Of late, I have been awash with nostalgia; reminiscing a great deal about my school days, teenage friendships, first crushes and the kaleidoscopic life that I was lucky enough to live in Hong Kong in the 1990s. It was a magical period with the flamboyant arrival of Canto-pop, trailblazing action films that garnered international attention, and the last decade of British colonial rule in Hong Kong.
Perhaps this recent reminiscence was brought about my school, Island School‘s much-awaited (and much-publicised) return to campus after extensive renovations. Or maybe it’s because I have been chatting with my aforementioned friends from back then, about the fact that next year will be the 30th anniversary of our GCSE examinations. Whatever it is, the memories have come flooding back. Some make me smile, others spark bittersweet wistfulness the way only adolescent memories can. One in particular however, makes me laugh until my sides ache and tears roll down my cheeks. Even now, after all these years. Every single time. It is easy for me to revisit the incident as often as I like because it is what inspired chapter eight of my first book, Running on Full.
So even though I was planning to write a whole post about it, I have decided to just share the chapter here, word for word. Although, any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental. 😉
The Camp Of Sin
The rumour doing the rounds was that the prefects were having a party. We weren’t presumptuous enough to think we’d be invited but we wanted to have one of our own. Unfortunately no one thought a single-sex party was any fun. An hour after the barbecue, we were reluctantly herded into our respective dormitories. Vicky Lester, the prefect who made all the boys drool, actually locked us in. Like cattle. They certainly didn’t want us to see whatever they were going to get up to.
We were in Lantau – Hong Kong’s version of paradise island. Of the about 230 islands officially belonging to the territory of Hong Kong, Lantau is the largest, bigger than even Hong Kong itself. And it’s virtually untouched. At least it was back then.
A hundred and eighty fourteen-year-olds were in Lantau for a week. Every academic year there would be one week of camping, and an entire batch of students would disappear off into the hills, islands or rural mainland territories surrounding Hong Kong.
All six sections of Third and Fourth Form – Da Vinci, Einstein, Fleming, Nansen, Rutherford and Wilberforce – had braved an eventful two-hour steamboat ride from Hong Kong to Lantau Island. We were all very excited, me most of all, because until then my only exposure to camping had been storybooks. With great fanfare we had boarded the steamer, and looked out into the open ocean from the wide deck. There was cake and biscuits and iced tea by the gallon, and as adolescents are wont to do, we stuffed ourselves silly, singing, chattering and laughing all the while.
And then someone mentioned the word seasickness. It first came from the far side of the deck, where the Einstein bunch was standing. A girl with a long, blond ponytail was doubled up over the railing, presumably throwing up.
‘Seasickness . . . ’ the whispers started.
Until then, no one had noticed the steamer’s movement, but suddenly all of us felt each wave hit like a tsunami. Panic spreads fast, and the epidemic had already struck. Within minutes, everyone knew just how much everyone else had had for lunch. The food certainly wasn’t to blame – the teachers and prefects had nibbled on the same refreshments and they felt perfectly fine. Only the younger lot were affected, which would have been quite acceptable, except that about a hundred and twenty of us were being sick simultaneously. The self-assured teachers and prefects were suddenly at a total loss for what to do, as more of us succumbed to the contagion.
Only one teacher went about diligently mopping up, picking up students and planting them on the chairs inside, in the shaded cabin. Like a messiah, he handed out cups of cold water and comforted those who had nearly passed out. He was the Honourable Mister Temp, our Religious Education teacher.
We all loved him, even before his healing touch aboard the Lantau-bound steamer. The subject he taught did not exactly give Sex Education a run for its money on the popularity charts, but Mr Temp was always warm, gentle and so terribly earnest. We never had the heart to let on that we were not quite as pious as him, and yawns were always respectfully stifled in his class. Of course, there was the odd Religious Education class that inspired interest. Like the one on Hindu Mythology, where everyone was so stunned to learn that a particular Hindu god had an elephant’s head that they all turned to look at me in wonder as though I had one too.
‘He’s going to be my favourite god from now on,’ Emmanuelle Gough had whispered to me after that. ‘I think he’s so cool.’
And so, because of the godsend called Mr Temp, we did survive that trip to Lantau and arrived at Silvermine Bay, where the century-old Po Lin monastery beckoned. The monastery was breathtakingly beautiful – lush vegetation, fishponds, and fountains and hills rising majestically in the background. On the highest peak was a grand copper statue of the Tian Tian Buddha, so gigantic that it was clearly visible from miles out at sea. It is said to weigh 250 tons – the biggest Buddha statue in Asia.
First on the agenda was the camp itself, a short bus-ride away from Po Lin. And that was a legend in itself. The corridors were clean, but in a state of disrepair, some of the windowpanes were broken and the beds were flimsy iron cots befitting a prison cell. There were shrieks of dismay all around me. I tried to put on an aptly disgusted expression and blend in, but in reality I wasn’t all that appalled. It was nothing I had not seen before in India, but that of course I couldn’t broadcast. So I frowned harder and made some more disgruntled noises.
The best was yet to come though. Most of us were desperate for the bathroom and when there was a mass movement in that direction, nobody was prepared for the sight that followed.
‘There are no toilets!’ Allison Courtney came out screaming, her emerald eyes wide. ‘There are just holes in the ground!’
Gasps and exclamations of disbelief were followed by many personal inspections, all with the same result. I had a sneaky feeling that I wasn’t going to find it all that unfamiliar. Cautiously I ventured up to one cubicle, fervently hoping that it would be some grotesque, archaic arrangement and not what we call the good old ‘Indian toilet.’
But the good old Indian toilet it was.
‘And there’s no toilet paper either!’ Someone wailed. I think a couple of the girls were actually sniffling. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘Maybe the Chinese drip dry,’ some Smart Alec noted.
There were more shocks in store, foremost among them the fact that the boys and girls would be staying far apart. Separate dormitories were understood, but what no one was prepared for was that the boy’s quarters were more than a kilometre up the hill.
Great moans of disappointment, predominantly emanating from the girls. We were of the age when girls are interested solely in boys and nothing else. The boys were struggling with hormones too, but sport was their No.1 interest and they weren’t old enough to start thinking of girls as sport, just yet. I was an anomaly because I was as interested in sport as I was in boys.
Dinner consisted of fried rice with frog meat, and the next day it was ‘choi sam’ with what I was told was garden snake. At first I thought the man at the canteen was pulling a fast one on us, but when I noticed my classmates accept the frog meat quite solemnly, I speechlessly took my tray. And then everyone began to eat with chopsticks. I was stunned – all these Caucasian kids chomping away happily with chopsticks! Didn’t you need special DNA to do that? I was definitely going to need something special, but for the first day I settled on my reliable Indian hand, as there was nothing else available. Decorum be damned. The next day Jonathon Chambers taught me how to use chopsticks and I was surprised at how quickly I caught on. It wasn’t genetics after all.
Our days were packed tight with organised activities like canoeing, basketball, rock-climbing or trekking, observed by the hawkeyed Sixth Form prefects. There were also nature workshops, geography classes and Orientation – essentially an exercise in map reading. Mr Temp would then take an afternoon class on Buddhism and East Asian philosophy.
But the evenings were free for us to do whatever we wanted. One Wednesday evening, a small group of us was strolling along Mui Wo Chung Hau Street and we sauntered into a nearby village market. There was a small stall that rented out bicycles. I was thrilled. I was as familiar with rented bicycles as my peers were with rock climbing. I suggested that we all take one and go ‘explore’ the countryside. None of the girls seemed interested other than Porsche, and some of them even admitted to not knowing how to ride one. I immediately decided to be a hero and impress everyone, particularly Zack Corrington.
Picking up from where I had left off at the government colony back in India, I pompously asked the stall owner for an adult-sized men’s cycle, much to his astonishment.
‘Can you really ride that?’ Zack asked me, his hazel eyes shining with sheer respect.
‘Of course,’ I said with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulder and proceeded to step onto a low stone bench, and then atop the cycle. Coolly I rode off, whistling for effect.
I had not counted on two things.
One, it had been almost eighteen months since I last rode a cycle, back in India.
Two, cycling on sand was something else altogether.
Less than five metres away from my friends, I came crashing back down to earth. I was so embarrassed I wanted to dig myself into the sand. Zack came running to my side.
‘Are you hurt?’ he said, concerned and lifted the enormous cycle off me. I shrugged and tried to stand up.
‘I don’t believe this!’ I wailed. ‘I really can ride a bike that size,’ I tried to explain to everyone so they wouldn’t think of me as asinine and boastful. But it only made me sound more idiotic.
Zack helped me limp back to the camp, where I got first aid for a pretty nasty gash on my knee and then we were off on the bikes once again. This time though, I chose one with more appropriate dimensions.
That was the night the prefects decided to have some fun. The teachers were invited of course. We couldn’t care less about the stupid party. We had enough problems of our own to contend with, the epicentre of which was being locked in the dorm. Michelle Porter was in distress because she couldn’t be with her latest boyfriend, Pete Howells. Alice Choi was wrapped around a pillow, theatrically announcing that it was a substitute for Justin Muller. The tall, auburn-haired Vera Locke was dying to see what the boys looked like in their pyjamas. Everyone was miserable. By the time the complaints had turned into a cacophony of moans and groans, I just couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘Oh God! Stop it all of you,’ I snapped, generating sudden silence. ‘If we can’t have any fun without them, then let’s go join them!’
‘How,’ wailed Michelle. ‘That stupid cow Vicky locked us in.’
Melissa Lowness with the half-gold, half-brown hair had been sitting quietly on her bunk, painting her nails red all this while and looking bored. ‘You know, if you’re all so desperate, just jump out the bloody window,’ she said in her clipped Latin American accent. ‘What’s the big deal?’
‘You know she’s right!’ I exclaimed. ‘The windows are open, you morons. We can all just go!’
Utter excitement. Everyone was scrambling up onto the windowsill to see how far we would have to jump. The windows were pretty high in the double-vaulted dormitory, but the fall couldn’t have been more than about eight feet. It looked quite entirely possible. The only problem that I saw was that I saw nothing. It was pitch black outside, not a single lamp anywhere on the vast darkness of hillside that stretched behind the building. The boys’ dorms were somewhere up that hill.
‘Okay, who wants to go?’ I asked, turning around, perched atop the windowsill. There were a few unsure murmurs and a few emphatic affirmatives.
‘You guys are crazy,’ said Avery Merchant, her wire-rimmed glasses perched over her hooked Parsi nose. ‘Do you have any clue how much trouble you’ll get into?’
There were many who agreed with her and in the end only about fifteen of us had mustered up the nerve. Or were as desperate, if you subscribed to Melissa’s theory. But Mel herself wasn’t quite so dour. Despite her sarcastic comment, which had initiated the revolution, she was game for the adventure. Tuck was packed into a bed-sheet, torches were switched on and one by one, we started jumping off the window and out into freedom.
I led at the front with the most powerful torch in my hand, while Mel guarded the back end of the queue. The delicate darlings were sandwiched in the middle. Step by step we inched our way up the hill. Slipping, sliding, wavering torch beams guiding the way. Thankfully, no one saw us but should they have, what a sight we would have been – a single file of fourteen-year-old girls clothed in an assortment of nighties and pyjamas, scrambling up a hill on all fours, in the dead of the night and in the middle of nowhere.
Today I wonder if I’d have the courage. Or for that matter, be as desperate.
By a miracle of fortune we actually found the boys’ dorms They were clearly fast asleep as the lights were out and there wasn’t a sound emanating from inside. Evidently, they hadn’t been pining for us the way we had been. What a pity.
Melissa decided to get on with it and pounded on the door. A medley of noises erupted. Amid shrieks, questions, bellows and confusion, rugby hero Victor Rose opened the door. In boxers. Vera gasped.
‘Hi Vicks,’ we sang in chorus even as he rubbed his eyes, literally. And then he broke out into his trademark fanged smile.
‘By Joe! What a surprise,’ he grinned, totally oblivious of his semi-clad state. ‘C’mon in, girls!’
The midnight procession marched into the room as lights were switched on, quilts were quickly grabbed, and exclamations of all sorts rang around the hall. Not all the boys were pleased with the unexpected arrivals. Especially the ones who preferred to sleep in the buff. Allison Courtney’s twin, Stephen, for example, flung his shoes at us. But he was heavily outnumbered.
‘Am I dreaming or has God answered my prayers?’ Chris Cuthbert jested from his overhead bunk.
I was scanning the room for Zack and just as I spotted him, he smiled at me, perched atop a bunk a few beds away.
‘I hope you brought Celina along,’ he shouted out with a hopeful grin. Just Wonderful. I was not going to ruin my midnight party playing audience to Zack and his love sagas.
‘You know this is not her kind of ‘thing’,’ I said of the high-and-mighty Miss Celina Kay Ross, his latest love interest, as I walked up to him and he nodded in resigned comprehension. He swung himself off his bed and we joined the large group in the centre even as a few of the boys went to call others from the adjacent dorms We ate, played Spin The Bottle and Truth Or Dare halfway into the night. A few couples sank into dark corners and got up to their usual business, while the rest of us who weren’t quite so lucky made up for it with obscene jokes.
When it was almost one in the morning, most of the girls got up to leave. But I was having too much fun. And so were Vera, Melissa, Emma, Alice and Sonia Sheikh, apparently. The six of us decided to stay on and play a few more rounds of Truth Or Dare. Every now and then Chris would make us jump out of our skins by announcing that he saw some teacher or the other outside the window. To punish him we gave him a particularly difficult dare when it was his turn. He had to stuff his vest with tissue to look a bit like Juliet, and then step out and cry, ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ to the quiet stillness outside. He accepted the challenge with gusto.
But no sooner had he stepped out than he came back running, yelling, ‘Mr Temp’s here! Mr Temp’s coming!’
We all rolled our eyes and cursed him for trying yet another stupid stunt. But he didn’t stop.
‘I’m serious, he’s right here!’ He yelled, his face white. ‘Get out of here!’
By the time it dawned upon us that he might be telling the truth, it was almost too late. We could actually hear the footsteps outside.
‘Quick!’ Mel yelled. ‘Get under the beds.’
In a flash, all six of us darted under one bed each, even as somebody switched off the lights. Just as Mr Temp swung the door open, each and every boy had dived back into bed, not necessarily his own.
Pin-drop silence as Mr Temp’s buffed shoes slowly came into view, moonlight shining in from the outside.
‘You boys are still awake?’ he asked slowly, and I held my breath. ‘I saw the lights on just a few seconds ago. C’mon boys, own up! I want to know who switched off the lights.’
Not a sound. No reply from the boys. And certainly not from the girls. Somebody pretended to snore. Quite rightly assuming that no one was going to ‘own up’, Mr Temp walked across to the switches and the room flooded with light. My heart jumped. Thankfully, we were not in Mr Temp’s field of vision.
‘What’s going on, Rob? Daniel?’ he asked the boys on the nearest bed. ‘Why are you both on the same bed?’ I had to stifle a giggle. Vera winked at me from under their bed.
‘Nothing, Mr Temp, we were chatting, that’s all,’ Rob said with a very straight face.
‘Alright then, it’s not like I’m going to get angry. I just want to know who switched off the lights just now.’
That got the boys breathing again and a lot of voices started talking to Mr Temp at the same time. He really didn’t seem angry at all. Under the bed directly opposite me, I could see Emma smothering herself to keep from laughing. We were going to get away with it after all.
‘What’s that!’ Mr Temp’s baritone reverberated suddenly and we all froze again. I saw his shoes coming down the dorm, in our direction. The shoes stopped short, just two beds away from me. Then I saw hands come down and pick something up; it looked like some kind of rope emanating from under the bed sheet. His hand pulled back up, and with it came up the head that was attached to the rope. Sonia Sheikh’s waist-length permed hair had given her away!
As Sonia would later tell us, Mr Temp looked like his eyes were going to pop out of his head.
‘Sonia Sheikh! What are you doing here?’ We had never heard Mr Temp shout ever before. But at that moment, he wasn’t just shouting, he was bellowing with rage. ‘This is shameful, shameful! What would your parents think should I tell them I found you in the boys’ dorm at two in the morning?’
‘I’m not the only one,’ she replied meekly, a tone entirely unbecoming of her sharp American twang. After a few seconds of silence, Mr Temp said in a somewhat more controlled voice, ‘What do you mean?’
Before Sonia could answer, Mel did a most admirable thing and slipped out from under Chris’ bed. Chris sat there looking highly uncomfortable, with the tissues still rendering a 34B bust.
‘She means there are more of us here and it’s no big deal,’ Mel said, looking Mr Temp straight in the eye. That was our cue. One by one, each one of us crept out from under the beds and stood in a straight line in front of Mr Temp. Mel, Emma and Alice looked very defiant, but I was mortified. Mr Temp was speechless. Eventually he found his tongue.
‘I am so shocked and disappointed that despite everything that I have taught you, you girls have behaved in this disgraceful manner. Shame on you.’
Mel began to giggle and I was truly horrified. It was one thing to have some sneaky fun, but something else altogether to totally disrespect a teacher.
‘I’m too angry to even think right now,’ he said, his lips actually quivering in fury. All the boys were silent spectators by now. ‘Get back to your dorms right now.’
When he said ‘tomorrow morning I will inform your parents and then hand out an appropriate punishment,’ I instantly wished he would hand out capital punishment. Anything would be better than facing the wrath of my intensely moralistic Indian mother in her Kali maata avatar. Silently we trooped back down the hill, in exactly the opposite mood to the one we had come up in.
I lay awake half the night, dreading the consequences. But the call was never made. In fact, the next morning Mr Temp was a changed man, more like the Mr Temp we all knew and loved. He wasn’t quite so furious anymore, but of course, we still had to be punished. The six offenders were made to wash the dishes of the entire camp, after breakfast. Our sinful deeds were declared to everyone and once the tables were cleared, we got working on the dirty plates – all hundred and eighty of them. If you count the teachers and the prefects, it was a good two hundred. Mel and Alice felt humiliated, but the rest of us didn’t mind in the least bit. In fact, as she was handing her plate to us, Rutherford Form Master Ms Pierre even winked at us as if to say ‘hope you had a good time while you were at it.’
Later that day we found out just why Mr Temp had been in so black a mood the night before. Apparently, a couple of tipsy prefects had stumbled onto Mr Chan and Miss Hammond in the latter’s room and well, the two had not exactly been playing scrabble. In Mr Temp’s book, students were not supposed to be up to such activities, let alone teachers. So, Mr Temp had stormed out of the party and gone to check on the boys instead. Only to walk into us. No wonder the poor devout man lost his head. And I bet he still remembers the Camp of Sin to this day and shakes his head in dismay the way only Mr Temp can.