Sight seeing and the magical memory tour to find my old home

We had a car and driver booked for the day and set off soon after 9am to look for the places I felt it was important to visit. Our driver had other ideas. He insisted we wanted a ‘city tour.’ The only place I really wanted to visit was the KL Tower, and I explained this, and provided him with a list of roads and addresses. In the end, the day became a negotiated mix of city tour and Harriet’s trip down memory lane.

At first, we looked for the two buildings where I attended school. It seems that the school moved locations every few years in those days. Now known as the Garden International School, from the glossy website it looks like a wonderful place. In those days it was the Garden House Secondary School, and was certainly the school I enjoyed most out of all the schools I attended, but the arrangements were very simple. We were housed in large, colonial houses or adjacent buildings (the Asian equivalent of the portakabins that schools here use for overflow) and we were kept cool inefficiently by ceiling fans. I used to take a bottle of water that had been in the freezer overnight, and by break-time it would have melted to a cold-ish drink. What my parents did not know, however, was that I often bought drinks from the Coke machine, which were deliciously cold, both to drink and when you held the cold glass against your hot forehead. I also bought curry puffs, spring rolls and ubi kayu (tapioca) chips from the street vendor who came to the school. Although I did manage to find curry puffs during our holiday, I didn’t look for ubi kayu chips as they are so hard I knew they would damage my teeth!

So we looked in Jalan Imbi and Jalan Kia Peng, but I didn’t see anything at all I could recognise. I found out later that one of the school buildings is still there, but I would have needed someone who knew exactly where it was to take me. I said each time to the Teenager, ‘I went to school in this road,’ which didn’t seem very meaningful really but I felt I had to mark my retracing of steps somehow.

We did fit in a visit to the KL Tower, or Menara KL, which is a huge tower originally built for telecommunications. You buy a ticket and are ushered into a lift. The attendant presses the right buttons, tells you it will take 60 seconds to get to the top, and the doors shut while she stays on the ground floor. It does take a long time. When we got out to the viewing area, as you can see, there was a great view. I did feel it was very high and, although I was pleased to see the sights, I was also looking forward to feeling solid ground beneath my feet again. I noticed the building where we used to visit our GP and the Concorde Hotel. Of course you can always see the Petronas Towers, which are the most prominent landmarks. Regular readers will know that, every now and then, I seem to be drawn to going up high (for example on a roller coaster or high ropes course), but that each time I find I don’t really enjoy heights. I am not sure I have learned even now as, just a few days after finding the Menara KL a bit dizzy for my liking, I made an even more unwise decision which resulted in me and the Teenager swinging hundreds of feet above the rainforest. Keep reading the daily posts to find out what happened!

Anyway, after quick ‘city tour’ stops at the Leather Factory, the Chocolate Factory and the Batik Factory, we set off on our search for my former homes. The first place we visited, which the driver knew well, was the Park Royal Hotel in Jalan Bukit Bintang, opposite the Sungai Wang shopping centre. In the 70s, this hotel was called the Regent, and it was our home for the first six weeks. This was the hotel I walked out of in the mornings before going to my new school, overwhelmed by the heat, sounds and smells of a very different country. This was the place where all the staff, having recently seen the film Oliver Twist,, renamed my redheaded little brother ‘Mark Lester’ as he looked so similar to the child star. And it was the first place I experienced a tropical storm, waking in panic at the sound of tremendous thunder claps. I just got the driver to go past the front door, as I knew the interior would be changed beyond recognition. But it was important to be there, just for a few moments.

I missed out Jalan Venning, the road we lived in for the next six months. The driver had never heard of the road and I was realistic, realising that if we started looking for it we might not get to more important locations. Living there, I saw my first wild snake, in the garden, and became used to the vibrant energy that emanates from vegetation in the tropics, even in a residential garden. The jungle is always waiting for an opportunity to take over, and if lawns are not mown and bushes not cut back regularly, what was a tidy garden can soon become impenetrable. We also found, after moving in, that we were living next door to Tun Abdul Razak, who was the second prime minister of Malaysia, succeeding Tunku Abdul Rahman. Security was fairly tight, with pictures at the side of the road of people running away and guards pointing guns at them to warn us to behave. And the armed guards to match. This was interesting in itself until one day everything became more dramatic when Tun Abdul Razak suddenly died. Everything moved quickly as funerals have to take place almost immediately. There were lots of important comings and goings, and at first the guards were suspicious of us driving to and from our house as a family. They probably thought we were interested expats wanting to know what was going on. Soon, however, they all learned that we lived there and needed to pass by frequently, and would amuse my brother by pointing their (loaded, I am sure) guns at him.

So we went straight on to look for the house in Kenny Hill. At least, Kenny Hill is what it was called up to the early 70s. The rather genteel suburb, perhaps an equivalent of Hampstead, inhabited back then mainly by expats. But by the time we arrived, Malaysianisation had moved forward, quite rightly, and Kenny Hill was becoming known as Bukit Tunku (meaning Prince Hill) as it is now. The road we lived in was Tinggian Tunku (Prince Heights) and had formerly been Jalan Kenny Tinggi. The driver had heard of Kenny Hill but described it as ‘a very secret place,’ and was clearly nervous to be driving around there. He had no idea where Tinggian Tunku was but I insisted we had a good look around, as I hadn’t come all that way to not see my old home. I knew it was there and I was going to find it!

We drove round and round, with me peering out of the window and saying, ‘go that way, oh no not that way, this way,’ and generally feeling confused. A couple of times I got out and asked guards in sentry boxes at the gates of the larger houses. I was given directions but none of them really seemed to know where the road was. To be fair, it’s not a big road. I could tell the driver wanted to give up, but I was determined – we were so close!

Eventually we found the road and I recognised the house on the hill opposite – Kenny Hill is just what its name suggests, a very hilly place, so that all the houses are on different levels and most of the gardens have impossible slopes. When I lived there the house used to have an in and out drive and we found the ‘in’ entrance but it has now been blocked up. I peered in but couldn’t see much. So we drove round and down to the ‘out’ entrance which now had clearly become both in and out. There it was. The actual address on the gate, and a glimpse of the house between the trees. Better still, I could see the balcony that my brother’s and my rooms led out onto, and was able to point out to the Teenager my bedroom window. A dog was barking furiously at us and the driver started to panic and shout for me to come back. I wasn’t worried about the dog but I did think the owners might start to get suspicious about the woman standing and taking photos of their house, so I jumped back in the car.

That was enough. I had been there and I had found it. Clearly, someone else was living there and the house itself had moved on and changed. Looking at my bedroom window was a pivotal moment. With hindsight, I think that may have been the very moment that I said goodbye properly to that life and to my young self. I do believe that we carry within us all our previous incarnations – not of other lives but from this one. But I needed to let go of that young Harriet, make my peace with her and allow the past to be what it was. That was the moment I really understood that those times were all finished and done with. Not just where and how I lived, but also the pain and confusion of the family situation.

We carried on to look for lunch and the next stop on the magical memory tour.