Fragments 1966 – 1976

I was born on March the 19th 1966 in Isleworth. Truth be told, I’ve no idea where that is except that it is located in what was Middlesex and that it must be somewhere near Teddington where my folks lived in a flat above a sweet shop. 

The only story I know from this period, the first six months of my life, is that one Saturday morning, some children got my dad out of bed to complain that the sweet machine wasn’t working and, despite it being nothing to do with him, he refunded their money. (As with the story about his apple being taken off him by another boy on the train when he as being evacuated, I think my dad told these stories to amuse us but they used to make my heart ache.)

At the age of six months, we moved to 20, Eton Avenue in New Malden. My first clear memory is standing outside the house with my nan, waiting for the ambulance to bring my mum home from hospital with my new brother. Then I remember us being in the hallway and I was mortified to see my brother was already taller than me. (In fact he was wrapped in a long blanket.)

I have lots of jumbled memories of my grandparents’ house on Burlington Road in my early years: playing with my mum’s younger brothers and sister, just out of their teens; my granddad’s garage come workshop; the trunk that was full of Golden Age 'Batman' and 'Superman' comics; the gradual arrival of my much-loved cousins; the fug of cigarette smoke in the living room and the racing on the telly in Saturday afternoons, with it’s static ridden picture and white lines that would slide up the screen; and, of course, my grandparents, whom I loved unreservedly.

I think having that close extended family around me took some of the sting out of the stints that my dad did in Lagos, two or three weeks at a time, when all we’d hear from him was a couple of postcards (some were 3D!), where he’d refer to me as “number one son” and tell me to look after my mum. But that foreign travel was the precursor for what came next; one Friday my dad’s boss called him into his office and asked how he felt about working in Hong Kong. My dad said he’d discuss it with my mum, which he did when she met him off the train at New Malden. They’d made the decision to go before they’d reached the stairs down from the platform.

And so it was on the 25th of February 1975, we left London for Hong Kong, on a British Airways flight that took nearly a day, with four stops on the way. We lived for the first six weeks in the Lee Gardens hotel. I can still remember the electric eye that controlled the sliding doors at the entrance and the warmth of the evenings as we left the air conditioned foyer to find somewhere to eat. We’d often walk past a restaurant with fish tanks in the window full of live lobsters (but we never went in there). 

I remember how during that time we went to a Chinese wedding where my mum tried the green and black, foul smelling ‘thousand year old’ eggs and I nearly choked on an abalone. There was pigeon soup and my dad told us only later that when he got up to go to the loo, he saw two dead pigeons in the bottom of the tureen.

We spent a fortnight after the Lee Gardens living in Villa Verde in the mid-levels. We were in a ground floor flat with a garden and one Sunday morning I ran around its perimeter fifty times, my first ever long distance run. I also remember its wooden floors and lying on them, playing Action Man with my brother. He was my only playmate for two months, I wonder if that’s where we really forged our close relationship. 

Finally, we moved up to the Peak, or, more precisely, Mount Kellett, where we enjoyed the rare (for Hong Kong) privilege of living in a house. After Easter we started at the Peak School, which we could reach by walking along Mount Kellett Road or Homestead Road. That first term I was exposed to mental arithmetic, a talent that was never developed in the UK, a baptism of fire for which I remain grateful to this day. But that shock aside, we fitted straight in, adapting with surprising ease to a life that was very far from what I'd enjoyed up until then, both geographically and metaphorically.