by Mark Colvin
The first ‘real’ book I read on my own, though, I found for myself on a bookshelf behind the living room sofa. It was sometime around my fifth birthday. With The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett, suddenly, the days of Ant and Bee, John and Jane and their dog Spot, were over. The book itself was a thing of beauty, one of a number that my mother had been given as a child, illustrated with pre-Raphaelite-influenced pictures and re-cased in gold-tooled leather by her two spinster great-aunts who had taken up bookbinding after the Great War. It wasn’t the cover or the illustrations that sucked me into the book’s pages, though, but the power of story. There was something about the sullen, sallow child Mary, exiled to a great echoing house in Yorkshire by her parents in India; something about the eponymous secret garden, the growing friendship between her and the gardener’s boy Dickon, and their gradual rehabilitation of her crippled cousin Colin; something about the way the book catapulted me in both time and space to a world and an era I’d never known.
At difficult times in my life since, I have often read for sheer escapism, but the attraction of books at the beginning was not escape in that sense: I was a happy little boy in a happy house. It was more about exploration. Reading, I could somehow see immediately, offered you freedom and adventure without the accompanying danger. You could travel to volcanoes and treasure islands, under the sea or into space, laughing or crying, all while sitting on the sofa or lying on the carpet with your chin propped in your hands.
And it wasn’t only that I’d learned to read. I’d become a reader, one of those kids who has to be called repeatedly at mealtimes because a book has them so completely in its thrall, a boy who occasionally bumped into lampposts while walking along the street deep in a book. Or deep in a magazine—I remember getting my first subscription to The Robin, the junior member of the stable that included The Eagle, home of spaceman Dan Dare and his evil nemesis The Mekon.
I loved the printed word, but there were limits to my literacy. I thought the sign outside my grandmother Sybil’s neighbour’s house in Hampshire, which read ‘The Bungalow’, was a warning that the property contained a Buffalo, so I would sprint past it in terror, until I told Granny my secret fears and she explained. And when, asked by my mother what I wanted for my fifth birthday, I asked for an encyclopaedia, what I actually wanted was a tricycle. It’s my first memory of having to hide disappointment, though I’m not sure I was very good at it. As it turned out, the illustrated children’s encyclopaedia I was given, which I still own, was a treasure hoard, full of interesting stories about trains and planes and cars, dinosaurs and—for some reason this stuck—the then recently rediscovered coelacanth, a bizarre-looking fish long thought to be extinct.
My real fifth birthday treat, though, in 1957, was a trip to Heathrow Airport, or Heath Row as it was still called then. Flying was such an expensive rarity that a lot of 1950s families used to make the trip out to the viewing area, to watch the KLM Constellations and the Pan Am Stratocruisers come and go. It was the beginning of the commercial jet age, a time when aviation was a badge of national pride, and BOAC’s De Havilland Comets had been the pioneers—until they started falling out of the sky with metal fatigue. The problem was eventually addressed, and soon the Comet 4B would become Britain’s jet aviation workhorse, but the country’s edge of being first was lost. Within a year the Boeing 707 would dominate the international skies, and would do so for decades. But on 13 March 1957, what I saw was a magnificent collection of turboprop airliners, taking off, manoeuvring on the tarmac, landing.
Back home that evening, my birthday dinner was roast chicken, a relatively expensive rarity in the 1950s. My Big Present was a little red pedal-car.
* * *
In my father’s world, the SIS was coming to terms with the fact that not only had Suez been a disaster, it had helped draw the world’s attention away from the Hungarian Revolution which had erupted at exactly the same time.
Joseph Stalin had died in 1953, increasingly paranoid and sclerotic, and at the beginning of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev made his ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing the great dictator. By the middle of the year, versions of the speech had been printed in a number of Western newspapers, and rumours of it had spread widely in the Eastern Bloc. Hungary, with its strong cultural and historical links to Western Europe, had never been an enthusiastic colonial vassal of the Soviet Union, and by the end of October 1956, the whole nation appeared to be in revolt. For a brief moment, it appeared that the liberation, or at least partial autonomy, of a Soviet buffer state from communism—a key aim of Western intelligence since 1945—was about to happen. The Kremlin seemed to hover on the brink.
The broadsheet Pravda published a statement that included the words: ‘The Soviet Government is prepared to enter into the appropriate negotiations with the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic and other members of the Warsaw Treaty on the question of the presence of Soviet troops on the territory of Hungary.’ It was seen as an extraordinary concession, almost cause for celebration, in Budapest. But then, at the precise moment the French and British became mired in Suez, the Kremlin drastically reversed itself and sent in the tanks. Within a fortnight, the revolution had been utterly crushed. Thousands were dead. Two hundred thousand Hungarians, seeing no end to totalitarianism, fled across the borders, in many cases enriching the business, political and cultural lives of the countries like Australia where they ended up.
Both my parents, having lived so close to Hungary and understanding at first hand from their time in Austria exactly what Soviet occupation meant, and why people would flee it, were deeply affected by the turmoil. I remember years later finding a November 1956 copy of Picture Post, entirely devoted to Hungary, at the bottom of my father’s sock drawer. He hadn’t wanted me to see it because of the pictures of corpses (I was only ten or eleven), and he had tears in his eyes as he explained to me what the front page headline, ‘CRY HUNGARY’, and the whole story of betrayal and abandonment meant to him and to the democratic world.
It would be twelve years before another Eastern Bloc country, Czechoslovakia, tried again to defy Moscow, with the same result; another twelve years before the groundbreaking rise of Solidarity, a non-government labour union, in Poland; and a total of four and a half decades after World War II before the countries Stalin had annexed were able to become free. For many Western converts to communism, however fervent, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, followed by the ruthless crushing of the Hungarian uprising, meant enough was enough.
Britain, meanwhile, was losing its own Empire piece by piece, in some cases without resisting. In August 1957, when I was five and my sister nearly two, what was then called Malaya became independent. We did not know it, but this event was about to play a major part in our lives.
* * *
In London, I had moved from kindergarten to the Chelsea Froebel School. It was ‘progressive’, and I remember it with great affection: mostly there was a lot of painting, storytelling, learning numbers with blocks and rods, and only desultory attempts to get us to learn our times tables. In summer, we put on grey Aertex shirts and went to Battersea Park for running races and to play rounders. I had my first crush, on a girl in my class called Beth. I would go red if I had to speak to her and not know what to say.
I have no visual memory of flying back from Vienna in 1955. The first aeroplane ride I remember was in 1957, my first visit to France. It was a twin-prop Bristol Freighter whose enormous nose was in fact a pair of doors. A ramp was placed in front of them to load two or three cars per trip. Behind the cars there was seating for twenty people. It was just a short Channel hop to Le Touquet—less than 70 kilometres—but even though Le Touquet was a traditional haven for the English, from HG Wells, Edward and Mrs Simpson and Noël Coward to Winston Churchill, even a child could tell that it was Foreign. You had croissants for breakfast, which you were positively encouraged to dip into hot chocolate, which came in a bowl, not a cup. The lavatory was called a WC, pronounced ‘doo-bluh vay-say’,
and it was not a ‘throne’ but a hole in the floor with places for your feet. There were bolsters instead of pillows on the beds. I watched men playing boules in the park, and wished I was old enough to have a drive on the go-kart track. The grown-ups played golf and tennis; the food was good. It was, in its small way, the beginning of a long love affair with France.
That winter, as often through my childhood, I went to stay with my grandmother for a week or so. Granny Sibyl lived near Winchester, in a tiny white cottage on a very steep slope. She subsisted frugally on the naval pension, gluing china back together if it broke rather than buying new plates. She kept an immaculate garden on this sharply angled hill, and took her disagreeable poodle, Suki, for long walks across Twyford Down, meeting other elderly ladies with dogs along the way.
At the top of the hill near the cottage was a fence, beyond which the ground sloped steeply down into a railway cutting. I was allowed to sit at the top of the slope and wait for the steam trains to go by. Down in the cutting, the engines puffing along were almost small enough to imagine them as Thomas and Gordon and Henry on the island of Sodor. I waved to them and sometimes, thrillingly, the engine drivers waved back as they slowed to a stop at Shawford station. Down the hill from the cottage was the river Itchen, small and slow and reedy, one of England’s most famous trout streams. Near the bridge that crossed the stream in Shawford village lived a man who had built a tiny, realistic town out of match-boxes in his garden. If you walked further downstream, there was also a little wooden bridge where you could be like Christopher Robin and play Poohsticks.
Granny’s hallway had a glass case with all my grandfather’s medals. There were an awful lot of them, up to and including Knight Commander of the British Empire and Commander of the Order of the Bath. I could never quite understand what this mysterious Bath was for. Could you wash in it? And how would you command it? Elsewhere in the house were a portrait of Nelson with his eyepatch and missing arm, a tableau of the victor of Trafalgar dying on the deck of the Victory, surrounded by Hardy and his comrades, and a framed replica of a letter from Nelson himself. You were never in doubt that you were part of a naval family. If you grazed your knee or banged your head, you were told to ‘Remember Nelson’—translation: even if they lose an eye or an arm, boys don’t cry.
Granny was a terrible cook: we ate frizzly overfried eggs and burnt bacon for breakfast, and greasy overdone chops for lunch, at a table with a lazy Susan in the middle: ‘We bought it because your grandfather couldn’t bear to speak or be spoken to at breakfast. Not even “Pass the marmalade.”’ The lazy Susan was also where she kept the half-melted silver ashtray that was one of the few things she’d salvaged from the 1923 earthquake in Tokyo, where my father was born while my grandfather was on posting as naval attaché to Japan. Granny told me how her own father, General Kays, had been so choleric that once, on seeing the housemaid carrying a decanter of port with insufficient care, he had shouted, ‘That’s right girl, give it a good shake,’ and she, unfortunately, failed to pick up the sarcasm and did.
Granny was from another age. She talked about ‘gels’ instead of ‘girls’, used ‘weskits’ for waistcoats, ‘forrids’ for foreheads (I still do this), and often uttered phrases most people had stopped using in the 1920s. Years later, when I got my first job, she asked me, ‘And do you get a good screw?’ which apparently meant ‘Are you well paid?’ It was hard to keep a straight face.
She often told the story about how, when Queen Mary (grandmother of the present Queen) visited the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, they were warned to hide their valuables, because the old lady was notorious for ‘admiring’ people’s knick-knacks in such a way that they were obliged to offer them to her as a gift. Luckily, the only things at Greenwich the royal personage who historians sometimes describe as a ‘kleptomaniac’ took a fancy to were all already the property of the state. My grandfather, at the time, had the job of president of the college, and my aunt, then a very small girl, used to ride her tricycle around the ground, telling the sailors on duty to ‘Salute the president’s daughter’.
Granny would prove indomitable throughout her long, lonely decades as a widow. She read, and in the case of Jane Austen re-read, constantly. She worked her way through the Daily Telegraph every day, and listened to the BBC. She kept in touch with friends from the old days and made herself busy around the village. When I stayed with her that winter, we bought fresh eggs from the chicken farm down near the Poohsticks bridge, and that Christmas we went to the village pantomime. I shouted with laughter at Widow Twanky and practically rolled in the aisles at all the terrible jokes. I loved it so much that she patiently took me again the next night.
But soon there would be no more stays in Granny’s cottage, no more Chelsea Froebel School, not for a while. We were going to live overseas. West Africa was the original destination, but my father was strongly of the view that his interests and abilities were better suited to middle Europe or the Far East—he would later boast about how he finagled his way out of the Ghana job and into a posting in Kuala Lumpur.
The result was that in 1958, not long after my sixth birthday, we boarded a ship at Southampton, bound for the country that was still called Malaya but would soon become Malaysia.
* * *
The Falstria was a cargo and passenger ship, long, white and sleek, belonging to Denmark’s East Asiatic Lines. ‘No other means of overseas transportation,’ said the brochure, ‘offers such complete relaxation and pleasure as a sea voyage.’ They might also have mentioned that it was a six-year-old boy’s dream.
This was pre-containerisation, so there were the ship’s cranes to watch as they loaded heavy netted bundles containing rice and grain sacks, barrels, wooden crates of different shapes and sizes, even sometimes motorcars, onto and off the ship. There were the Danish sailors, coiling hawsers and manning winches, usually kindly and ready to offer a word as long as you didn’t get in their way. And there was the smell of heavy engine oil mixed with sea spray, as I went forward to visit my beloved dog Bamse in his kennel on the foredeck. There was also a children’s room with toys and books where Danish child-minders looked after me and my sister Zoë.
We sailed out of foggy England, down to the Mediterranean, and docked in Marseilles, where we spent a day with our London neighbours, Freddie and Jean Shaughnessy, who were holidaying nearby. Heading for the southern Mediterranean, it got steadily hotter, and the ship’s small, square seawater pool came into its own. With the help of an inflatable rubber ring I began to learn to swim.
The Suez Canal, which had been closed since the invasion of 1956, had now reopened, and I still have a vivid mental picture of the vast crowd of people in white robes clustered on the dock at Port Said, trying to sell us souvenirs, mostly leather goods—saddles, brightly coloured curly-toed sandals, toy camels—but also ornaments and knick-knacks and a type of red felt hat which I’d never seen before but my parents told me was called a fez. There was a dry intensity to the heat as we passed slowly through the canal, dunes on either side: I did not know it, but I would not truly feel cold again for about two years, though the heat I was soon to experience was different, dense with tropical humidity.
I’ve never taken a long sea voyage since: jet travel quickly superseded it as a way of getting from country to country. But even on island ferries during Aegean holidays, the smells and sounds and sensations of the deck of a ship at sea have always wafted me back to 1958 and those idyllic days as we skimmed across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, heading for the Malaysian Peninsula.
I remember little more detail of the voyage, just sunny days and swimming and endless sea horizons, until we docked in Penang, our first landfall in our new country. I was startled to see small Malay boys, hardly older than my own age, shinning up trees to fetch coconuts in return for coins from tourists. In Kuala Lumpur we stayed in a hotel for a few days and I ate Chinese food for the first time: a taste explosion after 1950s London in the wake of rationing, and the excellent, but gen
erally bland, Danish cuisine on the Falstria.
Soon we moved into our new home, 7 Lorong Kuda, right next to the Kuala Lumpur racecourse. A high hedge separated us from the track, but from our first-floor windows on race days you could see the tiny jockeys on their great horses come thundering round the bend as they gathered pace to enter the straight in front of the grandstand. We had a spacious garden, far bigger than our little backyard in London, and of course tropically greener. There were banana trees at the back, and a mangosteen tree in the middle, the trunk of which I would later use as the wicket in cricket games. It was in some ways my Garden of Eden. The front door had a portico, where you could get out of the car, a blue Ford Zephyr, without getting wet, even in a monsoonal downpour. Right in front of that were a big tree and a concrete fishpond.
Inside, there were big comfortable cane chairs downstairs, with a dining room which led down to the kitchen at the side. That was the domain of Ah Kwong, who cooked for us, and his wife Ah Kwai, who did the laundry and housework. Poor Ah Kwai: a hardworking middle-aged Chinese woman with a son of her own but with limited English, she was confronted with two children who wouldn’t do what they were told—and wouldn’t do it in pidgin English: ‘No wantee, no likee.’
Even though, since independence the year before, Malaya was no longer a colony, we were typical little Anglo-Australian colonial children: most of our friends were English or Australian children too, and we lived a life semi-removed from the local culture. I was a bit frightened of the older Malay and Chinese boys who hung around the racecourse and walked through our garden (it was a public right-of-way) to get there. They played a game with a rattan ball that involved keeping it in the air as long as possible, and they used to shout at me, ‘Hey, Johnny, come here Johnny.’ Why ‘Johnny’? That wasn’t my name, I thought: what did they mean? They meant no harm, but I was still quite a timid child, and generally scuttled off as fast as I could.