1980 - 1985. Downhill In London

4. False Start

We took a cab from Heathrow Airport.

In the back of the black taxi, My Father let me hold his hand and he kept squeezing it and pointing out landmarks. He made the cabbie take a detour through the centre of town, so that he could show me all the sights. That was the beginning of a long line of firsts. To me everything looked so grey and cold, as if London were painted from a palette that had run out of the primary colours.

The little house in Mill Hill, a suburb in the North of the city, lifted my spirits. It was a typical Thirties semi-detached, white-painted with a bow front and leaded windows, garage at the side and unruly roses around the front lawn. Extreme suburbia. The strips of grass between road and pavement, and leafy trees, were not unlike our little piece of Kowloon, which was comforting.

It was a furnished let and so were able to move in directly, and the crates arrived a week later as my Father had paid a small fortune to have them air freighted. The larger items - a few selected items of furniture and the like, turned up a month later, after I had gone to school. But once my small bedroom filled up with the familiar detritus of my childhood, it felt much more like Home. Smaller, cosier, colder yes, but Father was there, so it was definitely Home. With no Jin. But before I felt settled, I had very steep �learning curve� to negotiate: my Father expected me to run the house. To cook and be housekeeper and manage the laundry. Quite a tall order for a hitherto spoilt and clumsy twelve-year-old.

Right up until the moment we boarded the aircraft in Hong Kong, I�d been expecting it all to be another one of my bad dreams and I�d wake up in my little bedroom sanctuary and hear the sounds of Kowloon and it would be just another day. And now I was actually in England, where everything was so strange and new and frightening. Reality shook me by the throat. It really had not occurred to me that there would be no Audrey in our new home, to take care of all the practical stuff and keep us fed. And that I would be doing it.

I had a fortnight before starting at my new school, and my goodness, I really needed that time. There was so much to learn.

Shopping in an English supermarket, overwhelmed by walls of mysterious things with strange names and brands, which one then used in various unknown ways for cleaning and cooking. Paying for them with currency that had no meaningful worth. Even carrying the wretched things home in those flimsy bags. Searching my brain for things Audrey had muttered over the years, like how long to boil an egg, even what bits of vegetables to cook and what to throw away. It all kept me fully occupied from dawn to well into the night, teaching myself how to work the domestic appliances and clearing up after my culinary disasters before my Father discovered the mess. Why when I had followed the printed instructions to the letter, or read and re-read the recipe half a dozen times, did what emerged from the pan never closely resemble the picture on the packet? I persevered. No way was my Father going to be disappointed. Or angered.

No way was he going to be given a new range of reasons to punish me with his belt or length of cane.

Incredibly and much to my surprise, he was actually very good-natured about my random cooking, and dutifully ate whatever I presented him when he came back from his new work at his bank�s head office in the City. He even enthused occasionally. Yet very tactfully, he suggested that once I started school, he would instead have his main meal in the staff restaurant, and that decision rescued us both from the unappetising prospect of depending entirely on my cooking, even in the holidays.

The strangeness continued.

My Father was just so different when we came to England, which was a blessing and a relief. He appeared content with his position at work and was only occasionally grumpy when he came home in the evening.

He was surprisingly protective of me, taking an interest in my going out to the shops and listening to my accounts of people I had met. He was even determinedly practical about the house, which was a side of him I had never before seen. Best of all, he rarely even raised his voice at me and after a fortnight, I was warily amazed that he hadn�t even slapped me since we left Hong Kong.

I liked helping him to set up house. The massive upheaval took my mind off my Mother, or rather her absence.

In private moments, of course I missed her and I was still puzzled and angry that one moment she was still the calm, loving, stable bedrock of our family, the next she was under a shroud and I could no longer talk to her, or slip behind her and peek out at the world from behind her steady shoulder.

To this day, I'm still not sure precisely why we moved from Kowloon. In the light of subsequent events, it wasn�t for the best.

Perhaps my Father couldn't face the memory. He would have had to drive past the place where she had been knocked down each time he left the house, so maybe that was it: he wanted to escape the daily reminder. Although later I found some hints that his finances were not as sound as they should have been - had that anything to do with it? If I were a gambler (which certainly I am not - that is one vice to which I�ll never, ever, fall victim), I�d bet that the real reason we moved lay somewhere in my Father�s business dealings. But I never did learn the truth.

Whatever prompted the move made no difference, for we had done it and there was no going back and so I found myself in a very strange land, with no roots, or friends, or real understanding of the culture. The Hong Kong I left had more in common with the England of twenty years earlier. I was truly an innocent abroad.

Except of course that I was far from innocent. Jin had seen to that.

And although I had escaped him, it transpired that I was still fated to be a natural victim, albeit in a different context.

My Father decided that I would be better off going to a pukka girls� boarding school. It was half way through the academic year and so the choice of school was limited, but off I was duly despatched, with a traditional trunk full of the prescribed uniform and games kit (including, to my secret delight, my very first entirely unnecessary yet much-coveted brassieres). Father drove me there and I was extremely nervous with anticipation as we pulled up at the huge, sprawling Edwardian pile buried deep in an Oxfordshire woodland. I was going to join the First Form. Having spent many Kowloon evenings devouring musty old volumes of Enid Blytons and WE Johns and the like, I really hoped that being at boarding school might turn out to be great fun, once I had settled in. I was so na�ve.

Unsurprisingly I was so sad and lonely once he had dropped me off and driven away but I was swiftly swept up in the relentless routine of school life.

It was there that I began to confide my thoughts to a small diary -one of those five-year ones with a clasp and flimsy padlock.

Each evening, after I had closed my books and had a few precious minutes of privacy within the curtained cubicle provided for personal study, I would extract it from its secret hiding place behind the radiator and hunch over the desk to scratch a few lines. It was a habit I maintained, on and off, until my mid-teens, until I saw no more point in keeping a lasting record of my tedious little life.

That diary was one of the very few legacies of my childhood that I bothered to retain as an adult. When I finished writing what you are currently reading, and had saved the draft on my computer, I spent a cleansing few moments, reducing each and every page of that scruffy little booklet to tiny fragments and then I made a special trip downstairs to the communal wheelie bin outside my apartment block, where I scattered inside the shower of paper like ashes from an urn. I sat up until midnight, watching from the balcony of my flat until I had witnessed the municipal binmen take away those unwanted memories. That old diary had no place in my new life.

Too much unpleasantness lay behind the tiny childish scrawl I began at boarding school.

It didn't take them long. A clique of mainly Third and Fourth-form girls.

I suppose I invited attention: I was different, withdrawn, nervous and gullible. I had arrived late into the Year, after friendships and alliances had already formed. The easy-going blandness that had been my response to moving up to my first secondary school back in HK failed to protect me this time. I was singled out. I fell for their pranks constantly, and although I tried to accept being the fall guy with good grace, I'm afraid the niggling and teasing and laughing soon wore me down and once they'd seen how easy it was to make me cry, it only encouraged them to pick on me more.

It wasn't relentless - hardly 'Tom Brown's Schooldays', but it took its toll. 'Chink', 'Half-Caste', 'Suzie Wong' were not the nicknames I would willingly have chosen for myself. Before puberty brought out my Father's gangly genes to the fore, I was more obviously my Mother�s daughter, that is to say my oriental lineage was much more prominent than in early adulthood. I was the only Asian in the Lower School: an obvious target.

My belongings constantly went walkies; I had to remake my bed each night to remove the apple pies and rescue my soft toys from the window ledge of the dormitory. In narrow corridors, I frequently had to press myself tight into the wall, or else face an anonymous barrage of pinches and punches when the clique crowded past. And I had more than my fair share of enforced cold showers, with a couple of 'bogwashes' for good measure. That�s what I deserved for being different.

Yet although I was emotionally fragile after all I had been through in the previous year, I was determined not to let the stupid cows beat me. Perhaps if I stuck it out, they�d leave me alone, I reasoned.

That made me treasure the friendship of the small group of my fellow outcasts: the nerds and the oddballs. It was unfortunately, a weakness the 'in-crowd' exploited so effectively.

Very quickly I gained a best friend. Rather conveniently, she had the bed next to mine in the dorm. Gill was impossibly chirpy and it really annoyed the clique that they couldn't wear her down either. I think this was actually due to her natural unworldliness rather than any great moral strength: she was a twelve-year-old genius and eccentric and I wonder if she actually even realised half that time that she was being bullied. She was extremely clever, a gifted musician, and looked the part too: round wire-framed specs, frizzy hair, cute freckles. Her chest had begun sprouting, whereas mine was stubbornly flat, yet if she noticed it at all it was just to complain how inconvenient it was, having this unaccustomed encumbrance to contend with when she played her violin. She preferred Brahms to Duran Duran. We enjoyed each other's company hugely and when the oppressive school timetable allowed us a free hour, we would invariably spend it together.

Ours was an entirely innocent friendship. If there was any biological attraction, it passed us by unacknowledged. It simply felt good to be together. In retrospect, as far as I can recollect, I did feel physically good when I was close to her, and yes, we hugged as friends do, held hands sometime, but we didn't regard each other in any more meaningful way.

The gang of bitches clearly didn't see it that way. It riled them so see us cheerful in each other's company and so began a whispering campaign. I had to ask an older girl what a 'dyke' was, and the answer made me laugh before it made me cross. I knew all too well what men did to women but the notion of women doing it to women was ludicrous. How could anyone call us that? It was a disgusting thing to say about us!

Yet stupidly, not long afterwards, we played straight into their hands.

One evening, I had phoned home and my Father was less than sympathetic, listening to the litany of wrongdoings that had been perpetrated against me. I really only needed to talk to him, to get the words out: I knew I would have to handle the aggravation by myself but I still needed to tell him about it. The call went badly wrong - he went off on one of his pompous lectures and so I had a little tantrum and then he lost any remaining patience and hung up. To the fragile little thing such as I then was, that was one rejection too much. Back in the dorm, I hid under my sheets and cried for what seemed like hours. It must have woken poor Gill, and kept her awake, for after a while, she slipped into my bed and put her arm around me and held me to her. Considering how scatty she normally was, I can now see quite how wonderfully genuine and compassionate that gesture had been for her. She said nothing, just squeezed me and rubbed the back of my hand until at last I stopped sobbing and we both drifted off to sleep.

Trouble came the next morning. The House Prefect, doing the morning wake-up. And there we two were, huddled together in my narrow iron-framed bed. Not good form in a girls� boarding school. The Prefect made a scene, the rest of the dorm looking on, scandalised and delighted with the early morning entertainment.

Remarkably, we were spared being reported to the Staff. Both of us pleaded tearfully, and the Prefect, who had other duties to perform, couldn't be bothered to waste any more time on us. But the damage had been done. Gossip like that takes only a few nano-seconds to reach even the farthest corners of a small school, on the way gaining impetus and losing accuracy. And of course our tormentors lapped up each sordid detail of the much embellished incident.

Why they decided we needed their particular punishment I don't know. The psychology of the bully is beyond me. The clique passed judgement and sentence in absentia.

It was the following weekend when they pounced.

Saturday afternoon, after Hockey. I think the rest of our Year had been tipped or warned off, for one moment everyone was chattering and showering and dressing in 'personal kit', ready to enjoy a few hour's relaxation, the next the changing rooms were deserted. Expect for me, Gill and a sneering group of about ten taller, older and altogether unfriendly girls. I knew most of their names, not that that mattered.

"Oh look, what have we here?" said one.

"It's the little queers from The First Form," sneered another.

"The dirty little pervs who snuggle up at night with their tongues down each other's throats."

"Or other places," sniggered the first girl.

"So they can feel each other up and do disgusting things to each other."

"Fuckin' disgrace!"

"Shouldn't be allowed."

"This is a good school. We don't want filthy queers here."

By now the girls had reached us. Gill was packing her games kit into a drawstring bag and one of them snatched it from her and hurled it across the changing room. Another pushed her roughly in the shoulder and dear, sweet Gill just looked bewildered, blinking through her specs.

Two of them circled round behind me and I decided to run for it, much too late of course. Hands gripped my shoulders.

"Not so fast, Suzie Fuckin' Wong. You can't come to our country and bring your filthy foreign ways into our school. Dirty little bitch.�

I can remember trying to say something and then falling hard on to the damp tiles as something hard was swung against the back of my head. Then a mass of arms and legs surrounded me and feet connected with my curled-up body and strong hands were tugging at my limbs and even my clothes. Heavy knees held down my legs and someone was sitting on my stomach. There was a ripping sound as my precious cheesecloth blouse lost an arm.

Across the changing room, Gill was much more vocal, screaming angrily in her croaky, precise accent, but I could tell she was undergoing the same treatment.

I felt the cold, hard wetness of the floor against my backside and was horrified to realise that these girls had stripped me naked.

�Is it true Chinks have sideways fannies?� one girl guffawed and as the others roared with laughter, my legs were pulled apart so that they could check for themselves. Someone had an arm around my throat and had my head in a lock against her body, forcing me to watch myself being prodded and poked.

Then without a signal, both groups of girls hauled Gill and I to our feet and we were propelled to the centre of the room, arms and necks still firmly grasped from behind. Gill had stopped complaining. Her face was red and her glasses had been knocked off or removed and she was visibly scared. The bullies pushed us together.

�Go on then, dyke. Kiss your girlfriend!�

Someone had a handful of my hair and was twisting it. I cried out.

�We said kiss her, chink!�

And so I did, to stop the pain. A peck on the cheek wasn�t enough to satisfy them. Full, on the lips, tasting the saltiness of poor Gill�s tears.

�Jesus! That�s disgusting.�

�Fuckin� makes me feel sick.�

I must have been punched in the kidneys, for there was a great stabbing pain in the small of my back and my knees gave way.

As the aching fug cleared, I knew they had gone, leaving just Gill, sobbing, sitting on one of the wooden benches a few feet away. I staggered to my feet and made my way to sit beside her. She shuffled a foot away, to distance herself: I don�t think consciously, but something had definitely changed. Through her association with me, she had undergone this ordeal. I so wanted to hug her and comfort her, but now wasn�t the best time.

They had emptied the changing room entirely. We scoured the whole gym block, but it they had done a thorough job - not even an abandoned towel to be seen. Our hockey kit and clothes we found when we eventually got back to the dorm. After we had scampered naked, right through the school: across the Quad, past the Library, into the Junior Wing and up half a dozen flights of stairs. Past just about everybody in the entire school, it seemed. All of them shrieking with laughter and pointing fingers and whistling and yelling names.

I was mortified; Gill completely traumatised. We hid in the dorm until lights out, and were awarded several official punishments for our absence from supper. Chapel the next morning was torture, every face seeming to smirk knowingly at us.

Our notoriety soon passed. These things don�t last - there is always another bit of excitement or school gossip to take their place, but neither Gill nor I could ever forget. We decided it would be better if we spent less time together and sadly, our friendship dissolved quite rapidly.

I alone now became the focus for the bullies and there was some consolation that at least dear, scatterbrained Gill would be left alone. I put up with it for another month, before I could take no more of having my locker trashed and my possessions thrown out of the window and my arms and legs pinched and punched in every queue for the refectory or chapel. I had tried so very hard to brave it out, but the pressure was relentless and when my schoolwork suffered, I just couldn�t cope any longer. In common with prisons and military recruit training, it is part of boarding school culture that you don�t �grass� on your peers, and even though I perhaps ought to have explained to the teaching staff that my late work and missing books were due to my being picked upon, I was terrified that I wouldn�t be believed and I would then suffer even more. The trouble with my chosen course of action, or rather inaction, was that inevitably I began earning extra punishments for a host of trivial things, and these, on top of the oppressively tight timetable, and the need to allow time always to recover my missing possessions, finally pushed me over the edge.

One night, I slipped out of the dorm and crept down to my secret sanctuary - the chaplain�s room behind the chapel. I remember quite vividly lying in a ball on the scratchy blue carpet, crying in total desperation until my throat was raw.

My Father wasn't best pleased to pull me out of that school after less than two terms.

But even he couldn't deny my obvious distress. In fact he surprised and delighted me when he accepted my pleading almost without objection and actually stuck up for me rather firmly when we met in the Headmistress�s office, taking her to task for letting such bullying take place. Much to my relief, we all three readily agreed that my leaving without delay would be in everyone's best interest. He even successfully demanded the return of part of my fees.

I dreaded going back home, in case my Father's supportive attitude had been only temporary and that as soon as we were back, he�d remember his belt, but he hardly mentioned the episode ever again and if anything was remarkably careful to ensure I had my own space at home. His new laissez-faire attitude made it so much easier. That it was actually born of apathy passed me by - I had not yet noticed how he had begun to lose his zest for life. Of course, I now know that had already begun the steady process of decline that eventually finished him off, but how could I have recognised the signs then? He had rescued me from the bullies and I now owed him a debt of gratitude.

He arranged for me to attend the local secondary school in Mill Hill and I was excited, if apprehensive. This time it was a traditional grammar school. Third time lucky?

It was. This time there was no bullying and I coped fine with the new surroundings and yet another set of classmates. It was an entirely normal and unremarkable period, apart from the additional duties I had at home, fulfilling the role of industrious, if inept, little housewife.

That Christmas, our first in England, I tried to hard to show Father how much appreciated his understanding and support. For weeks, I had secretly studied cook books at school and wrote up an entire plan to provide proper, traditional English food over the holiday: ingredients, shopping list, cooking instructions with split-second timing. My Father humoured me and issued me a little extra housekeeping, and though my cooking has never been anything more than barely adequate, I suspect that my first attempt at the full works - roast turkey and steamed pud (as separate courses I must point out!) - was possibly my lifetime best. Sad to think I peaked at only thirteen! Just the two of us, sharing the dinner, with crackers and some little presents afterwards, and he even helped with the washing up. Yes, I�d go so far as to say that Christmas was never bettered.

Joining the Girl Guides was also a masterstroke. I threw myself into it, eagerly trying to fill my sleeve with badges. Yet again I must have found comfort in wearing a uniform and I'm sure this foible led directly to my choice of career. It was also yet another factor in shaping my tortured sexuality.

It wasn't long before I had developed a crush on this fabulous girl. We�d been away on Camp, somewhere in Wiltshire, so it must have been 1981 - a few weeks after my fourteenth birthday, though emotionally I was still much, much younger. She was so perfect in every way. Sixteen, with a great figure, Celia was everything I longed to be, and knew I couldn't. Blue-eyed, blonde, with a crisp, rounded accent. She didn't endure the agonies of recurring spots on her chin. Her skirt and blouse fitted as if they had been tailored and she even marched with an effortless grace. I think all the juniors admired her, but I fell hopelessly in love with her.

Each week I would arrive early at the hall in which the Guides met, in the hope of exchanging a few words and a laugh with her. I plotted to ensure that I could be alongside her in activities, sitting as close as I could to her or best of all, being her partner. Her company was so easy and if my constant presence and doe-eyes annoyed her, she never let it show. I thought I had been so clever when I engineered her invitation to spend a Saturday afternoon with her: the first of several.

Celia's home was nearly as impressive as she, and I was chuffed to bits that her Mother took to me instantly. Despite the differences in our age, school and background, our friendship grew, possibly because I was happy to do whatever she wanted and agreed with everything she said. I became a regular visitor. I adopted her tastes, aped her mannerisms, aspired to her wardrobe, although my efforts to emulate the New Romantic look from what I could find in my wardrobe fell far short of Celia's cool standards.

And I felt so comfortable with her. Sprawling on her bed on a Saturday afternoon, listening to Radio 1 or her latest cassettes and enthusing over her latest clothes was as close to Heaven as I could hope for.

I loved watching her change and float around the room to show off her latest trendy new things. She couldn't have known how my throat tightened and my lungs ached each time she stripped to her bra and pants. I would study her as subtly as I could, inwardly dismayed at the way her full, firm teenage body filled her underwear in a way my awkward, skinny bits and pieces never would. I was acutely aware of my own feelings; even had a good idea why I had that warm buzz inside my tummy. I had yet to be conditioned by received thinking and social pressure and it simply didn�t cross my mind that perhaps I shouldn�t feel that way about another girl. How I longed to touch her and feel those delicious curves for myself. What I failed to appreciate, even by the age of fourteen, was that my feelings just might not be reciprocated.

So when I thought the opportunity had finally presented itself, and naturally I grabbed at it, the awful truth was even more devastating, for the possibility that my love would not be accepted or even appreciated was not something I had considered.

All I had done was take hold of her hand, as we huddled closely, sharing one of Celia�s magazines. She froze and examined her hand in my palm, then saw my pathetic expression, no doubt fixed in some adoring gaze, and she leapt away, flapping her wrist as if to shake an unpleasant substance from her fingers.

�What the fuck do you think you�re doing, Pen? Oh my God, that�s disgusting! Jesus, I don�t believe this!�

She made a meal of it, so loudly that her Mother came tearing up the stairs, full of concern at the racket. As she opened Celia�s bedroom door, I dashed past, red-faced and about to howl.

How could I have been so stupid? I hated myself all over again, cursing my ignorance through the tears all the way home. Rejection is one of the hardest humiliations. I couldn�t bear to see Celia again. I don�t think my Father realised for many weeks that I had stopped going to Guides and then he passed no comment.

That came as a great relief, as I was dreading having to explain why yet again I had run away from something unpleasant. What would he think of me?

But by then, my Father had more than enough problems of his own.

Next Chapter: 5. Changing Fortunes