In about 1970 we moved to a three-storey block of flats called Highclere, in Middle Gap Road, looking out over the back of the island and the harbour of Aberdeen towards the island of Lamma. It was, and is, a lovely view. At first we were on the third floor; every couple of years we moved down a floor until we lived in the ground-floor flat, which was blessed with a tiny but very welcome garden. We had an Irish terrier, Barney, whom my parents ordered from Harrods. He was delivered in a crate to Kai Tak airport, and when we opened the crate he came bounding out wagging his tail, exactly unlike a young dog who’s just spent twenty-four hours in a wooden box in the hold of a 707.
I suppose all children are self-absorbed; all lucky children, anyway. In my case this was compounded by the isolation we lived in, the post-colonial bubble we had carried around us to Burma and Labuan and Hong Kong. My parents were friendly, gregarious, chatty, and profoundly isolated people; they had social friends but not intimate ones, and our contacts with other families tended to be special-occasion affairs, Sunday lunches or days out on one or another borrowed boat. We had a boat of our own for a time, a tiny launch called Carousel with a rattling engine and a small, smelly downstairs cabin. She was great fun, until she sank in a typhoon in 1974. One of my favourite adventures in childhood was the time we stayed out overnight and I spent the night on the roof, watching shooting stars with my best school friend, Graham Semple. His father was in the army – I was at an army school, owing to some theory of my mother’s which ignored the fact that, since everyone moved on from the school to new postings after a year or two, it meant I had no permanent friends. Graham Semple’s dad worked at the listening station which spied on Communist China, something I wasn’t supposed to know – but did because the dads of most of my friends worked there. They were the only people who weren’t posted on from Hong Kong at the end of every tour; they were recognisable from the fact that they spoke Mandarin, not much use in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, but essential for eavesdropping on the People’s Liberation Army.
Lannie would come out and stay with us at Christmas or Easter. We would all visit the graves at Stanley – officially John Fraser’s, but also, I now know, that of her lover Leslie Holmes. Two or three times on these visits she came down with malaria, a flare-up of the illness she had picked up in Hong Kong back in the 1930s. The malaria meant a couple of days in bed waiting for the fever to break. She used to like me being in the room, so I would sit in a chair by the bed reading while she dozed and occasionally chatted; sometimes she would think I was my father, and would call me Billy. Sometimes she would slip back in time and talk about wanting to go out to Lantao when she felt better. Then – usually at night – the fever would reach a peak; she would be in a delirium, her face covered with globules of sweat; and the next day she would be weak and pale but fully herself again.
In childhood one doesn’t usually experience one’s own life as a narrative. Things happen one after another, but it’s only in special circumstances that your own childhood is experienced as a story. Big shifts in how you live will do that, and so will changes in location, and bereavements. Once we had settled in Hong Kong I didn’t have any of those things. I was keen on reading, on Tottenham Hotspur (who I never saw play, even on TV, because we didn’t get English football in Hong Kong; in fact until I was about eight I thought Tottenham Hotspur was a man, not a team), on chess (but there was no one to play with except my dad, who hated it because he said it was too much like being in the office), on Barney the dog. Once a week my mother, who couldn’t swim and was therefore super-keen for me to learn, took me to a swimming lesson, crossing on the Star Ferry over to Kowloon to the YMCA, and I would have an ice cream soda afterward as a treat. (Ice cream soda seems to have passed from the world, which is a pity. 7UP with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it. Try it on a child – I’ve not seen it fail yet.) On Wednesdays school ended at lunchtime and I would have a friend – usually Graham Semple – home to play. Some evenings my father would go down to Deepwater Bay Golf Club to hit balls at the driving range; I would go too, mainly to watch him. The balls would soar off into the floodlights with the hills of the bay around them in a dark amphitheatre. All the while I would secretly be craving the post-golf treat: the portion of chips served with a freshly squeezed glass of lemon juice that you sweetened yourself with sugar and then topped up with soda water. I had a variety of techniques for distracting my father at the crucial moment so that he wouldn’t notice just how much sugar I was putting in.
In general, all through my childhood, I was happy; but I was also, often, afraid. Conrad once described imagination as ‘the enemy of men, the father of all terrors’ – which is an odd thing for a novelist to write, but which tells the truth. I was very imaginative and very good at cooking up things to fear. On our weekend boat trips I never wanted to be too far away from Hong Kong Island, and indeed preferred being at Lamma, which was actually in sight of our home, to Clearwater Bay or to any other of the prettier but further-flung beaches and coves. I miserably nagged my parents to go somewhere I would feel comfortable – though the fear was all in the anticipation, and I would forget it when we got to wherever we were going and there was a chance to jump off the boat into the translucent water. This fear was partly that the boat would stop working, and we’d not be able to get home; on the Star Ferry I would worry that the engines might cut out and we would be swept out to sea, or that the pilot would forget where we were supposed to be going and head for open water by mistake.
Being away from home was another issue. My first day at nursery, when I was about four, I still remember for the pure intensity of my anxiety. This was a fear not about separation per se but about distance, about the sheer length of the trip home. It would have been all of a mile and a half, perhaps even less – but perspective, by definition, plays no part in these fears. The nursery was on the Peak, and I made a terrible spectacle of myself; I remember my mother visibly not knowing what to do as she tried to get away. She was bad at soothing my fears, which my father was able to calm as much by his presence as anything else. But Julie didn’t seem to know how to bring that part of herself to bear. My first attempt at staying at a friend’s house for a sleepover was when I was about eight, and that was another bust. His home was on the Peak, and again I was terrified that it would be physically impossible to get home: the house would be washed away, or the road would be washed away, or some such thing. (I had seen the effect of floods, and had once seen this very road washed away in a landslide, so I knew that things did sometimes disappear down the hill.) I made a big enough fuss for my parents to have to come and collect me. A school outing to Lantao for two days’ camping was another predictable disaster: after the first night in a disused army barracks, I calmed down enough not to be sent home a day early, but only just. The fear of awayness encompassed my parents’ evenings out. I would be fine until our cook, Ah Ho, left to go to bed in his quarters, as he would do at about nine or ten; then, if I woke, I would be in a state of intense anxiety until my parents got home. Once or twice I rang the host of the dinner party, who would always be exaggeratedly polite and treat me like a grown-up while he or she went to get my mother or father; they, happily half-pissed, would vow to be home any minute, or claim that they were just leaving; and I would go through to the spare bedroom and listen for the sound of the Morris 1100 struggling up the short, steep beginning of Middle Gap Road. There was next to no traffic at that time of night, so I would hear every car with great clarity, but could never be sure whether it was the right one until I heard it brake to turn into our driveway. I was made to feel that I was being a tremendous fusser and crybaby, a view I accepted but didn’t feel I could do much about. (As a parent myself, I now think that eight is rather young to leave a child alone without a babysitter. Autre temps, autres mæurs.) As I got older, I would imagine with increasing vividness what had happened to my parents: their car had crashed or gone over the edge of the road – they were dead, I was an orphan. It was a terrible thing to imagine, th
e worst thing in the world, of course it was … and yet it had a tingle of thrill to it as well. How distinguished, how different I would be if my parents were dead and I was left alone. I would have to be so very, very brave – people would think, isn’t he brave … As James Fenton wrote in the opening line of one of my favourite modern poems, ‘The Staffordshire Murderers’: ‘Every fear is a desire. Every desire is a fear.’
Bill’s photo of the landslide
As for what underlay these fears, some of it was obviously genetic. People have different innate levels of anxiety and experience it with differing levels of intensity. Mine is on the high side, and part of that is just the luck of the genetic draw. But part of it also, I’ve come to believe, had to do with my parents’ way of being. Specifically, it had something to do with ways in which they were not there. My father was a lovely man, but he was scared of strong feelings and tried to avoid them; he felt – he knew – that they were dangerous. And my mother had secrets that, to her, felt explosively dangerous. She knew things that no one else must be allowed to know. This was the source of the feeling that there were places inside her that were off limits, that her psychic territory was marked with Keep Out signs – or more, perhaps, that there was a kind of interior Area 51, a place whose existence was officially denied. That left me with a feeling that there were places inside my parents that were not safe; that they were not a secure repository for their own feelings, let alone for mine. I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. And that left me anxious.
These anxieties were not the whole story of every day. I had a happy childhood. Most days, though, there was an anxiety somewhere, to which I stood in some relation – it was growing worse or better, leaving me alone for a moment or not. It didn’t prevent me from getting on with my childhood, and it didn’t make me miserable – just, often, anxious.
This nervous child, who panicked at the idea of being away from home for a night, or on a boat trip out of sight of his family home, might not sound like the ideal candidate to be sent to a boarding school eight thousand miles from his parents. But as I’ve said, I was a happy little boy as well as a scared one, and – since every fear is a desire – part of me absolutely pined for the idea of being away, away, as far away as possible. By the age of nine or so I was very much aware that there was a much, much bigger world than that of Hong Kong. There were places, for instance, where I could have a bicycle. A bicycle! Hong Kong Island, which is essentially a single steep rock permanently choked with traffic, was not a place where a child could head off on a bicycle – though I did have one, a chopper on which I would forlornly go back and forth outside the garage, and would sometimes push to the top of Middle Gap Road (it was too steep to ride up) and cycle half a mile or so to the place where the paved road ran out. Roaming wild and free it was not. If I went to boarding school I would have a bicycle; and – perhaps the single thing I wanted more than anything else – friends who were there all the time, not just on Wednesday half-day afternoons, and people to play football with whenever we felt like it. Everything would be bigger. I thought these things over and announced to my parents that I wanted to go to boarding school a year early, at ten. They were surprised, even a little shocked, but they had by then no real way of talking things over with me. When I said something that made them have strong feelings, they would not respond, but would go away and think about it and come back with an answer a day or two later. So the answer came back: yes, you can go to boarding school a year early. I would start going when I was ten.
I know that for many people the school years are a primal scene, a defining set of experiences that shape the rest of their lives. That’s always struck me as a bit pathetic. Perhaps the English are particularly bad about this; I notice that although there is a lot of American popular culture, especially films and TV programmes, about high school – so much so that I once thought of writing an autobiographical novel about my experiences in the American high school system – adult Americans don’t talk about their school years much, whereas adult Britons not infrequently do. Anyway – my school years weren’t central to my life and I’m not going to write about them as if they were. I was sent to Gresham’s in north Norfolk, an academically good enough school with a strong outdoorsy, gamesy bias. I don’t know if my parents knew about that emphasis, indeed I rather think they didn’t – they told me that the school was known for teaching maths and science, which is what at the age of ten I thought I most wanted to study. But the great virtue of the place was that it was so structured, so active, and so friendly – not without its ups and downs, of course, but there were people I could call friends around every day, all day. That was what I had most wanted, and as a result I was happy at school. There was compulsory sport four afternoons a week, semi-compulsory army corps one day a week – semi-compulsory because the alternative was ‘granny bashing’, or going to visit residents at the local old people’s home. I preferred corps, which involved a lot of marching, going on field expeditions, et cetera, and is the reason I have the relatively modest practical skills I have (tying knots, first aid, that sort of thing).
My first holiday home from school, Christmas 1972
As for the awayness that had bothered me so much when I was younger, I didn’t really feel it. I did have a couple of episodes of homesickness, which was an acknowledged risk; it was spoken of as a specific illness, like measles. The odd thing is it felt a bit like that, too. You missed home like a physical sensation – it was a kind of ache. This could come and go at unexpected times, and sometimes did not go at all, and the children who had that form of homesickness couldn’t cope with boarding school, and would usually leave. That would sometimes happen with tough and abrasive boys, who turned out to be deliquescent with grief at missing their mothers. Boys who would tease, mock, and denigrate each other mercilessly on every other subject and at all times, never ridiculed the homesick. I had it badly my second term – my first at the full distance from my parents, since my mother had been in Norfolk for the first term. It lasted for about two weeks, then went away and never came back.
I suppose my Far Eastern childhood was, by contemporary British standards, about twenty years out of date. Gresham’s, isolated in Norfolk, was about ten years out of date, so it was a good way of gradually catching up.
All through the years I was at boarding school, the reverse exoticism I’ve mentioned was a big factor. To an only child brought up in the tropics, nothing could have been more exotic, alien, bizarre, otherworldly, than sleeping in a freezing cold dormitory with twenty other boys. And in the eight years I was at boarding school I don’t think I was lonely, not once. It helped that while it was a physically strenuous and in many respects Spartan school – where punishments might involve a six a.m. detention on Monday, or a three and a half mile (three bridges) run, or doing ‘sides’, i.e. punitive essays, on ‘RLP’ (red lined paper), or collecting five prefect signatures from five different houses at eight in the morning – it was also relaxed and unpressured.
For all these reasons – principal among them the sense of structure that boarding school gave – my fears were largely absent through these years. Looking back, I think I was remarkably cool about the fact my parents were all those miles away. There was one source of friction with home, though. Letters were a bone of contention, a sore point, an ‘issue’. Boarders were supposed to write home once a week. My parents let me know they looked forward to my letters – depended on them, even. Once or twice, when I failed to write, they shopped me to my housemaster and I got into bad trouble (aged about eleven) and semi-bad trouble (aged about fifteen). To me, this was hypocrisy. Since they could, at that distance, with letters taking a week, have no idea how I actually was at any given moment, why make a fuss about it? If they minded that much about my state at any given moment, they shouldn’t have sent me to boarding school – that was my view. My mother tried to blackmail me emotionally by telling me about my father’s failure to write to his parents during their incarceration. I fe
lt sorry for my dad, but didn’t feel the cases were at all that similar. I wrote when I felt moved to do so and when I didn’t, I didn’t. They had put me out of sight, so I put them out of mind.
Family Romance Page 26