So you would think from this photo that I was miserable arriving in Kuala Lumpur having had to say good bye forever to some close friends including my Israeli mate, Daphna, in Japan. But in fact I was in my element in this photo because I was playing my first professional acting role.
Well, that’s stretching it, but basically, we had two dogs. One, from Japan, Wong, the brother to Suzy, who after plastic surgery to his leg and a flight with quarantine was turning out to be the most expensive but beloved mongrel on the planet. In addition, we had agreed once we had arrived in K.L. (Kuala Lumpur) to take on a good friend’s boxer, Fang. We adored both, but Fang did have quite a personality, being a boxer with amber velvet fur and black flicks, silky dark brown ears and bouncy paws. On the odd occasion when he was unmonitored in our house, it was necessary to attach him by a lengthy lead to something, so that he wouldn’t run riot with house guests.
On one of these events, his lead was attached to a thick, arm chair that weighed ten stone which he dragged round the garden because he thought there was something interesting in the distance. So, one unfortunate day, he went off on one of those chases, having not been attached to anything in the house and despite all searches, he never returned. The photograph (see, there was a point to all this story about our dogs) is an advert in the local press saying “Can you help this girl find her dog?” The newspaper photographer wanted a particularly upset expression and I think we can all agree that I delivered. Obviously, some of it was genuine, I was upset about losing Fang, but I was actually leading quite a nice life despite what the picture implies.
The moment we arrived, I fell in love with Kuala Lumpur. It was much more like Thailand, for a start, so hot, humid and utterly tropical, with all the smells and sensations that go along with that. While my mother began house hunting and my father began his new role, we had the luxury of staying in the Regent Hotel. My mother tells me that the roof-top swimming pool use to give her heart palpitations because there was no safety barrier, just surrounding plants beyond which a long, long drop to the street below. The now lucrative sector of health and safety had not entered anyone’s lives yet. As a child, that of course did not bother me. What delighted me was that I had their fruit punch every day, which had watermelon, kiwi, guava, papaya, banana and mango in it and was earth-shatteringly delicious. EVERY DAY. Need I say more. Yes. There was more. I would regularly have their beef burger which had cheese, pickle and lettuce and mayonnaise, which if you had been swimming all day, was a joy.
We moved into our house in Damansara Heights, which was the kind you might see in parts of Los Angeles, a Spanish build and roof, mezzanine balcony, white marble floors, all very pretty if a little exposed. I accompanied my mother on her first experience driving a car to work colleagues of my father, both of us nervous: my mother because it was the first time she had driven in years in a completely unfamiliar country with unfamiliar traffic customs, me because my mother was literally trembling for the whole journey.
I was registered at a British school called Alice Smith, very different from the American school in Japan. In the first place, they had all learnt about fractions and I hadn’t a clue what they were, so my parents appointed a governess to tutor me in that side of maths. Mrs Ryan had home schooled her own children and was nothing short of a genius in terms of making learning pleasurable. Firstly, she encouraged me to cover my books in paper with my own designs on them, so that I could enjoy them. Oh, I loved that. Also she wore pretty yellow skirts and make-up and I was generally very impressed with her sartorial choices. Why this had become so important, I will never know. But she got the thumbs-up from me, as a tutor.
At Alice Smith itself, the uniform was not unappealing. Green gingham… (gingham is in fact derivative of a Malaysian word and the cloth comes from Malaysia)….cotton with little wings around the shoulders. I found it very becoming with my hair plaited, I genuinely approved. We were instructed on personal hygiene in terms of deodorant as one of our first lessons, due to it having a post colonial reputation in terms of its teaching and air conditioning only being provided to the older students.
To my surprise, I began to excel there, to my own detriment, because on one of the too frequent occasions of winning some competition in writing or something like that, the rest of the class decided that they were not too happy with this favouritism, so a ring leader organised for the fellow pupils to stand around me in a circle and chant “we hate you, we hate you” repeatedly. I begged them to stop, to tell me why they were doing this to me, but they wouldn’t, so I fainted. Ahhhh, happy days. My mother, distraught, came to collect me and luckily I was eventually put into a different stream, where I seemed to fit in and “we hate you” soon came to an end.
A post script to this story was that after the chanting hate thing, I asked the ring leader why she did this to me. The prize for the competition that I won was some kind of chocolate trophy. The girl replied that “That chocolate makes me fuzzy.” This became a catch phrase in our household, allowing the event to sink into the past as a laughable mis-hap. This particular person, the one who found chocolate so fuzzy-making, chose, having put me through the particular hell that only a child can do, to write to me years later at boarding school saying how much she wanted to stay friends with me, like in the good old days at Alice Smith. BLEW MY MIND. Some people.
We moved a little later on to a part of KL called Kenny Hill. There was a shop down the street that I used to walk to, often bare foot, to buy Jackie magazine or something like that. And some assams. Sour plums with salt on them. Delicious. Since you ask. I would chat with the locals, who punctuated all their statements with “lah”. So an example would be: “How are you, lah? “I’m ok, lah.” I loved joining in with all that, accommodating my language with them, it had a gorgeous easy going sound to it.
Christmas was often spent in Port Dickson with my father’s boss from work and his close male friend. It was a relationship between two men that never raised eyebrows in that part of the world. Somerset Maugham seemed to have broached that territory in his writing and many western men followed suit to live freely without any judgement.
I was enchanted by both of them, the boss because his aesthetics were of Dutch colonial heritage so everything around him, curated by him, was beautiful. He gave my parents a rosewood card table which I ogle enough to know that I am staking my claim on it, in case my parents are reading this. His friend, from Indonesia had a wicked sense of humour and was child-like and fun. One of the funniest times was when he insisted on taking my brother and me to see the new film, Jaws. We made our way to Port Dickson beach literally the next day. Every two seconds as we began to plunge in the water, he would simulate an attack from the creatures below, sending my brother and I running screaming out of the aqua-marine paradise. It took a while to get over it, but we did, eventually.
Half way through this joy, I had to face the horror of going to boarding school. I will go into more details about that another time. Up to that point, my brother joined for all the holidays, telling me stories of Breakfast Rabbit, a character he created who I adored hearing about. He and I would record ourselves on tape cassettes, doing various characters usually involving flight attendants we had come to know on our lengthy twenty hour crossings.
One incident upset my mother and indeed upset me, which was around 1978. I had started boarding school, and for some reason to do with timing, my brother and I could not travel together. So I was escorted to Heathrow airport and once there, I went to the Qantas airlines desk to check-in. They announced that the system of unaccompanied minors had finished from the age of twelve, so, they were sorry to tell me, I was on my own. The flight involved changing in Singapore and I was terrified and burst into tears. They were still sorry but unable to actively help, so I went to the British Airways desk, who considered minors to be minors until they were sixteen. They organised for a stewardess to accompany as far as the plane. The stewardess told the staff on the Qantas flight what the situation was but the staff were legally obliged to repeat that they were unable to help me from there. I asked an old lady (probably my age now) if she was going to Singapore and changing for Kuala Lumpur. She answered that she was, so I asked her if she minded if I could tag along. She answered that she was not comfortable with that. So I asked her if at a distance I could follow her. She answered that she could not stop me. This is how I made my way to Kuala Lumpur, aged twelve. Thanks Qantas. My mother raised hell with them when I landed.
Kate Terence's Letters from London 