Spies Like Us

Chapter 1 An Aussie Firecracker

For three weeks I'd been out walking the crowded streets of Hong Kong looking for my dream job as a foreign correspondent in the Orient. But, despite the large skyblue scrapbook tucked under my arm, nothing.

Zilch.

It was reaching the stage where I was certain most of the four million Chinese in the British Colony recognised me as I lugged the awkward scrapbook, my stories pasted on its brown paper pages, up and down Nathan Road and across and back on the ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island. I remembered how I laughed at my Russian classmate Jim Egoroff's difficulties with English when he arrived in Brisbane in 1950. Fourteen years later, October 1964, I couldn't pronounce even one local word right. Not even the suburb I was living in: "Tsim Sha Tsui".

I was a foreigner myself now.

In Australia I had never doubted that once in Hong Kong I'd get a job. But my confidence in myself had evaporated. Not only couldn't I understand the Chinese language, but I could barely make sense of the English they spoke up here. And they seemed unable to understand me.

Hong Kong, I soon worked out, was a place where everybody spoke English; but nobody understood it.

How could I work here when I couldn't interview the people? This weird city where even the smallest sign mixed English and Chinese: "Sow Mow Ping Central"; "Kai Tak Air Port"; "Kowloon Side". This Colony of neon signs which lit up like a Christmas tree every night: neon Chinese letters from the top of almost every building reflecting off the mile-wide harbour from both Hong Kong and Kowloon sides - so that it was difficult to tell where the advertising reflections ended and reality began.

At least I had a free room. I was living for nothing in my mate Ken Fletcher's room in the Grand Hotel near the harbour on Kowloon Side. I had assumed my standard of living would fall once I reached the poor Far East, but instead it had jumped. Our hotel room had its own bathroom and lavatory inside. It didn't cost Fletch anything either, because he played tennis with the hotel owner's son, Victor Sun.

Shortly after our arrival in HongKong, Victor took us to the pictures to see a brand new James Bond spy film called From Russia With Love. He had to book the seats weeks before we arrived because the Chinese were so mad about James Bond: which I found strange. Why would the Chinese admire a British spy with a licence to kill any foreigner he wanted to?

The theatre was a fair way up Nathan Road in the Mong Kok area, so Victor drove us in the Sun family's large black American Chevrolet, and dropped us off while he went to find a park. The very fact that they owned a car showed the Sun family was rich. Hardly anyone, even the few British, owned cars in Hong Kong. It wasn't worth it because there was nowhere to drive. The whole Colony was less than twenty miles across and, of course, no one was allowed to drive through the Bamboo Curtain into Red China.

In Kowloon we were living on the Chinese mainland next door to 750 million Commos. No wonder my mother, Olive, wanted me to stay home, saying that, at 23, I was much too young to go overseas.

Being fresh out of White Australia, I saw Victor coming up Nathan Road several times before he finally arrived. But Victor didn't laugh at my natural mistake. He said he had the same problem himself when he first went to study engineering at Cornell University in America. "All of the Americans looked the same when I first arrived too," he said. He was right. I started to notice that the hordes of young American servicemen in Hong Kong all had crew-cut fairish hair, check bermuda shorts, small brown eyes, big watches, sunglasses, hairy legs, short sleeves, large cameras sticking out like a black paunch, a gold ring on one finger with a jewel in the middle.

My last interview for a job was with one of the bosses at the South China Morning Post, the English-language morning paper run by the British. I was desperate for work because, the way things were going, I'd be back home before Christmas. I couldn't just live in Ken's hotel room forever.

One of the good things about Hong Kong was that you could get shirts made to fit, something no one did in Australia. Plus they always sewed your initials discreetly onto the shirt pocket. For nothing. "HDL" my shirt said in black on the blue background as I examined myself in the Grand Hotel mirror. I had the initials sewn on the American way as the Chinese tailor, Harry, had suggested: using my middle initial "D" for Duncan, Olive's family name. It was moments like this when I wished I had a leather jacket, but I couldn't afford one yet. For some reason, the hotel mirror distorted my image so that I looked fat, whereas I was, in fact, too thin. Nothing seemed to work quite as well in Hong Kong as it did back home in Australia. But it was unfair to compare this poor Colony with Australia, which everyone knew had one of the two or three highest standards of living in the world.

I knew I was ready to roll when Fletch - lying back on his bed - said: "High Noon in Hong Kong," mimicking the local advertisement at the pictures for a brand of cigarettes: even though we didn't smoke. Ken was a snazzy dresser and was always at me to dress better. He bought his clothes in America when he was there with the Davis Cup team: classy lightweight dacron-and-cotton checked jackets in something called "Scotch pattern". You couldn't get them in Australia. But, even though he could afford it, Ken wouldn't buy a leather jacket because the smell reminded him of his schoolbag.

"Remember to lay it on thick," he said as I left the room, "but don't worry if you miss out. Something will bob up. I'll say three Hail Marys for you."

Above Carnarvon Road, washing hung from bamboo clothes props sticking out from the sides of buildings, the only place the Chinese could dry their clothes since they didn't have backyards. Left into Nathan Road, past Chinese mothers in pyjama pants and tops with babies slung over their backs in hammocks. Around the world-famous Peninsula Hotel to the Star Ferry where huge jelly-bean-shaped double-decker green and white ferries connected the two halves of Hong Kong: Kowloon, where we lived among most of the shops and hotels, and the small Island to the south where most of the offices were.

There was no bridge: the only way across the clear green harbour was by boat.

When Hong Kong Island was founded as a British Colony in 1841 it was described by critics of the decision as "a barren rock". But the British man who claimed it, wrote in reply:

One day from this rock

a million lights shall glow;

And through this harbour 10,000 ships

Go marching to and fro.

I only knew this because, that morning, the South China Morning Post (which I had under my arm tucked inside my blue scrapbook) said so. It was a story announcing that, during 1964, for the first time more than 10,000 ships had visited Hong Kong harbour within one year. And there were certainly more than a million lights. I had thoroughly read the paper that morning because I knew newspaper people love to think everyone reads their paper front to back.

From the lower deck of the ferry the Island rose like the tip of a mountain out of the sea, smothered at sea level by skyscrapers. Residential towers scattered up the sides. Every now and then on the steep hillsides were shanty towns so big that you could see them from Kowloon. Made out of all sorts of rubbish ... tin, cardboard, plastic, canvas ... these crowded illegal towns survived with no running water or sewerage, home to refugees from Communism with nowhere else to go. Every year tens of thousands more Chinese fled to Hong Kong from Red China. It made me realise what a flat empty continent we inhabited in Australia. And how lucky we were to be so far away.

Outside the newspaper office on the footpath, several elderly Chinese women in conical hats tied under the chin sat on their haunches selling mostly Chinese-language papers. I marvelled that they could spend several hours in that position, when I couldn't sit like that for more than a few seconds.

Once inside, my arms involuntarily trembled at the elbows as I was ushered into a large teak-lined office with a ceiling fan where a tall, elderly Englishman stood at the deep window in sunshine so bright he was hard to see. With an upper-crust accent he greeted me without a handshake and called me "Lunn", which was off-putting. By his questions I could see he didn't really like Australians. I couldn't even get him to have a look at my three-inch thick scrapbook.

Every time I opened the scrapbook at a story he moved quickly away from the desk and back to the safety of his window.

Then, suddenly, he said the paper had had a lot of trouble with Australian reporters. Not only did they break contracts and leave Hong Kong, but one Australian had recently bashed up the Post's sub-editors just because they said his story was no good. Worse still, when the executives tried to restrain him, an Australian sub-editor had shown no loyalty to the newspaper at all and had, instead, taken the Australian renegade's side.

His company now had adopted an iron-clad policy of employing no Australian journalists. "Under any circumstances."

I assured him that there were no fights in the sub-editor's room at the Courier-Mail.

He paced around in and out of the light of the window looking at me. Again he refused the offer of my scrapbook, even though I had it opened at my story on the failed world record table tennis attempt in Brisbane: "The half-way mark (ping) to the world record (pong) has been (ping) reached (pong)." It even had a photo of myself playing the man attempting the record.

The Englishman said he would like to give me a job because I seemed a reliable fellow, if I could just somehow disguise my identity from the Editor.

"I'll tell you what," he said at last. "Let's pretend you've never been in here today. You go away, grow a beard, and come back in a month and say that you're a South African, and we'll take you on."

The only chance left now was to try to find an Australian reporter called Steve Dunleavy. His name seemed to crop up whenever I mentioned newspapers in the Colony. Apparently this Dunleavy owned his own small paper, so Victor said he might need some help. But no one seemed to know where he lived. All they could tell me was: he can be found any time "after dark" having a drink somewhere in the strip of nightclubs along Nathan Road near the harbour. The trouble was that at night Nathan Road became the most crowded and, it was said, the most exciting street in the whole of the Orient.

Dunleavy had been a famous reporter in Sydney, where he always, but always, beat rival newspapers - and even sometimes the entire New South Wales Police Force - to front page stories. Or so I was told. If the police refused to make a statement, Dunleavy would get the story anyhow: because he knew how to talk police language, saying to witnesses "Good evening. I'm a Police ... (whisper) reporter". And, when this didn't work, Dunleavy would put on a hat and trench coat, walk over to the youngest policeman at the crime scene and, with the hat brim pulled right down at the front, say authoritatively: "Dunleavy, Paddington, Constable. What's going on here?"

As luck would have it, by the time I got back to the Grand from the Post, Fletch had somehow found out that Dunleavy had taken a job at the "Firecracker Bar": a popular nightclub which overflowed with people of many nationalities every night of the week in the basement of the massive black President Hotel just around the corner in Nathan Road. This seemed strange. The only function a reporter could possibly perform at a nightclub would be public relations.

Or else, maybe he wrote the advertisements?

It was near midnight. The nights were starting to cool off because it was now November. All I knew about Dunleavy was that everyone said: "You'll know him when you see him".

Hong Kong always contained thousands of sailors from the many warships that parked in the harbour, and tonight was no exception. As I approached the Firecracker, thinking about how I would start up a conversation with a stranger, half a dozen English and American sailors staggered around on the wide footpath outside. A British sailor dashed inside the Firecracker and returned wielding a gold chair upholstered with red velvet. He swung the chair wildly at his American opponents, but missed so often that finally he threw it: and missed again but broke the chair. An American picked up the gold remains only to catch his foot in the now mangled frame. Though hardly a blow had landed it was clearly a dangerous situation so, along with many Chinese, I watched from inside one of the numerous shop doorways nearby.

A low, distinctly Australian twang sliced through the Oriental night air:

  "When do Laurel and Hardy arrive mate?"

The deep resonant voice came from an immaculately dressed man who sauntered out of the Firecracker Bar into the midst of the action. He was addressing the sailor who had his foot stuck in the chair. He pulled back the jacket and waistcoat of his tailor-made dark blue suit, and I saw the initials "SD" embroidered on his shirt pocket.

So this was him.

He was handsome, though a bit of a Brylcreem Bodgie. In contrast to his expensive clothes, SD's dark hair was so long on top that it flopped a little at the front and curved up over his collar at the back. He looked about 26, three years older than me. His only imperfection was a slight kink in his hooter: and you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to work out how he must have got that kink.

Dunleavy's words stopped the men, who looked up under the flicking glow of a thousand red, green, and blue neon Chinese advertising signs at the Australian figure with his forefingers in the tiny pockets of his waistcoat - which he had now, for some inexplicable reason, done up: as if it was some sort of battle armour. There he was, bathed in a rainbow of Hong Kong's iridescent surreal lights: a lone dandy who dared insult six professional warriors beneath the drips of air conditioners which muffled the clack-clicking sound of Chinese women playing mahjong.

"What did you say?" challenged a British sailor as all six advanced menacingly towards the confident intruder.

"I said," replied SD very slowly, "when do Laurel and Hardy arrive ... mate?"

Surprised by the exact repetition of the insult, the sailors stopped dead. "Well you're no help Aussie," said an English sailor, "why don't you stop making smart cracks and give us a hand." Dunleavy stepped recklessly into the centre of the melee, touching the right side of his nose with the outside edge of his right thumb, as champion boxers are wont to do, and helped a couple of the men - mostly much bulkier than himself - to their feet.

"Let's face it, none of you could fight your way out of a paper bag," SD said. "Now, matey, you Poms are going to have to pay for the broken chair, which belongs to the bar."

The drunk Americans staggered off while the British sailors pooled resources to pay up. Then Dunleavy disappeared inside, counting the money as he strolled back through the doorway under the pink neon "Firecracker Bar" sign.

Following him, I joined a couple of hundred people sitting in smoky semi-darkness around tables. A Filipino rock band on stage belted out the latest hits; led by a beautiful teenage guitar player with long black hair falling below her waist: almost reaching the bottom of her short, short white dress. All of these bars and nightclubs in Hong Kong had Filipino bands. But there were no strippers, because the British authorities who ruled Hong Kong wouldn't allow it.

For a while I listened to the music, wondering how to approach Steve Dunleavy. A Beatles song took me home. I was a Beatles fan. Not only had I mimed their records in a black wig on stage at Milton Tennis Centre but, six months ago, I had seen them live at Brisbane's Festival Hall. The Beatles were the biggest thing in Australia that winter. It was impossible to get in unless you queued for days. But I was lucky. The manager of Festival Hall, Bert Potts, had nicknamed me "pink cheeks" because of what my mother, Olive, called my rosy cheeks.

"How would you like to see the Beatles, pink cheeks?" Mr Potts asked one night when I was covering the wrestling. He let me, and five of my friends, sit on a cramped ledge and watch the second concert for nix. When Paul sang, the audience of mostly girls went berserk screaming. Every few seconds one would run at the stage pointing at him and calling his name and fainting in the arms of waiting police.

Then I spotted Dunleavy through the thick smoke. He was sitting at a table with several people, including the most alluring girl I had ever seen: a Chinese girl with an hourglass figure in a silver cheongsam which wrapped around her like a butterfly's chrysalis. Newspapers always gave the "vital statistics" in inches of any goodlooking girl who appeared in the paper, and this one looked 36-24-36: which was considered ideal because the hip measurement equalled the bust.

It turned out that Dunleavy didn't write the advertisements for the Firecracker Bar. He was working as a casual throw-er-outer. The people at the bar said bouncer was a job which suited Dunleavy because he was a fantastic fistfighter. They said Dunleavy himself called fighting "going the knuckle".

Watching him move around the nightclub smiling, chatting, amusing, and touching people, I was reminded of my uncle, Cyril Duncan, who Olive said had defeated Aborigines in the ring. Like Uncle Cyril, Dunleavy stood with his weight on one side or the other, always slightly side-on, as if he was about to push a car up a hill. I noticed how the whole time he talked, Dunleavy's eyes never left the object of his attention. Whereas I often wondered what to do with my hands, and clung selfconsciously to drinks, Dunleavy's arms hung confidently beside a strong lean frame: secure in the knowledge that they could be up at the first waver of an eye.

He dressed like I wished I could. Shoulders filled the jacket to the extreme edges so that the suit dropped straight and uncrumpled. A red silk handkerchief, elongated slits on either side of the back of the jacket swinging cape-like. Plus a ring on a little finger. A ring was something we had been taught in Brisbane that only girls wore: except for the Phantom skull rings we sent away for as kids. Now, suddenly, even a ring without a skull looked he-manish.

When the band finally took a break, I walked over to introduce myself. Not that I wanted to, but if I was ever going to get a job overseas it had to be done.

"Er hello, Steve Dunleavy?" I said, noting that he had blue eyes like myself and a dimple in his chin: though his wasn't as pronounced as mine.

"Sorry to butt in on you like this. Look, you don't know me, I'm a friend of Kenny Fletcher the Australian Davis Cup tennis player. Anyway, I'm an Australian reporter, and so far I can't find a job in Hong Kong."

Dunleavy smiled: "I'm a bloody Australian myself, Hughie," and held out a more slender, harder hand than I was expecting. "You're not from Sydney are you."

How could he know?

"Great town Brisbane," he said with a radio announcer's voice. "A big country town growing up frontier-style. Lots of top journos come out of Brisbane to Sydney."

I told him of my four-year cadetship on the Courier-Mail and the unfinished university degree after five years of study at night. I had come to the Orient to write some big stories.

"Getting university degrees in journalism, Hughie, is like getting a university degree in driving racing cars. Some can - some can't. And most of those who can won't take the necessary risks to win," Dunleavy said, eyeing me like a boxer.

I explained that I had a large, blue, linen hardcover scrapbook which contained all my 268 published newspaper stories: even the sports results I had typed out. On the first page was my only by-lined feature (on night sport in Brisbane): plus, the latest entry, my recent eight story coverage of the Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers. "Ah yes, that

wonderful weekend when all the sweethearts and sweet peas, and the guys and the gerberas, gather in Toowoomba: Gateway to the West," he said, and laughed. He even talked like he was writing stories.

I hadn't brought the scrapbook along, because it was too heavy. But I could be back with it in less than ten minutes.

"Journalism isn't about scrapbooks, Hughie," Dunleavy said, now looking a bit irritable. "Scrapbooks are out of date by the time the story's been pasted inside. Scrapbooks are for librarians. As a reporter you're only as good as your next story - not your last."

He generously invited me over to his table.

"Not another bloody Aussie journo," said a blond bloke with a long thin scar down his left cheek. "The Colony is crawling with them these days." His name was John Ball, an Australian journalist himself. According to journalists back home, the only way for an Australian to make a name as a reporter was to work overseas. Since most went to Fleet Street in London, I was surprised to find so many Australian reporters here in Hong Kong.

"So how do you like it?" John Ball asked.

Far more exciting than Brisbane, but I hadn't realised that Hong Kong was actually on the Red China mainland. Using the knowledge gained from four years in the army cadet band at school, I said: "The Red Chinese would only have to march straight in to Hong Kong. Nothing could stop them."

"That's true, Hughie," said Steve. "They say here that one phone call from Chairman Mao would be enough to see the white flag go up."

"That's why Americans get paid danger money here," said John Ball matter-of-factly.

"But it can't be too bad, can it, because Australians and British don't get any extra," said Dunleavy laughing.

They said I could drive out and see the 17-mile border fence between Hong Kong and Red China, about half an hour from the Firecracker Bar.

"I wouldn't mind going in there for a look," I said, trying to impress. "It sounds like a good story."

"Forget it, mate," said Dunleavy. "Australia doesn't recognise Red China exists. We recognise a large island off the coast of China, Formosa, as the real China now that the Communists rule the mainland."

"It's like recognising Tasmania instead of Australia," said John Ball.

When I told them I had just been knocked back at the South China Morning Post, Steve said I was lucky. "That's not a newspaper," he said. "It doesn't reflect what is happening in this great city. The Post's only good for cricket scores and what's happening to Princesses 'back home' in jolly old England. Out here we've got the Americans bombing North Vietnam; the Indonesians going ape in Malaysia; the Red Chinese testing nuclear bombs and threatening the United States and mumbling about the British even being here - and over at the Post all they can think about is how the Chelsea bloody Flower Show will go off next year."

Steve's own paper was called American Tourist. He said shops wanted to reach the American tourists, so he was filling a niche in the market. He wrote it, laid it out, and organised the printing all by himself. Steve knew photos too because, he said, his father was a press photographer in Sydney. If he needed any help on the paper, he called on his old mate here, John Ball. "But I think I can do something for you, Hughie," he said, winking generously with his right eye. "Leave it with me, and drop in again in a fortnight. But please, please, don't bring your bloody scrapbook." And he leapt up to do a circuit of the Firecracker, striding out as if trying to use every muscle in his body.

As I emerged back onto Nathan Road I felt euphoric for the first time since coming to Hong Kong.

Nathan Road was once known as "Nathan's Folly" because it was thought to be far too wide for the tiny Colony. But, now that millions had fled the 1949 Communist takeover of China 15 years ago, Nathan Road was just wide enough for the traffic in a city bursting with refugees and tourists. There were more shops in this one long, wide straight flat road than in the whole of Brisbane put together. There were more jewellery shops in Hong Kong than there were streets in Brisbane. And every jewellery shop, and every bank, had an Indian in a turban with a shotgun standing outside.

All the apartments had steel bars on the windows in various patterns, whereas back home we didn't even lock the back door when we went out. But according to Steve, the biggest danger of all - Red China - was not completely tucked safely away behind the Bamboo Curtain like I thought. The Communist Chinese, or Chicoms to those in the know, owned a skyscraper right smack bang in the centre of Hong Kong. It was their headquarters in the Western world.

This building resembled a fortress, and was said to be full of spies.

Not only was it guarded by thick stone walls and high steel gates, but also by two human-sized stone lions: perpetual sentinels to protect the Chicoms inside from the evil spirits that surrounded them outside in capitalist Hong Kong.