The Word Cloud

Chapter 28

Boarding school life

     In a cold frosty December day, a most inhospitable day, in the middle of Yorkshire, a rugby match was being played between two schools. In the scrum, a Chinese boy was pushing with all his might like everyone else. The scrum inevitably collapsed and the home side was penalised by the referee. The mud splattered Sang was playing the left prop for his school’s under sixteen’s rugby match against a visiting team in a small town in Yorkshire. He was a substitute for the injured prop. The match was lost and the winning side was jubilant.  Sang was no longer the puny weedy Chinese boy when he left Hong Kong. He has a grown up substantially but compared with his new contempories he was a head shorter than everyone else.

    Sang had been at this boarding school for over two years and he seemed to have made progress after three years of not making any progress in other schools. In the first year that he was in England, he was in Derby where his mother was running a fish and chip shop. The shop was an old terraced house in the busy suburb of Derby. They shared a back yard with another family. The husband was a miner who Sang later discovered to be a typical brute or tyrant of the house with big curve handle bar moustaches to match his butch image and the wife was a totally submissive little housewife who seemed a very sad woman with flaming ginger hair. If his dinner was not ready when he got home there’d be trouble. The first time Sang beheld him he was awe struck by his image after his work shift; he was totally covered in black dust and his angry beady eyes struck fear into the boy’s heart. There were times when this giant was gentle to his wife and to his son and daughter, but more frequently, he was a brute violently beating up his wife who was half his size. On one occasion, in a dark evening, Sang was making fish cakes in the kitchen when he heard a great deal of noise from his neighbour’s house and the woman ran out of the door half naked, crying and in fear for her life. The brutal husband, also half naked, followed suit and threw a cup and saucer at her. Sang was curious at what was happening outside, so he wiped the misted window pane with his hand to have a closer look. When the enraged brute realised that Sang was at his kitchen window looking at them, he came closer and held his muscular arms up like a gorilla and roared at him causing him great alarm and he shouted for his mother who was at the front of the shop in case the brute should enter.

    The shop’s business was generally not good, not good enough to sustain a family and Lee Sung had to find another job to bulk up the family’s income; he was working in Birmingham. Sang had always thought that the family would be together as it was in Hong Kong. He only saw his father once a month. His sister Mei Mei and her husband were also living at the shop and she was heavily pregnant. Sang went to school in the day time and helped his mother in the evenings peeling potatoes and making sausages or fish cakes. The highest ever taking was thirty pounds, but then, the chips were only two pence a bag; this was before the decimalisation of the currency. The family worked until late at night; the closing time was twelve midnight.

     On Saturdays, Sang usually accompanied his mother to the market where they bought all sorts of groceries like sausage meat for the shop. Sang discovered the difficulty of not being able to communicate when he saw his mother buying their groceries and he was amazed and astounded by her way of communication: She could only talk in broken English and her pronunciation could make a great challenge for people playing charades. She added gestures to her language like displaying her fingers, nodding, swinging her head and holding both her arms out to indicate how long a piece of meat she wanted. Being foreign, neither she nor Sang understood the significance of displaying two fingers and how it can upset the butcher who had a carefully coiffeured curly moustache and a red bow tie, and who later, after being offended consistently by them, took great pains to enlighten them how to display their two fingers correctly.

    ‘Allo!’ Thai once loudly called to attract the attention of the butcher in the market who was already serving another customer. ‘Allo, allo! How matchy (much) dis?’ With the butcher saying words to the effect like, ‘I’ll be with you in a minute, my darling! I’ll finish serving this lady first.’ She did not understand and she would interrupt in her loud voice, ‘allo! allo!’ Still no attention. ‘Allo! Allo! How matchy dis?’ The unhappy butcher must have felt the pressure and came to deal with her quickly. Broken English it may be and other people might laugh at her peculiar way of speaking, especially some Chinese people who had benefitted from education, but it was effective and she got by whereas many of her contempories just relied on their husbands or children to do the talking.

      Having separated from each other for more than four years, Thai had lavished on her son; she took him to departmental stores and bought all sorts of clothes to treat him. On one Saturday, the four of them, mother and son, and the sisters Mei Mei and Mei Kim were at a departmental store looking at the brightly lit goods. He was dazzled by the display of the store. There were little figurines, flower vases and china of all sorts displayed under the bright light and there was not a speck of dust to be seen. He saw some headless manikins which he later had bad dreams about. The family wondered about the store and they came across a newly installed photo booth. They could not resist having their photographs taken and Sang was the first one to enter. When the money was placed into the slot, the excited little boy, who had lost one of his front teeth a day earlier, posed for his photo to be taken. Little did he know that he was about to enter into an ordeal because he had totally forgotten the strong flash that accompanied the photo taking. He was greatly alarmed by the flash which had temporarily blinded both his eyes. The alarmed little boy almost fell from the stool and he quickly staggered out of the booth covering both his eyes in his hands. The photo booth has not finished yet and both his sisters and his mother told him to go back and their excited loud voices made quite a stir attracting numerous shoppers who were amused at the little boy covering both his eyes with his hands. He quickly went back into the booth for his second flash. Again, he came out covering both his blinded eyes. The sisters, now very much amused, made him go back and a group of shoppers had gathered round the booth laughing at the pitiful little boy. The third photo was taken and Sang asked if he could come out. The sisters kept him in and after the fourth flash, he was told to come out. He came out and when his vision had recovered sufficiently he saw about twenty amused shoppers looking at him, laughing at his ordeal. He was embarrassed at the attention he had occasioned and he had learnt that having your photo taken was exciting, but expect to be temporarily blinded.

     Despite being less pecuniarily restricted, the family still spent money frugally; Thai would buy pig tails, liver and hocks and trotters for their consumption and the fish man who delivered the cod fillets to the shop usually gave a few cod heads to the family at no extra cost. The heads were worthless in England, but if it was in Hong Kong, people would pay good money for them. The large eyes and the cheeks, when cooked, were especially delicious! Customers who bought fried chicken portions did not like the wing part because they were too dry; Thai would cut the wings off and save them for their dinner. The family’s wealth slowly but surely increased through their diligence and frugality. By the end of the year, the parents managed to save up for the air fare for their fourth daughter, Mei Hung, to join them.

    The family moved to Hull because through word of mouth, Thai heard of a shop for sale at Hull for four thousand pounds. She begged and borrowed again from friends in order to secure the purchase of this shop. The first week that they were in Hull, they were mystified by a curious bad smell which came and went on its own accord. They looked everywhere in the shop to check where the smell was from but to no avail. They later learnt that the smell accompanied the weather; when the weather was bad, the whole city smelled of bad fish and when the weather cleared the smell would be gone.

      Sang was struggling at school because his English was terrible; the boy just could not grasp the language and as a consequence, his education was compromised. With the new shop drawing in a higher income Thai pulled her strings with her friends and managed to find a boarding school in Leeds for Sang because she believed that was the ultimate thing to do for her son; to secure his education, and being in a boarding school, he would have nobody to speak Chinese to and everything that he spoke or heard would be in English. She would rather that he concentrated on his school career than helping in the shop despite Lee Sung’s objections because he would rather not part with any money if he could help it, after all, education is free here, he reasoned.

    Sunday afternoon, after the church service which he had hated and loathed but nevertheless had to attend in his Sunday best despite not being a Christian, Sang was practicing his pieces on the piano in one of the cubicles because his piano lesson with Mr. Jones was on the next day. He made sure that his scales were impeccable and his pieces on the way to perfection. Mr. Jones was an elderly gentleman and a very effective and respectable teacher; he did not have to shout or raise his voice and Sang was terrified of him and had done his utmost best to practice his pieces. He was genuinely interested in playing the piano, his newly acquired taste. It was because of the terror of his teacher that had pressured him to practice every day, and with this pressure gone when he went to University, he found himself unable to concentrate on his practising.

      When he had finished his practice, and after all the other activities, like playing snooker, table football and table tennis, has been exhausted, there was nothing else to do. He would sit in his common room on the third floor which hardly anybody entered, because there were only a handful of full boarding students, whose fathers were either in the British army or the oil fields in the Middle East. Sang was the only exception because not only was he Chinese, his father was in the fish and chips business! There, in the common room by himself, he would look out the window to the valley below and up the other side to the ‘white house’, so called because this farm house was painted white. The boy would spend hours and hours gazing out the window day time or night, but his gaze was not at what was before him, but at his home village. His mind wondered at what his friends were doing now, what his young lover was doing, did she still remember him like she had promised?  Was his other grandmother still making those walking sticks from the cane plants? How was her migraine? Did the alcohol from those baby mice help?  Was his grandmother still arguing with Wan Ban’s family about the rent for the salted fish shop? Could she insist on them paying up when they would laugh at her in her face knowing that her son was far away and couldn’t care less? They would probably say to her that ‘a coffin isn’t that expensive, why do you want so much money?’ The impudent and ungrateful rats! They were beggars that she had once helped and then, when they had become prosperous, they actually looked down on the one who had benefited them in the past. Was that not ungrateful? There were endless things on his mind that the hours he spent looking out the window to the white house, with his chin resting on his arms on the top of the window, seem like a habit to him. There was also the current situation like how could he do his utmost for his education because his parents were paying for his stay at this school. Constant reminders to do well at school from his parents and his two grandmothers incessantly rang at his ears; ‘if you do well at school, you can be a doctor, or an engineer or a lawyer, all highly paid professions. If you do badly at school, you’ll only be fit for a litter picker with a low salary.’ His parents have always regarded their professions in the food trade as low professions because the work they do is really hard and the long hours they worked can be stressful and they had many repetitive strain injuries from their work.

    There were times when he was so lonely that he could not bear it and he would telephone his busy mother on reverse charges from the coin operated telephone by one of the entrances, to tell her about his loneliness but before he could utter a word about it, the reminders of to do well at school would rain down and he would forget what he was ringing his mother about.

    At weekends, when most of the boarders have returned home, only a handful of full boarding students remained. One night he was all alone in a dormitory of fifty beds. It was very quiet and eerie. The other full boarders were away on a weekend to Aldershot for some adventure and Sang was the only one left in the large dormitory. With no one to talk to he quickly fell asleep, but at midnight he woke up from a bad dream. The boy must have matured ten years in that short term he was at the school for he would have been troubled by such a bad dream previously. He was not; when he realised that it was a dream, he had quickly calmed down and dismissed it. The curtain was half drawn and a beam of moon light shone through the lattice window just beyond his bed. He sat up because he could not sleep. Looking at the bright moon light on the floorboard he mind wondered to the usual places like what his friends were doing, what was she doing, and how his grandmothers were .... He got out of bed to the window to draw the rest of the curtain, but looking outside into the still night with a full moon, he remembered a Chinese poem that he had learnt when he was eight years old at Kwan Ah School in his home village. It was a simple poem by the famous poet and scholar Li Pak who was on his way to take his examination at the capital and he was similarly homesick like Sang was, the poem went like;

     Beyond the bed is the moonlight bright

     On the floor brightly it lights

     Looking up, the full moon I admire

     Looking down, my home folks I endear

He was terribly homesick, but it was not this home, not the home in England; it was the home he remembered in his home village. With no one around to see him he allowed tears to run down his cheeks. Ever since his father had told him ‘tough Hans bleed and not cry,’ he had always restrained his tears even when he felt he was bullied by older boys.

     He was bullied on one occasion but he stood his ground and showed others that he was no push over to be trampled on, and he became one of them. He was knocked out cold on one occasion but it was not bullying; the boys were lining up to go to breakfast and Sang was already in a line when some older heavy weights who were three heads taller than him, came pass. They were boisterous and pushed each other about and the unfortunate little boy was knocked by them and his head was squashed into the wall. He crumpled onto the floor, stone cold like a boxer caught out by a smart blow. Darkness was before him as he was temporarily unconscious like he was asleep; he could hear the laughing and talking, followed by the silence and then the footsteps as the diners walked off to their breakfasts. No one came to help him! In the silence, he felt a sensation on his face and he came round; it was the Prefect called Woodhead who had crouched down and patted his face to wake him up. The little boy slowly stood up, helped by the prefect and they both went to the dining room to join the others.

     The boarding school was a Moravian Church school. The first time Sang came across Christianity was during his naive conversation with his sister Mei Hung one evening at their home in the village. He was extremely naive then but being older and better educated now, he was still puzzled by their strange practices like when they say grace at dinners; he was totally puzzled and confused why they should thank the Good Lord for their dinners when everyone knew that it was the cook who had prepared their dinners which were paid for by their parents and had nothing to do with God? If his father, his own earthly father working at the fish and chips shop, should stop to pay for his stay at the school, would the school think of the Good Lord and allow him to stay? He questioned himself that is there something that everyone knows and not himself? He questioned other stories he came across like Moses seeing a burning bush; could it be that he saw a bush with yellow flowers in full bloom? And his flight from the Egyptians crossing the Red Sea, did he really part the sea water to clear a way for the Jews to escape? But the sea must have been vast? Miles and miles they would have to traverse in the sea bed and Moses must have been totally exhausted holding out the waters on both sides for so long! He thought of his own Chinese believes, like he believed in the various Deities like the Monkey God, the Equal of Heaven, with supernatural powers, so it might just be conceivable that Moses did have such powers to part the waters of the sea.

    Going to church every Sunday to listen to the vicar re-iterating the bible’s stories became such a bore to him that he could have compared himself to the inmates in prison. The boys sat at one side of the church and the girls from the girls’ school sat on the other side and the rest of the congregation were at the back of both sides. During one such service, he nodded off once and apparently snored loudly that he was woken up by the Prefect who later gave him a hundred lines to do that he was not to fall asleep in the service and be an embarrassment to the school.

     The vicar was a friendly old man with a wife and a beautiful daughter who was fancied by all the boys including Sang. Some of the sermons that he preached from the pulpit were heard by Sang about three times a year. The most memorable one he remembered was about two brothers the younger of which demanded his inheritance from the father and he wondered off. Years later he came back a beggar but the father was still happy to receive him and had cooked up a feast to receive him. The older brother was naturally disgruntled and angry and told his father his feelings because he did all the work to sustain his family and not once did the father lavish such an exorbitant feast on him. The sermon was concluded by a quote from the father who said ‘my son was lost to me, and he has returned....’ That was the end of the sermon and Sang thought ‘wow! How exciting!’ This must have been the favourite sermon for the vicar because Sang must have heard it about fifteen to twenty times by the time he left the school. Boring though it was to Sang, there was one occasion that was very interesting and exciting to him and most memorable, especially more so because he was in his puberty: He could not remember what the sermon was about – his English was still poor, but the vicar had shocked the congregation by pulling out from a plastic bag some soft pornographic magazines to show the congregation. This was very exciting to the boys and Sang, sitting at the front row, only a few feet away, had a very good view of the magazines. What the sermon was about he could not remember for it never went into his head but he could vividly remember the gorgeous nude in black suspender belts on the front cover. Her sexy face, her large glorious breasts with pink nipples the size of cup saucers, Sang thought to himself, were what was really worth worshipping! The vicar made a remark that if any of the boys wanted to borrow the magazine ... ‘lead me not into temptation?’ but that was exactly what the vicar was doing! It was extremely tempting but who would have the courage to take up his offer? This sermon was never repeated because the outraged congregation, the stalwart seniors and more righteous ones, had vehemently protested to the vicar.

     It could be supposed that Sang had benefitted from all those Sunday services; he had the patience of a saint: He became unbelievably patient induced by listening for hours of church services and he became extremely tolerant at waiting rooms for the Doctor, or at the dentist’s and everywhere where waiting was concerned, he tolerated to the extreme when others would have long given up or complained.

     His patience was not without end though: He was unjustly punished, in his mind, on one occasion by the Prefect in charge of his dining table when he was sixteen because he was not using the correct table manners expected of high class gentlemen. The snobbish Prefect, a perfect English gentleman with a mushroom haircut, insisted to him the correct way of using his knife and forks, meaning that he was not to turn the fork upside down to use it like a spoon and at the same time using the knife to shove food into it. Sang found it very difficult to use the implements correctly and his mash potatoes would fall onto the plate before he could get it to his mouth. However, he humoured the Prefect and he tried his best to cope and the Prefect was pleased that he obeyed his words and the two became good friends.  However, their friendship did not last long because the evening menu on Thursdays was either chicken supreme with rice or chicken curry with rice which was a great improvement to the normal menu for the whole week. It was looked forward to by all the boarders. The hungry boy relished the dish so much that he wanted to quickly down his plate of food so that he could go for seconds and using the fork ‘correctly’ was hindering his chance of getting seconds. So he reverted to his former bad table manners again and the Prefect was mortally offended by his refusal to obey his orders. Who could blame him? Where good food was concerned and a second slower getting to the queue at the servery as soon as the cook shouted, ‘SECONDS!’ could mean getting no seconds at all.

    His punishment was quod; it did not bother him because it was a detention on Friday after school and he was not in a hurry to go home as he was a full boarder going nowhere. He was made to pick litters around the school. To be punished for so trivial a matter was a silly punishment, he thought; it was more likely that he was punished for disobeying the control freak. Since then neither he nor the Prefect talked to each other and he went on to use his fork as he pleased. The end of the year came and the Prefect never returned. He had often wondered why the stiff upper lipped Prefect insisted on his using the knife and fork correctly. It was not as though he placed his knife into his mouth or he was slurping from his spoon. It was only because he found difficulty gathering his food like the grains of rice into his fork that anyone with a bit of common sense would use the fork like a spoon. Let him try using chop sticks to eat his dinner, Sang thought, would he be so snobbish and stiff upper lipped? Sang could probably invent some funny ways of using the chop sticks correctly and amuse himself at his clumsiness.