It was January 2003 when Mama prepared her bags and suitcases ready for one of the biggest moves of her life — to the UK to further her PhD studies. Change for our family of five wasn’t just coming; it was already sitting in the living room, zipped into multiple overstuffed bags.
It was nighttime when we said our teary goodbyes by the living room. I think I mustn’t have cried in front of my parents because I had always been a stubborn child, although my sisters who was a toddler and a baby at the time bawled. Still, I remember watching Abah’s car leaving the corner of our street when the first teardrop fell and another and another followed. I really thought she was gone for good. I retreated to a small, shadowed corner by our wooden sofa chairs, sobbing into the upholstery. The world felt too fast, too large, and far too empty. I sat there in the quiet, waiting for the sound of Abah’s car to return, even if it was returning without her.
Our nanny-helper at the time who watched everything from behind the front curtains, assured me we would meet again. Of course, I couldn’t comprehend how on earth that was possible. To a child who had never left the boundaries of our country, the UK might as well have been the moon. How do we get to her?
My childish questions were answered months later, in March 2003, when we also took part in the same journey, a flight across dozens of countries, thousands of feet in the air to where she was at. I also finally understood that the world was bigger than I could ever imagine.
Landing in the UK
We were up in the air for almost 14 hours.
Within that time, I saw to my child’s wonder, the entire world and how the day shifted gradually to a starry night on the ground and the sky. I can never forget the humming and trembling noise of the airplane during that long flight, the low snores of the other passengers, the dim lights of the cabin, and people quietly trying to chew on snacks within the warmth of their jackets and blankets.
The flight was cold, but I barely felt the chill. I was too busy losing myself to watching movie after movie on the seatback screen, watching until my eyes turned a stinging red and my nose began to run from the dry cabin air. Of course, Abah thought better of it and berated us to sleep or nap when possible.
We could’ve have flown for what felt like days and I wouldn’t have known, but we eventually landed on a frosty dark night, at 2-3AM. Unfortunately, I couldn’t appreciate the new country we arrived at or remember why we were there in the first place, but a familiar face appeared in the distance. I was bleary eyed from jetlag, but Abah called out to the approaching figure wrapped up in a thick fur-trimmed coat, a piece of attire that was odd to me coming from an all-year tropical country.
It was Mama and even though everybody was cold and it was late in the night, she beamed brightly at us all, to be united with her family again. It was a brief reunion because my younger sisters were freezing cold and so we rushed to wherever the adults were taking us — our home.
Tamworth Road, Newcastle Upon Tyne
The first thing that pops in my head when I think of our first home was my large and bright Pokémon duvet and bedsheet set. I’ve never seen a bed like that before. Back in Malaysia, we had normal thin, cooling cotton pillowcases and blankets. Here, there was a new well-insulating duvet that keeps heat in. That first night that we stayed there, we crashed straight to sleep. Exploration of the new world could wait the next morning.
Our life was centred at 25 Tamworth Road, a first-floor flat with three rooms — two bedrooms; one for the kiddies and the other for my parents, and a cosy living room that had a mid-sized window revealing a shared rear yard. Tucked next to the living space was a tiny galley-style kitchen that served as the gateway to the only bathroom in the house.
To my parents, compared to our old home in Malaysia, this must have been a tight squeezed space to live in for the time being. However, through a child’s eyes, those seventy square feet were infinite. It felt like the whole world full of potential nooks and crannies to hide and play.
As we didn’t stay there for very long, perhaps about a year, I can only recollect pieces of memories focused on the shared living room space and my parents’ bedroom. The latter, mostly because it had a window that featured the street ahead and if you pull back just far enough to your left, you will see a school playground — Westgate Hill Primary Academy. It was only less than a minute walk to that school, if we only got admitted there, but it was simply too packed with children. We chose the next nearest available school: Moorside Primary School.
In that same room too, we gathered around a television watching CD movies Abah had brought home. It sat in a makeshift, slightly odd arrangement — perched atop a sturdy, fabric-covered divan base but it did its job. One time at night, we were watching Monsters Inc. for the first time and Sulley’s sudden reverberating roar scared my sister so much, that she had a meltdown and the movie had to be paused for the night. After that, we developed a family protocol: every time we revisited the movie, we had to carefully skip over that specific scene to keep the peace.
And then there was the living room—the true heart of our English mornings. We had a second TV there where we watched most of the British shows and cartoons while we had our breakfast of cereals and Cheerios (another new food in our palate). On the weekends, we’d wake up to watch High-5, Bob the Builder, Strawberry Shortcake, among others. We watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on repeat until I knew some of the scenes by heart. At one point, I was so convinced that the movie was real that I wrote a letter to Dumbledore (I’m not sure in full English or mixed Malay), to ask if I could be admitted to Hogwarts. I left the letter wide open overnight in our white laundry basket by the TV only to be disappointed that it was still there, unclaimed the next morning.
That laundry basket, however, had a dual purpose. When it wasn’t a mailbox for headmasters and Harry Potter, it was our primary mode of transport. In our imaginary games, it transformed into a car or an airplane. Since my sisters were the only ones small enough to squeeze inside, they were always the passengers, and I—the eldest and strongest—was the designated engine, pushing them across the cold wooden floorboards toward whatever new world we were exploring that day.
While the weekend mornings belonged to the cartoons, the evenings were often a strictly grown-up affair—or at least, they were meant to be. Mama would settle in for the local soaps, often forming a “trio-bunch” with our nanny and me. We’d sit together, captivated by EastEnders and Coronation Street. As a child, the actual plotlines were a total mystery to me. I had no grasp of the tangled webs of betrayal or the complex family trees; to my six-year-old mind, it was just a series of dramatic confrontations and endless neighbourhood gossip that seemed to revolve, inexplicably, around a pub. But even if the drama went over our heads, the language didn’t. We were absolutely obsessed with the accents. There was something so distinct and rhythmic about the way they spoke, so different from the English we were learning at school or the Malay we spoke at home. We spent hours messing around, trying to imitate those sharp Cockney vowels or Northern inflections, layering them over our thick Malay accents until we dissolved into fits of giggles.
The kitchen, on the other hand, was a realm that belonged primarily to the adults, a space of frying pans and hushed conversations that I mostly observed from the periphery. But one memory remains anchored to that space: the small white window beam above the sink. It served as a makeshift greenhouse for the children’s proudest achievement—a long, orderly row of egg cartons. Inside each cardboard cup sat an eggshell filled with a bit of damp soil, cradling the pale, reaching stalks of bean sprouts we had brought home from school. I can’t quite remember if it was a permanent fixture or if we were constantly harvesting and replanting our tiny crops in a cycle of suburban farming. It’s one of those soft details I’ll have to ask Mama about later, to see if she remembers the green life we tried to cultivate above the dish soap.
When boredom crept into the flat, we had an antidote for that: homemade cheese sticks. It became a full-family production, a small assembly line of flour and friction. My sisters and I would take turns rolling the dough, our small palms pressing it into long, uneven sticks until we had a tray full. Once our work was done, Mama or Abah would take over and pop them into the oven for a quick bake. The kitchen was always filled with the fragrance of warm toasted cheese.
School life
My sister and I don’t have many fond memories of school, well, at least for the first one we attended. For some reason, we were perpetually running late—perhaps because the trek involved navigating a maze of road crossings and neighbourhood streets that felt much longer when the wind was biting.
On that first day, I was presented to my classmates like a curiosity from another world. My teacher introduced me as the girl from a tropical country in the Far East—a description that sounded grand and exotic, though I lacked the English to confirm or deny it. I stood there, silent and wide-eyed, the “new girl” from a place they could only imagine. The other clear memory of that day was me struggling to answer a simple mathematics question, a prerequisite to head for recess.
“What is 5 + 5? It’s very easy,” the teacher prompted, looking at me with expectation (they were told I was a bright student in my previous school).
Of course, I knew what the answer was. I had an early education back home but for some reason, I couldn’t say it in English. Especially not the English they spoke which had that same disorienting, rhythmic lilt I heard on the TV soaps. It was a sound I could imitate for fun at home, but there, under the fluorescent classroom lights, it felt like a barrier. I stood there, trapped between a math problem I solved many times a year ago in preschool and a language that still felt like a riddle.
“It’s ten. The answer is ten!” a helpful boy (who probably wanted to go to recess quickly) hissed loudly in my ear. I repeated the answer and was dismissed to which I used the time to unite with my younger sister in the crowded hallway who also had a miserable first day.
After that, we both must have forced ourselves to adapt to school life despite the bullying and teasing from the other students. I didn’t know what hell was but for a kid, that must have been it. So much of what I endured in those hallways has been lost to memory. Instead, I find myself remembering to the softer fragments of that year: the slow, hushed days spent within the safety of our flat, or the rare, expansive freedom of the local parks.
Our time at Tamworth Road was only a single chapter—a quick, one-year stay that acted as our “training wheels” for life in England. We eventually moved on to our second home and school, where we remained for the next two years. Perhaps I’ll share them in another post?
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