Paradise Revisited
In the end it was the lack of Marmite that drove Bob Drummond away.
It wasn’t that you couldn’t buy it anywhere. The gloopy yeast extract was still available in plenty of shops around town. His local supermarket continued to stock Vegemite, which was a perfectly palatable alternative for his morning toast. But when they dropped the Marmite, they finally confirmed the suspicion that had been forming in his mind for several years: this wasn’t his home anymore. The place had moved on, and it was time he did the same.
Hong Kong had become his home at some point in the eighties. He couldn’t put his finger on the exact date, or even the year, but there had come a time when ‘home’ stopped meaning a small town in the Scottish Borders and became his government-issued flat at the bottom of Ede Road in Kowloon Tong. Without realising it, he had slipped comfortably into a niche.
Most evenings he would stop off at the Club on his way home for a quick San Miguel. Well, it was usually two, but never more than two, because he was the only bachelor in the group of old hands, and the others had dinner waiting for them at home. On weekends, he would be back at the Club for a few games of lawn bowls and lunch by the pool – Singapore noodles with a good splash of chili sauce to pep them up a wee bit. He usually dined at home, where his part-time maid would leave him grilled chops with mashed potato and boiled vegetables under an upturned plate on the kitchen counter. Depending on the evening, he would choose between HP Brown Sauce and Lee Kum Kee chili sauce. And if he had a slice or two of cheddar for his supper, he had the option of Branston Pickle or mango chutney, with which he had become acquainted on his regular Friday trips to the curry house with his expat colleagues. Drummond felt his culinary horizons had been widened beyond measure since leaving Scotland.
Some of his friends at the Club left in ’97, not wanting to work for the new regime. But Drummond was happy to stay. His branch of government, the Agriculture and Fisheries Department, became the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, but nothing else really changed. As the Chief Arboreal Botanist, his main responsibility was the reforestation of country parks, and he enjoyed his work. The Club made use of his expertise too, electing him to the Committee, and putting him in charge of its extensive gardens, which formed an unexpected oasis of green in the middle of Kowloon. He planted flowering trees from around the British Commonwealth, and if he ever stayed for more than two beers in the evening, he would bid them good night as he tottered through the gardens to Gascoigne Road in search of a taxi.
What Bob Drummond really loved about the Club was the video library. It was full of VHS cassettes of BBC sitcoms, and box sets of documentaries on things like British Castles and the Normandy Landings: everything a displaced Brit needed to feel at home. He would sit in his flat in the summer twilight watching The Two Ronnies or Morecambe and Wise, while fruit bats squabbled in the mango tree outside his open balcony window.
Retirement brought some changes – he had to move out of the government flat, for one. But he filled his days playing bowls and getting under the feet of the gardeners at the Club. The Committee made him an Honorary Life Member and he tried not to notice that there were fewer and fewer people in the bar to have a sundowner with. Those that did pop in were getting younger by the day. He knew that they chuckled at his colonial garb of tailored shorts and long socks, but a bachelor of his age wasn’t going to change the way he dressed, even if it was getting difficult to find replacement socks.
Having blocked it for years, Drummond was finally overruled by the rest of the Committee, who voted to close the video library to make way for a fitness studio. Apparently, nobody watched videos – or even DVDs – anymore. He took a few boxes of cassettes home, but it wasn’t the same. The ritual was broken. And so, the seeds of his departure were sown. He understood why the supermarket had stopped selling Marmite. The locals didn’t eat it, and the new breed of expats didn’t come to this part of town. They all lived in Mid-Levels and Disco Bay, and went to fitness studios.
There was no point feeling sad. The world moved on and that was the end of it.
One evening, as he flicked through endless superhero films in search of something to watch, he thought of his old home on the River Tweed. His brother still lived there. He had been recently widowed, but he seemed happy enough. It would be nice to see a little more of him now that they were both retired and on their own. In bed that night, Drummond dreamed of the old pub on the High Street, which hosted an annual ceilidh. He remembered being swung around by strong arms, with the happy faces of his parents and their friends flying past him in a blur. Everything was right with the world, and wee Bobby Drummond could conceive of nothing more wonderful than those evenings. How could anything go wrong when all the adults he knew and loved were in the same room, all happy and relaxed? Heaven, he decided back then, was a ceilidh. When he woke in the morning, the decision was made. Although he suspected he was being a sentimental old fool, Drummond had decided to leave.
Old fool indeed, he thought as he sat in the pub with his brother. It had been purchased by a national chain and refurbished as a sports bar long enough ago to have become tatty, without regaining any of its lost character. When the conversation died, as it always did after the first exchange of pleasantries, the old Drummond boys sat watching the football on different screens. It was the same Scottish teams he remembered, but the business of actually playing the game had been outsourced to Spaniards and Scandinavians, with names he knew he would never remember. The pub had a manager now, not a landlord, who went home to Edinburgh at the weekend, and had never heard of the famous annual ceilidhs. His brother said he didn’t remember them either, but then he’d never been one for that teuchter nonsense. Country dancing was for Highlanders and American tourists, he said. Bob Drummond found he had nothing to say, and he didn’t know what to ask people to get them talking.
The old sweet shop had gone from the High Street, along with its big glass jars of sherbet and chunks of fudge, which the locals called tablet. Drummond had not stepped through its doors in half a century, but he still mourned its loss. There was Marmite in abundance at the village Co-op, but no Lee Kum Kee chili sauce. Would he like some Cajun Spicy Wing Sauce? asked the woman behind the counter. He thought not. He was a bit old to be changing his diet for a second time. All the years in Hong Kong had changed the shape of his life. It was nothing drastic, and it had happened imperceptibly. But he could no longer slot back into place in Scotland, or anywhere else for that matter.
He found his body shrinking inside all the layers of clothes. He worried that he was sickening, that the country of his birth was slowly killing him. Each winter, he wondered whether summer would ever come again. When it failed to show up to his satisfaction for the third year in a row, Bob Drummond took matters in hand.
He treated himself to a haircut and a shave at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Barbershop. They always did a wonderful job. ‘You’ve made me look like a younger man,’ he said, winking at the barber as he handed him a generous tip. It was true. It was as though he had shed a layer of dull old skin. It felt so very good to be back.
He strolled downstairs and bought himself a copy of the South China Morning Post. The local news didn’t seem to have changed much, which was reassuring. He would do the crossword and the sudoku by the Club’s pool in the afternoon. He took the MTR three stops to Jordan. The train was cool and clean as ever. He admired the handsome cove reflected in the train windows, dressed in nice smart shorts and long socks. He hadn’t studied his legs for years. They were still good and strong, and his knees would tan-up nicely after a few days in the sun.
It was only when he came out of the station and started to walk along Gascoigne Road to the Club that he started to feel a little nervous. He had reconciled himself to the Fitness Studio and the empty bar, but what if they had messed with his gardens, or taken Singapore noodles off the menu? He reached the side gate, which was always kept locked, and fumbled in his pocket for the key. When he was elected an Honorary Life Member, he had been presented with his own key on an engraved brass fob so that he wouldn’t have to walk around to the main entrance. But would it still fit?
It fitted perfectly. The lock and the hinges on the gate were well-oiled. As he walked along the little path that led up the slope beside the bowling green, the warm sun shone through the leaves of his trees. Three different varieties of Bauhinia were in flower, their white, pink and purple orchid-like flowers adding a gentle scent to the breeze. It was early in the year for them to be in full bloom.
‘Celebrating my return, are you?’ he asked. The old banyan at the top of the slope now shaded half of the clubhouse roof. ‘And you need cutting back, you rascal,’ he said approvingly.
Along the path beside the tennis court stood the row of Chinese fan palms he had planted. They were fully mature now and covered in the small black fruit that brought birds to the gardens.
Settling down at his table beside the pool, he positioned himself so that his knees were in the sunshine and his body in the shade of a large blue parasol. He needn’t have worried. The Singapore noodles arrived with a little dish of chili sauce on the side, and the brown bottles of San Miguel were still very, very cold. The waiter was familiar, though Drummond couldn’t quite remember his name.
The General Manager came outside to pay his respects. Drummond couldn’t remember his name either, but his greeting was effusive. He hoped everything was to Mister Drummond’s satisfaction. They had been working hard to keep the gardens looking good, he said.
‘It’s wonderful,’ said Drummond, with a laugh. ‘If you’d only kept the video library, I’d never need to leave.’
The General Manager smiled back. ‘If you’d like to come with me, Mister Drummond, I have something to show you.’
He led Drummond into the clubhouse, which was just as he remembered it. His name was still there in gold letters on the list of Honorary Life Members and captains of the lawn bowls team. The General Manager took him into the administrative office and unlocked a door he had never been through before. A line of old-fashioned neon tubes pinged and flickered into life. As the lights warmed up, Drummond took in the rows and rows of shelves packed with thousands of dusty video cassettes.
‘They were kept in storage in case somebody wanted them,’ said the General Manager.
‘Incredible!’ said Drummond. ‘I had no idea.’ He walked down one of the aisles, trailing his fingers along the cassettes. The room was narrow but deep. The rows of videotapes gave way to shelves of big glass jars, full of old-fashioned sweets of every description. Then came the jars of Branston Pickle, mango chutney and endless bottles of HP Sauce and Lee Kum Kee.
‘Heaven!’ breathed Drummond, inspecting a display of knee-length socks. ‘Absolute heaven.’
‘It is, Mister Drummond,’ said the General Manager with a warm smile. ‘That’s exactly what it is. And we’re so very happy to have you here.’
‘Now,’ he went on, ‘everybody is waiting in the bar for your ceilidh. Your parents are here, with all the old hands from the bar. Take a few moments to look around, and then you can go up and join them.’
Julian Lyden is a Hong Kong-based writer with an interest in folklore, crime and the unseen forces which shape our lives.
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