Three Boys, Three Suitcases and Thirty Pounds

Late summer in 1971, just as the UK was decimalising, my mum stepped off a plane from Hong Kong with three boys, three suitcases and thirty pounds in her bank account. I know the amount as I found her bank statement and flight ticket in her belongings when I settled her estate in 2016, she had turned those thirty pounds into an estate of more than half a million pounds!

I was four and a half years old when we landed in the UK, we’d spent the previous four years living in Hong Kong where my father had been teaching English to the Chinese with the Missionary Society. Relations between my parents had got so bad that Mum just decided to up and leave, what little money she had went on the plane tickets to get us away. That meant we were reliant on the state when we got back and of course their solution was to take me and my two brothers into care. To avoid that, we were separated with my oldest brother, who was 8ish, going to his godfather’s, my middle brother, who was 6ish, going to his godmother’s and me, well I ended up with the local vicar and his wife! (My blog “It’s like feeding time at the zoo” covers more of that!)

Eventually, about 6 months later, mum managed to cajole the council in South London to give her a house and we all came back under the same roof where we grew up and mum stayed for some 40 odd years. From there she managed to get all of us, via various bursaries and scholarships, through a public-school education and into “proper jobs”, well my brothers anyway, I think mum eventually accepted my job as being “proper” (i.e like an accountant - middle brother – or Army officer - oldest brother!) and finally married with children.

My mum is one of my biggest sources of motivation and angst. She taught me so much but treated me so badly. She inspired me and ruined me all in the same breath. She was such a dichotomy that numerous therapists spent many hours dissecting my psyche trying to piece me back together.

You see my mum, despite being a single mother, bringing up three boys, with an absent father who was travelling around Asia, working multiple jobs to ensure we all got a good education, still believed that the man should be the bread winner, the provider and should take care of his family. (Interestingly, she never remarried and rarely made us aware of any relationships she did have until we were older) So, fundamentally, I was brought up as a sexist.

She was also racist. I have written another blog entitled “I’m not a racist but…” as this was one of her stock sayings just before she would be disparaging about a black or Asian person. The company she kept was as equally racist but kept it in the closet as they were predominately in the metropolitan police force! So, I learnt to be a closet racist too.

Continuing the dichotomy, two of her best friends were a gay couple, yet she was deeply homophobic because of her religious beliefs! (She was “high Anglican” although I’m not really sure I ever understood what that meant!) Guess what, yep, that meant I grew up with homophobic feelings!

On the flip side, she also taught me to work hard, be tenacious, resilient, to laugh in the face of adversity, to care deeply about a cause and, most importantly, to never give up no matter how bad the odds seemed to be! She made sure I was well educated and had the best chance in life coming out of that education. She taught me to respect women, even if not to value them!

So why am I sharing all this? It’s because I have had to unpeel all these layers of my life to become a more rounded person, to remove the sexism, racism and homophobia as best I could and to change my scripting in the hope that I can be more accepting of people as people, who they truly are and not as the colour of their skin, their sex or sexuality.

It’s because of that unpeeling that I now want to help others to do the same thing, to help them close, or maybe even eradicate, the gap between what they truly believe deep down and what they show to the outside world, to help them to become their authentic whole self.