Three in a Junk

Toby remembered a crisp paper boat, shaped like a clown’s conical cap, careering down a clear stream in Wales. The tiny craft twisted in eddies where cress plants broke the surface and spun faster and faster towards the rocky ledge where he and his brother had built a spillway. The shadow of the boat rippled across the pebbles on the bed of the stream, as it moved. Then over the spillway the little craft went, surviving the fall of a few inches, to bob placidly in the calm pool beyond.

He and Bob had constructed many paper boats each ending eventually as a waterlogged wreck, but each with its moment of glory at launch. They had tried a variety of designs: galleons, catamarans, trimarans, and yachts, and even on one occasion, a Chinese junk. They copied it from a geography book, laboring all evening with cardboard, paper and glue. But it was one of their failures. After school the next afternoon they ran down the garden and across the fields to the stream. But it was too top heavy and it capsized as soon as it was launched.

Years later they tried sailing a junk again.

The family, Robert and Mary their parents and he and Bob lived in North Wales after his father had retired from the Metropolitan Police. So, he, Toby, studied the physical sciences in the University of Wales at Bangor.

When he left college, qualified summa cum laude in Mathematics he had worked for a time in Britain as an analyst with the Atomic Energy Authority. He became an engineer almost by default. His job in nuclear power plant design was challenging and he was content for a few years but then he realized that progress was slow. Technological progress had slowed: the age of innovation and invention had given way to procedures and regulation. “What’s in it for me?” seemed to be the prevailing disease. So he emigrated with his wife Holly and sailed to the United States in 1968.

He had done well in the States in a couple of positions before joining Kane engineering. With Kane, his British background made him a natural candidate to open a new office In Hong Kong to exploit the newly opened markets in the People’s Republic of China. Holly and he had come out in 1975.

Bob, younger than he, was very like Toby in face but a little plumper and for some reason his brown hair was far bushier and rampant. It put Toby’s thin hair to shame. Bob had gone to the University of London but had found the strain of independence too much. Once, to escape, he had voluntarily signed himself into a ‘rest home.’ When the family eventually found him, in a mental asylum in Croydon, south of London, they had difficulty getting him out.

”I am happy here,” he said. “I don’t have to make decisions and I am looked after well and I don’t see any reason to come out. I don’t have to deal with traffic and rush here.”

However, the family prevailed and Bob tried again in London. After a few months the college authorities called Robert and Mary again.

“Bob, is ‘escaping’ from work by arriving increasingly late at the labs,” said his advisor. “He used to leave early but now he has not come at all. He apparently stayed in his digs until he was forced by hunger to find something to eat.” “His landlady said,” the advisor continued, “that he stayed most of the time in bed, withdrawn and staring at the wall.”

In the end his parents took Bob home with them to Wales.

No one admitted to what could be done, no one admitted that Bob could be suffering from a mental handicap or that he should be treated because he was ill. Even in this second half of the twentieth century, mental illness was a ‘visitation upon the family,’ something to be spoken about in hushed tones in private but never admitted in public. They could, however, arrange that he be sent for a ‘cure’ … a vacation, as if changing the scenery would mend the broken mind. So, Toby and Holly, in Hong Kong were persuaded to have Bob visit them for a short vacation.

“Tweak a Dragon;s Tail," John Graham, To be published.

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