THIS interview did not get off to a promising start. 'Hello,' said the elderly woman, palely loitering in the corridor of the Legislative Council. 'I'm afraid I'm not supposed to be talking to you.' A few political pundits had already warned that Elsie Tu is not as sharp as she was (unkind remarks about mislaid marbles had surfaced a few times), and the sudden flicker of unease was fanned by her next observation which was 'You know, I'm from the same part of the world as you.' Nothing in the extensive pile of cuttings had indicated Tu is Irish. 'Newcastle-upon-Tyne,' Tu prompted. 'You are the Labour MP?' Well, er, no. 'Oh dear,' Tu began to laugh. 'You're the journalist. I am sorry - you see, they're expecting someone from England but I said I wouldn't be able to see her.' Another woman appeared ('Are you the Labour MP?'), there was a minor confab and then Tu took control and trotted into her office. Apart from that little hiccup, nothing she subsequently said or did indicated that at 82, this was a woman trembling on the brink of Alzheimer's.
Hong Kong appears to be divided into those who believe Tu has lost her marbles, those who think she's lost her way, those who claim she's just lost it - 'Whatever it is' as she remarked - and those who voted for her on March 5. The latter, though a decent figure, were not enough for her to keep the Urban Council seat she had held for over 30 years. As public slaps in the face go, the events which culminated in the March elections take some beating; it was rather as if the Queen Mother had been forcibly struck off the Civil List, taken to Dover and told to make a life for herself outside England. And, like another queen, if you cut open Elsie Tu's heart you would probably find the bitter name of defeat engraved upon it - and that name would be Szeto Wah.
Tu has made no bones about her disgust with Szeto and with the Democratic Party. She has reported her opponent to the Boundary and Election Commission for his behaviour which, she says, included passing out a pamphlet containing unflattering descriptions of her. 'Insults I can take,' she says. 'He called me 'an ugly old English woman'. Well, all right.' (It clearly isn't - her voice still quavers at the words, which she must have repeated aloud a thousand times since she first read them.) 'But he told absolute lies. He said that his reason for standing against me was that I had changed in my policies, that I had ceased being a democrat.' This, of course, is the nub of the problem. Either you believe that Tu has done a U-turn which will leave Nigel Mansell breathless, or you accept that she has continued on her own idiosyncratic - but consistent - way in the 40 years she has been in the territory. Naturally, she believes that she has supported only one ideal since she arrived, and that has been to help the people of Hong Kong.
What must make the current public unpleasantness so difficult for Elsie Tu is that she has a lifelong horror of quarrels. When she was a child, she was so ashamed of her family life that she never talked about it. Her mother was a disturbed woman who used physical violence as an outlet for her dissatisfaction with life. 'I'd sometimes have to hold my mother back when she'd throw things at my father. When my elder sister did something that displeased my mother once, I had to beg of my mother, on my knees, to treat her better. My other sister had a mark on her face all her life where my mother threw a cup at my father and hit her instead. As often as possible I went away from home and I think I turned to religion as a sort of escape.' The form of religion she chose, the Plymouth Brethren, was a severely restrictive one. She was attracted - and there is a certain retrospective irony to this - to its democracy, its lack of hierarchy. 'It seemed to me a simple way to reach Christianity. I didn't know that it would be something worse, that every word of the Bible is taken literally, and I only gradually realised I couldn't take that either.' She left the Brethren once for a gap of about five years. A man called Bill Elliott, whose family she knew, came to persuade her to return to the fold. He must have used some powerful arguments; at any rate, he later became her husband, and they travelled to China together in 1948 to - as the phrase put it - convert the heathen, while also - as another stock phrase of the time would have it - keeping the Chinese in their place.
There is a school of thought in Hong Kong which believes that Tu's recent actions, her appointment as an adviser to Beijing and in particular her hostility to Governor Chris Patten's reforms, spring from a sense of guilt about this missionary past. 'No,' she says emphatically. 'Because I don't think I converted anyone, personally. And it was too short a time to feel guilty about it, we were really just studying the language.' They also had first-hand experience of Chinese history, as the Nationalists retreated and the Communists arrived. 'We had fear before the Communists came because we were told all sorts of things about them ... but a lot of it is in the imagination. Not all of it, of course. But people get led away by mass hysteria, don't they? And haven't we got mass hysteria now, with this anti-China business? And it's the people in the street who suffer.' In 1951, the missionary community was put under pressure to leave China and the Elliotts came to Hong Kong, intending to journey on to Borneo. They stayed for three years, setting up an illegal clinic, using their own bed as an examination couch. As a result, Bill Elliott became tubercular and the couple returned to England. 'When we arrived home, his parents looked at both of us and said, 'Which one of you has TB?' Because by that time I think I had bulimia. We didn't know the word then but I wasn't eating, I was sick and emaciated. I couldn't take the pressure from the Brethren. I used to cry, I just couldn't bear it, but my husband would say 'You know, you are wrong, you're going the wrong way'. I can understand Princess Diana, you get sick inside. I was thinking of ways of ending it ... we had some kids we were teaching and I didn't want them to get upset but I was thinking of how I could walk under a bus and make it appear like an accident.' Instead of killing herself, however, she ended her marriage. The fact that there were no children - an operation when she was 19 meant she could never have any to her everlasting regret - made it slightly easier. She had set up a school in Hong Kong and was told that unless she returned to it, it would be closed. Her husband, and the Brethren, refused her permission to go back. So she went to Southampton, sent a telegram of regret to her hospitalised husband, and sailed east by herself. 'I had learnt from my mother the harm of quarrels, so I never had an argument with him. I just left. I think that was probably the hardest experience in my life.' Is he still alive? 'I don't know. It's probably about 10 years since I last heard from him.' She arrived back in Hong Kong with $150 and little else, not even the initial support of the man who was to become her second husband, Andrew Tu. 'He was the headmaster of the school and he said 'Please go back - don't leave your husband like that'.' It must have been an unthinkably lonely, unhappy time, an existence of dry bread and water eked out by occasional kindnesses from those around her. One of the Brethren who told her to return to her spouse later invited her out to lunch and tried to sexually assault her. 'He wanted me to give him oral sex and I'd never heard of such a thing. He said he thought we might have a bit of fun ... No, I didn't take any action. I suppose I was stupid not to.' Religion left her, never to return - she is often mistakenly described as a Christian, but is resolutely agnostic. Does she, at 82, fear death? 'Yes. Well, not fear but it does make you wonder ... I would be afraid of reincarnation, of coming back a second time. I like to think that when you go you're gone. Life is very hard, you know.' She has certainly never sought the easy option. In the 1960s, she made a name for herself fighting the corruption which was corroding many lives here. That took immense courage. The authorities did not like her stand but the people did, a situation she was happy to maintain for many years. She was blamed for the Star Ferry riots in 1966 by a Commission of Enquiry but her constituents re-elected her to the Urban Council the following year by the largest vote ever recorded. For a long time, she was synonymous with democracy and fair play. Which is why her apparent departure from these ideals has caused such an upset.
To Tu, of course, there has been no deviation. Her much-stated line is that she is not pro-China, she is pro-Hong Kong. The Liberals' Allen Lee Peng-fei has said she is a pragmatic person who has accepted the need to co-operate, not to confront. But it is an undeniable fact that she does not like the present governor of Hong Kong. 'See if you can get her to say his name,' one political observer remarked. 'She usually calls him 'that man'.' There is a perceptible tightening of the lips when the subject is broached. 'I didn't get a good impression from the first day,' Tu observes, with severity. 'He called me to his house and he sat me in a chair and he talked to me as if he was cross-examining me. He treated me like a child, it was question after question. He said 'How would you feel if we had all the district boards and regional councils elected?' I said that I wouldn't like to speak on behalf of the district boards or the regional councils but that I could speak on behalf of the Urban Council and the answer would be no, they wouldn't like it. They'd prefer to have a gradual reduction in appointed members so that we didn't get rid of all the expertise in one go. And then' - and this little anecdote evidently rankles three years on - 'we were going towards the door and his dog ran out, barking, and he went to pick it up. I love dogs and I went to stroke it, and he looked at me as if my dirty hand shouldn't touch it.