Trouble

Part 5 of Tales of Serendipity

Ever since we'd arrived in Sri Lanka we'd felt an undercurrent of unrest and danger. One of my Dad's work colleagues had had his car shot at by a soldier, apparently when he'd driven down a road he'd been told not too. There were parts of the far north that were designated as "no go areas".

I was too young to understand the political situation, all I knew was that some people called the "Tamil Tigers" were fighting with the government for land and recognition. It was all happening a long way away from the city, though.

Until it suddenly seemed to get very close indeed. Evening curfews were declared by the government. Overnight, I lost the huge freedoms we'd enjoyed over the previous two years.

One day fighting broke out in the city, and the air was filled of shouting and police sirens. We watched from the balcony as columns of smoke rose all around us across the city.

Suddenly there were an enormous series of cracks and bangs, very close to the house, and we ran inside terrified. We went to sleep very scared of a city that had once seemed to friendly and welcoming.

The next day we found out the truth. Somebody had set light to a bottling plant near the house. The cracks and bangs had not been weapons fire, but burning crates of empty bottles exploding!

The riots came to be known as "Black July", one of the darkest times in the country's history. Up to 3000 Tamils were killed that day.

Sri Lanka had become to dangerous, and my Dad's contract was coming to an end. It was time to go home. The trouble is, two years was a fair proportion of my young life and Sri Lanka was home. England seemed a distant, cold and alien place.

We went back to England that summer, I cried more on the return trip than I had on arrival! Over the coming months we watched the on news as Sri Lanka sank deeper into a bitter civil war. One that it still hasn't recovered from.

But one day I'd like to go back. Just to see how much of what I remember has survived. And to relive my days of Serendipity.

The End

Becky - The Wilderness Years

Part 4 of Tales of Serendipity

This is a bit of a supplemental chapter, please feel free to skip it if you're not interested in the very early stirrings of a young tranny abroad!

Becky, of course, didn't actually exist as a named individual before 2000, and the faint inklings of tranny-ness I was carrying around in my head certainly hadn’t got a name back when I was in Sri Lanka.

I’ve just always wanted to use “Becky - The Wilderness Years” as a blog title!

I soon realised when I started trying to write down experiences from that time (when I was between nine and eleven years old) that while I distinctly remembered having tranny thoughts before I went to Sri Lanka, and I definitely had them afterwards, it was hard to remember specific tranny-related stuff from the time I was there.

I have dredged up a couple of memories though. One of my friends was the daughter of one of the ex-pat families we tended to hang around with. One weekend we were all visiting a hotel complex up the coast, and she and I got to exploring the rooms and corridors. We were always exploring, we lived to find places that we though no-else knew existed. We seemed to spend most weekends in various hotels, and the back-corridors and service areas were our secret passages and concealed hideouts.

This day we'd "borrowed" yellow towels from a maid's trolley and were using them as props for games. As a joke this girl (dammit... I can't recall her name) wrapped one around my head so it hung down over my shoulders. A bit like long blonde hair.

She laughed and said I looked like a girl, and then found another towel and wrapped it around my waist like a skirt. We then played a game, at her suggestion, where I had to pretend I was her younger sister.

Of course, my fledgling tranny neurones were firing like crazy. Not really knowing why this seemed so exciting, just knowing it was. The girl said that I would look great in makeup, and she'd make me over the next time I visited her house.

I protested like crazy and said I'd never do that because I was a boy (why? WHY do trannies always act so defensively?) and she never went through with the "threat".

Even when I made pointed reminders on each of my visits to her house. "Huh... you'd better not try to put that makeup on ME!!"

Yeah, I know, such a fool.

The other thing I recall was an occasion when my parents had gone out for the evening and we were again being baby-sat by Sheila, who (as always) was pretty much letting us get away with murder.

I'd been thinking about some of the cool summer dresses and makeup and stuff that my mum had, but there was never a time when I was alone in the house to, er, investigate.

I couldn’t stand it any more, so I decided to co-opt my brother into things.

"I say! Here's a wizard wheeze!" I said to him (or words to that effect). "Why don't we go into Mum and Dad's bedroom and try on clothes and stuff."

My 7-year-old brother, completely oblivious to my ulterior motives but always looking for inventive new ways to be naughty, was all for it. So (once again advising Sheila that this was to be kept strictly secret) we ventured into our parent’s bedroom.

There followed and evening of my brother and I prancing about in flouncy dresses and inexpertly applied lipstick. I’d made a little more effort than my brother, naturally, but not so much that it didn’t look like carefree messing about.

We cleared up afterwards. No-one would ever know we'd been. I even didn't argue about tidying up my brother's share of the mess, which was highly unusual.

Mum still, inexplicably, found out. We were both given a stern telling off. My brother was apologetic, I was mortified.

No prizes for guessing who the snitch was. Stitched up by Sheila, again!

The funny thing is, decades later when I came out as a tranny to my mum, I mentioned that dressing-up session. Because I was convinced she might have guessed from that occasion (and other indiscretions) that I was interested in girl's clothes.

Amazingly, she could hardly recall it happening, despite her anger at the time being seared in my memory. Just goes to show, I think, that trannies tend to place more emphasis in our minds on things that we feel "out" us, when the other people involved barely register them.

Final part: Trouble

Adventures Abroad

Part 3 of Tales of Serendipity

Some of my favourite stories of Sri Lanka are actually re-tellings of my Dad's adventures. Like the time he got drunk with the entire Blue Peter Summer Expedition team in a bar in the middle of nowhere. Or the time when, at another bar, he got chatting with a man who had an important job...

"In my village I own the only elephant," he said. "We keep it in the temple."

My dad nodded sagely. "Because it's a sacred animal?"

"No, because it's the only building big enough."

Obvious, really, when you think about it.

I did have my own adventures too, of course. One of the best things about being abroad as a child was that I got to experience all the fun stuff without the all the worries and petty concerns that my parents must have faced daily.

Our first house in Colombo was large and airy, with whitewashed walls, a roof terrace and a large walled garden. While it was a nice house, the area of the city it was in wasn't quite so pleasant. A large open drain ran alongside the street outside, and although our parents sheltered me and my brother from a lot of it, I get the distinct impression that it wasn't a particularly safe area of town. One event I did get to hear about involved a hawker who arrived at the door selling malaria vaccinations. My Mum turned him away. She later found out that this was a well known-scam. The vaccine didn't work and he'd probably only have had one syringe, which he would use for the whole street.

My Mum wasn't left on her own to deal with all this kind of stuff, though. The company had arranged for two locals to work for us: Sheila, who acted as a sort of au pair, and Mohan, who fulfilled any handyman duties required while my Dad was away with work.

Mohan wasn't to stay with us long, he left under a bit of a cloud after some indiscretion that I wasn't given the details of. Sheila, however, stayed with us for all the time we were out there, and became almost a member of the family.

After a couple of months it must have become obvious that the area we were living in wasn't ideal, and we moved to another house in a different suburb of the city. This area seemed a lot more gentrified and safer. The house was adjacent to a police station (which pretty much guaranteed low crime) and near to the city's planetarium and main television station.

The house itself was a young kid's dream. It's wide waxed floors were ideal for racing toy cars, building elaborate Lego models, and for generally ruining socks by sliding about on. It was full of interesting nooks and crannies for me and my brother to play in, and we soon started to treat the entire place like a giant climbing frame. I worked out that if I climbed out of the bathroom window I could shimmy along a ledge and, via a series of ledges and footholds, climb up up onto the roof.

One day, while Mum was away shopping, I decided to share my mountaineering prowess with my brother. Knowing that we'd get in trouble if found out, Sheila was given strict instructions not to tell Mum what we were up to. For some reason we'd got it in to our heads that Sheila was on "our side" against our parents.

A few days later Mum sat us down and told us that the policemen at the station across the road had spotted us climbing about on the roof, and told her to make us stop. We were terrified at the thought of the police getting involved, and never climbed up onto the roof again.

Of course, several years later I found out it was Sheila that had told Mum, out of sensible concern for our wellbeing. She'd made sure Mum used the police story, because although she was terrified at the thought of us falling, she was also afraid we'd stop being friends with her!

As well as swimming virtually every day, I was an avid cyclist. Damon, John and I used to cycle all over the city. One day we decided to set out on an expedition to the brand new parliament building, part of the new administrative capital that was being built outside Colombo. It was quite a trek, through mainly undeveloped countryside, and it took the best part of the morning to get there.

The parliament building itself had been built in the centre of an lake, which was currenly in the middle of nowhere as the rest of the new capital was yet to be built. It was aparently deserted, but there were scary-looking guards all around it, so we sat at the entrance and ate our sandwiches.

One of the sandwich wrappers got caught by the wind and sailed off towards the parliament building. Using the tactic that we'd worked out previously (basically that young boys in a foreign land can get away with anything if their hair is blonde-ish and they look innocent enough) we strolled up to one of the guards and asked permission to get our sandwich bag back.

Which is how I got to have a sneaky look around the Sri Lankan parliament building.

On the way back we stopped in a grubby looking cafe by the side of the road, hoping to buy something to drink. It was deserted apart from the owner who served us warm Cokes, and an elderly Sri Lankan who sat beaming at us as we drank. The sight of three white kids out biking on their own miles from anywhere must have seemed quite strange to him.

As we got up to leave he stood up and, voice cracking with pride, sung us the entire British national anthem. I'm not sure why, perhaps he wanted to show us how much he admired the old colonial power, perhaps it was the only English he knew. Whatever, it was oddly humbling, and one of the strangest things I ever experienced as a boy.

Next: Becky, The Wilderness Years

Tales of Serendipity

Part 1/5: Norfolk to Anuradhapura

In the early Eighties I was a young lad living and going to school in a small village in the middle of Norfolk. My Dad worked at a nearby training college, teaching people how to use huge earth-moving machines, and my Mum worked part-time in a little cottage industry that made wooden jigsaws. I was also employed, not least by schoolwork, but also mastering wheelies on my Raleigh Grifter and exploring the woods and fields for miles around. My horizons, while as wide as the Norfolk skyline, were quite small.

One day my Mum had some big news. My Dad had got a job working in another country, helping teach them to drive the earth-moving machines so that they could build a huge dam. It was in a strange-sounding place called "Sri Lanka".

Sri Lanka is an tear-shaped island that drips into the ocean off the tip of the India. In a way, Sri Lanka is the same age as me, because we were named the same year. In 1972 it changed it's name from Ceylon, which is the name you still tend to see on the country's tea. Even further back, in ancient times the Arabs referred to it as Serendib, which is where we get the word serendipity.

To give you an idea how sheltered an existence I'd had up until that point, and how limited my geographical knowledge was: a school friend once boasted that he was spending the summer on Canvey Island, and I thought that sounded exotic.

My Dad's work would take him away from home for half a year, which for a young boy seemed a huge amount of time to be without a father. The tanned man who returned six months later was almost a stranger, but although his contract had been extended, we wouldn’t be parted from him again. He was now allowed to take family out with him, and we were all going to live in Sri Lanka.

A few weeks later my parents, my younger brother and I were flying over the Indian Ocean to our new home. Stepping off the plane I was immediately hit by a wall of heat, which I assumed was coming from the 747's massive engines. It was only as we were walking across the tarmac towards the airport building that I realised that it was this hot everywhere.

It's hard to describe just how jarring those first few hours were. Everything was different, from the oppressive heat and humidity to the strange smells and alien sounds of the city. I spent my first night in my new bedroom just sobbing at the sheer strangeness of it all. Just the thought of staying in this place was terrifying, let alone having to live and go to school there.

Luckily I had a bit of time to adjust to things before starting school. Our house in the capital wasn't ready yet, so we were temporarily housed in the town where my father had been billeted for work, a place called Anuradhapura.

An ancient capital of Sri Lanka which had fallen a millennia ago, Anuradhapura was now a relatively sleepy town in the north of the country, surrounded by the ancient temples and water-works of the old city.

Apart from the inconvenience of daily homework arranged by our old school in England, most our time was our own. We picked mangoes from the tree in the garden, visited the nearby dagobas (giant mound-like monuments) and reclining Buddhas, and slowly began to get used to living in a foreign country. My one piece of "home" at that time was my first ever computer, a little Commodore VIC 20 I learned to program between the frequent brown-outs of the town's power supply.

I don't really remember much about that time. One thing that sticks in my mind was the fence of the house next door was decorated with tiny swastikas. Having recently seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was convinced it was filled with Nazis, probably conspiring to steal the ancient relics of Sri Lanka... until my Mum explained that the swastika design had an older and totally benign meaning in the local religion.

Part two: Back to School