Golden Boy by Martin Booth Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t have to drink it and I’ll get you that lemonade.’
    He was not to know it but that first day in Hong Kong, he started me on a lifelong addiction as effectively as if he had been peddling dope.
    The same thing happened when we came to order our meal. To be on the safe side, I asked for an egg and cress salad. What appeared before me was a salad with, arranged around it, some bizarre, pink, curled objects with long feelers, a battery of legs and
black shoe-button eyes. Each of these weird creatures was about four inches long.
    â€˜Prawns,’ the officer said, leaning across the table to me in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Have you ever eaten crab?’
    I nodded, a little overwhelmed at his paying me so much attention, not to mention his forthcoming and amicable manner: to him I was not a child so much as an adult-in-training. My father certainly never treated me in such a fashion.
    â€˜These are first cousins to the crab,’ the officer went on. ‘Much nicer and without the stringy bits and chips of shell.’ He picked one up and deftly stripped off its carapace with his thumbnail, dipping it in a ramekin of mayonnaise and holding it out to me. I bit it in half and another addiction was given its first rush. He then showed me how to shell one, rinsed his fingers in a bowl of warm water with a segment of lime floating in it and turned his attention back towards my parents.
    At the end of the meal, which was punctuated by steam locomotives periodically hauling trains along a railway track not thirty feet from the Nissen hut, the officer shook my hand.
    â€˜A word of advice, my lad,’ he said. ‘So long as you are in Hong Kong, whenever someone offers you something to eat, accept it. That’s being polite. If you don’t find it to your fancy, don’t have any more. But,’ he looked me straight in the eye, ‘always try it. No matter what. Besides,’ he went on, ‘Hong Kong is the best place in the world to eat. Promise?’
    My mother listened to this counsel with an ill-suppressed look of maternal anxiety but she did not protest: assuming the officer to be superior to my father, she was perhaps afraid to speak out for fear of disregarding naval protocol. I never knew the officer’s name, nor ever saw him again, but I was never to break my promise.
    As dusk fell, the street below my balcony at the Grand Hotel
underwent a remarkable transformation. Drab hoardings and shop signs erupted in numerous shades of neon colour. Peering over the balcony was like looking down on a fairground: even the lights of the circus or the seaside funfair in Southsea could not compare. There, the lighting had been provided by ordinary light bulbs. These were fashioned out of thin neon tubes shaped into Chinese characters, English letters, watches, diamonds, suit jackets, cameras and even animals. Just down the road was a restaurant bearing a red and yellow dragon ten feet high. The illuminated words were strange, too: Rolex, Chan, Leica, Fung, Choi, Tuk …
    That evening, my parents were invited to a welcoming cocktail party and I was left in the care of the hotel child-minding service, which consisted of a middle-aged Chinese woman with her black oiled hair severely scraped into a tight bun. I was introduced to her by my mother.
    â€˜This is Ah Choo,’ she said.
    I collapsed into paroxysms of laughter which were promptly silenced by a stern maternal grimace.
    â€˜Ah Choo is the hotel baby amah,’ my mother went on.
    â€˜What’s an amah?’ I enquired to defuse the situation, ignoring the deprecatory implication that I was a baby.
    â€˜A female servant,’ my mother replied, ‘and you’ll do exactly as she tells you. Exactly!’ She turned to the amah standing in the door. ‘Ah Choo, this is my son, Martin.’
    â€˜Huwwo, Mahtung,’ the amah replied, then, looking at my mother, said, ‘You can go, missee, I look-see