After we’d taken our O levels we all went in different directions.
I went first to boarding school in England which wasn’t a happy experience. I looked and sounded English but I didn’t know anything about the country or teenage culture and I didn’t have the right clothes. I tried hard to fit in but really the only thing I gained from that experience was to discover rock music and of course the late 70s was a great time for music in England!
Somehow I got to university and for a few months before that I lived in London, volunteering and hanging out with music students, trying desperately to become English so that I could feel a part of things at university. I had learned from boarding school that it wasn’t a good idea to mention that I had lived in Malaysia or gone to a different kind of school so I got into the habit of never mentioning it.
This went on for decades.
Although I had returned to England for my education I had assumed that I would be returning to KL for vacations/holidays. Unexpected family circumstances, however, dictated that after I started at university my home in KL was no longer my home. Now I had another reason not to mention Malaysia – it was just too painful and I kept the homesickness to myself.
Photo by Robin Benzrihem on Unsplash
Life jogged along and I did the usual things – jobs, marriages, having a child. For a while in the UK there was a TV advert for Malaysian tourism that said ‘Malaysia truly Asia.’ When that ad came on I would change the channel. If someone said they had gone to Malaysia for their honeymoon, or whatever, I would try to change the subject.
And, most of all, I resented the cold. When I first went to boarding school I was horrified to discover how cold it became that first term just before Christmas. And dark! It would be 3.30 in the afternoon and street lamps were coming on! The cold and damp seeped into my bones and seemed to stay there, each year, until May. Summer was nice, especially the light evenings, but I have never got used to the cold weather. My theory, totally unsubstantiated, is that the years I spent living in a tropical climate were transformational years, when my body was becoming adult, and it just didn’t learn, during that process, to protect me from the cold. Each year I think that maybe I have toughened up but so far it doesn’t seem to have happened!
Perhaps a slightly sad post today, but it’s a part of my Garden School story so I felt I couldn’t leave it out. Look out for the next post to see when and how I eventually got back to Malaysia…
