The other big thing that really started to change things was that, first of all my father got a job for a year in Java and was based in Jakarta. For that year I was involved in looking after my mum as my brother had moved away and was living in Dorking with his girl friend.
Both me and my mother went out to Java for a month and I found it absolutely fascinating, particularly nature and the cultural differences. Colour was king, I felt all at once, battered and bathed in kaladoscopic bright colours both in terms of the clothes and the natural world. There were butterflies as big as my fist, frogs, croaking and ducks proliferating. I was in a wonderland and it felt like I was slipping into a David Attenborough film.
The heat was terrific, I remember as I got off the plane and thinking I could feel the heat of the engines, but no that was just the normal daytime temperature. So pushing through the sweating crowds we started to look for my father. Well, I nearly fell over when I saw him!
He had turned native and was wearing the brightest of high key coloured shirts, with shorts and sandals, YES, sandals! This was my father, who in England would wear the most traditional of office wear. This was a crazy world and full of fascination, but I must continue, as I am digressing from the Greendene story, maybe I will return to my travels at a later time.
I mention this episode because it was after he returned to England that I felt somewhat of and incumbrance in the house, I was surplus to requirement. My father was retiring and it seemed right that I should leave him and my mother to enjoy each others company again.
Extract from Journal:
April 12th 1981 – The Primroses, cowslips are just beginning, dandelions and daffodils in full swing. Eager activity of the sparrows, the first brood: Green, just a sprinkling on the trees, especially the hawthorn. Now travelling off to a distant land without a Spring.
(The Lodger to be continued)
Bobs Blog 