Light and Shadow Updated Edition by Mark Colvin

Author:Mark Colvin [Colvin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780522872590
Google: MNtOtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2017-10-30T05:50:38+00:00

Chapter 16

Foreign Devil

MY ROUTE TO Ulan Bator was not the most direct or obvious one, which would have been through Moscow. Ten months before, Britain had expelled ninety diplomats for spying, and UK–Soviet relations were at one of their many lows: going through the Soviet capital was not considered a safe option. The way in was therefore through China. I flew to Hong Kong, was met at the airport by a junior Foreign Office official, spent a night in a hotel, and was taken to the station for the train journey to what we now know as Guangzhou but was then, in its much less expanded form, called Canton.

The first part of the trip—to the border of communist China—was short and uneventful. My long hair, fair skin, height (192 centimetres) and King’s Road–fashionable wide-lapelled lightweight suit had drawn no particular interest in British-ruled Hong Kong, where gwai lo (Western ghosts/foreign devils) were commonplace. On the mainland, though, I was soon going to experience what it was like to be utterly foreign—an object of scorn, curiosity, even disbelief. But first I had to get across the frontier. The Hong Kong train stopped there, and all the passengers had to get off. I was faced with a no-man’s-land—from memory about 200 metres—across which I had to lug my suitcases.

Since I had brought my Oxford set-list summer reading, including Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, half of Dickens, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and a few other massive tomes, and since there were then no wheeled suitcases on the market, this was no mean feat. In fact, I recall lugging one bag 20 or 30 metres, then going back for the next, repeatedly, until I reached the Chinese Customs shed on the other side. Four blank-faced People’s Liberation Army soldiers, automatic rifles slung forward for easy use, if necessary, watched this spectacle without apparent emotion: they may for all I know have been trying to conceal their contempt or stifle their laughter at this gangling, decadent, imperialist running-dog. Inside the shed, there was at least a trolley, and I endured the thorough rifling of my cases before boarding the train to Canton.

Here it was that I first encountered the two middle-aged Queen’s Messengers—special diplomatic couriers—who were to be my travelling companions all the way to Ulan Bator. My diary of the trip is long-lost, so I regret that I can no longer remember their names, but I believe one was a retired colonel, and the other a former Colonial Special Branch officer. Both wore the official Queen’s Messenger’s tie, carrying the service’s symbol: the silver greyhound. Both carried red diplomatic passports, and told me that they always had several of these on the go, though not on their persons: usually two or three were in various foreign embassies in London, waiting for new sets of visas. They were stolid, brave men, in a service where those qualities were needed. Their job was to carry the sacrosanct, heavily sealed diplomatic bags, big off-white canvas

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