So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  We had lunch with Claude Fenner’s wife Joan. Then I took the chil-dren to see the film The World of Suzie Wong,with William Holden, Larry Naismith, others I had known and the delectable Hong Kong actress Nancy Kwan. The story complemented the children’s under-standing of Hong Kong. I told them that in the London theatre my girl-friend Yu Ling had played the role of Suzie Wong’s best friend. A Chinese? That surprised them. I explained now fond I had been of her and how much she had impressed Larry at the wedding party.

  When I put them on the plane home they both said ‘Please, don’t say goodbye.’

  At the end of January David Rowe-Beddoe joined me in Manila. We had time to talk over mutual friends, Emlyn Williams, Richard Burton, actors all. Then we heard that the Royal Mint had lost the $5 million Philippines tender. I thought I had not left a cutlet uncooked to secure that piece of business, but even then, despite reducing our De La Rue commission to a fraction of what we deserved, the competition won. Quite rightly because the price difference was unbridgeable no matter how influential we were. The Royal Mint needed to pull up its socks. But David was pleased about the banknote order and my new top level of contacts.

  I introduced him to Mario who invited us to join him on a bus owned by the Head of the Chamber of Commerce. It was a single-decker, its roof raised and windows replaced with larger oval ones. There were two double beds at the back, and behind the sofa were shelves with glasses and various taps. Imelda joined us and I introduced David.

  Then we drove through a poverty-stricken area which Imelda exam-ined through the one-way windows. She dictated to her Human Settle-ments Secretary. There had been too little progress there and she wanted it speeded up. We eventually stopped in the middle of a slum, at a grisly nightclub. There was dancing inside, nearly in darkness, wonderful rhythmic music, and some seriously worn out ladies of the night. We danced and everyone became cheerful. Filipinos have the gift of living for the now, putting their troubles behind them, and being happy, especially the very poor and the very rich. Like everywhere else the middle classes are more stick-in-the-mud. The telephone rang. The music stopped. There was silence. I’m not making this up. It was midnight exactly. The call was for Mario, even in such a place as that. What organisation. David was bowled over by the man.

  Our factory manager Gordon Martin took David and me over the State Printing Works being built. Everything under control. No inter-fering busy corrupt little local bees. My closeness to Imelda seemed effective. No one had dared even approach the place.

  David and I went to Hong Kong for a meeting with the Commis-sioner of Banking. He had been Governor of the Bank of Sierra Leone and was well known to us. David told me later he was thinking of offer-ing him a job, in charge of ‘Integrated Money Systems’. We flew to Djakarta. There we spent the morning in Indonesia’s SPW, gave them a delicious lunch, and spent the afternoon at the Borobudur Hotel, dozing in the sun. We then enjoyed them giving dinner for us. Relations could not have been better.

  In Karachi we were joined by the De La Rue Head of Security for meetings with their State Printing Works directors, civilians all of them. They were the height of dignity, so unlike the Bengalis whom they despised.

  ‘Bloody little Bengalis,’ one of them said, ‘put just one of them in a room and in an hour there are twelve.’ How the two countries remained united at all is difficult to imagine. My own rather peripheral affection for Bangladesh had died when I read the year before, 1975, that on 15 August Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s national hero and founding President who had led them into Independence in 1971, had been assassinated at home in a coup, with his wife and three sons, and others in his household.

  In Dhaka I had expressed my horror. The man may have been corrupt but why assassinate him? Why his family and household? My Bangladeshi friends said it had all been entirely necessary, to rid the country of all association with him, forever. I then lost any desire to get closer to them. Thirty-five years later the five perpetrators were found and hanged, ending a decades-long fight by Sheikh Hasina, Mujibur’s daughter, who had since become Prime Minister. This seemed like the Balinese Chokorda’s simile about shadow puppets, except that here the boxes were coffins.

  On my way home to Hong Kong I had to go to Singapore. They wanted some changes to a banknote proof. Then on to Djakarta where my old friend, the beautiful Didiet, had arranged an appointment for me with the general in charge of security at Pertamina, the giant oil conglomerate and leading star of the reviving economy under General Suharto. He wanted an outside organisation to audit their security. Our meeting went well, with major opportunities to follow. The man I recommended was an old friend, very senior in Britain’s Secret Service and a De La Rue consultant. Years before he had introduced me to Claude Fenner, Malaysia’s Commissioner of Police.

  Ada was awaiting my first week of the month, together with the usual heaps of mail. She said I had lost a lot of weight. I could see that when I looked in the mirror. After giving liquid and solid specimens to the doctor, he said I was not assimilating my food and he prescribed something for it. I was more aware of loneliness in those less hectic days at home. The arthritis too was swelling up and my eyes were getting worse again. It was harder to get the toothbrush into my mouth.

  To make up for my irregular life as a traveller I took up water-skiing every morning at nine o’clock. Round the corner in Deep Water Bay were a couple of Chinese with a speedboat for hire. I could just keep my grip of the bar and the surge of adrenaline reduced the pain I was in. They took me all round Deep Water Bay, Repulse Bay and the islands, then back. About twenty minutes, nothing amazing, just viragesin big curves from side to side, feeling the wonderful windy waterborne joie de vivre. Once I broke the rope and came to rest between four crate-sized jellyfish, translucent umbrellas, their near-lethal tentacles trailing beneath them. The boat zoomed back and the men pulled me out.

  I gave a dinner party for ten people, at two days’ notice, and it was a success. Ada did everything beautifully after we had conferred about the food. All I had to do was order the Krug and other drinks. After-wards we all went to Central Hong Kong to celebrate Chinese New Year in the flower market. I bought a couple of dozen helium-filled balloons and gave them away one by one to solemn sleepy Chinese babies, my other arm being pulled upwards out of its socket. I lost my grip and the remaining balloons flew up to the moon to boos all round. Charles Hoare and his wife Felicity took me on their junk with a group of friends. He was unlike most men in Hong Kong, widely read, a wonderful conversationalist and wit, the nature of an actor. He became a lifelong friend. Many of the others preferred discussing money, drink-ing and sex; the usual expatriate staples.

  I flew away to another month or more of the same, a never-ending pleasure, the rediscovery of old friends. That, like the continuing love of parents and family, is a good way of giving a shape to life. It was also a shield against the continuing sad dreams that would not go away about the loss of what I had most to live for.

  Towards the end of March I had to go to Manila to meet Rino Giori, the multi-millionaire genius behind our banknote printing machines worldwide. I was nervous because of his reputation for aggressive mood swings. Senior Deputy Governor Briñas had us to lunch. When I introduced Rino to him the sly old mandarin set the scene as if for the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

  He said: ‘So, we are in the presence of greatness.’

  Rino bathed in glory as I led him through half a dozen meetings, starting with Governor Licarros. Rino was excited by the architect’s model of the factory now well advanced in construction.

  When I drove him to the airport he said he had been worried during his week in Peking. He had ditched his girlfriend in Hong Kong’s Penin-sular Hotel. Then he corrected himself. No, she had ditched him. This from a man who was said to have had an affair with Sophia Loren. An idea occurred to him. He turned to me, pulled out his visiting card, wrote down her name and room number.

  ‘She is too strong,’ he said. ‘I give you
my best wishes. I pay you a royalty!’

  And off he went into the terminal, bound for Switzerland.

  I went to Kuala Lumpur to ensure that the Bank had received our £750,000 offer for more of the same, then to Kathmandu. After the usual few days’ rounds (everything took longer there), I was sitting in the hotel garden having tea; trim lawn, birdsong, cucumber sandwiches and spode china. An American lady on a chair a few feet away exclaimed to me: ‘Oh my Gahd, your fingers!’

  I looked at her, then at them.

  ‘I meant to say fingernails.’ As if expecting me to say ‘That’s all right then’.

  She came and sat next to me. ‘May I see?’

  Diffidently I placed the palms of my hand on the table. She went into raptures, making me very self-conscious. We were not alone. As a special favour she asked would I turn them over. This felt as if she wanted me to unbutton. More raptures about the categories of my fingerprints. Then she said: ‘I can see you are going through a tragic crisis.’

  I asked how she could tell.

  ‘Here,’ she said, pointing at the centre of each of my palms. ‘A row of crosses, like a graveyard.’

  I peered and it was true; there they were. They have since disap-peared. She said that as a face can show the experiences of life, so can hands. Like me she had no time for palmistry to foretell the future. She had a book illustrated with palm prints, including the Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone’s. She showed how his lines indicated what an orator he was.

  Nepal was looking its best after the monsoon, clear as a bell. I went for a two-hour drive to get a closer look at Mount Everest. I stopped and climbed a grassy hill. At the top I turned and saw the astounding white sheath of Annapurna. Just then a tiny waif of a girl trotted up and pushed a flower into my hand. ‘Rhododendron,’ she said. She asked for a rupee. Her expression changed with a shy smile as she thanked me.

  In Singapore I introduced De La Rue’s computer expert to explain automated cheque clearing, direct debiting and various related tech-nologies. He made such unfamiliar concepts simple. After Australia and New Zealand I was back for my week in Hong Kong.

  On 4 April 1976 I had occasion to nurture my almost proscribed rela-tionship with HSBC. My priceless old friend the actor Robert Morley came to lunch. I also invited the HSBC Chief Cashier, David Turner, and his wife Priscilla. For Robert I bought a high-backed emperor’s throne made of basketwork and placed it at the end of the long dining table. The Turners were excited to see that the table was laid only for four. After we sat down, unfolded our napkins and settled over the hors d’oeuvres, she asked in her punctilious Scottish accent: ‘Muster Morleh, what is your opinion of Chinese food.’

  They both expected him to breathe warm streams of praise.

  ‘Well,’ he said, patting his mouth with a napkin. ‘I mean you have to admire these poor countries. They certainly do the best with what they have. With such imagination too.’ Who other than the Chinese would shin up bamboo poles inside grubby caves and scrape off birds’ nests from the ceiling, and make them into soup? What they did to sharks to get their fins amounted to the wickedest and most painful murder, all in the name of soup. It was delicious, he had to say. And when it came to preparing sea food they spend hours hitting it with a hammer to make it edible.

  There was much more and the Turners’ faces fell. Then she realised they would be able to dine out on this. She prodded David under the table with her foot. They started to enjoy themselves. It was an excel-lent lunch.

  The actor and producer Derek Nimmo organised tours for English actors, many of them famous in drawing-room comedy. British Airways had spare seats, the hotels in the Middle East and Asia, some-times Australia and New Zealand, had spare rooms, so he negotiated concessions all round for ‘Dinner Theatre’, at the Hong Kong Hilton and the equivalent elsewhere. This gave great pleasure to the locals, and the actors welcomed winter months away in the sun, and coming home with a few thousand pounds saved. Whenever they came I had the smallish cast home for a meal and invited my new associates at the Hong Kong Bank. The most fun was after a liquid lunch when some of us poured ourselves into the sea in our underwear, some still clutching brandy balloons. One fat man floated on his back and balanced the glass on his tummy.

  HSBC had been put in a quandary by the behaviour of their beloved Bradbury Wilkinson. A whole range of banknotes had been delivered from Switzerland, and not from England. De La Rue had been tipped off by the shippers. I had the delight of advising David Turner that the actual printing had been done, without the bank’s knowledge least of all its authorisation, by the Zurich firm Orell Fussli. He agreed this was most irregular, arrogant even. At the same time I showed him our design proofs for the new series which was about to be issued by their competitor the Chartered Bank. They were superb, the brainchild of Julian and a local artist, a whole series of Chinese mythological images, with the top HK$1,000 spread with a magnificent golden dragon, the image for good luck. It was to lead to a new figure of speech: ‘I bet you a dragon!’

  I asked for a meeting with the chairman, Michael Sandberg. There were now improving cross-currents between us in that small commu-nity. He granted my request. Just the two of us in his office at the top of the building. He said he had been told that my entertainment was different from the normal Hong Kong fare, and what fun the actors were. I said how much I valued the conversations I always had with the bank’s head offices all over Asia and how much I had learned from them. He said this had been reported to him. I rejoined that there was one matter which I was sure had not been reported. This focused the conversation differently. I proceeded mysteriously to describe it as almost a kind of disloyalty. Not just one bank more than another, but a kind of consensus, a disenchantment, maybe not knowingly shared and I felt certainly not personal …

  During this run-up I watched him intently. Timing was of the essence. As he was on the point of throwing me out of his office, prob-ably forever, I said: ‘You see, Michael, they all think that I and De La Rue should be your printers …’

  He burst into laughter. He went on to say how much he had enjoyed going to the De La Rue dinner at the Dorchester, what an impressive evening Gerry Norman had given, with the entire Diplomatic Corps, and how much he looked forward to going to the next one.

  I started being invited to the Bank’s box at the races, and to a number of the chairman’s dinners. By then I had long since risen before dawn unseen, to take photographs of the Bank’s building. In the dining room I had seen the paintings by Chinnery and cited them for inclusion in prospective banknote designs.

  Eighteen

  My mother had lived in 31 Queen’s Grove, St John’s Wood, NW8 ever since her split up from Larry. It was much more than she could afford: high rent and a full repairing lease. For years I had been telling her that this was way beyond her means, such a large house and garden. In the nick of time she moved and bought a small house in Southfields. She and Joy had moved there and were settled in, with books, paintings, lamps and furniture, by the time of the sales conference. She was hard at work in the garden. I helped her set up the old-fashioned swing seat which had originally been at Apple Porch. I took the three children there for lunch over the Easter weekend.

  The De La Rue chief executive Peter Orchard addressed the sales conference in Basingstoke, as ever under the watchful eye of our chair-man Gerry Norman. We had long since guessed that Gerry had less than total confidence in him, because for years he had himself combined his role of chairman with that of chief executive officer, a practice frowned upon.

  As usual for the second week our sales force retired to a country place, for our annual sessions of self-criticism and struggle, with David Rowe-Beddoe as our Great Helmsman. He was the best thing we had. We had begun to wonder whether he, being much favoured by Gerry, would take over as CEO while Gerry remained as chair-man. Then on our last day Peter Orchard showed up again. He told us that David was leaving the company, and that our new MD would be Charlie Banks. This w
as a man we knew of but did not know. Years earlier he had built the banknote factory at Gateshead. He was now head of Security Express – armoured security trucks, delivery vans, that sort of thing. So Peter Orchard had won, we sighed. It was traumatic for us to lose David, with whom that evening was to be our last.

  Julian and I sat him between us at the dinner table and Julian gave a moving speech of farewell. We all drank numerous healths. From that moment the company began to lose its stature. Orchard was a control freak, with little understanding, a double first in Classics at Cambridge perhaps but too clever by half. He doled out criticism far more frequently than support.

  Later I was called to have a meeting with Charles Banks, a man of the people and one we came to respect for his fair-mindedness. He was heavy-boned with broad hands and wrists, and soft blue eyes with large irises, disconcerting but kindly. Being confronted by him at that hour I was not at my best. So much not so that next day Pat Turner asked me what on earth I had said that made Charles think I fell short of his expectations.

  Nonetheless I had been selected that autumn to attend a three-month residential course at the London Business School. The previous DLR man there had gone on to be general manager of our security print factory at Dunstable where he was doing well. Meanwhile, before my course, I should take a trainee regional manager under my arm, show him the ropes for him to hold the fort while I was in London.

  The London Executive Programme had forty of us, mainly men in early middle age being groomed. The sheer variety of businesses we analysed made me realise how much I had learned from the Com-monwealth Development Corporation. Pat Turner came to the ‘parents’ lunch’. He was alarmed to see the summary of pay scales of the course members. My pay was in the bottom quartile, just ahead of the area manager for the Ulster Gas Board. No wonder De La Rue found difficulty in recruiting. The salary scales were improved by Charles Banks. At the end of the course I was elected to give the farewell speech.