On the plane to Dallas, where I would be connecting to Albuquerque, I wondered whether I was making a mistake. Why on earth would anyone fly so far (5,000 miles as the crow flies) to spend three and a half days with a bunch of people they were at school with, most of whom they hadn’t seen for 40 years? It wasn’t the first time I had pondered this question, as several people had already asked me why I was going to New Mexico for a long weekend….
In fact, there were compelling reasons for me to take this trip.
In 1975, aged only just 13, I had moved with my parents and younger brother to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for what was intended to be a three year posting due to my father’s job. My mother had insisted that my brother and I moved with them to attend schools in KL, rather than stay at boarding school in the UK as was the norm for British ex-pats.
The whole school
We arrived in KL on a Thursday and on the Monday morning I was delivered to what looked like a slightly tired colonial mansion, the Garden School. As you can see from this photo of the whole school, there were not many of us. We were also incredibly diverse, with many nationalities represented. From memory, I would think that if there were more than four or five students of one particular nationality in your class, that would be a lot.
The result was that we all got along very well, without undue judgment, prejudice or unpleasantness. Of course there were fights and arguments but there were no cliques and I don’t remember anything very horrible happening. If someone new arrived, which was quite usual and often in the middle of a term, they were instantly a part of the class. We were used to people coming and going.
I think we all worked quite hard. The school was based on the British curriculum and in those days went up to O levels. We were all expected to continue our studies afterwards, most of us in the UK or US, and we needed to be up to scratch when we got there.
In those days there was no air conditioning in the school. We started early and finished at 1pm, leaving plenty of time for homework! So we didn’t eat lunch at school but there were stalls selling ice cream and various snacks. I wasn’t supposed to spend my pocket money on any of this food but I regularly did so and suffered no ill effects.
My overall experience was that, having struggled to fit in at the small co-ed private school and then the girls’ convent I had attended in England, I felt comfortable and accepted. There was no worry about being different from other kids because we were all different from each other. Some had been born in Malaysia but many had come from other countries. Some spoke languages other than English at home. Being different wasn’t notable; it was the norm. We left all that stuff at the school gates (if we bothered wtih it at all) and got on with being people. I didn’t realise when I left Garden School at nearly 16 that it would be many, many years before I was to encounter such acceptance and such a feeling of belonging again.
Watch out for the next post to hear about how the Garden School began and some of our unique adventures.
