by Martin Booth
The air was contaminated with the foul smell of burning rubber and cloth. Ash blew past us like grey snow, some of the flakes still alight. A fire engine pumped water down a fat undulating hose from a street hydrant but it could not have had much effect. The sky was alight with sparks and flames, a thick column of smoke rising into the night sky then bending away on the wind. Spotlights played upon the havoc.
Next, we distributed the turkey sandwiches but carrying the boxes of bottles was beyond us so we returned home with them.
'Bloody long way to come to give away a dozen blankets and a picnic,' my father remarked irritably as we halted at the vehicular ferry pier.
'Shut up, Ken,' my mother said tartly and, curling up on the back seat, promptly fell asleep.
My father and I settled down to drink the tonic and wait at the car ramp for the next ferry departure, scheduled for two o'clock.
The following day, the full extent of the fire was broadcast on the radio. Ten thousand huts over an area of forty-five acres had been totally destroyed; sixty thousand people had been made homeless. The blaze, which had developed into a fire storm, had reached such high temperatures that aluminium cooking vessels had been completely burnt away. Incredibly, no-one was killed. This prompted the conjecture that the fire had been set deliberately to force the government into speeding up the squatter re-housing and rehabilitation programme. If this were the case, it worked. Within a year, the site of the Shek Kip Mei blaze was a brand-new refugee housing estate.
In weeks I had become more or less au fait with the geography of the Peak. The path I had taken that first day was called Governor's Walk. The near conical mountain was called Sai Ko Shan (or, in English, High West), shan meaning mountain. I attempted to climb it but it was too steep for me. At its base was a rifle range where I collected deformed .303 bullets, digging them out of the butts with my penknife.
To reach the rifle range, I had to take what must be one of the most spectacular walks on earth. It began – and ended – at the foot of Mount Austin Road and circumnavigated the Peak.
I would always set off clockwise, walking beneath overhanging trees alive with butterflies and the birds that ate them, passing a waterfall and arriving at the place where the soldiers lay down to shoot across a valley at the butts. On one occasion, my walk was halted by a police barrier. A young woman had been murdered on the shooting platform, which I thereafter avoided for fear of ghosts.
After visiting the butts, my pocket full of spent ordnance, I carried on around the mountain. At first, the road wound its way by several houses, one of which was empty because no servants would work there. It was, according to Wong, haunted by the spirits of previous amahs who had been raped and murdered there by Japanese troops in 1942. A short distance further on, the road narrowed and became unsuitable for vehicles.
Holding more or less to the same contour, it continued around the mountain, sometimes as a viaduct, at others cut into the rock. Bit by bit, an incredible vista unfolded, first the western harbour approaches with merchant vessels awaiting a docking berth or discharging cargo into junks and flat barges called lighters. In the distance was Stonecutters' Island, a military signals base. Further on, Kowloon came into sight, the peninsula crammed with buildings, ships lying along the jetties, ferries ploughing across to the island, walla-walla boats little more than aquatic insects. In another hundred yards, the central business district and the eastern suburbs came into view, the lower slopes of the hills dotted with houses and the redbrick block of the Bowen Road military hospital. Beyond Kowloon were the nine dragon hills.
Yet it was not the view that captivated me. I took that for granted. My bedroom window afforded me the same panorama. It was the sound. At first, I did not hear it but, gradually, it impinged itself upon me. It was a faint humming noise, as a wild bee hive might make. One weekend, walking the two roads with my mother, I asked her if she could hear it.
'Oh, yes,' she said, 'I can hear it. Do you know what it is?'
'It's the city,' I replied, surprised that she did not realize it.
'No,' she answered, 'it's the sound of a million people working hard.'
Halfway down the western flank of the Peak, on a promontory 1,100 feet above sea level and approached by a cracked and overgrown concrete track called Hatton Road, was a large gun emplacement known as Pinewood Battery. During the war, it had been equipped with two 3-inch anti-aircraft guns but had been destroyed on the morning of 15 December 1941, during the battle for Hong Kong. The gun platforms still existed, as did the subterranean block houses, the command post, ammunition bunkers and sleeping quarters. The concrete walls of the buildings were still decorated with their camouflage paint, whilst in the sleeping quarters, the metal-frame bunk beds remained standing, the remnants of palliasses draped upon them.
Pinewood was a special place for me. The ruins were a purpose-built adventure playground in which a few friends and I could enact the Japanese storming it and the British defending it, the latter always winning in strict contradiction of history. Yet it was when I went there alone that it was the most exciting. Just walking down to the battery made my spine creep and the hair on my neck rise. A man had died there during the four-hour-long bombardment of 15 December. Now, it was as if his ghost still inhabited the place, rode the breezes coming up the mountain, sighed in the stunted pine trees and whispered in the azalea bushes.
I would sit on one of the emplacement walls and watch the ferries far below me, heading for Lan Tau or Lamma islands or the smaller outlying islands of Cheung Chau and Peng Chau. They carefully avoided Green Island directly in front of me where, as red warning notices on the shore stated, Hong Kong stored its explosives. Only fishing sampans risked passing through Sulphur Channel between Green and Hong Kong islands. The shoreline was strewn with treacherous rocks, the currents fast and unreliable.
Tiring of the view, I would then start hunting for wartime relics. Most of all, I wanted a British cap badge or uniform button. The battery had been manned by Indian Army troops when it fell and a Rajput regimental emblem would have been a find indeed. My wish list also included a Japanese shell from a Zero fighter – I was sure the place must have been strafed and knew that bullets hitting soft earth did not necessarily deform – machine-gun cartridge cases and, best of all, a shell case from one of the AA guns. What I actually found outdid the lot.
I was working through the low, dense scrub below the battery, about twenty yards out from the concrete skirt, when I came upon a piece of khaki material sticking up from the ground. Hoping it might be a fragment of discarded uniform with a button on it, I grabbed it and tugged. It was firmly embedded in the earth so I pulled harder. It would not shift. Kneeling, I set to work excavating it with my penknife. In less than a minute, I discovered the edge of a collar. Just beneath it was the smooth side of a skull, an eye socket filled with earth staring up at me.
Immediately, I knew what I had found and jumped backwards as if it had been a reared cobra, ready to strike. Scrambling through the undergrowth, I reached the battery, ran through it and headed up Hatton Road. It was a steep climb to Harlech Road. My legs ached as never before. I paused to gather my breath and wits and then ran on to the Peak Café where I asked someone to telephone the police for me.
An hour later, I was back at Pinewood with a dozen police officers and some coolies. They started to dig up the skeleton as I was asked questions by a British police officer who then took me home in a police car. My father was summoned from his office. I thought I was going to be for the high jump when he arrived, yet he was surprisingly mellow.
We were informed that the skeleton I had found was that of a Japanese soldier who had been shot in the back of the head. He had not, I was told, died in the war but afterwards, captured by local Chinese who had probably murdered him in retribution for what the Japanese had done to the local population.
'What's going to happen to him?' I asked. I toyed with the idea of asking if he had any badges on him but decided that was pus
hing my luck.
'His remains will be handed over to the Japanese authorities for return to Japan,' the police officer answered, 'where he can rest in peace.'
The next time I walked down Hatton Road, the hair on my neck did not prickle and I felt utterly alone.
This was not always the case during my Peak wanderings.
Whilst some of the mountain was covered in thick scrub, much of it was densely forested. Where there was a road, path or clearing, the fringes of the forest were heavily overgrown with plants seeking the sunlight but, under the canopy of the trees, the undergrowth was comparatively open. In this universe of dappled light existed creatures rarely seen.
The first wild animal I saw appeared fleetingly to me about a month after we moved to Mount Austin. It was early dusk and I was returning from the rifle range. A little way ahead of me, there was a rustle in the undergrowth and what I took to be a miniature deer stepped daintily out into full view. I froze.
Not much bigger than a large dog, it was reddish-brown in colour, had a short tail, two swept-back antlers and, to my astonishment, tusks. I was enchanted by it. The only other deer I had seen were in England, in the New Forest, where they seemed as tame as the feral ponies. This one was different. It was a truly wild animal that had chosen to show itself to me. Except for its disproportionately big ears, it too did not move: then it uttered a brief dog-like yelp and vanished.
'It must have been a muntjak,' my mother explained when I got home. 'They're also known as barking deer because their call is like a dog's yap. You were very lucky. Few people ever see one. They only come out at night.'
Discovering that such creatures existed, I started to explore the forests. Several evenings later, I saw a bushy-tailed, cat-sized animal appear quite suddenly out of a burrow. With a badger-like striped face, the rest of it was otherwise a nondescript brown. It stood at the burrow entrance, sniffed the air then, spinning round, vanished back down the way it had come. It did not reappear and I was later told it was a ferret badger.
I soon realized that entering the forest was pointless. With the ground covered in dry leaves and twigs, walking silently would have been hard work for an experienced hunter, never mind me. The denizens of the forest could see, hear, smell and locate me long before I did them. Furthermore, most of them were nocturnal, and I could not stay out after dark.
At the bottom of the valley that dropped away to the south of Mount Austin was Pokfulam reservoir, the first ever built in Hong Kong to provide water for the embryonic city. As 1953 had been the driest year on record, by December and the school holidays the reservoir was very low indeed. This implied two things to me: first, that whatever lived in the valley would probably have to visit it to drink and, second, that whatever lived in the reservoir was now restricted to shallow water and therefore easily seen.
Supplied by Wong with a picnic lunch, I set off one Saturday morning and settled myself down on the cracked-mud periphery of the reservoir, as near as I dared to the water's edge and the soft mud. To my surprise, there were very few footprints pressed into the softer mud. I pondered this, found a stone and tossed it down to the water's edge. It struck the mud and disappeared with a sucking noise. The muntjak knew what I had not: the mud was quick. I shivered at the thought of what might have happened had I stepped another ten feet across the reservoir bottom. There was no-one about who would have heard my calls for help. I took up my picnic, left the mud and sat on the dam wall.
The water lay below me, as still and transparent as green bottle glass. I could make out every detail of the bottom. Schools of tiny fish occasionally darted by. A frog swam along. Suddenly, there was a large flurry of mud. It took a while to settle but I knew that something had put paid to the frog. As the water cleared, I noticed an oval outline in the mud about the size of a large meat-serving dish. Very slowly, it detached itself from the bottom and rose towards the surface, trailing mud that spiralled down from it. It was a grey-coloured turtle. From one end, a white and grey mottled head appeared, stretching out on a long neck which curved upwards towards me. It culminated in a prehensile nose that broke the surface for a moment before the head was retracted and the creature drifted back down to the mud. If I had not seen where it settled, I would never have known it was there.
Over the winter months, I also stumbled upon a pangolin feeding at an ants' nest in a wide crack in the concrete on Hatton Road, any number of giant African snails with shells the size of a whelk's, a dozing owl and, in a cave high up on the Peak, a colony of hibernating Japanese pipistrelle bats. Even the pangolin, normally nocturnal, paid me scant attention, feeding until I was almost upon it and even then just scurrying off.
Other encounters were not quite so benign.
The one warning my mother frequently issued was to beware of snakes. Hong Kong was home to over two dozen species of which at least four were venomous to man and potentially if not actually fatal. I kept an eye out for snakes but rarely saw one and, if I did, it was invariably heading away from me as fast as it might. Snakes in China appeared to know instinctively that there was a better than evens chance they might end up in a wok.
Walking to and from school, I daily passed along comically named Plunketts Road, at the side of which ran an open drain, or nullah, designed to shed heavy rainfall off the mountain as quickly as possible to prevent landslides. One afternoon, taking the path beside it, I heard what sounded like a hissing water leak. As a main water line ran along the side of the nullah and the public was being exhorted to save water and report wastage, I exercised my civic duty and went to investigate. The nullah was about eighteen inches wide and two and a half feet deep, sloping downhill in a series of steps.
In it was a common rat snake. Approximately three feet long, it was dark brown for its entire length with no pattern. A fangless constrictor, I had seen them often enough in snake restaurants and had once watched as one crushed then swallowed a small bird on the Peak. This snake must have fallen into the smooth-sided nullah and could not get out. If it continued down the nullah it would reach a storm culvert and escape. If it headed uphill, it would arrive at several blocks of apartments and, I was certain, a place on the supper table in one of the servants' quarters. It was facing uphill.
A stick was needed to turn the snake. I found one of a sufficient length in the undergrowth, knelt down on the edge of the nullah and attempted to force the snake's head round to face the way to safety. I had given it a few prods when it reared up, spread its hood and spat at me.
This was no common rat snake. It was a cobra.
I recoiled, a smear of slimy venom on my shirt. Very carefully, so as not to touch it, I removed the garment and dropped it on the path. At this moment, two boys from my class arrived on the scene. We debated what to do. The primitive and illogical fear of snakes welled up in us. That cobras fed on rats and rats spread disease to humans was forgotten. This was the devil in serpent form, the creature that had tempted Adam – we had had Bible Studies in school – and seduced Eve, whatever that meant.
A decision was made. Like Stephen in the Bible, we would stone it to death.
Gathering as many large stones as we could find, we commenced hurling them at the snake. Some found their mark, most did not. All the while, the snake raised its head, the hood spread to show the black-and-white ghost-like pattern of a face on its surface.
We had been at this endeavour for five minutes or so when two coolies carrying poles over their shoulders came trotting down the hill. They looked over the edge of the nullah. The cobra seemed slightly wounded. One coolie dangled a coil of rope in front of the cobra's head. It struck at it then pressed its head to the nullah floor. The other coolie, signalling us to stand back, reached down into the nullah, grabbed the cobra by its tail, swung it up in the air and slammed it down on the concrete pathway. It was dead. They coiled it up, tied it with twine, hung it from one of their poles and set off down the hill. I walked home, ashamed that I had taken part in this assassination and vowing never to kill a
snake again. Except in self defence.
My only other dangerous and somewhat farcical encounter occurred one evening on the Old Peak Road, a very steep footpath that wound down the mountain to the city below. Until the Second World War, it had been used extensively by sedan chairs and coolies but had fallen into disuse, the undergrowth on either side encroaching upon it, sometimes covering it completely. My reason for going down it was that someone had told me a Tokay gecko lived in the vicinity of the junction with Barker Road and was best seen at sunset when it appeared to go hunting.
The world's biggest gecko, at seven inches in length when fully grown, the Tokay gecko was spectacular, a light brown with red, white and black spots. Its call, a distinctive tock-aye, gave it its name. It was also very rare, mainly because it was a highly prized local entree.
I had descended as far as Barker Road when I heard a noise behind me that sounded like someone rattling several half-empty boxes of matches. Turning, I found a fully grown porcupine coming at me in reverse, all its quills upright and a-quiver. I stood my ground, not thinking it would press home its advance. Yet it did, accelerating in my direction. I clapped my hands and shouted – to no avail. I fled. The porcupine, although not overhauling me, at least kept pace. The angle of ascent soon told on me. I slowed. The porcupine continued its attack. Moving backwards up a 1 in 3 slope seemed not to bother it. I found a new lease of fear and reached the level ground by the observation point. The porcupine stopped at the roadside and faced me. Now that I could see it clearly, it was huge, three feet long and bulky. Its nose was blunt, like a beaver's, its quills black and white. It shivered. The quills rattled. Then it was off, running clumsily down Harlech Road and into the twilight. It was only later that a Chinese friend of my mother's told me that porcupines could kill a leopard cat with their quills.