Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Your earliest Image as a child.

Christmas time. On my horse and ready to ride.

My first real recollection is of being in Malaysia on the KL air force base, aged 3. There may be some stuff prior to that but real life kicked in in KL. Dad was a RAF pilot and he was teaching the RMAF guys how to use our ex-cold war hardware that they had just purchased. IIRC it was Whirlwinds, Vampires (variable noise generators due to the only effect the throttle seemed to have) plus a selection of other stuff.

I remember

Going from Aberdonian ghost white, through prawn to quite dark brown over the 3+ years.
Learning to wear toe post flip flops, I can still pickup a TV remote with my feet now (not advisable at home)
My light brown hair going red in the sun - the Malays thought it quite amazing and liked to pat me on the head, annoying.
Almost fainting from heatstroke a good few times.
Sliding down the bank to find pineapple trees at the bottom - look them up, it was bloody.
Walking across the golf course to the officers mess to get dad and kick a tree branch fallen on the floor, it was a snake and it was a bit pi""ed off.
Seeing alligators or something like them in the rain ditches in monsoon season.
Having my high-speed squeaky dolphin Aberdonian accent broken to a clear forces roll.
The wonderful, soft, caring Malaysian people.
The smell overdose of a durian fruit. Next best thing to mustard gas on a bus.
The somewhat bolshy RAF manner often portrayed back then, glad that is no longer the case.

The tour included Indian, Singapore and other places and I remember many many things about them. For those of you who fly to Singapore and previously used Kai'Tak I have a lovely photo of it as a 2 story wooden neighbourhood taken from Dad's PR Spitfire as a test shot.

A great childhood and having been the foreign oik in someone else's country I believe I got a better perspective on fitting into a multi-cultural world, but a lot of people may well disagree!

This is a shot in front of the officers quarters on the RMAF base in KL aged 5ish (1968?) a bit. It was quite a set of memories.



I was very lucky.

Alistair, a great upbringing and experience and I totally agree with you about being surrounded by aircraft and pilots back in the day it was really exciting and the people were kind and generous with their time as I have always had an enquiring mind and never stop asking questions.

I feel very fortunate to have experienced the excitement of the third dimension very early in life too.

Interestingly this turned up the evening we returned from visiting our Son and his wife who live on this very site in an ex RAF house. My late Father flew a Mk IX Spit doing PRU in Italy as the Germans were retreating so fairly risky I suppose but his Log Book tells it factually as you will know.