Absolute FILTH – failed in London try Hong Kong
I lived in Hong Kong for few years in the early 1990s, working on magazines, mainly, and at the time there there was this acronym doing the rounds, a kind of protest about the low calibre of the British guys who were getting very well paid work in the colony (as it was then). FILTH – failed in London, try Hong Kong, they were called. I got called it a few times. Which I always thought it was rather unfair – since I have never tried to get a job in London, let alone failed there, and I wasn’t all that successful in HK either. But anyway, I was reminded of this acronym the other day when a much-respected Hong Kong magazine asked if I would be interviewed for a piece in their My Life section. I said yes, and the following is the full, unedited transcript of the South China Morning Post piece, which ran a few weeks ago. Hope you enjoy it!
At boarding school in Surrey in the mid-1970s, a fellow pupil asked me, after I had told him I was born in Beijing, whether that meant I was Chinese. “Oh yes,” I said, “that means I possess a Chinese soul.”
OK, in my defence, I was nine and just beginning to enjoy making up stories. The truth was far more mundane. My father was a British diplomat, who was posted to Beijing three times during his career, and who ended up British Ambassador there in the late 1980s. I don’t remember anything of China as a baby – we left in 1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution when I was one – but my family returned to Asia in the mid-1970s, when my father was appointed Hong Kong Political Adviser to the Governor Murray MacLehose, and my memories of that time and place are vivid.
We lived on the Peak, in a large white house on Mount Kellett Road and I flew out every holiday. I remember going camping on High West with my brother John one summer. I was about 10 and he was 14. We marched off with all our clanking gear and slept on the bare mountainside, made a fire and cooked bacon. I discovered afterwards that my mother had been freaking out the whole time. The radio had reported that an escaped criminal was at large in the vicinity.
Hong Kong in the 1970s was a happy time. I recall junk trips and picnics and visits to a bustling market in Central where I bought a tiny transistor radio – my prized possession.
In the early 1980s, after a stint in Africa, my father was appointed to the Asia desk in London and we regularly sat around the dinner table in Kent discussing Chinese politics and events in Asia. At the time, my dad was preparing the Joint Declaration, a treaty between Britain and China to shape the future of Hong Kong after 1997.
I was at Marlborough then and beginning to develop a major reading habit. I constantly had my nose in a novel, sometimes even walking and reading at the same time. I read mostly westerns – J.T. Edson, was my favourite – but also thrillers and historical fiction. I discovered John Le Carré – and fell in love – as well as the Greek novels of Mary Renault.
After leaving Marlborough, my life took an unexpected turn. I went on holiday to Greece and didn’t come back. When I ran low on money, I found work as a fruit picker in Crete. Actually, most of the time I hung out on the beach, chatting up tourist girls and drinking. I discovered a sub-culture I had never imagined: working-class Brits wandering the world, picking up manual work here and there, and having a ton of fun.
I cancelled my plans to read Chemistry at Southampton University and, I think, inspired by John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, I embarked on a fun but penniless career as a beach-bum.
Being perpetually broke palled after a year. I remember one miserable period of three days in the autumn when me and my friends just lay in our room, starving, drinking black tea, and occasionally venturing out to steal oranges off the trees for sustenance. Then one of us managed to get us work picking olives in the mountains of Crete – and, miraculously, all was well.
But I’d had enough of living on Cannery Row. I got myself back to England in the mid-1980s, hitchhiking through Yugoslavia (as it was then), Italy and France, finally got my academic shit together and applied to Edinburgh University to read Linguistics.
Linguistics became Social Anthropology after two years of study, and in my third year, the university sent me to Bali to do fieldwork for my dissertation, entitled Magic, Sorcery and Society. That was a bizarre experience. I hung out with traditional healers (aka witchdoctors) in a remote mountain village with no electricity.
The healers told me about the power of witches, known as leyak, and their queen Rangda (below). I witnessed exorcisms – similar to the one in The Omen – in which the healer has a slanging match with the demon inside the body of the patient.
Once, riding home through the dark jungle on a motorbike, the engine died and refused to restart. As I sat there, I saw a ball of light, a foot or two off the ground, moving towards me. The healer had said leyak sometimes appeared as balls of fire and I was, I admit, shitting myself. So, I reached for my long-abandoned Christianity. I began to belt out Jerusalem at the top of my public-school lungs, astride my bike in dark jungle. Astonishingly, it worked.
The power of Christ compelled the ball of light to quickly move away and disappear. The Lord is with me, I thought. The engine on the bike restarted and I rode home vowing to be a better man – or at least go to church on Sunday once in a while.
Only later did it occur to me that, the kerosine lamps the locals carried in this area without electricity would look exactly like a ball of fire at knee height. And a strange figure bellowing in incomprehensible English in the middle of the jungle would seem to a Balinese farmer the epitome of a howling leyak.
After university, I flew to Beijing for to see my folks. I had no plan, really, but to travel around China with a camera and a vague idea that I wanted to write for a living. After a few months of shoestring travel from the Great Wall to Yunnan, I ran out of money, so I got on a train heading east to Hong Kong to look for work.
I arrived in the colony with a backpack full of dirty clothes and about US$10 in my pocket and was lucky enough to get a job teaching English.
Hong Kong in the early-1990s was a fantastic place to be a brash young Englishman. Work hard, play hard was the colony motto. I got a job on a magazine, proofreading and writing small bits of copy, and eventually got a position on the Hongkong Standard newspaper, writing for their Saturday magazine. I spent four happy years in Hong Kong, drinking too much in Lan Kwai Fong and Wanchai at night, bashing out magazine features by day. I had a ball. I made many fantastic, creative friends and enjoyed uncountable wild parties, pursued many lovely girls, and got very little sleep. But I was nearing thirty and knew the partying had to stop.
I returned to London and got work at the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and after a few years I moved to the Financial Times. But I missed Asia and, when the FT offered me a job as their stringer in Delhi, I bit their hand off. But the job turned out to be less fun than I had expected. I was bored and lonely in Delhi, and my London boss hated me, so when 9/11 happened, I resigned and went up to Pakistan to freelance.
I wanted to see war first hand. It seems insane now but I had a thing about testing myself, my manhood, in those days, seeing how far I could push my luck.
I was in Islamabad for a few weeks waiting to get into Afghanistan and writing for any paper who would take my copy. It was a bizarre, terrifying time. I remember covering an anti-Western demonstration in Peshawar, tens of thousands of Pashtuns chanting “Death to the UK!” I was running beside the mob and I tripped, and that was one of a handful times in my life that I thought – this it is: I’m dead.
I was surrounded by a gang of Taliban who moments before had been calling for my blood but who, seeing me fall, helped me to my feet and took me to a nearby chai shop where I was given sweet tea and a good deal of genuine sympathy.
I got into Afghanistan, and reported from Jalalabad for a few weeks. I was in the bomb-eviscerated caves of Tora Bora just a day after Osama bin Laden fled them. But freelancing in a war zone is not practical. I had no back up, little money, and one night, when I came back from the battlefield after an 18-hour day, and banged out a piece for The Independent, I had an epiphany. I had been mortared and machine-gunned, I had eaten nothing all day (it was Ramadan) and I was exhausted, staying in a half-built hotel, sleeping on concrete. I knew I would be paid £70 for that article. This doesn’t work, I thought. I’m going to get my leg blown off, or be shot, for £70. I made plans to return to London.
I got a soft day job at The Times. I was working 10am-6pm on Body&Soul, a Saturday section aimed primarily at women. I was titled deputy chief-sub-editor and I subbed and wrote headlines and occasionally articles. Body&Soul was not really my thing. But at least nobody was trying to kill me.
I was nearing forty, and realised I had nothing: no money, no woman, no house, and a job I didn’t much care for. So, I made a plan. I worked out what I really wanted to do, not wars, not travel. I wanted to write historical fiction in the style of Bernard Cornwell, a novelist I greatly admire, from my home.
It took me five years to get it together, getting up at four to work on my novel before heading into The Times to edit other people’s copy. But my first book – Outlaw, a dark tale about a gangster-ish Robin Hood – was a great success. That one book has sold over quarter of a million copies – so far. I still get a few thousand in royalties annually from it sixteen years later. And, earlier this month, I published the 11th book in the bestselling Outlaw Chronicles series.
I did one other very significant thing at The Times. One of the editors gave me a flyer advertising a “Psychic Love Coach” and told me to go and do a story on her. Make it funny, the editor said, be as mean as you like. So, I presented myself at this love coach’s west London front door. I didn’t knock, chuckling to myself that if she were truly a psychic she would know I was there. Ho-ho.
The psychic turned out to be a Hong Kong person – a lovely half-Chinese, half-Irish lady, who read my fortune in a dog-eared pack of playing cards. She made me hold a pair of “magic” crystals and meditate, chanting “I deserve to find love! I will find love!” every morning and evening. Then she made me go speed-dating.
That was how I met my wonderful wife, Mary. I invited the psychic to our wedding, and Mary and I have two teenage children and live in a medieval farmhouse in Kent. We celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary this year.
My life is much more placid these days. Much happier. I’ve given up wild partying and write fiction full time, and only occasionally venture abroad. I’ve written 22 novels and my brand new series kicks off in late August with Templar Traitor, an epic tale based on the true story of an Englishman who fought for Genghis Khan.
This story of a young man in Asia, involved in foreign wars, living among fascinating alien peoples – resonates with me. Can’t think why. Maybe because my fanciful schoolboy lie was not so very far from the truth. My soul truly is Asian.
End of magazine piece.
In hindsight, I think the acronym that most accurately applies to me would be LUCKY – London unknown, China knows you! But, if you can think of a better one, feel free to tell me using the “Contact” tab above.
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