Sometimes, but not often, Daddy used to take me to Surabaya with him when he went to teach the grown-ups. One day we went very early in the car to an office in Surabaya where Daddy had a lesson. This was fun for me because I didn’t usually get time to see Daddy that much during the week and so I was very happy. Our driver took us in the car and Daddy sat in the back with me and kept making me laugh. He kept playing silly songs on the car cassette machine and then singing along but making up silly words to the songs. Finally I had to tell Daddy to stop being silly because he was making my tummy hurt through laughing too much.
When we got to the office where Daddy was teaching there were some people already there. I remember the people there were very nice to me and gave me some orange juice and some drawing paper, but there was one man who was a bit annoying. I realise now that he was just teasing me, but at the time I was only a little girl and so when he kept telling me that my daddy was not a teacher and was really a ‘tukang becak’ (which means becak driver), I became very angry with him and said, ‘Ngak, kamu nakal’ – which means ‘No, you are naughty.’ When I remember that time now I smile to myself.
When I got a bit bigger, I started nursery school in Surabaya and Daddy and me used to go in the car together most mornings. As I said before, we had a driver because Daddy said he didn’t like driving in Indonesia. When I asked him why not, he just told me it was difficult for him because driving in Indonesia was different to driving in England. In Indonesia, he said, all the drivers were ‘bebek gila’ or ‘crazy ducks’. I laughed again when Daddy said this. Daddy always made me laugh a lot when I was a little girl, and he still does now.
In my nursery school I made many friends and I always had lots of fun. I have some pictures of my third birthday party at school, and I really can remember this one. The same as with my first birthday party, there was a clown and we played games and ate ice-cream and lots of other food. My mummy and daddy are both in these pictures. We are all smiling and looking very happy.
Because Mummy and Daddy were both very busy when I was little, I sometimes spent a lot of time being looked after by other people. For example, we had a maid or nanny who lived with us and she would help me to get ready for school and to have my meals. Her name was Sri, but we called her Mbak Sri or just Mbak.Mbak means Miss, and it is a polite way to talk to an older lady when you are a kid, or a younger lady when you are a grown-up. Mbak Sri always played with me everyday when Mummy and Daddy were busy, but she could only speak Indonesian and not English. This meant that when I was small I grew up speaking Indonesian better than I spoke English. Mummy used to talk to me mostly in Indonesian and Daddy used English. If I didn’t understand Daddy when he spoke English, he sometimes tried to use Indonesian but his Indonesian wasn’t very good and Mummy and me sometimes used to laugh at him and then he would pretend to be angry and tickle us both!
On Saturdays, my daddy was usually still working so even though I was not in school then, I didn’t see him very much. On Sundays Daddy played football very early in the morning near where we used to live and sometimes I watched him play with his friends. All his football friends were Indonesian but I think Daddy was the best player even though he never scored a goal and he fell over a lot. After he finished football, Daddy always went to lie down in his bedroom for a long time because he said he was very tired.
Mummy didn’t watch Daddy play football very often. She said that football was silly and was just a lot of old men running about getting hot and angry for no reason. I thought Mummy was wrong, though, and now I am (nearly) a big girl, I play football in my school for my school team. Mummy didn’t really like many sports when I was little, but she did sometimes join in the neighbourhood fitness club. This was a club that had aerobics in the road and any of the neighbours in our complex who wanted to, could come and join in. It was usually just the ladies in the complex who joined, but sometimes some men did, too. I joined sometimes if I didn’t go to watch Daddy play football, but I didn’t really like it that much.
Daddy told me when he was little he was a good runner too, and he used to run in races back in England. One time he showed me a picture of him running in a race in England. He looked very different in the picture he showed me, because he had long curly hair and he looked very skinny. When I was a little girl, Daddy never had long hair, and now he has almost no hair at all!
Mummy told me once she used to do karate before she met Daddy and one time she showed me some pictures of her, too. She also looked very different because in the pictures she had long black hair and also was very skinny. I asked her why she was not skinny anymore and she told me it was because I had been in her tummy and made her fat and she had stayed like that forever. When she said that, I
