The Bird Fancier: a Journey to Peking: A Journey to Peking

THE BIRD FANCIER A JOURNEY TO PEKING ALASTAIR MORRISON THE BIRD FANCIER A JOURNEY TO PEKING ALSO BY ALASTAIR MORRIS...

Author: Alastair Morrison | Robert Hefner

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THE BIRD FANCIER A JOURNEY TO PEKING

ALASTAIR MORRISON


ALSO BY ALASTAIR MORRISON Fair Land Sarawak: Some Recollections of an Expatriate Official The Eastman Case: Reflections of an Onlooker


ALASTAIR MORRISON

Pandanus Books Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies The Australian National University

Cover picture: Cage birds for sale at Lung Fu Ssu, by Hedda Morrison. © Pandanus Books 2001 This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Morrison, Alastair, 1915– . The bird fancier : a journey to Peking.

ISBN 1 74076 006 9 1. Morrison, Alastair, 1915– - Journeys - China. 2. China Description and travel. I. Hefner, Robert. II. Title.

919.50442

Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Production: Ian Templeman, Duncan Beard and Emily Brissenden

To Hedda

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The cover photograph and the photographs on pages 160 and 182 are by Hedda Morrison, used by permission of the Power House Museum, Sydney. The photograph of Alastair Morrison on page viii is by Reg Alder. All other photographs are from the collection of Alastair Morrison. This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

vi

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

Growing Pains

9

Cambridge 1934–37

29

I visit Peru 1937–38

57

Viva Chile 1938–39

91

Peru again and on to China 1939–40

113

Prolonged Rest Cure 1940–42

131

Pastures New 1942

161

Force 136 1944–45

183

Better late than never 1945

207

I plan a leave in Peking 1946

235

vii

Alastair at his home, St Andrews Village, in Canberra. Photo: Reg Alder

viii

INTRODUCTION

E

ven before I met Alastair Morrison in 1993, his name was inextricably linked in my imagination with China. Alastair and his wife Hedda, who had died in 1991, were old friends of my wife’s family, who owned a copy of Hedda’s wonderful book, A Photographer in Old Peking. The book is filled with striking pictures of musicians, magicians, hawkers, bird fanciers and the myriad others who coloured the street life of Peking in the 1930s. Shortly after I met Alastair he presented my wife and me with a copy of his privately published memoir, The Road to Peking, which contained, among other recollections, detailed descriptions of the time he spent with Hedda in Peking when he was a young man. It was another vivid insight into a world that has long since passed, and reading it was very much like reading the companion volume to A Photographer in Old Peking. The story of how Alastair came to find himself in Peking shortly after the outbreak of World War II is a long and fascinating one, but to understand it fully, one must first know a little about his unusual family history. He was born in Peking on 24 August 1915, the second of three sons born to George Ernest Morrison, a native of Geelong, Victoria,

1

THE BIRD FANCIER A Journey to Peking

and his wife Jennie (nee Wark Robin), a New Zealander whose mother had also been born in Victoria. G. E. Morrison was a medical doctor and journalist who travelled widely and published a book, An Australian in China, in 1895, describing his remarkable 100-day, 5000km journey through China the year before. In 1897 he was appointed Peking correspondent for The Times, and soon became one of the most influential foreign correspondents of his era, a world authority on China known widely as ‘Morrison of Peking’. A detailed account of his life is contained in the book Morrison of Peking by Cyril Pearl (Angus & Robertson, 1967; Penguin, 1970).The Morrison Lecture, given annually at the Australian National University, was established in his honour in 1932. In 1912, G. E. Morrison became political adviser to Yuan Shih-k’ai, the first president of the Chinese Republic, and it was while serving in that role that he took his family to England in 1919 while he travelled on to France with the Chinese delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. He died in England in 1920. Alastair Morrison was not to see the city of his birth again until 1940. His mother died in 1923, leaving instructions that her sons were to be raised in England. The three orphaned boys were placed under the guardianship of a distant cousin who arranged for their education at English public schools and universities, and while they were young they continued living at home with their nanny who had come to England with them from China. One of Alastair’s early memories is of being allowed to sit in the drawing room on Sunday evenings and look through the plates in Thorburn’s British Birds. ‘Birds have always fascinated me,’ he writes. ‘As long as I can remember they have excited my interest and imagination, beautiful creatures and great travellers, making great journeys to and from far parts of the world.’ That fascination with birds and their peripatetic habits was the impulse behind many of his own travels which took him, as a young man, through Britain, France, Spain, Norway, Swedish Lapland, Iceland, and, upon his graduation from Cambridge University in 1937, to Peru and Chile, where he collected bird specimens for the British Museum and live birds for the London Zoo and private aviculturists.

2

Introduction

His account of those travels in the first half of The Bird Fancier is an engaging and often amusing collection of anecdotes and observations of the places and people he encounters, from the famous — such as the poet W. H. Auden, whom he met on a ship to Iceland — to the obscure, such as the Indian, Caillupe, who was his assistant at a remote lake high in the Peruvian Andes where he was collecting ducks. Alastair entertained the hope of supporting himself indefinitely through his ornithological work, and mapped out plans for ‘one journey to Tierra del Fuego after Bronze-winged and Crested Ducks, and perhaps King Penguins as well, which are said to breed off Cape Horn, and another to Paraguay after the beautiful little Ringed Teal. After that I thought to hunt pheasants in Western China and Kashmir and the Shan Hills.They were happy dreams.’ His plans were interrupted when he sustained a serious knee injury in the Andes and was immobilised for a time. War had broken out in Europe and ‘It was a little difficult to know what to do next,’ he writes. ‘This was the period of the phoney war, and men from overseas were not wanted in England at that time. I did not wish to return half crippled. A more inviting prospect was contained in a letter from my brother Ian, now in Shanghai, suggesting that I should come to China.’ On the way to China he visited his younger brother Colin in Hong Kong before sailing on to Shanghai, where he spent some time with Ian and saw a doctor whose advice was that he should take a four-month rest cure to enable his knee to heal. Soon after he arrived in Peking he was introduced to an English woman, Miss Bieber, who was soon to depart for the United States and invited him to stay in her Chinese-style house. Through Miss Bieber he met her German secretary, Hedda Hammer, and the two rapidly became good friends. Hedda, a talented photographer who detested Nazism, had leapt at the opportunity of leaving Germany in 1933 to work for a photographic firm in Peking. ‘She was small, energetic despite childhood polio which had left her with a permanent limp, and had a winning smile,’ Alastair writes of Hedda. ‘Miss Bieber had left her to look after her house

3


while she was in America. To a large extent she soon found herself looking after me as well. And so developed the bond that became the mainstay of my life.’ Over the following months, with Hedda as his guide, Alastair came under the spell of the city of his birth. The tone of his writing becomes charged with excitement as he describes the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and street life of old Peking, a city whose people and monuments were also being captured in photographs by Hedda. Meanwhile, the war was escalating and Alastair took a job in the British Embassy in Peking, working as a cypher officer in a small intelligence unit. He stayed on in the Japanese-occupied city until 1942 when he was included in an exchange of Japanese and Allied diplomatic staffs. For the duration of the war he continued to record his impressions of the people and places he visited. He went to South Africa briefly, and then on to Ceylon and India, where he became a captain in the Indian Army.With his own personal dreams on hold, he immersed himself in wartime life with a kind of bemused detachment, never losing his sense of humour and fun despite situations which challenged him both mentally and physically, including breaking his leg while training as a parachutist near the end of the war. When the war ended in 1945 he was serving in Malaya, and acted as a liaison officer with the communist-inspired resistance movement, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, until that organisation was stood down. Communication with Hedda, who remained in Peking during the war, had been difficult, and although they were not formally engaged, Alastair ‘had every intention of returning to Peking if I survived the war’. After the Japanese surrendered he managed to convey several messages to her through various people, including a friend of Hedda’s, Dr Hoeppli, the Red Cross representative. ‘A dignified, portly man with a sense of occasion, he had known Hedda for years,’ Alastair writes. ‘He called on her in formal clothes, complete with

4

Introduction

silver-topped cane. He came, he said, to congratulate her on her impending marriage. When she expressed some surprise, he gravely informed her that when a gentleman inquired after a lady in the way Mr Morrison had inquired after Hedda, he intended to marry her.’ Alastair eventually was able to make his way back to Peking, and he and Hedda were married there in July 1946. His descriptions of life in post-war Peking provide a valuable historical perspective on the effects of war on China. Alastair and Hedda returned to England in 1947 to visit his grandmother and nanny. While in England he was offered a post in Sarawak with the British Colonial Service, and The Bird Fancier ends with his and Hedda’s arrival in Sarawak in 1947, where they lived for the next 19 years before moving to Canberra in 1966. In Sarawak Hedda continued to produce a remarkable body of photographs depicting the people and customs. Many of those photographs were reproduced in Alastair’s earlier book Fair Land Sarawak: Some Recollections of an Expatriate Official, published in 1993 by the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University in New York. It was in the summer of 1948 that Alastair typed out the first draft of The Bird Fancier. He sent it off to a few publishers, but without success, and nearly half a century passed until, in 1993, at the suggestion of friends, he revised the manuscript and published it privately under the title The Road to Peking. In a preface he wrote: It is not a detailed biography but rather a loosely connected narrative containing some of the recollections of the first 32 years of my life that I can bear to live with. It would call for an infinitely longer volume if it was candidly to contain all the recollections that I would prefer to forget. They are legion. And I find that they are the ones which most often, from far away and long ago, come winging back to prick my conscience and to jolt my self-esteem... Going through the memoir again, one thing strikes me above all else: the extraordinary amount of kindness

5


from people in every walk of life, kindness that was often undeserved and unrequited, that I have been privileged to enjoy. I have been more than fortunate in that regard. May my innumerable benefactors all be blessed in Heaven. The Morrisons travelled widely in Australia. Camper-vanning was their favourite source of recreation. Until her death in 1991, Hedda remained active as a photographer and both she and Alastair became strong supporters of environmental activities in the ACT. Alastair continued this interest after Hedda’s death, providing generous financial support and other assistance which made possible the publication, in 1993, of Field Guide to the Birds of the ACT and, in 1997, of Reptiles & Frogs of the Australian Capital Territory. In 1994 a retrospective of Hedda’s photographs, along with a sampling of the Morrisons’ extensive collection of Chinese chueitze, or toggles, was held at the Power House Museum in Sydney; the following year, the exhibition came to the National Library of Australia in Canberra.

When I first read the private edition of The Road to Peking in 1993 I too came under the spell of the old Peking about which Alastair had written, and in my capacity as literary editor of The Canberra Times I made some effort to bring the book to the attention of a publisher who might make it available to the wider audience I felt it deserved. Unfortunately, nothing came of those efforts until last year, when it was suggested that the book would be ideal for Pandanus Books, the new publishing arm at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. Ian Templeman, head of the publications unit at the School, eagerly embraced the idea and commissioned me to edit the book. The Bird Fancier is a slightly shorter version of The Road to Peking, though most of the original material remains. Certain passages and phrases have been condensed to ensure the forward

6

Introduction

momentum of the narrative, and all efforts have been made to preserve the essential character of Alastair’s prose. The old spellings of Chinese place names have been retained, to reflect the geopolitical realities of the world in the 1930s and 1940s. Other terms, such as Moslem and Mohammedan, have been updated to reflect widespread contemporary usage. Certain comments which appeared originally in the body of the text, and others which have been added by Alastair as afterthoughts or further explanations of the original events, have been appended as footnotes. It is important to keep in mind that this is a young man’s memoir, written when Alastair was 33. There is, in the writing, a reserve about personal matters which might seem quaint to readers of contemporary, more confessional memoirs. But Alastair does, after all, describe himself as ‘an ornithological anachronism, a misplaced relic of the 19th century’, and few who read this memoir can fail to feel a twinge of loss at the passing of such a world and such a time. Recently, Alastair and I were talking about the many long months that he had spent on board ships during his travels as a young man, and how that universe of shipboard life had long since disappeared. ‘Those were the days before backpackers,’ Alastair said.‘I was a rare bird, like Hedda in Peking. She was a rare bird taking photographs. There was a sort of inevitability about our coming together. Meeting Hedda was the most important thing of my life, and it was fantastic being in love in Peking at that time.’ In those few words he paid tribute to the two great loves of his life: first and foremost, Hedda; but second, and always with him, from his earliest recollections right up to the present, his fascination for birds, those ‘beautiful creatures and great travellers’. Alastair Morrison has been, throughout his long and fascinating life, a bird fancier. The Bird Fancier is a tribute to that life and the world that it recalls. Robert Hefner Canberra, April 2001

7

Alastair, left, with his brothers Ian and Colin, and their Nanny, in Peking. ‘Even in those days I seem to have had a liking for ducks.’ Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

8

CHAPTER 1

GROWING PAINS

B

irds have always fascinated me. As long as I can remember they have excited my interest and imagination, beautiful creatures and great travellers, making great journeys to and from far parts of the world. One of my earliest recollections is of being allowed to sit in the drawing room before bed on Sunday evenings to look through the beautiful plates in Thorburn’s great work, British Birds. It was one of a remarkably varied collection of bird books my father had bought before his death in 1920. There were other well-known works including Buller’s Birds of New Zealand, Hume and Marshall’s Game Birds of British India and Gould’s Synopsis of the Birds of Australia. Also included in his library were many travel works; something on almost every part of the globe and a substantial section of Australiana. They were an important influence on my life. My mother, although 27 years younger than my father, did not long survive him, dying in 1923. The logical course then would have been to consign my two brothers Ian and Colin and me to the care of our numerous aunts and uncles in Australia. But my parents had wanted us to be educated in England, and so our upbringing was entrusted to several of my father’s friends who acted as our trustees while an elderly and distant cousin,

9


Miss Cicely Fawcett, took on, at short notice, the onerous duties of guardian. She performed the task conscientiously. She was a kind and public-spirited woman who had devoted herself during his life to caring for her widowed father. She had never married, but, unusual for her time, had received a tertiary education at Bedford College. She was a strict Anglican who would refer to Anglicans who had become Catholics as perverts. She lived in a little house in Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead and spent the school holidays with us. At first I found my relations with Cousin Cicely somewhat strained, but as time passed and I grew to appreciate her fundamental liberal nature we became good friends. One curious feature of our upbringing was that, although resident in England, our maternal grandparents played no part in it. My grandfather, Robert Robin, came from a family of well-to-do Glasgow whisky merchants. He was a favourite son and after graduating from Glasgow University set out, at first with ample family support, to see the world and make his fortune. He spent time in the American West and in Australia and New Zealand. In New Zealand he met and married my grandmother, Margaret Cadigan, a remarkable and strong-willed girl who was born in 1864 in the goldmining centre of Jericho in Gippsland, Victoria. Her father, Tim Cadigan, came from Bantry, County Cork and her mother, Ellen Maloney, from Duness, County Clare. They had emigrated to Australia and were married in Melbourne in 1863. They finally moved to Reefton on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand. Tim Cadigan seems to have worked in hotels or grog shops. He was, my grandmother told me, very fond of my grandfather even though he was a Presbyterian. He used to describe him as ‘a little prince of a man’. My mother, born in New Zealand in 1889, was given a generous education, partly in Germany. She was a well-qualified secretary, fluent in French and German, who met my father in 1910 when he advertised for a secretary to work for him in Peking. She showed remarkable enterprise in taking up the post, and despite the disparity in their ages — my father was 50 — they married two years later.

10

Growing Pains

Although my mother had a loving relationship with her parents there were also quarrels with my grandmother, and my mother was determined that her own mother should not have the care of her children when she died. She provided them with an annuity and bought them a house at Seaford in Sussex where my brothers and I used to visit them. At home we were cared for by our old Nanny, one of that sturdy breed of Edwardian women who were recruited by many well-to-do British families in Asia, especially India, to help the mems look after the children and to try to ensure that the children did not learn bad habits from the natives. Nanny had been in India and Burma and arrived in Peking when my elder brother Ian was born in 1913. A short dumpy woman, she was very devoted to us and stayed with us for the rest of her life. She died in 1949. Our first home in England was at Witley in Surrey where we lived from 1921 to 1928. The surrounding heaths and pine woods formed an appropriate background for some of my earliest reading, the books of three New World naturalists, Ernest Thompson Seton and William J. Long — both Americans — and C. G. D. Roberts, a Canadian. Of the three I think Long was the best writer. He wrote very pleasantly about the animals of New England and made it easy to imagine yourself in the woods of Maine. When I was not quite eight I was sent to Sandroyd, a wellknown preparatory school in Surrey, where Ian had preceded me. I suppose the standard of teaching was good but I did not thrive there. I was occasionally beaten, once most painfully on the calves of the legs, and could hardly walk for several days. My crime had been throwing a wad of blotting paper at another boy during rest period after lunch. My aim was poor and the missile struck the blackboard. In 1926, after an operation for appendicitis, I was fortunately taken away from Sandroyd and sent to Wellesley House, an infinitely better establishment at Broadstairs in Kent. During the enforced period of recuperation at home following the operation I began to keep birds. I bought a pair of small and sleek

11


Orange-cheeked Waxbills from Chapman’s in Tottenham Court Road. They fascinated me, but the venture was an unsuccessful one for I confined them in a canary cage with feeding holes through which the bird puts its head to reach the food pots on the outside. The feeding holes were easily negotiated by an Orangecheek, which is about the size of a wren. One of them escaped almost immediately and the other died a couple of days later. I was greatly upset. Wellesley House, where I proceeded in September 1926, was a very good type of preparatory school, so called because such schools were designed to prepare boys for entry to public schools. Two partners were joint headmasters, a fine couple who seemed really to enjoy teaching and ran their school extremely well. The boys were well looked after and well fed and I spent two happy years there. The senior partner was a good amateur entomologist and I, like so many boys of a similar age in those days, took an interest in collecting moths and butterflies. The time passed uneventfully. I made up a lot of leeway in regard to my education and played my fair share of games. At about this time we spent a summer holiday at a farmhouse in the Lake District and so I was introduced to the magic of the hill country. In the spring of 1927 I had my tonsils removed and once more, being at Witley by myself during convalescence, my thoughts turned to keeping birds. I bought a pair of Cutthroats, dapper little birds from West Africa, the male with a fine red streak across the throat. I think they cost me 7s/6d. After that, so long as I was in England I was never without birds. When I was at home I looked after them myself. Nanny looked after them during term time. At first she resisted the idea of keeping birds in the sitting room, which we called the schoolroom. But once they had been successfully introduced, she became very attached to my birds and looked after them perfectly. I had the old Cutthroat cock for years. I cannot remember how many hens I provided for him — they are peculiarly subject to death through egg binding. My next purchase was both unsuccessful and

12

Growing Pains

salutary. A bird dealer sold me, for the exorbitant sum of 17s/6d, a pair of what he assured me were exceptionally rare Mexican Cherry Finches. They did not survive for long and I was later to learn that I had been shamefully swindled, my Cherry Finches being actually Indian Avadavats and worth no more than 5/-. At the close of 1928 I was due to go to a so-called public school, in reality a private secondary school. Ian had gone to Winchester, where Colin later followed him. I was consigned to Malvern and the bracing air of the Malvern Hills. It was hoped that this would improve my health. I passed the entrance examination and was accepted for House 9. The housemaster was an old friend of the heads of Wellesley House. During the summer of 1928 we moved from Witley to a larger house some 40 miles away in Sussex, at Haywards Heath. From the point of view of social development this was a mistake on Cousin Cicely’s part. Forty miles across country was a long way in those days. The move disrupted the social connections which had been built up by my mother. We left our friends behind and Cousin Cicely lacked the ability to help us find new ones. Her problem was that our lease in Witley expired; she could not find a suitable house for us to rent in the Witley area and she was loath to tie up part of our capital in buying a house. Our new house was very comfortable and Haywards Heath had an excellent railway service to London. Haywards Heath itself was a nondescript dormitory town, but our large garden contained handsome Yellow-necked Field Mice, and a rare orchid grew just inside the front gate. But I did not move to Malvern that autumn. I fell ill with serious inflammation of the joints derived from an intestinal condition which has plagued me all my life. After a spell in a nursing home I had to stay at home, where I had a private tutor. Every week I had to go to London to see Cousin Cicely’s doctor in Golders Green. In January 1929 I went to Malvern. It was a depressing experience. I was cold and miserable and altogether unhappy.

13


There was one other new boy, Preston, who became a fairly close friend. He was an Irishman who lived a lonely existence in County Meath, his father being away most of the time running a club in Cairo. He sang sad Irish songs such as The Wearing of the Green and The Ballad of Kevin Barrie. I loathed that first term. I was not fit enough to play games, and after a few weeks caught measles and spent most of the rest of the term in the sanatorium. It was springtime when I went home again, and in the spasmodically recorded nature log that I had started during the previous autumn, I noted identifying my first Willow Warbler. When I returned to Malvern in the summer it was easier. Gradually I fitted into the pattern of life. Malvern was a normal and well-run public school. It had been founded in the 1860s, one of a number of such schools established to cater for the educational needs of well-to-do middle-class families. The boys still came largely from families who were in business, and the standard of teaching was high. I lived the normal life of a boy at such a school. I did my share of fagging and as little work as I could get away with. The structure of the school and its discipline were hierarchical, with authority vested largely in the prefects. The college prefects were senior prefects with authority in college matters. They were distributed through the houses. In addition there were house prefects with authority in the house. At the bottom of the pile were the fags, the newest arrivals. The general-purpose fags were the newest arrivals of all. They could be called on to do various jobs for the prefects such as cleaning their shoes, running errands and polishing brass buttons on cadet corps uniforms. When a prefect needed something done for him he would open the door of his study and shout ‘Somebody!’ and the fags would rush to where he was. The last arrival got the job. Each prefect also had his personal fag who was not required to answer fag calls. After the first two years or so one grew out of fagdom. There was one other intermediate grade, the most senior boy

14

Growing Pains

who was not yet a prefect. He was known as the senior inferior. His task was to ensure that those below him were neat and tidy and brushed their hair and cheered loudly during football matches. He had the privilege of carrying an umbrella. When not in class we had studies — three boys to a study except for prefects, who were two to a study. There was a common room where we could read the papers, and the prefects also had a common room of their own. I liked my housemaster. He was a kindly bachelor, not overly bright, who had been a good athlete in his younger days. He did not possess the insight and intuition to understand others very deeply but he was tolerant and fair. He was keen on his house and its record but not objectionably so. In most matters it was possible to take an interest without feeling you were being coerced. He lived well himself and he saw that we did too. Mail came through his hands. He never interfered with personal mail but occasionally opened what appeared to be business letters. He did this to me only once but was somewhat bemused by the contents. It was a post-mortem report by the London Zoo pathologist on one of my much-treasured Chinese Bulbuls! I made steady, if unspectacular, educational progress. In the winter I played soccer and rugger with enthusiasm if not much skill, and went for the various runs which occupied us when we were not playing winter games. I also did some boxing, and being large for my age I achieved considerable success in my early years. The heaviest weight for most novices was above eight stone, but by 1930 I already weighed more than 10 stone. I pulverised my opponents that year and was only narrowly defeated in the final by a boy whose agility more than offset my weight advantage. Each year thereafter, as my opponents grew up, I achieved less and less success until, in 1933, I was knocked out in short order by a boy called Robin Scott. After that I gave up boxing.

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The most sensational boxing episode that I witnessed at Malvern involved a contemporary called Salmon from another house. A scion of a family of merchant princes, Salmon was not a notable pugilist but was a sportsman willing to have a go at school activities. The bout in question pitted Salmon against a much stronger opponent, against whom Salmon stood little chance of winning. But Salmon’s flies were not in good order, and no sooner had the bout commenced than his virile member popped out and remained obstinately in place throughout, like some ancient battle standard, despite the best efforts of his seconds in between the rounds. Salmon was only narrowly beaten, for his opponent, convulsed with laughter, barely laid a glove on him. Salmon claimed that the episode was accidental but I have sometimes wondered whether it was not, in fact, a well planned and original tactic of psychological warfare. Cricket was my chief bugbear. I am not a natural cricketer; no one ever tried to teach me the game and I was not greatly interested. But unfortunately, Malvern had been a famous cricketing school. Cricket had to be played and it had to be watched. At regular intervals not only were the talented players required to play but also the hopelessly incompetent such as myself. We often found ourselves playing boys from other houses who were keener than we were. Occasionally I employed stratagems that never failed to irritate our opponents. I had read of an Australian Aboriginal bowler who was reputed to be the fastest bowler in the world but who could never play in first-class cricket because in his bowling action he bent his elbow and so was said to be throwing the ball. The two next batsmen in during our games acted as umpires, and it was my practice as umpire to give an occasional no-ball, charging the bowler with having bent his elbow. This led to expostulation, but there could be no effective answer other than personal violence. One of the things which I most enjoyed was the annual school play which took place during the summer term under the organisation of several of the masters including Mr C. R. Allison, a

16

Growing Pains

senior teacher of English and history. The plays were good shows and great fun. They did much to relieve the cricket-induced tedium of the summer term for me and many others.

There were not many beatings in my house. My housemaster very rarely beat anyone, and those which took place were carried out by the prefects, always for petty breaches of good order and discipline. The beating instrument consisted of two cut-down gym shoe soles taped together, the heels trimmed to provide a better grip. Six strokes were the maximum.There was a book in which beatings were recorded, and also the performance of the boy beaten. Those who took their punishment stoically were commended, while those who could not take a beating calmly were severely censured. The record was rather harsh on those whose nervous system impaired their performance. One of my few claims to distinction lay in the fact that during my time at Malvern I was the only boy to receive a college prefects’ beating. I was charged with being a general nuisance and received a ceremonial six-strike caning in the college prefects’ common room. The individual charges were trivial; I had perhaps behaved in a slightly boisterous manner on one or two occasions. But the charges were preferred against me by college prefects from School House, the headmaster’s house, where, as I happened to know, several of my contemporaries were running a successful bar. Indeed, too successfully, for the next term they drank so much gin before lunch on a Sunday that their behaviour gave them away and they were summarily expelled. My own beating earned me considerable sympathy amongst my fellows. There was a certain amount of adolescent homosexuality at Malvern, older boys having a crush on attractive younger boys. It was an ephemeral process and could hardly be described as a problem. The only expulsion for behaviour in this area during my time concerned one of the housemasters. He was one of the chaplains, a jolly Pickwickian figure whose brother was a colonial governor. His

17


approaches to one of the boys in his house were indignantly rejected by the boy in question, who immediately complained to the headmaster, and the jolly chaplain was seen no more1.

My own life centred largely on my interest in birds. We had some good books and I was able to buy more. I joined the Avicultural Society and looked forward eagerly to the arrival of its monthly magazine. I read British Birds and for several years, starting in 1930, took part in the British Birds ringing scheme. I also joined the British Ornithologists Union. I had by this time acquired an aviary in which I kept a variety of birds. I was always buying and selling. I seldom made any money on these transactions but acquired a great deal of experience. I toured the London bird shops regularly, always hoping to find some rarity which the dealer had not recognised and which I would be able to buy and sell at a profit. I knew every bird shop in London and I came to know an old collector called Frost who used to bring in wonderfully exciting collections from all over the East. When he returned to England it would thrill me to visit his place on Haverstock Hill and peer into little travelling cages containing beautiful bright-eyed creatures from the Moluccas or the mountains of New Guinea or Bali or the Himalayas. It seemed a wonderful life to live. Frost was always willing to talk. There was hardly any part of the world that he had not visited in search of birds or orchids. His main collecting area was now the East Indies and these he knew intimately. He once even took a collection of Greater Birds of Paradise all the way from the Aru Islands to Little Tobago in the West Indies. The introduced population survived there for many years. My interest in birds brought me two valued friends who lived near Haywards Heath. One was a retired colonial official, Dr Emilius 1

18

Some 60 years later I learned that after his regrettable lapse at Malvern the chaplain emigrated to the Antipodes where he had a successful career with the Anglican Church of Australia, culminating with a bishopric.

Growing Pains

Hopkinson, who had been a GP in Oxford at the outbreak of the Boer War. He joined up, won the Distinguished Service Order and later joined the Colonial Service as an administrative officer. He had spent his entire colonial career in Gambia. He lived at Balcombe, a few miles away, kept quite a few birds, and was the leading authority on birds bred in captivity. I was a frequent visitor. He had a good ornithological library and had travelled widely during his leaves. The other friend was Floyd, a former university lecturer in biology and an artist by inclination. Having some private means, he lived in a little mill cottage beside a mill pond at Cuckfield, surrounded by an extraordinary collection of animals, birds, fish and reptiles. The front of the cottage was well-furnished and little-used. The back half, the old kitchen, was used to keep animals in, and here I would find Floyd, having a cup of coffee and surrounded by every kind of wild beast. When I first knew him he had several monkeys, a large species of South American weasel called a tayra, various squirrels and, a little later, a Honey Bear. He also kept many tropical fish. Floyd was looked after with almost feudal devotion by a very good fellow called Claude Williams. Floyd and I would sometimes make the rounds of the bird shops together. At such times he would wear his only hat, a great floppy sombrero he had acquired in British Guiana about 15 years earlier. Periodically I would visit the sewage farm, an old-fashioned installation where the sewage was run through settling tanks and filters and then on to fields. It was a great place for birds. One overcast November day John Hawkins, the manager of the farm, came out and showed me a Black Redstart, new to me, which was wintering on the farm. John was a friendly Yorkshireman and a firstclass naturalist. He knew his birds perfectly and he had a remarkable collection of moths. We became good friends and I began calling at the farm most Sunday afternoons. John nearly always had something of interest to show me on these visits.

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I did not have much in common with my brothers. I was a great admirer of Ian, who was charming and good-tempered and full of infectious enthusiasms which were not always sustained for very long. Being older, he was more able to make his own circle of friends at Winchester, several of whom lived in the south of England. Colin, who had a very sociable nature, suffered most from our curious situation of material comfort and social isolation. I failed to do much to help him. His solace was music. We generally had a so-called tutor in the holidays. He did no tutoring but simply kept us company, lived comfortably and was well paid for doing so. It was a very easy job, generally filled by a university student. Our experience with tutors varied. The first was a Sandroyd schoolmaster, a drunken little man who disgraced himself at the local pub in Witley. Then, for several holidays in succession we had Sholto Douglas, a Scot whom we all liked and who became very much a part of the family. He was a good linguist, joined the army from Oxford and during the war had a distinguished record with the Polish forces. We had a jujitsu expert; a man who did well in the diplomatic service; an unnecessarily conscientious medical student; the son of a missionary bishop who felt that Ian should be disciplined; and an unpopular schoolmaster who was involved in a bizarre motorcycle mystery. None of us liked this man. He would collect butterflies and hide away in his room a great deal, and was frequently absent, having departed on his motorcycle. But one day the machine would not start. The stoppage was traced to an unusual cause: the petrol tank had been filled with parrot seed. We had an old Grey Parrot. As the family bird lover, I was the individual most likely to think of parrot seed, so it was perhaps fortunate that I was in a nursing home at the time. The mystery was never solved.

We began to be interested in travel. Ian loved the sea and made a number of enterprising trips on small craft while he was at

20

Growing Pains

Winchester. My own first solo journey was in 1931, to Milford, County Donegal, where I stayed in a comfortable hotel for three weeks. It was a most enjoyable outing. I roamed through the beautiful countryside, enjoyed the contact with its friendly people, and saw many new birds. It was the first time that I had to meet all manner of people on my own, and I was filled with great plans for the future. This was no doubt stimulated by the remarkably varied collection of travel books that we had inherited. There were many books on Africa, a remarkable work on big game shooting in northern India by Colonel A. A. A. Kinloch; several works by Theodore Roosevelt; D’Albertis’s New Guinea; a wonderful three-volume work by Fountain on the Americas; Nansen’s Furthest North; Shelford’s Naturalist in Borneo; and a number of books on China and Australia.They were a wonderful resource for an introverted schoolboy and I read them all. The next summer holidays Cousin Cicely had an unusual proposition to put to us. We periodically received very generous gifts from a friend of our father’s, Charles Crane, who had been American Ambassador in China. He was a patron of marine biological research, and had a passion for travel in Asia. On this occasion he sent us about £10 each. Cousin Cicely supplemented this and told us to arrange our own holidays. We could do what we liked and go where we pleased, so long as we did not go to godless Russia. We visited Jersey and made a walking tour in Brittany, trying to make the money last as long as possible. There were plenty of squabbles, especially to begin with. We drank moderate quantities of good Brêton cider and our insides slowly adapted, not without some violent protests, to an alien way of cooking. We had no startling experiences but learned a great deal, especially about ourselves. In 1933 we made another trip, this time to Holland. The idea of a walking tour in Holland, which is urbanised and dead flat, and where everyone in those days used a bicycle, was quaint, but we were very ignorant. We did indeed walk from Rotterdam to The Hague, which is something few people have done. Then we travelled to Scheveningen by train with the intention of walking

21


up the coast. We were viewed with amusement by Dutch passersby and were irritated to find that we were taken for Germans. We certainly found beautiful beaches, but half of Europe seemed to be holidaying there, many of them in very beguiling costumes. We persevered and walked to Katwijk and then to Zandvoort. We then gave up, and after a visit to the charming town of Haarlem betook ourselves by train and ferry to Texel, the largest of the Friesian Islands. Texel was well known to me for its bird sanctuaries. Then we went on to the smaller and more attractive island of Vlieland, which was narrow, sandy and covered with dunes and plantations of pines. This was the best part of the tour. We stayed at a little pension run by a former Dutch Merchant Navy officer, a most kind and considerate host. I saw many new birds and came to realise how woefully ignorant I was in regard to waders. We left Vlieland with regret, but time was drawing on. After a brief visit to the island of Terschelling we embarked in Harlingen on a small British ship called the Groningen, which brought us all the way up the Thames in fine weather to dock near Tower Bridge. This was a memorable part of our tour, the river full of interest and shipping. In those faraway days London was a great ocean port and Britain the world’s premier maritime nation. Other holidays passed uneventfully at home. I had my birds and my bird interests. We had little social life in Haywards Heath. We often visited one of our trustees, Archie Rose, who had been in the China Consular Service and was now a director of the British American Tobacco Company and of the Chartered Bank. Archie was a very kind man who had a charming country retreat at Framlingham in Suffolk. The Depression simply passed us by, cocooned as we were in the security provided by the comfortable income from my father’s investments in Chinese railway bonds.

At the end of the Easter term in 1933 I was made a house prefect and finally, in the autumn of the same year, a college prefect. This

22

Growing Pains

latter post was by no means a sinecure, for in the allocation of duties I was made prefect of choir, a job which I would much rather have avoided. This meant that I not only had to organise the choir, which was easy enough because boys could be compelled to sing in it and to attend choir practice, but also the semi-official choral society, which was meant to be voluntary and which was a most unpopular institution. It had never thrived as a voluntary body and was most unlikely to do so in the future. I accordingly conferred with all heads of house and was able to persuade them to introduce a system whereby strong pressure was brought to bear on individuals, a register was kept of all boys attending choral practice, and an altogether unauthorised assurance was given that regular attenders would be rewarded with an extra half holiday. The system worked quite well, and a choral piece concerning Sir Richard Grenville and the last fight of The Revenge was duly performed. My personal relations with the music master were cordial, though I regretted the persistence with which he opposed any suggestion that we might sometimes sing some popular music, in particular Gilbert and Sullivan. The introduction of such works would have done much to popularise the choral society even if its main activity was of a more serious nature. The headmaster was eventually prevailed on to grant the extra half holiday for deserving choral society members. In general, though, the post of prefect of choir was a thankless and unrewarding task. I myself had a stentorian bass voice and the music master once told me that if I cared to train, he thought I could pick up a choral scholarship at university. I firmly resisted the suggestion, which would have involved much hard work and seriously interfered with university long vacations.

As my school days drew to a close, it was planned that I should spend four months in France studying the language before going up to Cambridge in the autumn. It was in the pleasant early summer of

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1934 that I found myself in the gracious Touraine countryside, staying with a retired French couple called Leconte. Monsieur Leconte, Uncle George, had spent many years in China and had been French Consul General in Hankow. He and his wife owned a little estate on a hill at St Ouen les Vines, not far from Amboise. Uncle George was a small, tubby, bespectacled man with a goatee beard, and his wife was a good deal younger. They had no children of their own but had a very warm relationship with two nieces. The Lecontes kept a good table. They also made their own wine, a most agreeable sparkling wine in the Vouvray style, and a good red too. It was a quiet and peaceful atmosphere. The nearest that I came to excitement was the occasion when I fell off my bicycle while taking some correspondence from Madame Leconte to the post office. Their house lay at the top of a hill. A gravelly drive led down to the village with a sharp bend at the bottom. I came down the hill too fast, skidded at the bottom, and in the ensuing fall cut my hands badly. It seemed hardly worthwhile to go all the way uphill again without posting the letters. This I proceeded to do, but by the time they were posted there was much blood on the envelopes. This example of British phlegm created a considerable impression on the Lecontes, and an even greater one on the recipients of the letters, for it was the time of the Stavisky affair2 and the resulting disturbances. The letters as received must have had a most sinister appearance. I walked and bicycled through the countryside, and formed a great liking for the Touraine country people. My French improved and I could soon speak it with reasonable fluency, but thereafter made no progress at all. Madame Leconte gave me some lessons but did not long persist in the attempt to make me do some work. But I came to love the country and would never feel a stranger there again. Before I left I accompanied the Lecontes on a motor tour they made to visit friends and relatives in the south of France. Uncle George was very interested in medieval architecture, and 2

24

A French financial scandal of 1933, named after the financier Alexandre Stavisky. The scandal triggered right-wing agitation culminating in a riot on 6 February 1934 in which 15 people were killed.

Growing Pains

we visited a great number of fine churches and other buildings. He was also very interested in local food specialities, and we ate extremely well. I greatly enjoyed the tour, though at times it could be a little monotonous. Madame Leconte was the driver and drove very well, but she did this under a ceaseless barrage of warning and remonstrance from Uncle George, who was an inveterate backseat driver. She never took the slightest notice. We drove southeast from Amboise and across the Massif Centrale to the valley of the Rhône and south to Nîmes, which I thought was especially beautiful — small but very elegant and with most interesting Roman remains. I went on to Arles by myself. From there I visited the Camargue, the delta of the Rhône, and stayed at a little village called Les Saintes Maries. It possessed a remarkable fortified church. It is famous bird country, and even though I was not there at the best time of the year I saw some exciting novelties though I failed to see the flamingos which inhabit the area. A flock of knots in full breeding plumage were a surprising sight. They should have been thousands of miles away in the High Arctic. At Toulouse a very stupid activity on my part finally caught up with me. I have always been an avid collector. On this journey it had occurred to me that a collection of hotel keys and their brass plaques with the hotel names on them would be interesting souvenirs of the journey, so I did not surrender mine to the hotel on departure. By the time we reached Toulouse I had the makings of a very useful collection, but the Lecontes were overtaken by a string of complaints from annoyed hoteliers and I had to disgorge my horde. We returned to Amboise by a circuitous route. On the way we visited Albi, the centre of the Albigensian heresy in the 13th century, and its great red cathedral. I think it was here that we saw one very macabre relic, a figure of Christ on the Cross made out of the skin of some pious criminal. Condemned to death, he had sought this one favour of his judges, that he might be flayed and his skin mounted on a crucifix.

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More than the visits to churches I enjoyed the stops for lunch on the road. Uncle George always knew of some special local delicacy that had to be sampled. It never ceased to astonish me that no matter where we stopped, in village or country town, we could always be sure of a first-class and beautifully cooked meal and good wine. I did not encounter comparable cooking again until I reached China. Ian came over to France and we spent a few days walking along the Loire below Angers. Then in August Colin arrived in France with a school friend and we all met in western Brittany. From Brest we visited the island of Ushant, well known to me from the account by Eagle Clarke in his Studies of Bird Migration. On Ushant there were few other visitors and the weather was fine. It was good to wander along the cliffs or bask in the sun in one of the deserted forts. I saw choughs for the first time, handsome red-billed crows which by then were very rare in Britain. The sea was always with you, but far below, and it seemed remote and detached. For me it was a very happy place, but all things must come to an end eventually. We returned to the mainland, Colin and his friend to walk further through Brittany, Ian to make a voyage on a tunny boat, and I to a long hot journey back to Amboise. Soon afterwards I returned to England.

26

Alastair’s father, G.E. (‘Chinese’) Morrison. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

27

Alastair’s mother, Jennie (nee Wark Robin) Morrison, when she was a young woman. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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CHAPTER 2

CAMBRIDGE 1934–37

I

n the autumn I went up to Cambridge, where I read economics. It was said that a man who read The Times every day could not fail to get through part 1 economics, and having read The Times all my life I thought I would have few difficulties. My main interests at this time, apart from birds, were islands and the polar regions. I had for a number of years been an armchair student of polar travel, particularly Antarctic travel. Somehow that great, lonely, silent southern continent appealed to my imagination. At Easter in 1935 I went to the Scilly Islands, thinking to find them closely resembling Ushant across the way. In this I was mistaken, for where Ushant has precipitous cliffs, the Scillies slope gently to the sea and are far more highly cultivated. At that time, the farmers were having a hard time, but all the available ground was taken up with flowers and early vegetables. As a budding economist I was surprised to find that the islanders’ fish was imported all the way from Hull. This little trip made me plan even more for my first long journey in the long vacation. I devoted much thought to the matter. I wanted to see how I could stand a fairly long and solitary

29


trip, I wanted to go north, and if possible I wanted to visit islands. Eventually I decided to visit what looks on the map to be one of the loneliest islands in Europe, the little island of Røst at the end of the chain of the Lofotens which stretch out to sea southwest from the northern coast of Norway. I crossed from Newcastle to Bergen and from there went north, travelling on one of the regular mail boats which called at many small settlements on the beautiful coast to Svolvaer in Lofoten. Svolvaer was a small town built of wood on a deep harbour and hedged in by precipitous mountains. I spent several days there and did little except read the short stories of Saki. It was impossible to get very far inland, though I did see breeding bramblings and a breeding colony of fieldfares, the latter very bold birds which dive-bombed me. From Svolvaer I took a little ship which called at nearly all the small fishing settlements along the southern side of Lofoten. It is a hard and jagged coast and even then, in June, the tops of the mountains were covered in snow. Beyond the last of the larger islands is the scene of the legendary maelstrom, so graphically described in the story by Edgar Allan Poe. It is true that there are strong currents here, but there is no gigantic whirlpool. After so many jagged peaks, Røst was something of an anticlimax, for it is flat, low-lying and dotted with many little lakes. I was put up by a kind lady, Frü Winther, who kept a store there. A friendly officer on board the little coaster made the arrangements for me. I knew hardly any Norwegian, but that made very little difference. Norwegians are a friendly and highly educated people, and a large proportion of the population spoke English, generally very well. At Frü Winther’s I lived a comfortable, homely existence, enjoying some novel articles of diet such as the eggs of various sea fowl, particularly Eider Ducks. The eggs of many sea birds have an unpleasant, fishy taste, but fresh Eider Duck eggs are excellent and of immense size. There were plenty of Eiders around the islands, and later I found one or two nests. Their down was not systematically exploited.

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Cambridge

It was sometimes quite cold and windy on Røst. I explored the island and encountered birds which were new to me, including Lapland Buntings and Arctic Skuas. One day I went out to a lighthouse with a party including Frü Winther’s daughter, the local doctor and his wife, and a little girl who was staying with the doctor’s family. We climbed a lonely, grassy island where there were many puffins nesting, and I found a shag’s nest. At the lighthouse we were hospitably entertained, but I was told that the two families looking after the light were on speaking terms only when visitors came. I returned to Svolvaer and went farther up the coast to Tromso, the principal town in northern Norway, and from there sailed for Spitzbergen on the steamer Lyngen, which carried mail and passengers to the coal mines there. The weather was poor when we set out. I had never been seasick before and I hope I never shall be again. The second-class sleeping saloon was in the extreme bows and you could hear the crashes as we smacked into the waves. Finally I went up to the deserted saloon, for if there is one thing worse than being seasick yourself, it is having others seasick around you. Soon I felt better, and by the time we passed Bear Island I was quite well again. We carried on to the Norwegian coal mines at Longyear City. Although so isolated, the community seemed to be a contented one and I was told that most of its members never wanted to work anywhere else. We went as far north as Magdalena Bay, about 800 miles from the North Pole, and came back along the coast, calling at a Russian coal mine. There were far more Russians here than there were Norwegians at Longyear City, and they produced far less coal. Nevertheless, it was a model place in many ways. They had pigs and cows which were so clean that they positively glistened. Some other passengers and I were shown around by the Russian in charge, a polite man who was saluted with military discipline by all his workers whenever they passed him. I met a fellow later who had spent a few days with this commissar. He was most hospitably treated but told me of an

31


unfortunate incident which took place one evening during the course of a political discussion with his hosts. They eventually got on to the subject of Stalin, whose picture hung in the room. ‘Behind him,’ said the commissar with emphasis, ‘is all Russia.’ He tapped the picture significantly with his finger and two cockroaches hurriedly emerged from under it and scuttled away, to the embarrassment of host and guest alike. I stayed on the Lyngen and proceeded via Tromso to Narvik, an unattractive town designed solely for the export of iron ore from northern Sweden. From Narvik I walked north along the road to the Lyngenfiord. One day I covered 32 miles and felt that I had done rather well. I had never walked so far before in one day and never will again if I can help it. But a young Norwegian commented: ‘What on earth made you come along the road? I would have gone across country.’ He would have done, too, even though the country there was very rough indeed. Norwegians are great walkers and love to wander through lonely places by themselves. My feet were badly blistered and I finished my trek in a bus, then returned to Tromso on a coaster. I now decided to visit Swedish Lapland. I sent off my suitcases — by modern standards I had an absurdly large amount of luggage — to England and proceeded to a little place on the road north of Narvik. From here I proposed to walk over the hills by a little-used track to Lake Tornetrask on the Narvik Railway in far northwestern Sweden. I knew that on Lake Tornetrask there was a Swedish tourist hostel and that from there it was possible to walk south using huts which had been erected to help travellers. The first part of my journey to Sweden was not very agreeable. I had never done anything like it before and did not know how to look after myself properly. I walked up a long valley which gradually became more and more lonely until I finally reached a little hut. This had been built to help people such as myself, but I made poor use of it. I did not light a fire or cook myself a proper meal, and after an uneasy rest I set out again. It rained, as it had done the whole way up the valley, and mist lay

32

THE BIRD FANCIER

low on the surrounding hilltops. The only soul I met was a solitary Lapp going in the opposite direction. Finally I started to climb out of the valley through open moorland to the divide leading to Lake Tornetrask on the other side. The way was marked by stones painted red at intervals of a hundred yards or so, but once I was in the thick mist at the upper levels I lost these marks and could not find them again. Visibility was only about 40 yards. For a long time I wandered about not knowing where I was, but finally recovered myself by following a little stream until it petered out and then continuing on upwards until I passed a ridge. Then, by great good fortune, I found another stream on the other side which led me on down to the lake. I came to a Lapp encampment and one of the men took me over to the Abisko tourist hostel. Thereafter I was to see quite a number of Lapps, strange nomadic people following their reindeer from place to place and wearing clothes like something out of a fairy story: breeches and brightly coloured short coats and red tasselled caps. They seemed to be a contented folk and it was strange to find such herdsmen in such an up-to-date and progressive country as Sweden. The tourist hostel, like everything else that was run by the Swedish Tourist Association, was first class: cheap, comfortable and spotlessly clean. The Swedes had placed such hostels at intervals through their lonely Northwest, with well-marked tracks leading between them and with little huts for travellers at intervals of a comfortable day’s march. The hostels provided food but it was necessary to carry it for use in the huts. I spent several days at the tourist hostel and then set out to walk south. At the first hut I met a young Norwegian, Jacob Jorgensen, walking the same way and we continued on together. Jacob was a slight, wiry man carrying a pack more than half as heavy as he was. I could hardly lift it. He was an excellent travelling companion, cheerful and helpful, and he showed me how to travel in comfort under such circumstances. Jacob personified a type which I believe to be very common among Norwegians, the characteristics

33


of which are patience, good humour, great physical strength and the most inflexible obstinacy. We did not walk together, for our styles were entirely different. Jacob was a true hillman who never varied his pace whether on the flat or on a hill. I would leave him miles behind on the gentler gradients but he would generally catch up with me while I was admiring the view on one of the steeper slopes. We spent the nights in huts, much tormented by mosquitos. Why mosquitos should thrive in northern latitudes I do not know, for there is relatively little animal food for them. You would imagine that the food supply is altogether defective. Perhaps as a result of this, the mosquitos of Lapland pay very marked attention to human beings and are the worst I have ever encountered. They are large, vicious and able to bite through thick woollen stockings, and they can make life a burden, sometimes attacking in clouds. They are not malarial but are far more active and determined than anything in the tropics. The part of Lapland through which we walked is made up of a dry tundra, a plateau country split up by a number of long narrow lakes running northwest and southeast. The first tourist hostel to the south of Abisko lay at the foot of Mount Kebnekaisse, the highest point in Sweden. It was a small hostel but we spent a couple of days there to enable us to climb Kebnekaisse, which was a matter of no great difficulty. We saw very little from the top, where we were enveloped in mist. We found that it was easy to tell whether the food in these hostels was good by the appearance of the lady manageress. At Kebnekaisse the lady was thin and bony and we fared poorly, but after several more days we reached another hostel where her counterpart was fat and jolly, and we fed uncommonly well. One of the huts was in a valley overlooked by a splendid cliff called Skirfe. The top actually overhung slightly, and when I went there I stood well back and threw boulders over the top, then crawled cautiously to the edge to watch them sail down and eventually crash on to the screes below. It would have been a perfect site for a scenic suicide pact.

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Cambridge

Here I parted with Jacob, whose intention was to walk up the valley and then across some very remote country to the Norwegian coast. It was a bold enterprise, if somewhat foolhardy. I tried to dissuade him but that only hardened his resolve. Finally we said goodbye one fine early autumn morning and he soon disappeared up the valley. I heard from him later that he had had a most difficult journey and was nearly drowned crossing a river, but finally reached the Norwegian coast. He was a fine fellow. I never met him again, though we corresponded, and the next year I arranged for a girl I knew and her brother to do the same trek south from Abisko with him. Jacob looked after them in a most kind manner, but unfortunately fell in love with the girl and made his first proposal of marriage several hours south of Abisko and at regular intervals thereafter, which somewhat complicated the journey. I decided to return home via Stockholm and Göteborg for I was running short of money. I went by motorboat and bus to a place on the railway where I was able to catch one of the cheap and good Swedish trains to Stockholm. I was lucky to meet a charming young forest officer called Peter Tesdorp in the bus, and he immediately took charge of me and looked after me for the rest of the journey. I never knew such kindness; he made every sort of arrangement for me. When we reached Stockholm he took me to his parents’ flat for a much-needed bath and dinner, introduced me to his pretty fiancée, took me for a quick tour of Stockholm, and finally put me on the night train for Göteborg complete with a large basket of fruit. I left Sweden with a wonderful impression of warmth and open friendliness. In Norway I found people no less kind but more dour — a harder, tougher people. Perhaps it has something to do with the food, for I believe that Swedish food is superior to Norwegian. Basically the two styles are the same — the great institution of smorgasbord, the fine art of endless variety in light snacks — but the variety was richer and more agreeable in Sweden. I never fed badly in Sweden, but on the Norwegian coast I did grow tired of boiled fish, boiled potatoes and butter sauce.

35


I was, however, much struck by some of the Norwegian cheeses, particularly a goat’s-milk cheese which looked like chocolate and had a most elusive and delicate flavour. But on the whole I think that most people will agree with me that Sweden is the country for the good trencherman.

In my second year at Cambridge I switched from economics to geography. The department was a small and lively one, presided over by a former Antarctic explorer, the genial Australian, Professor Frank Debenham. I did not take too kindly to some of the practical work such as surveying and hydrology, and no reasonable person should be expected to know anything about map projections, but I enjoyed regional and historical geography and anthropology. Geography is a live science and gains a great deal because most of the lecturers are absorbed in their subject and generally manage to make it interesting for their students. My brothers and I had now moved to Farnham, where we occupied a large, pleasant and extravagant house which we seldom lived in. I liked it because when we were at home I had a room to myself to keep animals and birds in, and I had my bedroom conveniently next door at the top of the house where I was never disturbed by anyone. In the spring of 1936 I visited central Spain with Ted Allen, a Cambridge friend. He and two companions had been to southern Spain the previous year to photograph the Griffon Vulture. They had been successful but had worked in a protected zone near Algeciras and had been troubled by the attentions of the police. This year Ted wanted to photograph the Black Vulture, the largest tree-nesting species of bird in Europe, which makes its nest at the tops of immense pine trees in the Sierra de Gredos to the west of Madrid. I knew nothing about photographing birds, but was only too happy to visit Spain. We set off via Folkestone and Boulogne in

36

Cambridge

Ted’s little Austin 10 and drove for 24 hours without a stop except to refuel and eat. We lost our way once and kept circling back to a little village not unsuitably called Damville, somewhere in northern France. As the night wore on we found that our main trouble was something we had overlooked: our lights dipped the wrong way. On the big roads there were numbers of huge lorries. They would courteously dip their lights as they approached, but if we tried to follow suit we simply switched ours directly towards the oncoming lorry. This not unnaturally irritated the French drivers, who would then put their lights on full beam again. It was a distracting night. We reached Bordeaux in the early hours of the morning and, after some delay caused by engine trouble, crossed the Spanish frontier late in the evening. We took an inland road climbing steadily upwards. Just after darkness fell we reached the famous Col des Roncesvaux, which as far as I was concerned was nothing but a bleak pass in the mountains. Here we decided to camp. It was the first night I had ever spent in a tent, except at an OTC camp, and it was not altogether a good introduction to the pleasant pastime of camping out in the open air. The tent was easy to put up but it was shockingly cold and I hardly slept at all. It was only the next morning that we found we had camped not far from a monastery where travellers were accommodated for the night. We drove on across the tableland of northern Spain and spent the next night in a covert of scrub oak 30 or 40 miles north of Madrid. We reached Madrid in time for lunch and put up at a comfortable hotel. Before our departure we had secured a remarkable collection of letters of recommendation from various gentlemen at Cambridge who seemed only too anxious to vouch for our respectability. We had sent these by registered mail to the British Ambassador in Madrid, and had received a most cordial reply. The letters worked wonders. We were treated like a first-class scientific expedition. The Spanish authorities produced excellent passes with the minimum of delay, and the British Ambassador himself had a few

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kind words to say to us. He assured us that he was almost certain he had seen magpies on the local golf course. The Third Secretary, an elegant and amiable man, took Ted to see the Spanish Foreign Office. We suggested that a taxi might be called. ‘You’ve a car, haven’t you?’ cried the diplomat. ‘We can go in that.’ Neither Ted nor I felt that the Austin was a fit vehicle for a Third Secretary but our suggestions were overridden. We went outside where stood our faithful vehicle, an occasional streak of red paint showing dimly through the mud. ‘I think,’ said the diplomat,‘we’ll take a taxi!’ While Ted visited the Foreign Office I went to call on the Belgian Ambassador who had known my father in China and whose sister was my godmother. The call went off very well but for one small interlude when I had the distressing experience of hearing the Ambassador discuss with his wife in French, which I understood, the advisability or otherwise of inviting me to lunch. They decided not to. We were glad to leave Madrid, which was bleak and cold in early spring. As a city it seemed to have little to recommend it. We drove west over the mountains to the pretty medieval town of Avila, where we laid in a stock of provisions. Then we travelled south and up a valley on the northern slopes of the Sierra de Gredos and along a rough track until we came to our camping site, a little meadow by the side of the stream which ran down the valley. Here we erected our tents and lived for nearly three weeks. The place was a forest reserve, the pine trees growing to a great height and being tapped for their resin. We camped quite comfortably here, using one tent for sleeping quarters and the other for living in during the daytime. Ted was a good camp cook and was so convinced of my fallibility that he insisted on doing all the cooking himself, even breakfast on wet mornings! Our association was quite harmonious, for Ted did nearly all the work. Gradually we explored the surrounding hillsides and found a number of Black Vultures’ nests. They were not difficult to find,

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being great conglomerations of sticks on the most remote tops of the tallest trees. Ted used a tackle which had been developed by various enthusiasts at Cambridge. The principle is an old one, used for climbing trees which are too big to be swarmed up. The climber wears climbing irons on his feet, and around his waist he has a rough belt of alpine rope. To each side of this belt is attached a much longer piece of alpine rope which passes around the tree and the length of which can be adjusted by the climber. The climber leans backward against the rope round the tree trunk and braces himself against this and his feet, which take the strain at the lower end. To move upwards he leans forward, and as the rope around the tree becomes slack, he jerks it up the trunk. He can then move up by pushing himself upwards and outwards, with his feet shortening the support rope as the trunk grows thinner. Ted was able to climb to every nest we saw, but it was a slow and tedious business building the hides. The Black Vulture lays but one egg, and spends several months in hatching it and then rearing the young one; it would appear that they will not lay twice in a season. The main problem about photographing the nesting bird is that it may desert its nest before the hide can be completed. To our great disappointment this happened at the first two or three nests we tried to photograph. It was a bitter blow and we did not know what to do. Probably they would not have deserted so readily if they had young ones, but all the nests we saw had eggs. We searched in vain for a nest which could be covered from a more accessible tree or rock. We made periodic trips into Avila to replenish our supplies. Generally we had fine weather, and since we were well equipped we did not suffer from the cold. One evening Ted caught a minute trout in the stream running past the camp and it was eaten with due ceremony. We came to know the goatherds and a man called Pompa who collected eggs for a British egg dealer. We had heard of him from H. F. Witherby, the publisher of British Birds, who had visited these regions some years before and had provided us with most of our local information.

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Pompa was a swarthy, hard-faced man, lithe and active and a wonderful tree-climber. One day we went out with him to visit an isolated crag in search of Lammergeiers and perhaps Eagle Owls. We scrambled up the crag, our heavy nailed boots making an ineffective display in comparison with Pompa’s rope-soled shoes. We never found the birds we were looking for but it was a fine excursion. We had dinner that evening in a restaurant in a small town and came back to camp after dark. It was the first time we had done so. Ted went into the sleeping tent first. ‘My God!’ he cried, ‘my sleeping bag’s gone.’ I thought he was trying to be funny and made some unhelpful remark, but the richness and intensity of his reply left me in no doubt that he was serious. We had in fact been robbed: Ted’s sleeping bag, various articles of clothing and some money. It was maddening, the more so since the thief was probably one of the friendly goatherds. We could not see how it could have been Pompa since we had given him no warning about our trip and had left him miles away. Fortunately, the thief had left our passports. The worst loss was the sleeping bag. I suggested that we should use mine on alternate nights, but greatly to my relief the self-reliant Ted declined the offer and wrapped himself up in a tarpaulin from the car. The next day we called in the Guardia Civil but their inquiries led to nothing. It was about now that we at last discovered a Black Vulture’s nest which could be photographed from a rock on the slope immediately behind the nest tree. We quickly built the hide and Ted obtained one or two quite good photographs. It was tragic that we found it so late that he could put in only one day at the hide. They are an impressive bird and well worth photographing. I once watched two either quarrelling or playing, I was not sure which. One kept stooping at the other, which in its turn would roll over on its back and present its claws to the attacker. They are such large birds that it looked like a slow-motion picture. The theft cast a cloud over our last days in the Sierra de Gredos. That was sad, for it was an enchanting part of the world:

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open fragrant pine woods giving out onto pleasant meadows at the higher levels. What impressed me about Spain was the feeling of spaciousness: a great, open, parched countryside broken up by ranges of mountains and strangely isolated crags. I unfortunately did not speak any Spanish and Ted did all the interpreting, but it is a country which I would have much liked to visit again. We drove back quickly, but this time went via Bayonne on the coast. The trip had lasted about as long as it usefully could, and towards the end we were getting on each other’s nerves. But I shall always think of Ted as being probably the only man who could put up with my unrelieved company for a whole month. He was kindly and independent, very efficient in whatever he did, and supremely self-confident without being conceited. I never met such a self-reliant man, and he had an extraordinarily wide range of interests, from early Chinese bronzes to water polo. From Cambridge he joined the Malayan Department of Agriculture.

For my next trip I decided to go to the northeastern corner of Iceland, which was ornithologically the least-known part. On this occasion I hoped to do some work on behalf of the British Museum. When we returned from Spain we brought back with us one Black Vulture’s egg which had been deserted, and this I sent to the Natural History Museum. I had been an occasional visitor to the museum before, when trying to identify various foreign birds, but when I sent the Black Vulture’s egg I was asked to come up to the museum by N. B. Kinnear, who was in charge of the Bird Room. Thus I made the acquaintance of a gentleman who became a very good friend. Kinnear had worked in the Bird Room for many years but he also had practical experience in the field in India and in the old wooden Arctic whalers before World War I. He was a great asset to the museum for he possessed personal charm and could talk like a book about the birds of most parts of the world. A man could

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come into the Bird Room from Tierra del Fuego or Gilgit or Darfur and could always count on an interesting and well-informed talk with Kinnear, who would, in the process, tell him what material the museum needed from that area. The museum was built up largely by private donation, and it was men like Kinnear who encouraged and stimulated many into benefiting the national collection. Not all departments in the museum were so fortunate. The reception accorded the earnest inquirer in some departments was liable to be an object lesson in practical discouragement. The museum wanted some material from Iceland — redshank, snipe and Snow-buntings — and so I learned the technique of collecting and preserving specimens. It is not a difficult matter to prepare a bird skin, though it requires some practice at first. The skin is taken completely off and turned inside out, leaving the wing and leg bones and base of the skull. After thorough cleaning it is coated with arsenic, turned back again and filled with cotton wool. When finished, the specimen should look like a dead bird lying on its back. I paid several visits to the museum to learn how to skin, and bought myself a .410 collecting gun. I hoped to be able to obtain some outside assistance in the way of finance for my trip. In this I was lucky, for there was in Trinity a benefaction called the Rouse Ball Research Fund designed for the use of young students. I duly applied for my grant and was awarded £40, a very considerable help since my funds were limited. I could afford to pay for the journey only by living very quietly and abstemiously for the rest of the year. I managed to get through my exams and then hurried off northwards. I travelled to Leith and took ship on an old Danish vessel for Reykjavik. We had a mixed lot of passengers: some fishermen, the poet W. H. Auden, a bearded artist and some tourists. We had a placid voyage, calling at Thorshavn in the Faeroes en route. I would have liked to see more of the Faeroes, splendid wild islands split up by the most magnificent fiords. We passed the Westmann Islands off the southwest coast of Iceland

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and I well remember how we were met far out at sea by Great Skuas. Finally we reached Reykjavik, a pleasant, friendly little town. It is astonishing how ignorant many people then were on the subject of Iceland. Suffice it to say that it is a volcanic island about the size of Ireland lying just below the Arctic Circle. It does not have an extreme climate and there are no Eskimos there. The people are Scandinavians but with an Irish mixture, for in the early Middle Ages there was much traffic between Iceland and Ireland. The language is an archaic form of Scandinavian, though the amount of English spoken never ceased to surprise me. It has the world’s oldest parliament and a remarkable literature. The population at the time of my visit was about 110,000, and the people were very highly educated. Much of the country is barren lava desert and there are many traces of volcanic activity in geysers and hot springs. In the south and west are a number of icecaps, relics of a prehistoric period when ice covered the whole country. The principal industries were then fishing and sheep farming. The fauna is rather a poor one. There are no large land animals, although reindeer have been introduced. The island does have the little white arctic fox, of which more anon. It is not a rich country but is socially very advanced, and there are no more kindly and hospitable people in the world. I set off from Reykjavik as soon as I could and proceeded by bus to Akureyri, the largest town on the north coast of the island. The journey took two days on roads which were by far the worst I had encountered until then. The Icelanders, having a large country and a small population, could not afford good roads. Often they were little more than tracks through the lava. It rained continuously and the landscape was not a very impressive one: bleak and rocky hills and occasional jumbled lava fields. Much of the interior of Iceland is almost lifeless. Akureyri is situated on a fine fiord. I put up at a little hotel and met various people, including the chief of police, who took me to inspect the swimming pool where various young girls were disporting themselves. I also met Kristian Geirmundsson, a charming

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man and first-class naturalist. He was a brilliant, self-taught taxidermist who painted in delightful backgrounds to his mounted specimens. He worked, if I remember rightly, in a herring factory and had an aviary in his garden full of redpolls and made of string netting because no wire netting was obtainable at the time in Iceland. The extreme northeast of Iceland which I intended to visit is called Melrakka Sletta, which means Fox Peninsula. I could not learn very much about it but set out in a small converted herring drifter for Kopasker, a small hamlet on a sandy plain ringed by hills at the western base of the peninsula. I was given an introduction to an Icelandic gentleman who lives there, a prominent local politician, and was received like an honoured guest. I unpacked my gun and started to do some collecting but was shockingly unsuccessful. I seemed to have forgotten all that I had been taught in London, and the unfortunate specimens which I took looked quite dreadful by the time I had finished with them. I did get a small series of redshanks and eventually my friend Mr Bishop, the British Museum taxidermist, made them into quite presentable objects, but I was in despair at the time. The weather was fine at Kopasker and I regret to state that I spent many golden hours of sunlight immersed in Pearl Buck’s Brothers. A subsidiary project which I had in mind for my trip to Iceland was to bring back some arctic foxes to the London Zoo. At that time they were rare in British zoos and I thought they would be an interesting novelty. I made known my requirements in Kopasker and within a very short time was brought three tiny cubs about a month old. They had been dug out of the earth and growled fiercely in their alarm. The arctic fox has two colour phases, a blue or dark grey one, and a white one. Mine were all white, though at that age they were a dirty grey. I bought them for a few shillings and then had to find out what to feed them. Fortunately that presented few difficulties. They took milk readily and lost no time in disposing of any meat I gave them. I would give them the bodies of the birds I was skinning and they would finish everything except the breastbone.

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From Kopasker I moved on to a farm on the extreme northwest point of the Sletta. It was Sigurdurstadir, standing bleakly on a great tussocky plain dotted with lakes, close to the sea. It was the haunt of many Eider Ducks, and to the west was a rocky eminence, probably an extinct volcano, called Raudinupur. There was an outbreak of measles on the farm, so I lived in a tent and took my meals in the farmhouse. There was a perfect place for my fox cubs in the shape of a sunken hay barn, the floor of which was about five feet below the level of the ground. Here the cubs had plenty of room to run about, and they throve amazingly. Life on the Sletta had its disadvantages. There was almost always rain and a high wind, and all along the shore for miles, and also some way inland, innumerable Arctic Terns were nesting. They are very graceful birds, but they are also bold and aggressive and have a harsh cry. Wherever I went, they came screaming at me, swooping down with a great rush of wings and frequently giving a hard smack with their bills as they went by. I often had it happen to me, though they never drew blood. To have these little furies attack one at all times and wherever one went was sometimes slightly wearing on the temper and engendered sentiments which would not be endorsed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Sigurdurstadir was a typical, small Icelandic farm. The people had a fair number of sheep and caught and smoked some fish, sea trout I think. There was a carefully tended hay meadow near the house which provided fodder for the ponies during the winter, and the people also collected Eider down. The Eider Ducks were strictly protected and, nesting as they do in large numbers together, the nests were easily available for the collection of down. The collection of down was, I think, done twice, once from the nest when it contained eggs and once after the young had hatched and left the nest. The down was cleaned by an instrument like an enormous Jew’s harp on which the down is fluffed out and grass and dirt removed. I can imagine nothing

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more delightful than to own such a farm, for the Eider is one of the most fascinating of birds. Unfortunately, in common with most waterfowl, the Eider has decreased in numbers and the yield on the Icelandic farms has greatly fallen. I spent some time at Sigurdurstadir, my most interesting find being Purple Sandpipers, little fat dumpy sandpipers with yellow legs, breeding commonly at sea level. The farming people were friendly and helpful. The eldest son finally took me on the next stage of my journey to a fishing centre called Raufarhofn on the east of the Sletta. I made my first acquaintance with Icelandic ponies, sturdy, docile, sure-footed little animals. We took my foxes with me and had some difficulty in loading them, packed in an old kerosene box. The ponies were most suspicious, but finally we found a quiet one which did not object too strongly. Raufarhofn was a thriving, if malodorous, village blessed with a herring factory. I stayed with a hospitable storekeeper and managed to find a farmer who had a vacant fox pen in which he had formerly kept silver foxes and who was prepared to board my three cubs. My plan was to make a circular tour to Myvatn and pick up my foxes on the way back to England. I moved on down the coast, always being provided with ponies for very reasonable charges. I am no great horseman but I managed to avoid falling off. I greatly regretted that I was no fisherman for I passed several fair-sized rivers, totally unfrequented by rod fishermen but containing good stocks of salmon which the Icelanders net and smoke. I made my way across the base of the peninsula of Langanes and finally arrived at a little place where I stayed with a particularly nice family. Here I was promised that if I could return by a certain date, I could probably get a passage back to England on an Icelandic trawler which called there. I now struck due west heading for Myvatn. I had to walk this part of the journey for it was not a frequented route, although there was a telephone line in course of construction. After three days’ walking I reached the lake, one of the greatest breeding haunts of waterfowl in Europe. All the commoner ducks live there,

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and also many rarities such as Harlequin Duck and Barrow’s Golden-eye. The volcanic soil supports a peculiarly rich underwater vegetation and much animal life on which the ducks feed. I stayed with the local parson, who, like most parsons in Iceland, was also a farmer. I found a farmer who had a blue fox vixen, for I had two dogs and one vixen and was anxious to make up two pairs. It was a most delightful, friendly little animal and I arranged to buy it even though the price was high. Then I went back to Akureyri and made a quick trip along the north coast to see some fine waterfalls and an extraordinary volcanic formation, a great semi-circular depression in the lava with the sides steep cliffs and resembling in shape the gigantic hoof mark of a horse. I stayed a few days with a pastor, near whose home was one of the few Icelandic forests, a straggling growth of undersized birch trees, very green and inviting in that treeless land. I met an Icelandic schoolmaster who was very indignant over the behaviour of W. H. Auden, who had sought out and photographed all the homosexuals in Iceland. There were only a few, and the Icelanders were not particularly proud of them. It was some years later that I discovered that Auden had written a book about Iceland — and included a photograph of me in it. I hope the schoolmaster never saw the book. I also met an anti-Nazi German, broken in health and bearing the signs of great suffering. Two of his old students had come to visit him at great personal risk. He was much worried when two tough-looking individuals boarded our bus. He whispered that he thought they might be Nazis. Actually they were two blameless Cambridge undergraduates, geologists from Johns. I asked this German how he thought Nazism would end. ‘In a sea of blood,’ he said simply. What nonsense, I said to myself. Such was the ignorance of the times. It was nearly time now to set off on my homeward journey. I hurried back to Myvatn to pick up the blue vixen and had a rather

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unfortunate experience in the bus. I was sitting in the front and put the vixen in the back. We had not proceeded far before there were loud and emphatic protests from the passengers who were also in the back. I had overlooked the fact that foxes have a strong natural odour. It was necessary for the vixen to travel on top of the bus after that. In Akureyri I was greatly irritated to find that I had missed the boat which I had planned to catch, and I had to charter a taxi and chase the boat all the way round to Kopasker. It was blowing hard in Kopasker and in going out to the steamer I had my foot caught between the launch and the ship’s side. I was lucky not to be badly hurt. In Raufarhofn I picked up my white foxes without difficulty and proceeded on to my friends on Langanes. They were as good as their word and arranged my passage back to Grimsby on the Icelandic trawler. It took only four days. A special zoo permit was waiting for the foxes and I delivered them safely to the zoo quarantine station. Altogether it had been a very pleasant and enjoyable journey.

The long vacation had one more treat in store. Floyd and I went to see Mr Whitley, the owner of the finest private zoo in the country at Paignton. We had both been there before and this time Floyd wanted to take Mr Whitley some of his animals, as he was overstocked. They included the pair of drills, for it seemed likely that very soon the male was liable to be found wandering round central Sussex with Floyd’s kitchen grate in tow. A visit to Mr Whitley was always interesting. He was one of those extraordinarily gifted men who make their appearance but rarely and who have a peculiar gift and insight for dealing with animals. There was not an animal living which he could not keep and breed to perfection. He had kept and exhibited with the utmost success horses and dogs and every sort of domestic pigeon and had turned his hand to foreign birds and animals. He had built up a wonderful collection, perfectly housed and in the

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most beautiful condition. He would never keep an animal unless it was a perfect specimen, and he was the most exacting critic of the condition of the wild beasts in his possession. Mr Whitley had ideas which seemed odd to the ordinary run of doctrinaire zoo official. He believed, for instance, that a healthy animal in captivity will not eat things which are harmful to it, that an ostrich will not swallow bunches of keys and old razors if it is provided with a proper supply of sharp grit which it needs for its digestive organs. At Paignton there was only one chimpanzee but it was worth crossing Europe to see. The public could give it what they liked, lighted cigarettes and broken glass not excepted. During the summer an ice-cream vendor would take up his stand nearby and the chimpanzee was surfeited with the stuff. He was a magnificent animal and as lively as a cricket. Nothing is more cruel than to keep these intelligent apes as they are in most zoos, shut away from the public who are generally forbidden to offer them anything at all. They lead a miserable existence of utter boredom. The Paignton chimpanzee had a large and simple cage with a sand floor. Mr Whitley was a great believer in having a floor which was resilient, and the inner cage had a wooden floor which was slightly sprung. I have seen the beast jump head first on to the floor and go rolling over in delight. A favourite game was for its owner to take a large pole which he would put inside the cage. The game was for the chimpanzee to try to cross the cage without being hit over the head. Sometimes it would wrench the pole out of Mr Whitley’s hands and at other times it would get a severe smack over the head, and would then grin. Last thing at night it always had a light snack and a cup of cocoa or Ovaltine. The poor beast came to a sad end. When the war broke out its owner could no longer feed it and it was sent to the London Zoo. Here left to mope, and deprived of human company, it wasted away and died. The houses in which Mr Whitley kept his animals and birds were of the most simple design, and most had earth floors. Their inmates lived for ever, or so it seemed. Mr Whitley had one quality which I admired particularly: If he did lose an animal, he was the

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first to admit that he had made a mistake. It was a refreshing contrast to the great majority of zoo officials and others who keep animals, to judge from whose pronouncements no animal has ever died in their care except from an act of God. Mr Whitley was one of the most pleasant and interesting hosts it was possible to imagine. He had an inexhaustible store of valuable information and entertaining stories. He was readily accessible to anyone who was genuinely interested in animals or birds or plants, for he was a great horticulturist too. I greatly enjoyed these visits, which were most stimulating and entertaining. On the particular visit I made with Floyd after my Iceland trip we took down with us three monkeys in the back of the car, plus various assorted fish and reptiles which Floyd wanted to present to the zoo. It was on another occasion that Floyd, having had some spare specimens of a newly imported and rare tropical fish, telegraphed Mr Whitley,‘HAVE YOU GOT ASTRONOTUS OCELLATUS?’ to which Mr Whitley replied, having failed to work out what was meant,‘HAS THE POST OFFICE ERRED OR IS IT A DISEASE?’

My last year at Cambridge was very enjoyable. I had a small and select circle of friends, and the way of life at Trinity was most congenial. I was now president of the Cambridge Bird Club, though not a very good one. The trouble was that most of the activities which I should have been promoting — communal inquiries by members of the club into various ornithological problems — bored me. I was more interested in knowing what birds might live along the headwaters of the Amazon or the Salween than in undertaking some painstaking and probably invaluable study in my own garden on some subject such as ‘Territory and Sex Life of the Dunnock’. I was an ornithological anachronism, a misplaced relic of the 19th century. Like most people in their third year I was presented with the problem of what to do when I went down from the university.

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I only wanted to collect birds, but that by itself hardly appealed to Cousin Cicely and my trustees. We reached a compromise. I was to apply for the Colonial Service, and if successful in passing my preliminary interview would be allowed to spend one year travelling and be provided with some funds for the purpose. The main attraction of the Colonial Service was that it would take me abroad and enable me to travel. It also had the advantage of having no competitive examinations. Entrants were accepted on interview alone. I duly had my preliminary interview and was given permission to proceed for a trip overseas before I submitted for the final interview. I had the whole wide world to choose from in deciding where to go. It was an entrancing thought. The only limitation, in deference to Cousin Cicely, was that I should not go to godless Russia. This did not present any difficulties since I never wanted to go to Russia anyway. After some thought I concluded that the country which I visited must fulfil certain conditions. My secret hope was that I should pay my way collecting live birds. I wanted to do some useful museum work and I wanted to go to a reasonably healthy country. If I was going to collect live birds it seemed advisable to visit a country that was not being worked by any of the existing collectors, and this eliminated to a great extent Africa and the Far East. By a process of elimination I settled on South America, and from there it was but a short step to settle on the Andes of Peru. No one had ever collected live birds there. The entire avifauna was relatively little known and I could work in a temperate region in the mountains. Having settled on the country, it was necessary to learn something about the birds which lived there. I found that there was only one old and out-of-date account of the birds of Peru written in French by a Pole in the 1880s, and that there was absolutely no descriptive handbook of the birds. I therefore set out to make my own. It was a bigger undertaking than I had thought, for Peru is a large country with a great variety of life zones and around 1500 forms of bird. With Mr Kinnear’s encouragement I started to make

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my own descriptive catalogue. I would go up to the museum once a week during term time and three or four times a week during the vacations and work steadily through the skins of birds known to occur in Peru. It gave the Bird Room staff a lot of extra work but they never complained. In many cases I had to make my own list, for there was only a partial handlist to the birds of the Americas available. It did not then cover all the families, and I had to fill in gaps myself. As regards general conditions in the country, I did not find it easy to obtain useful information. I went to see the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, who advised me to see the management of the Antofagasta Railway which runs from Chile into Bolivia. A British businessman told me to be sure to take both a dinner jacket and tails, and a Peruvian vice-consul advised me on no account to go without a 9mm automatic: an essential protection against bears. I acquired a large amount of useless information. It was, in fact, surprising how difficult it was to obtain information in England on the subject of the interior of South America. I wasted far more money than I could afford buying items of equipment such as special tents which I never used. There was one major and inexcusable gap in my preparation: I took no steps whatever to learn any Spanish. I was indeed a phenomenal dolt. I already had a .410 collecting gun which I had used in Iceland, and I bought a 12-bore as well. My ignorance on the subject of guns may be gauged from an incident which occurred during the course of the winter while visiting my trustee, Archie Rose, on his farm in Suffolk. There were a number of Mallards on little ditches around the farm and one day Archie told me to take his double-barrelled 12-bore and shoot a couple of ducks for dinner. I did not like to admit that I was far from well informed on the subject of 12-bores, and duly sallied out. I knew so little that I was under the impression that the two triggers were operated with different fingers, first finger for the right-hand barrel and second finger for the left-hand, and that both fingers should be

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within the trigger guard simultaneously. As may be imagined, the result was not altogether good. When I did find a duck I fired wildly as it rose, setting off both barrels together. I hit a barn and was myself nearly knocked over by the recoil. It was a sensational start for my shooting career, and especially for two men working inside the barn. I never had the courage to tell Archie just what had happened, though I have no doubt he would have been amused. He was a wise old Ulysses, widely travelled and experienced, who had spent many years in remote places in China but whose heart had always remained buried in the quiet Suffolk countryside. His farm was the most friendly and warm little place imaginable. When I bought my own 12-bore I had a few lessons at a shooting school, enough to show me the basic principles of shooting and to convince me that I would never be anything but a poor shot.

I was fortunate enough to get through the tripos. I had written a regional essay that was warmly commended. This was a thesis required from all geography students on any subject which interested them. My own was written on the Eider Duck in Iceland. I was fortunate in that a studious American, Dr J. C. Phillips, had done much preliminary work on the Eider in his monumental Monograph of the Ducks. Indeed, so closely did I find myself in agreement with much of what he had written that his chapter on the Eider Duck was in many places hardly distinguishable from my regional essay apart from some notes culled from my journey to Iceland, to which, of course, Dr Phillips never had access. The essay was a great success and I had it very nicely typed and bound. I was lucky to be given another grant of £85 for my journey to Peru from the Rouse Ball Research Fund. It was necessary for me to travel as economically as possible and I booked my passage out to Peru on an old cargo ship carrying 12 passengers. Sometimes I felt quite sick with apprehension, having always had a horror of

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dreaming too much about the future. It is so easy to build up rosy dreams of what you will be doing in the future, particularly when going off on a journey, and there is no more certain road to disillusionment. I was provided with every sort of credentials for the authorities in Peru, though I was later to realise that the sympathy with which the British Minister viewed the stray ornithologist largely made such preparations unnecessary. During the summer before I left, Cousin Cicely died of cancer. I felt genuinely sad, for the old lady had been very good to me. Her last years were, I am afraid, embittered. She felt, with some reason, that my brothers and I hadn’t shown her the appreciation that was her due for everything she had done for us. To take on, quite late in life, at the request of a dying woman whom she had only recently come to know, responsibility for the upbringing of three orphan boys, showed rare generosity of spirit. I had come the closest to appreciating her but I could have done more. She had, for health reasons, to give up the house where she had lived for so many years, and the garden and the dogs to which she was devoted, and move into a modern flat. She did not long survive the change, and was cremated in Golders Green. She was a dogmatic, upright Christian lady with a high sense of duty and a great strength of will. She viewed my wish to be a naturalist with sympathy and I shall always be grateful to her memory.

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Jakob Jorgensen, Alastair’s walking companion in Swedish Lapland. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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Alastair, with friends at Talahuara, in the Peruvian Andes. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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CHAPTER 3

I VISIT PERU 1937–38

I

sailed from Liverpool to the accompaniment of news about the Japanese invasion of China after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident1. The invasion brought to an end the comfortable income which my brothers and I had derived from the Chinese railway bonds in which most of our capital was invested. I travelled on the Loreto, an old cargo ship of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company, one of the oldest of all British shipping lines. Wags said that PSNC stood for Passengers Should Never Complain, but my only complaint was that it was a very slow ship and took a long time to reach Peru. I shared a cabin with a rotund Welsh officer going out to join one of the PSNC coasters on the west coast of Central America. There was another Welshman on board, a big, raw-boned, retired schoolmaster, a German Jewish refugee couple and their little daughter going to Colombia, and various people going to Chile, but none to Peru. The food was good and there was a useful bar. Indeed, I never heard of anyone who complained of the bars on PSNC ships. The 1

A conflict in 1937 between Chinese and Japanese Guangdong (formerly Kwangtung) army troops on the border of Japanese-controlled Manchukuo and China which led to full-scale war between the two states. It lasted until the Japanese surrender in 1945.

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time passed agreeably enough, and I started to learn a little Spanish out of Hugo’s course on the subject. When we reached warmer latitudes a bathing pool was rigged up on the foredeck out of some baulks of timber and an old tarpaulin. It took us a full three weeks to reach Panama. The actual city of Panama is at the Pacific end of the canal. There were two towns at the Atlantic end: Cristobal, near the docks and under American control; and Colon, under Panamanian control. We were a few days loading cargo in Cristobal, which was a marvellous transhipment centre, well planned, spacious and highly mechanised. But it was only a foretaste of the technological marvels of the canal itself, a most remarkable tribute to American enterprise and engineering skills. I do not think that anyone can ever tire of passing through it. I love seeing other ships, and the canal was a focus for the concentration of much shipping. You passed other ships even in the famous Culebra Cut, and never tied up alongside to allow other ships to pass. At Balboa, at the Pacific end, we took on some more passengers, two tall young Americans from Harvard and a German baron. The Americans were going to Buenaventura in Colombia on a motorcycle tour. Their idea seemed to be to get to Colombia and then to try to travel on their single motorcycle as far as they could in 30 days. They were pleasantly mad. Their papers appeared to be inadequate and they had very little money. The baron, Wolfram von Schöler, was a plausible individual in his late thirties who was on his way to Peru to buy antiques for sale to American collectors on the West Coast. He claimed to know Hollywood intimately. I was never quite certain how much to believe, but he was a most entertaining companion with a fund of amusing stories. He was intensely anti-Nazi. We passed down the coast to Buenaventura, where the population was largely black. It was then a dirty tumbledown place with one modern hotel which boasted a swimming pool. The baron and I spent the afternoon at the pool. Here we met a number of Americans off a Grace Line ship which was also in port.

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I talked to a muscular young college graduate who spoke to me with feeling on the subject of the University of Chicago, which he led me to believe was the greatest and finest university in the world. I modestly mentioned the fact that I myself had been to Cambridge. The Chicagoan was lost in thought. ‘Seem to have heard of the place somewhere,’ he said. ‘A good rowing school, isn’t it?’ The limitations imposed by an education at the University of Chicago became only too apparent. In the evening the baron and I went ashore after first paying a visit to the Grace liner and then to a German vessel next door. By the time we had finished these two visits, we were feeling somewhat invigorated, and set out to explore the town. It was a remarkable experience, chiefly on account of the darkness, the mud underfoot and the friendliness of the inhabitants of Buenaventura. The baron liked his fellow men and was equally at ease in a hovel or a mansion. We visited many places that night which I would normally have been afraid to enter. Actually, the people seemed delighted to have white visitors. Our only difficulty lay in the fact that our united resources were quickly reduced to a £5 note and a $100 bill and we were unable to change these at night except at a ruinous loss. It was therefore a little difficult for us to pay our way. Noticing our financial embarrassment and misinterpreting our needs, or at least mine, a buxom coal-black Colombiana in one little place came to the baron’s aid. She would, she explained, regard it as a privilege to sleep with him free, gratis and for nothing. It would, as she charmingly put it, improve the race, though we were left in some doubt as to which race she was referring. The offer was courteously declined, but there can be no denying the innate sense of hospitality of even the humblest inhabitants of Buenaventura. Our next port of call was La Libertad, the port for the oil-fields of western Ecuador. It was not a very interesting place: an arid, sandy plain with a sparse growth of thorn bushes. We were here for several days and I went ashore to collect a few birds. I had brought

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with me a .410 walking-stick gun, an amusing toy resembling a flashy Malacca cane with an elaborate handle. You pulled out the ferrule to open the muzzle, and the action was opened by twisting the handle, the trigger being held in place by a gold band. No one observed the nature of my walking stick when I went ashore, and I spent a blasphemous morning trying to shoot some birds. I did secure a few, but the trouble was that the cartridges jammed in the breech and could not be extracted. I had to find a suitable stick to push out the cartridges. When that was done, the stick would jam in the barrel too and I needed another stick to push the first one out. We had picked up one or two extra passengers and I had the misfortune to share a cabin with the Archdeacon of Stanley, in the Falkland Islands, whose stamping ground was for some obscure reason in northwest Peru, and an old Italian merchant. These two gentlemen were pleasant enough companions during the day but were far from ideal cabin mates at night. The archdeacon had a resonant snore of a most deafening and persistent quality, and it was the theory of the old Italian that by clicking his fingers like castanets, he would distract the subconscious attention of the archdeacon and thereby cause him to stop snoring. However, the archdeacon proved unresponsive to this subconscious treatment and continued to snore interminably to the ceaseless accompaniment of the Italian. I had to admit defeat and went and slept in the saloon. The archdeacon left the ship in Lobitos and thereafter I had more trouble with the Italian, for he was no lover of fresh air; when I opened the portholes, he lay and groaned all night.

At Lobitos the baron and I decided to make a little tour down the coast to Salaverry where we could rejoin the ship four days later. We set off without luggage for Talara, where we got seats on an old lorry carrying cans of petrol to the large town of Piura. There

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the baron looked for antiques, finding some charming little gold ornaments and a silver mask. We met a slightly drunk Englishman and a very drunk Peruvian and went to bed early, having decided to make the next stage of our journey across the desert of Sechura by plane the next morning. Through the intervention of a courteous and helpful German consul, we caught the plane — a small single-engined machine, one of those built and run by an enterprising American called Faucett — with minutes to spare, and it took us about an hour to reach Chiclayo. It was my first flight and I felt very nervous, a feeling I have never entirely lost on subsequent flights. From Chiclayo we travelled by bus to Pacasmayo. The journey was an enchanting one, down one green valley full of sugar cane and then over a stretch of desert into the next valley and so on. The contrast between the rich green of the valleys and the barren grandeur of the flanking ranges of the coastal cordillera was superb, and as the sun set the colours were wonderful, a real landscape of purple and gold. It is perhaps not out of place here to give a brief picture of the geography of Peru. The coast consists of desert or semi-desert broken up by occasional fertile valleys. The Andes rise a short distance from the sea, decreasing in height towards the north. On the seaward side is the coastal cordillera, which rises to a height of about 15,000 feet in central Peru, and on the Amazonian side is the eastern cordillera, the average height of which is slightly less. Between the two is a high plateau of an average height of about 12,000 feet. The eastern cordillera falls abruptly away to the plains of Amazonia, which occupy the entire eastern portion of the country. At Pacasmayo we dined well and the baron, a festive soul, felt that our arrival called for a celebration. We drank two bottles of excellent Peruvian wine and then explored the town, socialising with the locals in a number of small bars. The friendly people, mostly Indians, responded to our various toasts with natural dignity. We were drinking pisco, a form of Peruvian brandy and a most

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powerful intoxicant, but no sooner had we invited those present to drink some pisco with us than they insisted on reciprocating the attention. This went on for quite a long time and a happy atmosphere prevailed. I must admit that as the evening wore on my recollections became somewhat vague. Indeed, the next thing I remember clearly was finding myself, well past midnight, on the top of a truck bound for Trujillo, the next town. I was looked after by some helpful Indians who prevented me from rolling off the top of the truck and covered my insensible frame with an old sack. We spent much of the next day hunting for huacos, the general name for any form of Indian relic in Peru. The baron found a number of attractive pieces. We would wander into various little shops and inquire if anyone had any huacos to sell. Often we drew blank; at other times we would hear of someone who had a friend who had a huaco and we would be guided to some remote little hut or hovel where it would eventually be produced. Most of the huacos we came across were little figurines, jugs and other objects that had come from graves. They were rather primitive but had great feeling and vitality. They have one peculiarity, and that is the fact that everything had been laboriously moulded by hand, as the Indians had never had the potter’s wheel. The baron was a hard bargainer. He knew when to joke and when to cajole and when to storm out altogether. We embarked again at Salaverry, the port for Trujillo, and two days later arrived in Callao, the port for Lima. The Peruvian authorities gave all my luggage a pass through customs, and I quickly set about making arrangements for my forthcoming journey into the Andes. I was to travel up into the mountains in state with Mr Hixson, the representative of the Peruvian corporation which owned the Central Railway, who was about to make an inspection tour of the corporation’s activities. We would travel in the private coach of the general manager of the railway, Mr Morkill. I spent a night in Chosica, a small town at an altitude of about 1500 feet.

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It was my intention to visit the department of Huancavelica, a part of the Andean tableland lying southeast of Lima, which for some reason had been entirely ignored by previous ornithologists visiting the country. I had been recommended to go there by the late Dr C. E. Hellmayr, a great authority on the birds of the Americas. To reach Huancavelica it was necessary to proceed along the Central Railway to its terminus in Huancayo and then to continue along a Peruvian State Railway to Huancavelica, the capital of the department. I intended to make my base in Huancavelica and from there to explore the surrounding country. Huancavelica had been important in colonial times as it produced mercury needed in the smelting of silver. Mr Hixson and Mr Morkill arrived at Chosica the next morning and we set out in a most comfortable coach with an observation platform, attached to the back of a goods train. It was a most fascinating railway journey leading straight up into the Andes on a very steep gradient but without the use of any racks. We were abruptly enclosed by precipitous and jagged mountains with forests of cacti on the easier slopes. The only green vegetation was along the bed of the valley where ran the Rimac River. There was a bright sun and the deepest of deep blue skies through which sailed immense and improbable white clouds. I began to feel the height. Many travellers into the Andes suffer, at least to begin with, from a form of sickness called soroche, caused by the rarefied atmosphere at great heights, but fortunately I never suffered from any unpleasant reactions. At first I found my breathing a little difficult and felt rather sleepy, but that was all. In the afternoon we reached the divide at 15,600 feet and thereafter ran through moorland, or puna as it is termed in Peru, until we reached the smelting centre of La Oroya, which was the headquarters of the American Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. It is situated at an altitude of 12,000 feet in the narrow valley of the Mantaro. Oroya was a cold, bleak place. The oppressive fumes from the smelter could not escape from the valley and had killed

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all the vegetation for many miles around. The smelter was a huge plant and there was a large resident population of American technicians. The next morning I proceeded on to Huancayo in a Sentinel steam railcar. Huancayo has an altitude of about 10,000 feet and is further down the Mantaro Valley where that valley opens out into a wide rolling plain flanked by hills leading up into the puna. There is more vegetation here, for it lies within the arid temperate zone. There are seven principal life zones in Peru, varying according to the altitude and whether the area is east or west of the main Andean axis. The Pacific slopes of the Andes are, except for a small area in extreme northern Peru, entirely arid, receiving hardly any rain at all. The plains of the Amazon are damp and humid tropical forest. The humid tropical zone in the east is typical of all Amazonia. Its counterpart in the arid tropical zone of the west coast is mainly desert. The tropical zones extend up to an altitude of about 3000 feet and from that altitude up to about 8000 feet are replaced by the humid and arid subtropical zones. Above these zones again are the humid and arid temperature zones up to about 12,000 feet, and on the top of the Andes lies the puna, which extends to the upper level of vegetation near the 16,500 feet level. There is, of course, much individual variation to suit local topography, but that is the general picture. The fauna varies according to the life zone to a quite surprising extent. The leastknown zone is the humid temperate, for it is mostly found on the extreme eastern side of the Andes at high levels. There has been much deforestation in readily accessible places, and usually the real, high-altitude woodland is rare, although odd pockets were to be found in unlikely places. Of all the life zones it is the most interesting, and the birds are very little known. I did not expect to find much in Huancavelica except arid temperate and puna, but no ornithologist had ever visited the department and I hoped that I might make some useful discoveries. Huancayo is typical of the arid temperate zone with hot, bright sunny days but cold nights, and it can be very bitter during

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occasional bad weather. It is a famous resort for tubercular people, and is the terminus of the standard-gauge Central Railway and the starting point of the metre-gauge State Railway leading to Huancavelica. I spent several days in Huancayo. I made arrangements for my onward journey, receiving much assistance from the Peruvian officials of the Huancavelica State Railway, and visited a magnetic observatory maintained by the Carnegie Institute some little distance outside the town. The observatory was in the charge of a Welsh-Canadian scientist called Frank Davies who extended a most cordial invitation for me to come and stay there when I was next in Huancayo. I finally set out for Huancavelica in a comfortable rail-car. To reach Huancavelica you follow the Mantaro again down the narrow valley into which the broad vale of Huancayo abruptly contracts, and after about two hours turn suddenly westwards into the mountains up the valley of a smaller stream which joins the Mantaro at a place called La Mejorada. From there you climb slowly up the heavy gradient to Huancavelica, which lies in a bleak valley more or less where the puna and arid temperate zones meet. I arrived there at about 12.30 on 26 August 1937, two days after my 22nd birthday. Huancavelica was an old and backward little town, full of Indian hovels, some fine churches and one or two large squares. It even had a swimming pool, built in the colonial days, where the water wells up from some warm mineral springs. My arrival caused me some difficulty, for my Spanish was vestigial and I encountered no English-speaking person. My luggage was carried off by a horde of Indians wearing ponchos to the main square, or plaza, where were situated the two principal hotels, the Americano and the Ferrocarril. I finally decided to give my patronage to the latter, though not without first giving the landlady, Señora Paton, considerable cause for offence. I had read that the invariable answer given to any question in South America is ‘Quien sabe?’ or ‘Who knows?’

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and I gave this as my reply when she offered me her best room. She was considerably incensed. It is not the best possible reply for the newcomer to South America to give. Later the Señora and I became good friends. She was a good-hearted and hard-working lady who ran the hotel and maintained a large family including a most drunken husband. Having settled on the hotel I had to find a room in which to work, and here the railway authorities were most helpful, giving me an excellent vacant room in the station which was about five minutes’ walk from the hotel. I unpacked and paid my respects to the chief of police. Now began a month of intensive collecting. In the mornings I would go out for a walk and shoot what birds I could, and in the afternoons I would skin them. I also trapped a few small mammals. The birds in the immediate vicinity of Huancavelica were not very interesting, though since everything was new to me I found plenty to occupy myself with at first. The first days were not very pleasant, for I felt cold, depressed and lonely. Gradually I became acclimatised and did not feel the cold so much, and as my knowledge of Spanish increased I began to feel less lonely. Periodically I paid visits to a little village called Yauli, a halt on the railway about 1500 feet lower down than Huancavelica. Here it was much more sheltered and warmer, and there was quite a rich vegetation. I found many interesting birds at Yauli, including a most beautiful hummingbird. There is no group of birds more fascinating than hummingbirds, beautiful little creatures often with iridescent plumage. They come in a great variety of shapes and sizes, though they are all small. They have tremendous vitality. They have always appealed to the more romantic ornithologists, and since many were first made known to science during the early and middle part of the 19th century, at a time when ornithologists still had souls, they have been given the most fascinating names. There are Sun Angels, Wood Nymphs and Hermits, Hill Stars and Comets. One which had particularly appealed to me was a fine mountain hummingbird found in South Peru which went by the picturesque

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name of Bearded Mountaineer, the beard being a beautiful patch of long iridescent feathers on the throat. At Yauli I found what looked very much like a Bearded Mountaineer, although it seemed to differ from my description of the South Peruvian bird. I found it near limestone gorges by the stream, and I believe that it must have nested in limestone crevices and fissures. There were also some interesting spine-tails, curious little long-tailed birds about the size of a robin which make the most extraordinary nests, great bulky affairs as big as a football, nearly always to be found in thorn and cactus bushes and made of sharp, thorny twigs nearly as big as the bird itself. These nests are very robust and strong and it is a complete mystery to me how such a small bird manages to weave these large thorny twigs firmly together. The middle of the structure is a snug affair of soft grass and feathers. There were various Tyrant Flycatchers, most of them ground birds, a woodpecker which lived on the ground, and a good assortment of other birds. They had the charm of novelty, but I also found the New World birds of exceptional interest. There are wading birds which look like grouse and strange little ducks with spurs on their wings which live in mountain torrents, and oven-birds which build great adobe nests. There are the tanagers, a delightful family of most elegant and brightly coloured little birds, and hummingbirds which are not only iridescent but are also very fast movers. America is the stronghold of the coot family, one of which is a gigantic bird as big as a goose and another has horns (a rare bird, this), while the condor is, of course, the largest bird that flies. Yauli was the most productive collecting ground I visited in the department. It had only one drawback as far as I was concerned. Some years before, an unidentified European, a German or Yugoslav as far as I could make out, had passed through and after his departure had issue by a pretty cholita, a girl of mixed blood, of one little fair-haired daughter, an attractive though grubby infant. It occurred to some local wag that it would be a most mirth-provoking spectacle to tell the child that I was its father. Whenever I appeared,

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the poor little thing would come running after me calling me Papa while the local inhabitants, including the child’s mother, laughed heartily at the ‘joke’. It was a cruel and heartless trick, and very embarrassing for a young man just down from Trinity. Gradually my knowledge of Spanish improved, and I came to know quite a number of the local people. There were the petty officials and their wives, many of whom had their meals in my hotel, contractors and mining engineers. Peru has great mineral wealth and most Peruvians in the Sierra either owned mines or were looking for them. I was often asked whether I would like to see a property, usually a lost and forgotten mine of the colonial period. Half of the people of the Sierra seemed to know or claim to know of old abandoned mines of incredible richness. The population of the Sierra was then mainly Indian. In central Peru they were all Quechuas, shy suspicious folk, nominally Christian but at heart quite pagan. It was not easy to get to know them, for the history of white exploitation is not a pretty one. The Indians had in times gone by been used like beasts of burden in the mines and treated as serfs on the great estates. They had no reason to trust or like white people, and even though the Peruvian government had commenced to take a liberal and practical interest in their welfare, it seemed to me that it would be many generations before the memory of Spanish savagery was effaced. Economically they were very backward, for most of the best land was taken up by large haciendas. Where they did own land in arable country they cultivated maize or quinua, a useful endemic cereal, and some wheat. The staple diet was largely maize and potatoes. Some of the Indians I came across ate almost nothing but roasted maize and a little salt. In the puna, where most cultivation is out of the question, they kept sheep, llamas and alpacas. In their own communities the Indians probably lived very much as they always have done. Many of their old pre-conquest customs were still preserved. I saw the strangest dances on the steps of the biggest church in Huancavelica on feast days. They

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were associated with the Catholic faith but were, I am sure, of a most thoroughly pagan origin. The country was dominated and, I am afraid, oppressed by the Church. I have no antipathy towards the Roman Catholic faith, but the Church in Peru was not entirely a force for good. It was wealthy, a source of occupation for the idle and a means of exploitation of the credulous and ignorant Indians. There was little morality on the part of the clergy, and many of them were far from celibate. They were prepared to sell Church property which might easily be disposed of, such as old vestments and silver. If any work was required to be done, they could easily induce the Indians to give their services until the job was completed. I felt that the Church, which in its early days often did noble work in trying to protect the Indians, could have made a tremendous contribution towards the elevation of the people. In actual practice, it was mainly a force for their continued subjection. There was much degradation among the people. Nowhere have I seen so much chronic drunkenness. Drink was ridiculously cheap, the main standby being a raw form of sugar spirit called canasso. I bought quite a bit for preserving reptiles and it worked quite well. I am myself by no means averse to a little alcoholic stimulant at times, but mass drunkenness is not funny. The other habit which the Indians had was that of chewing the leaf of the coca plant, a small tree which grows in the subtropical eastern valleys of Peru. They chewed it all day, and though it has a vile and sickly smell it could take the place of food and drink, allowing the Indians chewing it to perform prodigies of strength and physical endurance under its influence. It had, however, a deadening effect on the intellect, with those Indians chewing it becoming little more than brute beasts. The Indians said that they could not get along without it, that they needed it because they did not get enough to eat. This might well have been true, for most Indians were hopelessly undernourished, but the use of narcotics was hardly a good remedy. However much one may have liked the Sierra Indians, it was difficult to feel any great warmth for some of the cholos, the Sierra

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half-castes, the shopkeepers and small businessmen. They were sometimes genial rogues, but that is about as much as one could say of them. I found them dirty and dishonest. There were, of course, no bars on the ground of colour. Power in the country had generally been exercised by a limited number of white people descended from the early settlers, but no man was discriminated against on account of the colour of his skin. There were obvious social inequalities, but racial concepts had little to do with it. Most of the petty officials and others with whom I came in contact were, to some extent, of mixed blood, and with many of the attendant defensive complexes. They rather expected to be offended by the odd Englishman and were in a position to make life exceedingly unpleasant for him if they were. But they were also exceedingly easy if approached without prejudice and in a friendly way. There was always a certain latent feeling against the foreigner in South America, though it was primarily anti-American in my experience2. But whether that feeling was manifested depended entirely on the individual. I had very few disagreeable experiences, and even those could have been avoided.

I decided that I would stay on in Huancavelica until I had collected my first hundred specimens and would then send them to England, as I had only limited storage space. It took me just a month, and I went back to Huancayo to pack and forward my collection. Frank Davies had invited me to come and stay at the magnetic observatory, and never have I enjoyed anything more, in particular the possibility of a hot bath. I was most hospitably entertained by Frank and his wife and by his two assistants, Henry and Bill. Henry was a tall American and Bill came from Perth. Poor fellow, he was to be killed several years later in a commando raid 2

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It has given me a certain amount of amusement that I have been in both South America and Asia, in South America where the American was considered the imperialist, and in Asia where the role used to be filled by ourselves.

I visit Peru

on the Norwegian coast. I was provided with a substantial instrument case in which to pack my birds, and was given every assistance. The atmosphere at the observatory was very pleasant, for Frank had the gift for getting the best out of the men working for him. I found it a green and happy oasis. Frank had emigrated from Wales to Canada at the age of 14, had taken odd jobs here and there and finally worked his way through college, where he achieved distinction as a scientist. He had been a member of the first Byrd expedition to the Antarctic and had also taken part in a Canadian expedition to the Arctic. We therefore had much to talk about, and I was particularly interested to meet a member of one of Admiral Byrd’s expeditions. I myself could never make a good polar traveller, but from my brief visits to the accessible parts of the Arctic and subarctic, I have no difficulty in understanding why there always have been and always will be men and women who want to go there. After an enjoyable week in Huancayo I returned to Huancavelica intending to work the higher levels of the department up to the Pacific divide. At Yauli I met my friend the baron who was in search of early Indian mummies reputed to exist a little way farther down near a place called Acoria. It was amusing to see him again, though I did feel that his parting words were a little unnecessary. I had travelled up with a young New Zealand missionary, Twentyman, and was sitting next to him in the rail-car. As we pulled out the baron remarked in a clear, ringing voice,‘I hope you are keeping clear of lice and syphilis.’ I was deeply embarrassed. The baron returned to Huancavelica a few days later in great wrath, for the cave which was alleged to contain ancient mummies had produced nothing more than a large quantity of undoubtedly 20th-century llama dung. He spent a few days in Huancavelica and in that time succeeded in unearthing a most delightful stylised stone llama of real antiquity with a hole bored in its back for the reception of a gold offering. The baron had an extraordinary knack for finding such things. I never knew how he

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did it. I did discover that much of his Spanish was actually bastardised Italian. Early in October I went on up to Lachocc, the railhead, lying at about 13,000 feet. I lived in the tiny station and took my meals at a little canteen run by a disreputable Peruvian and his chola wife. This was the first station in which I worked in the puna and I felt the cold intensely. Lachocc was situated where the Huancavelica Valley gives out into a broad and open upland. It was wide, spacious country, and gave me the impression of being on top of the world. The mornings were generally fine and sunny, but the afternoons, almost invariably, were very cold. It was easy enough to collect specimens in the morning, but skinning in the afternoon was a bitter business. Sometimes I was so cold that I could hardly do the work, for there was no indoor accommodation and I had always to skin in an open doorway, my chair a kerosene tin and my table two kerosene boxes stood on end. After dark I wore every bit of clothing I possessed and still shivered all night. From Lachocc I worked both up and down the valley and also collected a few small mammals. Collecting mammals is something which I shall never greatly enjoy, for the largest proportion of all living mammals are of the size of a rat or mouse, and no one has yet improved on the ordinary breakback trap as a means of collecting specimens. I loathe using the things because I find them such a nervous strain to set properly. They are always liable to catch your fingers and often spring themselves with a nerve-jarring whack just as you put them on the ground. The most interesting collecting ground near Lachocc was a patch of scrub in the valley below. It was rare to find any timber in the central tableland for most of it had been cut down for firewood ages ago, but here, for some reason, was a small growth of old and stunted quinual trees, which grow up to a great altitude in the Andes. There were not very many of them. Odd clumps stretched along the side of the stream for a quarter of a mile or so. But this small patch of vegetation, which as far as I know was separated from any similar vegetation by many miles of

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rugged mountains, was typical of the humid temperate zone of the eastern Andes and contained birds which I found nowhere else in the department. It was not easy to obtain specimens, but by dint of much patience I obtained examples of Fraser’s Giant Cone-bill and the Stripe-headed Ant Pitta. I knew that the quinual scrub contained odd creatures which I had never seen before, but it took me several days to obtain the few specimens which I required to establish the identifications of what lived there. Lachocc was a place through which passed all the personnel connected with the mines farther away in the Sierra. I became friendly with one of the truck drivers called Juan Pastorelli, a big, tall, good-natured man, half German and half Italian. He invited me to stay with him at a place called Talahuarra where he lived in a little hut to which was brought ore for onward forwarding to Lachocc. I gratefully accepted, for Talahuarra was very high, about 15,250 feet, and lay just below the divide between Pacific and Amazonian drainage. I went up there one day with him, arriving in a snowstorm. It was a very bleak spot, but good company largely compensated for this. Pastorelli was not a rich man but he was a distinguished and thoughtful host. His hut was mud-walled with a corrugated iron roof. The walls were stacked with cases of dynamite, gelignite and detonators, and here we would cook on an old flaring primus stove. The food was simple, mostly mutton stew. Mutton was cheap around Talahuarra and the meat kept for ever. The skinned body of a sheep hung inside the door and we would cut off a piece of meat whenever we required any. Pastorelli was a keen shot and used to take my 12-bore and shoot viscachas, a pretty South American rodent like a cross between a rabbit and a grey squirrel, which lived among screes and rocks. The birds here were very interesting, though the work of collecting them was exceptionally arduous. There were some big tinamus, like gigantic partridges, which used to live up near where the vegetation finally petered out at 16,000 feet or so. They would seldom fly, and if you saw a party it was essential to get above

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them, as they always ran uphill. It was very hard work to shoot a couple of specimens. There were a number of other interesting birds which were confined to these high altitudes, and even hummingbirds. I saw one of the lovely Black-breasted Hill-stars flying about during a snowstorm. In the surrounding country there were numbers of vicuña, the pretty little wild llama which produces the finest and most delicate wool of any animal living. They had formerly been much persecuted, but the Peruvian government was now protecting them and they were quite abundant. I once saw a big herd near an abandoned railway line. It had once been intended to extend the Huancavelica line to Castro-virreyña, and much of the construction work had actually been done, cuttings and embankments and tunnels. Work was abandoned during the Depression years. Some of the tunnels had filled with water which had subsequently frozen. I thought the abandoned workings were the loneliest places I had ever seen. I often met great trains of llamas bringing in ore. They are more economical than mules at these high altitudes because they do not need any special fodder. In many ways they are rather unpleasant animals, for one of their defensive habits is to spit with considerable power and accuracy. My old friend Floyd, in his school days at Clifton, derived much amusement in the Bristol Zoo from teasing the llama when another visitor could be seen coming in the direction of the llama pen. He would then make way for the new visitor just as the rage of the llama was reaching its climax. I am not so sure it is a funny thing to do, for in Lima I met a veterinary surgeon who was investigating a peculiar disease akin to syphilis which is carried by llamas and can be transmitted to human beings, though not, I think, generally, by spitting. I stayed with Pastorelli for nearly three weeks. It was a simple life and often bitterly cold. The mornings were nearly always fine when I went out shooting, and it snowed nearly every afternoon. Preparing my birds was often a sore trial though I had become more or less acclimatised to the nights. I wore every stitch of

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clothing I possessed — two pairs of trousers, stockings, ski socks, three high-necked sweaters and a scarf — and used two blankets and a sleeping bag with anything else piled on top. My going to bed never failed to entertain Pastorelli and any of his friends who were there. There was one I particularly liked called Ramon. When I had a stomach upset and had sometimes to make a hurried exit for the great open spaces during the freezing cold of the night, it amused them even more. But it was an enjoyable period. The truck drivers and others were friendly and cheerful and I began to acquire certain picturesque additions to my vocabulary. Many of the people working in the Sierra were said to be members of the revolutionary party Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana lying low. Whoever they were, they were very good fellows who greatly heightened my regards for their country. When I finally left, Pastorelli refused to accept a centavo towards his expenses, although he was far from well paid. He said that he had greatly enjoyed having me and that the loan of my gun was more than ample recompense. He left me with the feeling that I had done him a great personal favour in coming to stay with him at all. From Talahuarra I went to a large mine on the other side of the divide called Santa Inez which lies between two large lakes. My friends at Talahuarra had advised me not to do this. The people of the mine were, they said, a miserable crowd. I unwisely ignored their warnings for I particularly wanted to see what water birds the lakes would shelter. I had hopes of finding flamingos, perhaps the rare and little known Andean species. At first things went all right, though the engineer in charge was a strange fellow. It was difficult to get meals at the right time, and although the people were superficially polite, it was far from genuine. I had meant to move on after three days but could not get away through lack of transport. I asked one of the men whom I took to be in charge if it would be all right to stay another day, and he readily agreed. The next morning I went out very early, and when I eventually returned I asked for my lunch. It was not

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forthcoming and the cook told me that he had instructions from the engineer, Fernandez, not to give me any. I went to see Fernandez and found him in a filthy temper and extremely offensive. Did I think the mine was a hotel? Had I not said I would stay for three days, and if so, why the hell hadn’t I left? No transport? Then why had I not hired mules or llamas or something? The dignified thing would have been, I suppose, to have turned on my heel and left immediately without further discussion. The trouble was that I had nowhere to go, and furthermore, I wanted my lunch. I therefore reasoned with Fernandez and finally convinced him that it was all due to a misunderstanding — convinced him sufficiently, at any rate, for me to get my lunch. It was, however, a most disagreeable incident and upset me considerably. After I had prepared my specimens I walked out for miles along the road to Talahuarra to pick up the first truck that should come, and it was in the gathering shadows of a cold, wet evening that I was eventually able to meet a truck which collected my luggage and bore me swiftly away from Santa Inez. The truck belonged to Señor Dante Castagnola, a prosperous miner of Italian extraction, and it was to his hospitable mining camp that I now proceeded. I was warmly welcomed by Señor Castagnola and his two sons. They called their mine Lira. It also was among lakes, and here I came to know the Giant Coot, a most surprising bird living in bare open lakes at great altitudes. It is a great hulking bird as big as a goose, with enormous red legs. I spent several days in the friendly atmosphere of Lira. It was comfortable and reasonably warm, and the only matter to which I found it a little difficult to accustom myself was the fact that my host was a vegetarian. For lunch and dinner we would have vegetable soup and then some form of stewed vegetables with biscuits and raw onions in olive oil. It is probably a healthy diet but I nearly cried when one of the boys shot some ducks with my gun and they were given away to a visitor. Lira was a very good antidote for the encounter at Santa Inez.

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Finally the time came for me to go back to send off my skins. I made the journey back to Huancayo direct in one day. I was very tired but also very satisfied. I had about 160 specimens, mostly of little-known high-altitude birds. I think I can truthfully say that few ornithologists have worked harder in the puna. Most work there had in the past been done by ornithologists passing through on the way to somewhere else. I obtained a lot of rare specimens which now form part of the British Museum collection.

I returned to Huancavelica on 25 November. I now planned to complete my studies in the department by collecting a few additional specimens which I needed from near Huancavelica and visiting three other localities lying at lower altitudes. The first of these was Lircay, at an altitude of rather more than 10,000 feet and lying on a parallel valley to that of Huancavelica some way to the southeast. There was a fair road running to Lircay across the lower levels of the puna. The road was wet when I travelled there and the truck I was in sometimes skidded alarmingly. A skid in Peru is likely to have the most diverting consequences, for the vehicle is often liable to go off the road and roll two or three thousand feet to the bottom of the valley. Fortunately in this case I had a good driver. Lircay was a pretty little place, though I found some of the people ill-mannered. Some cholos of the Sierra had an irritating habit of speaking to the stranger and when he replied of bursting into a great guffaw of laughter. The emotions which this behaviour arouses in the breast of the visitor are not always charitable. The so-called hotel was run by a most irritating old chola woman, reputed to be one of the richest women in the place. I and some other luckless visitors paid well for what we had, but we never had very much. The old landlady was always screaming at the top of her voice at someone or other and I sometimes wondered whether I could not do a good deed for the Lircay

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community with the powdered arsenic which I carried for preserving my skins. The main object of my visit to Lircay was to try to obtain some specimens of a tinamou which I knew existed in the hills. It was not easy, for tinamous, which are ground birds living in the grassland, are very hard to detect. I did shoot one eventually, but with great difficulty. I fell over once and caught the little finger of my right hand between my 12-bore and a rock, which was not altogether an erotic sensation. I continued on down the railway to Mejorada on the Mantaro and from there along the Ayacucho Road which follows the Mantaro Valley to a little place called Anco. This truck journey was somewhat nerve-racking, for the vehicle’s brakes were in need of overhaul and about the only way of slowing down was to change gear. Unfortunately, the driver had not yet fully mastered the technique of changing down. At about 8000 feet Anco was the lowest station in which I worked. It was a surprising contrast to the puna in which I had been working not so long before. The valley was arid and the slopes where irrigation was impossible were covered with various cacti, some of them of great size. A little stream came down from the hills behind Anco and its waters were used for irrigation. Wherever there was water the land was green and lush and sugar cane and oranges were cultivated. It was a pleasant spot, and the little hotel, a halting place for traffic bound for Ayacucho, was the best one I came across in the Sierra. It was run by a cheerful soul called Cutti who bore a marked resemblance to the actor Jack Oakie. The hotel was clean and the food excellent. Cutti had two gigantic dogs like St Bernards, so fat they could hardly walk, and he was always ready to wager a bottle of his beer at some simple game of chance. He even contrived to consume considerable quantities himself in company with a bosom friend called Treverso. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay at Anco. I encountered a number of birds which I saw nowhere else in the department and collected two bats which I found later

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were true vampires, the beast which sucks blood. I do not think that it ever attacks human beings in this part of the world, but the attacks which it makes on horses and other domestic animals are a considerable nuisance. The technique of the animal is to settle on the withers or legs of the horse and with its sharp incisor teeth cut a small hole in the skin which bleeds profusely, the bat feeding on the blood. It does not usually kill animals but weakens them through loss of blood. Vampires are widespread in South America. They are the only directly harmful bats which exist, though European prejudice holds otherwise. The Chinese think more charitably of these little animals. For them the bat is a symbol of happiness and good luck, a cheerful little animal twittering in the dusk, so much more attractive than the perverted European belief that the bat is foul and verminous, seeking an opportunity to entangle itself in a woman’s hair.

On Christmas Eve I returned to Huancavelica for I had promised to look after the house of Twentyman and his wife, the New Zealand missionaries, while they went to stay at the observatory in Huancayo. They needed a change and I had no particular objection to spending my Christmas in Huancavelica, where I had various odds and ends to clear up. I received a most welcome and satisfying Christmas present in the form of confirmation from the British Museum that my Bearded Mountaineer from Yauli was indeed new to science. I was now quite at my ease, for I could speak a reasonable amount of Spanish and I knew most of the local notables. I could never bring myself to love the cholos of Huancavelica but I had come to know how to adapt myself to them. I visited Yauli, where the little child still called me Papa though the Indians did not laugh so heartily as before. Right up to the end I was still finding interesting birds in that best of Sierra collecting grounds. On one of my last visits I came back in the train to find that the whole crew had been celebrating. This meant quite a big party

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for it was a state railway and there were about half a dozen conductors and a swarm of brakemen. I myself was thirsty and I stood some of the crew drinks. This so melted the heart of one conductor that out of sheer goodness of heart he proposed to a respectable Peruvian gentleman on the train that it was in the public interest that I should sleep with his daughter, who was also on the train. Papa took it surprisingly well and agreed that it might not be a bad plan at all. I seemed to be the only person who was really embarrassed. We were fortunately distracted, for the driver failed to stop at one station and we had to make an ignominious return in reverse. My friends the missionaries came back on 3 January and I left the next day. I cannot say that I was sorry to see the last of Huancavelica. I took away some pleasant memories, for I had met some people I liked very much, but they were mostly intruders from other places in Peru. I was sorry to say goodbye to Señora Paton in whose hotel I always stayed. She had plenty to do looking after her children, her hotel and her husband. The latter was a good fellow when he was sober but you had to get up early to find him in that condition. He used to put the butter on the small buns, pancito, which men would have with their morning coffee and that would set him off. It was said that the preparation of each bun called for one nip of pisco, and a very large number of people used to take their breakfast at the hotel. I did not think he would last for long at the rate he was going, but strangely enough I heard later that the family had moved to Callao, where old Paton forswore the bottle and became a model family man. I suppose the truth of it was the Huancavelica was liable to make anyone take to drink. I took with me from Huancavelica one live duck, a drake Crested Duck, a very fine Sierra species. I bought it from a cholo family and it was the first of my collection of live birds. It was still living in the London Zoo long after the war.

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The second part of my trip involved a visit to Lake Junin, a large shallow lake lying some way north of Oroya at an altitude of 14,000 feet. I left my Crested Duck with friends at the observatory and went to Oroya to present my introductions to the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, a huge American organisation generally known as the C. de P. Through the help of Mr Colley, a senior member of the corporation’s staff, I was promised the use of a little hut built by the side of the railway track to accommodate duck shooters from Oroya. It was a little low place with mud walls and corrugated iron roof, with an outer room where a boat was kept and an inner room with bunks and stove. Caillupe, a Quenchua Indian who was in charge of the place, lived in a little room tacked on to the back. His job was to watch the duck house and to take readings with a stick of the level of the lake, and he was to act as my assistant for the next few months. Though he could neither read nor write, he was a helpful, simple soul who did odd chores for me for a subsidy of one sol per day. The lake lies in the middle of a wide plain, ringed by low hills. The countryside does not give an impression of height except that on fine mornings I could see great snow peaks glistening in the far distance to the north of C. de P., and from a little way up the valley immediately behind the duck house there were other peaks of the eastern cordillera to be seen much nearer at hand. The climate was bitter, with much rain and mist, but the fine weather had a balmy quality. Caillupe would call me at an early hour and make breakfast for me and I would not emerge from my sleeping bag until it was ready. Then Caillupe would go off to the lake where he had a little tin boat from which he caught frogs and shot waterfowl. There were many Indians so engaged, for ducks and coots swarmed on the lake and there was a ready market for them in Oroya. The Indians used old muzzle-loading guns and speared frogs with long poles. The frogs grew to a great size. I found later that they were a rare and little-known species, but unfortunately I took only one specimen back to England. They are ugly beasts, very much flattened and purely aquatic in their habits.

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I would spend the day shooting or preparing enclosures for live birds which were brought to me by the local fowlers. I found it difficult at first, for I knew very little about the care of waterfowl and I lost a number through pure ignorance. I made little wirenetting pens with sacking wind breaks and thought my ducks would thrive in them. Unfortunately, the most essential thing for all captive live ducks is to keep them dry, for once they have been away from water for a short time they lose the oil in their feathers which keeps them waterproof. Once this is lost they are extremely sensitive to damp. A duck which has been kept away from water will drown if suddenly returned to its native element. It rapidly becomes waterlogged and finally sinks without ever realising the nature of the trouble. The oil will return to the feathers if the bird is gradually allowed to acclimatise itself by controlled bathing. Of all this I knew little, with the unfortunate result that I lost a number of ducks which I could very easily have saved had I built them proper shelters. The fowlers eventually brought me quite a number of birds. They had no clever technique for catching or snaring them, but obtained birds by pursuing those in moult until they were so exhausted that they could be picked out of the water. It is a peculiarity of waterfowl that they moult all the primary, or flying, feathers simultaneously and are then entirely unable to fly. I was brought quite a number of the two most abundant species, Puna and Sharp-winged Teal, but few of the more valuable Crested Duck, which is a solitary and unsociable bird. I was also brought a number of Andean geese, plovers, gulls and ibis, and was kept busily employed looking after them. I was kept so tied to the house that I hardly ever went out on the lake itself, though it was most interesting. It was quite small compared with the other great lake in Peru, Titicaca, but they have one most interesting thing in common: on each lake is to be found a peculiar grebe which is confined to the lake. I collected a number of birds and made one discovery that was of considerable interest, though I did not realise it at the time.

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I noticed that there were two coots found on the lake, both of about the same size, one with a red front and green legs and the other with a white or yellow front and grey legs. It was not until after I had returned to England that I discovered that although specimens of these two birds had been known for very many years, they had always been confused. They are identical in size, and in dead specimens the colour of the bare parts quickly fades. It was eventually necessary to describe one of them as new to science, since the differences had never been clearly pointed out. They are now considered to be the same species, though seen in the flesh they seem remarkably different. Once a week I would go into Oroya to obtain provisions. I would walk a couple of miles down the line to a halt called Socorro and pick up the passenger train there. When I returned in the evening the train would stop in front of my door. Occasionally I would have odd visitors, various mining engineers or Peruvians from nearby towns. At times it was very lonely. The trains roared by and the road was not far away, but the duck house was out on the open pampa and was some distance from the nearest house. Sometimes I got very jumpy, and when letters to and from Huancayo were delayed I convinced myself that my good friends at the observatory had something against me. I nearly killed the faithful Caillupe with an overdose of Glauber’s salt, for the poor fellow asked for a purge and when Alophen pills were ineffective I light-heartedly gave him much too strong a dose of salts which he obediently drank. Caillupe was also the centre of another incident which nearly ended disastrously for me. Once a month on pay day he would go to the nearby town of Cahuarmayo and get very drunk. This rather amused me the first two times, for he was amiable and would usually retire to bed complaining of a severe pain in the head. He always had a terrible hangover the next morning. The third time this happened, however, he returned at a rather early hour and, after trying to get me to have a drink with him, staggered off to his room. It was one of those wretched days

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when everything goes wrong, and being in a great rush to get my birds fed in the evening, I hauled Caillupe out to help me cook the grain and do some other work. He was still drunk and when he went to attend to the stove complained bitterly. Why should he work for me or the C. de P. or Mr Colley? Why should he continue to slave his life out? He was fed up. He was finished. He would go and work somewhere else. I was in a far from amiable mood myself at that moment, and when I heard all this I told him to get out of the house. When he did not proceed with the speed which I considered suitable, I pushed him out forcibly. Since he was a small man and drunk, he fell over in the process. He went muttering away to his quarters and I had time to take stock of the situation. It was a somewhat awkward one. By good fortune I decided to go round back to Caillupe’s quarters, and on entering I found him busily loading his old muzzle-loading gun. The reader may perhaps now expect to hear how I stunned the man with a blow and trussed him up until he was sober again. In fact I was very frightened and embarrassed. It was a choice between force and reason. The latter was more suited to my peaceful temperament. ‘Come,’ I said. ‘We have both been angry. It is stupid for good friends to quarrel.’ The effect was immediate. Caillupe put down his gun and wept on my shoulder, and I on his. That was the end of the matter, but I was considerably shaken. If I had not gone promptly to his quarters I have no doubt that he would have killed me. In addition to nearly being shot by Caillupe while at Lake Junin I also had the unusual experience of being savaged by a Sharpwinged Teal. This is an Andean representative of the better-known Yellow-billed Teal. The very first duck brought to me was a Sharpwinged duckling about two-and-a-half weeks old. I was fascinated and held it up to my face to have a better look, whereupon a surprisingly long and sinuous neck shot out and the duckling bit me on the tip of the nose, the serrated bill nearly removing two oblong patches of skin. Such are the hazards of bird collecting.

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I was now in the throes of preparing my travelling cages for the voyage home. I had brought some models with me and others were slowly built in Cahuarmayo and Junin. The essential principle for keeping ducks and most other birds on the voyage home is to provide them with cages where they live on wire netting with a cleaning tray below. In this way they keep clean and dry, and all droppings fall through to the tray. Food and water are placed outside the cage in front of the bars through which the birds can push their heads in order to feed. I ended up with a considerable collection: about 10 geese, 150 ducks, and small numbers of ibis, gulls, plovers and other small birds. The only mammals were some small mice and several peculiar little wild guinea pigs which live in the reedbeds of the lake, strange little animals which seem far from well adapted for an aquatic existence. When cornered on small islands in the lake they show the utmost reluctance to take to the water. Guinea pigs originated in Peru and many are kept domesticated by the Indians and run about the houses. They are a common article of diet and are good eating. In addition to the few mammals I had some frogs. The manager of the railway, Mr Howard, whose kindness never knew any bounds, arranged for a goods train to stop and pick up my birds and bring them into Oroya, from where the Central Railway promised to send them down to Lima and Callao. It was just too easy. The train duly stopped and we quickly loaded in my cages and luggage. I took a fond farewell of Caillupe, a good fellow with whom, apart from the small matter of the gun, I had lived on amiable terms. His one idiosyncrasy which I never liked was to tell me stories of evil spirits and lurid local murders last thing at night. At Oroya my birds were transferred into another coach with an air brake so that it could be sent down to Lima with the next day’s passenger train. The coach, an ordinary luggage van with two big sliding doors on each side, was tacked on to the end of the train. Everything seemed ideal but I made one bad error. I stacked my cages round the sides of the van thinking to attend to them

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more easily that way. At first all went well, as there is a gradual ascent from Oroya to the divide at La Cima and the train proceeds slowly and steadily. But once over the divide all hell let loose. There were many curves and bends, and soon my stacks of cages started to fall down. I spent the whole journey rushing from one end of the van to the other propping them up, a task not made easier when a lot of boiled wheat fell on to the floor and made it very slippery. In Lima I kept my birds still in the same coach in the yards of the Central Railway. With the kind assistance of the British Minister, Mr Forbes, the official matters connected with my departure were soon completed and I was ready to leave. I had booked a passage on a Dutch ship called the Boskoop. The ship was slightly delayed in arriving in Callao and the question of transferring my birds and the coach they were in from the railway yards to Callao involved me in a small incident which made an indelible impression. The agents for the Dutch line were a British firm. The individual in charge wished me to move my birds to the docks a day earlier than appeared to me to be necessary, which was very inconvenient. My friends in the Central Railway had promised to move the coach at short notice whenever it became necessary, but the agent would have none of it. I demurred. The agent decided to clinch matters. ‘No hard feelings or anything, old boy,’ he said, ‘but you must realise that we are only taking your birds as a personal favour to you.’ It was a favour that was costing me the sum of £50, a useful amount in 1938 for payment of freight on 10 tons of deck cargo. I am afraid that it was an attitude all too common among British businessmen, the ‘personal favour, old boy, and if you don’t like it, you can do the other thing’. I ignored the agent’s advice and my friends in the Central Railway moved the birds when it was convenient for me. Nothing could have been further from the personal-favour complex than my reception on the Boskoop. If anything, I seemed to be doing the Dutch merchant marines a favour by giving them an opportunity to carry my ducks. They were loaded on an

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after hatch and provided with an awning. Nothing was too much trouble. The passengers were as well looked after as the ducks, with comfortable accommodation and excellent food. The journey home took a month and I regret to state that I put on two stone during that period though I was working hard all day. Everything was to be had in abundance. One peculiar Dutch dish which I recollect with pleasure, though it sounds an extraordinary mixture, was dried boiled peas eaten with bacon fat. It used to be served in place of soup about once a week. I worked hard on the Boskoop, for live birds must be looked after entirely by the shipper. The time passed quickly, the passengers were a pleasant crowd and I sat at a table with the chief engineer and the doctor. Once, while we were still off Peru, I was called on deck one night because one of my birds was said to have escaped. I rushed out in my pyjamas to find most of the other passengers standing round a Peruvian Gannet which had flown on board. I was not particularly interested but obviously had to do something. The gannet had an unfriendly look but I made a grab at it. In the ensuing struggle the gannet buried its bill in the calf of my leg and the comments I had to offer caused quite a little surprise. It made an excellent skin. Our port of destination was Liverpool and my disembarkation was the occasion for much exasperation. The cages containing my birds were made of half-inch match boarding and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for the dockers who came on board to walk on top of them. Half-inch match boarding will not, however, sustain the weight of a hefty docker, and several of the cages were smashed, the birds inside either maimed or killed. I lost about £30 worth of birds in the space of a few minutes and it was the biggest laugh the boys involved had had for years. Some of my small birds were in little box cages and these were carried ashore individually. It had not occurred to me to tie the doors down, and one man succeeded in turning a cage completely upside down while carrying it ashore. As a result I lost

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the only example ever imported of a rare little finch. This was the occasion for more hearty laughter. I have never had any trouble loading or unloading birds in South America. I later compared notes with other collectors who confirmed that British docks were the collector’s nightmare. Once ashore the collection was soon removed to the London Zoo where they were placed in the quarantine station. Some of the birds went to the zoo but most went to private zoologists in England, France and the United States. I spent a few days in London staying in a hotel in Russell Square and, having few friends there, quickly learned how lonely life can be in a great city. But there were consolations. The quarantine station at the zoo was in an old riding school just behind an excellent pub called The York and Albany. The station was presided over by an experienced zoo employee, Will Harwood, who possessed the most intelligent dog I ever encountered, a magnificent Alsatian called Rex. When I first saw Rex in the quarantine station I was rather annoyed, for I thought he would terrify my birds, which were placed on a small ramp which had been used for washing cars. Harwood said ‘Keep off that ramp’ quietly to the dog and Rex never again went near it while I was there. If I threw a ball for him he would chase it, but if it went on to the ramp he would stop dead and wait for me to go and get it. Rex was a most lovable and intelligent beast. We were good friends, but once, when he had been left on guard in Harwood’s house which adjoined the station, I went to see if Harwood was at home and was nearly torn limb from limb. He had a job to do. I have usually regarded most stories of canine intelligence with some scepticism, but Rex seemed to have an almost human understanding. My birds sold quite well, and I realised altogether £470 for the live ones. I did not sell my collection of 550 skins which were worth about another £150. I felt greatly encouraged and decided to make another trip. I studied my skins at the museum and found that I had many interesting specimens and that my labours in compiling a descriptive catalogue of the birds of Peru had not

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been a waste of time. My identifications were surprisingly accurate, about 95 per cent correct, and as a result I had been able to concentrate on the rarer species. Apart from the discoveries of the Andean Coot and the Bearded Mountaineer, I was able to describe three new geographical races of Andean oven-birds. I was extremely contented.

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Alastair at Melinka, in the Guaitecas Islands, 1939. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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CHAPTER 4

VIVA CHILE 1938–39

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had enough money in hand to finance a second venture and it was a logical step to go to Chile, where some rare and littleknown waterfowl also were to be found. It took some time to get away from England, for there were family matters to settle. It was the last time that I and both my brothers were to be together. Finally, in September 1938, I sailed from Liverpool again on the liner Orbita. This time I was taking birds with me, for I had promised to bring some English pheasants to Mr Colley in Peru. I obtained the pheasants, beautifully packed, from a game farm, but the Peruvian laws regarding the importation of livestock were extremely complicated, seemingly based on the premise that no unhealthy animal exists inside the country and that disease can only be introduced from the outside. It was so impossible to comply with them, since I did not have the necessary year or so to make the preparations, that I eventually shipped the birds with me to Chile on the off chance that I could unload them in Callao when I got there. The Peruvians were not the only people with vexatious regulations. The shipping company was unwilling to accept birds for transportation on a passenger vessel, and I was finally

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permitted to take them only as a personal favour. When I embarked, I found that in addition to my birds, which were no trouble to anyone, there were about a dozen dogs on board. They were the cause of much ill feeling because strong-minded owners, lady passengers in the first class, would insist on overriding ship’s regulations and taking them for walks in the second class, which they duly befouled. This did not amuse second-class passengers such as myself who had no dogs. However, on the whole it was a very agreeable journey. I had the company of a very entertaining man, Stanley Bond from southern Peru, and some nice people going out to Bermuda. There were two South Americans, a Bolivian called Crespo and a Cuban called Roca. I came to know some of the ship’s people very well: an assistant purser, one or two engineers and the chief radio operator. There was an extremely good bar with an excellent attendant called Danny. Our first port of call was La Pallice, from where Bond and I visited the nearby town of La Rochelle and had lunch. From here we went on to Bermuda, which I toured by bicycle with a retired Indian Army officer called Geake, who had been in Upper Burma and was later killed there in 1942 by the Sikh Military Police under his command. Bermuda is a charming place, undulating country cut up by lagoons and arms of the sea. It has a first-class aquarium with numbers of Galapagos Penguins and tortoises. Bermuda must be a delightful place to settle down in if you have a sufficiently well-lined purse. We called briefly at Nassau in the Bahamas and then went on to Havana, where I went ashore with Bond and Crespo and one or two others and toured the city. We drove along the magnificent marine drive and were taken to see a remarkable cemetery. We also dropped in for a quick drink at a little bar. A popular drink in these parts is rum and Coca-Cola, which is very refreshing and is often called Cuba Libre (Free Cuba). However, when we asked for a Cuba Libre the bartender cried fiercely, ‘No es libre, carajo, es jodido.’ (‘It is not free, it is fucked.’) We were a little disconcerted

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and adjourned to the Havana Club, one of the more remarkable institutions in the New World, run as an advertisement by the owners of Bacardi rum. Situated in a fine old colonial Spanish house opposite the cathedral, the club was open to all visitors to the island. On a pleasant veranda you sat down at a table groaning with bottles of every conceivable kind of spirit and liqueur and drank what you liked. You might order anything, and silent-footed waiters brought you extraordinary rum cocktails. You were the guest of Bacardi rum. It all cost you nothing, though there was an unwritten law that you bought some Bacardi before leaving. This was no hardship, for few visitors ever leave Havana without buying some. It is one of the world’s great drinks, a dry and enlivening ambrosia which bears about as much resemblance to the usual West Indian rum as a thoroughbred does to a dray horse. Our party left the Havana Club in a most cheerful frame of mind, each of us carrying a large, wicker-covered flagon. From Havana we proceeded for a brief call at Kingston, and then on to Colon. The news at this time was depressing. War clouds were gathering and we reached Colon on the eve of Munich. We had passed the cruiser Orion off Jamaica, for the Emden was said to be in the Caribbean. A German freighter which was just behind us when we came into Panama had put about and left for an unknown destination. It did not seem as if we could do much about it, so we did our best to try to forget. It was indeed a somewhat hilarious evening. We moved from club to club, from the Silver Spray to the Atlantic, from the Atlantic to the Moulin Rouge, and so on. The time passed quickly and since I now spoke quite a bit of Spanish I had to do a certain amount of interpreting for members of the ship’s company. Two members gambolled lightheartedly in the Silver Spray and one fell flat on his face, splashing water to a great distance, which led the management to put in a strong complaint. I think the incident was settled by ordering several more rounds of drinks for our own consumption. When with aching heads we groped our way on deck the next morning

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we were greeted with banner headlines that civilisation was saved and that peace was assured for our time. It was simple as that1. We passed quickly down the coast and in Lima I called on friends and had lunch at the Maury Hotel, one of the few really bright spots on the culinary map of Peru. The food was magnificent. I always started by ordering a palta rellena con camarones. The palta is the avocado pear, which grows to perfection in Peru, and the dish I have mentioned is a large and luscious half palta piled to overflowing with succulent prawns in mayonnaise. My port of disembarkation was Valparaiso, which has a fine natural harbour and a beautiful Mediterranean climate. I was once again provided with every facility through the courtesy of the Chilean authorities. In South America such facilities generally centre on the possession of firearms, which are always strictly controlled. Anyone who intended to do any shooting in South America was required to make prior arrangements or face interminable difficulties. While in Valparaiso, I was invited to dinner with the Consul General, an event which I viewed with a certain amount of trepidation, for he had a somewhat dry and sharp manner in the office. I accordingly absorbed a certain amount of liquid courage before proceeding to his house. The Consul General was living with his daughter, and not long after I arrived the telephone rang and was answered by the daughter. When she came back, her father inquired who had made the call. The daughter replied that it was that ‘old slitch, Mrs Blank’. I was much puzzled by the word ‘slitch’ and wondered if I had heard correctly. I rather diffidently inquired as to the meaning of the word. The Consul General gave me a piercing look. ‘A slitch,’ he said, ‘is our own little private, personal family word for a cross between a slut and a bitch.’ I do not think I have ever been so surprised in my life. The evening was a most congenial one. My plans were to visit South Chile, and in order to do that it was necessary for me to go to Santiago, the capital, which lies at 1

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In the Munich agreement of 30 September 1935 the British and the French granted almost all of Hitler’s demands and left Czechoslovakia defenceless. Chamberlain returned to England a popular hero, speaking of ‘peace with honour’.

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the foot of the Andes. There I met a number of excellent Chilean naturalists including Don Carlos Reed, director of the Santiago Zoo, a tremendous personality who was almost too hospitable. I called on him one morning and before I left he had made me accept white wine, chicha, rum, red wine and the skin of an Araucanian pigeon. I left Santiago for the south on 19 October, my taxi catching fire on the way to the station. The train ran all day down the great central valley of Chile which forms the heart of the country. It stretches parallel to the coast for some 600 miles from Santiago to Puerto Montt. The valley is quite narrow, hemmed in between the Andes and low hills along the coast. It is a country of great beauty and charm, and all the way down to Puerto Montt I kept seeing snow peaks to the east, decreasing in height as we went farther south. I made the journey in two days so that I could travel in daylight, spending the night at a small town called Temuco. As I went south there was a steady change in the climate and topography. Santiago might be in the south of France, and then there is every transition until in the extreme south, around the small port of Puerto Montt, the country is temperate and green and similar to England. Puerto Montt might almost be in Scandinavia, for the houses are made mostly of wood and it lies at the head of a fine fiord shut in by precipitous, wooded heights. I stayed in a comfortable hotel in Puerto Montt but soon went on to a small town called Maullin lying on the estuary of a river to the west. Here, a good many years before, Lord William Percy had found considerable numbers of the Bronze-winged Duck, a very fine bird which had never been imported to Europe, and I hoped I would be able to obtain specimens. I spent 18 days at Maullin, but whereas Lord William Percy had found the Bronzewinged Duck abundant in 1924, I did not see a single specimen — due, I think, to clearance of land in the vicinity. If my stay was ornithologically unprofitable, it formed a good introduction to life in a small Chilean town. I came to know all the

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prominent people in the place and found them very good company. Maullin, with a population of about 1200, was the centre of a small district and there were quite a number of officials. The police, or carabineros, had two officers and 43 men, there was a harbour master and six naval ratings, a doctor and half a dozen civil servants. To cater for the population there were three so-called cabarets, the most elaborate of which was called El Rancho Grande. It was a friendly and cheerful little place and the atmosphere was quite different to Peru, for Chile is a white country and there is virtually no Indian population. The standard of living was much higher than in Peru, and education more advanced. The people were well disposed towards the odd Englishman and I soon discovered what a very high regard they had for the Duke of Windsor, who had made a successful tour some years before as Prince of Wales. Many Chileans seemed to regard the abdication as an almost personal affront, and the chief of police seemed to regard me as being partly responsible for it myself. It was no use telling him that my name was not Baldwin and that the Archbishop of Canterbury was a much older man. I worked the country around Maullin fairly carefully but found nothing of special interest. I did find sanderlings along the estuary, plump little waders which nest so far north in the High Arctic that few men have ever seen a nest, and which then fly to the other end of the world to spend the winter. It soon became apparent that I was not going to obtain any of the birds I required, and with some regrets I decided to move on to the lake region to the north of Puerto Montt. I proceeded to the other side of a large lake called Llanqhihue where I stayed in a good German hotel at a place called Enseñada. This area was a famous pleasure resort. It is a volcanic area with two beautiful extinct volcanos, one to the north called Osorno and one to the south called Calbuco, both about 6000 feet high and covered by snow. Osorno is an almost perfect, slender cone. The country is heavily wooded and away from the roads very bad going over lava screes. I spent a few days in Enseñada collecting some

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birds and living in great comfort. I became involved in long political discussions with various Germans and it seemed to me that the longer they had been away from home the more violent they were in their Nazi beliefs. Finding very little in Enseñada which was of any use to me, I went on to the next lake farther up in the mountains, called Todos los Santos, which was long and narrow with steep and precipitous walls. At the far end of the lake there lies a little place called Peulla, from where a motor road runs to the boundary of Argentina. This was a good locality for birds. The lake had extensive reedbeds where the River Peulla entered it, and the river itself broadened out in some places to attain the dimensions of a small lake, one such place being called the Laguna de Encanto. Here at last I found Bronze-winged Ducks. Quite a number lived along the stream, and there were also a few Steamer Ducks, peculiar big grey ducks with a yellow bill which live along the coast of southern South America. There are two species, a large one which is flightless and which flaps or ‘steams’ along the water, and a small one which can fly perfectly. The latter nests on freshwater lakes and it was this species which I found at Peulla. It seemed an ideal spot to collect birds, but it also seemed too good to be true. The difficulty was that none of the local people knew anything about trapping birds and I myself knew very little more. I thought that I might be able to net Bronzewinged Ducks by driving them into an immense net which I had brought for the purpose. In practice it did not work at all. My idea was to stretch it across the Peulla River and to drive the ducks downstream into it, but when I tried to put it across the river I found that it became far too heavy to drag across. Before we were halfway over, it weighed about a ton. I made several attempts to set it but eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that it was quite out of the question. I returned to Puerto Montt and set out on a small steamer to Ancud at the north end of Chiloe Island. We passed through

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narrow channels running through green and heavily wooded country. The South Chilean woods are thicker than anything in Europe and the undergrowth is very dense, consisting largely of impenetrable thickets of a form of bamboo. Ancud is the old capital of Chiloe Island, and the Spanish fortifications which held out long after the rest of Chile had been liberated are still to be seen. It is a decaying place of about 5000 people dominated by a cathedral many sizes too large for it. Ancud was the site of an attempt in the 1890s to establish a settlement of English migrants. A number of settlers went out, but it was not a successful venture and most of the settlers had drifted away. There were only two or three families left, a couple of families of Scots who were quite prosperous, and an old Englishman called Turner and his two maiden daughters. Turner was rather a tragic figure, a clerk who had wished to emigrate to New Zealand and who had somehow decided to go to Chile instead. ‘We were the stupids,’ he said. He had never prospered and yet never broken with his new environment. He had been in Chiloe since 1896 and had been British Vice-Consul in Ancud in 1914. Turner and his two daughters still clung to their English way of life and were in very straitened circumstances. One of the daughters told me that they could not even afford a turkey for Christmas. The Scots were now in their second generation and becoming rapidly Chileanised, though they still retained their Scottish speech. It was strange to be addressed suddenly in pure Scots by a man in a poncho looking like a Chilean countryman. There was not much to be learned about waterfowl in Ancud, and I went on to a small place called Puntra on the little 60cm-gauge railway line which connects Ancud and Castro on the east coast of the island. The railway ran nearly all the way through heavy, wet forest interspersed with an occasional clearing. Puntra was a tiny place where the clearing was rather larger than usual. There was a little boarding house run by a competent German girl and I spent a couple of days there. I had hoped to meet some

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nutria hunters who might give me news of duck, but the prospects seemed so very unpromising that I went on to Castro, a crowded, thriving little place. My main recollection of Castro was that there was no beer, for the Exeter had called before she arrived in Puerto Montt and there was not a bottle left in the place. It was a pity, for Chilean beer is undoubtedly good and in those days very cheap. The innkeeper’s estimates as to the total amount consumed by the ship’s company of the Exeter was between 2000 bottles, 2000 dozen bottles and 12,000 dozen bottles. The Exeter had created a very good impression, for not only had her crew consumed all the beer in the place but the men who consumed it had behaved in a most cheerful and orderly manner. Anyone who became at all rowdy had been disciplined by his own shipmates. The possibilities regarding ducks in Chiloe were so poor that I decided to go on to the Aysen, on the mainland some way to the south, where it is possible to cross the continental divide into a much drier region which is really Patagonian. On a bright and sunny Christmas Day I left Castro on a little coaster called the Colo-colo, stopping first at Melinka in the Guaitecas Islands. From here the Colo-colo passed through narrow, rocky channels all the way to Puerto Aysen. I saw many Steamer Ducks and Kelp Geese, and began to wonder whether the latter might not be the birds which I should try to obtain. The Kelp Goose was one of the wanted species on my list. The gander is a beautiful, pure white bird while the goose is blackish-brown striped with grey. It is one of the least known of all geese in captivity, and I knew of only three specimens having been imported, all many years before — one to England, one to Holland and one to Germany. Although it is a member of a small South American family, most of which thrive in captivity, it has a peculiar diet and an unusual habitat. It lives along the tide line of the rocky South American coast and feeds on a small form of seaweed which the Chileans call luche. It was thought that it might prove difficult to find a substitute diet for the bird in captivity, and although I had been offered a substantial

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price, £40 a pair, I thought it would be better to try for the more easily kept Crested and Bronze-winged Ducks Puerto Aysen is a little wooden town shut in by high, misty hills. It never ceased to rain while I was there, and I soon moved on to Coihaique, which is near the divide in a much drier region. Here sheep were extensively kept. I travelled in a good truck with one fellow passenger, a Basque who had spent 18 months in England and who had acquired a very picturesque command of the English language. It was a cheerful journey and we stopped a couple of times to take a glass of wine and to enable the driver to see a most beautiful young Chilean girl in one of the wine shops. We all became very friendly, but it was a short-lived friendship for the driver swindled me over my fare when we arrived in Coihaique, which stands at the junction of the rivers Coihaique and Simpson. Two young fellows called Laborde and Mackey, whom I had met casually, took me out to see Don Nicolas, administrador of the Aysen Company which owned most of the area for purposes of sheep farming. They provided horses and we rode out. My companions suggested a race without telling me that they had been at pains to provide me with a first-class mount. I had done a certain amount of riding around Maullin, though I am not a gifted horseman and I am usually provided with quiet and staid animals. My sporting instincts aroused, I gave my beast a good kick in the ribs. The effect was electrifying, for the animal went off like an express train and it was with the utmost difficulty that I stopped it at all. My companions, left far behind, nearly died with laughing and I was somewhat mortified. However, the next day I met Laborde riding a horse and leading one without a saddle. He insisted on my riding the one with the saddle while he rode bareback, but when he suggested a canter, his horse nearly ran away with him, for he was wearing immense Chilean spurs which, riding bareback, inevitably dug into his horse’s sides, urging it on to further exertions. I saw some Bronze-winged Ducks on the Rio Coihaique but the administrador kindly offered to take me on up to another

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station, Nirehau, which was in the charge of a charming Englishman called Saunders. Nirehau lay over the divide in open country with forests of Antarctic beech on the slopes of the hills. It was a bleak, cold country but sheep throve there. The Aysen Company, which had opened up the area, was at that time having much trouble with squatters who were occupying their land and were almost impossible to evict. Saunders lived a hard life, spending most of his days in the saddle riding the range. There were quite a number of ducks along the streams, and certain geese simply swarmed. They were, in fact, regarded as a pest in much of the sheep country. I shot a few specimens and toured part of the ranch with Saunders, who provided me with a quiet horse. Still, I managed to fall off it three times, fortunately without hurting myself. We went for a long ride up on to the mesetas, table-topped hills which overlooked the valley. We passed through the beech woods, silent, lifeless places, and then came out on the barren hilltops, rocky wastes with hardly any vegetation. In the woods were some lakes where we shot a few grebes and Stiff-tailed Ducks for my collection. On our way back we saw a skunk, a comic little black-andwhite beast trotting unconcernedly over the pampa. Saunders’s big pointer saw it and went rushing after it until he was close enough to see what it was, and then he put his tail between his legs and fled. He had once attacked a baby skunk and had never forgotten it. Never having seen one before, I turned my horse and went trotting after it, to obtain a better view. I did not intend to get too close, but when I was about 30 yards away it turned round and snarled like a fury. The skunk is a much-maligned little animal and in no way dirty in its habits. He goes his own way and minds his own business and if interfered with has the means to defend himself in no uncertain manner, the effects of which I understand are quite comparable to those of the atomic bomb. I remember once reading a book by an American naturalist in which he argued that the skunk was a more suitable national emblem for the United States than the Bald Eagle, a largely carrion eater which

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has little to recommend it apart from its powers of flight. However, no matter what the zoological merits for a revision of the American national emblem, I have not found the few Americans with whom I have discussed the matter to be very receptive to the idea. In Nirehau I collected some interesting specimens, but it was obviously impossible to obtain live waterfowl there. I had no means of trapping the ducks I wanted, and there was no possibility of getting eggs or young ones either, since the latter were already well grown. I concluded that the only thing to do was to try my luck in the Guaitecas Islands. Don Nicolas arranged for my passage on a little old ship called the Laurencia to Puerto Montt. I think the hull had been built in the seventies but it had a good captain and a helpful purser. We were played out by the band of the carabineros since we had a popular officer on board. The journey to Puerto Montt was uneventful, though I was introduced to a most villainous drink of white wine, red wine, sugar and strawberries. In Puerto Montt I sent off a collection of skins, purchasing a large chest from the local jail where the prisoners were allowed to do a certain amount of work to sell to the public. One of the prisoners greeted me like a long lost brother. It turned out that he had worked for someone I had met in Maullin. He assured the warders that he had known me for years and had, until recently, worked for my mother. In the hotel I met the wildest Nazi I encountered in Chile, an old Englishman who was making his way around South America on a German freighter. He was a stupid old man who, my diary records, was asking for a good, swift kick in the pants. I decided to proceed to Melinka via a little place in Chiloe called Queilen, as I wanted to obtain some specimens of a peculiar little spine-tail which is confined to Chiloe. I travelled on a coaster called the Tenglo which only a little time before had been trading round the Icelandic coast. There were several professional ladies on board, as there generally were, and a Chilean I knew slightly had an angry altercation with the purser, who prevented him from

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taking one of the ladies to his cabin, not for sound reasons of morality but because she was a third-class passenger. My friend was most indignant and after I had retired to bed in the next cabin told me all about it through the bulkhead. No one objected to that. Queilen was a tiny decaying place whose Chilote inhabitants were about the only people I met in Chile who looked as if they had Indian blood. I stayed at a simple little pension whose landlady told me that prices varied to suit the guests. It, like Queilen, was tiny; I slept upstairs and the landlady and her husband downstairs. I collected a few birds and obtained a small series of the spine-tail I was looking for. It was while I was in Queilen that I was woken up late one night by the whole house shaking vigorously. I thought nothing of it and went to sleep again. I had been awakened by the earthquake, or terremoto, which killed some 20,000 people in Concepcion. It was one of the worst disasters in the history of Chile. There was another famous earthquake a few years later in South America which fortunately caused little loss of life but which occasioned so many premature births that the government of the country is said to have officially forbidden the use of the words Terremotito and Terremotita (Little Earthquake) as Christian names. I went on to Melinka on the Laurencia and arrived there on 27 January 1939. My friend the purser, a kind and helpful man called Oyarzo, introduced me to half the population of the island and arranged for me to stay in a little pension kept by a widow called Señora de Risco. She was one of the richest people on the island and had interests in various fishing boats. She had a little low house where I had quite comfortable quarters. The Guaitecas Islands are low and covered in scrub, the vegetation coming right down to the tide line. They are completely sodden and impenetrable from the point of view of ordinary walking, and it rains continually. The most important product of the islands was a form of cedar which makes excellent and longlasting stakes for wiring in sheep runs. A great deal of money had

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been made out of them in the past and one noted dealer in them, the husband of Señora de Risco, was known as the King of Melinka. He went bankrupt in the early 1930s. I was often asked later whether I had known the King of Melinka and was able to reply that personally I had stayed with the Queen. The señora was a kind lady and her house was full of children. I lost little time in letting my requirements be known. Based on my experiences in Peru, I did not expect that there would be an immediate reaction, and it came as something of a shock when I was brought 18 live geese within two days of my arrival. The islanders had never before heard of such easy money. Kelp Geese were abundant and many were in moult and unable to fly. A large number of the islanders put to sea and I had rapidly to lower my price. The geese they brought presented a considerable problem for I had nowhere to keep them and did not know how to feed them. I found, however, that even though newly caught they took to eating the luche I provided quite readily, and I sent out all the children to scour the place for the stuff while the señora gave me permission to build a number of pens in her backyard. From then on I was kept hard at work. I could obviously acquire a substantial number of Kelp Geese but I was worried about the possible difficulties of taking them home, for they were supposed to be difficult birds. Furthermore, although I knew that I could sell a limited number for a high price, it looked as if my collection would be a very unbalanced one. I tried to improve the position by collecting a few Steamer Ducks and penguins, about the only other birds which I could obtain in the islands. Several were brought to me. The Steamer Ducks at first throve (though they unfortunately went into a decline on the voyage home), but the penguins presented various problems which were new to me. I, like most other people, had seen penguins in zoos and found them comical, jolly little birds with a most kindly look about them. As a collector I was to form a very different opinion about them. The ones I was brought were

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Magellan Penguins, very similar to the better-known Black-footed Penguin from South Africa. They are powerfully built birds which look deceptively small due to their short feathers. Armed with a most powerful, hooked bill, they are completely fearless and can also hit uncommonly hard with their flippers. It is, in my experience, a waste of time to try to feed a newly caught penguin. It must be put in an enclosure for a few days and starved. It must then be caught up by hand, using not less than three men for the purpose, and have a substantial quantity of raw fish pushed down its gullet. This process must be repeated all the way to England. So long as they are forcibly fed with enough fish they seem to thrive, despite the rough treatment, but they must not be left to feed themselves. They do not take enough in this way, though with patience they can be taught to pick up dead fish. Forcible feeding is a wearing and blasphemous process, for penguins bite like furies. My hands were soon covered with small septic sores through continually chopping up luche. I brought back only four penguins though they were a good business proposition. One really needs to make prior arrangements, in particular to obtain a supply of fish about the size of a small herring with which the birds can be crammed with a minimum of effort. The most essential requirements of all for the would-be penguin collector are an unnaturally sweet temper and an almost overpowering love for animals. I no longer regard penguins as comical little fellows and I suspect that few people who come into contact with them in their natural haunts ever do. I should hate to have to walk through a penguin rookery as many Antarctic travellers must often have to do. I once met a member of an Antarctic expedition who told me of a colleague on the expedition, a quiet and Christian man who, when he had nothing else to do, would climb a nearby bluff which had a penguin rookery at the top. There he would stand and wait for the penguins coming home, pushing their way up the steep track to the top of the bluff, their crops full of fish or krill. When the little fellows reached the top of the bluff the explorer

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would quickly push them down again and watch them rolling to the bottom. My luck as far as collecting live birds had definitely turned when I reached Melinka, but I was soon to be involved in a most unpleasant episode. All my money, a substantial sum of 1965 pesos, was stolen. There could be very little doubt as to who the thief was, for a government pharmacist had shared my room the night before and I, getting up early and not wishing to disturb the man by drawing the curtains, had left my wallet under my pillow. It caused me much embarrassment, and the intensive and futile search made of all the unlikely places where the wallet could not possibly be only made things worse. I finally reported the matter and the pharmacist was searched, though without success. He threatened to sue me for defamation. To add insult to injury, the man shortly after visited Santiago, a thing which he could never normally afford to do, and it appeared that my pesos were spent on much loose living. The loss of my money caused me considerable inconvenience for it was some time before I could obtain a further remittance. In the meantime my collection grew and I set about getting cages made. There were many minor irritations and sometimes life was by no means easy. The thing which annoyed me most was that Señora de Risco’s children would sit up talking to 11 or 12 o’clock every night when I was usually very tired and wanted to go to sleep. Little space was available for pens and it was a matter of great difficulty keeping them clean. I bought small quantities of coarse straw and fern fronds for ridiculous prices and did what I could to keep the pens reasonably clean. It rained continually and I spent an average of three hours a day chopping up luche. I was bitten and smacked by the penguins and my hands were covered with painful sores. I could not get any small fish for the penguins and had to cram them with strips off large, usually soft fish which broke up in the penguins’ bills. There were many times when I wondered why on earth I had been such a fool as to try to earn my living collecting birds. It is a question every collector must often ask himself.

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I was helped much by a kind old German called Trede who worked in the biggest store on the island. Through him I was able to get my cages built, though I had much difficulty in obtaining feeders and wire netting which I had stupidly forgotten to bring with me. I had concluded that the easiest way to take Kelp Geese home would be to take a large stock of dried luche to feed them on, and I collected a prodigious quantity, altogether nearly a ton. I was quite appalled at the amount of stuff I had to take with me. The cages by measurement amounted to nearly 14 tons. I booked a passage on the Laurencia and the collection was loaded on more easily than I had expected. A collector, once he has a collection, can count on little peace until he is home again. I had to tranship in Puerto Montt, and here I found that much of the luche I had brought with me had overheated in the sacks and was rotten. I threw most of it into the river and had to devise an alternative diet very quickly for my 30 pairs of Kelp Geese. I found that they ate lettuce readily and soaked biscuit more reluctantly. It was, however, obviously an impossibility to provide lettuce all the way home. I kept the luche which had not gone rotten in reserve and hoped for the best. I left Puerto Montt with hardly a peso in my pocket, for when I was about to leave I found that the little local Bank of Osorno which had given me an advance when I reported my loss through theft, had met with a refusal to honour the advance by the British Bank which held my account and a substantial credit in Valparaiso, although that institution was fully informed of my predicament. They were not even prepared to do me a personal favour. I paid off my local overdraft and left Puerto Montt in a vile temper on a Chilean coaster for Valparaiso. The coaster was rather a pretentious vessel and I was treated with contumely, which came as a surprise after the courtesy and help I had received on the old Laurencia. At my first meal on board I sat at a table with a couple who told me they were ballet dancers, a little Spaniard married to a Danish girl, a tall and willowy and almost albinistic blonde. But once the chief

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steward came to realise my discreditable occupation, I was given a table to myself in a remote corner of the saloon near the service hatch and far from the blonde ballet dancer. Little incidents like this can be very trying, and the only thing to do is to keep one’s temper and forget about personal dignity. I was happy to see Valparaiso. A friend called Cran Kenrick had kindly promised to help me with my arrangements for disembarkation. With his aid I had my birds unloaded into a godown where I waited for the Boskoop to arrive, for I was lucky enough to travel again on that best of ships. I was overjoyed to see her come into port and I received a most kind welcome from the various members of the ship’s company whom I knew. My main preoccupation going up the west coast was lettuce. I obtained fresh supplies wherever I could, in Mollendo, Callao and La Libertad. To have stored enough for the entire journey home would have required an immense cold room, for lettuce, like all vegetables and fruit, must not be frozen but merely kept cold and often turned. In La Libertad I was brought a large stock which was rotten when received, though I had to pay a high price for it. It involved me in a dreary row with the steward in charge of the cold room, for one of his assistants put all my lettuce in there without consulting me and the steward was very rude. My relations with stewards have usually been most cordial, but this was an odd man and keeping the peace called for a certain amount of restraint on my part. It is difficult to enjoy being called, unjustly, a liar. However, it was a minor matter and I had nothing else to grumble about. Everyone on board went out of their way to be kind, and when I was working late at night the captain himself would sometimes come down to inquire if there was anything he could do to help. The birds did fairly well, although I lost some geese, apparently through heat stroke, off the Chilean coast where we loaded nitrate. We passed through the Panama Canal at night, a most delightful experience, with the channel lit up by guide lights along the bank like a fairy playground. I have seldom worked so hard, and there was plenty of worry.

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Viva Chile

Coming into the Bay of Biscay we ran into a fairly big sea, which made the work uncommonly difficult and left me with the perpetual fear that one big sea would come on board which would have been all that was necessary to smash the cages and wash the collection overboard. You cannot insure such a collection. Shortly before we reached Liverpool there was the captain’s dinner, an excellent Dutch institution. It was a tremendous affair, and before dinner someone had started to buy champagne cocktails. There were many speeches of interest, for we had many nationalities on board: British, Dutch, Chilean, Ecuadorean, Swiss and one solitary German. The hit of the evening was a touching speech by an English ex-serviceman who hoped that the peace and the harmony and the good fellowship which prevailed on board among passengers of so many nationalities would be a happy augury for the future of the world. It was shortly after this that I staggered out to feed my birds but fell asleep on the hatch, remaining insensible until the early hours when I was awakened by a chorus of hungry and reproachful geese whom I had then to set to work and feed. But while I slept peacefully great things were happening in the saloon. The ex-serviceman had a few more drinks and continued to ponder the unhappy state of the world. He came to the conclusion that there was something wrong on board, that perhaps after all he had been mistaken when he made his speech at dinner. Suddenly enlightenment came to him.The German passenger was a spy. It was necessary to kill him. He did his best, though in his drunken condition little damage resulted. The German retired to his cabin and locked himself in, and other passengers took the ex-serviceman to his and put him to bed. But he was soon up again looking for the German, and this time the other passengers put him to bed again and took all his clothes away from him. The ex-serviceman reappeared without any clothes and then they took him firmly down and another exserviceman, who had served in the same division on the Western Front, punched him on the jaw. After that he stayed in bed. He was very sorry for himself the next morning.

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I had cabled ahead for lettuce and as we entered the dock gates in Liverpool boxes of the stuff were thrown on deck. A great cheer went up from the crew when it was pointed out that it was Dutch lettuce. Bearing in mind my unhappy experience unloading my Peruvian collection, I had made special arrangements. A number of excellent fellows came along, each wearing a bowler hat and a raincoat though it was a pleasant sunny day. They unloaded my collection with the utmost efficiency, and I travelled to London by the same night train and with an exactly similar coach for my collection as the year before, but whereas the collection had then travelled as live birds for more than £20, this time we called them something else — cage birds, I think — and I paid just over £7. It did not take me long to get rid of my collection, but the lack of variety brought the price down. I received altogether about £500, and sold some skins for a further £50, which was enough to pay for yet another trip. I still had not sold all my skins for I had a secret ambition to have a first-class private collection of South American birds. I decided to return to Peru once again to complete the work I had started on my first trip. I knew exactly where to go and what to do and I hoped to avoid the mistakes which I had made the first time. I planned to spend the first four months collecting skins, working down from Ayacucho through the unworked department of Apurimac to Cuzco, and to come back to Lima via Arequipa. This would enable me to see much of the most interesting country in South Peru and I would then return to Lake Junin and, with my additional experience behind me, waste as little time as possible in acquiring a useful collection of live birds. My plans went even further than that. I had also mapped out for the next two years a journey to Tierra del Fuego after Bronze-winged and Crested Ducks, and perhaps King Penguins as well, which are said to breed off Cape Horn, and another to Paraguay after the beautiful little Ringed Teal. After that I thought to hunt pheasants in western China and Kashmir and the Shan Hills. They were happy dreams.

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Alastair’s trustee, Archie Rose, outside the Moat Farm, Framlingham. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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Ted Neary, the mechanical superintendent of the Central Railway in Oroya, who visited Alastair many times while he was in hospital there. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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CHAPTER 5

PERU AGAIN AND ON TO CHINA 1939–40

I

travelled out to Peru again on a sister ship of the Orbita, the Orduña, whose second class was crowded with refugees from Germany and Austria and a company of British troops going out to Jamaica. I shared a cabin with a man named Gill, an accountant for the Southern Railway of Peru who had once planted dates in Iraq, and at dinner sat next to a remarkable character called Jimmy Brush, a telephone engineer from Lima. Jimmy was a rugged man whose face was tanned to the colour of mahogany through much exposure to the elements. He had a withering sense of humour and an extraordinary capacity for seeing through fraud and pretence. In Havana we picked up a most amusing retired colonial civil servant from West Africa who now ran a plant nursery in Kingston, Jamaica. He told me many droll stories about the early days in West Africa. In Christobal another passenger joined the ship, an enterprising American girl from somewhere in the Midwest who was about to tour Chile and Argentina performing old Spanish dances under the professional name of Tonia de Aragon. I spent much time in the bar. One admirable South American custom is that you always play for drinks with dice.

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There is none of the tiresome business of a continual circulation of rounds. The games usually played are capitan manda and bidou, both forms of poker. Bidou is a particularly fast and skilled game which I never mastered, but I enjoyed playing capitan manda. Such games are by far the best way of settling who will pay for a round, and you can never feel that someone has missed his turn. It has some similarity to liar dice but is more amusing. When we arrived in Callao various friends came out to meet Jimmy, including Jock Macrae, the manager of the Atocsaico sheep farm near Junin, whom I had met on my previous trip. Jock was involved in a number of additional rounds, for one of the unwritten laws about paying for drinking in South America is that a man must never say that this should be the last round (ultimo); he must say the one but last (penultimo). The man who, like Jock, speaks of the last round must immediately pay for another one. Jimmy and his party went ashore in a very contented condition. Once more my baggage was passed through customs, and after seeing various friends I went up to the Sierra as quickly as possible. I proceeded to Huancayo where I received the usual kind and warm welcome at the observatory. After a quick trip to Lake Junin to make some preliminary arrangements for my later visit to collect ducks, I set off for Ayacucho, travelling as far as the Huancavelica Railway would permit, to La Majorada, and then on by truck past Anco, spending a night at a little place called Huanta. I arrived at Ayacucho early the next morning after a somewhat harassing overnight journey in a good Ford truck with two young Peruvians, the normal driver and a friend of his, an unpleasant youth. The driver wished to do his friend a favour and therefore permitted him to drive, an unfortunate arrangement for he was a bad driver and very anxious to show off. It is a dangerous road and the man at the wheel spent a large amount of his time arranging the rear-view mirror so that he could see himself in it; at such times he took only an occasional glance at the road itself. At one point we passed a place where a truck had gone over the side with loss of life not long before. The driver’s friend was at that time on

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Peru again and on to Chile

the inside position, but he insisted on pointing out the fatal spot and we lurched dangerously across the road ourselves. Ayacucho is a small town lying in a broad vale in the mountains at an altitude of about 6000 feet. In colonial days it was of considerable importance as a centre of the Inquisition, and it was still remarkable for the number of its churches, about one for every 400 inhabitants. Ayacucho was still a great training centre for Roman Catholic priests, and some of the plazas and old colonial houses were very fine, but the hotel was one of the worst I encountered in Peru. It was a pity for the house itself was a fine one and in colonial days must have been a very stately home. As in most hotels in the Sierra, toilet arrangements were primitive. It must be admitted that there was much room in Peru for improvements in sanitation. Even where running water existed, the water closets and their drains were usually so faulty that it was the custom to place used toilet paper in a box by the side of the closet rather than in the closet itself. I met a young American Protestant missionary in Ayacucho who had many troubles, for the priests had set the women against him and his home had several times been invaded by mobs of hysterical women. My impression of the small missions in Peru was that they made a mistake in starting work in the towns. They would have obtained far better results if the missionaries had learned the Quechua language and then established themselves in remote Indian communities. They would have had a hard time at first, but once they had been accepted by the Indians, as they would be in time, they could do much good, particularly if the evangelical work was coupled with education and medical work. I went on from Ayacucho in a good station wagon to a little place called Ninabamba about 80 miles southeast, on the Pampas River which separates the departments of Ayacucho and Apurimac. The journey was not uneventful, for we carried a large family of drunken Indians, a man, two fat women, some children and a minute baby. Since there were three other passengers as well as myself, it may be imagined that we were somewhat

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crowded. Fortunately we had a good steady driver who refused to drink. How the baby escaped being smothered I did not clearly understand. I never found out which of the women was the mother. At odd times on the journey both women suckled it. Ninabamba marked the end of the road which was under construction to Cuzco. The Peruvian government was then opening up their country in the most practical manner by the building of roads. As civil engineers they displayed great skill, for their country is one of the most difficult in the world in which to build roads, and the ones I travelled, though narrow, were well made. Ninabamba itself was an old hacienda building in which there was a small inn run by an Argentino and his chola wife. It was the gathering point for many of the contractors who were working on the road, a cheerful, hearty crowd, some of whom I had known in Huancavelica. I was given a small windowless room on the ground floor where I put up my Hounsfield camp bed, a most useful and indispensable article of travelling equipment, and set out to work the valley. It was the lowest altitude at which I ever worked in Peru, and at times was very hot. The main trouble, however, was a species of small black biting fly which existed in clouds and sometimes made life almost intolerable. My hands became so swollen that at times I found it difficult to skin my specimens. The avifauna was not especially rich but was mostly new to me since it was a life zone which I had not hitherto visited. The food was edible and the company friendly. I would not say that the conversational level was a very high one, but I knew enough Spanish to hold my own, I could swear with tolerable fluency, and I found that the twisting of harmless sentences into doubtful meanings never failed to raise a laugh. I had not been in Ninabamba very long before we received the news of the outbreak of war. There was not much I could do except volunteer my services if they were wanted and continue collecting. The boys at Ninabamba soon remembered that there was a solitary German who lived a couple of miles up the road. They set out to

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arrange that we should meet, for they anticipated a marvellous freefor-all. Actually, I had met the man. He was a stupid, honest, bearded young artisan from Hamburg who had somehow gravitated to Peru, had been rather unfairly treated by some Peruvians for whom he had worked, made no secret of his dislike for various aspects of Peruvian life, and was something of a Nazi. He eventually came to lunch on a Sunday and we all drank a lot of beer. It was an absurd situation, for so mercilessly did the neutral Peruvians attack the German that I, the victim of Nazi aggression, had to come to his assistance. One particular tough of Bosnian extraction was convinced that all the really hard fighting in World War I was done for the Germans by the Bosnians. The Peruvians were most unkind and I felt quite sorry for the German. He was a simple soul and not a bad fellow, but he should never have left his job in Hamburg.

From my collecting grounds along the margin of the river I could see high up on the hills on the other side of the stream patches of thick vegetation following the lines of the gullies. Remembering the quinual scrub near Lachocc, I longed to visit them, though they seemed very remote. I came, however, to know the owner of a large hacienda on the other side of the river and a little way upstream, a delightful man called Roberto Vivanco who invited me to stay. One Sunday morning he sent mules for me. Unfortunately the Indian in charge had forgotten to bring one of the regular riding horses, and for me there was only an undersized little pony with no stirrups. The various Indians who had come in to Ninabamba for their weekly drunk were much diverted. Feeling very self-conscious, I decided to ride without stirrups and tried to mount the beast. In doing so I stepped right over the little animal and nearly fell over the other side. I made an undignified departure amid roars of laughter. We had to cross the Pampas River by a suspension bridge which

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swayed alarmingly. I walked over but most of the local people never bothered to dismount. After two or three hours we reached the Vivancos’ place, the hacienda Ahuayro. The house was beautifully situated on a spur looking up the valley and over the flats below where the Vivancos grew sugar cane. It was a most pleasant spot, a comfortable house with a spacious veranda on which one could sit and look for miles up the sun-drenched valley. I started work immediately, going up the valley behind the house where, about 1000 feet higher, there was a little scrub. I found some interesting birds here, and then, at the Vivancos’ suggestion, went up one day with Alfredo, the younger brother, to a place called Pomayaco, about 2000 feet higher at an altitude of 9000 feet. Here was an old house which had been built by the Vivancos’ father many years earlier as an escape from the heat of the valley beneath. It stood on the crest of a ridge with magnificent views, and from it a broad and mossy track ran through beautiful deciduous woods to an old abandoned copper mine. The discovery that such a place existed came as a delightful surprise. The birds were fascinating and they could be studied under the best possible conditions, for the track was seldom used and I had only to stroll along it to see all the birds of the woodland. I would ride up to Pomayaco every other day on a wise and placid old mule, starting as dawn broke, and spend the whole morning collecting. The next day I would prepare the specimens I had obtained. I spent some six weeks at Ahuayro and they were undoubtedly the most enjoyable period I spent in South America. The hospitality of the Vivancos knew no bounds; they were the most courteous and thoughtful of hosts. It was a delightful situation and the work was most interesting. However, every good thing has to come to an end, and finally I began to feel unwell, being affected by what was apparently a mild form of dysentery. I eventually concluded that the most prudent course was to return to Lima. It was a mistake, and I have ever since regretted that I did not see Cuzco, which I could have reached in a few days’ travel.

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I set out to return at a rather inauspicious moment, for Peru was about to hold a general election. Unwisely I decided to travel to Ayacucho with various individuals who were going in to record their votes. I say unwisely because when we left Ninabamba the driver, a feeble little man and the bastard son of a local politician, was hopelessly drunk. Few journeys have frightened me more. The driver was so far gone that he could hardly walk, but he drove us for a great distance over mountain roads. As we went round one corner a man in the back with me called him by an opprobrious name. The driver was much incensed, stopped and leapt out to do battle. He omitted, however, to apply the handbrake and we commenced to roll backwards towards the hairpin bend which was on top of a steep drop of about 2000 feet. My fellow passengers on top began to abandon ship. I would never have thought it possible to get off a truck so quickly, but fortunately some fellow in the cab was sufficiently intelligent to apply the handbrake. A little later a fellow passenger, more enterprising than the rest, helped me to drag the driver on top of the truck where he burst into tears and said we did not trust him, and then punched another man in the face. But he had the satisfaction a little later of being the only man who could repair the truck when it broke down on a stretch of icy puna. Ayacucho was crowded and I was lucky to be able to get a little cubicle in a room which was being used as an office by one of the candidates. Everyone has to vote in Peru and the abstainer is fined. It is by no means a bad system, but unfortunately other aspects of the election were more ideal theoretically than in practice. The sale of alcohol was forbidden. It would not have been saleable anyway, for most of the candidates were doling out free drinks to anyone who cared to come along. It was the most remarkable party I ever saw in my life. I watched one group of potential voters come along the street to where a candidate named Fernandez had his office. ‘Viva Fernandez!’ they cried vociferously. The candidate came out. ‘Are you fellows going to vote for me?’ he asked. ‘Sure,’ they replied.

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‘Then come in and have a drink.’ They went in and a little later staggered out again. They walked around the corner of the block to where candidate Gonzales had his office. ‘Viva Gonzales!’ they cried. By the time polling had finished, insobriety was general and I spent a sleepless night. I had a talk with one of the unsuccessful candidates the next day and he complained bitterly about the exorbitant costs of electioneering. With the election over I travelled peacefully back to Huancayo in a good truck with a first-class driver for most of the way. I left my birds at the observatory and went down to Lima to visit the American Clinic. They diagnosed amoebic dysentery. This may well have been a correct diagnosis, but almost everyone who went to the clinic was diagnosed as having amoebic dysentery. I met an American lady who complained of sinus trouble but she had to follow the routine and she, too, was found to have amoebas. It is a very common disease in Peru, though it does not usually appear in its most virulent form. I was given a large number of capsules to take and was told to lay off alcohol except for a little Scotch whisky, which the American doctor said was not a drink but a food. I was duly grateful. While undergoing treatment I stayed at a boarding house called the Quinta Boza kept by a capable Scots lady. It was cheap and comfortable and less lonely than staying in a hotel, for I had the company of Jimmy Brush and several other Englishmen resident in Lima, mostly employees of some of the big British firms there. I remained in Lima until I had finished taking my course of pills and then, having been pronounced free of amoebas by the clinic, hurried back into the Sierra. I had completely abandoned all idea of going to Cuzco, and since at the time there was no demand for men to proceed home to England to join the forces, I wished to do some work on Mr Colley’s hacienda, a colossal place lying on the hills north of Huanuco, which is itself northeast of Cerro de Pasco. Mr Colley once told me that he was not certain whether he had 100,000 acres or 200,000 acres since he had not yet found one of the boundaries of his estate.

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Before going there I made a quick trip down into the Amazonian basin. It is reached via the Chanchamayo Valley which runs from Tarma, east of Oroya, right down into the tropical jungle country. A spectacular road runs through the valley and in a few hours, amidst magnificent scenery, you drive from the freezing puna down into the moist and humid jungle. The Chanchamayo Valley was one of the areas visited by the first great naturalist to work in Peru, the Swiss Tschudi, in the 1840s. A large proportion of the early ornithological work in the country was done by Polish naturalists. During the last quarter of the 19th century three first-class naturalists — Jelski, Kalinowki and Stolzmann — worked in various parts of the country and their collections were reported on by yet another Pole called Taczanowski. They did splendid work under great difficulties, and our knowledge of Peruvian birds is based largely on their work. Kalinowski came to Peru from eastern Siberia. In one old paper in French in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society he is described as ‘the intrepid explorer of Kamschatka’. What stout fellows those old naturalists must have been! Once back in Oroya, I travelled up to Cerro de Pasco and then by car to Huanuco. As usual, the car ride was enlivened by a small incident. There were two cars travelling together and I was in the second one, whose brakes needed servicing. The first car stopped in a narrow place on the road above a gorge in the bed of which ran a mountain torrent. The second car did not observe the fact that the first car had stopped until too late, and the driver could not stop in time. ‘Ai carajo, ai carajo, ai carajo!’ he cried, in shrill and ascending tones, as he drove into the back of the first car. No one was injured, but if he had tried to pass we would have gone over the edge. Huanuco was a thriving little place in the arid subtropical zone, and Mr Colley’s hacienda was about three hours’ ride farther on, up the valley of a tributary of the Huallaga River. The country on each side of the tributary was arid, but finally the stream bifurcated and at 9000 feet, on the more easterly of the

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two streams, was the hacienda house at the commencement of a very humid zone. From here the hacienda stretched up the valley to about 11,000 or 12,000 feet and then dropped away again to 5000 or 6000 feet in the subtropical zone. Unfortunately I never collected anywhere except in the immediate vicinity of the house, where I found the bird life to be extraordinarily rich and varied. In 11 days I recorded 43 species, many of them new to me. To have worked the hacienda thoroughly up to the divide and away down the other side would have been a fascinating experience. I was, however, in for a spell of bad luck. The house was an old rambling place which was being modernised and rebuilt by Mr Colley. I lived comfortably enough, though the climate was exceedingly damp, but soon I began to feel unwell again. Finally my left knee swelled up to a great size and I was virtually unable to walk. I travelled to Oroya as quickly as possible and the good people of the C. de P. very readily accepted me into their hospital, which was probably the best in Peru. My knee swelled to prodigious dimensions, and although I was in no way dangerously ill I have never felt more miserable in my life. I spent Christmas 1939 and the New Year in hospital and thought I might be crippled for life. I was well looked after, though the doctors could not find much the matter; I could not have been better treated if I had been a valuable employee of the corporation. The other men in my ward were mostly American mining engineers and very good company. They used to pull my leg about British ways and pronunciation and our reactionary land-owning classes, but they always gave me a fair hearing when I had my say about the USA. I remember one fellow patient who came from Colorado and used to tell me about Gunnison County, where he hoped some day to have a small cattle ranch, wintering the beasts on the valley bottom and driving them up to summer on the high mountain pastures. It sounded an idyllic existence, but a little later in China I was to meet another American from Colorado who had many unkind things to say about Gunnison. He came from the next county.

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There is little fun in being ill in a strange place, and I was to learn how very much a sick man does appreciate having visitors. Mr Colley came, and so, many times, did my good friend Ted Neary, the mechanical superintendent of the Central Railway in Oroya. It was a kindness and an attention which I have never forgotten. The only thing which sustains in bad times such as this is a conviction that life must be a continuous series of ups and downs, that good fortune will follow after bad and that good fortune when it comes must be treated with caution and reserve, for the greater the fortune, the greater the subsequent descent into an abyss. I was nearly a month in Oroya, and when my knee slowly began to improve I hobbled to the train and went down to Lima. The doctors at the clinic there could not offer any explanation of the trouble, although they gave me a most careful examination. They took some fluid from my knee and injected it into an unfortunate guinea pig; when the wretched animal survived, the doctors decided that all was well. They told me I must have fallen down and strained myself — in my sleep, presumably. It was a little difficult to know what to do next. This was the period of the phoney war1, when men from overseas were not wanted in England. I certainly did not wish to return half crippled. A more inviting prospect was contained in a letter from my brother Ian, now in Shanghai, suggesting that I should come to China. The more I considered this suggestion the more it appealed to me. I ventured to ascertain British official opinion on the subject of the war. Mr Forbes, the Minister, told me, ‘We’re not going to make the mistake we made last time. We’re going to squat on our hunkers and starve them out.’ I went away much comforted, and took a passage to Colon. Before I set off I made one last journey into the Sierra to collect the things I had left at Huarapa. As a result, I was in Huanuco for the Easter festival of Carnival. It is a time when all Peru goes quite mad and everyone throws water at everyone else. 1

The early part of the war. Germany was taking over Poland and there was little action on the Western Front.

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As you walk along the street you are liable to have slops lightheartedly thrown on you from above, and everyone is armed with little balloons filled with water. It is all very good-natured and very humid. The only thing to do is to put on your oldest clothes, buy a large supply of balloons and a basket in which to carry them, and join in the fun. I could still only limp around but I felt greatly excited when I finally set off for my ship in Callao from the Quinta Boza. It was a fine and sunny morning and as I drove down to Callao I could not get out of my mind the jingle ‘We’re off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz’. It came back to me again and again. My plans were to go to Colon and take a chance on getting a round-the-world-freighter trading to the Far East. For the first time in Peru I had to pass my luggage through customs without an official pass. I asked a baggage agent for terms. His reply was brief and to the point: ‘If you don’t mind having your baggage opened in the customs, 5 soles. If you do, 10 soles.’ I gave him 10. Curiously enough, the ship I was to travel on was the Loreto, the same old PSNC freighter on which I had travelled out in 1937. I even had the same cabin and I was the only passenger. It was a quiet trip, though I can still remember the diffident way with which the purser explained one rather unusual item of cargo on the manifest to the American customs officers in Balboa: eight tons of bulls’ pistles. I had a small celebration with the second officer in Colon, where I took rooms in a good and reasonably cheap hotel, but it rained and rained and I caught a terrible cold. I was lucky enough to catch a first-class British freighter which would take me all the way to Shanghai. It was the Javanese Prince, one of a line which ran around the world, from the east coast of North America to the west coast via the Panama Canal and thence to the Far East and back to New York via the Cape. Again, I was the only passenger. We passed through the canal and set sail for San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles. As is usual, a number of American Negroes came on board to work the ship through the canal. One burly Negro was involved in an altercation

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with an Indian member of the crew. The latter was an elderly greyhaired man. What angered him I do not know, but he kept crying, ‘I am an Indian gentleman and you are a damn nigger.’ The ship was an excellent one, modern and fast, with comfortable accommodation and a charming Orkneyman for a skipper. The officers were British and the crew were Asian, Malays on deck and Indians in the engine room and saloon. The food was very good, although they assured me that they did things much better in peacetime. I was looking forward to the opportunity of setting foot in the United States but I had overlooked one small detail. I had omitted to provide myself with a wartime transit visa, and when we arrived in San Pedro I was told that I was not allowed ashore. There was a guard on the gang plank who ensured that the order was obeyed. It was a great disappointment. We spent three days in San Pedro and nearly a week in San Francisco, but the immigration people were adamant. They would have to get special authority from Washington. Not realising how long we were going to be in American ports, I did not bother.

I did not greatly enjoy the voyage across the Pacific, feeling depressed and far from well. It is an immense stretch of ocean, and by the time I reached Shanghai I had spent about nine months on board ship in less than three years. Sea voyages can be good fun once in a while, but they are much more enjoyable if you have a job to do. Our first stop was Manila, where I spent an unprofitable morning trying to find a bird market which I knew existed there. I thought to have no difficulty since my Spanish was quite fluent, but I never met anyone in Manila who spoke the language. I hired a taxi driven by a Chinese whose only English seemed to be ‘OK Mister’, and who drove me to two disreputable places which I took to be brothel areas, though it was too early in the morning to be

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sure. Finally I gave up the unequal struggle and returned to the ship.2 I was not the only person who felt bitter about Manila. That evening on deck I found the radio operator leaning morosely over the rail. I was surprised, for he was a cheerful soul and by his own account very expert at finding himself congenial girlfriends at ports of call. He gave me the inside story on Manila. He had been there several times and generally went ashore and spent a pleasant evening. Two or three voyages before he had found himself a particularly attractive girl, with nice face, nice figure, nice clothes. He was enchanted. The evening was an enjoyable one. He wined her and dined her and danced with her, and it was only at a late hour that he found, on looking into the matter, that she was a boy. He had never set foot in Manila again. From Manila we went to Hong Kong, where my younger brother Colin was now a government cadet. With several other cadets he lived in a delightful house called Starlight Villa over on the Pokfulum side, and he drove me all over the island in his little car. I met several interesting people including that most excellent and versatile naturalist, Dr G. A. C. Herklots, and a tall English girl called Elsie Fairfax Cholmondeley, who knew both my brothers. She was an unusual person. Colin once described her as being of ‘good old yeoman stock’. She worked in the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, staged a remarkable and enterprising escape from Stanley Internment Camp in Hong Kong during the Pacific war, and married a man called Israel Epstein, an American left-wing journalist. They were devoted to China. Years later they fell foul of the Cultural Revolution and suffered greatly as a result. 2

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The perpetual and salacious misuse of the word ‘bird’ is something to which every ornithologist must become accustomed. It seems to be completely universal, and even in Malay I was to find that the word punai, or green pigeon, is used as a term for a young girl. As an itinerant ornithologist in South America I was frequently asked what I was doing. I found that an excellent impression was created if I took the initiative and said that I was studying birds ‘with feathers’, or better still, ‘and not only with feathers’. This was considered very witty and thus my social standing was assured, rather as a group of Englishmen might on finding that the stranger in their midst is wearing an Old Etonian tie.


We came into Shanghai on a cold, early spring day and tied up at the Hongkew wharf. Ian came to meet me and took me away to his impressive flat on the eighth floor of the Gascogne Apartments on Avenue Joffre. The day after my arrival Ian, who was at that time the representative of a railway finance organisation, took me to a lunch party at Hungjao, the country suburb of Shanghai, which completed my impression that he was prospering. Given by Tony Keswick, head of Jardines, the biggest British trading organisation in China, the party was attended by the Counsellor of the British Embassy, the British Consul General, the Dutch Consul General and the wife of the French Ambassador, whose imposing hat looked as if it had the tail feathers of a Great Bustard mounted on it. Shanghai in those days was still a pleasant spot for Europeans, and ridiculously cheap. The Japanese controlled the areas outside the International Settlement and the French Concession, and there was still a large measure of law and order. The city had an extraordinarily friendly and cosmopolitan atmosphere, with people of every nationality mixing. A man could do as he pleased, and no one would stop him being virtuous if he really wanted to be. Shanghai was nearing the end of its hedonistic days for Europeans, but they still had a little time to run. There were many first-class German refugee doctors in Shanghai and I went to see a very good stomach specialist, Dr Preuss. He was a careful man and examined me more thoroughly than I had ever been examined in my life. This included that most unpleasant of examinations known as sigmoidoscopy, for which I had to prepare with starvation and purges of various types to enable the colon wall to be inspected. The results appeared to please Dr Preuss, for as he carried out the examination with an instrument which looked like a telescope inserted in my rectum, he explained with a rapture which I was far from sharing, ‘Ah, Mr Morrison, what preparation. Like a ballroom floor.’ He discovered eventually that I had a severe intestinal infection of some odd bug, and appropriate steps were taken to rid me of it.

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Ian left for Peking on business and I decided to follow him. I travelled by train, spending a night in a Japanese hotel in Nanking. I arrived in Peking in a cheerful frame of mind, having met an American called Schulzberger who introduced me to Japanese sake as we neared the end of the journey. We rolled through the city walls as dusk was falling. Ian met me and took me away to the Peking Hotel, where I fell asleep to the clanging of the trams as they passed along outside. The next morning was bright and sunny and I set out to see something of the city. I took a comfortable hotel rickshaw and the coolie took me for a long run along the broad crowded streets, ending up at the Forbidden City. We passed through the great red walls and came to a ramp leading to the eastern gateway. When I stepped down from the rickshaw and walked up the ramp I saw something which I shall remember all my life: framed in the gate was a gigantic courtyard shut in by a quadrangle of red-walled buildings with gleaming golden tiles and crossed by a winding formal canal with white marble balustrades, while above everything was the blue North China sky. It was like discovering a new world, and I was deeply moved. I went to see various places in Peking during the next few days and it was not difficult to decide to stay a few months, for my Shanghai doctor had recommended that I take a four-month rest cure. Ian had a friend, John Hope-Johnstone, who had lived in Peking for a number of years. His interests lay primarily in Chinese musical instruments and higher mathematics. He seemed to know everyone in Peking and introduced me to an English lady called Miss Bieber who was soon to visit the United States and was prepared to let me have her little furnished Chinese-style house. The arrangement seemed ideal and I hurried off to Shanghai to get a clean bill of health from Dr Preuss, and to collect my luggage. I returned on a very good Butterfield and Swire ship, the Shengking, which used to maintain an express service between Shanghai and Tangku, the port for Tientsin. Most of the passengers were American, including a number of navy wives

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travelling to Chefoo, the summer base of the American China Squadron. However, I was distressed to find that one of my fellow passengers was an Englishman who was considered something of an authority on birds. I say distressed for I was to find that, despite a prolonged residence in China and an interest in birds, he had never been anywhere except Shanghai and Weihaiwei, a summer resort on the Shantung coast. It was common for many old China hands to spend their careers and sometimes their whole lives in one particular treaty port without ever stirring out of it, but an ornithologist should do better. In Tsingtao we were held up by Japanese red tape and an absurd cholera examination, and it was just beginning to get dark as we left the harbour. I tried to switch on a light outside the bar on the upper deck, just in case anyone fell over, but the only switch I could find, one of several underneath little wooden covers opening downwards, did not switch on the desired light. I wandered off and joined a group of American passengers and shortly we heard a powerful siren in the engine room. Armed Russian guards came rushing out on deck with drawn revolvers and prowled up and down looking intently here and there. I pointed out to my fellow passengers that a practice piracy alarm was taking place and more than hinted that on an American ship no one would take the trouble. I also pointed out the value of having such practices without any prior warning. It was only later, when I saw an angry chief engineer inspecting all the switches under little wooden covers, that it dawned on me that I myself might have been responsible. I was very embarrassed and never had the courage to own up. It seemed more charitable not to. When I reached Peking I called on Miss Bieber, who introduced me to her German secretary, Hedda Hammer. ‘I hope,’ said Miss Bieber,‘that you will become very good friends.’

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Hedda outside Peking in 1941. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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CHAPTER 6

PROLONGED REST CURE 1940–42

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iss Bieber left shortly afterwards and I moved into her house, a delightful little modernised Chinese home, one of the courtyards of a large house which had once belonged to a Manchu prince called Meng. It was now the property of a Chinese lady who rented out various courtyards. The houses consisted of a central courtyard around which lay the various single-storey rooms which communicated one with another. In a large compound there were many such courtyards, for in former days the various units of a Chinese family generally lived a communal existence to the extent that they lived in the same compound,each family within its own courtyard. Chinese houses were stately buildings with fine timberwork. Although lofty and spacious, they were not of very substantial construction. All the structural strength was made up of wooden uprights, except for a thick wall at each end. Most of the brickwork was used simply to fill up the wide walls which carried no load. The houses were not generally of any great age. They were cool and pleasant in summer, but very cold in winter. Those houses which were well heated had large coal stoves with intricate stove pipes extending for the longest possible distance through the room or rooms before reaching the external chimney.

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Perhaps the most delightful thing about these houses was the presence of fine trees in the courtyard. The Chinese were great tree lovers, and nearly every courtyard had trees growing in it. From any eminence within the city of Peking you could, in summer, see hardly anything but treetops, making it hard to believe that you were in a great city with more than one million inhabitants. The courtyards were very private. Walking through the little lanes, or hu-t’ung, with high grey brick walls on either side, pierced with discreet doorways, you could only imagine what beautiful buildings and trees were to be found within. Chinese houses were admirably adapted for minding your own business. Your neighbours might suspect what was going on, but they could not see for themselves. Miss Bieber’s house had a fine sitting room, a dining room, and two bedrooms with adjoining bathrooms and running water. Her staff, whom I took over, consisted of a boy, a good cook, a coolie, a rickshaw puller, and a wash amah. My total living expenses, including rent, wages, food and a few drinks, amounted initially to little more than £20 per month. China had never been an expensive country to live in, and when I reached Peking it was exceptionally cheap since the cost of living had not yet caught up with the collapse of the exchange rate. I had been born in Peking, where my father had been correspondent for The Times of London for many years before World War I and later one of the first foreign advisers to the Chinese Republic. I had been reared in a somewhat Chinese atmosphere, had met any number of people who had been in Peking, and had heard and read a great deal about the city. I had tended to view with some scepticism the love for Peking which old Peking hands had all acquired. I felt that a discriminating traveller such as myself would see things more clearly and probably be less impressed, but was to find that I had been sadly in error. I came to love the Peking of those days in a way which I have never felt for any other place in the world.

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It is difficult to analyse the spell which Peking cast on visitors. As a city it was magnificent — broad and spacious and built in beautiful surroundings as a capital for a great empire. It lies on a plain, but hills were always clearly visible to the west and north. The city was enclosed by immense and impressive walls pierced with various gates capped by imposing gate towers. In the centre of the city lay the great golden-roofed mass of the Forbidden City, the old Imperial Palace, and there were beautiful lakes and parks and many temples. The climate was an exhilarating one, bitterly cold in winter and steaming hot in summer, with beautiful springs and autumns. The people, perhaps through long centuries of contact with the customs and usages of an Imperial Court, had a natural courtesy and charm. Nowhere in the world did you meet with better manners, from scholar, coolie and shopkeeper alike. Much has been written in Peking’s praise, but not half enough. Not that life was one perpetual bed of roses in Peking. Like anywhere else, you met with annoyance and unpleasantness. The climate could be delightful, but there were also frequent dust storms which made life a misery, while the dryness tended to make Europeans nervous and unnaturally irritable. You met with difficulties as you must wherever you go. There was much beauty and also much dirt and squalor, grinding poverty and evil smells. You were always liable to find that your best friend had died overnight of some strange and inexplicable disease. But the good so far outweighed the bad, the pleasure the pain, that so long as it stood, the old Peking remained something unique and irreplaceable, one of the ultimate expressions of the human genius. It was an example of how much beauty and charm could be created by human beings if they set their minds to it. I explored the city under the guidance of Hedda, who knew Peking intimately. She had lived there since 1933 when, at the age of 24, she came out from Germany to manage Hartungs Photo Studio, an old and established German-owned shop in the Legation Quarter. Hedda was small and energetic despite

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childhood polio which had left her with a permanent limp, and she had a winning smile. She was patient and good-tempered and had a good relationship with Chinese people in all walks of life. At Hartungs she managed a Chinese staff of 17 men who were mostly older than she was. Her command of Chinese was by no means scholarly, but she spoke it readily and communicated well. When her contract with Hartungs came to an end in 1938 her employers tried to make her return to Germany, but she refused to go. At this point she was invited to live in a courtyard of the large Chinese residence of a French diplomat, Jean-Pierre Dubosc, in the West City, and Miss Bieber, who could not manage a working relationship with Chinese, gave her the job of organising craft work of various kinds. Hedda was not Jewish, but like most of the young artistically inclined Germans of her day detested Nazism. This was the reason why she had left Germany, jumping at the opportunity presented in an advertisement to work in Peking, although at the time she knew very little about China. Miss Bieber had left Hedda to look after her house while she was in the US. To a large extent she soon found herself looking after me as well, and so developed the bond that became the mainstay of my life. I started to learn Chinese and took a course at the College of Chinese Studies, an institution primarily intended for instructing newly arrived Protestant missionaries in the language, although laymen were also accepted. My class consisted of a number of young missionaries, a florid young American tourist (who used to wander around Peking dressed in a pale blue silk Chinese gown looking like a prosperous eunuch), a young Japanese naval officer who did not stay for long, and a lone wolf from the American State Department, Hungerford B. Howard. The teaching was quite good and I began to acquire a slight knowledge. Chinese is a simple language if you have a good ear — sadly something that has been denied me — and desire to acquire an elementary knowledge. It is a very difficult language if you wish to learn it well. Nowadays a student can acquire a good basic knowledge at a Western university followed by a couple of years in

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China and speak the language fluently. But to acquire a first-class knowledge of both the written and spoken language is a lifetime’s study. To reach the standard of an educated Chinese is something that is but rarely achieved by a Westerner, and the few who try generally become very queer in the attempt. The time passed pleasantly, and under Hedda’s guidance I came to know the city and its environs fairly well. I visited most of the well-known temples and parks and became particularly interested in the markets. There were many kinds. Apart from markets for food and vegetables, perhaps the best known was the Tung An Shih Ch’ang off Wang Fu Ching Ta Chieh, an important street where my father used to live and which was still known to foreigners as Morrison Street. The Tung An Shih Ch’ang was an extraordinary warren full of little booths where you might purchase anything from a pound of apples to a sword stick, a Leica camera to a valuable piece of porcelain. It contained some of the best restaurants in Peking, a theatre, and — under the Japanese occupation — opium dens as well. There were other markets which took place on certain days of each month in the grounds of certain temples. A never-failing source of interest, they catered for all sorts of people: sellers of second-hand clothes who, to call attention to their wares, sang their praises in unison while they picked up each individual piece; strolling players; Chinese dentists; salesmen for patent medicines; and dealers in pigeons and wild birds. The Peking people were great pigeon fanciers and there were a number of fine fancy breeds. They even attached little whistles to the tails of their pigeons which produced in flight, when the birds were let out from their lofts to fly around, a rather sad, humming noise. The people were particularly skilled fanciers with wild birds. During the spring and autumn migrations the markets were full of them. Their favourite birds were ruby-throats, which are closely related to our nightingales, with a scarlet throat patch but a much weaker song; various kinds of titmice; and siskins, the same birds which occur in Europe.

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The Chinese loved to have their birds about them. They were always kept in light, round bamboo cages. When the owner went for a walk he frequently took his pet bird with him, covering it with a special cloth cover while he was walking and taking it off when he felt like a rest. You would often meet a group of fanciers in one of the parks, each with his own bird, gossiping away and arguing about the rival merits of their various pets. Such meetings particularly applied to those who possessed songbirds such as Mongolian Larks or Spectacled Laughing Thrushes, for these will sing against each other and produce a beautiful medley of songs. Some of the birds were tamed forcibly by a very effective, if rather cruel, method most commonly used with rubythroats and bluethroats. The newly caught bird had its wing and tail feathers tied so that the feathers could not get broken and to ensure that it could not flutter. It was then tethered to a little perch by a piece of string round the neck. If it jumped off the perch it hung and slowly strangled itself. It was then picked up by an attendant and replaced on the perch. After a couple of days the birds remained quite glued to their perches and entirely lost their fear of people around them. Other birds were taught to do tricks, telling fortunes by selecting cards out of a little box which opened with a spring, the catch of which they were taught to release, or flying up into the air to considerable heights to retrieve little marbles thrown up by their owners. There can be little doubt that the Chinese were among the most skilled bird fanciers in the world. Unfortunately there was another side to the picture, as there nearly always is. Although many birds were owned by men who were devoted to them and went to great pains to look after them well, many of the commoner species brought into the market in large numbers were bought as passing novelties by ignorant people, and the mortality was heavy. Many, however, were bought by devout Buddhists for release to portray the freeing of souls. In addition to their avicultural skills, the Chinese were great fish fanciers, and many extraordinary varieties of goldfish were still kept in Peking. The biggest stock of all was at a fish farm just

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north of the Temple of Heaven. I often went to see them and was impressed with the trouble their owners took to feed them well. They were provided with masses of daphnia, or water fleas. During the summer it was a common sight to see men armed with fine nets collecting daphnia in the canals and by the borders of the lakes. The variety of fish was tremendous: black goldfish, red goldfish, white goldfish and bluish goldfish; goldfish with telescope eyes; goldfish with lion heads; goldfish with veil tails; and goldfish with peculiar roughened scales. My own favourite was a beautiful pure white fish with a scarlet head. I became interested, as everyone does in Peking, in curios and Chinese carpets and furniture. I started to collect little pendant ornaments, the counterweights or toggles which, attached to the string of pipe- or other bags, were in the old days tucked through the girdle1. Miss Bieber was the leading authority on these little objects which are the Chinese equivalent of the well-known Japanese netsuke. They were found in many materials — wood, ivory, jade and others — and in an endless number of designs. They were generally more simple and more stylised than the Japanese netsuke, for where the Japanese reproduced detail with the most minute exactitude, the Chinese endeavoured to give the impression, with detail of secondary importance. No matter what the rival merits of Japanese netsuke and Chinese toggles (chueitze is the Chinese name), hunting for the latter was a source of never-ending pleasure. No city in the world possessed anything like so many antique shops as Peking. There were dozens of them scattered all over the city. Hedda knew most of them and we visited them regularly. Shopping for curios or antiques in the Peking of those days was a dignified process. There were still many shops where you would receive a courteous and smiling welcome, where you might examine the contents of the shop to your heart’s content but 1

I gave the entire collection to the Power House Museum in Sydney as a memorial to Hedda after she died in 1991. A few of them were displayed along with an exhibition of Hedda’s photographs at the Power House in 1994 and at the National Library of Australia in Canberra in 1995.

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were never pressed to buy. If there was nothing you wanted and you left without having purchased anything, you would receive an equally courteous farewell. But if you did decide to buy anything, most intricate negotiations had to be set on foot. The shopkeeper, when asked to name a price, never seriously expected to be paid it. If he asked for, say, $10 and you immediately gave him $10, he was surprised and contemptuous and, I think, genuinely regretful, for he had missed what was to him one of the important things in life: the intellectual pleasure of argument. There were no set rules as to how bargaining should proceed, but it was customary for the purchaser, on being informed of the price, to express astonishment. He could hardly believe his ears. Did he really hear the shopkeeper say $10? The shopkeeper would then prove in the most convincing manner that $10 was the price he himself paid for the object and that it was only his desperate need to purchase rice for his starving family that had compelled him to accept a price which everyone knew was at least $5 less than that being charged by any other shop. The prospective purchaser might then make motions of leaving when the shopkeeper might suggest that, since the purchaser was an old and valued customer, he might like to mention the price he would be prepared to pay. With reluctance the purchaser would be led back and — out of pure philanthropy and in order to help the shopkeeper in his present financial troubles — make an offer of $7. The argument might go on for some time before arriving at a final compromise of $8.25. You took away your treasure, the shopkeeper beamed and everyone was happy. The essentials for bargaining were patience and good temper and a few jokes. If you could make your adversary laugh (he would never cease from smiling) you had won the battle, but there were many imponderables such as the state of his liver and yours, his immediate need for money, and, very often, whether he thought that you would appreciate what you wished to buy. The latter was one of the most endearing characteristics of some of the best dealers. They took a pride in their wares and

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would prefer not to show them at all to a rich potential purchaser if they thought that he did not genuinely appreciate them. I came across two particular instances. One was a carpet dealer who had all the best of the old Chinese carpets, which in Imperial times were made in the western provinces. They are delightful, though nothing like so fine or valuable as the carpets of the Middle East. This man took a great pride in his carpets and was always happy to produce them and talk about them to those whom he thought really liked them too, even if he knew that they could not afford to buy. But they were not kept for general view, and many visitors to his shop went away without ever seeing a good carpet. Another case concerned a pokey little shop on Jade Street. Hedda and I visited it in search of toggles. We asked the shopkeeper, a crabbed old man, if he had any toggles and he said he had never heard of such things. We explained what they were but he seemed unimpressed. For some reason we persisted, and finally, as if it was the only way of getting rid of us, he said that he would look in his chest. He burrowed into a great brass-bound affair and brought up many little paper packages, each of which he unrolled without finding any toggles. He shook his head as if to say, ‘I told you so,’ but finally, from the bottom of his coffer, produced a package containing five of the best ivory toggles we had ever seen. After a protracted discussion they were ours. He unbent slightly and then inquired, ‘Would you like to see the rest of the shop?’ We had no idea there was a rest of the shop, but he led us through a small doorway into a large room which contained many fine things. Some of the antique shops sold furniture but most of the best furniture was to be found in one little street just to the north of the Temple of Heaven. By Chinese furniture I do not mean the elaborate, carved blackwood furniture that was produced in large quantities during the 19th century, largely for export to Europe. Really fine Chinese furniture dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when Chinese craftsmen were producing elegant tables, chairs and cupboards which, for workmanship and beauty

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of design, compare favourably with anything that has been produced in Europe. In Furniture Street you were always likely to find a charming piece, generally in some dim corner of a shop simply stuffed with furniture. If you wanted to see the piece more closely the dealer would be delighted, and after a large-scale operation would finally extract it for you. Then, in all probability, you would decide that it was not quite what you wanted and the dealer would put it back again. They were a pleasant crowd of people, and also good craftsmen who renovated and repaired furniture with great skill, using the simplest of traditional methods and tools. Peking was rich in craftsmen of every sort: jewellers, brass workers, ivory carvers, lamp makers, paper makers, bookbinders and a host of others. Hedda was particularly interested in them, and there were few she had not photographed. I saw many of them at work, generally in their homes or the homes of their employers. They started work at a ridiculously early age and continued to work immensely long hours for a relatively minute wage for the rest of their lives. Yet they appeared contented and cheerful. The individuality of their work and the pride which they took in it seemed to give them a personal dignity which compensated to some extent for their hard life. The crafts I have mentioned were generally found in the houses, but wherever you went in Peking you would find people in the streets doing odd or interesting things, often with great skill. In the summer there was a pock-marked man who would come to Morrison Street and sit on the pavement making little toys out of green reeds; he would plait you a frog or a crab or a dragon while you watched. At the New Year there was another fellow who would make the most elegant little toys out of various kinds of coloured rice flour, again while you waited. There were purveyors of sweets who catered largely for small children. One of them would blow a kind of caramel-like glass into the shapes of the most amazing beasts, while the other produced fretwork designs of junks and dragons and fish by pouring molten toffee on to a

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block of marble. As sweets they may not have been very sanitary, but the children seemed to like them well enough. The strangest man of all, an odd fellow with a bad squint, sold some patent medicine made of ground-up scorpions (which unfortunately thrive in Peking in the summer months) and would stand about in Hatamen Street with a big enamel basin in front of him seething with the venomous beasts. These he would pick up in handfuls and put inside his shirt and socks. They might first have been rendered harmless, but it was a gruesome sight. Most of the sights were interesting or amusing, but such was not always the case. There were beggars who throve in wellorganised guilds, many of them cheerful vagabonds. But there were a few dreadful and decayed White Russians and, worst of all, beggars with ghastly sores and ulcers, usually deliberately made worse to excite pity, who would crawl around the markets and big streets. Some of my most enjoyable recollections of Peking are in respect of Chinese restaurants. It was a little time before I tried any Chinese food, but once the revelation had come I never looked back. My first Chinese dinner was at a restaurant in the Pei Hai where they still cooked minced pork eaten in the favourite way of the Empress Dowager: stuffed into buns. It is a somewhat overrated dish, though a great attraction for tourists. As time passed I came to acquire a modest but useful knowledge of Chinese food, for Hedda and I would eat out two or three times a week and I would eat simple Chinese food in my own home. The variety was endless. The most common of all restaurants in Peking were the Shantung restaurants, and they were very good. Then there were Cantonese restaurants and Szechuan restaurants and Fukien and Shanghai and Hunan restaurants. And just to round things off, there were Muslim restaurants where, in winter, you braised your own meat over a brazier, and duck restaurants where you ate nothing but duck, and vegetarian Buddhist restaurants which produced the most wonderful imitations of meat and fish made out of soya beans.

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There was even one restaurant, an ancient establishment in the West City called the Hsia Kuo Chu, which was exclusively devoted to the selling of pork dishes. When I say pork, I mean pork: pork liver, pork heart, pork sausages, pork lungs, pork trotters, pork sinews, pork tongues, bacon and ham, many soups, and so on ad infinitum. When we went there the smallest dinner you could order was 16 dishes, and you could get as many as 32, all pork and no vegetables. It was an interesting place, but one visit was nearly enough for a lifetime. Perhaps the best-known restaurants were those specialising in roast duck, Peking Duck. The ducks of Peking were fine big white birds, especially fattened for eating. In certain cases the young duck was crammed with so much food that it matured into a perfect ball of fat and never grew any ordinary feathers. You might see them just outside the south wall of the Chinese City. There were only a few duck restaurants. When you arrived for dinner you were brought carcases of various sizes and decided on which you would eat. It was taken away for roasting in a brick oven, and just to sustain you through the ordeal of waiting, the restaurant people might bring duck livers or tongues. Then appeared the duck, the skin crisp and browned. Small slivers were cut off the skin, which is like a delicate form of crackling attached to the underlying fat and with a piece of meat at the end, rather as an afterthought. You picked up the morsel, dipped it into an appetising sauce and wrapped it, along with a few raw, spring onions, into a little bundle inside a small pancake. There are worse dishes. When you went to a Peking restaurant you were treated as an honoured guest. When you arrived and asked for the name of your host or whether they had a vacant room, you let loose a torrent of noise. The doormen, good fat men with shining bald heads, shouted the name of your host or the nature of your inquiry, and so did every waiter in the place. The noise went echoing down to the kitchens where the cooks and scullions took up the cry too. When you left, the amount of your tip was also announced, and cheered.

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If you came in and ordered you could choose from a menu about a yard long. When, with the help of the waiter (T’ang Kuan, or Official of the Soup, was the polite Peking term) you decided what you wanted, the first dish, freshly cooked and piping hot, was in front of you within minutes. The Chinese cook their food very quickly and at very high temperatures, the one to preserve the finer flavours of the food and the other to kill off any lurking germs. Cold dishes, which were also excellent, should be eaten with some caution unless prepared in your home or in a reputable establishment, for in summer, at any rate, there were many flyborne diseases in China. I have only one minor criticism of Chinese cooking and this concerns the sweets, which I regard as rather poor. Quite a number are made, but they are generally too sweet for the European palate. It astonished me to find how few Europeans ate Chinese food regularly. Most seldom did so unless it was to accept an invitation to a big dinner party. It was, however, much better to eat in small parties, two being a very good number. You enjoyed exceptional privacy, for in most Chinese restaurants you ate in little cubicles, you never needed to eat the same food twice, and when you ordered a favourite dish you really could enjoy it. Chinese food is placed on a central dish from which each guest helps himself with chopsticks. It is often heart-rending at a big dinner to see how quickly some choice dish disappears on account of the united inroads of 12 people. One of my favourite styles of food was Mongolian, which you cooked yourself in Muslim restaurants. They are winter dishes, beef and mutton, the mutton restaurants being the best known. You either grilled your own mutton over a brazier in the open air or cooked it in a steamboat, a kind of tureen with a small charcoal stove let through the middle. Personally I favoured the steamboat, for you were brought many kinds of sauce which you blended to your own satisfaction in a soup bowl. You were also brought small pickled leeks. When your sauce was ready you took the meat, which was cut up very finely, and cooked it briefly in the

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steamboat, which contained a good stock, noodles and white cabbage. Then you soused the meat in the sauce to cool it, and ate it with shao-ping, buns covered with sesame seed. It is a most enjoyable way of spending a cold winter’s evening. Less well-known than the mutton restaurants were the beef restaurants. There were only two in Peking then, the better situated just inside the Sun Chih Men. It was called the Niu Jou Wan, or Bowl of Beef, and during the winter that was all you could get there. The place had two braziers and was presided over by two fat old Chinese Muslims, dignified and stately men with big stomachs and long beards. All you would get was beef, great bowls of it, cut up very fine with some herbs and soya sauce. You would bathe the beef in soya sauce and then cook it with the herbs. When you had it to your liking, you would stuff it inside a big shao-ping and eat it like a hot dog. That was all you could get apart from raw kao-liang spirit, which went down very well with it. When you called for your bill one of the proprietors would chant it at you. They never gave an account in writing. The other beef restaurant was situated by one of the lakes north of the Pei-Hai. It was quite small and had only one brazier. The situation, which was otherwise a very pleasant one, was rather marred by a public convenience a little distance away but well in the foreground. However, it does not do to be worried by little things like that. It was a characteristic of many restaurants that the toilet was next to, or in, the kitchen. It was a system which had perhaps been designed specially for the European guest in a hurry who did not speak Chinese. If you made a beeline for the kitchen you would not be far out. I often went for walks and rambles with Hedda and we never took sandwiches or anything of that nature. When we felt tired we would stop at some little eating house or tea shop and we could always get a reasonable meal and tea to drink. The tea habit is one of the great advantages of travelling in China. All along the roads and tracks you would meet with little tea shops where you might safely quench your thirst on even the hottest

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day, for who ever heard of Chinese making tea without boiling water? The Chinese had a very wise and sensible distrust for cold drinks, which were a recent innovation. If there was no tea you could always get boiling water, and most country people would never touch cold water if they could avoid it. Even the wine was generally consumed hot, particularly the yellow rice wine, which resembles a light sherry and is the most common drink at dinner. Although the idea of drinking a hot wine may seem strange to a European, the result is most satisfying. You drink many little cups of it and the Chinese have been at pains to devise various little games to stimulate its consumption at dinner. The most common is a finger game where two players thrust out the fingers of one hand at each other and call out a number up to 10, which is their guess as to the total number of fingers thrust out from both their hands. The winner is the one who shouts out the correct number first. It is a hilarious game and frequently becomes very noisy. Few Europeans master it. Chinese are, on the whole, an abstemious people and generally lack any great capacity for absorbing alcohol. They get red in the face, giggle and are very embarrassed. When you do encounter a Chinese who enjoys wine he is likely to have a capacity that is practically phenomenal. I remember meeting a Chinese artist in Chungking with whom I was invited out to dinner by a mutual friend. Wine being difficult to obtain in a restaurant at that time because of an infamous edict by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, our friend brought gin which he proposed to drink with the addition of fresh orange juice. ‘Please,’ said the artist, ‘do not give me any orange juice with my gin, as otherwise I shall get drunk.’ He thereupon consumed a more than appreciable quantity of neat gin without turning a hair.

I spent the summer of 1940 in the Pei Ho Yen and did not overexert myself. The news was depressing but I still could not walk

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well and was told that I was not yet fit, though I certainly did not feel ill. My Chinese studies proceeded slowly. After a time I found that the course at the language school was not really what I wanted, as it was intended primarily as an introduction to the language for missionaries. The latter were well-meaning young people, though it was sometimes rather difficult to see what their qualifications for work among the Chinese were, technical personnel such as nurses excepted. I remember one fat and jolly American couple who were destined to go to some remote town in faraway Kansu and whose theological knowledge, on which their evangelical work would be based, had been absorbed in a short summer course in some seminary in California. They had felt the urge to do mission work, all honour to them, the man had thrown up his job and they had come to China with their little daughter. But it seemed a very inadequate preparation. The jovial missionary featured one day in a brush with my friend Howard. The missionary was telling us how his little daughter had been unusually naughty and had been duly spanked.‘Do you mean to say,’ said Howard,‘that you actually beat your daughter?’ ‘Sure,’ cried the missionary, ‘leathered the hell out of the little rascal.’ ‘I myself,’ said Howard severely, ‘was never beaten as a child.’ As the summer passed, my funds grew attenuated. Apart from the fact that I was not earning anything myself, the exchange was beginning to deteriorate. I was puzzled to know what to do, and after toying with the idea of taking a job in Hong Kong I was eventually fortunate enough to be given a post in the British Embassy as a cypher officer in a small intelligence unit. I worked for Captain Hill, universally known as Hilly, a charming man who had been severely wounded in the head in the closing days of World War I and suffered greatly from insomnia. He used to work all night, almost every night, and seldom went to sleep at all. He was one of the most versatile mimics and raconteurs I ever met. After meeting a man for a quarter of an hour, he could give an uproarious imitation of him. He was exceedingly kind to me.

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The work was interesting and far from arduous, as Hilly did nearly all of it himself. He had a few useful sources of information. The most important was Li Mien, a former nationalist army officer who had defected to the puppet government in 1937. Li believed — quite wrongly — that his role in supplying information to British intelligence was known to the Chinese nationalist authorities in Chungking2. The embassy was a great rambling compound containing many residential houses and accommodation for a large body of troops. It occupied the northwestern part of the Legation Quarter, that extraordinary fortified town within the city built after the Boxer Rebellion for the then very necessary protection of the international diplomatic community. Though an anachronism, the Legation Quarter was still under international control. In the summer of 1940 the last British troops, a detachment of the East Surreys, marched out. The embassy had been built to house all the staff of a firstclass diplomatic mission but it had become largely redundant with the transfer of the capital to Nanking. In 1940 there was a skeleton staff of a consul, a vice-consul, cypher officers, a Ministry of Works officer and a constable. The latter was a good friend of mine, an ex-Shanghai policeman called Reggie Beer, a Devon man who had joined the navy in World War I at the age of 16. He was one of the most generous and independent men I ever knew. Most of the houses in the embassy compound were occupied by British people resident in Peking, a community which lived far too 2

I never met Li Mien, but John Boyce, the British Consul in Peking after the war, asked me what I knew of him. He had been arrested by the Chinese, and his wife had appealed to the Consulate for help. As a defector and collaborator, his arrest was not surprising. He had guarded against this possibility, at considerable hazard to himself, by passing information to Hilly which he believed went directly to the Chinese authorities in Chungking. He believed that his identity was known there. In fact, all Hilly had done was to send copies of his telegrams to the British Embassy. He argued that since the embassy was passing information to the Chinese, this discharged his obligation to Li Mien. Li’s identity was never disclosed. The result was that he was left unprotected. I did what I could and gave Boyce all the information I had, but it left a nasty taste in the mouth. I believe that Li was eventually released.

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much in each other’s pockets and bickered exceedingly among themselves. I fortunately never had to live in the place, for although many of the houses were good ones, there was little or no privacy. I would walk down in the mornings, bringing Miss Bieber’s little Tibetan terrier for the exercise, and bicycle to work in the afternoon. A friend came to share my house. He was the local representative of the Associated Press, a tall American of Danish extraction called Vaughn Meisling. He spent the winter of 1940–41 with me before being transferred to Hong Kong, and I was fortunate to have such an agreeable person to share the house. Thoughtful, considerate, and very amusing, Vaughn was a delightful and entertaining companion and a true and loyal friend. Through Vaughn I came to know a number of interesting people I would not otherwise have met: members of the local American community, Belgian priests of the Scheut Mission from Mongolia, American Maryknoll priests, various Chinese newspapermen, and officers and men of the small detachment of American marines which still remained in Peking, acting as guards of the American Embassy. I found it interesting to meet newspapermen in Peking, my father having been one there himself. It is said of my father that he used frequently to attribute one of his sources of information, which was very good, to ‘a high Chinese authority’. He was also aware that this was the subject of some quite natural professional curiosity on the part of his colleagues. One evening, when entertaining friends including some newspaper colleagues, some topic of the day cropped up and my father sent his old Number 1 Boy, Mr Sun, out to the tea shops to listen to the gossip. When he returned, my father had him bring in a pair of steps and put them on the dining room table. Number 1 climbed to the top and described what he had heard. When he had finished, my father turned to his guests and exclaimed dramatically, ‘Gentlemen. You have been listening to one of the highest authorities in China.’ The old Number 1 Boy was still alive. He came to call and we exchanged gifts. He sent me a roast chicken and I responded with

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some fine tea. I also entertained the family to a Chinese dinner. One of the old man’s nephews offered to paint my portrait on the inside of a snuff bottle, and when the Pacific war broke out he also offered me financial support. There were large numbers of Japanese in Peking, more than 100,000 excluding troops. On the whole they were well behaved and seldom came to notice. Just opposite my front door was a civilian Japanese mess, and at one time there was an outbreak of window-smashing in the hu-t’ung. Some individuals used to come up the hu-t’ung on dark nights and throw bricks through the Japanese windows. I was always afraid that the Japanese might think it was me. On the whole the Japanese probably behaved better in Peking than they did in most other parts of China. I liked to think that the city exercised a civilising influence on them. It must not be thought that their behaviour was exemplary (any number of Chinese died in Peking at the hands of the Kempeitai), but their barbarity did not reach the depths it achieved in other more remote places. The majority of the population did not fare too badly. As far as the city itself was concerned, the Japanesedominated puppet administration did much to improve roads, and kept historic buildings in reasonable repair. Private Japanese, however, did much damage to many of the old Chinese houses, particularly in the East City. Where some Chinese family had formerly lived in chilly state, the Japanese would, perhaps, move in a dozen families. The big Chinese rooms were far too cold and draughty for them.They would pull down all the fine old timberwork, and where a great hall had stood before, they would contrive a row of little rabbit hutches where they could crowd together in Japanese comfort and certainly keep warm. The damage they did was great and lasting. They also planned to build a Japanese suburb outside the western wall of Peking and accordingly built numbers of small bungalows, most uncouth and out of place. The suburb was a failure; few people went to live there but it was an outstanding eyesore.

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I was never involved in disagreeable incidents. The nearest came one day when Hedda and I had been visiting the Summer Palace by bus. Some time earlier, while out for a bicycle ride near the palace, we had caught a wounded drake Mallard. This bird, which could never fly again, lived quite happily in Hedda’s courtyard. It was particularly fond of waterweed and whenever we went out we generally managed to collect some. On this occasion we had a fine bunch which was wrapped up in a bundle in an old scarf of Hedda’s. It was very moist and more like a sponge than anything else. As we waited for the bus various Japanese suddenly formed themselves into a queue, leaving us and a number of Chinese in the rear. Hedda was jostled by one Japanese. When the bus did finally arrive, we and the Chinese rushed the queue and disorganised it considerably. While I blocked the door Hedda slipped in and got a seat. But by an odd coincidence she had, in so doing, been pushed up against the jostler in such a way that the bundle of waterweed was squeezed against his face. The weed came from a not-too-sanitary stream and a quite surprising amount of mud and water was squeezed over the jostler’s face and clothes. The Chinese were much amused by the accident and the jostler lost much face. I was much embarrassed and anticipated a possible international incident, but nothing happened. Indeed, I allowed a small Japanese child to sit on my knee all the way back to Peking. Vaughn left in the spring of 1941 for Hong Kong, where he was eventually caught by the Japanese and interned for a time. I continued to work in the British Embassy in an atmosphere of what I now realise to have been almost fantastic unreality. The Japanese were becoming more and more threatening, although life in Peking still remained interesting. There were two schools of thought on the possible dangers of war with Japan. There were those who thought it was inevitable, and those who thought that they would not dare, the ‘they won’t know what hit them’ school. The pessimists were largely confined to a few people in the American State Department and were greatly outnumbered by the

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optimists. The most influential of the optimists was Dr Leighton Stuart, the president of Yenching University. He was an outstanding and able personality, greatly beloved by the Chinese and on close personal terms with many influential members of the Chinese government. He sincerely believed that because it was madness to go to war with America, the Japanese would not do so and that if their bluff was called they would back down. Dr Stuart imparted great confidence to many. He had done remarkable work in maintaining the individuality and independence of his university, a first-class institution. His regular visits to Chungking were in no way secret and were well known to the Japanese. His optimism could not fail to infect many people, and I was among them. The Japanese would climb down and come to some face-saving compromise with the Chinese and all would be well. In the event, the opinion of the professional diplomats was the correct one. I have often thought that the case of Dr Stuart was an example of how potentially dangerous it is for the amateur to become involved in international affairs. Diplomacy is a skilled craft which, like any other, must be learned by years of experience. The judgment of the professional diplomat can be calmer and more objective than that of the old-timer on the spot or of anyone else who lacks the previous experience. People living abroad tend to be critical of their own diplomats, who are often regarded as a proud and supercilious people. Being popular with his own community does not necessarily help an ambassador to find out what is going on in a country, or what his colleagues are doing, or even to put forward the interests of his country. I suspect that a diplomat who is liked by his own community may often be quite useless at his job. It may be argued that an Englishman living abroad will know more about the country than a newly arrived diplomat. This may be true in theory but it is by no means universally true in actual fact. Mere domicile abroad means nothing. So many English people abroad have an obsession for trying to create a little England around them and learn hardly anything about the country in which they are

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living, outside of their actual work. If a man has some outside interest — the language of the country or its culture, natural history, photography, zoology or just a healthy interest in the local girls — he will probably come to know a great deal, but in my experience the proportion of people with outside interests is limited. I myself used to be particularly critical of consuls in China and elsewhere, but I have come to the conclusion that on the whole they do a good job. They could not hope to please everyone. As time passes on I realise what an exceptionally lethargic consul I would make myself. You will generally find that the man who bitterly criticises is of all men the most incapable of doing any better himself.

The actual outbreak of war was sudden. On a Monday morning I came bicycling down the Pei Ho Yen, as was my custom, and found a cordon of Japanese troops around the Legation Quarter. A sentry with fixed bayonet barred my entry and indicated with grunts that I was not to enter. I did not argue but went instead to another gate. When I found them all closed I went to Hedda’s place in the West City. From here we telephoned various places and finally learned, from the German Hospital, that war had broken out. It was a bleak moment, for none of us had the slightest idea as to how the Japanese would behave. I kept away from my house all morning and was able finally to enter the Legation Quarter in the afternoon, though not the British Embassy. I met some American friends and for want of anything better to do they came to dinner with me. It was impossible to get out of the city and we could only wait and hope for the best. We did one thing, though. Ever since I had been in Peking I had zealously guarded Miss Bieber’s stock of drinks against her eventual return. They included several bottles of excellent French liqueurs and a bottle of Bacardi rum. It seemed a pity that they should fall into the hands of the Japanese, and we took what steps we could to ensure that they did not. The night of 8 December 1941

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in 53B Pei Ho Yen was marked by a certain insobriety. Actually we would have done better to consume these drinks later, at our leisure. But I was able to hand over my few treasures such as toggles and camera and field glasses to Hedda, and a German friend, Dr Fabel, took away the .32 automatic which I had with great reluctance accepted from Hilly for my protection, and stored it for safe custody in the German Embassy. It seemed an appropriate storage place. In the following days I was able to enter the British Embassy and to learn that all documents which should have been burned had been. No one had been maltreated, and the Japanese had made no effort to stop our people from burning documents. The news that essential documents and code books had been destroyed came as a great relief because Hilly had not taken the precautions he had been told to take. Several months before the outbreak of war we received instructions to burn all papers except those required for current use. But we had a lot of files dating back to the 1920s, and Hilly loved his files. He was very slow to act. On the following Saturday morning we received a most unusual direct message from London — there was an army radio station in the embassy — directing us to burn almost everything immediately. There were masses of paper to be burned and only two fireplaces in which to do it. We worked all day and far into the night and again throughout the Sunday, but the job was far from completed when the Japanese sealed off the compound on Monday morning. I was worried by the knowledge that Hilly had a lot of weapons in his office. It was a remarkable collection of weaponry and personal souvenirs including the Mauser machine pistol that had shot him in the head. (His faithful batman had retrieved it after killing the German who fired the shot.) Hilly also had various unwanted weapons dumped on him by embassy guard units over the years. Fortunately no shots were fired. What actually happened was that a Japanese officer came up the stairs, opened the door and found Hilly and my colleague Skip Davies at work. ‘Ah,’ said the

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Japanese,‘burning papers,’ and turned and left the office. The Foreign Office codes were burned in the embassy’s central heating furnace by the Number 1 Ting Ch’ai, or Office Boy, who had been with the embassy since soon after the Boxer Rebellion and was most reliable. The serviceability of Hilly’s armoury was open to some question. He habitually carried a pistol in his hip pocket, but when he cleaned it in the office one day, he found that the action was bunged up with fluff. The pistol could not have been fired. Hilly and a number of other Allied nationals were locked up for a time in the Marine Post Exchange. The marines had no option but to surrender, although the Japanese were taking no chances and I saw field guns mounted outside the Forbidden City from where they could have shelled the American Embassy. The people who were detained were finally released, but thereafter all embassy personnel were kept confined in their embassies and I never saw any of them for eight months. The news was devastating. I well remember my amusement at reading in the local English-language newspaper of the sinkings of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales. It was inconceivable, and in any case it was just the sort of story which the Japanese were bound to put out. The confirmation of the story brought a muchneeded blast of realism. It soon became apparent that whatever their ultimate intentions were, the Japanese were not going to ship all enemy nationals off forthwith to a concentration camp. They in fact behaved reasonably in Peking. People were allowed to continue living in their houses and were provided with enough money through the Swiss representative to live quite well. They had the freedom of the city, although they had to wear red armbands announcing that they were enemy personnel. The Allied community was exceptionally lucky in the appointment of the Swiss representative who looked after their interests. This representative was Dr Hoeppli, the helminthologist of the Peking Union Medical College. He was a man of science and a leading authority on jade. His career had been an unusual one. Having

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served during World War I in the German navy, he found at the conclusion of hostilities that he was actually Swiss. When the Pacific war broke out he shouldered the unusual responsibilities of becoming Swiss representative in order to help his many friends among the Allied communities. It was a thankless task, involving him in much work and interminable exasperation, but he took up the burden with alacrity. No one could have done more to help us. The Allied community had another piece of good fortune in that we had an exceptionally able American, Billy Christian, a senior employee of the British American Tobacco Company, to act as our representative in negotiations with the Japanese. Billy was an extraordinary character: astute, good-hearted and amusing. His jokes and stories were somewhat robust on occasion, but he had so much natural good humour that he could tell almost any story in any company and never embarrass anyone. He had been in China since before World War I and he handled the Japanese in a masterly fashion. My own position was rather odd, for I found that I was the only member of any embassy staff who was not shut up. My house was raided one day by no fewer than six Japanese policemen: four members of the Kempeitai who had their headquarters in Pei Ta University just around the corner, and two members of the blue-uniformed consular police. They searched the house, but fortunately I was out and my servants told the Japanese that it was really a German house and that I was an unwelcome guest who was in the process of being evicted by Hedda. That was, as far as I know, the nearest I ever came to being locked up. I think they forgot all about me. It was impossible for me to keep up my house, and the Japanese permitted me to move into the College of Chinese Studies where many odd people who had no home congregated.The college was presided over by an immense and impressive American called John Hayes. He had the foresight to invite various Japanese Christians to take over the running of the college. Although they had little influence, they were well meaning and quite helpful.

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Several young Japanese from the Japanese YMCA moved in and behaved very well. Hayes fought a very effective rearguard action. The Japanese were bound to obtain complete control eventually, but he saw to it that it took them as long as possible. I myself did not stay in the main hostel but with two old American missionary friends, Dr and Mrs George Wilder, a fine old couple who had met at Oberlin College and had come to China nearly 50 years earlier. I had come to know them because Dr Wilder was a first-class ornithologist and had done much pioneer work in North China. He was also a good Chinese scholar. He had a good knowledge of Chinese but regarded his own attainments with great humility and never failed to study every day with his teacher. Mrs Wilder painted pleasant little watercolours. The Wilders were astonishingly fit, Dr Wilder still played a useful game of tennis, and once when I walked some way with them they trotted along at such a pace that I had difficulty in keeping up without panting heavily. The Wilders took me in and treated me as one of the family. They were the most thoughtful of hosts, and although they knew that I was not a churchgoer they never so much as suggested that I should be anything else. I stayed with them for eight months and during that time they never spoke of religion to me unless I raised the subject myself. Their life was a Christian example and they were the most liberal and tolerant of people. I felt for them in a way I have felt for few people, and I have never since been able to bear hearing wild and ignorant criticism of missionaries. They include among their number many noble people. Life in Peking after the outbreak of the Pacific war was far from disagreeable. I lived in a comfortable house, had the freedom of the city and enough money not only to be able to pay for my living expenses but also for a few toggles and for two or three modest Chinese meals each week. I was paid an allowance at the same rate as diplomatic staff inside their embassies, and this was considerably more than the rate for non-officials. Peking is such a huge place that there was never any lack of something to do. You

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could walk for miles, and often through very charming surroundings. I knew that I was due to be included in the exchange of Japanese and Allied diplomatic staffs, though there was much delay. Many Americans left in mid-summer 1942 and it was expected that British and other Allied personnel would follow them shortly afterwards. Several incidents during this period of semi-captivity stand out in my memory. Once, in early spring, Hedda and I were out for a walk and were coming along the narrow way which ran between the south wall of the Temple of Heaven and the south wall of the Chinese City. It was a still grey day and quite low overhead there passed a great skein of grey geese on their northward migrations to the tundras of Siberia. Their steady flight and wild calling affected me greatly with its message of freedom and the magic of far places. They seemed to typify all that joyous freedom and independence which mankind has lost through folly and futility. On another occasion I was in the Pei Hai with Hedda. It was a favourite resort for everyone in Peking and there were generally numbers of Japanese troops there. They usually ignored foreigners, but on this occasion we noticed that we were being followed by a most villainous-looking Japanese private. No matter where we went he kept close on our trail and we began to be somewhat alarmed, for there was always the possibility of trouble with the Kempeitai. We sat down on a bench to see what he would do next. He approached and we tried to pretend that we had not seen him. Finally he broke the silence. ‘Hiya folks,’ he said. He came from California and wanted to talk in English. We did not encourage him but it was quite a relief. Once we had problems on the city wall, which was many feet wide at the top. We often walked there and rarely met anyone else. It offered fine views over the city and the neighbouring countryside. We had not noticed that there was a small police station near the ramp up to the top, and when we returned we were detained by Chinese police. This led to much argument, conducted by Hedda, and some telephoning. Finally she clinched

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the argument by pointing out that there was nothing to indicate that you could not go on the wall. If this was not allowed then they should put up a notice and say so. This was considered reasonable and we were allowed to go on our way. The last thing the police wanted was trouble involving the Japanese, whom they loathed. But Hedda did not point out that even if there had been a notice it would have been in Chinese, which we could not have read anyway. The Japanese had a great mania for spy-hunting which sometimes took absurd forms and to our way of thinking was rather ridiculous. Actually there was method in their madness, and it was a most effective device for ensuring their own internal security. Very little real intelligence came out of Japan until the tide of war had turned against them and the Allies began to capture Japanese documents. The Russians were the only exception. They had a remarkable agent in Sorge, the correspondent of an important German paper and a close friend of the German Ambassador. But the Russians did not always believe him, and in any case did not share their Japanese intelligence with the Western Allies. Perhaps the most alarming incident of my stay in Peking was the case of the khaki shirt. I did not have a very large supply of clothes, having left England in 1939 with the intention of spending six months in the Andes, and I had bought but few clothes since. One item of my wardrobe was an old khaki shirt with pockets and shoulder straps. I had seldom used it, but one day I put it on in the College of Chinese Studies. When I went in to lunch there were a number of Japanese in the lounge outside the dining hall and it became obvious that they found my shirt to be of great interest. They chattered away among themselves and then a little YMCA man called Honda came up to me. ‘Mr Morrison,’ he said, ‘what sort of shirt this?’ ‘Oh, just an ordinary shirt,’ I said.‘This army shirt,’ said Honda.‘No, no,’ I cried, for I did not wish to be regarded as a British officer in disguise.‘If not army shirt,’ said the persistent Honda, pointing at the shoulder straps and pockets, ‘then what sort of shirt?’ It looked as if explanations were called for. ‘This not army shirt,’ I said firmly. ‘This sort of shirt used in

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England by Boy Scouts.’ Honda appeared dumbfounded by the intelligence but smiled gamely.‘Ah, Mr Morrison,’ he said, shaking his head,‘very big Boy Scout.’ This apparently settled the matter and I heard no more about it. I was, however, rather worried, for it might have been extremely unpleasant if the Japanese had convinced themselves that I was a British Army officer, particularly if they had found my Cossack pyjamas, a remarkable creation which in an expansive moment I had bought at Cambridge some years earlier. They were light fawn in colour with scarlet shoulder straps, a neckband which buttoned up tightly, and cuffs and a sash to match. On the left breast were black, red and yellow stripes. As my friend Bob Hightower, a Harvard academic also residing in the college, pointed out, any intelligent Japanese finding the Cossack pyjamas could see at a glance that it was a British Secret Service uniform. That would have been very awkward for me. Finally, after many false alarms, it was decided that the exchange was really going to take place. One day in early August I bade farewell to Hedda and entered the British Embassy to join up with the official party. It was a sad parting.

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A distant view of Hsi Chih Men in the northwestern corner of Peking after a fall of snow. Photo: Hedda Morrison

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CHAPTER 7

PASTURES NEW 1942

T

he next morning we set off by train to Shanghai. It was a long hot journey and the cause of much vexation. The crowning ignominy for me was in Nanking, where I rashly offered to carry two of Hilly’s heavy suitcases a long way to the ferry. I started off with them but by the time I was outside the station I was feeling very distressed and all but collapsed. Fortunately I encountered a small Chinese boy who, for a consideration, was prepared to carry them for me and did so without any great difficulty. We arrived in Shanghai and were accommodated in the Cathay Hotel in considerable comfort. It was a collecting point for people who were to be exchanged from many parts of China. We were several days in Shanghai and I remember buying a number of magnificent toggles for ridiculous prices. There were many good things in the little markets off Canton Road, and the shopkeepers were pathetically anxious to sell. For our voyage to Portuguese East Africa the Japanese provided a first-class vessel, the Kamakura Maru, which had formerly been on the trans-Pacific trade. This ship had originally been called the Chichibu Maru after the Emperor’s younger brother, but some years after it had gone into service the Japanese

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brought in a new all-Japanese system of Romanisation which would have meant renaming it the Titibu Maru. At the suggestion of the British-educated prince, it was renamed altogether. It was a big, modern 17,000-ton motor ship and still had most of its passenger fittings intact. I was one of a number of men who were accommodated in tiers of bunks in the tween decks forward. We had the run of the ship, which was not crowded, and were well fed and well treated by the Japanese. There was, of course, no lack of grumbling, especially by some of the lady passengers on the subject of allocation of first-class accommodation, and there was the odd individual who had the heroic nerve to grumble because he did not think the service was good enough. We had much to be thankful for since there was no blackout and we could always sleep on deck. I enjoyed congenial company, particularly that of Murray Maclehose, a large and lively Scot. He was a member of the Malayan Civil Service who had been studying Hokkien in Amoy. The only blemish that I detected in him was to find him one day using a book I had lent him as a seat on a wet deck. He was especially popular with the British signallers on board, who called him ‘The Hose’. He was later with the Inter-Services Liaison Department in Foochow and was badly injured in Taiwan1. He had a distinguished career in the diplomatic service and a long and successful spell in Hong Kong as governor. The Japanese behaved well on the whole, but a curious series of incidents always puzzled me. The Japanese are usually very kind to animals and are generally devoted to their pets. But on the Kamakura Maru there was one unfortunate little monkey which belonged to a member of the crew. I never saw an animal more constantly maltreated. Any Japanese who happened to be nearby generally found time to tease or hurt it. I once saw a fellow 1

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Murray immensely impressed the American doctor who patched him up and whom I met in Shanghai. Murray’s face was almost cut in two and they had to keep him sitting up to stop him choking to death. While in this awkward situation he said, ‘I wonder, Doctor, if you would be kind enough to let the mayor know that I am very sorry that I shall be unable to dine with him tomorrow night.’

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come up with a pair of pliers and, while pretending to fondle the little beast, place the pliers against its ear and suddenly give it a hard nip, then shout with laughter at its screams. It may be that the Japanese have some sub-conscious hatred for monkeys for they would never maltreat a dog so. It was not a pleasant spectacle and there was nothing to be done about it. The goodwill of the Japanese evaporated quickly after we arrived in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo). Another exchange ship, the City of Paris, came in from Australia, but whereas we on the Kamakura Maru had been treated as passengers, the Japanese on board the City of Paris had been treated as prisoners. They were wearing ugly red battle dresses with target patches sewn on the backs and were guarded by armed Australian soldiers. The comparison was a painful one. Lourenço Marques was a thriving port, modern and well organised. We were treated with the utmost consideration by the Portuguese there. At first I thought I would be returning to England in one of the British exchange ships, the Narkunda, and actually spent a night on board her. Then, however, several of us were ordered to proceed to Johannesburg. We spent several days at a large hotel called the Polana, just outside Lourenço Marques, and then travelled on up by rail. I greatly enjoyed the journey, for the South African railways were first class, though of only metre gauge. We did the first part of the journey by night, but I was much impressed by the landscape we passed through the next morning, a high rolling country of sunny hills and blue distances. I regretted not having time to see more of it. I stayed in Johannesburg for about three weeks. It was an astonishing city. When we arrived I expected that the station would be full of black porters and I was at first greatly surprised to note that all the porters were white and wore similar uniforms to those of railway porters in England. Indeed, you hardly ever saw a black man in Johannesburg, except on the outskirts; it was completely white, a large, modern, European city of about 300,000 people. The

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people themselves were mixed: English and Dutch and a large Jewish community. One shop which I went to in order to inquire abut the price of a typewriter was run by a most persuasive Jewish businessman. The only thing that prevented me from buying was that I was still waiting for money from England and had only a few shillings in my pocket. After he had sung the praises of his wares the salesman became conversational. Was I a visitor and had I been in Johannesburg long? I regretted that I was a recent arrival. Would I stay long? Unfortunately I was leaving Johannesburg and South Africa almost immediately. The salesman seemed to take this as a personal blow. ‘A pity, sir, a pity,’ he exclaimed regretfully, ‘we need settlers.’ From Johannesburg I visited Pretoria several times to see the excellent Transvaal Museum and the Pretoria Zoo. The zoo was outstanding, with an excellent collection beautifully housed and well looked after. It contained many great rarities which I had never seen before. It was eventually decided that I should proceed to Calcutta on my own. I travelled to Durban, where my passage was arranged by some helpful naval men, one of whom turned out to be Ronald Orr, an old friend from Cambridge. After some difficulty in obtaining funds, due to my civilian status, I was put on board a Dutch troopship, a former luxury vessel which used to ply between the Far East and South America via South Africa. I left South Africa with mixed feelings. It is a land of great natural beauty, and everyone I encountered was friendly and helpful. But the racial segregation, which I had never previously encountered, made me feel very uncomfortable. The ship upon which I now embarked carried about 3500 troops. I was one of only two civilians on board, the other being Gerald Carey, an old friend whom I had known well when he was at school. Archie Rose had been one of his trustees too. His father had worked in the Chinese maritime customs and Gerald himself worked for one of the big shipping concerns in the Far East. He

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had been in Hong Kong and had been sent to West Africa to work in the Ministry of War Transport, but became tired of the job and was now on his way to India to join the army. We were, during the course of the next few years, to meet at intervals in Belgaum, Calcutta, Kunming, Chungking, Hong Kong, and finally at Waterloo Station. It was an odd experience being a civilian among so many troops, and at first I found it rather embarrassing. I was, however, provided with officer’s accommodation and there was no lack of good company. Later I came to realise the great advantage of being a civilian on a troopship, for there is no nonsense about being a troopdeck officer or orderly officer of the day. You might be a full colonel for all the work you have to do. The ship was not very well adapted for being a trooper; it had in peacetime carried only a limited number of first-class passengers in the utmost comfort and there was relatively little deck space. It formed part of a convoy of 10 ships which must between them have carried over 20,000 troops. At this time, autumn 1942, such convoys were reaching Bombay once a month. The convoy was a most impressive sight, continually changing course and with a conducting cruiser and auxiliary cruiser far away on the skyline. It has always been a mystery to me how few collisions there were in convoys. The night watches must have been most nerve-racking for the ship’s officers. The voyage took 15 days and was relatively uneventful. There was a well-stocked, much-patronised bar on board, as this was before troopers went dry. There were a number of homosexual stewards, all of whom had gone to sea to avoid being called up. The night before we arrived in Bombay there was a celebration on board and I wondered what on earth would be left of the ship on homeward journeys after the war was over. This point evidently did not escape the attention of a vigilant War Office; at war’s end, all troopers were dry. No one knew anything about me in Bombay and I went ashore and took a room in a station rest room prior to leaving for

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Calcutta. I was not greatly impressed by Bombay, a large and dirty city, though I was to find later that by Indian standards it was pretty clean. There is no lack of dirt in China, but somehow I could never get over the squalor of India. I took a ticket to Calcutta and duly arrived at the train, where I received much unwelcome enlightenment on the subject of Indian railway carriages. A first-class compartment in an Indian train in those days was a bare-looking horse box which did not communicate with any other compartment. You had the essentials, couches and fans and a toilet adjoining, but no service, no bedding and generally no restaurant car. You had to take your own bedding (the bedding roll was an Indian institution which I had not encountered elsewhere) and under normal circumstances no one travelled without a servant. The guard would make a note of how many people wanted meals, and a distant station was advised. You left your carriage and had your meal and the train waited for you. Similarly, tea was brought to your compartment at various stations and put out at the next station, where you might often see scrofulous dogs licking the tea things which a thoughtful waiter had put on the ground. The system was a little out of date. A few trains ran airconditioned coaches but most of the air conditioning was obtained by blowing a draught of air across blocks of ice which were loaded into the bowels of the coach. The trains were nothing like so good and not half as punctual as the trains which the Japanese were running in occupied China. It was true that trains were overcrowded because of the war, but the rolling stock looked as if it had been built shortly after the Indian Mutiny. However, once I had recovered from my initial shock the journey was interesting. The scenery was not startling, though quite fine as the train wound its way up through the escarpment of the Western Ghats which lie behind Bombay and stretch for a great distance down the west coast of India. The scenery was a new one for me, a great parched countryside with untidy villages nestling among groves of trees.

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It took two days to reach Calcutta and when I arrived there I was lucky to get a room, or rather a bed, in one of the hotels. The next morning I set out to locate the people to whom I had been consigned, not an easy task since no one had been advised of my coming. However, I finally gravitated there after an interview with the special branch of the Calcutta police, who seemed initially to regard me as a somewhat suspicious figure. I began work in Calcutta in the office of the Inter-Services Liaison Department, or ISLD, as Hilly’s organisation was known in India. My boss was Charles Drage, who had formerly been in charge of the Hong Kong office. I was fortunately able to move out of my hotel, which might have been reasonably good in peacetime but was not the last word in streamlined comfort in war. Calcutta was, in fact, ill provided with hotels, and some of those which existed were almost as antiquated as the Indian rolling stock. Compared to Shanghai it was a wilderness. I moved into a small boarding house which was run by a large and dusky lady who said that she was a French-Canadian. I bicycled to work and found the winter climate of Calcutta very agreeable. It is not a very attractive city, being huge and crowded and filthy, but for a few winter months the weather is perfect, with cool nights and bright sunny days. After I had been in Calcutta for a little while I was sent to Delhi for an interview. As usual, I arrived unheralded and unexpected at some unearthly hour of the morning. I was accommodated in a mess largely inhabited by Indian Army wives who were doing various secretarial jobs. The standard of conversation was not always very intellectual. One evening, shortly after I had arrived, I listened in on a conversation that was largely on the subject of General Auchinlek. He had been closely observed treading the light fantastic at Maiden’s Hotel the previous night. ‘My dear,’ said one matron to another, ‘he may be a ball of flame on the battlefield, but my God, he can’t dance!’ I hasten to add that I myself did not believe a word of all this and I have no doubt that the gallant field marshall’s proficiency on a ballroom floor was only excelled by his undoubted pre-eminence as a commander-in-chief.

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My interview went off quite well, though there was one distressing incident. The colonel interviewing me was a genial and amusing man, well known for his graphic mimicry of Dr Goebbels making a radio address. We had an amiable talk and then an awkward thing happened. The telephone rang and the colonel had a long conversation with some individual. At the end of it he said briskly, ‘Now, where were we?’ and my God, I didn’t know. I fortunately recollected some point which had cropped up about a quarter of an hour before the telephone conversation and this was accepted for want of anything better, since fortunately the colonel could not remember either. It was a close shave. I returned to Calcutta where I was given various odd jobs. The idea was that I should await the return of Hilly. The atmosphere was a somewhat frenetic one. Drage was well-meaning but unconventional. One of his ideas which did appeal to me was the keeping of a file of ‘telegrams-drafted (and not sent)’. Every office should have one. The system relieves much tension in dealing with stupid communications from the head office. There were many girls in the office, some of them very young and inexperienced. I remember the distress of one lass who in the course of dictation came across the moral use of the word ‘pervert’ for the first time in her life. She did not like to admit that the usage was new to her and it was duly typed out ‘purbot’, which caused much surprise. The brightest spot in Calcutta was the Alipore Zoo, which had an interesting collection. It was a rambling, countrified place incorporating several lakes. I spent much of my spare time there for it was green and peaceful. The zoo had a breeding pair of Lesser Birds of Paradise, the only pair which had ever bred successfully in captivity, and great flocks of Whistling Teal on the lakes themselves. There was one bird which I had never seen before, Mrs Hume’s Barred-backed Pheasant from the Naga Hills on the borders of Assam. The zoo even bred it, which was an achievement in the steamy humidity of Calcutta. It was one of the least known of pheasants and one of the species which I had

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planned to collect when I had finished with South American waterfowl. By the racecourse, not far from the zoo, I once witnessed an incident involving a rhesus monkey and three Bengali gentlemen. There were many half-tame monkeys in the city. They were often mischievous, and this one, a large animal, was sitting on the railings of the racecourse. It was in the cool of the evening and on the other side of the road were walking the three Bengali gentlemen, two strapping young men and an old and wizened gentleman whom I took to be their father. The monkey watched them, then suddenly jumped off the railings and rushed across the road at them. It was only a feint, and the monkey was up a tree the next moment. The two young men did not stand their ground. They took to flight but in doing so knocked over the old gentleman and trampled him underfoot. Everyone was embarrassed except the monkey. My stay in Calcutta was not, however, destined to be a very long one, for I had a difference of opinion with Drage and resigned in anger. This episode involved a very pleasant young Korean called David An who was in Calcutta just before Christmas. He had been brought there under the auspices of the American Office of Strategic Service. Drage told me to look after him during his stay. This I duly did. We became friendly and An told me of his problems with the OSS. I gave Drage a report on the visit and recounted the OSS problem. I would have been more cautious if I had realised that Drage would immediately give my report to the OSS officer involved, who severely castigated An. I only discovered this on Christmas Eve when I met An, who upbraided me for my breach of confidence. I was furious, and set out to find Drage with every intention of punching him on the nose, but he was out partygoing and I could not find him anywhere. The next morning, my ire in no way abated, I found him at his house. Not unnaturally, the object of my displeasure misinterpreted my motives in calling, thinking I had come to wish

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him the compliments of the season. It is a matter of difficulty to punch a man on the nose who greets you with the words, ‘Merry Christmas, old boy, how nice of you to come round.’ So there was no violence and I resigned. The next step was an obvious one, and that was to join the army. There was no difficulty in this matter (it was more or less automatic) and my only worry was that I would not pass the medical examination since my knee was still an object of some concern. I need have had no such worries for the examination was a most perfunctory one and I was quickly sent away to the Officer Cadet Training Unit at Belgaum, where I arrived at the beginning of February 1943. Belgaum lies at an altitude of about 1500 feet in the Mahratta country south of Bombay. It was a small cantonment and contained one of the training centres of the Mahratta Light Infantry as well as the OCTU. I arrived shortly after my course had started and was slightly worried as to how I would get on, for I knew that nearly all the cadets in training would be British Other Ranks who had already put in several years’ service. I thought that, as the civilian coming straight to the course without any previous service, I might find life a little difficult. I need have had no such fears. I shared a room with a young British Latin-American volunteer from Argentina. Our immediate neighbours were a couple of Rhodesians who had served with a regular battalion of the Black Watch. I was a little surprised to find that out of a total of about 90 men in my company, only about eight had seen any active service. It was, of course, through no fault of theirs, but it was not quite what I had expected. The company commander was a stout man who had been in the Burma Rifles and was a very good training officer. The sergeant instructors were first class and most entertaining. I soon noticed that as a civilian, and one who treated them with Old World courtesy, I was much better liked than some of my colleagues, for I made no claims to know anything. As a result, when I did fall into not infrequent error, I was usually let off lightly. One of the first

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times I had reason to interview the company commander I did so very much at my ease, and even leaned on his table. The sergeant major was much scandalised and would probably have had many unkind things to say to any of my colleagues who did likewise, but he spoke to me rather as to an erring child. I always made a point of standing to attention after that. There was only one man whom I viewed with considerable trepidation, and that was the sergeant major in charge of physical training, a tough and often rude man. I never learned to view the obstacle course with anything approaching affection. I was by no means skilful at negotiating obstacles, and one was entirely beyond my feeble powers. I refer to the wall which had to be surmounted at the beginning of the course. There was a technique for crossing it but one which I never mastered. Fortunately, my colleagues took pity on me and would make a point of pushing me over first. ‘Let’s get the old bugger over,’ they would cry, and I would shoot over propelled by a number of willing hands. The sergeant major must have been a little puzzled at the speed with which I used to surmount the wall, for I generally finished the course last, but he never thought of looking for an explanation behind the wall. The unaccustomed exercise affected my knee considerably, and after about a week it was giving me much trouble. I had slightly sprained both my ankles as well. The medical officer came from Manchester and was not as sympathetic as he might have been. ‘It’ll come right in time,’ he said, and so of course it did, though I did not believe him at the time. The course lasted only four months and was not difficult. Two men were returned to their units, one because he had a squeaky voice and was not considered suitable for command, and another whose only fault really lay in his being a little oversexed. He knew two Eurasian sisters down in the bazaar; while there was no reason to frown on this, his activities eventually reduced him to such a state that he could no longer march, and he was forthwith returned to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Anyone could pass so long as they did nothing controversial.

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It was a period I enjoyed, for the company was good and I had grown out of touch with young Englishmen of my own generation. I felt strong and reasonably fit, and the bugbear of my knee trouble largely disappeared. It was also an attractive countryside, an arid tableland with precipitous table-topped hills capped by the most marvellous Mahratta hill forts. I went to see one or two. Built substantially of stone, they were in good repair and had all the things you want in a fortress: battlements and towers and dungeons. The most surprising thing about them was that although perched on the top of hills in an arid country, they always contained large wells. Why there should have been water on these hilltops I cannot imagine, but it certainly existed. I had little time for birds, though I sometimes saw interesting things on schemes, and during a drill parade one day I saw my first Tawny Eagle. It was not a very good moment to see a new bird. The magnificent bird flew low overhead, and although we were standing to attention my head inevitably moved as I watched it pass. The move did not pass unobserved. ‘It’s all right, Mr Morrison,’ roared the sergeant major from the other side of the parade ground.‘It’s only a bloody shite-awk.’The true bird lover must sometimes suffer greatly. I was never given any practice at commanding anything larger than a section, though most cadets were made to command platoons at various times and during schemes. I never knew whether the omission in my case was mere oversight or a depressing indication of my military powers, and I was too shy to ask. I was lucky in having my Rhodesian friends in my section for they were highly trained infantrymen and generally knew what to do next. They were particularly good on night schemes, and by following closely in their footsteps I managed to avoid falling down nullahs and into wells, hazards which dot the Indian countryside. Another man in my company was a large tea planter from Assam, and I learned quite a bit about tea and the lives led by some planters. It seemed they brought their girlfriends down from the Khasia Hills, which rang a bell. I recalled having read that the

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ornithology of the Khasia Hills is but little known and required considerable further study. Ornithologists had either never visited the Khasia Hills or had never done any work when they arrived there. When I arrived in Belgaum it seemed to me that the only subject in which I started at an advantage compared with my colleagues was in language study. I therefore worked hard at Urdu, the official language of the Indian Army. It is a charming language and not very difficult. I had a good teacher, a fat old munshi called Rajguru. He also taught me one other thing, which is how morbidly sensitive many Indians are to anything which they can remotely construe as an insult. There were one or two very embarrassing outbursts in my class. It was necessary to indicate a preference for the unit to which one wished to be posted upon completing the course. There were three choices. For my first preference I put down the Assam Regiment, which is composed of Nagas and other odd jungly peoples. The regimental centre was near the Khasia Hills, where I thought I might do some useful ornithological work. For my third preference I put the Rajputana Rifles. I was puzzled to know what to do for second preference and consulted my company commander. I had the effrontery to tell him that I wanted a unit whose regimental centre was in or near a good hill station. ‘Put him down for the 2nd Gurkhas,’ cried the commander. ‘They’re a hard-drinking crowd and it’s near Mussoorie.’ Thus are great decisions made. It soon became obvious that very few members of my course were likely to reach infantry units. There were, in fact, only two infantry vacancies for the whole course, and one of these was known to be reserved for our only American cadet, a man called Al Wright who had gravitated to Belgaum via the American Field Service in North Africa. There was absolutely no likelihood of my getting the other vacancy for I was not an outstanding cadet. Most of those passing out were being sent to the Royal Indian Army Service Corps and the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. I had a definite hankering for an infantry unit, but could see that the chances were remote.

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About this time, however, there arrived a mysterious little major who was recruiting people for an intelligence organisation located in Abbottabad in the North West Frontier Province. It was very secret and he would say nothing whatever about it, but it appeared that owing to their inability to give candidates any advance information this unit was agreeable, in the event of the candidate finding the work uncongenial or being found unsuitable, that he should return to his parent unit. This looked like a very reasonable proposition to me for it meant that I automatically had two choices. I therefore applied for the intelligence job, was duly accepted and commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the 2nd Gurkhas. The end of the course was something of an anti-climax and the passing-out papers provided us with many a good laugh. I had done well at Urdu, which is an indispensable language in the Indian Army, had passed the elementary exam, and had started to work for the higher standard. However, in some ways it was a waste of time for none of our passing-out papers were marked in any way with the language proficiency attained. I received an excellent grading for Morse code, which I had never learned, and a very low one for games, which I never played. But one of my Rhodesian friends also received a similarly low grading for games although he was a really good all-rounder and had played in first-class cricket in South Africa. My friend the tea planter, a good man but by no means a brilliant games player, received the highest grading for games. He used to play golf with the assistant commandant. I left the OCTU a wiser man in some respects, but hardly on an operational footing. From Belgaum it was a long, hot and crowded journey up to Abbottabad. When I arrived there I had little difficulty in deciding that the intelligence work, cryptography, was far from suitable employment for me. I stayed a little time in Abbottabad for it was an attractive spot, a bowl in the hills and overlooked by pine-covered heights, with the snow-covered mountains of Kashmir in the distance. I did quite a bit of scrambling up the local hills. The higher ones with pine woods on their tops were the most delightful places imaginable. The altitude of Abbottabad itself is

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quite considerable, but the birds are the usual dusty inhabitants of the plains, babblers and shrikes and mynahs. In an hour or so you could walk up into a new world where the birds were those of the hills, minivets and flycatchers and water redstarts, and it was pleasant to idle in the fragrant pine woods. It is my constant regret that I have not seen more of the Indian hills. The people around Abbottabad were fine, upstanding Muslims, big-bearded men with hooked noses. They were a surprising contrast to the weedy, under-nourished peasants of the plains. Life in the army does not bring a man into close contact with people except the men in his unit, and I cannot claim any special knowledge of the country people. Many compared unfavourably with the Chinese peasants I knew, for they altogether lacked the Chinese qualities of vitality and determination. So many seemed to me to be hopelessly apathetic, and I have no doubt that it was due to centuries of chronic malnutrition. The peoples of northwestern India, where there is plenty of food and wheat rather than a rice diet, are big and sturdy. Abbottabad contained the regimental centre of the 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles (Frontier Force) to which Al Wright had been posted. I went to see him several times when I was in Abbottabad and he seemed to be enjoying life hugely. He was already an authority on the history and traditions of the regiment, which is a very famous one. It carries two honours in its name alone and it had a remarkable record during World War II. There were several American officers in the Indian Army and I often thought it was a pity that there were not more. I had exercised my option to proceed to my unit and finally went on to the regimental centre at Dehra Dun at the beginning of July. I think it was the most unpleasant journey that I ever made, for it was terribly hot and I never saw a train so crowded. Furthermore, I lost an opportunity to obtain a berth in an airconditioned coach, being beaten to it by a major in the 12th Frontier Force Regiment. I am probably maligning the poor man, but I regarded him as highly objectionable at the time for I rather

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prided myself on my efficiency as a traveller. Fortunately, I was taken into a coupé by a kindly civilian railway engineer called Thomas Kidd who was travelling with his wife. I recollect that Kidd tried to cool the compartment by a traditional Indian device. A large block of ice in a zinc tray was placed in the middle of the floor, we shut the windows and played the fan on the ice. It worked after a fashion, until the ice melted. I left the train before dawn at a place called Saharanpur and travelled by road to Dehra Dun, where the regimental centres of the 2nd, 3rd and 9th Gurkhas were located. To my great surprise I was actually expected and was provided with a tent, while another officer was deputed to show me round. It was an entirely novel experience for me, and a strange one. I was given a particularly warm welcome at my first lunch in the mess when every chair was occupied except those on either side of me. This is known as putting the new arrival at his ease. Either that or they must have heard about me already. The regimental centre consisted of three training battalions which provided reinforcements for the four operational battalions which had been formed. Another battalion had been lost in Malaya. I was posted to ‘A’ Battalion, my company commander being a very capable officer called Martin Cotter. I went through the usual rigmarole of purchasing the right articles of uniform, and I had an interview with the colonel, who was a good administrator. It was his custom during these interviews to impress upon new arrivals that they were now members of a very famous regiment and that they had something to live up to. In particular, he would stress that the regiment had one unique honour, gained at the siege of Delhi, which was the right of officers to wear red piping round the collar. This made them very conspicuous in public places, and made it more than ever essential that they should never let the good name of the regiment be besmirched by drunkenness or any other improper behaviour. I had been warned what to expect and was a little disappointed when the subject of piping was not touched upon.

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I wondered whether the colonel felt that I would not be with the regiment long enough to make such warnings necessary. I did the usual routine jobs of a junior officer, though not very efficiently; my knowledge of military matters was by no means profound. However, the battalion commander seemed to trust me for he put me in charge of enlisted non-combatants, a fine body of men consisting of sweepers and cooks. I used to drill these men at regular intervals and it never seemed to do them any good at all. The Gurkhas were a most interesting people, stocky little men with features that were rather Chinese. They were cheerful, and while they were not supermen, they had great pride of race and a quite touching belief in their British officers. The reasons which led them to enlist were to some extent economic, for Nepal was a poor and backward country, but there was far more to it than a mere desire to earn a living. They were simple fellows but they had what I am sure was a genuine liking and respect for British people, and when there was a war on it seemed the right and natural thing for them to fight for Britain too. The Gurkhas played a part in the war out of all proportion to the size and wealth of Nepal. They supplied nearly half the Indian Army Infantry who saw front-line service, and their gallantry was recognised by the award of an extraordinary number of the most valued British decorations. The Gurkha peasants of Nepal may have been simple people but they could not have done more to help Britain if they had been our own flesh and blood. The old Subadars and Jemadars, former senior NCOs holding a special form of commission, the VCOs (Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers), were delightful people. They were always ready to help the inexperienced officer but they also expected him to be pretty good. No one could make a British officer feel quite so insignificant and useless as a disapproving Subadar. I was on a number of occasions reduced to almost microscopic proportions. I had to make a good many discoveries which disagreed with my previous conceptions of life. I had never been a great admirer of discipline or spit and polish, and I tended to think of them as being

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something unnecessary and undesirable. It therefore came as something of a revelation to see how absolutely vital these things are if the morale and efficiency of an army unit is to be maintained. It also became apparent to me that if the officers were half-hearted in such matters it was unreasonable to expect the men to be any better, and I came to look with a more kindly eye on such phenomena as regimental traditions, and even on the playing of polo. I had thought of polo players as being immortal snobs with more money than was good for them, and when I found that the 2nd Gurkhas were a famous polo-playing regiment I viewed the fact with some suspicion. I later found that before the war most of the regular officers of the 2nd Gurkhas were far from wealthy and that although they played polo with skill and enthusiasm, this had been encouraged as a deliberate policy by former commanding officers. They reasoned that if a young officer spent all his available cash on a polo pony, he would have little opportunity for living a dissipated existence propping up the bar of the local club. It seemed quite an enlightened policy. I do feel, however, that there was no justification for putting out all the trophies won by the regiment on guest nights. They were the most gargantuan piles of silver I ever saw in my life. Life became something of a dreary routine for it was in the middle of the monsoon and it continually poured with rain. ‘A’ Battalion was the farther away from the mess, about two miles away at the top of a long slope. Bicycling up there three times a day became a real bore. It was desperately humid and I was attacked by that most loathsome of tropical irritations, prickly heat. At the beginning of August I fell sick with jaundice, a very common complaint in Dehra Dun at the time. It is a miserable disease and causes great depression. I was sent to the local British General Hospital and kept in bed. It was dull and irritating. About the only light relief came when a very senior medical specialist, a little pot-bellied, bald-headed brigadier, came to inspect the hospital. The MO in my ward was a keen and conscientious young Scot and was worried about the man in the next bed to mine who

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had some odd complaint picked up in Burma. When the great man came round he hastened to describe the case, looking no doubt for enlightenment.‘They’re the very devil, these cases, aren’t they?’ cried the brigadier adroitly. ‘Now tell me, what is your opinion?’ The keen young Scot gave his opinion at length and in detail, and having finished stood waiting for the brigadier’s judgment. ‘Hmm,’ said the latter, ‘I think that on the whole I am rather inclined to agree with you.’They passed on to the next case. After some time in hospital I was sent up to a convalescent home at Landour, just above the well-known hill station of Mussoorie and at an altitude of about 8000 feet. I travelled up from Dehra Dun by bus and then in an odd conveyance called a doolie, which looks like a motorcycle outcar and is suspended from poles carried by four men. It is an inferior conveyance and my own coolies were so lacking in stamina that I walked most of the way. It was an extraordinary change, for it was very cool in Landour and we sat huddled over fires when we could get them. The convalescent home was an antiquated place that was not ideal in many ways, but the change was an invigorating one and I soon began to feel well again. It was nearing the end of the monsoon and on fine days one could look for an immense distance out over the vale of Dehra Dun, shut in between the foothills of the Himalayas and the Siwaliks, and for miles across the Indian plains. There is nothing gradual about the ascent to Mussoorie, which is almost directly above Dehra Dun, and at night you can from either place see the lights of the other twinkling above or below you. I wish I had been given the opportunity of travelling for several years in India during peace. You could spend the summer in the mountains, early summer in the outer ranges, and then, as the monsoon broke, march through to the drier country beyond and come down to the plains for the cool and sunny winter months. I was much embarrassed by one matter which came to my attention at Landour. An Indian dealer brought up a number of little ivory trinkets for sale and a British officer, after the dealer’s departure,

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proudly showed me a couple of trumpery little pieces which he had managed to steal. He told me that he had often done so before, since when a dealer has many little pieces spread out on the ground it is very difficult for him to watch them all at the same time. I had seen a similar incident at Belgaum in which a fellow cadet had once, in my company and that of others, made off from a little shop where we had stopped with a couple of bars of soap for which he had not paid. We called him back, thinking it was a mistake. ‘You fools,’ he told us later,‘if you had not called me back I should have got away with that.’ The value was about six annas. I was much shaken by these incidents. I realise that such people are isolated individuals, but it had not really occurred to me that they existed at all. Shortly after my return to Dehra Dun I had a mysterious summons to an interview in Delhi. As a result I was asked whether I would like to join an organisation known as the Ministry of Economic Warfare and which was later, and much better, known as Force 136. I was not told very much about the work, but it meant that I would return to China, which I was very anxious to do. I was also reasonably certain that my days with the 2nd Gurkhas were numbered. I had no complaints on the score of my treatment there (indeed I had met with much sympathy and kindness) but it was obvious that I was a far from efficient officer and would probably, in the course of time, be posted to Ordnance. I therefore applied for MEW. For some reason it was a long time before I heard anything further on the subject of my transfer, and in the meantime I had been posted to the 29th Gurkha Rifles as education officer. The 29th was a training battalion composed of men from the 2nd and 9th Gurkhas and formed part of a training brigade just the other side of the Siwaliks. I went there and spent several enjoyable weeks, for the weather was now cool and sunny again. There was no education being done at the 29th and once more I worked with Martin Cotter. The commanding officer was from the 9th, a delightful man called Robbie Fawcett. The work was interesting and not arduous, and the camp was on the edge of the jungle where much of the training took place. I was once an umpire on a night scheme.

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I approached one position and was challenged. ‘Friend,’ I cried, ‘umpire.’ ‘Advance, friend,’ was the reply. I did so, and, when only a few feet away, the man who had challenged me fired a blank cartridge just wide of my legs. I heard a snigger in the darkness but a careful search failed to reveal the perpetrator. An Australian officer, a very experienced brigade major, came to lecture the officers of the training brigade on the campaign in New Guinea. I think it was the lecturer who told us of the Australian brigadier who, during the advance along the narrow track across the precipitous Owen Stanley Range, is alleged to have issued the order which stated, inter alia: ‘The brigade will advance on a one-man front. Any man disobeying this order will break his bloody neck.’ Questions were asked at the end of the lecture. One keen young officer inquired on the subject of measures against leeches, to which the lecturer replied that New Guinea was such a bloody awful country that not even leeches could live there. Our own brigadier, a rotund little man, proposed a vote of thanks. We had been privileged to listen to a most interesting lecture and what he, our brigadier, wished to stress was that we had not heard anything which we could not find in our own training pamphlets. This was, perhaps, theoretically true, but I felt that it was hardly the time to point it out. In order to enable me to clear up the question of my future, Colonel Fawcett one day sent me off to Meerut to the headquarters of MEW.There I learned that I was to be sent to Kunming. I spent the night with Dick Price, a friend from Shanghai who had made a most enterprising and hazardous escape from there after the outbreak of the Pacific war. I left the 29th with some regrets, for the company was exceptionally pleasant and the work and environment very much more interesting than that of the regimental centre. I finally left Dehra Dun at the end of October and took the train to Calcutta. I shared a compartment with an officer in the Garwhalis who was being seen off by a friend who was not sober. At any rate he misread my shoulder badges. ‘I see you’re in the 3rd,’ he said. ‘Good crowd, the 3rd, not like those scruffy buggers in the 2nd and 9th.’

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Boy in a Mongol hat, a common and necessary form of headwear in the North China winter. Photo: Hedda Morrison

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CHAPTER 8

FORCE 136 1944–45

I

n Calcutta I proceeded to the MEW office in Gariahat Road. This was a converted block of flats which steadily expanded throughout the war. It was always said that a resourceful officer who once arrived in Calcutta having forgotten the address merely stepped into the first taxi and hissed into the ear of the Sikh driver, ‘Go Secret Office,’ and was immediately driven there. I soon learned that I was not, after all, going to Kunming as I had thought but was being sent to Chungking, as a civilian. I spent my time making preparations for the flight over the Hump1. The amount of luggage you could take was very strictly limited, and since I knew that even the most common commodities were almost unobtainable in China, I went to much trouble to ensure that I took the maximum amount with me. I weighed every single item and packed them in light kit bags and finally put in three pounds overweight. It seemed likely that I would get away with that. I also put what I could in my pockets. It was surprising how much I was able to take. I left at the beginning of November in a comfortable passenger plane of the China National Aviation Corporation, 1

The general term for flying over the Himalayas to China. The Hump is actually the great mountain mass of Tibet extending down into northern Burma.

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better known as CNAC. At that time Japanese fighters were operating from Myitkina in northern Burma and it was necessary to fly the actual Hump at night. We therefore did not leave Calcutta until the middle of the day, and I watched various Chinese passengers waiting in great discomfort. While luggage was restricted, there was no limit to the amount of clothing you could wear, and each of them was wearing not less than three suits, one on top of the other. They certainly suffered for their enterprise. We flew up to Dinjang in northern Assam and left there just as dusk was falling. I felt no physical distress, although we flew at a great height and the plane was unpressurised, but I shall never feel at ease in an aeroplane. It is, after all, the only form of transportation where any major mechanical breakdown is likely to cause your death, and quite certain to cause it over the Hump at night. We spent a night in Kunming and proceeded on to Chungking the next morning, but this time in a crowded transport plane with icy-cold bucket seats and no heating. We passed through cloud the whole way and then came out into sunshine over Chungking, straggling untidily over its hillsides. The airfield was on a sand bank in the Yangtze, shut in by steep banks and surrounding hills. A British organisation would probably have condemned it as unsafe but the Chinese and American pilots of CNAC used it year in, year out, by day and by night, and never had an accident there. Their best pilots, who flew the passenger planes, were, of course, outstandingly good. They had to be. CNAC did a remarkable job. It was even said to have staged the first air raid on French Indo-China, in the very early days of the Pacific war. The story goes that a group of American pilots, having lunched exceedingly well in Kunming, concluded that it would be an admirable thing to bomb Haiphong. Having picked up a few small bombs which were lying around, they proceeded to do so, throwing the bombs by hand out of the plane’s door. The Japanese reported a heavy and sustained air attack by the US Air Force, many planes being shot down.

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In Chungking I set to work in the British Embassy under a gentleman who became a most valued friend, Mr George Findlay Andrew. Findlay had been in China for many years and had known my father before I was born. He had worked for 25 years as a member of the China Inland Mission, mostly on famine and floodrelief work and negotiating the release of kidnapped Europeans from Chinese bandits. They were the types of work for which his organisational and negotiating abilities and remarkable personality well fitted him. Having completed 25 years as a member of the CIM, he joined the big shipping firm of Butterfield and Swire as an adviser on Chinese affairs, and had held this post until he began to work for MEW. Findlay probably knew more about Kansu and western China than any living European. He had a very wide circle of Chinese friends in Chungking, both in and outside the government, spoke and read Chinese with equal fluency, and was the possessor of the most expansive smile in the whole of eastern Asia. He was greatly attached to China and its people and had a deep and sympathetic understanding of their outlook and way of life. He bore personal disasters with fortitude, never spoke ill of another man, and spent a large proportion of his time unobtrusively in helping others. At the same time, Findlay was the most cheerful and engaging of companions, with a sprightly and youthful outlook which at times took much keeping up with. The memory of his friendship is something which I value very greatly. The dull moment in his company simply ceased to exist. The work was interesting. Findlay had established a liaison connection with the organisation of General Wang Pun Soon, the leading Chinese expert on Japan. Personally I had reservations about the value of some of General Wang’s intelligence, though to listen to Findlay, who was not lacking in confidence, you might have thought that we had a direct line into every Japanese headquarters in China. Unfortunately, I was quickly given one or two odd jobs which did not appeal to me. The most burdensome was trying to

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organise a system of maintenance for British Embassy transport. What cars the embassy had were old ones. They had mostly come up the Burma Road before it was closed in 1942. They ran on poorquality petrol from faraway Kansu, or on alcohol. Spares and parts were unprocurable, except at fabulous prices; despite the inflation in China, we at that time still had a pegged exchange. The drivers stole petrol and parts with equal readiness, and into this maelstrom I was lightly tossed by a gentleman called Frazer Crawford, who in other respects I regarded as a good friend, with the instructions to spend a few days in getting things organised. It occupied a large proportion of my time for the rest of my stay in Chungking and was the cause of much irritation and blasphemy. Once in Chungking I took steps to let Hedda know where I was. I knew that the Chinese postal service continued to operate between Japanese-occupied and Free China. I sent a Red Cross letter to Dubosc of the ‘I am well, hope you are well, the weather here is very hot’ kind, and included the address of our mess in English. I knew Dubosc would pass the letter on to Hedda. Eventually I received a reply sent from Nanking, where Hedda was visiting. The envelope was addressed in Chinese. The address was written by an ill-educated Chinese who had to guess what the correct characters would be. He got them all wrong, but the wonderful Chinese postal service delivered it just the same. Wartime Chungking was a cheerful spot. It was so expensive that it was out of the question for most individuals to do more than pay for a small proportion of their living expenses, and in general we lived at the expense of HM government. This applied to all organisations in Chungking. People talked of the hardships of life there, but they consisted largely of shortages of such things as cigarettes, coffee and butter. I do not smoke, would just as soon drink tea as coffee (unless the coffee is good, which used to be very unusual in any British household), and regard peanut butter as quite a satisfactory substitute for the real thing. There was excellent fruit in Chungking and we had beautiful oranges and pomelos throughout most of the winter. A number of

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enterprising Chinese and one Russian were brewing various forms of alcohol, generally labelled gin, though by courtesy only. In the early days just after the closure of the Burma Road, the drink position had been rather unusual. There was none to be had at all, and those who liked the stuff had to brew their own. People went from house to house sampling each other’s private stills, some of which worked quite well and some, I am told, very badly indeed. However, Chungking was now receiving the blessings of civilisation and Chungking gin, liberally laced with fresh orange juice to disguise the taste, was drinkable. You had to be careful, however, with a brew prepared on the south bank of the Yangtze which was liable to induce amnesia for prolonged periods. Shortly after my arrival we gave a Christmas party at which a quite prodigious quantity of Chungking gin was consumed and a most friendly spirit prevailed. We had about a hundred guests and they consumed on average a bottle of Chungking gin apiece. The city was famous for its state of perpetual thirst; it was something to do with the climate. Chungking lacked some amenities but made up for them by the cheerfulness of most of its enforced residents. This applied more especially to the Chinese, nearly all of whom had to endure great discomfort. The city was overcrowded. It had been devastated by heavy bombing between 1939 and 1941 and the houses which still stood were mostly owned by grasping and avaricious landlords. Findlay had many Chinese friends, some of them people of great wealth in Shanghai or Hong Kong, but they never grumbled about their straitened circumstances and no people could have been more hospitable. I went to many Chinese dinners with Findlay, and except for one or two tedious official affairs, they were very entertaining. He had a remarkable capacity for drawing out the shy or the retiring, whether they were Chinese or European, and he was always at pains to pay as much attention to the old ladies as to the young ones. At times it seemed quite wrong to be enjoying oneself in Chungking, but on the other hand someone had to do the job and there was no point in being miserable about it.

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The Chinese being a sociable and highly civilised people, it is not surprising that they should have developed a certain amount of etiquette for their dinner parties, which are such supreme social occasions. When you went to a Chinese dinner you first of all sat around and nibbled a few sunflower seeds or peanuts, and drank tea. When the guests were all assembled and the dinner ready, the host would conduct you to the dinner table, which was always a round one, the best shape for good conversation. The rule was that the guest of honour must occupy the seat opposite and facing the door, while the host sat opposite him with his back to the door. The host would conduct his guests each to their seat, pouring out a cup of wine for him as he did so. The wine pot should be held in both hands. This was a general usage on polite occasions; whether you were presenting a visiting card or drinking a man’s health, you held the card or cup or wine pot in both hands. On very formal occasions the guest of honour should show a commendable modesty and resist being taken to the place of honour, and the host must then persuade him. When the guests were all seated and the wine cups full, the guests would drink a health to their host. Once this had been done, the engagement became general. There are various little points like this which the visitor to China should try to recollect, though many visitors do not bother. There was once a brigadier who came to Chungking and attended a Chinese dinner. He did not wait for the customary toast, but seeing the cup in front of him, cried heartily, ‘Good stuff, what,’ and quaffed his bumper. He was a visiting member of an intelligence organisation. The first course is generally a cold dish, and thereafter dish follows dish, but not too quickly. A Chinese dinner is far too good to be disposed of hastily. Good food and many healths in good yellow wine are a great stimulus to good conversation. The wine cups are continually refilled, but if the wine pot is left on the table it must point away from the table and not at any individual. There is, however, a very sensible convention which brings drinking to an abrupt end. The last course usually consists of three or four very

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simple dishes accompanied by rice. Once the rice has appeared on the table, all drinking ceases. After that you adjourn, drink a little tea and eat some fruit, and go home quite early. You will wake up the next morning without a care in the world. Our own mess was a good one. We had good servants and an admirable cook. Chinese servants undoubtedly stand alone. They were really businessmen. A Chinese servant undertook to look after your affairs on a commission basis, plus a small fixed salary. Being naturally good businessmen, they generally did a very good job. Everything which came into the house from the outside paid a commission to your servant. This commission was vulgarly called ‘squeeze’. Your food, your groceries, your bill for having the electric wiring renewed — everything included a commission for your servant. If this commission was reasonable (10 per cent was a fair figure), he was a good servant. If this commission became unreasonable, he was a bad servant. Should you, however, desire to draw the attention of your servant to the high prices he was charging, you did not tell him that he was robbing you. Rather, you had to imply that he was being swindled by dishonest shopkeepers. You generally established a modus vivendi and you were well and faithfully looked after. Your personal belongings would be looked after with the utmost care, and if you forgot where you had hidden your American gold dollars you only had to ask your servant and he would tell you. There was always a Number 1 boy in the household and you engaged all your servants through him. If the other servants did not agree with him, they quietly left. It was a most harmonious arrangement. Chinese servants were discreet. In Chungking we had a storeroom which at various times was used as a strongroom too. It was all very confidential, but one day long after we had ceased to use it as a strongroom I had cause to go into it and had left the key in the office. Never at a loss, however, our Number 1 boy quickly opened the storeroom with his latchkey to the front door. There was a famous case in Peking where an Italian gentleman was carrying on a liaison with a certain married lady.

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The gentleman went to great pains to ensure secrecy, and when he entertained his lady friend he admitted her to his house through a little side door running into his courtyard. His servants never gave any indication that they were aware of what was going on except for one small but significant fact. Every morning after he had been entertaining his friend, he received for breakfast an extra-large helping of scrambled eggs. Chungking is a rambling place built on the confluence of the Yangtze and an important tributary called the Kialing. The houses run up and down the slopes of steep hillsides, and wherever you go you must continually go up and down flights of stone steps. The embassy was on the north bank, but many people lived on the south bank, which was damaged much less by bombing. There were several ranges of hills on the south bank, and I would go for walks there on Sundays. It was a rich, heavily cultivated countryside. The Szechuanese speak a form of Mandarin, though not a very intelligible one. They lack the charm of the northern Chinese and are sometimes a little uncouth. They were not much loved by those Chinese who were driven to Chungking by the war, and they exploited their visitors shamefully. But I did not see as much of the Szechuan countryside as I would have wished, and I have no doubt that the country people, as opposed to the people living in and around Chungking, have as much charm as anyone else in China. At first the exchange was very unfavourable, but it gradually improved and I was able to afford an occasional Chinese dinner in a restaurant. There was one little northern restaurant which was a great favourite of mine and could prepare many of the dishes which I had come to know in Peking. There was only one slight source of trouble, and that was caused by the New Life Movement. Designed for the regeneration of Chinese youth, this movement was in general honoured more in the breach than in the observance. It forbade the consumption of wine in restaurants. In order to comply with the spirit if not with the letter of the movement, the resourceful Chinese restaurant-keepers insisted that you had your wine in tea bowls and poured from a teapot

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instead of the usual little wine cups. In appearance yellow rice wine resembles tea, so all difficulties were overcome. All difficulties, I should say, except one: the system increased your consumption by at least three times, for you tended to drink as many healths of one teacup each as you would have done in the little wine cups. The New Life Movement was the cause of some disastrous evenings. Funnily enough, I had noticed the same thing while going to South America. It was on the Orduña that the barman advanced an equally ingenious theory that if you ordered a double, you received more alcohol for your money than if you ordered two singles. We were drinking Manhattans at the time and the same thing happened. We tried out the barman’s theory and ended up by drinking the same number of doubles as we would have consumed in singles. We tried the experiment only once. Chungking has only two seasons: one of mist and cloud for about eight months of the year; and, during the summer, about four months of great heat and humidity. We had a continual succession of visitors who had to be met at the airfield and in turn despatched. One day, while seeing off a visitor, I witnessed a peculiar incident on the airfield.The passengers had been loaded in, the doors of the plane had been closed, and the pilot was just beginning to rev up his engines to taxi to the end of the runway. Suddenly it looked as if something was wrong. The engines slowed down, the door was flung open and an agitated Chinese lady made a hasty appearance and came running over to the mat-shed2 airport terminal.We wondered what was going on, and soon learned that she had forgotten her baby, which was asleep on a bench. The comment of a visitor to whom I related the incident was:‘An easily replaceable commodity in China.’ One visitor brought his secretary with him and she distinguished herself in an unusual way by sitting on Findlay’s cat and breaking its back. It had to be destroyed. We were aghast. What would happen, we asked each other, if she had a baby? I was kept closely tied to Chungking, but during the summer of 1944 was sent down towards Kweilin, which at that 2

Thatched palm leaves.

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time was being attacked by the Japanese, in order to pick up a load of important equipment. I set off in our only truck, a 15 cwt driven by the leading aircraftsman who serviced our vehicles. We carried a number of passengers: three Chinese doctors and four Chinese nurses. The early stages of the journey were not too pleasant, for we had a breakdown, and although I did not know it at the time, I was suffering from malaria. The first night out I was quite ill, though without the usual malarial rigour, and my medical passengers were most concerned for me. They went into committee and examined me carefully, though without effecting any startling revelation. They began to question me. How long had I felt unwell? How was my appetite? How were my bowels? I answered these questions but realised too late the fatal significance of my admission that my bowels were not all that they might be. The doctors and nurses were overjoyed and beamed one on another. There was something they could do for me. And they did. My feeble pleas were of no avail, and I was taken firmly away and given an enema. I felt a good deal better the next morning. However, the fever reappeared in Kweiyang, which is the point where the road to Kweilin branches off from the ChungkingKunming Highway, and again at the railhead of Tuhshan. Fortunately it was correctly diagnosed by an American missionary doctor and responded to heavy doses of quinine. I was now in something of a quandary, for the equipment which I had been sent to collect was at Chin Chen Chiang, further down the railway, and the trucks which had been promised to me by the British Military Mission would come only as far as Tuhshan. It was very awkward. With the evacuation of Kweilin taking place, conditions were chaotic and the railway would not bring the equipment to Tuhshan. Finally the BMM relented and I was given two three-ton trucks to take to Chin Chen Chiang. One lost a wheel through a broken stub axle, and there was some delay in Chin Chen Chiang where, in the railway hotel, I encountered bed bugs for the first time. They came out in swarms at night and made life

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unbearable. I took to sleeping on a camp bed in the hotel compound. This caused some disapproval on the part of a zealous air-raid warden who claimed that my white sheet was likely to be observed by the Japanese planes, which were active every night although they never bombed Chin Chen Chiang. However, I took the risk of becoming an air-raid target and slept in peace. The equipment I had to collect was in the railway yard. It had been brought up from Kweilin by a Free French major, a likeable but strange fellow, plump and very bitter, who seemed to hate almost everyone except General de Gaulle. He hated the Vichy French, the French in Indo-China, the Japanese, the Germans, the communists and especially the Americans. I had sent the 15 cwt down ahead of me with the leading aircraftsman and when the French major one day had the opportunity of travelling up to Tuhshan with a very charming American colonel, it was the LAC who went and made the arrangements. In my experience, rancorous hatred was a sad but undeniable characteristic of the Free French. They were individually good and decent Frenchmen, but their national cohesion had been fatally undermined. They seemed to trust the British as much as they trusted anyone, and that was not saying very much. When I did finally get under way I was left in a very embarrassing position, for I was unable to honour various promises of transportation to Chungking made by the French major. There was simply not enough room. It was embarrassing because the promises had been made to Chinese ladies. The return trip was more auspicious. The Chinese in charge of the trucks was at first sight rather an objectionable fellow, and many people who met him would consider this an understatement. However, I had no real authority and I soon found that if I left everything to him, things went quite smoothly. The drivers were undoubtedly carrying large quantities of illicit cargo, and they had quite as much interest as I did in seeing that the trucks arrived safely in Chungking. I was of use to them, as my presence meant that the trucks would probably not be searched by any

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over-zealous policemen. We achieved a state of understanding and I safely delivered everything in Chungking. Indeed, the return journey was quite notable in one respect. My malaria had disappeared and I was now left feeling very well and quite ravenously hungry, for I could eat but little while I had fever. I had a young student from Shanghai as my interpreter and assistant and found that he possessed a knowledge of Chinese food which was quite remarkable in one of his years. In every little restaurant along the way we had the most excellent food. I seriously question whether a man ever fed better at the expense of HM government. Once I had returned to Chungking I started planning my leave, which was shortly due. I gave this matter much thought. I wanted, if possible, to do some ornithological work in China, but to be of any real value it would require a certain amount of collecting and I had no collecting equipment. The only chance I had of obtaining equipment lay in proceeding to Calcutta, and the real problem lay in knowing how to proceed to Calcutta without at the same time sacrificing part of my leave. I finally concluded that there was only one way, albeit a rather painful one. I had noticed in Dehra Dun that my hearing was no longer as good as it had once been; I could hardly hear the ticking of a watch held close to my ear. I had been to see the ear, nose and throat specialist at the British General Hospital, a most sympathetic man who had recommended that I undergo a small operation for a deviated septum. I therefore decided to go down to Calcutta on the strength of the chit the specialist had given me, have the operation, obtain my equipment and come back to China before I took my leave. I duly flew to Calcutta and went to see the specialist at the British General Hospital there. I was a little hurt at my reception, for the specialist was an unsympathetic man from Liverpool. He gave me a perfunctory examination and said, ‘Well, d’you want the operation or don’t you?’ I was somewhat taken aback, and asked for his opinion. In the most grudging way he told me that it

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might not be a bad thing and that I should report to the hospital a few days later. In the meantime I was advertising for a .410 gun and was lucky to be able to buy one from a brigadier for the very reasonable price of 50 rupees. I was able to order 700 rounds of ammunition from Mantons and half a pound of arsenic (indented for as operational stores) through a helpful officer in Force 136. I therefore entered hospital with a clear conscience and had a piece cut out of the inside of my nose. It was a memorable experience, for the specialist not only came from Liverpool but had strange ideas as to what to talk about to a patient under local anaesthetic. First of all he mentioned conversationally that there were rats in the operating theatre. He then asked me whether I had ever seen a ferret kill a rat. When I said no, he entertained me with a most graphic description. From there it seemed a natural step to other forms of blood sports and we ended up on bullbaiting. You apparently set a bull terrier on a tethered bull and the terrier seized the bull’s nose and hung on and on and on. About this time the anaesthetic began to wear off and I started to feel slightly restive. I had kept my eyes firmly closed the whole time and had felt nothing, though there had been the most horrible noises of cutting and wrenching. But the final stages involved the use of a hammer and chisel. The specialist apparently held the chisel and the sister used the hammer, for I heard him cry urgently, ‘Quick, sister, harder, harder!’ I was not sorry when it was all over, and saw the specialist only once again. A doctor told me later that he had made a very clean job of the operation, but my own personal belief is that all he and the sister did was to divert the septum the other way, for whereas before the operation I found breathing difficult through my left nostril, I now have the same trouble with the right one. I had to come back to Chungking without my gun and ammunition and was rather puzzled to know how to bring them into China. There was very little space on the occasional RAF plane flying to Kunming and it looked as if the only person who might

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be able to help was General Carton de Wiart, the Prime Minister’s representative, who had a private plane. I wrote to the general and received a most courteous reply. He would be delighted to bring up my gun and ammunition on his next visit to Calcutta, and if necessary would collect them himself. This was typical of the general, who was a much-beloved figure in Chungking. It was a very happy choice when he was sent to China, for his sincerity and charm impressed everyone he encountered. In China there were so many generals, many without the remotest connection with the Chinese Army, that the Prime Minister’s representative attracted much attention, for here was a general who bore every evidence upon his person of having done much hard fighting. The general was always kind to me. He had heard that I was interested in waterfowl, which had been a study of his before the war when he lived in the Pripet marshes of Poland. He was as good as his word and brought me my equipment from Calcutta. What is more, he never let the gun out of his sight and took it with him when the plane stopped overnight in Kunming. This was lucky for me, since the plane was looted during the night. General de Wiart had much trouble with his planes. He had been forced down in the Mediterranean during the war while flying in a Wellington, and was captured by the Italians. It was not, therefore, a very happy choice when the RAF provided him with a converted Wellington as his private plane in China. One Wellington got smashed up in Chungking, another in Kunming, and a third, I believe, in India. He was then provided with a Dakota, which was looted in Kunming. It was also damaged in Chungking when a truck backed into the wing as the general was about to board it to fly to Chengtu. His remarks on these occasions were described to me as picturesque. I had now moved over to the south bank of the Yangtze for I no longer found the mess quite as congenial as before, and furthermore, when I was on the south bank transport could break down all over the north bank and no one could expect me to do

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anything about it. I lived in a mess at a place called Ma On Shan and had a friend there called Rex Harding, who had written several books about Africa and who in normal times farmed in Rhodesia. He was a widely travelled and amusing man, though shortly after my arrival in the mess he and a number of friends sold me a submarine at a late hour of the night. It was a tedious process and not worth describing in this intellectual journal. However, I had my revenge. A few nights later I was in a cheerful frame of mind and, finding that Rex had gone to bed, invaded his bedroom and chopped his mosquito net poles with a kukri. He was much alarmed at the time, and thereafter I slept in peace. My departure on leave was further delayed by the Japanese advance after the capture of Kweilin. Two of their columns advanced rapidly up from the direction of Liuchow towards Kweiyang. They took Tuhshan, and there was considerable anxiety in Chungking. Anxiety grew to such a pitch that plans were made for the evacuation of Chungking, and it was thought that an alternative capital would have to be established somewhere in Yunnan. This happened at the end of 1944, at a time when the Japanese were no longer as strong as they had formerly been, having suffered severe setbacks in other theatres. In particular, their air force was much weakened. There can be no doubt that the Japanese could have captured Chungking and Kunming and Sian and Lanchow if they had ever really intended to. But their columns which were threatening Kweiyang finally withdrew, having been little more than reconnaissance in force. I was finally able to take my leave in February 1945. It was not possible to go far afield, and eventually I went to a small coal mine in the hills on the east bank of the Kialing River, about 30 miles north of Chungking. I was very hospitably received and took my meals in the mess of the Chinese mining engineers and clerks. I found much of interest and made a useful collection. The weather was not good, with some snow, but this had the effect of driving some unusual birds down into the valley. I also had a touch of malaria. It was an ideal form of relaxation for I worked hard and

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had no time to think about anything except the matter in hand. There was little sunshine, but those still, grey Szechuan days had a peculiar charm of their own. Sounds carried a great distance, and from the high hillsides I would hear the children singing as they led in the water buffaloes to the farms, and old ladies gossiping at the tops of their voices as they went to market. There were some trees and much scrub left on the hills above the valley, but I had to work hard. I was able to obtain a useful picture of the winter avifauna of the area and was to find later that central Szechuan is relatively little known. Far more work had been done in the remote western areas of the province, towards the Tibetan border. I was treated with much courtesy and consideration at the mine. One thing which impressed me during my visit was the rapidity with which the Chinese eat in such a mess. Apart from congee in the early morning, the people had only two meals during the day and they generally averaged about 12 minutes over each one. During this time they would consume two or three bowls of rice and plenty of excellent vegetables and meat. I was left hopelessly behind. I took my specimens back to Chungking and packed them to send to the British Museum. I was allowed to send some small specimens in the diplomatic bag and the RAF undertook to send the rest home. This they duly did, and my specimens reached England from Calcutta in, I think, three days, but the RAF terminal in England held them for six weeks before notifying the British Museum. At one time I thought they must have been lost. It had now been arranged for me to leave Chungking to join the Malayan Country Section of Force 136. There had been a certain amount of disappointment over developments in China and I wished to try something which appeared to be a little more active. Chungking was an interesting place but I did not want to spend the rest of the war there. Every British organisation working in China encountered a good deal of disappointment for we did not have the resources to help the Chinese as we would have

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liked; furthermore, the Americans regarded it as an American sphere of operations. American aims were not altogether altruistic, for big business had high hopes of China and the Chinese market after the war. Those hopes were based largely on supplanting the British position in Chinese trade; as a result, British activities were not encouraged in some circles. This is not to say that British people met with a general refusal to cooperate from Americans there; indeed, the reverse was the case. We received much help, particularly from the 14th Air Force, and the individual officers one encountered could not have been more cooperative. But at a high level we were not welcome by any means. There were, of course, sound military as well as business reasons for this; it was obviously more economical to provide assistance from one source than from two. Duplication helped nobody, and in the long run it was a very fortunate thing that the part played by the British was so limited. The Americans poured in supplies and treasure both before and immediately after the war, but apart from the magnificent work of the 14th Air Force they achieved very little and received very little thanks from the Chinese. The great Chinese market proved to be an ephemeral one, and the efforts of the United States brought them little except unpopularity, which was unjust. Making all allowances for those Americans who were out to line their pockets in China, there can be no doubt that the US made great and sincere efforts to help China. The response was little more than a kick in the teeth. The British were well out of it. There were a number of British organisations in China, and much earnest endeavour, but my personal opinion is that only two really justified their existence. One was the British Army Aid Group working in the vicinity of Hong Kong, and the other was the British Ministry of War Production which in the Far East was presided over by the portly Walter Fletcher. The latter organisation was not always a very popular one, for some members of its staff

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had a quite exceptional ability for treading heavily on the corns of others, and there were some very soft corns in China. I had no great personal esteem for one or two members of the BMWP but I thought it did useful work. Walter Fletcher later became a British MP. I have noticed one thing about nice people: all too often they are incapable of ever getting anything done. In one organisation (not connected with Force 136) the foundations for at least three substantial fortunes were laid in Chungking through abuse of the diplomatic bag, bringing in high-value consumer goods from India. It was a Commonwealth operation, the principals being an Englishman, an Irishman and an Australian. I left Chungking at the beginning of March 1945 and was sent on a course to the Eastern Warfare School at Poona. I had an entertaining journey across India, sharing a compartment with a portly Baghdad Jew who was going to the Bombay races. He was a great personality and told me of his early struggles and how, when he first crossed India as a penniless youth, it was without a ticket; he would hide under the seat when the ticket inspector came round. He could hardly have repeated the performance. He had two servants whom he bullied unmercifully, but when someone tried to take over the servants’ compartment in which they were travelling, he rushed out to their defence, discomfited the aggressor and threatened to stop the train altogether by pulling the communication cord if there was any more nonsense. When an Indian passenger wished to enter our compartment he showed equal vigour in finding him another compartment elsewhere, but was much upset to learn a little later that the individual concerned was the brother of a famous Indian racehorse trainer and might have given him many valuable tips. He was good company, a fat and happy man going to the races and crossing half a continent to do so. The Eastern Warfare School was by the side of Lake Karakvasla, the reservoir for Poona, which is in the same type of Mahratta country as Belgaum. Here I took a course in partisan operations. I did not distinguish myself for I virtually collapsed on

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the first scheme and later sprained an ankle on the assault course, but I enjoyed myself greatly. It was an extremely well-run school, with first-rate instructors. The work was most interesting and the courses very small. With two other British officers I was attached to a course of Free French and some Vietnamese. The French were the best of company and I learned a number of words and expressions which I had never heard in France. But here, as in Chungking, there was a depressing undercurrent of mutual suspicion among the French officers. I was several times buttonholed and warned that certain of their number were not true de Gaullists. The training was for work behind the Japanese lines, demolitions, weapon training and minor tactics, always working in small parties. Two training officers gave us their undivided attention and they were both gifted instructors. One was a tall Scot called Jimmy and the other a thickset, fair-haired man called Pat. In civil life Jimmy was a schoolmaster and Pat was a Sussex farmer. The time passed quickly and pleasantly. One of the subsidiary camps was on top of a nearby mountain and inside an old Mahratta fort, once the haunt of the great Mahratta leader Shivaji. It was bigger and higher than the ones I had seen at Belgaum, and as usual there were great wells right at the top. The Mahratta country would be a fine countryside to tour on horseback during the winter months. The course took about seven weeks and when it ended I was sent off to do a parachute course at Jessore, near Calcutta. It was the base of some special-duty squadrons which were supplying our parties in Burma and elsewhere. It was a quick and eventful course. The first day you were taught how to roll on landing, and also the mechanics of getting into and out of parachute harness. The next morning there was more ground training (‘Just a little revision,’ as one of the sergeant instructors put it) and you jumped for the first time that afternoon. The morning after that you jumped again, and that night you did a night jump. You were then

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trained. It was probably all that was needed. There was not time to teach any more, and many people were dropped in without any practice drops at all. I saw one such party arrive. I think they were Karens. They had one hour’s instruction in rolling and were then despatched into Burma. Parachute jumping has been described by men with far more experience than my own, and I do not propose to go into details. You have very little to do except to get out of the plane when you are told to, and it is pretty well foolproof. You may, like me, be frightened of jumping but far more frightened of not jumping. There are few people who have the moral courage to refuse. The parachute is opened by a static line attached to the inside of the plane and is automatically pulled open as you leave the machine. My own jumps did not go too well. The first jump I landed on my bottom in a muddy patch, and the second time I carefully did everything which my instructors had told me not to do, hit the ground hard and cracked a fibula. Only the night before I had been twitting the school’s medical officer, a very good fellow called Mike, that he had no patients. He was quite unreasonably amused by my accident. I was sent to the same hospital where I had undergone the operation on my septum. I never feel happy in an aeroplane at the best of times, and it was perhaps just as well that I did not learn until after my second jump that the plane upon that occasion had been taken off not by the pilot, who was merely sitting by, but by one of our instructors who had never flown an aircraft before.‘There is nothing to it with these Dakotas,’ he said. ‘They fly themselves off.’ One of the other instructors was killed under extraordinary circumstances a little later. He acted as despatcher on a flight over Indo-China, and on the return journey, while he was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, a kite flew through the windscreen and struck him, killing him instantly. He had jumped about 300 times without injury. The school was a slightly unorthodox unit. There was one occasion when a number of RAF officers were entertained to

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lunch and after lunch the entire school and the RAF officers took off and did a jump, including a reluctant quartermaster who had to be thrown out bodily. There was an RAF officer attached to the school when I was there who had been in Shanghai. I found we had a much-beloved mutual friend. ‘Dear fellow,’ cried the RAF man,‘why, we used to smoke opium together.’ I found my stay in hospital exasperating. It was a very minor crack of the fibula but all I could do was stay in bed and do strengthening exercises. Various friends came to see me and never failed to laugh heartily at my misfortune. However, I was relatively lucky. Two Frenchmen training a little later both suffered from impacted vertebrae, which would have been even more exasperating, though no doubt my friends would have considered it even funnier. I was in hospital for nearly a month. When I was discharged I went along to the registrar to pay my mess bill. The registrar was on the telephone to a laboratory, and the conversation as I heard it ran somehow as follows: ‘Hello, hello, is that the laboratory? Now tell me, have you got the report on Fusilier Blank? He was a most interesting case. He was admitted to hospital suffering from malaria, scrub typhus and jaundice.’ A pause. ‘He died.’ I paid my bill and went away. I was now sent on yet another course to a school which was housed in the palace of a maharaja by the banks of the Hoogli. I did not enjoy myself for I loathed most of the work, though the standard of instruction was high. I did very badly. It was a difficult environment, for there was not much love lost between some of the instructors, and I was alone at the school. I finally disgraced myself. I had not taken the course very seriously and had to admit that I had behaved with some stupidity. About the only enjoyment which I derived from this particular school was when I was asked by one officer, a friendly soul, to help draft my own confidential report. I took some pride in it for it showed, I thought, a nicely balanced mixture of censure and extenuation. I never completed the course and shortly afterwards was ordered to report to Colombo.

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There were one or two small celebrations around this time, for Findlay was in Calcutta. One evening he and I and a very charming American girl were invited out to dinner at the Peiping Restaurant in Park Street by a Chinese whom I personally disliked. I was therefore in a certain condition when I arrived, rather late, to find that the restaurant had been put out of bounds to service personnel. This seemed a trifling matter at the time, and Findlay quickly suggested a way out of the difficulty. I hid my bush shirt and cap under the table and then put on Findlay’s civilian shirt while he sat in his singlet, for it was a warm night. The party terminated at a later hour after a rather awkward incident involving the destruction of the plate-glass tabletop. Both guests and host had to dip into their pockets to raise the 150 rupees which the restaurant people demanded in settlement of the incident. I paid it all back the next day but was never again invited out by that particular Chinese, who was a very importunate man. I had some difficulty in returning home, for I took the wrong American bus which dropped me in the middle of Bengal, where it was raining heavily. I was rescued by two very obliging military policemen who drove me safely home. I flew on down to Colombo and went to a camp among coconut palms. I had volunteered to be dropped into Malaya to work with the Chinese guerrillas there with whom we already had a large organisation. I was at the camp, which was known as ME25, for about a month. It was full of jovial Frenchmen who were continually firing off their carbines at coconuts and palm squirrels and other convenient targets. They gave a party on 14 July and produced a number of very experienced and expert players of that most harmful of games, cardinal puff-puff, by whose efforts a number of British officers were quite overcome. It looked as if it was high time that I arrived in Malaya.

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Alastair’s brothers Colin, left, and Ian, with Ian’s wife Maria, in Hong Kong, 1941. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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Alastair’s father, G.E. Morrison, with his Number 1 Boy, Mr Sun, whom the author later met in Peking. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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CHAPTER 9

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER 1945

I

finally left on 8 August from China Bay, Trincomalee with a party of two British and two Canadian-Chinese sergeants. Our destination was some tin tailings at a place called Ulu Yam about 20 miles north of Kuala Lumpur. We flew in a Liberator called Vicious Vera and it was a long, hot, dull flight of nearly nine hours at low level. A Liberator is an easy plane to drop out of, for you sit on a slide in the tail and when the time comes to leave the plane, all you have to do is let go. We were supposed to drop at last light, just as dusk fell, but the sun was still shining brightly when I first opened my eyes to have a look around, for I always jumped with my eyes shut. Having satisfied myself that the orange-brown canopy of my parachute was beautifully open above me, I looked down to what appeared to be a sandy clearing with jungle-covered hills behind and saw a number of little ant-like figures start to run violently down the drop zone, for our timing had been rather poor. This time I landed safely and rolled into a ditch. A little smiling Chinese boy in a khaki uniform with an oddshaped hat with three red stars on it came running up and helped me to get out of my harness. Then a dignified, bearded figure came striding through the rank lalang grass and gave me a dignified

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welcome. It was Philip Thompson-Walker, the liaison officer attached to the patrol which was taking the drop. It seemed quite unreal that we should be in Japaneseoccupied Malaya, for the sun shone brightly, a second Liberator was dropping supplies not far away, and our own plane, having dropped us, made another circuit and came diving low over the drop zone, apparently to see whether we were all right. It was so close that we could practically see the pilot wave. All of our party had dropped safely, though the last man to leave the plane had been dropped a long way down the zone. We moved off as quickly as possible and were joined by the 1st Gurkha support group which had been covering the party and whose personnel I had previously met at Jessore. We moved up a track and then up into the hills. After a fairly long and slippery walk in the dark, we reached camp, a group of little huts with attap, or palm-leaf, thatched roofs, in a clearing. We had a meal of rice and tinned peas and I went to sleep wrapped up in my parachute. The next day we parted. One British and one Canadian sergeant remained with Philip and the other two sergeants and I went on to meet the group liaison officer attached to the group of five patrols in Selangor, with whom we were to work. We found Douglas Broadhurst, or Duggie as he was generally called, at a small drop zone in the jungle called Sungei Rusa with several other officers. Here they were collecting the stores dropped the day before. To my dismay I found that they had not yet recovered the package containing my rucksack, which in turn contained various valuable objects, not least of which was a bottle of whisky. The Chinese to whom we had been dropped for liaison purposes were communist-inspired resistance forces. Their full title was the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, and they were the operational force of a political body known as the Anti-Japanese Union. They were almost entirely Chinese and had a remarkably efficient and widespread organisation. Force 136 was cooperating by providing them with arms and instructors and certain financial assistance in bullion and forged Japanese notes. The plan was to

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build up eight groups or regiments, each of which would include five patrols of 100 fully armed men and 100 auxiliaries. They were not under the command of British officers. Our position was that of liaison officers, but the AJA had agreed to accept the supreme operational command of South East Asia Command. The building up of the resistance movement had taken a long time. It had begun during the Japanese invasion of Malaya, but contact with the outside world had been lost for long periods. Contact had finally been re-established, but the extra-long-range Liberators required for the long flight from Ceylon had become available only towards the end of 1944 and the real work had not started until early in 1945. Nevertheless, most of the patrols had been established and they stood astride the main Japanese communications north and south. Their role was to harass and disrupt Japanese communications once the invasion of Malaya got under way. The Selangor group was the 1st Regiment, MPAJA. Contact with it had been established by Broadhurst some months before. Duggie was a Malayan police officer who knew Selangor well and had much experience of such operations. During the invasion of Malaya he was in Kedah, where he attached himself as a liaison officer with the Argylls. He was with a company which was cut off at the Slim River, and he brought many of them down through jungle and by-roads. Many fell by the way and eventually only two made their escape with him from near Port Dickson to Sumatra, from where Duggie reached Australia. He had subsequently taken part in operations in Timor and North Borneo which had been put in by submarine. Finally he had started up the Selangor group, coming in, with several others, to a blind drop; i.e., dropping in by parachute to an area where no reception committee existed and where it was necessary to find the people with whom it was proposed to work. It was not a venture I would have fancied, taking place as it did only a short distance from the main road north from Kuala Lumpur, but it had gone well and contact had been established almost immediately.

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Duggie was a quiet, slim man who spoke good Cantonese and had an excellent understanding of the Chinese. He was very little given to talking about himself and was capable of making a most lackadaisical impression. But when the real testing time came, he was not found wanting. There was no one in Malaya who talked less and did more than Duggie. He was a happily married man and had four children. With Duggie there were a number of other officers engaged in picking up stores. The next day I was sent on up to the base camp in the hills to the west of a village called Serendah. This was in the jungle, but only about an hour’s walk from the main Kuala Lumpur-Ipoh road. Here we were rejoined by Duggie and the others after they had completed hunting for stores, though my own kit was never found. That was sad, for I might just as well have consumed the whisky in Ceylon. It was inevitable that a good many containers should be lost in the jungle; the smaller drop zones were almost completely hemmed in by tall trees. We had astonishing little radios to maintain contact with Ceylon, and soon heard that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan, that peace terms were being discussed, and that for the time being no more personnel would be dropped in. We were now joined by John Davis, the senior liaison officer with the AJA, and also with the Malayan police, who had been in the country for several years, having arrived by submarine. He was on his way south to visit other patrols, but with the improved news decided to remain with our group. He even told me to draft a manifesto to the people of Serendah. I drafted a powerful manifesto but it was rejected out of hand; indeed, Colonel Davis had several unkind remarks to make about it. I was a little hurt, but no doubt a prolonged residence in the Malayan jungle had left him rather out of touch with the literary world. Apart from this unfortunate lack of literary appreciation I had a great admiration for Colonel Davis, who was an outstanding personality, possessed of great drive and determination; a man of strong opinions and convictions, but very modest about his own achievements.

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We now passed through an exasperating period. We had orders to stay in the jungle and avoid contact with the Japanese. There was little to do, and we were short of food. We were, however, able to listen in to a thanksgiving service in London which gave us all much satisfaction. We had one or two drops, at one of which I only just missed being hit over the head by an unobserved container. A medical officer and orderly were dropped in to proceed to a British officer who was desperately ill with scrub typhus a little way to the south at a place called Kanching. He died shortly afterwards. The Japanese had now withdrawn from Serendah and on 28 August Philip’s patrol moved in and occupied the police station. Duggie and I, with the Gurkha support group, moved into the Serendah Hospital. From here we could watch the Japanese passing by on the road below. We ignored them and they us, but on 31 August, at 4.45 in the morning, a party of Japanese attacked the police station and captured it, together with the British officers within. The sentry on duty was fatally wounded. We were awakened by the noise of firing and grenades. They were the only shots I heard fired in anger during the whole war. Duggie and John, having called out the Gurkha group, marched down through the early dawn into Serendah waving a Union Jack. To my relief I was told to stay behind and prepare for a possible evacuation back into the jungle. It was an extremely ticklish moment, but fortunately the Japanese did not fire on our party. Duggie went into Kuala Lumpur to interview the Japanese authorities, who complained that they were only attacking communist bandits. It turned out that there had been an attack by the AJA on a Japanese convoy farther north in which 27 Japanese had been killed.They could hardly be blamed for wanting to evict us from Serendah, through which passed the main road and the railway. On 1 September I followed Duggie into Kuala Lumpur, and a patrol came in as well. The liaison officer of this patrol was Jock Hunter, a well-known character in Malaya. He was a huge Scot, a rubber planter in peacetime, and loved Malaya with an almost

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passionate devotion. ‘Best country in the world, old boy,’ he would say, ‘bar Scotland.’ He was turbulent and outspoken and an exceptionally good liaison officer. His patrol liked and respected him and he was one of the few liaison officers who could, in emergency, persuade AJA men to do something which they did not wish to do. It was his third airborne operation; he had previously taken part in two in Burma. Jock’s telegrams to base were well known in Force 136. He was generally in trouble with his boots. Once, in Burma, he had signalled urgently for a pair and had received two left boots. His signalled comments were, I understand, couched in somewhat unusual terms. Jock had further trouble with boots in Malaya, as the following telegram may perhaps show:‘I ASKED FOR BOOTS SIZE NINE REPEAT NINE NAILED REPEAT NAILED STOP AND WHAT DO I GET STOP BLOODY GREAT TENS REPEAT TENS UNNAILED REPEAT UNNAILED.’ Jock’s influence with his patrol stemmed largely from the close personal contact he maintained with them. The young Chinese patrol officers lived with him and he was on very friendly terms with them. He impressed me greatly, for he had a certain intuitive understanding of Asian people and a genuine liking and sympathy for them. He was also fortunate in having a very good Number 2, Reg Davies, a conscientious and hard-working officer with whom I had trained at Poona. We settled in to a row of railway houses in Kuala Lumpur and I was given the thankless task of acting as a link with the Japanese authorities. There were many things we wanted, including telephones, rice and transport, but our position was somewhat delicate. Our standing was uncertain, and the Japanese were still in complete control of the country. It was no use thumping on the tables of Japanese officers and pointing out that we had won the war, for there were so many ways in which they could be obstructive. I had to exercise much patience, not only with the Japanese but also with brother officers who would advise me to take a firm line. Gradually we obtained what we wanted: furniture and radios and telephones and quite an impressive assortment of cars.

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Jock had a Mercedes, and at our own little group headquarters we had a Dodge, a Packard, a Buick, a Vauxhall 25 and an Austin 10. There were others cars to keep the AJA happy, and we had unlimited Japanese petrol which had been extracted from rubber. I was assisted during these negotiations by a very good interpreter, a Jaffna Tamil who was alleged to be a collaborator. He had worked for the Japanese and knew where everything was in Kuala Lumpur. There was some criticism of the use we made of him, but none of the critics could speak Japanese. My own impression was that he was a harmless, self-important fellow. Although subsequently detained for a short period, he was soon released for want of evidence, and finally deported. Everyone who visited Japanese-occupied territory must have observed how willing people were to claim a man as a collaborator and how difficult it was to induce them to substantiate allegations of criminal conduct. Life in Kuala Lumpur at this time was remarkably pleasant. The people were very glad to see us and the Japanese kept perfect order. We could go where we liked and do what we pleased, and there were no British Military Police to spoil our Eden. The landing was to take place at Morib as originally planned on 9 September, but it was not very successful, even without opposition, and British troops did not arrive in force until 13 September. It was something of an anti-climax when they did, for they were almost entirely Indian troops who tended to treat Malaya as captured enemy territory. There was a good deal of minor trouble, drunkenness and incidents over women. A friend of mine was caught in a very awkward predicament in a place where, strictly speaking perhaps, he should not have been. A drunken Indian patrol entered the house where he happened to be and hammered on the door of his room. He opened it before it was burst open and found a drunken sepoy pointing a rifle at him. Their mutual surprise was considerable. The sepoy was the first to recover and appeared much tickled by the situation in which he found the sahib. He beamed and put down his rifle. ‘Sahib jig-a-jig,’ he said.

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One evening before the troops arrived, I went out with Jock. We lost our way into town and picked up various individuals who undertook to show us. When we arrived at the Chinese restaurant we wanted, we had three Chinese and a young Tamil boy with us. Jock, in his expansive way, invited them all to have dinner with us. Afterwards we went hither and thither and met various further individuals, including a gigantic man called Boris, who was half Pole and half Siamese. At the same place we met Boris, there was an old Japanese called Uncle who had lived there all his life and was, if anything, more Malayan than Japanese. He seemed to be a kindly old fellow and I felt quite sorry for him. A couple of nights later we dropped into the same place again and it was something of a shock to find that Uncle had been murdered that morning by a Chinese. He had been cremated in the afternoon and his friends had erected a little shrine in the house. They were very sad and very drunk. We drank a silent toast to Uncle’s memory and went away. Various Japanese had been assigned to help us. For some time we had a little man called Fuji who told me, very apologetically, that he himself had never done any fighting. I informed him that I, too, had done no fighting but I don’t think he believed me. Another Japanese, Sasaki Gunto (the latter word meaning sergeant) worked in some supply unit. He was a stocky, bullet-headed man with a round and amiable moon of a face. He spoke little English, almost throwing the words at you in an earnest way, convinced that you did not understand. The day before the Japanese troops moved out of town, I found Sasaki having a quiet cup of rice wine with his friends. They politely asked me to join them, and not wishing to be uncivil, I had a cup. Sasaki felt that the time had come for him to make a farewell speech. ‘Captain Morrison,’ he said, ‘now the war is over. Soon I go back Japan. You go back England. Maybe some day you come Japan. I hold you in ever loving memory.’ Our headquarters had now moved into another house which I chose myself, though unwisely. It was a large and impressive

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building with a beautiful view over the Selangor Hills and had been the residence of the former Japanese director of forestry. It was a few yards away from another house occupied by John Davis and Chin Peng, the secretary general of the Malayan Government Party. The trouble lay in the fact that it was also the former residence of the manager of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, who for some reason kept agitating for its return and was not very long in obtaining it. We had quite a little trouble with bankers, for most unfortunately we had at one time rather vaguely occupied the Mercantile Bank houses and these had been looted due to a muddle over the guards. Fortunately, the RAF occupied the house of the third British bank, the Chartered Bank. Not only did the bank evict us, but the army turned our men out of the row of houses which had been allotted them by the Japanese. This had caused some trouble, for there was a perpetually irate full colonel who went around inspecting drains and never failed to discover much to be indignant about. Personally, I have always maintained that our duties as liaison officers did not include instructing our Chinese colleagues, who were simple country fellows, in the intricacies of the water closet. We moved down to the racecourse, which was quite a satisfactory arrangement. The AJA lived in the grandstand and the fact that they were all together greatly simplified matters of supply. Duggie managed to arrange that his own staff should stay in the house of a wealthy Chinese on a hill overlooking the racecourse. It was an odd design, great marble halls downstairs and only four very small bedrooms. Our senior AJA officers had two of the bedrooms, while Duggie and I and three CanadianChinese sergeants occupied the other two. Our work in Kuala Lumpur was largely a matter of keeping the AJA together and reasonably contented until they were demobilised. They did a few guard duties, particularly of Japanese prisoners who were organised into various work parties. It was interesting to see how well the Chinese and Indian guards treated the Japanese. The Japanese troops had very often inflicted great

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suffering on the Chinese and I had anticipated that the Chinese would be very tough with them. Actually, it was the other way round. The AJA treated them kindly, let them frequently rest in the shade and even supplied them with occasional cigarettes. One of our officers had to visit the Ordnance depot at Batu Caves one day with an AJA party. Here there were many Japanese working, and the visitors were greatly surprised to see a party of Japanese showing unusual activity and, in fact, running as if the devil was after them. The explanation was not long in dawning on them, however, for behind the party was a European stripped to the waist and carrying a large stick which he was using to good effect. The Chinese were much puzzled.‘Why,’ they asked,‘is he beating the Japanese?’ Later, when I was in Hong Kong, I was reminded of this incident when I met an officer in a war crimes team who had himself been taken prisoner in Malaya and was subsequently an inmate of a POW camp in Formosa. He was indignant about what he considered the unnecessary way in which the Japanese prisoners, war crimes suspects in Stanley Jail, were humiliated by their British guards (by that time mostly young and inexperienced boys whose acquaintance with the Japanese during the war was probably as limited as that of the stick-wielding members of the Ordnance Corps). I was able to pay a brief visit to Singapore shortly after the troops landed. A good friend in Chungking had been Derek GillDavies, an irascible lieutenant colonel whose company I had enjoyed on a number of festive occasions. He was a man who was strangely affected by a good Chinese dinner, filled on such an occasion with an almost irresistible urge to buy flowers. He came up from Singapore on a quick trip with General Dempsey, the commander-in-chief, in the latter’s private plane. My friend arranged for me to get a lift in the general’s plane down to Singapore to see my brother Ian, who was covering the invasion for The Times, but apparently without advising the general. The latter was an observant man and soon realised that there was a stranger on board. It was a most embarrassing moment, but the

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general very amiably did not have me thrown off the plane (which was by that time flying over Port Swettenham). When I told him that my regiment was the 2nd Gurkhas and that my brother was The Times’s correspondent, he appeared much mollified. I had never visited Singapore before, and it was not at its best at the time. My stay was short. My irascible friend took me for a Jeep ride one night which left me a shaken, nervous wreck for several days after, and I met a number of agreeable newspaper colleagues of Ian. Ian had eventually left the British and Chinese Corporation and joined the Ministry of Information. In Hong Kong he married a girl he had met in Shanghai, Maria Neubauer, a Czech. A move to Singapore saw him working for Rob Scott. On the outbreak of war he joined The Times and covered the Malayan campaign. Both he and Maria escaped to Australia. Ian then covered campaigns in the SouthWest Pacific and in Burma before being appointed to report on the invasion of Malaya. My brother Colin, who had been a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, was captured there and spent the war years as a POW in the Shamshuipo camp. Fortunately, being of robust constitution, he survived without serious detriment to his health. I recollect one odd incident. In company with Ian I went to see a colleague of his who was entertaining a personable Chinese lady to tea. This lady was wearing very short shorts, but there seemed nothing unreasonable about that and it was a pleasant enough social occasion. But we had hardly arrived before, so it seemed to me, a strange atmosphere of constraint fell on the party and it was not long before we made our excuses and left. It thereupon transpired that whereas I had been of the opinion that the lady was wearing very short shorts, Ian’s observation led him to believe that she was wearing no shorts at all. There is, of course, a profound difference. It was a question of some nicety, the opinion of the experienced journalist against that of the lifelong ornithologist. There was, however, one telling point in Ian’s favour. He knew his own colleagues better than I did.

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I returned to Kuala Lumpur hoping that various irritating problems with which I had been faced might have solved themselves. It was a vain hope, for they had simply been left to look after themselves until I came back. My own work became a matter of supply, liaison and generally acting as a shock absorber. Our Chinese, most of whom had suffered from malnutrition in the jungle, had been put on British rations, a generous and reasonable arrangement. The problem of food supply was always the most difficult one facing the AJA. Whether the public-spirited officer who had arranged for the Chinese to receive British rations had also intended that they should draw the British scale of Naval, Army and Air Force Institute rations is more questionable. In actual fact, however, that is what happened. There was an excellent and well-run NAAFI in Kuala Lumpur which even produced quantities of American beer. It was so long since any of us had had any beer that even American beer was like manna in the wilderness, and most acceptable. There were actually two kinds of American beer, one much better than the other. Every week I would draw several thousand cans. We would let the AJA have what beer they wanted, but they drank very little and we had a substantial surplus. It was a very advantageous arrangement, for we were able to reciprocate any help or kindness received from other units in no uncertain manner, generously permitting our friends to take the inferior brand of beer off our hands. We were never short of beer, rum or cigarettes. As already mentioned, one of my jobs when we first came into Kuala Lumpur was to provide our group with transport. At first, to humour our men, we would fly a number of flags on our cars — British, Chinese, American, Russian and AJA — and these never failed to impress sentries. A car with one flag is not infrequently saluted, but a car with five flags almost invariably so. I once drove on to Kuala Lumpur railway station in the Buick to meet a friend. We drew up outside the railway transport officer’s office and the officer himself rushed out and saluted the vehicle.

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He was inconsolable when the door opened and Mountbatten did not alight. It was a real blow when the use of our flags was prohibited. I eventually lost the Buick, which I dearly loved. It is, I think, a fair measure of the resolution and strength of mind of Colonel Davis that with scarcely so much as a by-your-leave he took it away from me and sent it all the way to North Johore. I was heartbroken, as I am never likely to have such a splendid car again. Readers may have formed the opinion that being a liaison officer with the AJA was not a very serious or arduous job. This is not the case. It was not at all easy to keep the AJA under reasonable control and fairly contented, and to avoid accidents and unpleasantness. The rank and file of the AJA were nearly all very young, very ignorant and completely under the control of their own leaders. We could never give them orders. We had always to persuade and to induce. We were fortunate in Selangor in that the AJA leaders were pleasant fellows and more reasonable than many of the other leaders and we were able to avoid serious trouble. But the work often called for considerable patience and restraint. The Canadian-Chinese sergeants were a great help. They got on well with the AJA, who were not suspicious of them as they were of Chinese from China. The Canadians were intelligent and reliable, and tried to put across our viewpoint. They were recruited very late in the war for special work and only a handful finally reached Malaya. I thought them first class, and they were very good people to work with. I saw to it that three of the best were attached to our group headquarters, where they were invaluable. Whenever a minor crisis arose, as it did perpetually, there was always a reliable man to help straighten it out. In addition to our Canadian assistants, we had a number of interpreters and radio operators who had been recruited in China by a Chinese government organisation. Some of them had done fine work, particularly with the early parties. They were courageous and withstood privation cheerfully, and many of them were

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individually charming people. They were not, however, very easy people to work with, for they were hand-picked, specially indoctrinated Kuomintang men. They were not allowed to leave China until they had attended a special course in Chungking. Again, these Chinese were not under our direct command, having their own liaison officers to whom they continually insisted on referring the most trivial matters. They did not get on well with the AJA for the two groups were mutually antagonistic. They were obsessed with questions of face and national prestige, which was a pity as they were very gifted. One of their instructors told me that their skill in mastering the principles of wireless was absolutely astonishing. Our own British operators were gradually sent home for demobilisation. They were very good, specially picked and mostly with previous experience of such operations in Europe. In the small units making up an organisation such as Force 136, officers and NCOs came to know each other in a way that was unusual. Our relations were friendly and informal, which made life much more agreeable. I shall never forget some of them: Taffy, who had won his Military Medal in Albania, who would always call me Captain Alastair and who was the most sentimental of men when he had had a few; Ginger, who in civilian life operated a big crane somewhere and was just waiting for the day he could get back to it; and John, a quiet, shy man who had dropped in with Jock Hunter and who used to talk for hours over the air with a most scandalous freedom to a pet FANY1 of his in Ceylon after the security regulations had been relaxed. It would not have come to my attention had he not written it all down for some reason and one day left several foolscap sheets from the night before on my desk. It was finally decided that the AJA would be demobilised at the beginning of December. Every man of the regular forces 1

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FANY, or First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, was one of the oldest of the women’s services. In the Far East it provided secretaries, cypher officers and many wireless operators for what were irreverently known as the cloak-and-dagger organisations. The FANYs did very valuable work. Without women to do so much of the work, Force 136 could never have been expanded as it was. But I always wondered why it was impossible to make use of one of the larger women’s services.


received a bonus of $350 and had to turn in any weapon which had been issued to him. We had a big stand-down parade on the racecourse in Kuala Lumpur which was inspected by General Messervy. When preparing for this parade there was some talk about the general’s military adviser, who was, I was pleased to find, an old friend, John Wainwright, who had lived across the way in Bishop’s Hostel when I was in Trinity New Court. He was a keen horseman and had joined the Indian Army. I used to send his sister, who was at school, various kinds of dormice to which she was very much attached. John and I had a cheerful reunion. General Messervy was not only a very famous general but was also a liberal and statesmanlike man who could understand that Chinese guerrillas were but little given to doing as they were told. The stand-down parade went off well except that the RAF, which was supposed to stage an impressive fly-past, did not put in an appearance until after the parade had dispersed. The AJA handed in arms and seemed very glad to see the last of them. The army provided transport to send them all to their homes. Just how these young boys, who had lived a sort of Robin Hood existence in the jungle for almost their entire adult years, were going to adapt themselves to peacetime life, particularly when they had finished their $350, was nobody’s business. There was talk of finding them jobs, but it seemed unlikely that they would fit into any normal employment as coolies or unskilled labourers. One odd fact arose during the course of the demobilisation. Force 136 found it extremely difficult to find anyone in Kuala Lumpur who was prepared to accept the arms which had been handed in. This was all supposed to have been arranged, but it was with the greatest reluctance that Ordnance finally took them over. The inevitable bitterness which overtook Malaya on the subject of Chinese communists has made an objective appraisal of the AJA a matter of great difficulty. My own experience with them was far more limited than that of many officers, and I have no wish to write in detail on the subject. I can only record a few of my own impressions.

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The most noticeable thing about the AJA was the extreme youth of most of its members. Both the leaders and the rank and file were fanatical boys who knew nothing of the world except what they had been taught to believe by their own propaganda. They were honest and sincere, if perhaps perverted, idealists. They were actuated by laudable motives but were too naive to realise that there was any good in anything which they had been taught was bad. Individually, they were mostly very decent boys, and our own relations with them were pleasant. They were not actuated by motives of personal gain, being scrupulously honest over matters of money, and their discipline was very strong. They had only two punishments: to be put on short rations or to be shot. They seemed to be held in genuine esteem by the Chinese country folk, and they treated others fairly. I was told that this was particularly the case with the aborigines, shy and timid jungle people who are easily bullied. The AJA were undoubtedly selected specially to form a corps of troops by the communists. Their numbers were not very great, about 4000 for the whole country, and they were not highly armed throughout the war. They had a variety of odd, mostly British, weapons which had been abandoned during the 1941-42 campaign: rifles, a few Brens and Tommy guns, a good many shotguns and, oddly enough, some Dutch arms. They had cut down some of the British service rifles to form a kind of pistol, and apparently actually fired them. They received no fresh arms until the beginning of 1945, and never had an opportunity of using them against the Japanese. Our instructions were to avoid action until the invasion commenced. We knew quite well that there were numbers of arms in the country in addition to those which we had dropped in, for there was a large floating population of criminals, extortioners and toughs among the Chinese in Malaya who had acquired arms during 1942 and used them for their own purposes. It is one of the misfortunes of Malaya that much of the human refuse of South China should have gravitated there in the years when

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immigration was freely permitted. Some of these men were communist sympathisers; others, and they probably formed a majority, were pro-communist when it suited them. Inevitably, some of the arms which were dropped in were retained by members of the AJA or concealed. Some of the drop zones were very small, and many of the containers fell in the jungle, where it was easy to remove arms. Some containers were never recovered. In general, there were no detailed inventories to show how much was missing from each drop. In wartime that is something which is generally lost sight of. The staff packing containers in Ceylon were working overtime to push into each container as many arms as they could, and lists were few and far between. I do not know what the final figures were, but it seemed likely that at the stand-down we recovered only a proportion of our arms and a number of old 1942 arms. The demobilisation really went through very well. It could so easily have never gone through at all. However, the trouble about any sort of resistance organisation is that once arms have been dropped the organisation is automatically blamed for all the arms in the country. Undoubtedly, Force 136 was responsible for providing a good number of the arms in Malaya, but by no means all of them. Many of the arms recaptured during the Malayan Emergency were of types which we had never possessed. There is no justification for believing that, but for the operations of Force 136, there would have been no subsequent Emergency. It was customary after the war to belittle the AJA, yet it was the only Malayan organisation which consistently opposed the Japanese. It did what it could; that was not always very much, but it did try. The AJA tried to help stranded British soldiers and others in 1942. Some (those gifted with exceptional physical toughness and a mental outlook which enabled them to overcome the greatest dangers of all to people in such a position: boredom, depression and loneliness) survived right through the war, including one very gallant English lady who went bush and was

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looked after by the Chinese. The AJA had an organisation throughout the length and breadth of Malaya which enabled it quickly to find and pick up Allied personnel who tried to re-enter the country. The members of the AJA were too ignorant and illeducated to be good sources of intelligence, but they picked up everyone who went into the country, including everyone who dropped in blind. If the invasion of Malaya had gone through as planned, there would have been armed guerrillas with British liaison officers and British-maintained wireless communications throughout the country, distributed in such a way that Japanese communications would have been greatly handicapped. In addition to the individual AJA patrols, there would have been 12 specially picked and highly trained groups of Gurkhas under British command to act as a stiffener to the semi-trained Chinese: four in Perak, four in Selangor and four in Johore. No commander could have afforded to pass up such an opportunity. The subsequent Emergency, really a communist rebellion, is a melancholy story, for the depressing thing about communism is that it has a great emotional appeal for good material among young people. The average Chinese in the AJA was a decent boy motivated by idealism which, however woolly, was genuine. He had no standards by which to judge the world, no experience to act as a yardstick in evaluating other peoples and ways of thought. It is easy enough in a mature democracy to realise that communism is false and phoney and fundamentally cynical. There was little in Malaya for the decent callow youth who feels a desire to improve the world and his own prospects. Under those circumstances communism seemed a reasonable and plausible solution. It is futile merely to condemn communism unless we are capable of providing true leadership and economic opportunity in its stead. I eventually left Port Swettenham on 4 December 1945, in company with many other Force 136 officers and NCOs, on an old British India ship called the Ekma. I was not sorry to leave Malaya,

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for I urgently wanted to be in Peking and it seemed time that I was on my way. I had a very incomplete picture of the country, having seen nothing of the Malay inhabitants, and I hoped to return some day. The Ekma was bound for Calcutta, but because of riots when we arrived there, we were ordered to Madras within half an hour of picking up the Hooghly pilot. I have seldom been so annoyed, for Calcutta was the starting place for China, where I now proposed to proceed, and I anticipated acquiring much useful information there. Down we went to Madras, and if it had not been for all the rum we had brought on board (the ship was a dry one), I do not know what would have happened. I was in a cabin with a number of officers of the Force 136 Gurkha groups, a dissipated body of men but cheerful company. We also had the commanding officer of the Gurkha groups on board, a veteran of the 9th who was known not very affectionately to his subordinates as Jungle Joe. We eventually reached Madras, a dull city, and I filled in time by going to Ootacamund in the Nilgiris to see a friend from Chungking, an astonishing girl of military lineage who habitually referred to her mother, to whom she was devoted, as the Old Cow. Ooty in those days tended to be a gathering place for many of the best people, governors’ widows and retired major generals and the like. They certainly had every reason for wanting to retire there. It was a little town situated at an altitude of several thousand feet on a plateau, the top of which was marvellous countryside of rolling downland. It is like a piece of Sussex, but much bigger and miraculously transferred to the hills of southern India. I returned to Madras from where we had to set out on a long dull journey to Meerut, near Delhi, where we were going for the break-up of Force 136. The tedium of the journey was enlivened only by the forethought of one of my colleagues, Peter Maxwell, a gifted East African from Kenya. A charming and able man who had run a most successful patrol at Kuala Kubu, near Kuala Lumpur, he possessed a lively imagination which made him

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entertaining company. Furthermore, he had an almost uncanny knack for finding what he wanted. In this connection his flair for finding that which was safe to drink in the most unlikely places verged on the miraculous. If there was a bottle of Scotch whisky in Meerut bazaar or cantonment, Peter could not only find it but also induce its happy owner to part with it. Peter had bought a large stone bottle of South African gin in Madras. The salesman strongly recommended it, assuring us that it was double strength and would therefore go twice as far as any ordinary gin. It certainly went quite a way, as far as Meerut in fact, and having been matured in sherry casks without having the resultant light brown colour and nutty flavour removed, it was altogether a most stimulating and appetising travel companion. We arrived in Meerut shortly before Christmas, a time of the year when the weather is cool and sometimes very cold at night. We were accommodated in a rambling camp and the headquarters staff set about the task which it had already begun of dissolving Force 136. Many members of the force were due for demobilisation or repatriation, and those who were not were, as far as possible, found employment to suit their tastes and abilities. My own problem was a complex one, for I urgently wanted to return to North China. There were no British units there so it was not easy to arrange. After much thought I concluded that there were only two possible methods of achieving the desired end, one being to have myself transferred to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency and the other being to get myself posted to a small liaison unit which I knew was operating in Shanghai. I tried for both and hoped for the best. To fill in time I spent a few days seeing places of interest in the Delhi area and also visited Agra. It was particularly interesting to have an opportunity of comparing something of India with the buildings and monuments which I loved in Peking. In Delhi I visited some of the tombs and the great Jama Masjid, one of the principal mosques in India. I found much to admire in the

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architecture of the mosque: wonderful proportions and the infinite sense of emptiness based on the concept of the universal presence of God; no distractions in the way of idols, images or carvings; an empty building for the congregation and the deity. In Agra I saw some more of the wonderful relics of Muslim culture. The first dazzling view of the Taj Mahal upon entering the main gateway, a great towering mass of elegant white marble outlined against the sweep of the arch, impressed me greatly. But it lacks the space and tranquillity of the Forbidden City. I think that even more fascinating than the Taj Mahal is the little tomb of Itimad-ud-daulah, a superb and delicate miniature. We spent a day looking at the beautiful deserted city of Fatehpur Sikri, built in red sandstone, which I far prefer to white marble. We roamed through it at our leisure and rested in the sunshine on the top of the imposing Gate of Victory. Fatehpur Sikri, being entirely deserted, had less of the squalor which hangs closely around even the most beautiful buildings in India, but even here there were officious guides and children demanding baksheesh, though I will say for the latter that they were prepared to jump off the battlements of Fatehpur Sikri into a relatively small well some 60 feet below to earn their eight annas. I gave it ungrudgingly. I had planned to visit the great cave temples of Ellora and Ajanta and regretted that I did not do so. I would have greatly loved to see more of India in my own time and my own way, and I have no doubt that Indians would be a very good people to travel among. I inevitably did not come to know many Indians, but received an impression of ready humour and razor-sharp intelligence. It is a pity they are so obsessed with religion. The Chinese derive an immense advantage from their healthy hedonism. I suspect that the difference between the Indian and the Chinese mentality is well shown in their food: the subtle, grateful flavours of the Chinese and the burning extremes of the Indian. My impressions of India were of necessity limited ones, but I am not one to decry what the British achieved there. I believe

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that the average Indian was fairly well off under British rule. There was terrible poverty but there was also reasonable peace and security. A man could travel from one end of the country to the other if he wanted to, and no one would interfere with him. The people of Britain made a great deal of money through trade with India but we did not interfere with the growth of Indian industries. We provided a legal system, a communications network, good educational institutions and a reasonably efficient administration. We tried to educate the people to a more useful appreciation of their place in the world, and it is, for instance, a little-known fact that one of the leading spirits in the founding of the Indian National Congress, Allan Octavian Hume, was not an Indian but a well-known British ornithologist2. Finally, we handed over the country in a dignified way and without a bloody revolution to speed us on our way. Britain produced numbers of men who were devoted to India and gave of their best to the country. What we provided was not always very efficient but it was honestly conceived. It seemed to me that our main errors lay not in honesty of purpose but in many small lapses of good manners. During my own short stay in the country I saw a number of incidents, particularly in railway trains, which embarrassed me profoundly. Indians are an exceptionally proud and sensitive people. One rude and thoughtless Englishman could undo the work of many selfless administrators. I was a great admirer of the Indian Army, which was one of our finest creations there. It was an extraordinary organisation in which men of every caste and creed were able to work harmoniously together. When it came to action, the narrower loyalties which so cripple the Indian people were lost in an overriding loyalty to the service. It was a great tragedy that the partition of India should have meant the division of the old Indian Army. The British officer in the Indian Army was often a figure of fun, a pig-sticking, polo-playing blimp with an absurd wife. 2

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Hume produced several works on ornithology, including, as co-author, The Game Birds of India, Burma and Ceylon.


Actually, he was a pretty good fellow. The standard was high; in combat units it had to be. Indian troops expected a very high standard of leadership from their officers and they generally got it. Without the Indian Army, we could never have held the Middle East, nor could we have recaptured Burma. I had time for these reflections and many others while waiting for my future to be decided. I had interviews with a UNRRA representative in New Delhi and spent Hogmanay in Meerut. I say Hogmanay, for this was the first time that I ever spent the New Year in the company of Scots. Actually, there was only one Scot, my Poona instructor Jimmy, but the occasion made such a deep impression on me that I prefer to use the plural. Jimmy was a most kindly and good-natured officer in my hut who was a schoolmaster in civil life. He was not a teetotaller but he was moderate and abstemious. I was quite surprised, therefore, when on New Year’s Eve he announced that it was his intention to get drunk. I tried to dissuade him, but the implacable resolution of the Scots, once they set out to do a thing, is well known. Jimmy was no exception. He did not go to the club but stayed in camp where he was aided and abetted by an Ulsterman named Mac who on this occasion showed unmistakable signs of having Scottish blood in his veins. Between them they absorbed an immoderate amount of liquor and kept it up all night. They argued and quarrelled and Jimmy nearly burst into tears on account of a remark made by the Ulsterman, and then became enraged with me and tried to hit me over the head with a large electric torch, calling me by many opprobrious Scottish names. Finally, as midnight struck, volleys of pistol shots were fired, at whom I never knew, for I was in bed though much alarmed. Even the most amiable Scot, it seems, is liable to deviate from his normal pattern of behaviour at New Year. The Ulsterman was an ex-medical student with a robust sense of humour. One of his stories concerned an over-zealous student in his class who was so keen that in order not to waste any time in the dissecting theatre he used to eat his sandwiches

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there while actually at work. This was considered bad form by the other students, who lost little time in removing the ham from one of his sandwiches and substituting a sliver from one of the corpses. The result, said Mac, was laughable in the extreme, and the keen student was very ill. Mac had taken part in operations in Greece and Malaya, and once set fire to my copy of The Statesman while I was reading it. The conflagration seemed to amuse my colleagues. By great good fortune I was finally posted to the liaison unit in Shanghai. I discovered later that but for the intervention of Reg Davies, who had been in Force 136 and who had been posted to the office of the military secretary in Singapore, I might never have received the posting. He was called on to draft a signal in reply to one from Meerut inquiring whether I might proceed to Shanghai. He succeeded in drafting a reply of such masterful ambiguity that it could be held to mean almost anything, and the very helpful people organising such things in Meerut lost no time in speeding me on my way. I was greatly indebted to Reg. I was sorry to leave Force 136. It was a most unusual organisation and had among its members an extraordinary number of interesting and unusual individualists. It was remarkable how well people worked together and how little bickering and acrimony there was among its members. The force commander was a man with a great gift for seeing that people worked harmoniously together. Rude telegrams, which can cause so much trouble between scattered units, were frowned upon and largely unknown, which is by no means a general rule in confidential organisations. During the war years I came into contact with three secret British organisations engaged in work in enemy or hostile territory. Their activities were marked by intense rivalries between the men at the top, by waste and by duplication. The three organisations which I knew, and there may have been more, were entirely separate and largely self-contained. Their activities were supposed to be coordinated at some astronomical level, but this

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coordination seemed to be highly theoretical. Fundamentally, their activities were very similar and there appeared to be no real reason why they should not all have been unified under one head. Quite a number of senior officers would then have become redundant and would have been available for posting on to the Ministry of Information or the Public Relations Directorate. The junior officers in the field, who did the work, were usually on good terms with each other and would have been just as happy if they had been in the same organisation. They had usually volunteered for especially hazardous work and had no interest in the rivalries between the organisations. There was perpetual and inevitable duplication, for it was quite impossible to work in enemy-occupied territory and keep strictly to the terms of an artificial and illogical directive. At the top there were intense inter-organisational rivalries which did no one any good, least of all the war effort. Sometimes this may have been due to pardonable keenness on the subject in hand, but sometimes I doubt if the reasons were very creditable. There was always a chance that an unusually successful operation or scoop on the part of any organisation might bring a senior officer, far away at base, something good like an OBE. You could never tell. There was good feeling within the organisation of Force 136, and its component parts were never allowed to war among themselves. Despite great difficulties it did some first-class work, especially in Burma. The main criticism of the organisation must, I think, be on account of its extravagance. It could hardly be called an austerity organisation, particularly at base. I am the last person to complain about being well looked after, but I think that from the long-term point of view the force would have benefited if money had not been spent so freely. At the same time, much of the criticism came from other, sister organisations which had not been able to secure quite such an adequate slice of public funds, and no virtue is more easily outraged than enforced virtue. There is so much waste in wartime that perhaps a little bit more or less does not really matter very

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much. I am reminded of the philosophical member of the Ministry of Works and Buildings in Chungking who built a new barracks for the British Military Mission. Through no fault of his, an unsuspected subterranean stream suddenly emerged and swept the barracks away so that they had to be rebuilt. He not unnaturally came in for quite a bit of chaff. ‘And what of it,’ he used to cry. ‘It isn’t worth more than a couple of small bombs anyhow.’ I now set off for China once again, though not before a visit to an ear, nose and throat specialist of the Royal Army Medical Corps. I thought it might be a good thing if I checked up the state of my hearing which was becoming very defective, particularly after a few drinks, and even more particularly if there was a buzz of conversation around me. On such occasions I found it very difficult to hear anything, not that it much mattered. I was becoming an expert in non-committal ‘Ahs’ and ‘Ehs’ and ‘Not reallys’, and it looked as if I should soon be regarded as a pretty polished conversationalist. I remember an excellent dinner in Calcutta where I sat next to a charming lady with whom I had a most animated conversation without ever learning what she was talking about. This slight mental fog made it all the more surprising that during a lull I heard a clear English girl’s voice ring out to my host at the end of the table, ‘And tell me, how is your love life?’ I therefore visited a specialist. This officer was an unsympathetic man and probably the rudest ear, nose and throat specialist in the RAMC. After having put me through various tests in a most brusque manner, he concluded by telling me that the only reason I was not hearing was because I was not damn well listening. Rarely have I been so hurt, and never have I since been near an RAMC specialist. Perhaps the most charitable explanation was that this officer was a member of the Labour Party preparing himself for the National Health Service. I doubt whether he ever put up his brass plate in Harley Street. During the course of this narrative I have recounted a number of anecdotes on the subject of the medical profession,

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from which it might be inferred that I am no respecter of doctors. This is definitely not the case. It is easy enough to make fun of the medical profession, and indeed, members of the profession spend much of their time making fun of each other. But when you are ill and frightened you do not feel like making fun of them and they generally do not make fun of you either. I know that the few trivial anecdotes which I have committed to paper will be taken in good part, and I wish to say that there is no body of men whom I hold in higher regard, except perhaps mechanical engineers3.

3

I do not know what it is that makes mechanical engineers such very good company, but I have always found that to be the case, both on ships and railways. Perhaps it is something to do with having to work with their hands as well as their brains, to do a skilled job often under dirty and disagreeable conditions. It takes the conceit out of a man and brings him into closer contact with reality. It stimulates his sense of humour and humanity and eliminates pretence. No man can put on airs in a stokehole.

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Hedda and Alastair, left, just after their wedding in Peking, 5 July 1946, with their American friends Jan Hockett and Vaughn Meisling. Photo: Collection of Alastair Morrison

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CHAPTER 10

I PLAN A LEAVE IN PEKING 1946

I

set out on my journey to Calcutta, from where I planned to fly to Shanghai by RAF Transport Command. After a delay of several days I finally left in a Dakota with a much-decorated air crew. We stopped briefly at Rangoon and Bangkok and reached Saigon just as dusk was falling. Here we were delayed for several days due to a breakdown. The RAF was faced with many difficulties at the time. With the end of Lend-Lease1, supplies of spares for American planes had dried up, and generally one plane could be kept in the air only by cannibalising another. Saigon was an astonishingly European city. I saw hardly any Indo-Chinese people there except for an occasional beautifully gowned girl. Time passed slowly. The RAF hostel had once been a large hotel but was in a shocking state of neglect. I had the company of some cheerful Irish priests, one of whom had a nice baritone voice and could sing many of the Irish songs which I liked. One night I cornered him and made him sing them all on the staircase of the hotel, and he took it very well. 1

Lend-Lease was the system by which the United States aided its World War II allies with war materials, food and services. It was authorised by Congress in March 1941 primarily to aid Britain, and was extended to China in September 1941.

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Otherwise, little of note occurred except that one evening I was having a solitary drink in a little café when suddenly I found myself surrounded by a number of bearded Frenchmen who took me firmly to their table and poured drinks into me. It appeared that I had known them in Ceylon, though in those days they were clean-shaven. They appeared to be veterans of the Foreign Legion, and had been dropped into various parts of French Indo-China. I was sorry to learn from them that one of my best friends at Poona had been killed. Eventually our plane was serviced and we took off for Hong Kong, flying at a considerable altitude above a great cloud bank. I did not pay much attention to the cloud until we started to come down through it as we approached Hong Kong. We came down slowly and were not more than 10 minutes’ flying time from the island when we came out of the cloud. The ceiling was about 150 feet and visibility was about a mile. That worried me considerably, for I recollected that the peak of Hong Kong is nearly 2000 feet high and that there are various other mountainous islands scattered about. It is on such occasions that the air crew are at a great advantage over their passengers, for they are in touch with their destination and in the present instance knew that there was clear weather immediately around the island. Still, I was very glad to step out on Kai Tak, a most perilous airport with a very bad approach. It was early spring and misty in Hong Kong, and I was further delayed because the weather was bad between there and Shanghai. I enjoyed the fleshpots and saw a number of friends who had gravitated to Hong Kong. Gerald Carey asked me to have a Chinese lunch with him, and I accepted with alacrity. It was only after we had met and were on our way to the restaurant that I discovered we were actually having lunch with a prominent Chinese business head. ‘Has he asked me?’ I inquired. ‘Good heavens, no,’ said Gerald. ‘He has only asked me because he wants me to do him a favour, and I thought it might be a good thing if I brought you along too.’ It was a good thing too, as it was a sumptuous repast attended by many

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I plan a leave in Peking

leading British business heads, or taipans, as they were known in China. I do not usually move in such exalted circles. A couple of days later I returned Gerald’s invitation and we went to an excellent fish restaurant called the Kuok Min, a place with a large aquarium in the entrance hall from which you could select the lobster or particular fish which you wanted to eat. As we were culling over the lobsters, who should turn up but two more mutual friends: a Chinese gentleman and a member of the staff of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The Chinese gentleman insisted, despite our protests, that we have lunch with him, which we did. It is a pity that all invitations are not as economical for the host. I looked for toggles without success, and on one occasion was much embarrassed by the company of a friend who used the opportunity to look for pornographic postcards to add to his collection. However, I did acquire one item of information which delighted me. This was the Chinese name for such articles, which is Ch’un Shih Hua, or Spring Time Pictures. The old Chinese sex books are most entertaining and command a high price. There was so much delay over leaving Hong Kong that I finally made my own arrangements. The embarkation staff officer was an individual I had no cause to like, for having given me every encouragement to go ahead and do something which he was incapable of doing himself, he later, when I applied for a refund of my passage money, wrote a most offensive note in which he stated that not having availed myself of army facilities, I was not entitled to a refund. I prophesied no good future for this man. The nearest he came to providing me with a passage was on a trooper carrying men of the New Zealand 2nd Division who were to form part of the occupation forces in Japan. These luckless New Zealanders, who seemed able during the war to stand up to almost anything, were not yet proof against a somewhat infantile malady: chicken pox. The trooper came into Hong Kong to discharge the sick, but no one was allowed to embark and she did not call at Shanghai as planned.

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I travelled up the coast on the Esang and we reached Shanghai on a grey spring afternoon and tied up on the Pootung side of the river. With some difficulty I made my way to the consulate with my luggage. The unit which I had come to join was a small one and had been organised by an old resident of Shanghai, Lieutenant Colonel J. K. Brand, to assist in maintaining cooperation between the consulate and the Chinese authorities in the difficult days immediately after the reoccupation of the city. The work consisted largely in dealing with the Chinese services and police in trying to obtain the restitution of British property, as well as the protection, when necessary, of British business personnel. Being in uniform made it easier to deal with many Chinese officials and also enabled us to pass freely through pickets and strikers who would not allow a civilian to pass. By a combination of patience, firmness and unfailing courtesy Colonel Brand had achieved a surprising amount under the most adverse circumstances. I saw only the tail end of the unit’s work. Colonel Brand was assisted by Bill Laidlaw of the 5th Gurkhas. They had both been in Force 136, and there were also two other officers helping with the transport and repatriation of British personnel. The junior officers lived first of all in the consulate compound and later in a penthouse on top of a block of flats called Embankment Building. The background of our work consisted of two principal factors: first, the frightful economic state of the country; and second, the feebleness of the civil authority. China was in the grip of acute inflation; prices never ceased to rise, imports were pouring in, and exports, due to the civil war and the paralysis of communications, were not moving out. Prices had risen, and were continuing to rise, to fantastic levels, and from being a country of cheap labour, China had become an incredibly expensive one. In terms of foreign exchange Chinese workers were paid as much or more than American workers, without any increase in efficiency. To manufacture anything in China which had to compete with the foreign product was almost impossible. Perhaps the best example

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of relative costs was the often-quoted one that it cost more in terms of real currency to move a ton of goods from one side of the Whangpoo to the other than it did to ship those goods to Shanghai from New York via the Panama Canal. Labour unrest was inevitable under the circumstances, and often entirely justified. The real trouble was due to the weakness of the Chinese government. China still had no efficient civil service, and the government had taken over in Shanghai one of the world’s most complicated cities without the staff to run it. Formerly, Shanghai had been largely administered by the Municipal Council of the International Settlement and by the French authorities of the French concession next-door. They had run most of the city with reasonable efficiency, and the police forces had been competent, well trained and well led. The foreign administration had of course disappeared during the Japanese occupation and was not renewed after the war due to the relinquishment of extraterritoriality. The Chinese government came back and gave many of the best (and most responsible and difficult) jobs to loyal supporters from Chungking who were seldom qualified to occupy the posts. The relatively experienced old staff went in their entirety, and the result was a high degree of chaos. There were some able Chinese who did their best for the city, the mayor being an outstanding example, but they did not have the backing of efficient subordinates and they had little real authority. An administration which cannot count on real power to enforce its authority when necessary is in a very difficult position. The city was filthy and neglected. Hawkers thronged the main streets in such numbers as to be a first-class nuisance, and when the city government later tried to remove them they rioted to such good effect that they were allowed to stay. Labour was extreme and militant and fantastically unreasonable, carrying on negotiations with a complete disregard for law. The usual method was for all the workers to turn up at once, shut up their employer and threaten and bully him until he had given in to their latest

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demand. Negotiations were always carried on by a complete mob because the workers did not trust their own leaders. Chinese working people have a great natural gift for extortion and for ganging up on the other guy. They made their employers’ lives a misery, and to admit a reasonable demand was only to invite a host of unreasonable ones. A good typical example of the sort of thing which went on was the case of one British-owned company. For weeks this organisation was regularly besieged by a crowd of thugs, all of whom had been dismissed for dishonesty before the outbreak of the Pacific war not less than five years earlier. The Chinese authorities entirely agreed that the demands of these men were scandalous and unreasonable, but they were still permitted, day after day, to bully and molest the unfortunate British businessmen in charge. The smaller the firm, the graver the difficulties of the management. I came across at least two cases where small British manufacturing firms, which could not resume operations, continually had their personnel threatened with physical violence if they did not provide work or even sell up the factory for the benefit of the workers. I never actually witnessed physical violence, though I was on several occasions forcibly prevented from leaving buildings while trying to extricate British personnel from picketed premises. Our routine in such cases was a fairly well established one. We would receive a telephone call from the beleaguered premises, would go round to the nearest police station and bring the police along personally. They seldom came otherwise. Then the police would negotiate with the workers, who had probably put forward some incredible demand such as that they should immediately receive six months’ pay for work which they had never done. The negotiations would end in failure. After much delay, more senior police would be called in and there would be more fruitless talk. And so it would go the whole long day, while we stood by; then, at a late hour, some sort of compromise would be effected. The trouble would probably start all over again the next day.

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You could not reasonably expect the police to take any firm action, for they were hopelessly underpaid and understaffed. They could demonstrate force but never use it. Their technique varied. I remember one occasion when a particularly unpleasant crowd was dispersed by a fresh-faced young superintendent. You could see that he was a sincere man and obviously sympathised with the workers. He personally assured them that if only they would disperse, he himself would accompany their representatives on the morrow to see the Bureau of Social Affairs where they could place their complaints before the authorities and receive justice. The thugs were much gratified by this demonstration of national solidarity and dispersed with surprising rapidity. The next day their leaders called at police headquarters but were told that the sympathetic superintendent much regretted that due to urgent pressure of work he was unable to accompany them; he had no doubt that if they went along to the bureau, they would receive the most sympathetic reception. The Bureau of Social Affairs was the organisation set up by the Chinese government to deal with labour troubles. I found the unfortunate Chinese officials who had the misfortune to be posted to it to be reasonable and helpful, but they too had no authority. They themselves were being continually shut up in their offices which, the last I heard, had been completely smashed up by a disgruntled mob. On another occasion when a British firm was picketed, the riot van was called up. It was a big red truck with a submachine gun mounted on the roof and commanded by a strapping young officer standing at least five feet three in his shoes and wearing thick horn-rimmed spectacles. After it had arrived, a senior police officer guaranteed that the Europeans inside the building would be allowed to leave. The riot squad stood watchfully by on the other side of the road and everything looked fine. However, no sooner did those within try to emerge than those without quickly pushed them in again. The riot squad continued to stand watchfully by. A little later I was talking to their commander. ‘It is

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disgraceful,’ I said, ‘the way these toughs interfere with our people. Why sometimes, they beat them up.’ The riot squad commander looked furtively around. ‘Sometimes,’ he muttered, ‘they beat us up too.’ The worst sufferers were, of course, the Chinese businessmen, who had no one to help them, and there were many cases where they were badly injured by strikers. I felt sorry for the Chinese authorities, for they had been faced with incredible difficulties: war with Japan, civil war, runaway inflation and economic chaos. Even a thoroughly efficient and experienced administrative machine would have found these problems almost insuperable, and it must be remembered that the country was still in a state of transition from the old to the new. The Chinese had made a good start but they had been dogged by ill fortune. Who can say how China would have developed if she had been free from foreign aggression from 1930 to 1950? The Chinese suffered from too much ballyhoo during the war and too much censure afterwards. Of course there were corrupt politicians in China, but they were just as corrupt several years earlier when, in the estimation of the outside world, China could do no wrong. But there were also many honest and rightminded men struggling against great difficulties to do their best for their country. China is not the only country with corrupt politicians. In addition to our work trying to help British organisations in their labour troubles, we were also engaged in trying to secure the return of British property which had been taken over by the Japanese and subsequently the Chinese. It was a slow and wearisome process, and it was particularly difficult to effect the return of anything moveable, especially cars. There were several cases where British subjects saw and identified their own vehicles, usually in the possession of the Chinese Army, but no sooner did we make an attempt to secure their return than the vehicle would be sent away, by orders of higher authority, of course, to Tsingtao

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or Mukden or some other remote place. It was a practice which reflected very little credit on the army. Residential property was another sore point, for much valuable property in Shanghai was British-owned. An Englishman might have been turned out of his flat by the Japanese, who were then turned out by a Chinese officer, and that was that. A considerable difficulty arose over the peculiar discipline of the Chinese Army. There was one occasion when an army unit moved into a British-owned property. The owner was a reasonable man who said that he was glad to help the Chinese authorities by permitting the troops to remain, but he did ask for an assurance that the stay would be of limited duration. Shanghai garrison headquarters actually gave such an assurance in writing. However, when it came time to move, the unit refused to do so and it finally transpired that they would not accept orders from the local garrison commander, who in our parlance would be General Officer Commanding, Shanghai. It would have required force to move them, and the whole thing had to be referred to the National Military Council in Nanking. In general, our work was rather hard and a considerable strain. I was in Shanghai for only a few months but it seemed like an age. It provided me with glimpses of the Chinese from several novel angles, and while those glimpses were not always very agreeable, I think that true esteem must be based on some experience of both the good and the bad. In Peking you tended to see China through rose-coloured spectacles; my stay in Shanghai was a useful corrective. Even though the work was sometimes unpleasant, there was the satisfaction of trying to help a lot of other British people, who had lost almost everything during the war, to re-establish their businesses and livelihoods, and one did not begrudge long hours of frustration and exasperation. There were, however, one or two British investment houses in Shanghai who deserved no help at all. They were institutions which were used to uttering loud and strident cries for help and for the protection of their so-called

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British interests when they were involved in trouble with the Chinese authorities, often through the rudeness of their own employees. But if they in turn were in a position to help a needy Englishman, it was a very different matter, particularly if he was only modestly provided with American gold dollars. They stank. Outside our work, life in many ways was pleasant enough in Shanghai. I had a number of good friends there and the mess was a cheerful one. We had moved into a penthouse on top of the Embankment Building, where there were three officers and Corporal Robertson who came from Crieff. Robertson was in the Royal Signals and was a great character. It might seem to be a little difficult for a solitary NCO to live in such a mess with three officers, but Robertson fitted in perfectly; if we had ever elected a mess president, my vote would have gone for him. He was a most cheerful man, and although I sometimes found it a little difficult to credit some of his stories, they were never dull. He spoke not a word of Chinese and he had a Chinese girlfriend who spoke not a word of English. They got on very well; really too well for the girl, who was pregnant when he departed. My two brother officers in the mess were rather younger than I, and were a light-hearted couple who continually played the radio. I often wondered whether they ever listened to it or whether they were so conditioned to noise that they felt unhappy without it. However, the radio never worried me and the mess was a harmonious one. One of my friends in Shanghai was Findlay, who had now returned to his job as adviser on Chinese affairs to Butterfield and Swire. Many were the Saturday afternoons I spent in the Butterfield and Swire office surrounded by Chinese ships’ crews respectfully tendering some modest demand, generally for not less than four years’ unearned back pay. It rather looked as if these seamen were organised by a mastermind, a psychologist who had made a close study of Messrs Butterfield and Swire. Trouble nearly always started at about 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning, after the seamen had eaten their midday meal and before the British staff

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in Butterfield and Swire had left for the Shanghai Club for the usual Saturday morning libation and a well-earned rest in the afternoon. Findlay lived in Avenue Haig, in close proximity to the Argentina Night Club. It was an intriguing problem of geographical location. Had Findlay chosen his quarters to be near the Argentina, or had the Argentina chosen theirs to be near Findlay? It was a problem I never succeeded in solving. An evening which I am never likely to forget occurred after I had been in Shanghai for a little time. My messmates were giving a party and since I knew few of their friends and did not expect to contribute much towards the evening, I phoned Findlay and asked him if he could put me up for the night. ‘Certainly, my boy,’ he said cordially. ‘Come along and we’ll spend a quiet evening together.’ Findlay had undergone a hard day at the office when we met at his house, and he looked tired and worn. ‘I am getting old,’ he said. ‘We must have an early night.’ Some time after tea we started playing rummy, which is on the face of it a harmless enough game. But Findlay’s rummy games were slightly unorthodox, for they were generally the accompaniment for the drink before dinner. They had been a famous institution in Chungking, and it seemed like old times. Usually Findlay won, but on this occasion I was in exceptionally good form and Findlay was hard put to maintain his usual pre-eminence. I do not recollect a more exciting series of games; by the time we had finished, it was late and we had consumed an appreciable quantity of gin. We had dinner and then it looked to me as if it was time to go to bed. Findlay, however, seemed to have taken on a new lease of life. He entirely agreed that we should go to bed early, but said that first we should just drop in to the Argentina to see the floor show. The evening wore on. We did see the floor show, but I began to suspect that Findlay’s main motive in coming was to see the vocalist, an attractive girl (or girls, for at times I received a distinct impression that there were two of them). We had several drinks, each costing rather more than their equivalent weight in pure gold.

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The evening was for me brought to a sudden close when Findlay, returning from one of his forays after the vocalist, had on his face what I took to be a look of horror. ‘The game’s up, old boy,’ he cried, ‘the game’s up. Menon’s here.’ Just why the arrival of that most amiable of men, the Indian Agent General, should have filled Findlay with such wild alarm I do not know, but at the time the situation looked serious. Evasive action seemed to be called for, and I made a hurried departure. A girl I knew who was then with an RAF wing commander said that my progress was erratic. I was a little disappointed with the wing commander, for he surely ought to have been able to recognise evasive action when he saw it. I returned home but Findlay miraculously recovered from his alarm and stayed on until the Argentina closed. He found me fast asleep when he returned, and was a little puzzled to know how I had entered the house, as I had no key, the outer and inner doors were locked, and the servants had not been awakened. Altogether it was one of the best quiet evenings I have ever experienced2.

One of the more unusual tasks I was given in Shanghai was to act as observer at the trial of two Indians charged with collaborating with the Japanese. The reason for sending an observer was that in Chinese courts the judge was also the prosecutor, and although a 2

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Findlay, of course, had a serious side, but it was the light-hearted episodes that remain uppermost in my memory. He later worked for a time in the Singapore Education Department, where his command of Chinese earned him respect in even very radical Chinese schools. On one occasion I was in Singapore by myself during that period and had an excellent Chinese dinner with him. At its conclusion I noticed that he took a couple of pills. I asked him what they were for. ‘Indigestion,’ he said. ‘Try a couple.’ I did, and thought no more of it. The next morning, after a good night’s rest, I was much alarmed to find that my urine had turned dark blue. I thought I must have contracted something akin to Blackwater Fever. I hastened to see a doctor, who asked if I was on any medication. Only then did I think of the digestion pills. The villainous Findlay had given me, without warning me of the consequences, De Witt’s Bladder Pills, an old and sovereign remedy for bladder infections which contains a blue dye. The doctor laughed heartily and pocketed his fee.


defence counsel could be appointed he was not permitted to have any contact with his client. The practice was a breach of Chinese treaty obligations; hence my job as observer. I went along with a public-spirited old Indian gentleman called Mr Doodah who had also arranged for a necessarily ineffectual defence counsel. Despite the fact that Mr Doodah was doing everything possible to help the accused, one of them during the course of a statement exclaimed dramatically, ‘Mr Doodah is my enemy.’ ‘Don’t be an old ass,’ muttered Mr Doodah by my side. The court was full of Sikhs, former members of the Shanghai police. ‘If I am guilty,’ cried one of the accused, ‘then all these men are guilty too.’ They certainly looked guilty. The case was finally dismissed for lack of evidence. Like every other occupied territory, Shanghai was much bedevilled by allegations of collaboration with the Japanese. My own personal belief is that nearly all of these allegations were spiteful and malicious fabrications and that it is best to regard them in that light. It cannot be said that we achieved a great deal of success in our work, but people seemed to appreciate the existence of our office. On the rare occasions when we did make some progress in any matter with which I was connected, I would tactfully let it be known that if the recipients of our assistance really felt that they had been helped, there was no harm in letting the consulate know. It would encourage the consular body. As a result, several very encouraging letters were written to the consulate, and they nearly all had some kind words to say about me too. I was greatly tickled when these letters were in due course passed to our office minuted, ‘Captain Morrison to see.’ But possibly the Consul General, Mr Ogden, saw through the stratagem; when I applied for a recommendation when the unit was closed down, I received one of the ‘his services have at all times been satisfactory’ type. I was a little saddened, for if the Consul General had asked me for a recommendation, I would have given him one which would have been well worth framing. He had a most exceptionally difficult job

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and I thought he did it very competently. He was criticised, but I would like to meet the man who could have done any better. I was also very fond of his daughter, a sweet girl called Anne. The Consul General’s testimonial was in contrast to that of Findlay, who had, in his usual thoughtful way, provided me with two testimonials. As he very wisely pointed out, you could never tell which would create the better impression. I append them for the information of other consuls general who may wish to learn how testimonials should be written: Captain A. R. G. Morrison served with me in a special mission attached to the British Embassy, Chungking, China, from the end of November 1943 till March 1945 when he left for advanced operational training in India. Throughout his period of service with me, Captain Morrison proved himself very efficient in the execution of his duties, with powers of application beyond the normal. His cheerful disposition and willingness to respond to any call of duty, made him an exceptional asset to the unit. I have every confidence that in his future career Captain Morrison will not fail to make a success of any duty he may undertake.

This solemn warning is issued to all and sundry to beware of the mild and genial appearance of Captain A. R. G. Morrison which supports the entirely erroneous reputation that he is an officer without any of the ordinary male vices. During his period of service with the undersigned at Chungking from November 1943 to March 1945 he proved himself to be foul beyond the ordinary in his lucid conversation, dangerous in his drunken moments which occurred with unfailing regularity, and an

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unchallenged expert of two-legged birds both on the wing and on the land. I have no hesitation in saying that with equal facilities in wine, women and song Captain Morrison will improve the occasion beyond any other British officer of my acquaintance. A noticeable tendency to arthritis in the right elbow and a limp in his walk will support this view.

At the personal level I was much concerned with the question of marriage. Hedda and I were not engaged in any formal sense, but I had every intention of returning to Peking if I survived the war. The first inkling of marriage for Hedda came from a visit by Dr Hoeppli. I had sent various messages through Force 136 inquiring after Hedda since the Japanese had surrendered. One, to her great astonishment, was conveyed to her personally by a Chinese general who had been associated with Findlay. The general, accompanied by several staff officers, very kindly called on Hedda in her modest quarters. She was even more astonished by Dr Hoeppli, who also conveyed a message. A dignified, portly man with a sense of occasion, he had known Hedda for years. He called on her in formal clothes, complete with silver-topped cane. He came, he said, to congratulate her on her impending marriage. When she expressed some surprise, he gravely informed her that when a gentleman inquired after a lady in the way Mr Morrison had inquired after Hedda, he intended to marry her. Actually, getting married presented problems. I was still in the army. Hedda was German. They were still the days of nonfraternisation measures to discourage British troops in Germany from marrying German girls. We could marry in a church ceremony, but I wanted an official ceremony as well. I sought to overcome this by assembling a collection of references to establish Hedda’s respectability so that we could also get married in the consulate.

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I had no difficulty with the references except for one lastminute hitch. Shortly before I was due to arrive in Peking, Otto Buchard, the leading antique dealer in the city, denounced Hedda to the US military attaché, Colonel Mayer, as a crypto Nazi agent. What made Buchard do this we never discovered. Hedda had always been a loyal friend of the German Jews in Peking and she had known Buchard and his wife Pony well. It was, however, only a temporary hitch. US intelligence had nothing against her. Spring changed to summer and I was given a month’s leave in July. It was my intention to spend the leave in Peking, but there were various difficulties involved in reaching the city. The best way was to fly there with the transport planes of the American Army which operated a twice-weekly service in both directions with Skymasters. It was not, however, as easy as during the war to get a lift on American planes. Restrictions had been tightened and priorities were far more rigidly observed. I saw an American major who thought he might be able to send me up in a freight plane, but not before some interrogation. ‘Why do you want to fly to Peking, Captain?’ asked the major. ‘I want to get married, Major,’ I replied. ‘In that case, Captain,’ said he, ‘you should be willing to walk to Peking.’ Eventually I went round to the American Consulate to see the gentleman there who dealt with matters of air passages. I was given a most non-committal introduction from the British Consulate, simply saying who I was and what I wanted to do. The American official was a middle-aged man with an intent look. It seemed to me that he scrutinised me in a most suspicious manner when I handed in my letter, and I prepared to tell a heart-rending story. ‘Just one moment, Captain,’ he said, and disappeared into an adjoining office. I wondered what on earth he was up to. Probably checking up on my sordid past. About five minutes later he returned with a large official-looking document in his hand. ‘Here you are, Captain,’ he said. ‘I hope you have a pleasant journey.’ Slightly dazed, I looked down at the paper which stated that Captain Morrison was proceeding to Peking on urgent

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official business, sufficiently urgent to warrant an air priority. Certainly my business was urgent, though hardly official. I staggered out murmuring words of thanks3. I landed at the Hsi Yuan airport near the Summer Palace on a brilliant summer day. Peking looked just the same. Hedda and I were married a couple of days later, our two witnesses being our old friend Vaughn Meisling and a friend of Hedda’s, a tall American Red Cross girl called Jane Hockett. It was a streamlined ceremony.We invited no guests and were married twice, just to be sure, once in the British Embassy chapel and once in the British Consulate, all within the space of one hour. Hedda had since the end of the war worked for the American Red Cross, which had been very kind to her. She gave classes in photography and took GIs on tours of points of interest. In addition, she generally did any odd jobs for which her knowledge of Peking peculiarly fitted her, anything from hiring a troupe of jugglers to producing a camel in mid-summer for the GIs to ride and have their picture taken in so doing. This was quite a feat, for in mid-summer most of the camels are far away in Mongolia. The Americans certainly looked after their people. The Red Cross Club was a sumptuous place occupying the old Italian Embassy which had been taken over in its entirety for the purpose. The day before Hedda and I were married I accompanied her round the club, where we were very hospitably received. I was introduced to lots of the boys. One, I remember, was a keen photographer, a nice fellow who seemed somewhat at a loss to know what to say when he heard we were to be married. Finally he said,‘Gee, I hope you make a good marriage.’We often wondered afterwards. The crack divisions of the United States Marine Corps, which had such a magnificent record in the Pacific, had occupied North China. Few of the marines, however, were veterans of the Pacific campaigns. They were really boys, though in American parlance, of 3

The Americans had most of the facilities in China but they were not mean in letting other people benefit from them. If they were asked for help they gave it.

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course, every ex-serviceman is a veteran once he has left the forces and ceased being a boy. The American demobilisation seemed to go through much faster than the British. The speed with which the Americans built up their military strength was equalled only by the rapidity with which they dissipated it again. The marines had moved in to North China to disarm the Japanese. They occupied important centres and kept communications open, to permit the Chinese troops to follow. Great numbers of Chinese troops were flown in by the Americans and even more brought up by American ships and landing craft from South China. It was an interim arrangement, and there was no question of their occupying the country permanently. It might be thought that the Chinese would have been grateful for what the Americans had done. In point of actual fact, the presence of the marines was the excuse for a wave of xenophobia in the winter of 1946–47, touched off by the sort of sex crime which is always liable to occur when troops are stationed anywhere, even in their own country. It could have been dealt with in the usual way, by disciplinary action. Indeed, even though American discipline may seem to us to be slack, there can be no doubt that when they do get round to handing out punishments, those punishments are exceedingly harsh. But a solitary rape case touched off demonstrations from which you might have inferred that so long as American troops were in China, no virtuous Chinese woman was safe from molestation and that, compared to the Americans, the Japanese were respectable and law-abiding citizens. China is a land of contrast and frequent disillusionment. There is no country in the world for which its foreign friends feel so warmly, no country which more often treats its friends with ingratitude. And the odd thing is that it is just those who have been disillusioned most whose love for China and the Chinese is the greatest. The wise man should disillusion himself in advance, before he ever goes to China. My stay in Peking was a brief but happy one. Hedda and I visited many well-remembered places, rowed in the Pei Hai in the

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early morning, searched the curio shops and ate much excellent Chinese food. The curio shops were very expensive. It is, I suppose, typical of inflation that shopkeepers only want to sell enough to cover their daily necessities, keeping as much stock as possible in hand. In Peking everyone wanted gigantic sums of American dollars. We had one particular source of interest, which was to try to track down some treasured ivory toggles which had been stolen shortly before by a dishonest servant of the other occupants of Hedda’s compound. We recovered about half of them, finding them for sale in various shops and stalls which sold small things. We had to buy them back, for in China that was the custom with stolen goods, but the dealers never disputed our word that they were stolen and we were able to regain our treasures for quite reasonable prices. Hilly’s unwelcome pistol was returned to me. At war’s end the Germany Embassy where Fabel had deposited it told him to take it away again. This he did, and deposited it for safe custody in the British Embassy. I eventually sold it in Hong Kong to a fellow officer for US$30. We gave a most entertaining dinner party for a number of our friends at one of our favourite restaurants, the Jun Ming Lou, in the Tung An Shih Ch’ang. It was a festive occasion, and 11 starters consumed a total of 27 katis of good yellow wine, which is reasonably good going. One of our guests was the British Consul, John Boyce, a charming and gifted man who had married us in the consulate. He himself planned to be married in Peking in the autumn, but died suddenly the day before the wedding was to take place. Peking is like that. Hilarity and tragedy stalk hand in hand. As a result of her work with the Red Cross, Hedda knew many of the American service personnel in Peking, and very good people they were. I recollect with special pleasure the photographer who phoned Hedda one day in a most agitated state. He had been given the films of some visiting VIPs to develop and, stretching out his hand in the dark for the developer, had quite inadvertently grasped an open bottle of beer and poured it over the films. It seems to me to be high time that Eastman Kodak perfected either

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a drinkable developer or a beer which will not harm photographic film. Such a discovery would revolutionise dark-room technique. Then there was the incident of the three old-timers. One day, I think it was a Sunday morning, three immense marines, members of the Marine Band, came to call on Hedda. Two of them were Irish-Americans and one was an Italian-American. Their names were Doughty, Feeny and Ferruccio. They were not young boys but genuine old-timers who had learned their job years ago in Nicaragua. In retrospect they seem to have been the most gigantic men I ever saw. They were nice fellows and talented musicians. Doughty, the bandmaster, was also a good photographer. We had a pleasant talk and then it seemed to be time for a drink. Our visitors concurred with this suggestion and I went off to look into the cellar. Unfortunately, the cellar at this period contained only 36 bottles of vintage applejack, a fierce and potent spirit brewed many years before by some gifted priests in Dairen. Just why Hedda should have laid in 36 bottles of applejack against my arrival, I never quite knew. I produced a bottle and we made steady progress towards emptying it. Indeed, we made such good progress that it seemed only right to produce another. By this time a most harmonious spirit prevailed, and when the bottle was finished it seemed essential to broach yet another for the road. This we duly did, and although I was finding the pace a gruelling one I held on in this neck-and-neck encounter until the third bottle too was nearly exhausted. Our guests then said they must be going. I, of course, had the advantage of batting on the home wicket and saw them safely to the door, wishing them godspeed. I have no idea what happened to them after that. I was unconscious for eight hours and Hedda let me be while she went off to the Coal Hill to take photographs. Hardly before I had recovered consciousness, I was dragged off to a dinner party where my agonised calls for water brought the helpful suggestion from our hostess that it might save a lot of trouble if I drank out of the goldfish bowl in the middle of the table.

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One of the few untoward incidents during my stay took place one evening when I was going along to have a cold bath.When I was about to plunge in, I noticed a little animal struggling in the water. The fact that I do not wear my spectacles in my bath did not enable me to see the animal very clearly. My humanitarian instincts aroused, I picked it up in my hand only to find that it was a baby scorpion. A most ungrateful baby scorpion too, for it gave me a most painful sting. Had I been an American I suppose I would have comforted myself with the reflection that it was an object lesson in foreign aid.

A month’s leave in Peking was not nearly long enough, but the time drew on and I had to start on my return journey to Shanghai and Hong Kong. Our unit in Shanghai had in the meantime been wound up. I put off plans for my departure for as long as possible and finally thought of a rather petty expedient to prolong my stay for a few days. The Skymaster service left every Tuesday and Friday. I should have left on a Tuesday but waited until late on Monday afternoon before going along to the American Consulate to apply for a passage. That, I thought, would ensure that I did not leave until Friday, for passages were usually booked some days in advance and usually it required a very high priority to obtain a last-minute booking. I would, however, be able to say that I had indeed applied for a passage. I explained the position to the American Consul and asked if I could leave the next day, expecting a polite but regretful refusal. Never have I been more bitterly mistaken. ‘Why certainly,’ said this most over-helpful American. ‘You can leave tomorrow.’ I was flabbergasted and also very indignant. I was accustomed to American cooperation, but this was going a bit too far. My explanation must have sounded very lame, and finally I did leave on the Friday. I had now to proceed to Hong Kong and was due for demobilisation in the early autumn. We planned that Hedda

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should follow me down to Hong Kong and that we would then go to Australia and collect birds. I had made some arrangements to this end, although the Australian representative in Shanghai was not over-helpful. As a British officer forming part of the staff of the British Consulate, and as the son of a well-known Australian, I thought there would be little difficulty in making all arrangements. But under some circumstances it looked as if Hedda might have to go on to Australia ahead of me, and this was obviously suspect. ‘How can we tell,’ asked the young lady in the consulate, ‘that if your wife goes ahead, you will follow after?’ It rather looked as if the young lady thought I was a white-slave trafficker, working under cover in the consulate general. I flew to Hong Kong from Shanghai and reported to land forces headquarters. No one, of course, knew anything about me and I might just as well have stayed on in Peking for another month. I did not know what sort of job I might be given, but hoped that it would be something restful. Finally I was called in to see the G1, a man who never wasted time. ‘How would you like to be my G3?’ he asked. ‘I am short of one.’ This was awkward. I had nothing against the G1 but had no wish to be a G3, for my knowledge of military matters was of the slightest. On the other hand, I wished to remain in Hong Kong until Hedda could arrive from Peking. It seemed to me that discussion would serve no useful purpose. I became a G3 Ops. I lived in an antiquated mess that was largely inhabited by the officers of war crimes teams and had an excellent bar. It was quite a cheerful place, and I shared a room with a middle-aged RAF officer called Pop who had lived for many years in Harbin. People did not take life too seriously. I remember being awakened one morning at two o’clock by a brother officer returning home and crying vociferously, ‘Boy, bring me some beer!’ There was no response and he sighed heavily.‘Really,’ he muttered,‘the service in this mess is scandalous.’ I found the work strange. You had to arrive in the office on time and be properly dressed. About my first and last job was the

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organisation of a Liberation Day parade. I was horrified when the G1 light-headedly gave me this frightful task, but it became so apparent, so quickly, that this was possibly beyond my feeble powers that the job was given to an efficient colleague called Fowler, whom I was instructed to assist. About the only thing he gave me to do was the arrangement for the seating of senior officers, members of the Hong Kong government and distinguished guests. I gave the matter my immediate attention and worked out a very good seating list. What is more, I detected a grave error which had been committed by my opposite number in the secretariat, for which I consider I deserve his undying gratitude. The Governor was absent at the time but the Governor’s wife, his daughter and his ADC were all in Hong Kong and had all been omitted from the secretariat list. This matter was soon corrected, and having drawn up our lists and allotted seats, it was merely a matter of ensuring that everyone arrived on time. I had to notify all army officers and duly scribbled off an order for the duplicator: ‘The undermentioned officers will attend at 0835 hours, etc.’ I signed it and sent it off to all the senior officers in the command. It was not until the parade was over that I discovered that this order had not been well received. The phrasing was felt to be a little brusque, and the order should have borne the signature of some officer of more exalted rank than a mere captain, even acting on behalf of the GOC. The G2, a pleasant marine, told me so himself, when I met him in the bar of the mess. ‘They don’t like it, old boy’, he said. ‘I don’t suppose you could care less, but it wasn’t tactful.’ A few days later the G1 called me into his office. ‘How would you like to be Adjutant of the Hong Kong Volunteers?’ he asked. ‘I think you’re the very man for the job.’ I was not very sure of that myself, but I could hardly make a worse adjutant than a G3, and also I was more than a little frightened of the G1. Before the day was many hours older the fateful letter was on its way:‘The acting GOC has much pleasure in offering the Hong Kong government the services of Captain A. R. G. Morrison.’

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Later I came to know the G1, Colonel Reynolds, rather better and acquired a high regard for him, though I never ceased to stand in some awe of him. He was a bulldog of a man, quicktempered but fair, and with an almost pathological dislike of wasting time. He was a driving force and got things done. Presiding over a conference of any sort, he was masterful, firmly but tactfully leading back wanderers from the point and cutting through unnecessary verbiage. The Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps was an organisation of long standing, and comprised a number of units which had played an honourable part in the defence of the colony in 1941. It had a somewhat unusual constitution and was a Colonial Office rather than a War Office responsibility. Its members had manned a number of batteries of heavy guns for coastal defence, provided several infantry companies, an ambulance unit and some others. The personnel were completely international. A large proportion were British, but there were numbers of Chinese, Portuguese, Russians, French and other nationalities. They did very well during the 17-day campaign for the colony and suffered heavy losses. Most of the corps was interned at the end of hostilities, though after some months all Chinese POWs were released by the Japanese. Most of the Volunteer POWs had been in Shamshuipo camp on the mainland, though many were later transferred to Japan. At the end of the war there was much confusion in the settlement of Volunteer affairs, and much justified dissatisfaction on the part of the Volunteers, particularly those of local domicile. All sorts of problems of pay, pensions, medical benefits, help for dependents of Volunteers who had lost their their lives, and other matters still remained to be sorted out, and this was a year after the end of the war. It was necessary to improvise and to adapt to local conditions demobilisation and pensions procedure as they applied in England. There was no lack of willingness on the part of the Hong Kong authorities to settle these matters, but there had been a lack of continuity. I was the fourth adjutant in less than a

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year, and some of the gentlemen charged with responsibility for Volunteer affairs let those responsibilities ride very lightly on their shoulders. I shall never forget the remark of one such gentleman: ‘There’s nothing to it, old boy. You can easily manage on an hour a day in the office.’ It quickly became a very absorbing task, for I had nearly always in the past been on the side of the critics. My work with the HKVDC brought me the forcible realisation of how very much easier it is to criticise plausibly than to work constructively; how much easier it is to write a thumping editorial, which is the end of the matter as far as the editorial writer is concerned, than to produce something useful and practical which works. By a piece of great good fortune the corps paymaster, Mr Rakusen, returned to Hong Kong shortly after my arrival. He was a most invaluable man and we became good friends. He knew most of the answers to the various problems with which we were faced, and he was a very keen Volunteer. He devoted nearly all his spare time and energy to Volunteer affairs, and my work consisted largely in presenting and putting forward, with his cooperation, various schemes which he understood in detail. Not all the Volunteers knew what a good friend they had in him, for he was sometimes peppery and was not a man to suffer fools gladly. He worked none the less hard for the fact that the worth of his labours was not always fully appreciated. The Volunteers had been promised that they would receive the same benefits as British service personnel and were very sensitive that this should be implemented. It sometimes made things difficult, for few of them had a clear idea as to what British benefits were, and still fewer that from British rates of pay must be deducted British rates of income tax. If a man went for an examination in hospital and was kept waiting for several hours, which would happen even to British service personnel, he tended to become angry, and there was very little I could do about it. Prices in Hong Kong could not, of course, be compared to prices in England, for at the time they were infinitely higher.

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The most embarrassing episode that I encountered concerned the provision of a demobilisation outfit of civilian clothing. The outfit was to enable a man to be decently dressed when applying for a job. British servicemen were given an excellent outfit, and the cost to the British government was about £12.10s per head. HKVDC members were entitled to the same issue, but it was impractical to bring out from Britain several hundred outfits for men of various shapes and sizes. Consequently, it was ordained by Hong Kong’s penny-pinching financial secretary that the men should be given cash in lieu, and at the British rate. This was grossly unreasonable because clothing in Hong Kong was wildly expensive. The decision caused great and well-justified resentment. The Volunteers had been organised in a peculiar way and there were a number of what might be called sectional units; i.e., Scottish, Eurasian, Portuguese and Chinese companies. The Portuguese were descended from the early traders and administrators of Macao, the nearby Portuguese colony which has a much longer history than Hong Kong. They formed a numerous and much-respected community in Hong Kong. The sectional system, which was so reminiscent of the company caste system of the Indian Army, seemed to have worked well. The Eurasian company especially distinguished itself during the fighting. I found plenty of work to do as adjutant, but there were advantages. I was on my own, and was provided with transport and a most excellent old driver. When Hedda arrived from Peking we had a little flat at Volunteer headquarters and Hedda had a splendid darkroom in the pantry of the old sergeants’ mess. I became interested in the work and deferred my release for six months, abandoning the idea of a trip to Australia.

Colin returned to Hong Kong from England, having in the meantime married Steffi, the sister of Ian’s wife Maria. Sadly, the outcome of

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these closely linked marriages was very different. While Colin’s was ideally successful and happy, Ian’s marriage to Maria did not work out nearly as well. Colin did well in the Hong Kong service, but retired early to be with his family in England during the school years of his three daughters. He himself took up teaching and enjoyed it greatly4. Hong Kong in winter is a delightful place. The climate could not be better: dry, cool and sunny. I had a Jeep and would organise recreational transport for myself. We came to know the colony well. The city of Victoria lies on the north side of the island, and is dominated by the peak immediately behind it which rises to an altitude of over 1500 feet. Here many people used to live. The disadvantage was that it was very misty in summer, but there are the most wonderful views to compensate for this disadvantage: islands and the sea and faraway mountains. The whole island and the mainland are mountainous, and the magnificent natural harbour of Hong Kong is contained between the two. Victoria is a straggling, ill-planned city and was in those days dominated by the mass of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, an outstanding example of what was known in China as the compradoric style of architecture. Opposite Victoria is the city of Kowloon on the peninsula of that name. The island and Kowloon peninsula were then British possessions, but the hinterland of the new territories was leased. It is an exceedingly beautiful part of the world, for the coastline is deeply indented by blue arms of the sea and overhung by steep mountains. It reminded Hedda of the Adriatic. There were endless beautiful walks. Every Sunday we would go across to the mainland by the first ferry in the morning, depart the Jeep at some suitable spot and send our old driver Ah Kam on to another place to wait for us. We generally aimed to finish our walks at one of the larger villages where there were excellent Chinese restaurants, and there we would have lunch with Ah Kam. 4

Colin died in 1991 in Winchester. Steffi continued living in Winchester until her death in February 2001.

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Hong Kong had made a remarkable recovery from the ravages of the war years, and far more quickly than any other place in the Far East. Its trade was booming and it was an extraordinary contrast to Shanghai, which had been far less damaged during the war. There were, of course, many difficult problems to be overcome, the chief of which was what seemed then to be a prodigious increase in its population. Chinese flocked to the colony and a very large number of wealthy Chinese were able, by means best known to themselves, to transfer their fortunes there from Shanghai and other places. There was not, however, sufficient accommodation for all these arrivals. Hong Kong had been severely damaged during the 1941 campaign and subsequent air raids, but a large proportion of the better type of housing away from the city of Victoria, and particularly on the peak, had been almost entirely destroyed by looters in search of firewood. During the occupation the people of Hong Kong had suffered great hardships. The Japanese effected a considerable reduction in the population, often by the most brutal methods. A favourite method was to ship off boatloads of people to islands and remote stretches on the coast of the mainland, where they were left miserably to starve and die. But even with these reductions, there were perpetual and chronic shortages of every commodity, including firewood. All of the woods which had been carefully established by the forestry department were hacked down, and all woodwork was removed from any deserted house. If you remove all the woodwork from the average house it will collapse, and the peak was littered with houses which looked as if they had been blitzed and had not a square inch of timber remaining. It was difficult to rebuild, and the pressure on the available housing was greatly increased by the many wealthy Chinese, not normally resident in Hong Kong, who came flocking in with bulging pockets. All accommodation was packed, particularly hotels. This was a pity, for Hong Kong had some good hotels. One of them, the Hong Kong Hotel, which on the face of it looked a little old-fashioned, also had quite old-fashioned ideas on the subject of good food and set a

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standard which was probably unsurpassed in Asia. There were several excellent restaurants, large and small, providing good European food. In general, the fleshpots were very full. There were also, of course, many first-class Chinese restaurants but we found them impossibly expensive, and since we had difficulties in making ourselves understood with Peking speech, we seldom went to them. The Cantonese seemed to have a barbarous and reprehensible custom of having food in restaurants served by waitresses whose job it was also to make polite conversation and perform odd chores such as lighting your cigarette. They are perfectly respectable girls, but an unnecessary distraction from the essential business of eating. We did have, however, one favourite little restaurant called the King Fu, run by Shantung Chinese who had been in Vladivostok and spoke Russian. Here we could not only make ourselves understood, but were also able to obtain good northern food at reasonable prices. The King Fu was the scene of one memorable incident. One evening we were visited by a very valued friend. ‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘you will have dinner with me.’ He had several drinks, which was perhaps injudicious since he had eaten nothing since breakfast. We went along to the King Fu, but once our friend had ordered a splendid dinner, he gradually lapsed into a state of coma. I paid for the dinner and then we put our friend into a taxi to send him home, only to find that he was too comatose even to tell us where he lived. We took him to our own flat and put him to bed, but it was really a most unorthodox evening. The drink situation in Hong Kong was also by no means negligible. Almost every imported drink was to be had in abundance. You could get plenty of Scotch whisky, but good Chinese yellow wine was curiously hard to obtain. There was far more in Peking. In Hong Kong the Chinese drank a lot of brandy with their dinners, a practice of which I strongly disapproved. We thoroughly enjoyed the winter. Hedda found much of interest for her photography; being a very quick worker, she turned out hundreds of postcards for sale to a local bookshop, and

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I ensured that the proceeds were suitably invested. I had plenty to do, the work was interesting, and I was able to arrange with the help of the local Volunteer association to reopen the Volunteers’ bar which was just beneath my office and was open during office hours. No one else in Hong Kong had such facilities. Some of the things which I had to deal with were really pathetic. The saddest cases were, I think, those of men who had lost their sight through vitamin deficiency in Japanese POW camps. In certain individuals vitamin deficiency affects the optic nerve, which atrophies and often cannot be restored. I remember one rugged old Scot, a shipbuilder, who had lost the major use of his eyes so that he could not hold his job. His son had been killed in Hong Kong. Much of my work concerned the dependants of Volunteers. I was particularly embarrassed one day to find that some particularly nice children we had been helping were not entitled to any assistance at all. It is difficult to be stony-hearted in such cases, but on the other hand someone has to pay the bill and is entitled to protection from fraud. In general, it seemed to me that the bigger their loss and the more difficult their circumstances, the more fortitude did these widows and other dependants display. Only one lady wept in my office, and I found that it aroused such sharp antagonism within me and so little sympathy that I often wonder whether a tearful woman ever gains very much. The people in real trouble do not cry; or at any rate, not in front of others. One slight complication arose when the dependants of Chinese Volunteers would send me presents, generally immense and highly ornamented cakes and baskets of fruit. They were merely following Chinese custom, and rather than be so rude as to refuse them, I would accept them politely and give them to my Chinese staff. However, I suspect that the Chinese ladies must have taken counsel together, and the last present was one of half a dozen pairs of (at that time costly) nylon stockings, sent not to me but to Hedda. There was not much I could do about that. Shortly before I arrived, a Volunteer Association had been formed largely with the aim of putting forward the claims of

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Volunteers to government. I rather anticipated that the association would spend a large proportion of its time prodding me, but actually I found it to be a most reasonable and helpful organisation and derived much assistance from it. I had deferred for six months, which meant leaving Hong Kong in March just as the weather began to be dull and misty. I was sorry to leave, but I could not remain in the army for ever, even though the job of adjutant had been a congenial one. My successor was appointed and I handed over to him a lot of work remaining to be done, and some glimmering of order in what had been done already. At one time I planned to write for the benefit of my successor a pamphlet entitled The Complete Adjutant’s Guide to Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Government, but a journalist friend warned that it was an axiom of British law that the greater the truth the greater the libel, and I forbore in time. I still think, though, that it would have been a very readable pamphlet. Largely as a result of the excellent work of Mr Rakusen I was offered a job in Hong Kong. If I took my demobilisation there I would be appointed the government information officer. This had some appeal, but I wanted to be demobilised in Britain so that I could see my grandmother (my grandfather had died in 1944) and Nanny. I was told the job could be kept open for me. We were booked to sail on the Ranchi, an old P & O liner which finally left in the middle of March. The ship was very crowded but was well run. The main trouble lay in the shortage of accommodation where a man might have a quiet drink with his wife. We were reduced to various subterfuges, for it was a dry ship and we did not wish to embarrass the ship’s staff in any way. We finally concluded that the only way was to decant our whisky into medicine bottles which we brought up on deck. We then asked the deck steward, an understanding and patriarchal old man, for some ice and water without too much water, and in this way we could have a quiet drink together. This is one of the last references to drink in these pages, and considering how many have gone before I fear that my readers

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may regard me as a dipsomaniac. This is not actually the case, for I altogether lack the constitution. But I certainly regard alcohol as an invention of some importance. At its best, what is drink anyway but a cheering sedative which makes the world seem a little less drab and stupid than it actually is? Follies and good humour released by alcoholic indulgence have provided me with many happy laughs, and I do not decry their source. Drink may be bad for a man, and it sometimes brings out the worst in him, but it also brings out the best. I do not think that you can really feel you know a man until you have seen him in his cups. The effect is often a surprising one. If a man injures his health by drinking, it is regrettable, but he at least does it of his own free will. We seem most of us fated to come to painful and unpleasant ends without having any say in the matter at all. The voyage passed steadily by, the weather grew cool, and it was a foggy spring day in 1947 when we steamed up Southampton Water. I had been away for nearly eight years and was happy to see my own country once more. The ship came slowly alongside in Southampton. ‘Are the people ’ere still civilised?’ cried a wag from the troopdecks. We stayed with my grandmother in Farnham. She was well, but there was, however, no great future for an 83-year-old lady living alone in England while my brothers and I were all living overseas. Her Irish relatives in Australia and New Zealand, with the warm-hearted, close-knit family loyalty of their kind, bade her to come forthwith to New Zealand. What is more, relatives secured her a first-class passage and a cabin to herself on an Orient liner to Sydney, something not easy to come by in 1947. Granny, the daughter of a goldminer and publican from County Cork, journeyed in style back to the lands of her youth, and I have no doubt that she mixed very easily with the other passengers, as she was a gifted conversationalist. She lived happily in Nelson until her death four years later. I looked into the question of employment. The London Zoo would have sent me to Australia to bring back a collection of birds

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and animals to replenish the zoo’s stock, but it wanted me then to take up a post of curator, which I did not want to do. In post-war England there was obviously no future for collecting in the way I had tried before. I called on the Colonial Office to inquire about the post of information officer in Hong Kong which I had been promised. I was surprised to find myself being interviewed by Tubby Salter, one of my old masters at Malvern. He greeted me warmly but told me that the Hong Kong post was going to the information officer from Aden. I could, if I liked, have the Aden job. The proposition did not interest me at all. I was then interviewed for the Colonial Administrative Service, which I had originally applied for in 1937. The interview with a group of courteous Colonial Service veterans went well enough, but it was pointed out that most of the vacancies were in Africa while my preference was for Asia. If I could be offered only a post in Africa, would I take it? I took a deep breath and said no. It was brash, no doubt, but evidently the Colonial Office took pity on me. A few days later I received a telegram offering me a post in Sarawak. It was the best thing that ever happened to me apart from meeting Hedda. Neither of us knew anything about Sarawak. My first reaction was to buy all the books on Borneo held by that best of bookshops, Francis Edwards. They formed the foundation of what was to become a very substantial library. Getting to Sarawak was more difficult that I had expected. Passages were in very short supply. Eventually I was shipped off in the Lycaon, an ancient coal-burning ship of the Blue Funnel Line. The Colonial Office could not immediately provide a passage for Hedda, but Ian’s wife Maria, on a visit to Europe to see her family in Austria, found Hedda a berth on the ship on which she was returning to Singapore, a beautiful modern Danish vessel called the Zelandia. We had only seven passengers on the Lycaon, all ex-servicemen taking up posts overseas. The elderly captain was a crotchety fellow,

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perhaps resentful at being given command of such a floating antique as the Lycaon. He did not care for passengers. One of our number was a man going out to Jedda to work on a water-supply contract. He was a nice fellow but had very little money. He could not afford to buy drinks and would never accept any hospitality that he could not reciprocate. The night before we reached Jedda, my fellow passengers and I gave him a party to which we invited most of the ship’s officers. It was a very jolly occasion and after 10 o’clock we adjourned to the stern so that we would not disturb anyone sleeping in the midships section. The bar did a roaring trade. But the captain did not approve, and next day issued an order rationing each passenger to no more than three small beers a day, a somewhat harsh measure on the Red Sea. It did not, however, have much practical effect. The steward, who had been torpedoed three times during the war, did not like the captain and ignored the edict. I had never come across anything like this before, and discussed the matter with the chief engineer, a grizzled old veteran of his excellent profession. He offered some advice based on a lifetime at sea. ‘The thing to remember,’ he said, ‘is that the captain of this ship can do anything he likes except put you in a family way.’ I had some reservations about the total accuracy of this statement, but no doubt it was generally true. I went ashore in Jedda, a nondescript town, and watched barge-loads of pilgrims landing from ships anchored offshore. One grossly overloaded barge sank in shallow water just short of the jetty. Never have I heard such a stream of vituperation as that directed by the moist pilgrims at the boatman. I marvelled at the window of one shop, certainly not air conditioned, that was piled high with boxes of penicillin all labelled ‘Keep in a cool place’. In Aden I went ashore with a fellow passenger who had been in some posh Indian cavalry regiment. He said he would stand me a good Indian curry lunch. We had great difficulty in finding a restaurant. Despite my misgivings, my host enlisted the

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help of an Arab lad, a most importunate and tiresome urchin. Eventually I boxed his ears and sent him packing. But when we emerged from the very inferior eating house where we had consumed an execrable curry, we were bombarded with rocks by the urchin and his friend. Fortunately no damage was done. The Lycaon broke down off the southern tip of Ceylon and drifted helplessly. The chief had the top of the engine casing removed, the engine was given a few hearty blows with a sledgehammer, and it started up again. The chief told me he had no idea what had caused the stoppage. Old steam engines did this sort of thing. Hedda too had shipboard problems, for the Zelandia caught fire off Genoa. Hedda struggled to her lifeboat station carrying her precious collection of China negatives. Fortunately, the fire was brought under control but the ship was delayed in Genoa for repairs. We had problems communicating. I tried to send Hedda a telegram giving our estimated date of arrival in Penang, adding the information: ‘HAVING A LOUSY TRIP DRINKS RATIONED.’ I had not realised that all telegrams went through the hands of the captain. He refused to send it. I deleted the critical words and substituted ‘HAVING GLORIOUS TRIP WONDERFUL COMPANY’ and he would not send that either. Hedda tried to send me a brief cable to let me know all was well. The wireless operator of the Zelandia suggested the single word Gezundheit (Good cheer). Hedda demurred, pointing out that I did not know German. So she wrote instead: ‘GET SOON TIGHT.’ This too came through the Lycaon’s censorious captain, and the message I received read: ‘GETTING IN SOON.’ I felt ill requited for the many weekend hours in Shanghai trying to sort out the labour problems of Butterfield and Swire, which was also part of the Alfred Hold organisation, the owners of the Lycaon. The British Merchant Marine was obviously going downhill fast. Hedda and I met up in Singapore, staying with Ian and Maria in their comfortable home on Gallop Road. Ian had been covering the horrors of Indian Partition, and it was the last time

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I was to see him. He was a cultivated and gentle man, and no swashbuckler, but had an insatiable curiosity about events in Asia. I would have thought that he had seen enough of war and violence after covering, on behalf of The Times, the campaigns in Malaya, the SouthWest Pacific and Burma, post-war violence in Java and Indo-China, the Malayan Emergency, and the dreadful events of Partition. But when the Korean War broke out he hurried off there, only to meet his death in 1950 in a Jeep that was accidentally destroyed in a friendly minefield. We embarked on an elegant little ship called the Pangkor for the onward journey to Kuching. And so it was that early in the morning of a fine November day Hedda and I found ourselves quietly at anchor off the mouth of the Sarawak River. The next chapter of our lives was about to begin.

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The Bird Fancier: a Journey to Peking: A Journey to Peking

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