Memories of old Hong Kong: British winemaker recalls growing up on Lantau island tea estate in 1960s
Sarah Driver remembers her ‘most wonderful’ stepfather, the lawyer, politician and social reformer Brook Bernacchi, and roaming free in the wilds of his tea plantation
Within the grounds of a former tea plantation, concealed in a corner of the Ngong Ping plateau, in sight of the Big Buddha, Sarah Driver is retracing her childhood. In the 1960s, she and her brothers, Robert and Ian, were the only European children living on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island.
Dressed in a simple blue cotton shirt and shorts, the elegant 55-year-old mother of four grown-up children inspects the rain-drenched bushes that still grow on the gently sloping grounds. “You only pick the bud and the first two leaves, like this; that is what we were taught as children,” Driver says, plucking the tip of a wet branch between her fingers.
“He had the original bushes imported from Ceylon [Sri Lanka],” she says of her stepfather, who in 1949 founded the Reform Club of Hong Kong, which became the de facto opposition to Hong Kong’s colonial administration. “Brook was a barrister and a big political figure in Hong Kong, as well as a thorn in the side of the government,” Driver adds, also pointing out that Bernacchi founded the Hong Kong Sea School, in Stanley, to train disadvantaged young males for a career in the navy, and established numerous other community welfare projects.
A path leads through the shimmering tea bushes to the whitewashed stone house, where Monty, a dog of dubious breed, patrols the terrace. Tea is no longer produced here, but the facility once employed 20 to 30 workers and its product sold in Hong Kong under the Lotus brand. The assiduously maintained grounds and gardens still extend to three hectares, the rest having been sold over the years or acquired by the government as country-park land.
Driver returns to the villa from her home in London whenever she can, although the motivation for her trip on this occasion is business rather than pleasure. In 2010, she and her husband, Mark Driver (both lived and worked in Hong Kong in the 80s), established the Rathfinny Wine Estate near the picture-postcard village of Alfriston, in the southern English county of East Sussex.
