Love in any Language
The melody of seven beating hearts
In a world too full of predictable phrases, I admire the often-enchanting way people not brought up with the English language speak.
It’s almost like music or poetry to hear words spoken in an unusual order – or hear a different word from the one your mind automatically predicts.
I thought of this when reading the paper this morning: the Reserve Bank had renovated a building in Kirribilli, Sydney.
They explained the $16million decision … “upgrading base building infrastructure that was at end-of-life, improving sustainability features, upgrading fixtures and fittings, and improving its functionality to meet current and future needs”.
Fortunately, people with a non-English speaking background don’t know how to talk like that. They don’t have our ability to slip into sloppy phrases and jargon.
So they go looking for the words to convey the music that lives in their hearts.
Thus they find a finer expression of human emotion.
The Viking
When I returned to Reuters in London after four years in “the Far East” in 1970, my beautiful Norwegian girlfriend and I had nowhere to live.
So Reuters graciously put us up in the Chairman’s London flat for six weeks because the boss was away.
So we were staying in Westminster right near Big Ben and 10 Downing Street.
The building proved so upmarket that three uniformed Doormen greeted us on arrival ... and one of them insisted on carrying our ports in the ancient cage lift.
As we rattled upwards, in a Cockney accent our Doorman said: “We ’ave Royalty staying here Guv’nor: I should say so! Three Earls, a Baron … and two cabinet ministers!”
He turned to my Viking girlfriend: “And don’t you fret Miss, there’d be a Dowager Duchess and two Princesses on your floor.”
The Viking stared at him and said: “We don’t mind. Long as they don’t bother us.”
We had a year in London where my beautiful Viking improved her English by reading the Bazza McKenzie comic strip (written by our own Barry Humphries) in the satirical magazine Private Eye.
As soon as she flew to Brisbane so we could be together again, I took her to the annual inter-state rugby league match at Lang Park for a bit of local culture in the days before State of Origin.
Because New South Wales had been buying our best players, we had been losing every year for more than a decade.
So we paid John Sattler – the biggest, toughest player in Sydney – $50,000 to come to Brisbane to play for us.
The ground was densely packed with both people and anticipation as Sattler ran out onto Lang Park. When the crowd saw those giant legs in the flesh for the first time they went strangely serenely quiet.
Whereupon my Viking pointed at Sattler and announced in surprise: “Look at him! He’s built like a shit brickhouse!”
Those around us laughed, but I didn’t … because she’d actually hit the nail right on the head.
Just by altering one word in Bazza McKenzie’s famous phrase.
The Cossack
I first learned to appreciate the art of saying exactly what’s on your mind when I was 10 and a Russian boy wearing a Russian military uniform – Dimitri Egoroff – landed from out of nowhere in my class, in my Convent, in my suburb of Annerley.
His family in Harbin had fled the communist takeover of China by Chairman Mao.
This Deemah (as we at first called him) never smiled, which emphasised the wide scar down the middle of his nose.
It worried us Convent boys: how did he get that?
He also had huge forearms – like a mud crab.
For his first rugby league match on the Big Boys Playground, Deemah turned up in a Cossack seal-skin cap as headgear … explaining: “My grandmama had of have been a Cossack wrestler!”
Then in class one day our pink-cheeked teenage teacher, Sister Veronica, asked us to each name our favourite animal.
When she got to Deemah he replied “a hippopotamus, Sister”.
Sister asked why?
“Because everybody is scared of him.”
Catholic schoolboys used to fight the State School Kids back in 1951 so, walking home from school one day – and for once feeling invulnerable because Deemah was with me – I called out:
“State School wowsers, we wear trousers on a Sunday morning!”
To my surprise Deemah stopped me.
He said calmly: “Never look for trouble, Lunn … unless you need it.”
Then he added, as if he cared for me: “Stick to the flat and narrow Lunn.”
He was right, of course.
So right, that soon all his classmates rechristened him with the very English name of “Jim”.
Which meant he was now accepted as one of us.
Sitting next to Jim for the next five years in class I started to learn that language comes from the world around you.
I noticed how most of my mother Olive’s sayings involved horses and snakes … because she grew up in the bush behind the Gold Coast at Nerang early in the 20th Century.
“Hughie, don’t stir up more snakes than you can kill,” she would warn; or she’d say “you’ve got more hide than a highwayman’s horse!”
In Brisbane we never came across any wolves, except in nursery rhymes: The Big Bad Wolf; the Wolf in Grandma’s bed; the Wolf in sheep’s clothing; and the importance of keeping the Wolf from your door.
But to Jim Egoroff – and perhaps to all Russians – wolves were a real part of life … like dogs to us.
So Jim had an opposite view of wolves to the one I’d grown up with.
In his mind, the wolf was the hero of any story.
Thus Jim advised me when I was in trouble one day: “Lunn, you have to keep the wolf at the door!”
When he became my closest friend and had rescued me from yet another run-in with the State School Kids, Jim shook his head sadly and warned me: “Lunn … you are a sheep in a wolf’s clothing.”
Decades later when we were in our 40s, Jim explained his lone-operator international lifestyle as a bachelor inventor: “If you are a wolf, Lunn, you have to lead a wolf’s life.”
Cleopatra
In Brisbane in 1964 I was 23 and couldn’t get a girlfriend … even though my mate Fletch had told me to “look for a girl who puts a spring in your step”.
Eventually, Fletch said “Hughie, you’re proving hard to place!”
“I know!” Fletch said. “Let’s go and live in Hong Kong: it’s full of girlfriends.”
So we went.
After 3 days, Ken had a beautiful Burmese girlfriend, but after three months … no girl for me.
Until I walked into an architect’s office to do a story on a new building … and there she was putting a spring in my step!
The architect’s personal assistant looked for all the world like Elizabeth Taylor in the new hit movie Cleopatra … a passionate spectacular where “The Siren of the Nile” falls for Richard Burton in life, and on film!
She was 21. With a voice like a series of little temple bells. Her mother was Portuguese from the nearby exotic island of Macau which had been a Portuguese colony on the shores of China for 400 years.
This beautiful girl with thick black straight hair and fringe asked what an Australian man thought of Hong Kong.
I said I kept getting mixed up in the northern hemisphere: I kept thinking east was west and west was east.
“It’s because all the maps here show Hong Kong Island on top of China … whereas, being south of the mainland, the island should be underneath.”
“No, you are right,” Cleopatra said. “It should be on the bottom … but it isn’t.”
Confused, I asked what she did in her spare time: “Tell fortunes, have fun,” she said.
“You can’t tell the future,” I scoffed, “no one knows the future.”
“No, you can.”
I was having trouble knowing when she was agreeing with me, and when she wasn’t.
Cleopatra read the life line on my palm and predicted I would soon be in great danger.
She looked dangerous to me, so I ventured: “I suppose a girl like you has a boyfriend?”
“No, you are right,” she said. “I’m going out with a doctor.”
I told her of my difficulties now that I had moved out of Ken Fletcher’s free room at the Grand Hotel.
I was setting up house with a flatmate from work – who was also my boss. He’d sent me out to buy a kettle because, being English, he loved a good cup of tea.
The three-storey Communist Chinese store in Nathan Road sold everything in the world, except food, so it was always packed with shoppers. But I couldn’t make the staff understand I wanted to buy a kettle.
Finally, in the crowded shop a helpful assistant began holding up many various items to see if he could find what on earth I was looking for.
Eventually, when he was 20 yards away, he held up a kettle!
At least I knew the word for “Yes” in Cantonese.
“Hi, Hi”, I yelled out enthusiastically across the counters.
All trading in the store stopped: as if someone had just turned off the movie projector.
“Hi, Hi” I called again, determined not to miss out now that my boss’s kettle was almost within my grasp.
The assistant started shouting angrily back at me in Cantonese, and so I yelled “Hi” even louder as I ran towards him and he took off.
All the other shoppers had scattered and were heading for the exits.
I asked Cleopatra if she knew what had happened.
She explained that while “Hi” did indeed mean “Yes”, I was saying it with the wrong tone.
This gave it an entirely different meaning.
What was I yelling out then?
Cleopatra placed her elegant left hand just below her belly, palm down, fingers close together, and whispered across the desk from under her black fringe:
“You were saying … a woman down here.”
She then took my left hand saying she would now read my love line.
“You are going to meet a girl who likes you very much,” she told me.
Where? I asked.
“In Hong Kong,” she said.
When?
“Today,” she replied.
“Who? I asked.
Exasperated, Cleopatra picked up her tiny beaded handbag and said: “Well, come on, let’s go.”
The Professional Liar
When I arrived in Peking on the train from Hong Kong in May 1965, I befriended a large African dressed in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt.
He was playing snooker by himself on the top floor of the only international hotel, so I suggested a friendly game.
“That would be absolutely truly delightful,” he said in suspiciously-perfect Queen’s English. “I have become far too dedicated to seclusion here.”
His voice was deep and the accent baronial.
Even his name sounded as English as you could get: George Kitson Mills.
George was from Jamestown, Accra, in Ghana, so I asked how it was that he spoke such good English.
“I have travelled expensively,” he joked, to show his mastery of the language, “but really Hugo, English is the language spoken in Ghana and taught in schools, since it was a British colony for 90 years.”
Because he had been living in this international hotel for nine months, I knew he must be very, very important. So I asked what his caper was in Peking?
Not that I was expecting a truthful answer.
But his answer was anything but evasive.
“I am nothing but a professional liar,” George replied. “I have come here solely to make things appear as they are not.”
Was he a spy?
“I suppose you could say that my darker purposes are to … eliminate,” George said.
Eliminate what?
“Things,” he said. “Or people, if need be.”
What happened to these people he made disappear?
“Oh, they bob up … later on … somewhere else,” he said, smiling broadly.
As I looked across the snooker table, George picked up two small empty rice bowls and asked if I knew how to solve the world’s food shortage.
I didn’t.
He tipped the empty bowls on their side and sat them down in the middle of the snooker table, where both bowls now overflowed with rice.
George wasn’t a spy.
He was a magician!
A magician being paid by the Red Chinese to teach them the magic tricks that had been taught to him by an English magician.
“These mean fellows drop their sour-eyed disdain when they see my high charms work,” George said.
Even his speech had a musical air of magic about it.
“You see Hugo, they revere incantation in the East. To them, illusion is more Confucian than confusion. Magic is not seen as an insubstantial pageant. Here they believe in spirits, and dead ancestors, and the powers of sorcery.”
When I complained that the splendour of the beautiful mysterious Forbidden City was forbidden to me, a Westerner, George assured me: “My high charms can work for you, too Hugh ... Entrance does oft depend upon enchantment.”
And he took me straight in under the enormous portrait of chairman Mao.
George did complain about one condition of his employment in Peking: “It was made most clear by mine hosts that during this year I must not change eyes with a local woman.”
For my mate George, love was forbidden.
The Go-Between
Covering the Vietnam War in 1967-68, I worked alongside a Vietnamese reporter – Pham Ngoc Dinh – who eventually became my friend for life, and for death.
Dinh had taught himself English from the large dictionary he kept on his desk in the Reuters Saigon office.
Just as the Vietnamese considered themselves victims of colonialism, they viewed Australians as victims also: because we were taken from our homeland and our ancestors to the other side of the world as convicts.
On first meeting an Australian, Dinh would say: What your grand-daddy do? Jail?
He asked this when Melbourne reporter Bruce Pigott arrived in our office.
Bruce moved into our room in the Continental Palace Hotel, joining me and bureau chief Jim Pringle.
We were never all in Saigon at the same time. Someone was always in the office, someone in the field, someone had to be in Danang, someone sleeping…
It was Dinh who seemed to understand Bruce more than any of us perhaps because Bruce took so much interest in the Vietnamese people.
One day Dinh told me that Bruce Pigott was “not long live man”.
“In Vietnam,” Dinh explained, “custom say people like Bruce not living long. Die very young. I know myself that … really, I know Bruce not long live man.”
And he quoted poet Nguyen Du, the Shakespeare of Vietnam:
All things are fixed by Heaven, first and last.
Dinh said he could see this in Bruce’s face.
“He not laughing, not drinking, all the time serious” … and Dinh raced over to check his dictionary for the right word and held it up and pointed saying “mel-an-choly” ... pervasive sadness.
Dinh told me he loved Bruce.
So much so that Dinh agreed to help when Bruce Pigott, 23, fell in love with a young Vietnamese woman, Miss Nga, 21.
Dinh said he first realised Miss Nga was also interested in Bruce when she began asking questions about people from Australia.
Dinh acted as Bruce’s go-between to convince her Confucian family of his sincerity: to allow her to marry an Australian.
“He want take her to Australia teach her Digger customs,” Dinh told the parents.
When Bruce asked Dinh why Miss Nga was so evasive about love and marriage, Dinh cautioned him: “Love cannot to make quick.”
Bruce wanted Miss Nga to wear the traditional Vietnamese costume for women, the áo dài, rather than her usual business suit and he wanted to conduct a traditional courtship, which was unusual in Saigon in the War.
Dinh would stand in the Reuters doorway and watch Miss Nga and Bruce walk off holding hands through the trees in the park opposite saying: “Very nice love of lady and man, true by true, in dark neon light.”
Dinh’s intercession was slowly working.
But then, during the Battle of Saigon soon after the Tet Offensive in 1968, word came that a group of journalists in a Mini-Moke had been ambushed by the Viet Cong.
Bruce Pigott was among them.
No one could get into that battle area where bullets were still flying, so Dinh walked in alone on foot to see if he could help his friend.
The Viet Cong at the scene questioned Dinh about what he was up to, and Dinh reverted to his best peasant persona to allay suspicion.
“I want see dead CIA men,” Dinh said, and so they gave him the nod.
“I put my hand in Bruce’s heart,” Dinh told me while putting his own right hand inside his shirt over his heart, “but nothing, no more. I wanted cry, I must cry, but stop. Stop! Cannot or they will know I love him.”
“In his heart”: so much more real and true than “on his heart”.
Then Dinh broke the news to Miss Nga. He told me later: “she like died lady”.
Dinh showed me an English translation of another poem by Nguyen Du:
One watches things that make one sick at heart.
This is the law: no gain without a loss,
And Heaven hurts fair woman for sheer spite.
My Friend’s Friend
In Hong Kong in the mid-60s my best friend Ken Fletcher befriended a Pakistani family, the Khans.
One of the sons, Dawood Khan, had boarded at Nudgee College in Brisbane, where he played tennis against Ken at St Laurence’s College.
In Hong Kong Dawood introduced Ken to his younger brother Farid Khan, an Olympic hockey-player who was schooled in England.
The three became almost inseparable.
Ken convinced Farid to stop buying opals in Mexico and instead move to Australia and mine the gems at Lightning Ridge and Coober Pedy.
Farid settled in Australia and when Ken moved back to Brisbane in the 1990s, Dawood came to visit.
The two brothers surprised us all at dinner one evening on Park Road, Brisbane, when they questioned why everyone was so thrilled to go see the new hit film Babe.
We couldn’t work out why they were even interested, let alone why it was worthy of comment.
Farid tried to explain: “We cannot understand why you would make a film about a pig?”
Fletch said, “But Farid, it’s not a whacking great big pig … it’s a very cute little pink piggy”.
“But why don’t you make the film about a donkey or a goose or a kangaroo? That would be much better than a pig!”
And Dawood agreed and we all had a great laugh.
That night Farid, also a star tennis and squash player, explained why Australia would never again see an era in tennis like Ken’s in the 1960s.
“In Pakistan, in a village, you see two dogs come out onto the street. They are skinny, they are hungry, they are mean. They growl and meet in the middle of the street and fight for a tiny scrap of food.
“In Australia, I see two dogs, they meet on the street, they have nice round fat bellies and they walk up to each other and they wag their little tails.”
After Ken died, Dawood flew to Brisbane from Hong Kong to visit his grave.
He shed tears at the launch of The Great Fletch.
Farid told me: “I was Ken’s friend. You were his friend … and so we should meet often. Because we can never make this again.”
Ma Chérie
In my 360-page book The Great Fletch I wrote just two lines about Fletch falling in love with a young French woman in 1967.
She was the girl who presented him with a Golden Racquet for winning the Montana-Vermala tennis tournament four years in a row.
The book was written after Ken’s death on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Lourdes February 11, 2006. I wrote, briefly, that the romance went nowhere because Fletch had been warned in no uncertain terms never to have contact with her again.
Five years after the book was published, I received a letter from France.
It began: “In July 1967 I was the girl who gave to Ken the prize of the golden racquet in Montana-Vermala.”
It was her!
Jeannine Fayolle had just read the book and (though not named) recognised herself – and was shocked to discover the devastating reason why Ken had never contacted her again.
Apologising for her imperfect English, Jeannine created some of the most beautiful love literature written in the English language.
She described the first time she saw Ken:
“I knew nothing of him but I was literally subjugated by his beauty, its look, its nature, its charm, by its contagious good mood …”
And she explained her feelings:
“I was crazy about him, about his charisma, about his courage, about its humour, about its kindness, about his strength and his sweetness, all that I had felt inside him and I love him profoundly.”
[Jeannine featured in our January 12 story The Girl with the Golden Racquet]
Yes Peter, Jim just has to change one of our well known phrases slightly to have a great effect.
Hugh
Thanks Hugh! I had of have really enjoyed reading each of these stories. Jim's priceless advice to "stick to the flat and narrow" hopefully came in handy at times. Loved your mother's saying, "more hide than a highway man's horse"