Lantau

I don't think I ever ate food cooked on a barbecue before the age of eight, that is before we moved to Hong Kong. I'm sure we must have had what we'd now call barbecue weather on many occasions during those first eight years of my life but I don't think that cooking al fresco was part of our culture back then. Certainly it wasn't part of the lifestyle of our little family in New Malden. 

All that changed when we went to Hong Kong. Everything changed, really. My parents were both from working class families but met when they worked for the Standard Bank in London. My mum started work there while my dad was doing his national service and they met when he came back, perhaps with a roguish smudge of camouflage paint still on his youthful cheek. 

We moved from our small three bedroom semi on a quiet suburban street in south London to a large house on top of a mountain in Hong Kong, one of just a handful of houses on the island. Where I had once done my swimming lessons at the Coronation Baths in Kingston, now my brother and I would splash around in an otherwise empty sunlit pool on top of a tower block while my mum played squash on the courts a couple of floors below. 

The bank provided well for its ex-pat workers back in those days when it took nearly 24 hours to travel from the UK to Hong Kong, and long-distance conversations with home, stalled by time delays, were a luxury. They provided a junk - the Lady Jane - with a skipper, Shek, who would take us out on trips into the islands of the South China Sea. And they provided a holiday house and two bungalows on the nearby island of Lantau.

These days you can drive from Hong Kong to Lantau but back then, in the late 70s, you had to take a ferry, which took three or four hours to travel across. I remember that you could by a bowl of noodles in a salty stock for a couple of dollars. In those days the number of cars on the island was strictly limited and there were a couple of rickety old company cars belonging to the bank that we'd use to travel 'round.

We'd go from Silvermine Bay, where the ferry pulled in, along the single road that ran along the southern edge of the island to get to the bungalows. There was a small town on the way, just a collection of wooden buildings, like something from the Wild West, and we'd stop there sometimes, to pick up supplies, I guess, and occasionally have a bite to eat. I liked the crab mornay, served in a shell. A large TV would always be blaring away and people would congregate to watch it.

From the bungalows there was a path down to the beach and we were encouraged to sing as we ran down it to ward off any snakes. The beach itself was beautiful and, to all intents and purposes, private. I remember how after a monsoon, its whole topography might change. We'd swim in the sea, of course, and throw a frisbee, or maybe play football. Once, in a grown-ups kick about, my dad's friend Fraser King jumped up to keep a ball in play and fell back into the jungle at the beach's edge. He landed on his back on top of a large broad cactus and all the of the needles had to be pulled out, one at a time. His back ended up a dirty yellow, smothered in iodine.

It's Lantau that springs to mind when I think back to the barbecues we had back then. It was by no means the only place we enjoyed them but I think we must have eaten that way every night when we stayed there. I remember the grown-up men joking about whose turn it was to 'waft' the coals and who had the best technique. And after we'd eaten, the children would cook marshmallows over the embers. 

I have three other strong memories from our visits to Lantau. The first was waking up early one morning to climb the mountain in the middle of the island with my dad and his brother, Bill, who was visiting. The second was when we visited another beach and, jumping off a sand dune, I cut the ball of my foot on an old, rusty tuna tin. I was taken to hospital for a tetanus and stitches, and it was like being tortured, having the curved needle put through my foot. I screamed and screamed.

And, finally, there was the little village that we used to drive out to and visit. A narrow river ran through it which we crossed on a small ferry, not much shorter than the river was wide. We'd walk through the market using our basic 'market Cantonese' to ask the price of cheap toys, like spy kits and Action Man outfits.  

I was reminded of all this today because I felt the weather just about excused a barbecue. I cooked some sausages and burgers for Dan and Abi (a recently lapsed vegetarian) and then cooked this steak for myself. The cottage garden is a far cry from Lantau Island, both as it was then and as it is now, featuring as it does Hong Kong Disneyland.

I remember the bright sunlight of the daytime and the darkness when we barbecued. Mercifully immune to mosquito bites, I could enjoy their whine along with the syncopated, discordant choir of insects and small animals out in the jungle around the bungalows. I'm so pleased to have these memories, that I don't think I'll ever go back, for fear of crushing their fragile, idiosyncratic shapes with the homogenous bluster of the modern world.