Remembering school days

In the evening of my magical memory tour another important event was planned. This is what had happened. Five weeks before we were due to leave for Singapore and Malaysia, I received an email from someone called Theresa Manavalan. Luckily, since I often receive dozens of emails in a day, I picked up on the name and opened the email. The writer asked if I was the same Harriet Stack who had been at Garden School in Kuala Lumpur, and if so would I like to be in touch.

I remembered Theresa instantly, even though we had not seen each other for 36 years. She was bubbly and confident and got on well with everyone. Whereas I was rather shy and quiet and not at all talkative. Things have changed a little! Of course I emailed back straight away and explained how wonderful the timing was as I was due to visit KL shortly.

In fact, the timing was extraordinary. If Theresa had wanted to contact me a couple of years previously, she wouldn’t have found me as I wasn’t using the name Stack back then. And, as she pointed out, what if she had got in touch five weeks after I visited KL? I would have said, ‘what a pity, I was there only recently!’ But it wasn’t like that. Her email arrived at exactly the right time, nearly four decades after we had been at school together.

Theresa, her husband and her daughter collected me from the hotel during a rainstorm and we went to The Royal Selangor Club for dinner. The Selangor Club, also known as The Dog (various reasons are given but no-one seems to know exactly why) is a colonial institution and if I had ever been there before I was so young that I didn’t take any notice. We had a lovely meal but we had to keep remembering to eat as we were talking so much.

The years melted away. Each of us would say, ‘do you remember so and so?’ and that would spark off the other into yet another anecdote. People I had never considered for all that time, because they had not been particular friends, suddenly appeared in my mind through the mists of time. We remembered the teachers, the classrooms and the memorable events. One of the most memorable being the day our class barricaded the teachers out of the classroom. Of course it was not myself and Theresa who did this, but we were inside, with the naughtier pupils working on the barricade, and all the teachers were outside. Mrs Bujang, the maths teacher, who was a force to be reckoned with, stood outside and made one of the girls take down a long list of exercises for us to do while we were stuck in there and she was stuck outside. I expect that Theresa and I, along with some of the other more conscientious girls, and perhaps one or two studious boys, actually sat down and did the exercises. I can’t remember how the incident concluded but I will never forget Mrs Bujang, with her broad Northern Irish accent, reading out that list of work to be done. We laughed. A lot. We didn’t just remember what had happened; for a few moments, we relived it.

Theresa also helped me to catch up with how things are in KL, and the country as a whole, today. Having known me before, she understood exactly what my experience had been, and as a journalist she recognised all that I had missed. Looking back, that meeting and our incessant conversation really helped me to bring myself up to date and, again, to leave the past where it belongs, in the past.

Of course I thank Theresa and her husband for the meal and for spending the evening with me, but I would also like to note my appreciation for her little girl’s patience with our nostalgia. I can remember how very boring it was to listen to my mother talking to old acquaintances about things that meant nothing to me, and I must have wriggled and sighed. It can’t have been easy, but this was one young lady who dealt with the situation with grace and politeness.

This is the oddest thing. It seemed so natural to spend that evening chatting and remembering. I felt as if I would probably see Theresa again in a few weeks. As I already felt at home in the country, and we had so much in common and had such a relaxed time, it seemed that this was just ordinary life, something that would happen every now and then as a matter of course. Meeting up was special, but now that we had made contact, it would be natural to see each other occasionally. Of course there is one big problem with that: the vast space between where I live now and where I used to live then! This is something I am still getting my head round; I have two places where my life is real and current, two places that feel like home, in distinctly different ways. But they are so very far apart. How I integrate this into my life, only time will tell.