Oh sure, I could have had more. We all could, right? We could all have more money or more friends or more fun or more something.
But more happiness, more contentment, more feeling of being alive?
Nope, not I. I was living the dream. I had it all.
I was on top of the world.
Yossy and I had started corresponding a few months after I returned to England in 1990. The letters started off friendly enough but rather inconsequentially, rather inconsistent too, in the beginning, maybe once every couple of months. (No email or Internet then, remember.)
As time went by, slowly the letters seemed to have more meaning for both of us. I started to reply to ones from her a bit quicker and I started to look out for hers. Photos were exchanged, and the letters became more personal, less ‘how are you and what are you doing?’ and more intimate. We shared problems, ideas, hopes and feelings.
We became closer. We became friends.
Finally, in 1992, two years after my first visit to Bali, two years after the World Cup, I decided to make a second tip to Indonesia, this time specifically to visit Yossy in Surabaya.
Our three weeks spent in east Java together were blissful, full of long walks and talks, romantic star-gazing and declarations of undying love and commitment, and we made the decision to permanently seal the deal, as it were, in a further twelve months or so.
When I returned to England I expected to encounter at least some resistance from friends and family when I told them what I was planning. I thought someone would call me crazy and try and talk me out of giving up my life in England and moving to the other side of the world, seemingly at a whim, yet nobody did. I like to tell myself it was because everyone could see the determination in my eyes and that they knew my mind was made up. However, a small part of me fears they were probably just glad to see the back of me.
The months apart dragged on and were the most miserable of my life. We kept in touch by snail mail, of course, and by twice-monthly phone calls, but those were dark and desperate times all right. I missed Yossy so much and although I knew it was only a matter of months until we would be together again, that winter was bleak, to say the least.
I became a bit of a hermit, and although I didn’t totally cut myself off from my friends and family, I found myself spending more and more time on my own. This was partly because I didn’t much feel like going out, but mostly because I was trying to save money.
One thing I did do during those cold and dark months, though, was to make a serious commitment to learn Indonesian.
Although a variety of teachers at secondary school had spent five years trying to beat into me the vocabulary necessary to be able to ask for directions to the supermarket in French, I had never been particularly gifted at learning languages. In the typically arrogant British manner, I had always assumed if any of these funny-foreigner-types wanted to speak to me, well, they’d just have to learn English, wouldn’t they? Now however, I broke the habit of a lifetime and spent many a long and lonely night with my head stuck in Linguaphone correspondence learning coursebooks.
To my surprise, I actually didn’t find it too difficult to learn the basics. Compared to English, Indonesian is a reasonably straightforward language. Verbs do not change their form to signify the different tenses as they do in English, and there is also considerably less vocabulary in general. The whole language seems structured on the principle that ‘less is more’ and that people can work out from context the timeframe of events without having to change everything around all the time.
For example, the word for ‘eat’ in Indonesian is makan, and this one word is used in pretty much all contexts. Whereas in English we might say: I eat, ate, have eaten, will eat, had eaten, am eating, will be eating, was eating, had been eating and so on and so forth, in Indonesian ‘Saya makan’ (I eat) covers it all.
Anyway, time rolled on, albeit slower and more miserably than I ever thought possible, and eventually the time came for me to depart the UK for Indonesia. If I thought the weeks and months apart from Yossy had been upsetting, they weren’t a patch on my final weeks in England. Talk about mixed feelings! I had so many goodbyes and farewell parties to get through I thought I was going to explode: work colleagues, friends, neighbours, Saturday football club teammates, Sunday football club teammates, more friends, and finally, most heartbreakingly, my family.
Saying goodbye to my mum, brother and sister at Heathrow Airport and not knowing when, or even if, I would see them again nearly finished me off. All of us hugged each other. Trying to be brave and not be the one to break down was just so unbearably sad.
All I could do was hang onto my mum and whisper how much I loved her.
‘I am so sorry to leave you, Mum,’ I said, choking back the tears. ‘But I have to go, Mum, I have to. I just can’t live without Yossy. I’m so very, very sorry.’
My mum just held me. She couldn’t speak. When, after an age, she finally did, she said, ‘I know, son. I know. Just make sure you always love her right.’
As we broke apart the last words she said to me were, ‘Son, be happy always. I love you.’
So, by 1995, I was happy. Just as I promised my mum I would do, I loved Yossy right, and we were enjoying life together. I loved life in Indonesia and I seemed to settle really quickly. Of course, things were different and I had to get used to a different culture and ways
