It was to this time in his life that my father dated his addiction to reading. There used somewhere to be a photo of him with his leg in a brace, sitting in the shade of an African patio reading Jock of the Bushveld. The photo captured a whole set of feelings about Dad’s childhood: the isolation, pain, privilege, the colonial comfort and weirdness and solitude, the sheer amount of his life he spent inside his own head. (You may think that most people live inside their own heads, but plenty of them don’t. In fact, if you do think that, you’re almost certainly one of the minority whose primary life is internal.) Jock of the Bushveld, a once popular but profoundly grim children’s book about an über-faithful South African dog, was notable to me because it was the only book my grandmother gave me. I accepted it with great solemnity, then went off to check the last chapter and the ending. At the age of ten I had a rule about not reading any story about an animal in which the animal dies at the end. Jock of the Bushveld looked from the cover to be that kind of book – as indeed it was. I didn’t, and haven’t, read it.
Once Jack had his shiny new PhD, he rejoined Lannie and Bill in Gatooma. Back in Rhodesia he quickly ‘realised’ – although this might have been part of the plan all along – that his adopted home town was too small and too remote to have the rich clientele base he now needed. In Chicago he had learned, as he put it, ‘millionaire’s dentistry’. But he lived in a place without rich clients. So, with the taste for travel and migration he had acquired, he went in search of a place that did have millionaires and booked a cruise around South-East Asia. Even at the distance of all these years, presented with only the bare facts, you can feel his itchy restlessness, the unrelenting way he was driven by hunger for something he called ‘freedom’. The idea was that the family would spend some time together – Jack had now been away for nearly three years – and tour the sights of Ceylon, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, perhaps even Australia. At the same time, Jack’s plan was to find a place with a convenient gap in the market for an ambitious high-class dentist. He found it when the ship docked in Hong Kong. A few days wandering around and asking questions established that the colony was temporarily without a European dentist at his level. Jack made enquiries, made a decision, and informed his family that they would now be living in Hong Kong.
Jack Lanchester’s practice thrived in Hong Kong. In those days the colony was a deeply stuffy, socially rigid, hierarchical place; even by the standards of the British Empire at the time, it was a backwater. W. H. Auden passed through on a war-tourist visit to China with Christopher Isherwood in 1938 and wrote a poem about it; he said that Hong Kong was ‘a worthy temple to the Comic Muse’. Not one of his best, but it shows how inherently trivial, and how profoundly provincial, the colony seemed to a super-intelligent cosmopolitan visitor in the 1930s. When I was younger I used to resent that poem, thinking it showed a lapse in judgement by Auden to see the colony as inherently comic. Did that mean its several hundred thousand Chinese residents were comic too? Or simply invisible? Now I think Auden’s blindness to the Chinese is just a description of how that world seemed to the overwhelming majority of its European inhabitants, and as for being comic, well, he didn’t have a crystal ball. I once overheard a girl at a party in the early 1990s who had just come back from a year in Hong Kong. ‘What’s the proportion of Chinese and Europeans?’ she was asked. ‘About fifty-fifty,’ she cheerily said. Real figure: 98 per cent Chinese.
The chasm between the British and the Chinese in the 1930s was wide: racism was pervasive and explicit. The events that were to transform the colony into a world city – the Chinese civil war, World War Two, the Communist victory in China, the economic expansion of the territories as a trading entrepôt, the 1997 handover – were all a long way off. The British by and large were there to make money, with a view to going home, or moving on, after a few years. Jack’s plan fitted this template to perfection: his goal was to go back to South Africa after he made his pile. He had no intention of returning to England, as far as I can tell, ever again. The only time he left the territory in the 1930s was to go on a holiday to South Africa. He rapidly built up a good-sized practice, and began to earn proper money. Jack and Lannie rented a cottage on Lantao, the big island, then largely uninhabited and relatively wild, a few miles from Hong Kong; they went there for weekends and, when Jack could be persuaded to take them, holidays. Hong Kong, famous for being urban, in those days also had some genuine countryside on the outlying islands and in the New Territories, and all three of the family loved the mountains and the beaches and the walking. Thirty years later, when Lannie bought a cottage in East Looe in Cornwall, she was to name it Lantao, after the place where she had been happiest.
Bill in his Hong Kong school uniform
The move to Hong Kong was a good idea, and a lucky break, of the kind in which you make your own luck. But like many a piece of good luck, it turned out to be a piece of bad luck. As the 1930s went on it became clear that war was imminent in the Far East, just as it was in Europe. This was not the civil war in China, which was obviously going to be won by the Nationalists just as soon as the Communists gave up their reluctance to admit that they were beaten – it was the war that would be caused by the expansionist, imperialist ambitions of Japan. You would have had to be unusually optimistic to think that this wouldn’t engulf Hong Kong, and my grandfather was no fool. By the summer of 1940, it was clear what was likely to happen and – in parallel with the evacuation taking place in Great Britain, up to and during the Battle of Britain – women and children were evacuated from the colony in July 1940.
Bill and Lannie were slated to leave Hong Kong. My grandfather was marked to stay. It was virtually impossible for men to leave; and Jack had now taken on a job as the official government dentist. I have no evidentiary basis for suggesting this, but part of me thinks that he might have worked out that the likeliest thing to happen was for Hong Kong to fall to the Japanese, and for him to end up in civilian internment; and the problem with that, from the financial point of view – which was how he always took his foremost look at things – was that he would not be able to earn any money while he was interned. The combination of internment and private practice would ruin him. If he was in government employment, however, he would collect back pay for his years in the clink after he was released, and while he would be nowhere near rich, he would be a long way ahead, in cash terms, of where he would have otherwise been. (Not to mention the important reduction in expenditure while interned … no, I’m pretty sure not even Jack would have considered that a bonus.) It may just be that, with a war coming, he thought that steady government employment was a better bet than private practice. This is speculation. I do know that the imminence of war caused him to turn down what would have been the biggest and most astute purchase of his life. Jack rented offices in a building at 32 Nathan Road, then and now the main commercial artery in Kowloon, just across the harbour from Hong Kong Island. (Kowloon, then as now, was as lively as Hong Kong Island, but less posh. The wife of the Governor gave lasting amusement and offence in the 1930s with a speech that referred to ‘the ladies of Hong Kong and the women of Kowloon’. Lannie would quote this about once a month for the rest of her life.)
At some point during 1940 the landlord of Jack’s dental office approached him and offered to sell him the freehold of the entire building.† The landlord was worried about the war, and so was Jack; the amount in question would have been a serious stretch; and there was also the question of what would happen to Hong Kong after the coming war – whether it would remain a colony, or a British colony. President Roosevelt was known to be no fan of the British Empire or the colonial presence in Hong Kong, and the smart money would have been on a handover to China sooner rather than later – in which case, given that China was in a civil war and at war with Japan, what odds would you get on its acknowledging colonial-era property deals? Jack thought it over and turned the deal down. Oy veh. Nathan Road is now some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. If he had done that d
eal, I would be, instead of writing these words in longhand on an index card in south London, sitting on my own tropical island, contemplating a trust fund the size of Andorra’s GDP. Too bad. Actually, though I can joke about it (as a fat tear plops down on to the page and smudges my handwriting), I think Jack in later years saw this chance as the one that got away – the big break that he had been offered, the ticket to ease and riches and to final, definitive independence, which he had let go.
So Jack the government dentist had to stay. Bill, equally, was better off if he left. He liked school well enough – he was at the newly built Central British School in Kowloon and reliably came at or near the head of his class in everything. That’s about the only thing you can tell from his school reports, which are different from their modern equivalents. They are much terser, and about the only thing they ever say is ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’, except in drawing where Bill went from ‘weak’ (40 per cent) to ‘poor’ (35 per cent) to ‘poor but improved’ (53 per cent) to ‘tries but is not very good’ (50 per cent). Hard to imagine a much worse review than that. Five years of school reports don’t reveal a single thing about what my father was like – they give you absolutely no idea of his character or interests. One thing that is clear from the reports, though, is that Bill’s health had greatly improved. He had hardly any days off school, according to his reports – nine days off in his first three years, and none at all in his last two. Pretty good going, and it fits with something he told me in later life, that he’d never missed a single day of work through illness, until he had a heart attack in his late forties. That’s not unusual for men, who do sometimes sail through life without any illness until they suddenly drop dead. But his parents were worried, and with reason, because if the Japanese were to come, internment was the likeliest outcome, and internment would destroy the health of more robust people than Bill. Also, the general climate in Hong Kong, hot and humid and frankly bad for most of the year, suited him less than the dry heat of Africa. Lannie had come down with malaria in 1936, and was suffering attacks which were to recur every couple of years for the rest of her life. That brought home the fact that Hong Kong wasn’t the healthiest place in the world. Evacuating Bill was the right thing to do.
Bill on horseback, during a holiday trip to French Indo-China
So Jack didn’t really have a choice over staying, and for Bill to leave was self-evidently the correct choice. It was clear that Jack would stay and Bill would go. That left open the decision about what Lannie should do. She had the choice of staying with her husband or leaving with her son; to put it slightly differently, she had the choice of which of them to abandon. To me, today, it seems obvious that she should have left with Billy; but it was less clear at the time. Lannie had a nursing qualification, and it was plain to everyone that in the event of fighting, nurses would be needed. So although the order was for a general evacuation of all women, she had specific essential skills and it could be seen as her patriotic duty to stay. If Bill left, he would be going to boarding school, so he would be surrounded by company at all times – indeed, in the normal course of things it wasn’t unknown for a child to be sent away to boarding school and not to see his parents for a year or more – whereas Jack would be isolated and on his own in hostile territory. Bill was going to safety, and Jack was going into danger, so it was her dutyto stay with Jack. It was a terrible choice, a decision between abandonments.
Bill in summer 1940
Lannie in summer 1940
Duty is one of those words that has more or less vanished from our culture. It – the word, and perhaps the thing as well – exists only in specific ghettos like the armed services. We prefer often to use the word ‘care’ and ‘carer’ for people who would once have thought that what they were doing – in, say, looking after incapacitated relatives – was a duty. Personally I find that the notion of duty makes some burdens easier to bear. To call the act of changing someone’s soiled underclothing a work of caring can make you feel as if you should be doing it because you want to do it, whereas the idea that you’re doing it because it’s your duty makes it more impersonal and therefore – to my mind anyway – a lighter burden. It leaves you free to dislike what you are doing while still feeling that you are doing the right thing in doing it.
There was, however, another reason why Lannie wanted to stay. To understand it you first have to know something about what Lannie was like. She was a much lighter spirit than Jack, which isn’t to say that she was less tough, because she was one of the toughest, most indomitable people I have known. But she was lively, and liked company, and liked a laugh and a party; she was sociable and made friends easily, and kept them too; she was thin and short and quick, birdlike in her movements, even when I knew her at the end of her life. She had, to use the period phrase, plenty of ‘attack’; she could be flirty; she was the kind of teacher whose pupils want to stay in touch with her. She had a group of ‘girls’ who used to visit her en bloc when later in life she came to visit in Hong Kong, in a round of teas and lunches and, once or twice, elaborate, spectacular multi-course dinners that were my first experience of full-on, high-level Cantonese cooking. (They were a bit of an ordeal, actually – I was too young to get the point.) The idea of their being ‘girls’ was to me as a child too bizarre to be entertaining, since they were Chinese women in their fifties and older, all formidable, and all married to rich and powerful men. Lannie used to say that she knew teachers who behaved towards their pupils in strict accordance with how important they thought the pupils – read ‘their parents’ – were. She said it made her laugh, because these teachers usually ignored or dismissed the very same poor, ambitious Chinese girls who tended to marry the kind of men who went on to be powerful, important, and – crucial in a Hong Kong context – rich. At the dinners the men tended to be very well dressed and smiling but also rather quiet and mousy – domestically, at least, the women ran things. They were visibly and movingly fond of Lannie.
Am-dram at its finest: Lannie (third from the left) in the ‘Gay Gatoomas’
In some ways the Lanchesters’ marriage was a mismatch. Jack was increasingly obsessed with money, brooding over his income and, as time went on, more and more on his investments. Lannie wanted to have a life. Her great hobby – it’s even mentioned in Jack’s obituaries – was amateur dramatics. The am-dram was in part her escape from Jack into company, variety, laughter, and the chance to pretend to be somebody else. This might seem a recipe for marital difficulties; perhaps that’s sanctimonious. But Lannie met someone she liked in her am-dram group, and began to have an affair. The man’s name was Leslie Holmes; he was a young barrister and a part-time lieutenant in the Royal Volunteer Hong Kong Regiment, who was certain to be involved in the fighting when the Japanese came. She was happy, she was guilt-stricken; she was ecstatic, she was delirious with misery. It was the usual story.
How Jack found out about the affair I don’t know; I think Lannie probably told him. Twelve-year-old Billy found out because one weekend on Lantao, when his parents thought he was asleep, they started arguing about whether or not to get a divorce. Their raised voices woke him, he overheard the conversation, and began to cry. They heard him, went into his room, and told him that they wouldn’t get divorced, it was just a silly grown-up argument. I know all this because Lannie told my mother, and my mother told me. The affair is, I think, the other reason why Lannie stayed in Hong Kong. The psychology of the decision was complicated: the fact that she had already once betrayed her husband may have made it harder for her to leave him. She also didn’t want to leave Holmes, with whom she was still in love. It was a question of leaving behind not one man she loved, to war and imprisonment, but two; and it was that fact that tipped the scale and made her decide to stay. It also made the guilt about her decision to abandon her son all the more intense.
Family Romance Page 15