me and writing about children and parenting became one of my areas of expertise and was something I only stopped doing fifty years later at seventy- seven.

My husband’s social life was costing us, and debts had begun to pile up, so the money I now earned was important to me, as I knew I could always feed the children with it. I could also afford to visit the famous alleys, and find cheap lengths of gorgeous fabric, which I sewed by hand, making glamorous new summer dresses. I had new friends, and was making a life, but I still felt miserable and longed to be loved. I tried to fill the emptiness by playing Bob Dylan and the Beatles and they left me feeling even more alone and bereft. I also started having blinding migraines which took five days out of life every time they struck.

One evening my husband came home and said we’d been invited to a party at the naval base on the commander’s ship. I put on a red dress from my pre-marriage party days and set off, feeling like I always did these days, in-adequate and plain.

At the gangplank we were warmly greeted by a man with piercing blue eyes and golden hair. His wife was a ravishing blonde ex-ballet dancer with huge brown eyes, beautiful features, and a pile of hair pinned up, so long that when it fell to her ankles when we were dancing, she looked like Rapunzel. Her chic little black dress showed off her ballet dancer’s figure to perfection. I was in awe of both these glamorous people.

Later we went back to their house where we all sat down at the dining table for an impromptu dinner. Our host sat me at his right hand and talked to me as though I was actually interesting. I felt such gratitude for his kindness. We continued to meet at parties as our friends were old childhood friends of them both. At each occasion he sought me out, raising his glass to me across many crowded rooms before making his way through the throng to us.

And then one night as he handed me out of his car after a party, he squeezed my hand. The next party we went to was at a French officer’s house. He and his wife were a gentle couple, and we played silly childish games, since we were a mixture of French and English couples with few of us speaking each other’s language, so conversation was difficult.

During one game if a player won some sort of forfeit, they placed a cushion in front of the person of their choice and knelt and gave them a kiss. My naval friend placed his cushion in front of me when it was his turn, and I said to myself if he does it again, I will know that he meant it. And he did. The next two months were a dizzy time of love and longing set against the back drop of riots and curfews and water rationing and our move into army quarters in Repulse Bay, where we became neighbours. Neither of us ever said a word but were drawn to each other at every meeting.

At the same time, I was fascinated by his ravishing wife, and couldn’t believe that he could care for me, when he had such a spell-binding partner, who I knew he’d loved since they were children. I could see that she was scatter-brained and sometimes strangely childish, but still found her beauty entrancing.

The night before they left to return to England we all met for one last time. As we danced he told me he loved me. I said I thought it might have been a sailor’s girl in every port, and he reproached me. He told me that his fey, feckless wife was a millstone round his neck, and that we both had “to make a go of it”.

They flew out the next day, and I went into a sort of collapse. I literally couldn’t get out of bed for a few weeks, and somehow struggled on into the grey winter like a zombie. The migraines ambushed me more and more often. I felt too fragile and depressed to write to my father.

My husband now asked me not to leave him alone with the husband of a woman I’d thought was my best friend because he feared being beaten up. The husband had discovered that my husband and his wife had been having an affair. I felt shocked and betrayed by my friend, but then, I found my husband was having another affair with another colleague’s wife, and I stopped caring.

After Christmas Jane, the woman’s editor offered me a fulltime job, and I began in January. A few weeks later, I woke up one morning, looked out at the sea, watched the fishing boats streaming back after their night’s fishing, and felt different. It was as though a huge grey cloud had lifted from me, and my first thought was – now I can write to my father. Because I was still trying to juggle my job and the children, and learning the ropes at work, I put it off until I had a moment to sit down and enjoy communicating again.

A few nights later I dreamt that one of my father’s good friends who was in Hong Kong, was sitting on my bed with its beautiful blue and green patterned Venetian bedspread, with his arms around me, comforting me. When I awoke in the morning I inwardly castigated myself that I was so desperate that I was dreaming about my father’s friends!

That night, as I slept, I heard the phone go, and my husband answer it. I heard him say: “Thank you, I’ll tell her.” When he walked into the bedroom I sat up in bed, and cried out, “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“Your father’s dead.” he said. The War Office had rung.

I immediately rang my father’s friend Ian, and unwittingly destroyed a dinner party. Ian came straight round, and as he sat on the bed and put his arms around me, my dream came back to me.

It felt as though the bedrock of my life had been ripped from beneath me. It seemed like the worst thing that had ever happened to me, even though I knew it happened to everyone. But he was only fifty- four. My siblings who were scattered around the globe on various rocks – Gibraltar, St Helena, Aden gathered, but I was too far away. No-one contacted me. I never heard from my stepmother again for nearly forty years when she was in her late eighties. My father-in-law wrote and told me about my father’s funeral, and now I was alone.

I had leant Pat Hangen my copy of Towers of Trebizond in which was a poem I felt I needed. As soon as day broke after the phone call, I rang and asked her to return it. The poem was like a lifeline back to sanity. Every time I was overwhelmed with grief, I read it again and it brought me back to a place where I could still stand being alive. It was John Davies of Hereford’s dirge for his friend Thomas Morley:

Death hath deprived me of my dearest friend.

My dearest friend is dead and laid in grave.

In grave he rests until the world shall end.

The world shall end as end all things must have.

All things must have an end that nature wrought.

Death hath deprived me of my dearest friend.

The rhythm of these lines helped somehow, while the words of the gurus did not. “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life.” Joseph Campbell once said, and: ‘we can choose to live in joy’. But had he ever experienced the sorrows of life, in his long, happy, childless relationship (with none of the agonies and ecstasies of parenthood) and his sheltered affluent university life-style? Words like his seemed to mock.

In my world, enduring the sorrows of life, it took weeks to move beyond the pain of grief and despair, and my husband lost patience with me. Then both children developed bad cases of measles. It took the spots ten days to come out for my son, and with his high temperature I feared he’d develop encephalitis. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. My daughter developed bronchitis and was very sick at the end of her bout of measles.

One night, as I lay by her side in bed anxiously watching her, my husband came to the bed room door. I’d been so pre-occupied with the children’s sickness, that I hadn’t really noticed that his party round had been even more frenetic that usual. He stood in the doorway, looking dreamy and dazed, and said to me, “I’ve just met the woman I’m going to marry.”

I replied coldly, “Well, you’re still married to me.” But inside, I felt a surge of relief. We must be on the home straight! We were. I even stopped having my debilitating migraines. I began saving my earnings for when I would need then.

Now too, my job became really interesting. I began interviewing all the interesting people who came to Hong King. They included charming, handsome Dr Seuss, a man of goodness and integrity. Writer Iris Murdoch was a challenge, and I wish I could do it again now that I know more about life. But then I was so naive that I wondered how such a plain woman could have found a husband! John Bailey, the husband who later betrayed her when she had Altzheimers, was vague and donnish when I met him. Robert Helpman, the great ballet dancer was a joy, gentle, charming, and kind.

Barbara Cartland, so exuberant and full of life at seventy- four (honey and vitamins she told me) took me to her bosom- literally – when I mentioned one of my closest friends who was her son’s best friend. When Raine, Lady Dartmouth, her daughter, came to Hong Kong a few months later, she was just as friendly and charming, seeking me out with all eyes on her as she walked across the dining room to greet me while I was lunching in the Eagles Nest of the Hilton. She was radiantly beautiful, tall and elegant, with big china blue eyes and peaches and cream complexion like the Queen’s. It was hard to see her as the wicked stepmother of Princess Diana in the years that followed.

I don’t think I was very good at writing interviews, but I did uncover a talent for writing columns which blossomed when I moved to another country. I also discovered that journalism could be a powerful force for good when a woman rang me one day and asked to see me at my home. She gave me what she said was a false name.

I opened the front door to a tall, fair-haired sweet-faced woman with great poise and dignity. She wanted to talk to me about setting up Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon, the family support group in Hong Kong. I ended up attending meetings of both, and then writing several stories. Both groups took off, and today, the woman, who became one of my closest friends, tells me there are at least seventeen groups now flourishing in the territory, three of them for Europeans.

To be continued

Food for threadbare gourmets

I’m still on my what to do with lettuce and greens jag and have adapted this recipe for lettuce soup from my old copy of the one and only Mrs Beaton. I use four spring onions if I have them and soften them with a couple of thinly sliced onions, a chopped garlic clove and a finely chopped carrot. When this is soft I pour in three cups of heated chicken stock. The lettuce then goes in, torn into small pieces, and a cup and a half of frozen peas, salt and pepper. Cook for eight to ten minutes and remove from heat while the soup is still bright green. Whizz in the blender until smooth. One of my oldest friends combs the hedgerows in the Forest of Dean for edible wild plants, and she would add leaves like nettles to this soup. I am not so brave…

Food for thought

You start dying slowly
If you do not change your life when you are not satisfied with your job, or with your love,
If you do not risk what is safe for the uncertain,
If you do not go after a dream,
If you do not allow yourself,
At least once in your lifetime,
To run away from sensible advice… by poet Pablo Neruda

30 Comments

Filed under army, colonial life, cookery/recipes, family, life and death, love, poetry, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, uncategorised, Uncategorized

Tagged as Alcoholics Anonymous, death, Deep Water Bay, food, Hong Kong, Joseph Campbell, life, love, Pablo Neruda

June 8, 2018 · 9:01 am

Sunset over Hong Kong

Image result for images of old hong kong harbour Hong Kong in the mid-sixties

A life – another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

Before we left England, we enjoyed two quintessential English events. The in -laws gave us their tickets for the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, one of the glamorous fixtures on the London calendar fifty years ago. I watched with interest the people and clothes, as well as the pictures. Standing next to a woman dressed in exquisite soft pale blue suede with matching knee length suede boots, I recognised the heiress Tessa Kennedy, famous for her elopement at eighteen with painter Dominic Elwes.

They had fled to Havana to escape the English courts and marry there, before eventually fleeing Cuba on a raft during the anarchy of Castro’s era… I watched the President of the Academy reverently ushering through the galleries the fascinating Dorelia, Augustus John’s mistress, then partner for over fifty years. She was tall and stately, her gypsy beauty undimmed, her bright draperies fluttering as she moved. The famous and the fashionable thronged the beautiful galleries.

Earlier in June I had sat in Whitehall- dressed in a big navy straw hat, coral linen dress, and navy court shoes, feeling deliciously elegant- this time in seats obtained by my father, for us to watch the Queen’s Birthday Parade close up. She rode side saddle into the great parade square, escorted by the Royal Dukes on horseback, all gold braid, chain mail, spurs, bearskins and majesty. The Guards and the Household Cavalry trotted and wheeled and manoeuvred in their timeless rituals as the colours were trooped, and we sat spellbound on a perfect summer’s day, the glorious trees of the parks all around framing the pageantry and splendour.

We returned to old Thomas Twining’s two hundred and forty-three year old house down by the Thames, also surrounded by ancient trees, where squirrels scampered along the top of the high Georgian garden walls. A hundred yards away, a small boat was moored. This was an ancient ferry crossing, and a boat had waited there since medieval times, ready to ferry passengers across the river to Ham Common and the beautiful country on the other side of the river.

History and historic houses, parks and woodland dotted the banks along this stretch of the river. I loved it all. And had I known then that I was leaving this blessed plot, this beloved place, ‘this precious stone set in a silver sea’ – this England – forever, I would have been rent with grief.

But then, simply looking forward to our next adventure I set blithely off. Expecting the gentle energy and rich tropical environment of Malaya, I had a terrible shock when we landed in Hong Kong. The army had laid on a bus to take us from Kaitak airport and deposit us at our hotel and as I looked out of the windows in horror at the traffic, black exhaust smoke, pollution and shoddy blocks of flats, there just below our window, was a truck filled with bloody red animal carcasses covered in flies. This nauseating sight accompanied us the whole way to Kowloon and coloured forever my feelings about this extraordinary place.

Our hotel turned out to be plum in the middle of the thriving and noisy red- light district of Kowloon. The girls whose beauty had bowled me over at first with their elegant cheongsams, beautifully coiffed chignons of shining black hair and immaculate make -up turned out to be prostitutes plying what looked like a prosperous trade with the legions of cropped headed American servicemen on R and R – Rest and Recreation – from Vietnam.

Nights were made hideous with the sound of rows and roistering in the bedroom next door, as well as the traffic outside, and honking of horns and shouts of hawkers who never seemed to go to bed. But after various vicissitudes, we eventually found a beautiful flat in Deepwater Bay, across the harbour on Hong Kong Island. It was ideal, as all the other flats were occupied with young families like us, and there was never any lack of playmates.

We had arrived in the blistering heat of summer, but in September something magic happened. The humidity dropped, and the air became crystal, clear and shimmering and the light glittered on the blue and silver sea. The atmosphere changed too and became charged with a beautiful and haunting nostalgia.

After that first year, I waited for the day, and every year the same magic suddenly returned to the strident city, and transmuted for a few glorious weeks, the raucous harshness of the place and people. Some people never noticed the poetry which suddenly flooded those days and nights. Those who did, likened it to the light of the Greek islands. It lasted for a month to six weeks, before ebbing away into the grey mistiness of winter.

The rest of the time for me, Hong Kong was a place to be endured. Yet now, since China has grasped the prize, I sometimes think back with nostalgia to those years spent on that amazing rock, ten miles by five miles, where then, nearly four million people hawked and spat and bargained and gambled and drank and starved and jockeyed for the biggest profits and built the highest high rises.

In the mid-sixties, with Vietnam and flower power both at their zenith, Hong Kong was both a place of rest and recreation for American troops slogging it out in Vietnam, and a place too, where some draft dodgers quietly eked out an alternative life style.

There were also the grand, old-established British families of several generations who had built up the great English Hongs, or business houses, there were colonies of newsmen, especially from most of the top American news agencies, from CBS and NBC, Life and Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times – to name a few – there were birds of flight from New Zealand and Australia, working their way across to Europe for their OE – overseas experience- refugees from South Africa and apartheid, army and navy contingents, the Foreign Office and government clusters, the Indian community, Portuguese- Chinese immigrants from Macau, the rich Chinese and the endless army of poor Chinese, most of whom had fled China in different waves, ever since the Communist takeover.

This was also the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Just before coming to Hong Kong, I’d read the history of the Boxer Rebellion. It struck me then, even in the mid-twentieth century, that China was a good place to stay away from. At a dinner party one night soon after we had arrived, a handful of us farewelled a lowly foreign office official, named Ray Whitney.

After learning Chinese like my husband and all those dining with us, he’d left the army to join the foreign office and was now posted to what was still known as Peking. Sitting next to Ray after dinner I naively suggested to him that it was a dangerous posting with the Cultural Revolution in full swing, and shades of the Boxer Rebellion. He swung his whole person round to look at me. “My dear young lady”, he exclaimed, ” I regard this as an adventure”.

A few days later, we read the reports of him and his colleague being beaten up on Shanghai Station and smeared with glue. When they reached the British Embassy in Peking, it became their prison. The diplomats there were beaten up while hordes of Chinese Red Guards chanted Kill! Kill! and part of the embassy was set on fire. Back inside, they were besieged, and no-one could leave for nearly eighteen months.

Requests would reach Hong Kong for Italian cook books and the latest novels with which to while away the captivity of an embassy of bored, beleaguered, idle diplomats. (Ray Whitney, a lovely man, had a distinguished career after this, knighted for his very real services, becoming an MP and a member of many influential offices and commissions.)

Reports were also reaching us of cruel mock trials of intellectuals and artists and other Enemies of the People. Old men were made to parade around in dunce’s caps at their trial and sentencing. It was a grotesque gesture by Chinese hooligans who had no idea of the history of Duns Scotus’s medieval hat. The Red Guards had now transformed the symbol for a dunce into a ritual for sadistic humiliation.

This was the year too of the Star Ferry Riots, when the government tried to raise the price of the Star Ferry tickets by one cent, the first rise since 1947. Those riots were just over when we arrived, and the next riots were soon to begin, fuelled by the unrest in China.

A curfew was laid upon the island. Everyone had to be in their homes by some ridiculously early hour like six o clock. I climbed into our turquoise Volkswagon and drove round from Deepwater Bay to a look-out on the Peak. I was the only disobedient soul outside and as an army wife, I felt slightly guilty. I looked down to Victoria, the town centre. Nothing moved.

Trams sat abandoned on the sides of the roads, cars were left empty and parked. The streets were silent and empty. The throngs of shoppers, the hurrying workers, the hawkers and Hakka women in their rattan hats trimmed with black, the street vendors, the prostitutes and the students, the toddlers who lived and played on the pavements, the school children crouched on the side-walk doing their homework in the shelter of a sewing machine or street stall, the rick-shaw men, and the porters in white vests and black shorts and wooden clogs, the business men in grey suits, the camera-laden tourists – all had disappeared.

It was eerie and frightening in the same decade as films of nuclear war and lethal clouds of radio-active dust destroying all life, leaving cities full of dead but still standing. That was how Hongkong looked that night, silent and empty. The silence was almost more un-nerving than the emptiness.

The unrest went underground, and suddenly erupted one hot summer’s afternoon. Perhaps as karma for disobeying the curfew, I found myself in the middle of the next round of dissent. I was driving up Garden Road with the children to see Pat Hangen. She and her children lived on the Peak with her husband Welles, NBC Bureau chief, always away in Vietnam and who later disappeared forever in Cambodia.

I had only recently learned to drive, and uphill starts were still a challenge, though there was only one junction where I might be called upon to use them, I thought. But, as I passed the Helena May Hostel for Young Women, I came on a mass of white-clothed Chinese youths, all shouting and waving Mao’s Little Red Books in the air.

I slowed down, and another group converged from another direction. I tried to edge out of the crowd, but more and more columns kept coming from all directions. I slowed right down to walking pace, and realised I was in the middle of a hostile, fanatical mob, and if I made one mistake, like running back or edging forward too quickly, it would be more than dangerous for me and the two now very silent toddlers in the back.

I wound all the windows up so that air came in through only a crack at the top, and the heat became stifling. Sweat ran down my face and spine in rivers, soaking my thin cotton dress. The children’s hair was plastered to their heads with sweat and I could smell the musty smell of their damp scalps, and something else – our fear.

There were thousands and thousands of young men shouting in unison and waving their red books in the air. As they moved at slow walking pace, I was obliged to shift the car at the same speed, crunching the hand brake on and off, as we slowly revved up the steep incline. Then, suddenly, I could see where it all ended. They were all advancing on the Governor’s Residence off to our right. Thankfully I left the Governor to it, and made our way to Pat, shaking all over from the tension.

And after that, things took on another momentum, with bombs exploding all over the place, and many areas placed out of bounds to Europeans. The Bank of China in the middle of the city began a propaganda war of noise, blaring out raucous, Chinese communist marching songs and party chants. The deafening noise was augmented by the childish response of the authorities, who used the tower of the Hilton Hotel across the road from the bank, to play decadent, western rock and roll to drown out the Chinese music.

It seemed to go on all summer. What also went on all summer, was the Chinese water torture. Hongkong and the New Territories relied on water supplies from China, and some years, flexing her muscles, and also to annoy, China restricted the water. This revolutionary year was no different and for the four long hot months of sweltering summer, we were severely rationed in order to survive.

There was no water for three days out of four. On the fourth day, water was piped for four hours in the evening, during which time we had the opportunity to fill baths, buckets and every available jug, bottle and kettle with water to last for the next four days. We all also seized the opportunity to shower or bath during this precious four hours.

Unfortunately, our flat was at the top of a twelve-storey building, and the pressure didn’t build up until the water had been on for two hours, so we only had the precious stuff for two hours every four days.

And we were the lucky ones. The Chinese living down in Wanchai and among slums built on the sides of hills from boxes and cardboard, queued for several hundred yards by the intermittent taps. They had to manage with buckets and containers small enough to carry back to their dwelling places. These were the people who had fled China after the Communist takeover and it was their teenage children who were now demonstrating in Hong Kong, mimicking the excesses of the Red Guards under Mao.

The much-maligned Colonial rule in Hong Kong prevented the same victimisation and destruction here. Yet at the same time that these rebellious Hong Kong teenagers were enjoying their Maoist demonstrations, dissidents were risking their lives to escape from China, in the continual exodus which had never ceased since the Nationalists under Mao Tse Tung had driven out the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai Check back in 1949. In 1949 alone, the population of Hong Kong had doubled.

Since then, the borders had been closed, and now most people slipped across the border in darkness or swam across, and were picked up in the New Territories. These refugees arrived undernourished and dressed in patched rags, testimony to the poverty that reigned in China under Mao. The society they now joined was a heartless one. Many once penniless Chinese had made good in the years since they too had arrived destitute.

They had obliterated their peasant past and educated their children at western schools and universities, penetrating established, rich society. Others had arrived from places like Shanghai with all their riches and built lordly homes on the upper slopes of the great rock which meant safety to them all. But they were indifferent to the plight of the newest arrivals. There were no charitable organisations to help them or the struggling poor. Philanthropy was not a characteristic of Hong Kong society.

A hundred and fifty years before, in 1812, the city of London with a population of a million, had free hospitals, alms houses, dispensaries and nearly three hundred free schools educating, feeding and clothing nearly twenty thousand children. Arthur Bryant, the historian who gathered these facts, wrote that ‘London could claim her real palaces were hospitals. Wren’s Greenwich and Chelsea; Gibb’s St Bartholomew’s with its Hogarth staircase; St Thomas’s with its four great quadrangles treating and discharging 11,000 patients a year; the new “Bethlem” and St Luke’s for the insane, with their enormous classical facades, were buildings that a king might have been proud to inhabit.”’

By contrast there were only two hospitals provided by the government here in Hong Kong for three and a half million people – huge rabbit warrens – not palaces. There were no facilities for the handicapped or insane at all. In a population of four million, there would have been a minimum of 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped, judging by the normal ratio of such figures per head of population. No-one knew where they were, though there were stories of deranged figures chained to verandas.

There were stories of goodness too. Two English teachers received a divine message to go to Hong Kong where a task lay before them. Obediently they packed up and came. Once in the colony, they had no idea what the task might be. They ‘waited on the Lord,’ and seemed to feel they should buy an old house in the New Territories. This they did, still having no idea why.

After a few weeks, they found a baby girl on the doorstep one morning. They took her in. And then the unwanted babies kept coming. They knew their task now, but they had no money. So they prayed for what they needed. And whenever they needed money or assistance, they prayed and it arrived. They called this place the Home of Loving Faithfulness.

The Dean of Hong Kong Cathedral and his wife were very pleased to have a new house built for them among the old trees just behind the Cathedral. It was handy, central, and of course, unlike most vicarages, new and efficient. In order to build this house, a destitute old lady who squatted beneath the trees, and scavenged enough food to cook small meals on a tiny stove, had had to be moved on.

But she always came back. The dean, a good man, and his wife, equally good, then organised a real home in a new block for the old lady, and there she was taken. By the following week she had found her way back, squatting where she had always squatted, which was now the veranda of the brand-new house. There she stayed, her acrid cooking smells drifting through the windows into the house. This was her home, so we have no right to force her to leave, said these worthy representatives of a sometimes-maligned church. So she stayed.

To be continued

Food for threadbare gourmets

I love the idea of thrifty ways to avoid wasting food. I found a recipe the other day in one of my scrapbooks for using up the remains of salad leaves to make a good pesto. Whatever the leaves, and someone else tells me she’s used radish leaves – put them in a blender with olive oil, garlic, and grated walnuts, salt and pepper. Whizz enough to make a textured mix – I use it over pasta, or with poached salmon. Amounts of olive oil etc depend on how much wilting lettuce you have in the fridge !!! I grate the nuts in my parmesan cheese grater.

Food for thought

This poem by Wendell Berry soothes my soul and brings me peace:

I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

29 Comments

Filed under army, colonial life, cookery/recipes, family, history, life/style, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, uncategorised, Uncategorized

Tagged as food, Hong Kong, life, Mao Tse Tung, Red Guards, Royal Academy, Trooping the Colour, Wendell Berry

May 4, 2018 · 10:59 am

The end of the golden weather

A life – another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

So we sailed away from the golden weather and un-ending sun-shine, back to a world that had changed since we had sailed east three years before. The journey reflected this. We couldn’t leave the ship at beautiful Colombo, there were strikes on the docks, and it was deemed unsafe for us to land. At Aden we were allowed to land but not to roam the town. We were whisked straight up to the RAF Officers club where we enjoyed a swim in the blazing heat and sun.

Sailing through the desert on the Suez Canal in late February meant scarlet dawns and blazing sunsets seen across the desert sands in sparkling clear air. These were the last moments of golden weather and beauty. At a cold rainy Port Said the presence of two menacing uniformed Egyptian guards at the top of the gangway deterred us all from leaving the boat…we were warned there was no guarantee we would get our passports back or be able to re-board. This was just a few months before the nationalisation by ‘The Dancing Major, ‘as President Nasser was known then. I realised then that Pax Brittanica had passed.

We landed in a cold misty dawn amid the grim grey docks of Liverpool, and by the time we reached London on the boat train from the docks, I was so cold and so depressed that England seemed very unwelcoming. I still had some months to go before taking my last A levels, so I was enrolled in the University Entrance Department of the Regent Street Polytechnic, my scholarship still opening doors for me.

My first day there felt so bleak and intimidating, that by lunch-time I had fled, and walking blindly down Park Lane, head down dodging the icy rain, sought refuge in Apsley House, The Iron Duke Wellington’s London pad where it was warm. When it was time to go back home, I caught the tube, and didn’t divulge where I’d spent the time. Days passed, the only heating in the whole building seemed to be the miniscule coal fire in the common room, which I could never get near.

I shivered uncontrollably with cold, prompting one student who arrived every day in a chauffeur driven Daimler to chide me kindly and ask why I didn’t wear warmer clothes. I was wearing all I had – a short-sleeved white muslin blouse, thin white cardigan and grey flannel skirt donated by my step-grandmother with whom we were staying. I was already at my new educational establishment when the rest of the family had taken themselves off to Simpsons in Piccadilly to get kitted out with warm clothes.

I felt totally intimidated by my fellow students – including the sophisticated girl delivered every day in the Daimler. I noticed a beautiful Indian youth from a princely family, a woman in her thirties who attended classes as a way of passing the time instead of working, an exquisitely mannered and groomed Jewish girl I became friendly with, some arrogant young chaps from Eton, a blonde elegant girl famous for being a general’s daughter, and a plain young man, the inheritor of a shoe – making empire who took me out in his green MG until I couldn’t bear being with him just for the sake of the MG.

There were others too, like the charming Polish girl who told me of starving in the ruins of bombed out Berlin as they fled west from Poland to escape the Soviet soldiers; and another Polish girl -this one fair-haired, blue eyed, and Jewish -who had endured unspeakable things.

These hard-up refugee girls somehow knew their way around a sort of student underground, knowing where to buy good second- hand clothes before the term vintage had been invented, getting their hair beautifully styled by trainee hairdressers needing models, having their teeth done by trainee dentists needing someone to practise on and getting free tickets to concerts and student activities.

Eventually I became part of a foursome who stuck together, Vera, a Hungarian Jewish refugee with a cloud of fair curls, blue eyes, and an anxious manner, Joanna, a calm gentle girl who lived in Hampstead, and Winifred, slim, elegant and as naïve as me. Joanna had been at school with Jackie Collins, before the budding actress had been expelled at fifteen and Joanna regaled us with stories of both Jackie and her older sister, Joan Collins. My history teacher was Mary Quant’s father, while one of the rich girls was the daughter of the man at the head of the cool new TV station, ITV.

All these hints of a larger world made us feel as though we lived on the fringes of glamour and excitement. Bill Haley’s Rock around the Clock shocked our elders, when teenagers – a term just invented – began dancing in the cinema aisles to this song. We would gather to dance this new rage of rock and roll too, at the central hall in the Regent Street Headquarters, though I was still too shy to dance and watched from a balcony with Winifred.

When we broke up for the Easter holidays, I caught the tube to Acton, where I had heard there were lots of factories. I walked down a long road lined with them and seeing a sign saying ‘vacancies’ went in and signed on. When I got back to my step-grandmother’s where we were staying, every one reacted as though I had said I was joining a brothel, but I ignored the disapproval and went anyway.

I lasted the week until Easter, packing thousands of yellow plastic lemons that would hold lemon juice. I became so bored that I ended up scribbling verses from Omar Khayyam inside the cardboard boxes, in the hope that someone, somewhere, would read them… sort of message in a bottle sent from a factory…

With the five pounds so hardly earned I took myself off to Marks and Spensers and bought a blue and white pinstriped blouse, a grey flannel pleated skirt and a cardigan. Back at Regent Street, I ended up making other good friends as well as my close foursome, and having lots of fun, skipping classes to see Ingmar Bergman’s incomprehensible ‘The Seventh Seal’, an exquisite Russian version of Twelfth Night, great lover Rudolf Valentino in The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and lots of goodies at the Baker Street Classic. The wondrous Wallace Collection was just around the corner, and museums and art galleries all within walking distance.

One day Joanna said her parents were away, and invited the four of us to their rambling house in Hampstead to try out a oujia board. With great enthusiasm and much ignorance, the four of us gathered around a table, and wrote the letters of the alphabet on separate squares of paper which we arranged in a circle. In the centre we placed a glass. We then each put a finger on the glass and sat in silence.

When the glass began to move, we each laughingly accused one another of pushing it with our finger, but then it seemed to gather a momentum all its own. In silent disbelief we watched it glide from letter to letter, and then hurried to write down each letter so we could work out the words and the sentences. As the séance progressed we all became more and more un-easy. The messages we were getting seemed rather malevolent, telling us that people we knew were untrustworthy, another was entangled with the wrong person, and other personal details.

Feeling we were playing with danger we broke off the session, made ourselves some coffee and dispersed across London to our various homes. I was so frightened by what felt like a mischievous and unpredictable energy that I didn’t dare switch off the light in my bedroom back at my step-grandmother’s flat that night. Nor did I switch it off for some weeks until the memory of the nastiness had faded.

As for my education – I never caught up with my Latin – though I enjoyed the lessons, as the Anglican church in North Audley Street was just through the classroom wall, and the organist was always either rehearsing or playing for a wedding – mostly the wonderful Trumpet Voluntary – a small compensation for my struggles with the subjunctive and ‘The Aeniad’.

My lovely history tutor, Mr Quant – didn’t teach my history period. I begged him to just let me swot myself and recommend some reading as I couldn’t face starting somewhere else, and we hobbled towards the finishing line together, and somehow I passed. Thus ended my schooldays, but not my education.

I now joined my parents in Monmouthshire, where they were living in a house belonging to friends who were overseas. Here I walked in a field golden with buttercups, edged with high hawthorn hedges. Here I felt again the sweetness and gentleness and ancientness of the English countryside that I had hungered for in the tropical heat when the only flowers apart from frangipani, were yellow cannas, purple bougainvillea and the scarlet flame tree.

I was eighteen and this was how I had remembered the scenes of my childhood… shades of Sir Walter Scott’s:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land…

We were living in a house lent to us by friends, far out in green hills and deep valleys. The name of the house revealed that it was built on the site of an Iron Age fort. Offa’s Dyke was reputed to end in our garden, just above a huge S-bend in the River Wye. Offa lived from 757 to 796 and invented the penny. His dyke separated Mercia from Wales and stretched for ninety-eight miles from north to south. Whatever the truth of the rumour, behind the un-used stables there was a large mound stretching into the back garden from the fields and woods beyond and covered in hazel and hawthorn.

The house was part Victorian and part Georgian, with a charming regency style wrought iron porch stretching along the garden side of the house. It looked over a lawn, where two ancient lime trees hummed with bees in summer, and which seemed like silent sentinels in the wintry mist which hovered among their thick tangle of branches in winter. Beyond the lawn was a ha-ha, but not deep enough to keep out the piebald pony who led a small herd of young steers through the gate-posts, up the drive, avoiding the ha-ha and across the lawn while every-one else was at church parade one Sunday morning.

By the time I’d rushed downstairs to shoo them away, they had meandered on into the little sheltered garden with a sundial, and pushed their way through the scraggy hedge which gave onto a lane, leaving only their deep hoof-prints.

The lane led down to a farm house, but before I got there, I would branch off through the woods with my puppy and take the winding path which meandered down to the river. Just below the tree-line, and in the grass which bordered the riverside was the ruin of the tiny sixth century church of St James, only its outer walls still standing, empty windows framing the sky, ivy climbing part of the grey stone walls, and tangled brambles guarding the foundations. In spring the woods were filled with bluebells and windflowers.

The house was faded and gentle, dreaming in the silence of the country-side, no neighbours within sight. My bedroom had pretty flowered wallpaper, pale green painted thirties furniture and long windows looking over the garden. It had a soft sweet atmosphere. The other place that I loved, and where I spent solitary afternoons engrossed in a book was the so-called ballroom. Not a grand one, its claim to fame being the ceiling which had been copied from some famous library in a country house.

Apart from the large and somewhat threadbare faded old carpet on the polished floor, the only other furniture in the room was a big drab-green brocade-covered Knole sofa, and a large gilt mirror hanging over the carved fireplace. That was all I needed. On sunny days I sat on the cushioned window seat, on other days I curled up on the sofa. When I shut the door the silence and the solitude were absolute.

So I dreamed around the place, head in the clouds or in a book, picking flowers, adopting two wild kittens as well as the puppy, my dreaminess driving my parents mad. I didn’t know anyone, but once a boy nearby invited me to a hunt ball at Tintern, and the rather erudite and elegant bachelor who lived on the corner further down, in a house filled with books and good furniture invited us to a pre-ball party. I thought he was much more interesting than my escort, and found the ball very dull, spoiled with too many in Malaya.

It was around now that both the Suez crisis blew up, and the Hungarian revolution was crushed by Soviet tanks. The Suez crisis didn’t bother me much… there had always been tanks and guns rumbling somewhere throughout my life, though this felt nearer, having so recently traversed that contested strip of territory. It seemed to get tangled up in the drama of the Hungarian tragedy. I cried my heart out when I heard on the radio the last words that came out of Budapest from Radio Rakoczi on October 23:

“This is Hungary calling! The last remaining station! … For the sake of God and freedom, help Hungary.” Then a horrifying silence. It felt unbearable that the west that I was part of, wouldn’t lift a finger to help the Hungarians.

I mooned around, not sure what to do with my life. I wanted to go to university but didn’t know how to go about it, and also shrank from more difficult years of trying to mask my scanty wardrobe and lack of funds. I’d never been able to save as my stepmother used to ask me if I had any money when she sent me shopping, and so my Christmas and birthday postal orders had dwindled away on potatoes and bacon and sausages.

I tried to repeat my factory stint by signing up to work in a local brush factory, and also tried to apply for a job interview at the local hotel for a receptionist. Both these schemes were vetoed by my father, who said he didn’t want to see his daughter behind the hotel desk when he fetched up there for a drink with his friends. So I continued to drift, until the day my father came home and said he’d made an appointment for me with the recruiting officer in Cardiff.

Which was how I ended up joining the army. I left home in the dark at six thirty, one cold January morning. My parents put me on the bus to the station with my suitcase, gave me three pounds, and I left my childhood behind.

( the picture is St James Church with acknowledgements to Mercurius Politicus)

To be continued

Food for threadbare gourmets

To cheer up lunch, which was just bread and cheese and chutney, I decided to knock up a courgette and cheese loaf to make life more interesting!

So easy… two cups of SR flour, a cup of grated cheese, a cup of grated courgette, quarter of a cup of oil, an egg, salt, a teaspoon of mild curry powder and a cup and a half – or more if needed – of milk. Just mix them altogether, and tip into a greased loaf tin. Cook for forty minutes or so in a hot oven, and there you have it… serve warm or cold, it’s just as moist the second day, and particularly delicious with soft blue cream cheese. I’ve also served it with cold meats…

Food for thought

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self development. Revelation of the Mystery by Sufi master Al-Hujwiri

18 Comments

Filed under army, beauty, birds, colonial life, cookery/recipes, culture, family, films, gardens, history, uncategorised, Uncategorized

Tagged as beauty, books, food, history, Joan Collins, London, Offa's Dyke, Regent street polytechnic, suez canal, Tintern Abbey

Category Archives: colonial life

The Cancel Culture

Letter to a Protesting Grandson in London

A Good Man Does Something

Another Bright Beautiful Spirit

Land of the long white cloud

Diamonds and dysentery

World on Fire

Life and loss, love and death

Sunset over Hong Kong

The end of the golden weather

Follow Blog via Email

Recent Posts

Archives

Meta

Category Archives: colonial life

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Follow Blog via Email

Recent Posts

Archives

Meta