Flying High, My Story Page 2

  Mum, on the other hand, thought I was perfect, always seeking to show me off to her friends. Every time she had a party, I’d be called into the living room and told to play the piano. I had a medley of songs which I rattled off while Mum beamed with pride.

  Her exuberance and generosity extended to her attitude to money. She was extravagant to the point of recklessness, which meant that quite often I was spoilt. My Aunty Girly (we still call her that and it drives her mad as her real name is Enid) tells me that Christmas was always awkward. We’d gather as a family at Mum and Dad’s and there were presents for all the kids around the tree. My cousins, she says, got ‘ordinary presents’ like a teddy bear or a book, but I usually got something bigger and the other children would want mine. One time, she reminds me, Mum came back from the UK and gave me a pure crystal football. It wasn’t like I could take it outside and play with it but, for whatever reason, she wanted me to have it. Aunty Girly would tell Mum that she was spoiling me, but Mum would say: ‘I can’t help it. I just can’t say ‘‘no’’ to him!’

  My dad was more frugal and less showy. I like to think I absorbed the best of both approaches from my parents but I am probably more influenced by Mum’s attitude when it comes to personal spending and by Dad when it comes to running a business. I love to spend money on entertaining people but I’m also an accountant at heart so I understand how to control money. I think it’s fair to say I run my businesses better than I run my own finances!

  For all the joy it created, Mum’s love of luxury sometimes got us into difficulties and once we had to move out of a house I loved because we were in over our heads financially. The first house I remember was a terrace house and it was split in two like a London maisonette. We lived on the top floor and on the bottom floor there was an industrious Jewish couple who went on to own the Tower Records franchise in Malaysia and the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf chain. Then we moved to Ampang to a huge colonial-style house which Dad got through his job with the WHO. It had a garden with enough space to mark out a football pitch; I thought houses couldn’t get any better. But, after a period, we bought our own house in a new area called Damansara Heights. This is the house that is most vivid to me. It was the scene of the wildest parties, of the most memorable Christmases and where my greatest childhood memories were formed. My sister arrived about this time too, so even if I was a bit jealous of the attention she got, the atmosphere was happy.

  We moved a couple more times in Kuala Lumpur and ended up in a neighbourhood where there were five or six kids, some older and some younger than me, who I used to hang out with every evening. We’d meet on some land nearby that hadn’t been developed and play badminton, football and any other ball game that you can imagine. Mum would go mad complaining that I wasn’t working hard enough and was worried I would never become a doctor. But I wasn’t exactly studious – I was smart enough, but I only did the minimum academically needed to get by. Like a lot of boys at that age, I couldn’t see the point of memorizing things for the sake of it.

  As I headed towards the age of eleven, I started to understand that there were problems in my mum’s life. Her mood would swing from periods of high intensity to chronic inactivity. Sometimes she was really on it – she’d discover from somewhere or other that 5.00 a.m. was the best time to study, so she’d wake me up at 5.00 a.m. and make me study history with her. Then other times she’d be stuck in her room for what seemed like months on end.

  When she was in the low phase, Dad would send her to hospital for treatment. Through my eleven-year-old eyes it didn’t make any sense: home was where she should be. I used to fight with him, not understanding why she had to go, why she had to leave us. As the months went by, the low phases seemed to get longer and I felt her absence more, craving the time she’d re-emerge from her room or return from the hospital.

  When Mum was down, the house was down too: it felt cold, empty and far too still. The piano was silent and Dad moved quietly around; my piano medley got rusty as friends and parties became distant memories. All I wanted was to hear my mum humming a tune or for her to chase me around the house, trying to catch me.

  Dad was strict with me and when Mum was away I didn’t enjoy the same freedoms. He sat me down to read and do my homework without the lightness that Mum brought to the job.

  One day, Dad and I had a furious argument in the dining room. Mum had just been taken off to hospital again and I was so angry that I couldn’t control myself. We faced off on opposite sides of the dining-room table. All the frustration, sadness and the fear of another long spell of life without Mum came to the surface.

  ‘Dad, don’t send her away! She should be here. I hate it when she’s gone,’ I shouted.

  ‘Anthony, it’s for her own good; she’ll be better in the long run,’ Dad said, trying to calm me down.

  ‘I don’t care about the long run.’

  ‘Listen, she has to go to hospital to get better.’

  ‘You’re just cruel and I hate you,’ I snapped back.

  Dad clearly wasn’t impressed. ‘Don’t ever say that. You, son, need to show some respect. Go to your room,’ he bellowed.

  ‘No,’ I replied stubbornly.

  He never raised his hand to me but I thought he might then. He was furious. I stood in front of him, defying him properly for the first time.

  Dad looked like he didn’t know what to do for a second; then, he did what he always did when he needed an answer, he turned round to the bookcase and picked out a book. He flicked through until he found what he was looking for and slapped the open book down on the dining table.

  ‘Read that. And then go to your room.’ He walked out.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen him so angry. Looking back, I realize he was worried and perhaps scared. Though so different, he and Mum loved each other deeply.

  After he’d gone, I walked up to the table and looked at the open page. There was an entry for Manic Depression. Reading the article, seeing her diagnosed in black and white with little idea about treatment, made me understand just how serious her condition was. I found Dad not long after and told him he was right.

  My reaction to this sad news about Mum was to throw myself into sport even harder. Dad encouraged me. Beneath his aloof exterior he was a passionate man.

  Perhaps because Mum was suffering so badly or maybe because she was still determined that I should become a doctor, my parents arranged a family trip to England in August 1976 to visit Epsom College, a school with a rich medical academic history. We flew to London and stayed in the White House Hotel near Great Portland Street, and from there we made the trip to Epsom in Surrey. I was completely uninterested in seeing the school and didn’t understand why they were considering sending me there.

  I was made to sit a test and I must have passed because we were taken on a tour of the school and grounds. The only question I asked was whether they played football; I was told they played only rugby and hockey, so I felt sorry for the boys who went there. No football!

  The next day Mum took me to Selfridges and bought me a West Ham top. I was so proud to wear that shiny claret and blue shirt that the previous day’s disappointment faded away. Dad tried to get tickets for a West Ham game while we were in England but unfortunately it didn’t work out. I did have one more unforgettable moment on the trip, though. Mum was now working for Pyrex and had a meeting in Sunderland. We travelled up on the train and, while she went to her meeting, Dad took me to Roker Park. It was so much bigger than any sports ground I’d seen in Malaysia. Even without a crowd, the stadium made me dizzy and I got my first feeling of what the atmosphere at an English First Division game must be like. Up to that point, I’d just imagined the grounds from listening to the radio and seeing highlights on television; to experience a stadium up close made me realize just how intense, loud and exciting watching a real game would be.

  When we got back home, I soon forgot about the trip to Epsom. A whole year passed and I spent every evening playing football in my West Ham top
as late as I could before Mum would call me in for dinner or the sun would set.

  Then, one day in July 1977, Mum and Dad appeared at my bedroom door. This was unusual but as I was bouncing up and down on my bed, I assumed they were coming up to tell me off. Instead, Dad told me that in September I would be going to the English school. The school that didn’t play football.

  2. Outward Bound

  Soundtrack: ‘Lonely Boy’ by Andrew Gold

  My parents drove me to the airport in early September 1977. I wasn’t scared – in fact I was thrilled to be flying by myself for the first time at the age of thirteen.

  As soon as we arrived I was handed over to a stewardess who took me off to a waiting room to sit in before my Qantas flight was called. The farewell with Mum and Dad and my little sister was offset by my excitement at flying solo. The thrill of take-off, brought on by the roar of the engines as they reach full power and the juddering of the 747 as it hurtles down the runway, is a feeling I still love today. I remember the steep lift-off vividly, my ears popping as we smashed through the clouds and into the clear blue sky. I was sustained by pure adrenaline for most of the flight; I don’t remember sleeping a wink. We stopped off in Bahrain but I stayed on the plane, not wanting to leave it until I absolutely had to.

  When I finally got off the plane at Heathrow, I looked around and my first thought was: ‘God, everyone’s white here!’ Whereas flying had been fun, arriving by myself was scary. As I followed the signs to the baggage reclaim area, the crush and size of the crowd made me feel tiny – everything at the airport was on such a grand scale. I’d been there before but visiting somewhere with your parents is a different experience to arriving by yourself. I felt nervous and vulnerable. And I now faced a lonely journey to Epsom on a coach which the school had told my parents was a Green Line bus number 727. I didn’t know where I had to go to get on it and had no idea how long the journey was. The only remaining instruction was to get off at the Spread Eagle pub on Epsom High Street.

  I waited by the luggage carousel, eyes fixed on the bags appearing out of the hole in the wall, nervously watching as other passengers picked up their suitcases and walked away.

  I managed to find the 727 bus departing from outside Terminal 2. The driver put my suitcase in the luggage hold, waited for more passengers and then we were off. As we drove along the A roads through Teddington, Kingston and then out into the Surrey countryside, I couldn’t believe how green everything was. It was also crowded in a way that I hadn’t experienced before – roads busy with people, cars, motorbikes and lorries. The bus seemed to be constantly stopping and starting while I sat anxiously looking out for the next stop.

  The driver kindly let me know when we got to the Spread Eagle on Epsom High Street and unloaded my suitcase. As the bus pulled away to continue its journey to Gatwick, I looked around, not sure what to do next. A teenage girl was walking by so I asked her directions to the college. She held up her hand to me which I thought might be an English way of saying hello, until she said, ‘Go home. We don’t want your sort here.’

  Welcome to England.

  Eventually, an elderly man pointed me in the right direction and I started on the final leg of my journey. The suitcase was heavy and, of course, back then they had no wheels, so I carried it slowly along the narrow pavements through Epsom and beyond into the leafier outer reaches of the town until I finally saw the sign that pointed to my home for the next six years.

  After the flight, the bus trip and the two-mile walk, I was knackered, hungry and cold. I dragged my suitcase on to the campus of Epsom College where I saw the main building for the first time on my own. It was daunting. Sitting on top of a slight incline, it stretched about 500 feet either side of a main entrance that had huge double wooden doors. The doors were topped with a crenelated tower and a flagpole proudly displaying the Union Jack. Outlining the entrance was a white stone arch that contrasted with the deep-red brick and the dark leaded windows on the rest of the building. To a thirteen-year-old boy from Kuala Lumpur the set-up did not feel welcoming. If I’d felt tiny at Heathrow, I felt microscopic now.

  I opened the huge doors and found a master who pointed me in the direction of my allotted house, Holman House, whose colours were red and white. He told me to hurry up and get changed because dinner was in ten minutes. I raced back across the campus and down the hill I’d just walked up, to Holman House. I climbed up the stairs and found my dormitory: twenty beds split ten and ten running along the walls of a long room. I grabbed a spare bed, opened my suitcase and pulled out my uniform. The other boys in the room looked at me with curiosity and then began to laugh as I struggled to knot my tie – something I never got much better at. Eventually, a fellow pupil, Roddy Williams, took pity on me and helped. Worried that I wouldn’t be able to tie it again by myself, I kept the same knot tied for my first week, just loosening it enough to pull it over my head at night and then tightening it in the morning when I put it back on. My new friend, Roddy, and I started talking about football and I began to feel better.

  Late and hungry, we ran downstairs to go to the main building for dinner. We were so engrossed in our conversation and worried about being late that we took the shortest way possible across the grounds. Out of nowhere, we heard a man screaming at us at the top of his voice.

  ‘You! You two horrible boys! Get off the grass this instant or you’ll be in detention before you know it.’

  We froze, terrified. Mr Parker, a history master who looked frightening in his suit and black scholar’s gown, glided up and gave us a telling-off, to the enjoyment of all the other boys hurrying to dinner. Roddy and I bowed our heads and shuffled off to the dining room. To top off an exhausting and upsetting day at my new school, I had been publicly embarrassed by one of the first masters I’d met.

  My parents never told me explicitly why they sent me to Epsom but it wasn’t long before their motive became clear. The school opened in 1855 to house widows of the medical profession and to provide education for their sons. The Royal Medical Foundation, set up by Dr John Propert, was the body that raised the money and built the campus; and when the school opened it was called the Royal Medical Benevolent College. Initially, there were a hundred boys but the number of children grew slowly. When I arrived there would have been nearly 600 boys. I’ve been told that Epsom College has educated more doctors than any other school in England – and, some say, the world. But despite my mum’s hopes, I wasn’t destined to become another doctor and add to Epsom’s impressive medical history.

  I spent the first week trying to work out how to navigate around the campus, learning about the history of the building and trying to get used to things which seemed bizarre. It felt so strange eating in a dining hall with over five hundred other boys and sleeping in a dorm with nineteen others. There were two matrons who looked after our washing: we just threw dirty clothes into a huge wicker basket at one end of the dorm and, a few days later, they’d reappear washed and ironed. Nothing in my new life was familiar and there wasn’t much of the comfort of home about it. When we showered in the morning, the water was often lukewarm or freezing cold because there was only a limited amount of hot water and the sixth-formers always went first. Homesickness, already hovering, landed hard on me. I missed home. Life here was so different and I felt so far away from anything I recognized.

  The strangeness continued in my first games class. We played rugby which seemed all wrong to me: picking up an egg-shaped ball and running into the opposition players who tried to bring you down to the ground. It was the polar opposite of the game I loved. In my first game, a boy on the other team got the ball and started to run down the wing. I was fast then and easily caught up with him. Everyone was screaming at me to tackle him but, as far as I was concerned, I couldn’t tackle him like I would in football because that would just count as tripping him up. So I tracked him until he put the ball down and scored a try. I really didn’t get it at all.

  After games we all piled into the changing room
s and were told to shower together. That freaked me out completely. Sharing a corridor of showers with thirty other boys seemed very weird.

  Once we’d got back into our uniforms I looked around for somewhere to put my dirty kit. An older boy pointed at the wire cages we’d hung our uniforms in while we played rugby. I was amazed. Unlike our uniform, the kit stayed in the cage for at least three or four sessions before it was washed, so if we came in from a really wet or muddy game, it would just sit there mouldering until we came to wear it again. Pulling it on was revolting.

  The first school away match came that first Saturday. We all climbed on coaches and started the long drive to Merchant Taylors’ School near Watford. One of the boys was carrying an Adidas bag on which he’d written Jairzinho.

  ‘You know Jairzinho?’ I asked the boy, whose name was Déj Mahoney. He was the one I’d tracked down the touchline rather than tackled. He looked at me like I’d lived in the woods all my life and we immediately started talking about the great Brazilian players, which led on to swapping stories about our favourite football teams and stars. Oddly enough, football had helped me to establish myself in a rugby school and I made a lifelong friend in Déj. So many of my friendships date back to Epsom, and Déj and I are still in touch, as I am with lots of school friends, even from the Alice Smith School I went to in Kuala Lumpur.

  Despite not having a clue how to play rugby, I threw myself into it. It was sport after all and I was quick and had good hands. One afternoon I was playing for my house team and I scored four tries because I was difficult to get hold of. A teacher must have noticed me because I was put in the A team squad, although I only made the B team. It was the second year before I made the A team.

  Despite calls home, I still missed Mum and Dad, my friends and relations. Just before the half-term break of that very long first term, I rang my mum. It would turn out to be a prophetic conversation.