CHAPTER FOUR
I have been a kitchen worker, a salesman of shirts and saucepans and children’s toys in a leading department store in Oxford Street, a distributor of leaflets around my local pub area, a tele-ads salesman, and a policeman. I have also travelled some. Now I am a writer. Not a bad record for someone who went to a red brick university and read politics, philosophy and economics.
I am thirty. Soon to be thirty-something. I cannot do anything about that. I am single and I have no plans to change that. Playing the field is not a description which fits me too snugly, though I am I honestly believe as popular as the next man in my circumstances. I have girl friends; they number in the plural, but they are friends, and
the last time I was more than friends with a woman was almost seven years ago.
She was a nursing sister with a name out of the Fifties. Constance. Constance Cummine, with an e, not a g. In a way that was typical of me. I seem to attract the extraordinary. She worked at the St Margaret’s Hospital on the bank of the Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament, in the operating theatre where some of the country’s most significant heart surgery is carried out. With long auburn hair, happy blue/green eyes, freckles fanning out on either side of her nose, Constance was anything but a Fifties girl. She was most certainly a woman of the Nineties with a self assurance and broad minded attitude to life that made our months together invigorating. Sexual exploration took on a deeper meaning for me as Constance with the auburn hair and I filled our infrequent hours together in laughing, sweating embraces in my small apartment, in bed and breakfast accommodation in Cornwall and Devon where we spent a few weekends together, and on stony earth in wooded countryside. Nor did she, it turned out, mind who knew of her wantonness. I did though, which was why my life changed dramatically as a result.
It was while I was on the verge of drunkenness with some of my sales friends that I made one of the biggest, certainly one of the least thought through decisions, of my life. I would leave London; no, I would leave Britain.
The pub on the corner of the street where I worked the telephones, trying to close out full or half page, full colour or mono, sales with chief executives and managing directors of large companies around the world, was fairly rough and ready. But it was after all just down the street, a few minutes walk during the lunch break, and anything more salubrious was over the bridge on the other side of Paddington railway station.
It was during one of the occasional after work sessions when another of the salesmen, a black would-be stage actor, remarked on his relationship with Constance. He did not say how he knew her, but that he knew I was seeing her.
“She’s nice,” he said. “Nice.”
“Mmm,” I answered simply. The Guinness was working. The pressurised hard sell day was starting to blend into a warm, relaxed evening.
The actor took a deep swig of ale. “She is nice, isn’t she Jason?”
The other salesman with us smiled. “Oh yeah. Constance is nice alright.” He too drank from his glass before turning and calling to an older man behind the bar who wore his hair long, greasy, tied back with a blue string. “Constance, Ben. She’s nice isn’t she?”
The man named Ben did not smile. He looked straight at me. “Are you Constance’s latest?”
When I said I was seeing her, Ben simply said: “Hrrmph” and turned away.
The budding black Olivier sought out the bottom of his glass. “A lot of people know Constance, Zachary,” he said. “She has very many friends, if you take my point.”
I took his point very clearly indeed. Suddenly I was sober.
Within a week I made my mind up, and took the first steps to carrying through my plan.
*
Flying into Hong Kong is an experience not to be missed.
Like travelling to India where life takes on new meaning, where the visitor can understand instantly that how and where he lives is not so bad after all, arriving in Hong Kong by air cannot be repeated elsewhere. It is simply a unique happening.
Mind you, now that the new international airport has been opened on what was once a small island to the west, which was beheaded and levelled, the landing in Hong Kong is less adventuresome. The flight path in is more sedate and the view out of the cabin windows offers less.
When I went there the old Kai Tak airport in the heart of one of the most densely populated areas on earth operated, and planes plunged onto the mile long finger sticking out from Kowloon into the harbour in a sudden hurry. The aircraft seemed to drift across rooftops and then slice between high-rises so passengers could see families eating their meals or watching television screens. There were skid marks on the roofs was what I heard from new friends. I knew there weren’t, but it would not have surprised me if there were.
The bustle of the place assaulted my senses like a damp cloth. There was also the heat. And the smell, a smell special to Hong Kong that disappeared with the old airport for some reason. Perhaps it was the proximity of nullahs. Whatever, it was an unpleasant smell which returning residents such as I sought out because it meant we were home.
Hong Kong was home to me for five years, the first three as a probationary inspector with the Royal Hong Kong Police. That was what Constance had done to me. For me. When I realised that I was one of many lovers she had taken I took flight.
Acquaintances of mine had headed east the year before to become secretaries and librarians and I had recently seen an advertisement for police officers in Hong Kong. So when I decided to abandon British shores I naturally thought of where they had gone, and because Hong Kong was still a Crown Colony then, yet sufficiently removed from my past and present life, it seemed to fit the bill exactly. It all sounded exciting, challenging.
A visit to the Hong Kong Government Office in Mayfair, followed by completion of the necessary applications forms, an interview and subsequent medical and I was soon on my way. To say the transition from telesales in Paddington in London to probationary police inspector in the Far East was marked would be doing an injustice to the English language. The change was mind blowing.
The first six months of my life in the “territory” as so many called it in deference to its soon to be changed sovereignty, was spent at the police training school in Aberdeen where sampans and motorised fishing junks which were floating homes to entire families huddled as flotsam.
I learned the arts and craft of policing. I patrolled the crowded streets in summer khaki or winter blue uniform with pounds of electronic and manual artillery hanging from my waist.
I loved it. I felt powerful. I was earning a respectable income, in a respectable profession, and taking full advantage of it. Life was fast and furious. I worked twenty-four in every thirty-six hours and played hard in the interval. I was involved in the investigation of major crimes which the vast majority of policemen back home would not even dream of confronting, and when off duty I drank copious amounts of the local San Miguel beer and had as many local women as I could afford to lay my hands on. There were exceptionally alluring oriental Constances everywhere and what others thought did not matter. Life felt good. Life felt very good.
In fact, my life was being eroded. After the second year I realised all was not well at all. My health was holding up but my conscience, if that is what it really is, was not. I am blessed/cursed with believing in the rightness of doing the right thing which is not the same as believing in living the Christian way of life or not doing utterly foolish things for the unadulterated pleasure merely of doing so, but it is to me inhibiting in that there always comes a time when something inside me says “enough. Stop what you are doing. Get back on the tracks and start again.”
So I did.
When my three years as a probationary inspector were up I did not renew my contract. I packed it in. I did not try to explain it to those friends who eagerly signed on for another three year stint, but just told them it was not for me and that was that. They knew me well enough to accept my decision. But I did not leave Hong Kong. It was alright to move on from the Force but it was not alright just yet to move out of Hong Kong. Instead, I became a journalist.
I applied for a job as a reporter with The South China Morning Post where I had got to know a couple of reporters and sub-editors. There was no London holiday in between. In truth, it was six months before my parents knew of my changed circumstances. I just moved from a dangerous uniformed life in Mongkok to a fascinating cleaner life on the Island where I worked shorter hours, earned a lower salary and paid an obscene percentage of that salary as my share of the rent of a closet sized flat in Happy Valley. And I carried a notebook and pen rather than a .38 revolver, a baton, handcuffs, a portable radio and a number of other defensive and offensive odds and bobs. I was less well off, but once again, life felt good.
The pressure of working in the media in Hong Kong was greater than pretty well anywhere else. The reason is that there was no union protection in an industry where the proprietor had absolute control. If you did not produce, you were out. There were many other would-be Pulitzer winners out there chafing at the bit to accept a pittance to get on the treadmill which could in a comparatively short time lead to the heady heights of editorship conferring a considerable salary and even more considerable prestige; face.
So while I did not work twenty-four hour shifts any longer, I was constantly aware that if I did not pull my weight in the overall effort to fill the space between the advertisements I would not last.
For totally wrong reasons, trainee journalists such as I was were handed court reporting from very early on. It is considered a safe beat to learn the ropes, whereas practically anywhere else in the world that round is regarded as specialist, littered as it is with potential law suits. I guess in my case, the news editor reckoned he had less to worry about because I was a former police office and therefore could be expected to niftily sidestep any of the legal potholes.
As it transpired it was pretty basic stuff with a group of us from different newspapers and radio stations gathering in the court building press room in the mornings to discuss the day’s cases, some wandering off to actually sit in on them, and then all of us meeting up again later in the afternoon to compare notes. Then it was back to the office, slump down in front of the terminal and process the notes into non-litigious stories for inside pages. Routine, basic reportage. Albeit a collective effort.
From court reporting I progressed to political rounds which involved gathering up copies of speeches to be delivered in the Legislative Council chamber each Wednesday, composing introductions and then subbing down the rest. It also meant developing contacts within the various Government branches and departments and coming up with the occasional exclusive by-lined article.
For the first time I could put my investigative talents to good use. Politics and government are fine hunting grounds for those who like to ask questions. Yet it took a year and a half before the paper’s editor decided that perhaps police rounds would be a suitable place for me.
Zachary Tighe, the former kitchen worker, salesman of shirts and saucepans and children’s toys, distributor of leaflets, tele-ads salesman in England, and policeman in Hong Kong, finally became a serious writer.
That’s what I am today. An investigative writer in my home town of London. One of my employers is Rupert Murdoch, who is a former owner of The South China Morning Post. He sold out long ago, but I did not. I kept up my association and still write the weekly London Diary. My column also appears in a popular afternoon paper in London.
In my latest column I covered what I saw as the deterioration of British society, not specifically or only since the new government had come to power, and more significantly not only because of the riots, but which had been happening for many years.
The problem as I see it is that we as citizens no longer have the responsibilities our parents and grandparents did. We have rights. This means that more and more is stacked in favour of the individual, which as a philosophy stands up, but as a practice leads undeniably in my view to a breakdown in society. It means that everyone, the bad guys included, has an escape route and can reject responsibility in the name of rights. Criminals exercise those rights and the authorities find themselves backed up against a wall with the result that more and more of the criminals are escaping their responsibilities, certainly escaping incarceration. The wrong message is being put out with the consequences being increasingly severe for our society.
That was the sideline subject of my last column. That law and order was under growing threat from more audacious and violent law breakers. It could not be long before Britain grew its own versions of the monsters that prowled the dark side of America.