Diary pages from this date

At our Convent: Ma Mere,the Reverend Mother,was French; and the Head Mistress of the school, Ma Soeur Beatrice, was English. Sister Beatrice was severe, and we were rather afraid of her. Most of the nuns were French, with a few Chinese and Portuguese. 

 

My favourite nun was Ma Soeur Alix. She came out from France in 1922, aged about 26, and was teacher of the top class. She was kind and sympathetic, and never lost her temper. If she left the classroom and we took advantage of her absence and began talking, she would come in again smiling, with her hands over her ears, exclaiming in her very French accent "What a cacophony"! In her class, the naughty girls always sat in front and the good girls at the back! I do not know how we learned English from so French a nun, but when I passed my matriculation at the University, I won a Distinction in English. 

 

Sister Alix taught the 4th (top) Class, Sister St. Louis (and later Sister Elizabeth) taught the 3rd Class, Sister St. Leon the 2nd Class, Sister John the 1st Class, and Sister Blandine (and later Sister Lawrence) the Babies' Class. Sister Cecile was the sewing teacher. I cannot remember ever learning anything except cross stitch in red cotton from her! Sister Vincent was the music teacher and there was always the sound of the piano. She used to shout angrily at us from the window of the music room, when our loud voices in the playground disturbed a piano lesson. 

 

The nuns liked to organise entertainments. I can remember "Queen of the Roses", with Audrey and some of the other younger girls as Rose Fairies. On another occasion, I was "Britannia", wearing a helmet. And once there was a grand fancy dress party, when we were all photographed on the school steps, Rosie Xavier and I both dressed as Watteau shepherdesses. 

 

We Church of England girls used sometimes to join the Catholics in the school chapel, with its ornate statues, and the altar decorated with lilies, and the strange aroma of incense. We sang the Lourdes "Ave Maria" and "Heart of Jesus", and were given Jesus pictures by the nuns. On the wall of our class room hung a large picture of St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, our nuns' favourite saint. Occasionally Catholic priests would visit the classrooms. They were French or Italian with huge black beards. The nuns would flutter around them, and we girls would feel nervous. 

 

The playground of the Convent and the stone steps leading up to the school were crowded with pots of flowering plants, marguerites covered with white blooms, and sweet smelling heliotrope, and many others. The Chinese excelled in pot gardening. 

 

From the playground we could see into the cellars. There were cases and cases of wine. The nuns would come into class after tiffin gently breathing whiffs of wine over us. 

 

In the dining room sometimes we had the school tiffin, but usually we brought sandwiches, envying the Chinese girls whose amahs appeared from home with grand hot meals in enamel containers fitted one on top of another. After tiffin we often went out and bought nuts or fruit from the Chinese stalls. 

 

The Convent girls were of many nationalities - English, French, Chinese, Portuguese, Scottish, Siamese, Parsee, Spanish, German, American and Eurasian. 

 

Our best friends among the Chinese were Jean, May and Alma 0 Hoy (they were from Australia), Agnes Pau., Ruby Chue, Frances and Sylvia Heyshing, and Julia Lam. I used to wish that I could draw and paint as well as Julia did. But all the Chinese girls seemed to find it quite easy to produce exquisite flower paintings, whenever the nuns demanded them of us. Agnes Pau was clever and rather serious. She became one of Hong Kong's teachers, and headmistress of a big school. Parrin Ruttonjee, a Parsee of India, loved to read the magazine "Titbits", and used to pass them on to me to enjoy the jokes. She was one of our-cleverest girls, and became a distinguished Hong Kong doctor. 

 

Emily Landolt was partly Swiss and partly Japanese. I liked her for her easygoing, laughing nature. Lily Shearer was partly English and partly Japanese - she was a boarder at the Convent, very gentle and sweet and rather holy - the girls used to say she would become a nun. Yvonne and Cecilia Phalavasu were Siamese; Mary Soriano was Spanish; Mercedes Muller was German; Simone and Marcelle Gain, and their little identical twin sisters, Marie—Louise and Marie-Therese, were French. Rosie Xavier, Ernina Remedios, Leonora Collaco, Marie Nolasco and Lina Silva-Netto were Portuguese, Kathlynne Naylor and Dorothy and Katie Kirschberg were American, and came as boarders from the Philippines. Kathlynne was sophisticated, and I admired her and became her friend, but she hated the Convent and soon left Hong Kong. She used to write to me from California and send me pressed Mariposa lilies and other Californian flowers. Gladys Addison and her sister, half English and half French, came from the romantic Seychelle Islands. 

 

There was a large group of Scottish girls, daughters of employees of the Taikoo Dockyard - among them were, Betty Laing, Jenny Whyte, Jean Foulds, Mamie Wallace and Cathie Ferguson. We called them "The Taikoo Girls". Some of the English girls were Vera Stanley, Joyce and Iris Thornhill, Beatrice Hardwick, Lily and Katie Grimes, Daphne and Patsy Nicol, Irene Deacon, Zena Bersey, Marjorie Hansen (who was partly Danish) and Nancy and Kathleen McEwen (partly Scottish). Marjorie and Nancy were my two best English friends - they joined the Girl Guides with me. Zena was a lively little girl from Cornwall, very pretty with black curly hair, whose father had a fine voice and sang at concerts. Zena herself loved to sing "My beautiful my beautiful" (the Arab's farewell to his steed). Among our other school friends were Gertie and Kathleen Simmons, and Ruby, Rosebud and Vivienne Young, all of whom were exceptionally pretty; and Tootsie and Connie Smith. 

 

Fat cheerful Daphne Nicol got appendicitis and died. We all went to her funeral, and hysterically threw earth on to her coffin. Poor Mrs. Nicol had masses of photographs of Daphne copied and distributed among her school friends.

The  funeral  processions  were  very  dramatic. A  band  came  first,
playing  weird  sad  music,  then  the  coffin,  carried  on  poles  on
men's shoulders,  and  following  it  the  mourners,  all  dressed  in  white
and  sack cloth,  their  heads  covered  in  large  white  hoods. They  cried 
and  wailed at  the  tops  of  their  voices,  and  had  to  be  supported  by
servants,  in  case they  should  collapse. These  people  were  often
professional  mourners  who had  been  hired  by  the  family,  and  the 
more  noise  they  made,  the  more honour  to  the  dead  person.
Then  came  a  large  framed  photograph  of  the deceased,  carried 
on  high  for  all  to  see.    And  finally  all  sorts  ofmarvellous  things 
made  of  white  paper,  carried  on  poles,  animals,  birds and  flowers, 
to  be  burnt  at  the  funeral.

Chinese  graves  were  very  elaborate  and  beautiful. They  were  dotted
about  on  the  slopes  of  hills  in  the  New  Territories,  and  were  made
of carved  stone,  looking  almost  like  wide  chairs  leaning  against  the
hillside  with  arms  enclosing  a  stone  floor.    In  the  centre  of  the
gravestone  was  a  door,  behind  which  was  the  coffin,  and  on  the 
stone floor  in  front  stood  little  vases  with  joss  sticks  in  them.

In  our  early  days  in  Hong  Kong  we  often  saw  women  with  bound 
feet, wearing  tiny  embroidered  shoes.    They  moved  slowly,  leaning 
on  the  arms of  servant  girls,  one  on  each  side,  because  they  could
not  walk  alone.

In  those  days  Chinese  ladies  wore  high  necked  jackets  and  long
skirts,  beautifully  coloured  and  embroidered. On  their  heads  they
wore wide  bands  of  embroidered  silk,  in  front  only,  so  as  not  to 
disturbtheir  buns  and  hairpins  at  the  back.    They  wore  earrings  and  bracelets, of  jade  and  gold. The  gentlemen  wore  jackets  and  long 
gowns,  and  black skullcaps  with  a  red  pompom  on  top.  Both  sexes  I
think  wore  soft  shoes.

By  the  time  I  left  Hong  Kong,  the  women  were  wearing  cheong  sam,
tight  fitting  dresses  with  skirts  split  up  the  sides,  so  attractive  on
slim  Chinese  figures.    The  men  by  then  were  dressed  in  foreign
suits.

In  1922  the  Prince  of  Wales  visited  Hong  Kong  on  his  Far  Eastern
tour.    Never  was  there  such  excitement,  or  tremendous  preparations.
There  were  receptions  and  parades  for  him,  and  firecrackers;  and 
wonderful decorations,  especially  at  night  when  all  the  Royal  Naval  Fleet  in  the Harbour  were  outlined  in  lights  and  buildings  were 
ornamented  with  large crowns  made  of  electric  lights.

The  Girl  Guides  paraded  for  the  Prince  on  Murray  Parade  Ground, 
a proud  occasion  for  usI And  on  another  day  we  went  with  our 
school  to  be inspected  by  the  Prince,  and  the  Governor,  Sir 
Reginald  Stubbs.

Murray  Parade  ground  was  a  great  place  for  parades.    Empire  Day,
May 24th,  was  always  celebrated  with  great  ceremonial,  also  the 
King's  Birthday in  June,  when  the  Governor  inspected  the  Troops, 
the  Navy,  Marines  and Police. He  used  to  look  splendid  in  his  white 
uniform  and  plumed  helmet.

We  grew  up  in  an  atmosphere  of  military  bands  playing  stirring
music and  soldiers  drilling  and  marching. This  was  part  of  a  British  Colony,  and we  were  immensely  proud  of  being  a  small  portion  of 
the  great  British  Empire. England  was  always  called  "Home"  with 
a  capital  "H",  and  people  would  talk of  "going  Home  on  leave".   
Mamma  would  tell  us  nostalgically  of  the beautiful  English  countryside 
with  its  wild  flowers.

But  to  Audrey  and  me,  England  was  just  a  name. Hong  Kong  was
our  home.    Living  among  the  Chinese  as  we  did,  we  felt  an  affinity
with them,  and  admired  their  commonsense,  patience,  courtesy 
and  humour. We  seemed  to  laugh  at  the  same  things.    Our  Amah 
was the  soul  of  kindness and  loyalty,  and  could  never  do  enough  for  our  mother  and  us.

We  grew  up  beside  the  Chinese  noise  and  exuberance,  their  shouting,
chanting,  firecrackers,  music,  the  hawkers  calling  out  their  wares;  the
beggars  calling  "Cumshawl",  the  rickshaw  coolies  -  "Shaw?",  and 
the  chair coolies  -  "chair?".

Perhaps  Mamma  never  quite  got  used  to  all  this. She  was  always 
afraid that  we  might  catch  some  dreadful  disease;  and  it  was 
ages  before  she  would allow  us  to  go  to  the  Chinese  New Year  Fair,
and  then  only  when  we  had promised  to  be  careful  and  not  let 
anyone  bump  into  us!    We  all  had  to  be vaccinated  against  smallpox 
regularly  every  few  years,  and  if  there  was  an epidemic  of  it  we  got  an  extra  vaccination.    Or  if  a  cholera  or  typhoid  or some 
such  epidemic,  we  were  inoculated  against  them.

Police  men  were  much  in  evidence,  most  of  them  Chinese,  or 
large  Sikhs with  turbans  and  black  beards;  the  Superintendents 
and  Inspectors  being British. There  had  to  be  a  good  Police  force  in 
such  a  place  as  Hong  Kong, where  bad  characters  could  come  and 
go  quite  easily  over  the  Border. Still,  there  were  many  robberies, 
and  we  were  careful  to  hold  our  handbags tightly.

Part  of  the  fascination  of  Hong  Kong  lay  in  the  mixture  of  many 
races of  people,  ours  and  the  Chinese,  and  the  Portuguese,  the
Eurasians  and  all the  others.