Finding Love in China.

Over six years of visiting China I ate some pretty odd stuff, much of it completely unidentifiable. I still wince at the memory of sea cucumbers —  sea slugs — and of 100-year-old eggs. Sparrows’ brains never did it for me although snake and camel were quite tasty. I have a horrible feeling that I did eat dog once ... and I definitely tried mare’s milk cheese which was nose-smartingly strong.

One thing I never ate, knowingly, was hedgehog.

In 1988, together with PBW, I wrote a book called China By Rail.  Dad wrote the first, technical, chapter and took the photographs and I wrote the rest of the book. From that came the ITV documentaries Manchuria Express and Slow Train from China and it was while making those that I met Henry.

He said he fell in love with me on day three while we were filming in a marketplace in Jilin in Manchuria. It was full of bright colours and crammed with fruits and vegetables, medicine stalls with dried frog and snake and even weirder stuff, stalls groaning with spices and wooden cages packed with live chickens.

As I wandered around, being filmed by the crew, I saw a man walking along with a curled-up hedgehog in his hands. Ning Fang, our interpreter, told me he would have bought it for supper. She didn’t see anything wrong with that but, soft, unrealistic Brit that I was, I rebelled. It just goes to show how strong cultural influences are. In the UK we don’t eat hedgehogs so it just felt terrible.

‘Ask him how much he wants for it,’ I urged her. With a shrug at these strange foreigners, she did. He was willing to sell it though she told me that it was probably for twice as much as it cost him to buy.

I didn’t care ... but as I was filming I had very little money on me so I asked each of the crew in turn to lend me some cash. They all refused apart from Henry who emptied his pockets for me.

With the transaction completed, I took the hedgehog back to the hotel in a carrier bag. No one but Henry would go near me, the rest of the crew were muttering about fleas but he was plainly intrigued.  That evening, I hired a taxi to take me out into the countryside to release the hedgehog back into the wild and Henry offered to go with me.

We drove for about 20 minutes until surrounded by fields full of young corn. Then I told the driver, in my pidgin-Mandarin to stop the car and walked out into the greenery, hedgehog in hands.

Just as I rolled it gently out on the ground there was a shout and to my horror what was presumably the farmer came running out of nowhere.

Hastily I got back into the taxi and we drove off while the farmer shook his fist at us. As I looked out through the rear window, he was raking through the corn to see what I had done.

He probably found the hedgehog and it most likely ended up being his supper instead of the first man’s. I was horrified but there was nothing I could do. I had done my best, soppy girl that I was.

Henry said very little the whole time but he told me later that this was the moment when he made up his mind to make me his wife. He thought I had a kind heart and would make a wonderful mother. Unfortunately, he was the one who would be needing both of those, not our children.

Our wedding was in the Seychelles. This was before package weddings abroad became popular but we both loved adventures. Henry wasn’t interested in a church wedding and I wouldn’t consider a register office. Both his parents were dead and all that was left of his family was a brother with whom it would only be polite to say he had ‘issues.’ Most of his friends were ex-girlfriends or came from within and around the media and, most likely, would be away on any given date so, if we had been married in the UK, my side would have outnumbered his by about 100-1.

Running away to a tropical paradise seemed be the best bet. My folks didn’t mind. My Mum was agoraphobic and my Dad probably heaved a sigh of relief at how much money he would save. It was all arranged via our family travel agent, the miraculous David Ibbotson who had fixed trips for Whitehouses in parts of the world that didn’t even admit tourists yet and had got Dad, Michael and me into Argentina only two years after the Falklands Conflict. I was quite satisfied because all the wedding documents referred to a ‘minister’ and Henry thought it would be wonderful to be married on a beach.

Then, three weeks before we were due to leave, I discovered that ‘minister’ on the travel documents meant ‘registrar.’ This will come as no surprise to anyone who has got married abroad in the 21^st century but to me it was a bombshell. As a fully paid-up Armchair Christian who subscribed to St. Augustine’s prayer of ‘God grant me constancy, chastity and patience — but not yet’ I wanted to be married by a priest. It was the first wedding for both of us after all so it wasn’t as though I was asking too much.

There was an alternative: we could have had a swift wedding at my family’s church where my Mum still went but I didn’t like the vicar, hadn’t been for years apart from at Christmas time, it felt hypocritical and it would all have to be horribly rushed. Suddenly it seemed that this just wasn’t going to be the wonderful, romantic wedding that I had hoped for. I was devastated.

I’d found out on a Friday and, by the Sunday afternoon as Henry left my house in Birmingham for a late-night shift in London, I was a complete mess. I waved him goodbye miserably and, as his car turned out of the road and I turned to go back into the house, I heard church bells tolling for Evensong.

They were the bells of St. Peter’s in Harborne, just down the road and, almost without thought, I grabbed my coat and bag and got into the car to drive straight there. I wasn’t even sure exactly where the church was located; I’d been there just once for my brother’s wedding years before. Hah! That seemed horribly ironic at the time, but something just drove me directly to that church that evening. It never occurred to me that it might be an incredibly selfish thing to do to turn up at a strange church and pray for a miracle. It didn’t register that I’d been the agent for my own karma in deciding to marry far away from family and friends and choosing the un-trodden path. I just knew I had to go and I had to pray.

So I stood and sang and knelt and prayed all through Evensong at St. Peter’s. I prayed for any kind of miracle that would mean that I could be married by a priest in the Seychelles in less than three weeks’ time.

Just before the end of the service, the vicar, Rev. Michael Counsell, said this:

“And prayers for the Church throughout the world, particularly our sister Church St. Paul’s in Mahé, Seychelles.”

At the end of the service he must have thought he’d been attacked by a wolverine. I introduced myself by saying ‘You don’t know me from Adam, but I’m getting married in the Seychelles in three weeks’ time and I desperately need your help.’

He listened kindly as I explained the problem and invited me round for coffee the next day when he would discuss the matter with me further. He thought he could help, he said.

The next day I tumbled over myself trying to explain the miracle that had taken me to St. Peter’s to hear him speak. Michael listened patiently to my inarticulate apologies for not having been to the church before and how much I wanted to be married in the sight of God even if I didn’t actually go to church.

‘I suppose you say those prayers every week,’ I said, finally tailing off.

‘No,’ said Michael. ‘Not at all. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever prayed for the Seychelles in church before. It just came into my head to do it. That’s why you’re sitting here today. I said it for you to hear. That’s how God works.’

Michael gave me the phone number of his old friend from seminary, French Chang-Him in Mahé.

‘You phone him and tell him that you’ve spoken to me and ask him if he will marry you at St. Paul’s. I’m sure he will do it,’ he said.

I went away hopeful. Oh dear God, you have given me this chance, please let the vicar in the Seychelles agree!

I telephoned the vicarage in Mahé that very day and Rev. French Chang-Him answered the phone in a beautiful well-modulated voice with a strong French accent. He listened to my garbled story and my plea. He thought for a while and asked me a couple of pertinent questions. Then he answered:

‘If my friend Michael Counsell has recommended you and, if he will give you and your fiancé pre-marriage counseling, then I will bless your marriage. Come and see me for tea on the day after you arrive in Mahé and we will arrange it.’

‘Thank you so much! Where do we come?’

‘The Bishop’s Palace. Everyone knows where it is.’

‘The Bishop’s Palace? You work there?’

‘Yes, didn’t Michael tell you?’ said French Chang-Him. ‘I’m the Archbishop of the Indian Ocean.’

Kicking over the traces.

Each night I attended a banquet at a different place in Changchun, being celebrated as a foreign

dignitary and eating clear soups with meat and vegetables, 100-year-old eggs, sea cucumbers, sweet-and-sour pork, chopped chicken, river fish that seemed to be 70% bones, chopped duck complete with bones, bean curd flavoured 20 different ways, all kinds of mushrooms including one type that looked, rather amusingly, like mini penises, pak choi and other green cabbage-like vegetables. Some of it was delicious, some of it took quite a while to get used to and sea cucumbers are definitely the food from hell. Bravely I ate as little rice as I could.

Desserts were fresh fruit or little cakes made to look like Western cup cakes but made with a strange, tasteless custard. Sometimes we had fresh lychees or red tinned cherries which I came to love for their sweetness and tang.

I ate only with men. Women would serve us but the concept of equal opportunities in the businesses I visited seemed to be limited to the work floor and not to celebratory dinners with foreign princesses.

The drinks were canned orange juice, beer, Mau Tai — a kind of clear rocket fuel — or very sweet wine. Probably fortunately for me Chen wouldn’t let me drink the Mau Tai. I think it wasn’t meant to be suitable for women. I don’t like beer and I couldn’t stand the wine so I did, at least, keep completely sober which almost certainly limited my capacity for conversational errors. There was, of course, the never-ending tea. I don’t think I could have survived without that tea.

All through the week, Chen chaffed and worried over me and I worried and chafed back like a dog on a lead. I longed to speak to the real people as well as to the officials and to eat real Chinese food instead of the magnificent banquets of 10 or 12 courses. I wanted to hear someone laugh over something silly, to understand a Chinese joke or two and to be told that I was doing well. I tried to teach Chen some English jokes but he couldn’t understand the concept. He was born earnest and he thought it was his job to tell me whatever I was doing wrong. I so, so wanted him, just once, to tell me that I was doing something right.

I wanted to explore the markets alone instead of being escorted around the department stores in an entourage of ten. I wanted to talk to the people who actually worked in the truck factories and embroidery factories and on the steam engines but it was not permitted. I did my best and was incredibly ungrateful and horribly lonely.

I found out that I was wearing all the wrong clothes and, given that this was the 1980s with shoulder pads and bright emerald boiler suits I think, in retrospect, Chen was right about that. Had I been 20 years older and dressed in more classic style I would have made more sense to them; but as it was, one official believed that I’d turned up at his factory in my pyjamas.

At last, Chen and I took the overnight train back to Beijing. I heaved a sigh of relief at the idea of being back at the Peking Hotel and hopefully being allowed a day on my own to wander as I pleased before being put on the airplane to head back home. I wouldn’t be meeting Dad as he and Mark were still two weeks away from heaing home.

When Chen told me that we were going to the very basic Railway Hotel instead and that he had a full itinerary for me for the last day, my heart sank. I endured rather than enjoyed the Heavenly Temple and the Empress’s Gardens and that evening I sat in my tiny, plain room with no lavatory even on the same floor and cried tears of exhaustion and disappointment. At 9.30 pm I cracked and climbed out of the window and went AWOL.

For three hours I wandered around the streets of Peking alone, meeting nothing but polite curiosity and kindness. Using sign language, I brought a bowl of noodles and meat from a street vendor, I watched a tumbling show, I spoke to dozens of young people who wanted to practice their English and toured the Friendship Store — the shop for foreigners which in those days filled with furs and silks and jade — until my heart sang. I tried on sarongs and kimonos and spent money joyously. I loved China!

Back at the hotel, after midnight, I crept in by the front door. Chen was sitting at reception, his dour face grey with fear. We looked at each other and he sprang up with relief. I felt dreadful. The poor man must have been sick with worry that his charge had gone missing .

“I’m quite safe,” I said. “I have been talking to the young people.”

He nodded and bless him said nothing but ‘Goodnight’ as I passed. What could he say? I was the foreign princess and he was simply grateful that I had come back unharmed. If I had not, he would have been disgraced forever. God knows what nightmare scenarios he had been picturing.

I went to my tiny room wondering how he had known I had gone but, of course, I was hardly inconspicuous. I felt wracked with guilt but was still glad that I had had my own adventure. It was such a relief to kick over the traces and find a little of China on my own.

I had no idea that I would ever be coming back — let alone again and again — and when the time came to leave I was heartily relieved. It had been a true baptism of fire.

Goodbyes were said courteously all round and reassurances sought that I had had a good time. It had been an amazing time, whether or not I had enjoyed it was hardly the point. What an opportunity!

On the plane to Hong Kong, the air hostess asked me if I would like a drink. I said, ‘yes please, a gin and tonic.’

She looked at me with an experienced eye. ‘How long have you been in there?’ she asked.

‘Two weeks,’ I said.

She smiled and said, ‘Have a double.’

The Princess Diana of Changchun.

I was royalty from the moment I stepped down from the train in Changchun. This was  an incredibly

important event for them and a true baptism of fire for me. I truly had no idea how unusual a white woman would be — or how powerful they would think me with the might and power of a prosperous Western city and the BBC behind me. Waiting on the platform were the Mayor and four other serious-looking Mau-suited men in grey and blue from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Introductions were made and hands were shaken. From then on it was a whirlwind of events, banquets, meetings and interviews as I was displayed to the whole city. I did the best I could to stop the panic showing in my eyes and the prayer ‘Dear God, don’t let me screw up,’ was constantly in my heart and on my lips.

I was paraded around schools, colleges, hospitals, factories, railway depots and offices. It began with the university; a large echoing grey building where I was welcomed in the traditional Chinese reception room with white-covered armchairs and a thermos flask of tea always dispensed by a woman. There would be wrapped boiled sweets and 3D pictures of trees made from wax on the walls and at least four men in Mao suits. This formula was the same with each and every destination. Each time the entire workings of the place were painstakingly explained to me with everything translated by Chen and after I had expressed full comprehension and gratitude for their kindness in letting me visit, I was given a comprehensive guided tour.

In the university, I saw students of all shapes and sizes in classroom after classroom and sat in on an English lesson. At the end I was asked to give a speech. I stuttered and stammered with no idea what to say but praised them and told them a little about home. I got a standing ovation for saying I hoped they would all visit Britain one day. When I asked Chen afterwards how I had done he simply said ‘The speech was too short.’ I realised that nobody realised that I was inexperienced at this; I was expected to know what I was doing.

I sat through piano recitals, watched displays of Tai Chi and dance and everywhere in public was met with detached courtesy. But in the ladies’ lavatories women clustered shyly around me staring at my pink skin and pointing at my clothing. Sometimes, one would reach out and touch my bare arm, shyly, as if to see if I were real. Most of the lavatories were only flushed by the occasional bucket of water, and many of them were filled with menstrual blood which took a little getting used to and made me everlastingly appreciative for British public loos. In one open loo which was just a drain at one side of a sloping floor, they stood and watched to see if I would pee differently from them. And then were perplexed that I didn’t go at all.

I learnt very quickly that I can be very stoical and that was a relief.

At the Children’s Palace, a school for gifted children, I had my portrait drawn in charcoal by a nine-year-old girl genius.

‘She is making you much more attractive than you really are,’ said Chen excitedly as he watched over her shoulder. I think he was trying to impress on me the girl’s great talent.

‘Have you ever heard of the word “tact?”’ I asked him afterwards. Chen had not and was most interested in the concept, carefully writing down the word and its meaning in his ever-present notebook.

‘I’m sure you understand that nobody here could think you were pretty,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Your hair is a strange colour; your clothes are odd, your nose is enormous and your whole face is too big.’

I wondered whether I had explained the word ‘tact’ correctly.

At another school, I was treated to a piano performance of Chopin by a ten-year-old boy. He fluffed it, losing timing and hitting quite a few wrong notes and he stopped in the middle, his tears of shame making it impossible for him to go on. There was silence. Every teacher from the school was there, together with Chen and my entourage of four men from the city government, not to mention 30 children.

I feared that the boy would be in tremendous trouble for what had happened but I was also outraged. The piece was far too difficult. I looked around the room at a sea of impassive faces.

Something made me stand up and walk over to the piano. I watched myself do it in a kind of horror as I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Chen half got up and then sat down again. I didn’t even realise until he told me later that I had made a clear gesture to him to stay back.

The piano stool was quite wide and I was able to sit next to the boy, put my arm around him and tried to give him a paper handkerchief. I don’t think he’d ever seen one before so I had to mime wiping my eyes with it and indicate that he was to do the same. Then — and this was the miracle — I started playing the top part of ‘chopsticks’ very slowly while looking at him. Tentatively he placed his hands on the piano and played the lower part. We played together for probably a minute and then he stopped. I stopped too. We looked at each other; he smiled and, with me sitting there beside him, he began the Chopin again.

It might not have been perfect but it was quite good enough. And he even began to enjoy it towards the end because his face lightened up and his body began to flow.

When he had finished, I stood up and clapped as loudly as I could looking round the room and daring the audience not to clap with me. They did.

As I went back to my seat (there were other performers still to come) I hissed at Chen ‘he is not to be punished. Tell them!’ He nodded and said something to the head teacher who was sitting on the other side of me. I don’t know what it was but the man pursed his lips and nodded.

I don’t know what happened later; I have no idea if I made life for that boy better or worse, but I do know that I was always rubbish at the piano and that I don’t know how to play chopsticks.

Sleeping with Three Strange Men

As the train left Beijing station on its overnight journey to Changchun, I felt very alone and lost.  It was

The kitchen on a Chinese train.

a big step to be going out into this strange world alone apart from Chen, my interpreter. The other two, belonging to the Railway Publishing House, were remaining in Beijing.

‘You’ll be fine,’ PBW had said that morning as we hugged goodbye. ‘Just beware the carriage attendants and, whatever you do, don’t get drunk.’ I wasn’t in the habit of getting drunk so I was quite affronted by this but then I’d never had a glass of Mau Tai before.

Each carriage had its own female attendant guarding the steps onto the train and the one for our section smiled at me as I tried a polite ‘Ni Hao’ in greeting before boarding. I felt reassured and laughed off PBW’s warning until five minutes later she came into our carriage to check Chen’s and my tickets and roared at me for putting my suitcase on the wrong bed. ‘You put your case on that bed, you pay for that bed,’ she said. I got the message.

Chen and I were travelling soft class lying, which consisted of four white covered bunks per compartment with washbasins and loos at each end of the carriage. As the train started off, we sat on one lower bunk with two complete strangers on the other, both burly Chinese men who did not know whether to stare at me or not. Manners obviously forbade them to ask Chen about me and there was certainly nothing I could tell them myself

Normally, in those days, white people ate alone in the dining room of a train, either before or after the Chinese, just as in the hotels. However, Chen persuaded them to change the custom, explaining that there was only one of me and that I was relatively harmless. I was quite an attraction, a bit like a Panda bear in the UK so after some hesitation, a couple of men came and sat down with us. Chen was happy to talk with them while I amused myself trying the differing dishes on offer and the sweet wines of China together with the ubiquitous tea. We had fatty pork soup with cabbage, bean curd with sesame seeds, pak choi and chicken’s feet. The men sucked on those with relish but I declined politely and finished up my rice.

‘You must be careful in Changchun,’ said Chen. ‘To finish your rice means that you have not been well fed. It is very rude. As a guest you should hardly eat any.’

Chastened, I considered the very real possibility that these two weeks might turn out to be a very effective diet.

After supper there was little to do by the dim lights in the cabin but talk or read or go to bed — but of course if you are sharing a compartment you can only go to bed by common consensus. I wanted to read but Chen wanted to ask questions. By the time the lights went out — and they did go out at 10pm and you had no option of turning them back on — I was exhausted and feeling like a very poor representative of my country. That was a state which was to last for the whole of the rest of the trip.

The problem was two-fold: firstly Chen’s total lack of anything approaching a sense of humour and secondly, his profound intelligence and diligence. He was determined that, by the time I returned to the UK, I should be a credit to him and that he should be a credit to me. I should know Chinese history, art and politics to degree level and, as a light alternative to this barrage of information, he would interrogate me night and day in what proved to be a rather vain attempt to improve his knowledge of British art, politics and history.

To start with, we discussed the history of England with particular reference to the Hundred Years War, the Industrial Revolution, the Jacobites, William and Mary and both world wars. For the first time in my life I wished that I had not opted for Art ‘0’ level rather than History and my lack of knowledge was sadly felt. My interest in the Tudors did raise Chen’s hopes about my value as a source of information but that led to an hour and a half on Protestantism, Catholicism, Luther, Calvin, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Holocaust and the Huguenots during which I was, frankly, out of my depth.

It did however allow me to turn the subject to a spirited discussion on the existence of God where I, amateur though I was, almost managed to hold my own. God wasn’t officially allowed in China at that time and Chen was appalled that I, a modern woman, believed in such an anachronism. He was very put out by my assertion that the Chinese people’s lack of belief did not have any effect on God’s existence per se and certainly did not hinder God’s belief in Himself

Surely, he said, if God did exist, the very fact that so many people knew that He didn’t would be enough to make him doubt Himself. And anyway, he could not exist in China because He was not allowed.

At which point I felt a distinct desire for a gin and tonic.

Apart from debating Life, the Universe and Everything, it was quite tricky getting used to going to bed in a Chinese railway carriage with three quite unknown men. All of them slept in their shirts and underwear and it took me ten whole minutes to explain to Chen that I needed a few moments’ privacy to change into a nightgown. Once he had the idea, he chivvied the other men out as though he had always known of this quaint Western custom and I realised for the first time how very proud and how very terrified he was to have a foreign woman in his care. Half of his nagging and fussing was because I was such a completely unknown quantity with my inexplicable laughter and my long brown curly hair; my pretty frocks and my way of dancing and making jokes. He did not know that it was just me; he thought it was all Western Women and it was so important to him to tell other people that he had acquired this strange and esoteric knowledge of the habits of the female Foreign Devil. 

For all that, I did sleep well and, before I dropped off, I was amazed and relieved that I felt comforted and happy with the thrum, thrum, thrum, cer-lick, thrum, thrum, thrum, cer-lick of the wheels over the tracks and content to be lying in this strange, foreign bed on a strange foreign train with strange foreign people.

It took me some time to realise why I was so content until I realised that, as a baby, I had been lulled into slumber, more often than not, by tape recordings of steam engines and of the clunkety-clunk of bogies going over the gaps in rails echoing up through the floorboards from PBW’s study below. But it was more than that. Communication challenges apart, I was on the other side of the world, having a real experience of life where there was no opportunity to take anything for granted. It was scary but it was great. And the reason why it was great was because there was actually something to be scared about.

I’ve spent most of my life in a kind of low-grade fear. I suspect most of us do. Certainly, working as a journalist and radio presenter meant that I raced around on deadlines, competing with other journalists. That didn’t help but I think I was attracted to that nerve-wracking kind of world because I was nervous anyway. In some strange way, I felt better as long as there was a real reason behind my fear, even if that reason was dealing with Margaret Thatcher or a fierce news editor. Once, when I worked as a newsreader at Beacon Radio in Wolverhampton, I continued reading the news after the fire alarm went off because I was more afraid of the news editor than I was of burning to death.

It’s also true that sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between fear and excitement. Perhaps the line is very thin indeed. I’ve often found it useful to ask myself which of the two I was feeling at critical times and often the answer has often surprised me. Sometimes I’ve been resisting something which could actually be very uplifting or releasing or just plain different by thinking I was registering fear instead of excitement.

However, it was not exactly exciting to be woken at 5.30 am by the blaring of the train radio and tannoy system coming on loudly in my ear. There was no ‘on’ or ‘off’ switch and the suddenness and the volume of the alarm were an unwelcome shock. The train radio had been on the previous evening but, then, it had just seemed part of the overall strangeness and it had stopped for the night as soon as the lights went out.

At breakfast the Chinese ate a mixture of meats and pickles with tea but the train staff, aware that they had a Female Foreign Devil aboard made a special effort for me. Hot, sweetened powdered milk accompanied two slices of cornbread fried in beaten egg, sandwiched with pickle and sugar and topped with two fried eggs.

To my shame, I couldn’t eat it. As the China years went by, I learnt to greet such a feast of carbohydrates with gratitude for it might be all I could eat that day. This time I picked at it and, when Chen had gone to the kitchen to ask for some more tea for me, I wrapped it in tissues and hid it in my bag.

Windows didn’t open on Chinese trains, but the lavatories opened straight onto the track so I was able to dispose of the evidence and sneak a Mars Bar from the stock of pemmican that the all-wise Dad had insisted that I packed in my suitcase for times just such as this. Nutritious, it was not. Comforting it was.

Barefoot on the Great Wall

The next morning brought no sign of my happily travelling suitcase so I had to face the idea of visiting

the Great Wall in the same clothes in which I had travelled. At least the weather was warm as my only option was a summer dress and wrap.

It was a long journey by what seemed to me to be an antiquated - 1960s style - car through miles and miles of flat land and cabbages punctuated by real Chinese people working and even the odd buffalo ploughing. In this modern world where we can see pretty much every nook and cranny of the planet on TV or the Internet it's hard to imagine the profound effect of seeing a reality that you have only been able to imagine.

When we got there, it was all that was beautiful and interesting. I hope that those who have visited the Great Wall in later years still know what a glorious place it is - and how steep and rocky the climbing can be. Chen was determined that I should get the maximum amount of benefit from the trip and in those days there was no cable car - and, although I was eager for exercise and fit enough to enjoy the climb. However, I had one great problem: my only shoes were strappy, slightly fragile sandals. Soon they began both to hurt and to threaten to break. This was no problem; my feet have always been strong and hard. I realised that it was rather important to save the one pair of shoes I possessed and happily took them off to go barefoot.

'What are you doing?' cried Chen in horror. 'You must wear your shoes. Only poor people walk without shoes.'

In an attempt to lighten him up I did a little dance and said I was happy to go barefoot in the sunlight and that I often walked without shoes at home. He was even more horrified and, when I proved to be impossible to dissuade, he sat down on the stone wall, hung his head and refused to go on.

He was so ashamed, he said. China had humiliated me, an honoured guest by forcing me to walk like a peasant on their Great Wall. They had lost my clothing so that I did not have the right equipment and he and his country were disgraced.

Once Mr Lu and Miss Wu had realised what was going on, they joined him in sitting on the stone and shaking their heads in deep embarrassment Their unhappiness and their shame were so profound that something simply had to be done. I wracked my brains for an answer. Whether it was Divine Inspiration or an instinct for self-survival I shall never know ...

I sat down next to the three abjectly miserable Chinese. Convincingly I began to tell them that it was a custom for rich pilgrims in the West to walk barefoot to show their humility and to honour the holy ground they were on. I said that I was walking without shoes as a mark of respect for the beautiful place where they had brought me and that it was important for me to be allowed to express this honour in my own way.

'Is that true?' said Chen, leaping up. 'Is that really true?'

I assured him that it was (maybe I was a few hundred years out of date in my facts, but it was worth it). I showed Chen the gold chain I wore around my neck and the gold ring I wore on my finger and emphasised that no one could think I was reduced to poverty because I was barefoot. Anyway, I was quite obviously in possession of an expensive pair of shoes but I was carrying them. Reassured, this strange, crusty little man was transformed. He followed me up the stone slopes telling everyone we met that his foreign guest was so impressed by the Great Wall that she had insisted (after the custom of her race) on honouring it by walking barefoot. We attracted quite a crowd.

Three years after this, a group of Chinese from the Railway Publishing House came to stay in Birmingham. They bought me a gift, painted by Mr Lu, the photographer. It showed the Great Wall itself, beautifully drawn and coloured and, at the base were painted two large, bare, white footprints. 'We were moved by the respect that you showed to our great history,' the said. 'We have never been so honoured.'

Two days later, after a crash course in Chinese culture, and holding on tightly to my recalcitrant and deeply-tanned suitcase, I waved a slightly uncertain goodby to PBW on the platform of Beijing's main station and clambered up into the huge green monster which was to be home for the next fifteen hours. This was the beginning of the official part of my trip and I was pathetically grateful to have some clothes to face it in.

From the labels on it, my suitcase seemed to have had an interesting time and several casual relationships about which it should have known better. Someone had, also, been through it with a fine toothcomb. At first I was seriously affronted to see every one of my possessions rearranged and then, in the clasp of a little pearl necklace, I found a single, long black hair. Hastily I examined my clothes, every one of which had been re-folded and here and there was the slightest evidence that someone - or several people - had been so intrigued by the foreign styles and fabrics that they had tried them all on. I had brought a simple strand of pearls which had once belonged to my grandmother. In the days before bling it was obviously quite a precious thing and, as the evidence of the short black hair trapped in the clasp, it had obviously been tried on as well. That melted my heart. Instead of being outraged I was touched that things which seemed so run-of-the-mill to me were so strange and special to others, even if they were Chinese customs officials. I felt closer to China for that moment of realisation that they were all too human and that, for the women at least, there was very little beauty in their lives. 

The First Visit.

With my interpreter Cheng Hongbao.

I first went to China in the summer of 1983. I was living in Birmingham, half a mile or so from where I had been born and, despite several attempts to escape, it seemed as though my fate was inextricably bound up in the Midlands. I had taken, idly, to wondering whether there might be a greater world rather than industrial cities and people who thought that those from a different town were foreigners but I had little proof that it might be true. I was breakfast presenter at the local BBC radio station interviewing people about local council committees, ageing hamster support groups and strange and original diseases and, at the ripe old age of 27, my family were starting to assume that I was seriously on the shelf

I was visiting the family home one Sunday to be fuelled and watered for the coming week when my father asked me if I wanted to go to China.

He, himself, had been travelling there, on and off, for seven years already, chasing steam engines. At that time, China was still manufacturing them with the inescapable logic that they were cheap, the land had plenty of coal and nobody gave a toss about pollution. PBW was a railway author and photographer who had already written and published more than 50 books and had spent much of his life working for steam preservation. It would be fair to say that he was obsessed — and for that he always blamed his nanny who would leave him in his pram on the platform of the local station while she was being romanced by the stationmaster.

He was in his own league as a train spotter. Where other people hung around railways noting down numbers, PBW bought the train.

We owned three full-sized efforts at one point as well as numerous models, paintings, train sets and regalia. Once, during a posh wedding we went to during my teens I confused a whole bunch of rather upper-class people who had been gazing at me suspiciously over their teeth. They had been talking about somebody or other's castle. I naturally assumed that they were talking about GWR engines.

'Oh really?' I said. 'We've got two. Clun and Thornbury.'

Which went down like a lead balloon.

This railway mania was not so much an obsession as a way of life. Once, after what looked, on the surface, to be another exciting holiday abroad, but was really a week of chasing steam engines, my mother said, ruefully, that she now knew every station ladies lavatory in Europe.

PBW's achievements included founding the Birmingham Railway Museum and presenting a BBC television programme called Railway Roundabout. From both of these he had cupboards full of films and soundtracks of favourite locomotives. It took me some time to realise why I was to sleep so well overnight on the Chinese trains until I realised that, as a baby, I had been lulled into slumber, more often than not, by the distant sound of Dad's tape recordings of Clun Castle climbing Hatton Bank.

When I was a child I was probably the only hope of sanity that my mother possessed. Nevertheless, Christmases and birthdays were just as likely to be marked with a new clockwork steam engine than a doll (for which, in retrospect, I am eternally grateful). It’s fair to say, however, that my engines weren’t lucky ones. For some reason, they always seemed to be the ones which were inexplicably involved in exciting train crashes when my brother Michael had friends to play.

Michael was, and still is, equally-obsessed and he and PBW travelled the world together, bringing back strange souvenirs and thousands of pictures which punctuated Christmases and weekends with slide-shows attended by strange, rather silent men with badly-matching clothes who only rose from their everyday torpor into spasms of enthusiasm when viewing something made out of metal with smoke belching out of its chimney.

Then tragedy struck: Michael became interested in girls. More to the point, he got married and started to travel with his wife instead of his father. It was a little like watching Puff the Magic Dragon drooping into his cave when his little playmate left. PBW found other friends to travel with, of course, but no one he could boss around quite as successfully as family.

I was sensible to realise that this fanaticism could be useful. At journalism college, we had to write a thesis on any subject and my History of Clun Castle got top marks thanks to PBW’s photographs, my mother’s typing, facts and figures from staff at the railway museum (where the engine lived) and intricate diagrams from friends of my brother’s who didn’t get to meet a lot of girls while train-spotting on railway platforms.

PBW was into China like a shot the moment that it opened up to the West. Somehow, within three or four visits, he had become involved with a twin-town project between Birmingham and Changchun, a car-manufacturing city in Manchura. He had even become known as the ‘wise, white-haired, old foreign devil’ and was fast friends with the China Railway Publishing House for whom he wrote a short treatease on steam engines. There was always a slight bone of contention in that China wanted to focus on the new and PBW wanted to focus on the old but everyone involved was quite politically astute enough to make sure that their bread was buttered on both sides.

There was a catch to this ‘would you like to visit China?’ offer of course. It seemted that Changchun needed a sort of ‘tester ambassadorial’ visit before either side would commit to sending or receiving an official delegation and signing any impressive documents. So I was to be a sniffer dog in a minefield. But that was okay; I could take a tape machine with me and make a series of programmes for BBC WM while I was there and there would be two birds flat out on the floor from one stone.

So, there I was, standing rather doubtfully at Beijing airport, peering out at a dim, cold September sky and some rather dusty trees and wondering idly where my luggage might be.

Dad and I had flown out to China together but, on this particular occasion, he was going in one direction and I, attended by a gaggle of Chinese 'minders,' was going in another. This was part of the deal. PBW wanted to go train spotting in the green and fertile south but the Chinese wanted 'an official visit' to the city of Changchun in Manchuria.

The reason for that was simple. On his travels through China PBW had set up a town twinning plan between Birmingham and Changchun and he had been invited to go there for the fifth or sixth time on an official 'thank you and can we show you off to the city?' visit. Instead, he was going off to have some fun and I was going to represent him.

Still, it seemed a fair deal. An all-expenses paid holiday to an exotic location where I would never have gone alone. I should have known better.

We waited at the airport for over an hour while my suitcase was discovered to be visiting Hong Kong for a mini-break in the sunshine. In the meantime, I tried to get my head around the names of some of the posse who were attending us. To my virgin eyes, the Chinese men were virtually indistinguishable from each other and the chorus of variable English welcoming my father as an 'Old Friend' and all the back-slapping seemed impossibly alien. I was new to them, and a woman to boot, so I did not automatically receive 'Old Friend' status. I supposed that probably the best I could hope for was to become 'The curly-haired, unsuitably-dressed, slow-on-the-uptake, big-nosed female Foreign Devil.'

 Dad and I had flown out to China together but, in a couple of days’ time, he was going in one direction to play with trains and I was heading north to Changchun in Manchuria to be ‘the Princess Diana of Birmingham.’

My own personal interpreter was to be Chen Hongbao and he was possibly the most intimidating of all of the welcoming group. In those days I did not understand the importance of 'face' to the Chinese and poor Chen had already lost face in front of this strange, foreign woman because her baggage had not arrived. He obviously felt humiliated and upset despite my assurances that I could manage perfectly well overnight. Half the airport had to be laid by the ears before we were allowed to leave. At least it gave me time to work out some distinguishing marks between those who were to be my personal companions for the next few days. Chen, the interpreter, was short and stocky with a shock of vertical black hair, thick horn-rimmed spectacles and an ever-present sleeveless grey cardigan. With him were Mr. Lu, the photographer from the China Railway Publishing House who was short and stocky with a shock of black hair, and big horn-rimmed spectacles and a grey cardigan with sleeves and finally and Miss Lee (I never discovered what she did) who was short and stocky with a shock of black hair and slightly smaller horn-rimmed spectacles and wearing a grey cardigan. Only Chen spoke any English, the others just nodded and smiled.

In the end, they all assured me that my suitcase would be found and it would be at the hotel just as soon as I was.

Which it wasn't.

Dad went ahead in car no. 1 and various officials and I travelled behind with Chen, Lu and Li in car no. 2. I spent the journey into town expecting the view to be exotic which was a bit daft as very few cities have dramatically beautiful roads to the airport. It was grey concrete all the way. Chen talked to me constantly, asking questions about Britain and pointing out landmarks of alleged interest in the sea of grey around us. The car we travelled in was spick and span and looked about 20 years old and the surroundings too looked like the worst of the British1960s high-rise buildings. I had forgotten that most of ‘old China’ had been destroyed in the cultural revolution. We had left England at the time when autumn is at its most splendid and the contrast was almost painful. What trees there were drab and dusty and there was no exotic foliage to be seen.

Our hotel was, logically, called the Peking Hotel (this was before everyone returned to calling it Beijing). It was large and looked impressive with red banners hanging over the great entrance and the steps leading up to it. Inside, it was huge and there was enough paperwork to fill in to keep Chen and PBW busy for a whole ten minutes so I could look around followed only by Lu and Li. The hotel shop was a riot of colour and excitement, filled with bright kites and Chinese silks but before I could throw myself into the fray I was rounded up and clucked at and herded up a set of brown stairs to the first floor and my room.

Back then, there was nothing much more dismal than the corridor of a Chinese hotel. It was dim and long and carpeted and painted in dull colours. From several of the rooms, which had their doors ajar, I could hear the blare of Chinese television and, as we passed, there were glimpses of businessmen drinking tea, smoking and watching TV in their underwear.

Then it was my room and I was bustled in, shown how to work the TV and left ‘to relax’ for half an hour before supper. The room had its own bathroom and the water was hot. This was a kind introduction and fed me with an illusion that was comforting if short-lived.

I sat on the lumpy, green-covered bed and contemplated my fate. The room was full of dark, painted wood and dim lighting and the view was non-existent. The television yawped out the Chinese equivalent to the Ying Tong Song no matter what channel I tried and when I turned it off, the same sound echoed clearly from the room next door. Suitcaseless, I did what I could and thanks to Dad’s long-held policy of carrying a sponge-bag and spare underwear in hand luggage it was a lot better than it could have been. By the time my three attendants knocked briskly at my door, I was, at least, presentable.

The main dining room was packed with Chinese people audibly enjoying their food and the first surprise was that our Chinese friends did not sit with us. This similarity to a Jewish Orthodox family not eating with those of other religions was strangely shocking, but PBW was there to wean me into the delights of Chinese dining. He told me that Chen would always translate the menu for me when he was staying in the same hotel but that there would be many times when he would be lodging elsewhere and I would be eating entirely alone. To help me with this, he produced a tiny but extremely thick Chinese-English phrasebook with a flourish. This tome kept me entertained in a horrifying kind of way for the rest of the trip. Goodness knows who had done the translations but either they were extracting the Michael from the Chinese or they genuinely loathed the Brits.

It referred to all British people as Mr. or Mrs. Boring and it lambasted them with criticisms and condemnation. ‘This behaviour is insulting to the great people of China,’ it said on the first page I turned to. ‘If you are not prepared to honour our ways, why have you come to our glorious country?’

I read with a mixture of fascination and disbelief to find that ‘the working people in the capitalist countries are living a hard life’ and that the Chinese ‘do not think much of money because we work for the revolution and not for money.’

Suitably chastened, I moved on to the section where Mrs. Boring lost her handbag and was told, ‘You should not have left it unattended. It is your own fault.’

Somewhere, lost in the barrage of ‘We are extraordinarily patient and you are imbeciles with big noses’ there was a section on food. I wondered just how hungry I would have to be to be brave enough to look for it.

That night I ate real Chinese food for the first time. It was simple chopped up pieces of meat with bones, pak choi, bean curd in soy sauce and white rice. It was simple and fairly tasty but nothing at all like anything I’d had from the takeaway at home. To drink there was beer or tea.

There was no hot water by the time I got back to my room so a bath was out of the question and I slept badly in rough sheets, naked ... and feeling very alone, frightened, cold and vulnerable in a very foreign world. 

The China Years

I, personally, never had any problems with Wolverhampton.

However, that could have been because I was hopelessly in love during the year when I lived there. I even remember not minding when shop assistants referred to me as a foreigner and could not understand my accent. I came from Birmingham, all of fifteen miles away so it was understandable.

That was back in 1980 and Wolverhampton, in those days, was not at its best. The shopping centre looked like an impregnable fortress, the football club was ailing and the burgers being sold on the street were only edible with the addition of so much mustard that one bite exploded your nostrils leaving them frayed like a Hawaiian grass skirt.

But I liked it there. I liked Tettenhall Park where my lover and I would meet on summer afternoons and say soppy things to each other between kisses. I liked the Wolverhampton Wanderers ground where we would jump up and down in the stands - I so that I could actually see something over the male heads around me and he could jump up and down with fury as the opposing side scored again. I was even surprised when Gerald Ratner called the produce of his jewellery shops 'crap' because I was rather fond of the pretty little ring my lover bought me in Wolverhampton Ratner's to celebrate our soppiness.

So it was very confusing when I found myself standing in a Chinese city for the very first time and all I could think was that it was just as ugly and dirty and depressing as Wolverhampton. And then some.

Of course, I was not in love by then and it seemed that the possibility of any such experience in China was about as likely as the Pope having doubts about the virgin birth. So I was not going to get any help from any rose-coloured spectacles or any cosy little outings to the park holding hands and listening to the bird song. Firstly because holding hands in Chinese public places in those days was simply not done and secondly because they had eaten all the birds.

Sometimes, at a special Chinese banquet, I did come across a few of the sparrows which should have been gracing the sparse, dull parks of the northern cities. They would arrive shrivelled and featherless on a plate complete with charred heads and pathetic little feet and my Chinese hosts would delight in showing me how to crack the skulls open to get at the brains.

That was when they were not encouraging me to eat hundred-year-old eggs or sea slugs.

I remember returning home after my first visit to China, shaking the dust of that country off my feet and swearing that never, ever, no not even for a million pounds, would I ever go there again. I would rather spend my summer holidays in Wolverhampton, loveless and alone.

Which is, of course, why I spent six springs, summers and autumns travelling the length and breadth of China and berating the place right left and centre while falling in love with its paradoxes, idiosyncrasies and the sheer-bloody-mindedness of its people. A few months ago I went back to Wolverhampton. I wanted to see if I could find any echo between my memories of the two places. Not to my surprise I found Wolverhampton to be the smaller of the two.

I found a standard, ordinary pleasant town with a fairly good shopping centre containing all the usual suspects; the odd private and original shop, slightly better burgers and some fairly nice parks. The football team are doing quite well and the people are just as friendly as my love-hazed memory remembered them to be. Wolverhampton is a  perfectly pleasant place. From what I hear China has sorted itself out too and become an attractive place for tourists to visit. They can now go to the Holiday Inn and hardly know that they have left their home country. Long gone are the days when nobody spoke your language, the buildings echoed with the sound of saliva hitting brass spittoons and the menu was only in Chinese. They no longer mix pig fat with sugar and a little red dye and smear it on a fried egg when you ask them for some jam for breakfast. They don't tie their bicycles on the sides of steam engines so they'll be able to cycle home when their engine-driving shift ends. They don't tell you that you can't go and see a building because it's being reconstructed when you are both standing right in front of the said building and it's perfectly obvious that it's not.

They no longer assume that you are poisoning their livestock if you give it an apple core in passing. The train attendants don't knock your feet with a mop if you don't move out of the way in time. The children don't shriek in horror at the sight of a strange 'foreign devil' wandering through their villages. The Chinese simply think we're rich people who will buy their produce rather than aliens who might be going to eat their children. Well, good for them. I hope they are very happy. It's a strange thing to think that they are all now drinking Coca Cola, eating at McDonalds and talking on mobile phones. I don't think I'll be going back.

You see, travelling in China in the old days was not just difficult and confusing and scruffy and inconvenient. It was magical and unbelievable and a continual adventure where you never knew who or what you might meet or where you would end up next except that it certainly would not have a decent lavatory.