You can’t get more post-colonial, vintage and ironic than this! This photo was taken on my fifth birthday in Segamat, a little railway town in Johor, where we lived for a couple of years. It is on the line from Singapore to Bangkok via KL. We lived in a colonial bungalow which was the staff quarters of the hospital where my dad worked. The grounds were huge. There were fruit trees and frangipanni trees where my dad had made a makeshift swing using a couple of ropes and a short plank (with drill holes, naturally, to keep the seat dry). I knew all train time tables by heart. I waited for them each day, the whistles, the chink-chink, the bells. They were my friends. Even now I find the sound of trains very timeless and soothing. Beyond all trains, is the world. But first, the plantations. Rubber, pineapple, coffee. Segamat was all plantation.
I remember wearing the Scottish kilt, waistcoat and my first wristwatch that my dad bought on his trip to Edinburgh. It was probably the smartest outfit any child had ever worn in the entirety of Johor. Two years after this photo, I first started writing. The reason I know it was two years after was because I used a new unused diary and it had the year on it. Oral storytelling came first. I was only trying to entertain my toddler brothers. ‘And then what happened?’, ‘But who was the first girl?’ Once the stories were too long to tell, I had to write them down, with illustrations of course.
Subsequently, about twelve years ago, I wrote my first novel Cry of the Flying Rhino which was set in Segamat.
Please support my novel Heart of Glass here, become a patron today.