Biography Volume 2. Arriving in London in the summer of 1995

Happy 2024!

I had such a busy January, working mainly with the bespoke order for the January wedding for which the wedding took place today! A dress alteration for the Singapore wedding, and the sister of the bride dress modification for the NY wedding. Since I worked without a day off, even on New Year's Day, I needed a few days to recover from exhaustion to write this finally.

So, a little correction from the first volume. I arrived in the UK in 1995, not 96.

I arrived at London Heathrow in June 1995, 2 weeks before my 16th birthday.

The moment I got off the plane, I was in shock. It was like I arrived on another planet, and oh boy, I didn’t speak the language!

Funny that, at the time, I had to register myself as an alien at the police, but I felt as though, I arrived in a totally alien land!

The UK was my second time abroad. I went to China with the Scout when I was 11, but of course, it’s not the same travelling on a group tour with an interpreter.

My host father came to pick me up. He was a large man with a flat, small disk on his head. Still to this day, I haven’t met or come across anyone larger than him.

On the long drive to the host family’s home in North London, he explained to me that he and his family are Jewish, they have a daughter my age living with them, and they also have two adult sons living nearby.

I knew the Holocaust and read Anne Frank as well as The Merchant of Venice etc, but I didn’t know anything about Judaism or any religion other than Buddhism and Shintoism that I grew up with.

He also told me that there are many Japanese students at the language school. He made me promise not to socialise with them and that I should only make non-Japanese speaking friends, or my English wouldn’t improve. I kept that promise until I started the foundation course at Uni two years later.

The house was a huge semi-detached house off Finchley Road. My host mother showed me how they have two different cupboards in the kitchen for “Milky” and “Meaty” dishes. You use Milky dishes for breakfast and no meat goes on them. Meaty is for dinner and no dairy products are allowed. I was told not to bring any pork products or fast food into the house. I was also told for my own health, I shouldn’t eat any beef because of the mad cow disease and I need to be careful with the IRA terrorists.

There were 5 female students in total living with them and an au pair girl, Ines from Croatia, which was in conflict with Bosnia at the time. She was beautiful, with long, curly hair coloured in burgundy, pale skin with green eyes. She was living there as a domestic help and soon we became close friends as she took on the role of being my older sister and taught me a lot about life, living in Europe and the English language.

Their daughter Marylin was way more grown-up than me. She was in a rebellious phase with her parents and hated living with foreign students in the house, so, we only met and talked at dinner.

They have built a house extension to add two windowless bedrooms to fit students and I spent the first week or so there but I hated it, so, I moved into a tiny room under the roof which clearly used to be a sauna and was only big enough to fit a single bed and I had to pass Ines’s room to get to.

Here in the photo, I'm with two of the German girls I was living with at the time. I never imagined that one day, I'd be living in Germany and even speaking German!