POST-COLONIAL BOY
1
I am the happy ending. That is a big part of what is strange for me about the story of my mother’s early life. I am the symbol of her lucky escape: the thing that prevented her life from being a cautionary tale about an ‘ex-nun’. I am the reason everything turned out all right. Except of course nobody’s life feels like the happy ending to somebody else’s. We have our own lives to lead, and our own messes and unhappinesses to make, and our own happinesses too. The convention in comedy whereby a wedding signals a happy ending is no more than that, a convention; if you haven’t realised that by the time you’re an adult you’re in for some surprises. So I am not the happy ending to my mother’s story. Nor was my mother’s story ended when I was born. That’s the first thing to say.
Another warning. As I turn from the part of the story I know through research and other people’s recollections and what other people have told me (or didn’t tell me) to the part I know firsthand, I have to record my sudden feeling of how complicated it is to speak about deeds and thoughts and feelings and motives. We talk so blithely when we talk about other people, of somebody doing X because of Y – she went to university because she wanted to get a good job, she was attracted to him because of his looks, they moved to the city to look for work. When we think about our own motives, though, it becomes dramatically more difficult to say anything completely accurate about why we have done what we have. I would struggle to give a full account of why I am doing what I am doing at this very instant, sitting here at my desk writing this book. I know that I feel I have to do it, but beyond that I’m in a sense speculating – and that’s speculating about myself, and about what I’m doing right now. Ask me why I did what I did a year ago and my answer would in all honesty be equally vague, though the false perception of hindsight might make me say something much more confident and decisive-sounding. The only honest answer would be some blend close enough to a simple I don’t know. So how can I know why people do what they do, and why my mother in particular did what she did? The English common law embraces a maxim once laid down by a judge about the question of motive: the state of a man’s mind is as much a fact as the state of his digestion. That is a principle which any legal system must embrace, in order to determine whether my shove on your shoulder (the one that caused you to slip and crack your head and suffer irreversible brain damage and die) was a slightly too rough gesture or a successful attempt at homicide. The state of intent, not the outcome, is usually the gauge of a crime. It’s fair enough that courts should take such a robust view of motive – but at the same time this is a falsehood, a convenient fiction. The state of a man’s mind, most of the time, is not a fact. It is not knowable, not even to the man himself, not in any of the most important ways. After having spoken so confidently about other people’s motives and intentions, and before going on to talk about my own, I wanted to record this double caveat: that our motives aren’t knowable, and our selves are not fixed. And now, since you can’t actually write or think or tell stories about yourself without ignoring these truths, back I go to writing as if neither of those propositions was the case.
2
By the time I was three years old I’d lived at ten different addresses in six different countries. The bank was a good employer in some respects (pay, security) and a merciless one in others. When it came to posting a small family with a young child around different bits of the Far East, the company showed no pity. Most of the time I spent in Hamburg I spent inside my mother’s womb, because we left when I was six weeks old. Our address in the city was – I can hear my mother saying the words – ‘Sehrigstrasse acht und dreissig’, 38 Sehrigstrasse. The flat was a tram-ride or lengthy walk from my father’s work. Just downstairs was a bar, the Cosmo Club, which had proved especially handy during Bill’s bachelor days, since it served good food, especially a Holstein schnitzel famous for being so big that nobody had ever finished it. My mother always told me that if I was ever truly, desperately hungry, and in Germany, the thing to order was a Holstein schnitzel.
My parents were happy in Hamburg. Bill would have liked to wait before Julie got pregnant, but she had a different agenda, to have a baby as quickly as possible; she was pregnant at the time of the wedding. This means that they kept the date of the wedding anniversary a secret that was never spoken. I learned it by looking at their marriage certificate. In Hamburg my parents had only two sources of worry – a low, indeed worryingly low, number for people who depended on worry. One was the fact that Bill was likely to be posted back out to the Far East at fairly short notice. The Hamburg job was specifically for a single man. That was no big deal; Bill preferred the Far East, where he had been brought up, and his main reason for wanting to be in Europe had been to meet English girlfriends. Now he had an Irish wife, so that wasn’t an issue. Still, the business of not knowing where you would be living in six months’ time, which had been a source of excitement all his adult life – and was no doubt rooted in his itinerant childhood – was more complicated now that he had a wife and son ‘in tow’. The other source of worry was my mother’s acute morning sickness. She had never felt anything like the all-day all-night all-terrain nausea I was giving her. There was a wonder drug on the market to treat morning sickness, and she went to her GP to ask for it. He said that he didn’t trust new wonder drugs, and that instead of taking this new thalidomide she would be better off drinking a half-litre of beer.
I was born in the Johannes Allee Clinik in Hamburg on 25 February 1962. The hospital avoided anaesthesia during childbirth on principle. When my mother told me that, it was in the context of explaining how awful childbirth was, and how God had had to make sex something truly remarkable in order to make up for the terrible suffering of bearing children. It can’t have helped that the doctor and midwife spoke no English and my mother almost no German; it was, as she wrote some years later, ‘quite an experience’. As I was lifted up in front of my mother, she reached forward and kissed me. The Lutheran nuns who staffed the hospital tutted and snatched me away and indicated that kissing a new-born baby was unhygienic.
Julie did not tell anybody that I had been born. ‘She told us of your arrival in May,’ Peggie remembers. In other words, my mother postdated my birth to nine months after the wedding.
She didn’t tell us your real birthday until years and years afterwards. When we got the telegram saying you had been born I went out and arranged for a huge bunch of flowers to be sent through Interflora. What they must have thought of the silly card I sent her … I suppose she must have told Bill. But that was quite unnecessary. Vincent and I had lived together – it was literally easier for us to share accommodation for a few months before we got married, and we just couldn’t see a reason why not. People talk about the 1950s and how puritanical everybody was. Not true. Lots and lots of people did it, it was hardly worth talking about. We wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised, if Julia had just told me. But she obviously thought she couldn’t. She certainly couldn’t have said it to my mother, or to other members of the family, but she could have said it to me.
Some of this reticence was to do with embarrassment: you might expect a woman who had spent fifteen years in convents to be a little shy about sex, and so Julie was. Having sex before marriage was, in her religion, a mortal sin – one that would cause her to be damned for eternity, unless and until she had it absolved. And it’s also true that some of the family would have been deeply shocked to know that I had been conceived outside marriage. But those are not the only reasons for this silence about my exact birth date. This was also the beginning of the process by which Julie put distance between herself and the people who might be in a position to give away her secret, starting with Peggie. This was something that was going to cause a great deal of pain.
Bill’s new posting was Hong Kong – deeply familiar to him, wholly exotic to Julie. He sold his proudest possession, the second-hand Porsche 911 that he had been driving for the last year. It was a relief to be se
lling it because he was moving, and not because he was now a father and family man; that would have been too much of an existential shock. At the very last moment of packing frenzy, Julie was jamming stuff into boxes as the removal men looked on, loaded the boxes up, and took them away. I was in the cot in the bedroom, crying. The removal men disapproved of the fact that my mother was dealing with them rather than with me. ‘Rabenmutter,’ they said, or rather muttered. ‘Raven mother’ – a lavishly rich insult, and one that outraged and amused Julie so much that she never forgot it.
Our first address in Hong Kong, where we arrived in May 1962, was in a small block of flats called Fung Shui, a building where the bank housed young families and where we were to live on three separate occasions over the next few years. I remember it from our subsequent times there, in the mid-1960s: a low, squat block of apartments with a wonderful view out over the harbour and across to Kowloon, on the all too infrequent days when it wasn’t misty. There were always families in Fung Shui, and therefore a rotating cast of children with whom to play, even though bank postings and manoeuvrings were such that people seemed never to stay around for very long, not even from a child’s perspective. There was a patch of grass – rough, broad-leaved tropical grass – that tended to wear thin under the abrading of tiny feet, and a kitchen garden, screened off from the road by bamboo and supervised by the Fah Wong (gardener), a fierce man who always worked in black pyjamas, like a member of the Vietcong. I was frightened of him, a fear based on guilt, because I used to raid his garden to dig up and eat the carrots. I was obsessed with these carrots: I used to stake out the garden and wait for times when the Fah Wong was absent, then go on stealing expeditions. I learned by trial and error which type of carrot top had a substantial carrot underneath, and which were only tiddlers, best left to grow bigger. They were incredibly sweet – that was why I liked them. I would pull them up, wipe them with my hand and then on my shorts, and eat them. I knew that this was both naughty and reckless, but I had such a craving for the Fah Wong’s carrots that I didn’t care. I was never caught, but the Fah Wong knew who it was, and gave me the death ray whenever we met, which was as seldom as I could manage.
Fung Shui
That first stay in Fung Shui lasted for eight months, and in the course of it we lived through the legendary Typhoon Wanda of 1962. Wanda was up there with the biggies, like the typhoon Lannie remembered from the 1930s. That one had taken a ship with all its anchors set and its engines going full throttle and dragged it backwards down the harbour at thirty knots. In Fung Shui, our flat had sixteen windows, and Wanda broke thirteen of them; she also sucked out one of the air conditioners. This was old typhoon lore: if you lost one window, the resulting change in air pressure would mean that you lost many more; if you lost an air conditioner it was always sucked out of the room, never blown in. The centre of that hurricane passed directly over Fung Shui. I experienced this myself first-hand twice more, with Typhoon Rose in 1971 and Hope in 1979. Typhoon Hope in particular terrified me, not least because my father, who enjoyed and wasn’t scared of typhoons, opened the french windows and went out into the garden to take the air (this at 2 a.m.). I begged him to come in, but he said it was safe and that we would hear the winds returning before it hit us. I’m assured by experts that this is utterly untrue. He walked around for a quarter of an hour or so and then came back in, and the winds came back a couple of minutes after that. He told me that the second half of a typhoon, after the eye passes, is not as bad as the first – and this too isn’t true, since the wind now faces in a different direction, which can make its effects as bad or worse. But his reassurances at the time helped me get back to sleep. For Wanda, he sat up enjoying it and mopping up, my mother sat up worrying, and I slept.
Photo taken by Julie during Typhoon Hope
Our next posting was to Rangoon. It was a promotion for Bill, who looked forward to it for that reason, but it was also something of a hardship post. The military junta that now ruled the country was cracking down on all forms of civil and economic liberty and was trying to sequester foreign assets. Bill predicted trouble, and was not disappointed. We arrived in Rangoon in January 1963. On 23 February the junta announced that it was nationalising the assets of foreign banks. We were put under house arrest; my father was allowed to leave home only to go to work and take part in winding up the bank’s business in Burma. My mother began to pack for the return to Hong Kong. Our camera was confiscated – it was the only place we ever lived of which I haven’t got a single photograph. That’s a pity for several reasons, one of them being that the bank house where we lived was near the family of the late General Kyi, assassinated hero of the war and the struggle for independence. His daughter Aung San Suu Kyi, who would have been eighteen while we were in Rangoon, is still living there to this day, under house arrest, kept alive by the international attention that brought her the Nobel Peace Prize.
Part of the culture of the time and place was that expatriates were expected to employ servants. It would have been bad form not to; it would have been denying a source of employment. In Rangoon, this reached an all-time high of exuberance: in addition to my amah – nanny – Ah Luk, who had begun working for us in Fung Shui, we had nine servants, none of whom worked directly for us but who were instead employed by the bank. There was a cook, a butler, a bearer, a maid, a cleaner, a driver, a gardener, and I can’t remember the others. I’m not sure what a bearer did, but it was a job in the old colonial East. As in a nineteenth-century Russian novel, basically the servants were in charge of the house. My mother’s principal complaint about Rangoon was not about the house arrest per se but about the resulting boredom, and especially about the rigid etiquette among the household staff. To have a cup of tea involved asking the butler, who informed the cook, who boiled the water and got the tea from the cupboard, whose sole key was in the possession of the bearer. This was a tradition of inviolable antiquity. It meant that on three afternoons a week – the days any one of the men had off – Julie couldn’t get a cup of tea, since one or another link in the chain of command was missing, and the division of labour was so rigid none of them was allowed to do any of the others’ work. Julie longed for Sundays, when the bearer lent her the key and the other two men were away and she could have a cup of tea whenever she liked. This was the big story about our months under house arrest under the military junta in Burma: the drama and difficulty of getting a cup of tea.
Julie had this taken for a visa while in Rangoon
We returned to Hong Kong. A few months later, in October, we sailed to England for a holiday. While we were there, the news came through that my father’s next posting was back to Calcutta. This fact – which took a while to come through clearly, after the usual rumours, prevarications, and counter-orders, all of which always reminded Bill of life in the army – gave him a heavy heart. He had not loved his previous time in Calcutta and was worried about my health, though not as worried as I would be, if I were moving there with a baby who was not yet two. (‘Children under four seem to do well here, despite all the illnesses they get’ – that’s from a letter Bill wrote at the time.) His trepidation, though, was nothing compared to the effect this news had on Julie, who was thrown into a full-on panic. She was desperately worried that she would meet somebody who had known her as Sister Eucharia. She had been a well-known figure in the not enormous Catholic world of India; she couldn’t get out of her mind the idea of some humiliating encounter, which exposed her as who she had been.
It is easy to be calm and reasonable about other people’s phobias. For Julie, at this time, the key idea was about exposure. She was terrified of being exposed. The question, I suppose, is: exposed as what? There are ways of answering that question. One is: exposed as a former nun. Or (a closely linked fear): exposed as someone who was lying about her age, and indeed lying about who she actually was. But to ask that question misses the point. It was as simple as this: she was terrified of being exposed. The various specifics of what might be exposed are less
important than the basic, primeval fear.
My sense is that if you fear exposure it is not so much a single piece of information you fear – a single definitive disclosure – but a terrible psychic disrobing, an irreversible baring of the self. (It is, I think, this which underlies the single most common phobia, that of speaking in public.) I’ve also noticed that this is something people desire as well as fear, especially in public life. Politicians, reckless risk-takers almost by definition since they risk being kicked out of office every few years, are prone to this, perhaps because they have to appear so staidly respectable. They are gamblers who spend their working lives pretending to be bishops or undertakers. The resulting tensions are often exposed in the escalating risks they take in their sexual and financial lives, amounting to what seems to be a need to be caught or exposed, in the way that Nixon and Clinton and Archer and Aitken all differently were.
My mother was not like that. She clung hard to her secrets. She was not acting out an ambivalence about secrecy and exposure, risk and concealment. She was the other type of person, one whose secrets feel deeply charged and dangerous and toxic. They manifest themselves as a no-go area, a place where strangers are not only never invited, but whose existence they are supposed never to guess. To people who knew her casually, Julie always seemed friendly, funny, forceful, vivid, intelligent, full of talk. There was little sense of the violent acts of suppression and erasure going on within. Julie wanted to be her own crypt. She did not drop hints, trail clues, leave evidence, solicit enquiries, or allow the existence of any paper trail; and in the huge archive of paperwork, mementoes, and old letters she left behind, there is not a single scrap that gives away her real name or date of birth or what she did during the missing years of her youth. She did not want to be caught or exposed.
Family Romance Page 24