New Home I

 

New Home

Part 1 – Taipo (New Territories, Hong Kong)

 

 

On arrival in Hong Kong from China in October 1949, without my father, we were fortunate to be able to take refuge at an uncle’s place at Diamond Hill. This uncle and aunt had three children then and with six of us, my mother and an aunt of hers, me and two younger sisters and an older cousin, Diamond Hill soon proved too crowded to say the least. My mother somehow managed to find a flat in Mong Kok, above an abattoir.   Yes, an abattoir.  The rent must have been quite cheap!

 

Although our flat was on the third floor, we could hear the noise early in the morning when activities started.  Luckily, it did not put me off meat or indeed medicine.  Strange!

 

Still, the rent was considered expensive when compared with the more rural parts of Hong Kong. Also, being in the middle of the wholesale market place of Kowloon, it was considered rough and perhaps not so suitable for families with young children.

Many years later, I ventured back to the same street. The building was still there, just about, but the abattoir had long since moved to probably some modern premises.  There used to be areas in Kowloon that no developer would imagine developing, but that has changed, with the old Kai Tak airport moved and height restrictions lifted.  I would not be too sorry to see that part of Kowloon redeveloped.

 

Anyway, as soon as father arrived, a month after us, he found a house in The Forbidden Hill in Taipo, New Territories. What a lovely name for a place!  The name has since been changed to Glamorous Hill, “forbidden” and “glamorous” having the same Cantonese pronunciation.  Not as good, I thought. If Forbidden is good enough for our Emperors, it is good enough for the Cockroach Catcher.

 

The weeks of the slaughter house noise would now be truly behind us. My father accompanied the truck that took most of our possessions and the rest of us went by train.  We got off the train at the then Taipo Market Station.

 

I have this peculiar memory of a bright blue sky and green hills as soon as the train emerged from the Shatin Tunnel, the one going through the Lion Rock.  Perhaps it was the difference between the city and the countryside, known as the New Territories, the part that China never ceded to Britain post Opium War but leased for 99 years, with the lease terminating on the last day of June 1997.

 

It was the age of steam.  As the train was about to go through the Shatin Tunnel, it sounded the horns and passengers in the know alerted us that all the windows had to be shut.  Emerging from the tunnel, we could see soot deposits on the window panes.  Eventually I had to commute by train to my secondary (grammar) school in Kowloon.  I had to shut the window if I happened to sit next to one.  It was quite a heavy window for me and I had to lift it by the leather strap and secure the panel on a latch at the top.  Not shutting the window in time would mean sooty face and sooty arms!

 

Our home was a longish walk from the train station.  A rather complicated set of steps led up to our house on the hill.

“Pigs!”  Yes, real ones, right at the entrance to our compound.  Well, apparently I was not going to be rid of these.  Luckily we were not in a block of flats but in one of a pair of semi-detached village cottages with a reasonable terrace and yard.  So the pigs were not so near that we could hear them inside our home.  As it turned out, the farmer and his wife lived in a wooden hut just above us on the slope and the wife was our sewage clearer.

 

Our home was very much a simple house, with very thick walls, and a central front door flanked by two windows.  Being semi-detached, the house had a free side wall with a window giving natural light to the sitting area.  The seat by that window would become my favourite for reading books.   It was so pleasant to curl up with three or four books and smell the jasmine outside.  I remember spending much time over my physics reading there.

 

The house looked as if it had two floors but alas, only the ground floor was habitable.  Some damage had been done to the upper floor and the landlord decided it was simpler to let it as a single storey home.  Our roof was not made of traditional tiles like those around us but of corrugated iron, and not that secure as we found out when Typhoon Mary hit Hong Kong in 1960.

 

There were two main bedrooms, with six foot high woodboard partitions and a sliding door that nobody bothered to use.  We all had mosquito nets, which you might be surprised to hear not only kept mosquitoes out, most of the time, and sometimes even kept cockroaches at bay!  Yes, cockroaches, my nickname-sake.  For those that have never lived with cockroaches, beware of your toes touching the net, or you might have them “cleaned” by the insects.  Ha! Ha!

 

In many ways, our home in the Forbidden Hill had the feel of a Chinese village house typical of the South that I later came to recognise through my travels into China.  Typically there would be a giant wooden front door that had huge wooden shutters on the inside to secure it at night.  On the outside you could lock it with a push bar and padlock. 

 

The kitchen was in a single storey out building, separated from the main house by a narrow three feet wide, open but walled-in passage way.  This kept the house safe from fires, and also gave us free access to our neighbours’ house through the back doors, which were never locked.

 

My eighteen years old cousin who left China with us slept outside the bedrooms in the corridor leading to the kitchen.  She never complained and was more like a big sister to us and a daughter to my parents.

 

For a long time, our main fuel was dried grass collected from the hill at the back of our house and, if we were lucky, dried twigs as well.  Charcoal was used sometimes, but it was a sort of back up as it cost money. 

 

Soon, we ‘upgraded’ from charcoal to kerosene, but in some respect,  that might well have been a “downgrade” because of its unpleasant smell.

 

Primitive as it was, we had running water. To be fair, the colonial government did well to supply us with clean tap water, as we were half way up the hill, the Forbidden Hill, remember?!  Our water came from a stream the other side of Taipo and to this day it is still one of the best water for making our favourite Teochew tea of Iron Goddess of Mercy.  The water was also supposed to be good for growing bean sprouts.  Most of the bean sprouts sold in Hong Kong were grown here.

 

There was, however, no hot water on tap.  In the summer, it was cold shower everyday, at first from a hose and soon we had the luxury of a shower head on a wooden structure created by my father. In the winter, we boiled water and poured it into a very small iron bath tub.

 

Toilet? What was that? We had spittoons and father boarded off a corner of the kitchen so that it became our toilet. Later he built a wooden hut between the main house and the kitchen. That is why we had the sewage clearing lady.  Enough said.  During one of our re-union dinners, one of my medical school classmates who is a native from Fan Ling, one train stop from Taipo, described how when he first visited a classmate living in the “city”, he was completely astonished to find a flushing toilet.  I felt so much better after that.

 

The water from the kitchen drained into an open gutter that ran through the passage between the house and the kitchen. Father built a slanting half roof over this so that when it rained, cooked food could reach the main house without getting drenched.  At other times, food preparations were done in that sheltered open space.  In fact it was a cool place to sit in the hot summer months.  

There would be a very nice breeze, probably because it was shaded from the sun.  I quite enjoyed sitting there, watching my mother peeling, cutting and preparing vegetables.

 

Refrigerator?  It had to wait for some years to materialize, but that is another story.

 

Being half way up the hill, what we did have was a phenomenal view of rice paddy fields right in front of our house.  Beyond the paddy fields was the railway, and then some more village huts against the rolling hills backdrop. A river ran along the railway track and the small streams supplying the river had wonderful fish life and water insects that was a delight when I showed my biology teacher years later. In those early years the water was stunningly clear.