All this heat… lying on bed (no longer in bed) gently sweating into the sheets, staring at the ceiling wishing there was a fan twirling the air around the room… god it’s hot. How does it feel hotter when the sun goes down? My house, ancient, wasn’t built in an era when it hit 35-degrees for weeks on end. As an old butchers, the meat hooks and bars for hanging giant carcasses off (nice) do nothing to keep the rooms cool. So I lie on bed gently sweating into the sheets.
The lack of a ceiling fan reminds me of a time in my life when I lived in a house that did have ceiling fans… over in Seikong - Hong Kong mainland - when Dad was posted there with the army in the 80s. I was 7-8 years old and we lived in a jungly army bungalow enclave on the side of a hill, mosquito screens on all the windows and large clunking ceiling fans swirling muggy air around quite a dark house. I remember my bedroom was a sort of lean-to-add-on to the side of my brothers room, and in it I had a tiny little cassette player where I played, continuously, a tape of Beatles music. Can’t buy me love. I also had a collection of Cindy dolls. (Note, not Barbies, which was always the aspiration.) They had shiny dresses, plastic shoes, handbags that didn’t open, hair that could melt if left too long in the sun, disproportionately long skinny limbs… and a male version - who’s name I don’t even know - of which I had 1 doll - a bit puny and underwhelming in equally shiny clothing but with helmet-hair rather than ‘real’ locks. My brothers had some kind of male doll thing too which had a more army-like appearance and when they returned to HK from the UK on the B-Cal flights exporting all the children who boarded to and from school 3 times a year, they would be reunited with these slightly dubious alpha male specimens.
One time, we became particularly fevered - the word feral works too - and hysterical and created a game, which would be a one-time-only game, given the nature of this invention. The idea was to put the ceiling fan on full-blast - it would make this thwump-thwump noise that got faster and faster as the blades went round and round - dizzying… - At which point we decided the best thing to do would be to throw the dolls into the whizzing blades and see what happened. Total-carnage-mayhem! Bits of Cindy and her boyfriend brutally shredded as they hit the rotators - then peeeeeewwwweeeewwww - they ricochet in parts all over our bedroom - whack splat thwack! Shoes - zoom! Overly-long-leg - weeeeeehhheeee! Our eyes manic with destructive pleasure we would re-chuck the (poor) dolls back in as they became increasingly dismembered and mangled. The grand finale would have been Cindy’s head coming off like a champagne cork and flying across the beds and landing with a thud in a dark cockroachy corner of the room. It was all over very quickly. I kept the clothes but the dolls didn’t make it and had to be dispatched of all together. I think it was worth the moment of stomach-clutching-out-of-control-laughter this gave us at a time when we didn’t see each other all that much (them at boarding school in Sussex, me at the local army school in Hong Kong). It didn’t resolve the issue of the extreme humidity either but was an excellent distraction.
Thinking about this time in Hong Kong I know now we were living in a different world era, Hong Kong was relatively un-developed, and we would head off, when my brothers were home for the holidays, on adventures on the Ghurka Junk - an incredible wooden boat (seemed enormous to me when I was only 7) that the regiment owned - picture a Chinese boat in your mind and this is what the junk was, full of curves. We’d go off on the junk, the boat being driven (sailed, I guess) by Ghurka soldiers who were so handsome and so kind and patient with us (were we nightmare bratty children who they had to put up with? God I hope not) and smiled with such warmth it could make me cry now just thinking about their kindness and how Dad would talk so fluently and unselfconsciously in this beautiful Nepali language, chuckling at some joke or other. And Mum would put this insane suncream on our noses which was like a strip of thick white paint that would last for hours and later make me think about Adam Ant. We would have a massive picnic - I think cooked by someone in the regiment - maybe some curries - delicious, so normal to have curry for lunch on a massive beautiful boat in unspoiled waters - and splash about in warm clear sea around Plover Cove (I wonder if that even exists any more) - watch out for the lethal jelly-fish (man-o-war!) and home as the sun set, feeling warm and crunchy from the salt water. And then the long drive home back up ‘twist’ the terrifying road that zig-zagged up behind Kowloon where Dad would try his best not to kill us while overtaking on blind corners in a bid to get past some sputtering diesel fumes of an ancient 3-wheel motor.
It’s funny where the mind wonders when you’re staring at the ceiling sweating gently into your sheets wishing you had a fan. Thwump thwump.
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