Magical memory tour part 2

After a quick stop at some stalls for lunch, we had a bit more of our city tour. I wanted to show the Teenager the railway station, which is an amazing building that looks more like a castle with turrets and decorative crenellations. We also saw the big Mosque, the old palace and the new palace. We stopped and looked at the National Monument and I pointed out to the Teenager that there are three periods of war listed:

The last one is for the ‘Emergency’ which was relatively recent when we moved to KL, and was often talked about, as I imagine the Second World War must have been in the UK in the 50s. I was very moved standing before the images of soldiers because I remember my mother taking us there often. It was also on her ‘wives’ tour: whenever my father’s UK colleagues or business contacts visited Malaysia and brought their wives with them, my mother would have the job of showing them round. She had a tour consisting of the railway station, the Mosque, the Museum and the Monument. If there was an extra day she would take them on a special trip to the Batu Caves and the Batik Factory nearby. If I had had one more day that is where I would have taken the Teenager; soaring limestone cliffs and huge caves housing thousands of bats would be just up his street!

I managed to divert the driver’s attention back to my magical memories. He wanted to take us to the Batu Caves but I pointed out that this would not give us enough time to find the Polo Club. I think the problem was that he didn’t really believe the Polo Club existed, especially when I said ‘it’s near Jalan Ampang Hillier, where all the embassies are.’ He made a few phone calls and we drove around a bit. I knew he wanted to give up and I was determined that we would keep looking. We were both stressed!

Eventually, I decided I would take a short cut. By now it was about 6am in the UK, and I knew that my mother would be able to tell us exactly how to get there. I made the considerable financial investment necessary to use my phone and give her a call. She was sleepy, but immediately able to understand my difficulty. She said, ‘you need to go down Jalan Ampang Hillier, where all the embassies are.’ This seemed to reassure the driver and we kept looking. I persuaded him to take one more turning, and suddenly, there we were. I explained to the chap on the gate who I was and he let us in.

Why was it so very important for me to visit the Polo Club. Well, this place, known in those days as the Selangor Polo and Riding Club and now listed on Facebook (Facebook!!) as the Royal Selangor Polo Club, was where I spent nearly all my spare time as a teenager. Coming from a racing background, my parents soon became involved in the amateur racing scene, and I started to ride, first with the riding school and then on the horses of friends and eventually our own, once we acquired them. My mother became District Commissioner of the Pony Club and was deeply involved in the tournaments we used to compete in against the Singapore Pony Club. I remember so well the flocks of young girls, maybe a year or so younger than I was, calling, ‘Mrs Stack, Mrs Stack,’ with their questions, problems and upsets. Both my parents held posts on the committee of the Polo Club so we were very involved and there was a lot going on. My father also started to learn to play polo and eventually so did I. The riding wasn’t a problem for me; I loved schooling polo ponies, practising stops and figures of eight, but connecting a polo stick with a ball on the ground, or even worse in the air, was just as impossible for me as tennis and hockey had been.

So the horses and the riding were important, but just as significant for me, this was the place where I started to grow into an adult. I went to my first disco at the Polo Club, terrified that I wouldn’t wear the right thing or be able to dance like everyone else. I met my first boyfriends (and my first husband) here and drank my first beer. I experienced many of those embarrassing growing up moments, alongside the fun and the glimpses of what life might be like when I was really grown up.

And this place was truly international. Of course, there were Malays, Chinese and Indians, but there was also a huge range of expat members. Some British, but many American, Australians, French, Mexican, Argentinian, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Swiss, Austrian…and those are just the nationalities that come to mind when I start to picture people I knew. It was similar to being at school where a lot of the time I was the only English girl in my class. I learned not to make any assumptions about what people believed, how they lived or what might offend them. I couldn’t rely on my own cultural references (and in fact I think that what I did was not really to develop them as much as I would have done if I had lived continuously in the UK, so that perhaps I make fewer assumptions than I might about other people, but also sometimes I don’t understand my fellow Brits!).

So I got out of the car, and for the first time in well over 30 years, walked into the place that had seen so much of my growing up and teenage angst. Of course there were lots of changes. Beyond the polo field used to be tin tailings stretching out for miles. Plenty of open space. There was a large lake behind the clubhouse where the horses used to be taken to swim and which had seen its share of real tragedy. But now buildings, some of them high rise, came right up to the edge of the polo field and the club buildings. The sand paddocks were still there, where I used to school the polo ponies and practise dressage tests, as was the sand track right around the polo field, which we used to ride around, sometimes chatting, sometimes until dusk fell. I noted with dismay, however, that whereas we always rode anti-clockwise around the track, the regulation was now to ride clockwise. Who had changed that, I wondered, and why?

I went into the clubhouse, walking through the tarmac car park which used to be sand, and explained to the few people there who I was and that I would just be a minute. I remembered from before how sometimes strangers would turn up and someone would explain that they used to be a member x number of years ago, and how irrelevant I thought it was. I was now one of those people. The clubhouse building is a replacement, but is very similar to the one I knew in its simplicity and openness to the elements. I found that very pleasing.

We didn’t stay long. We watched a horse being hosed down on the way back to the car. You don’t see that often in England, but in the tropics it’s a good way to cool them down. Visiting the Polo Club was very similar to seeing the house. I didn’t need to spend long; I just had to witness the passing of time, realise that the past is in the past and I am now in 2013, as grown up as I will ever be. Although there is still that teenager, and many of her thoughts, dreams and feelings, inside me, I am here right now. We have all moved on. The old pains are in the past, and it is up to us to shape the present.