Daylight 01

It is the moment of the greatest fatigue of all my first forty years; it is the moment of exultation in which I am reminded that forty is both a period and the end of tribulation, a period and the end to youth. I am not old today. I am older than young, but not old. This is the beginning of my prime.

Frequently, my heart sings with Harry Belafonte, "Come, Mr Tally-man, tally me banana / Daylight come and I wanna go home..." This world is a temporal and temporary lodging; it is not my eternal home. But there are still bananas to pluck, stacks to build, renegade overseers to chastise and reproach. I am only a humble banana-man.

"This is my story, this is my song, praising my Saviour all the day long."

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Here is my first decade.

I was born in a little university town in East Anglia, a former swamp and breeding-place for odd fish and flies. The nearest water source was a muddy rivulet so shallow that it could be navigated by anything waterborne piloted by a man with a pole. I had odd neighbours – the man who blew things up and picked glass out of his own flesh for decades, the man who rewrote the history of time. It inured me to the awe of things intellectual. I was a year old. I would eventually return for a small slice of my education.

My brother was born some years later. I distinctly recall asking my father, "When will he be old enough to play with?" My father, with characteristic wisdom, replied, "Do you really want him to be old enough?" My father was the youngest in his family. I always wondered what he really meant by that, and was never brave enough to ask. My brother was the bright one, and also the noisy one. This has always been true.

When I was six and a bit, I went to school. Before that, desultory attempts had been made to entrench my backside in a playschool or other medieval torture-house. I defeated all such attempts by the simple device of falling ill and spreading plagues around each time I went. I ended up being largely home-schooled, which was true even when I got to high school.

Education had always been highly-regarded in my family. My venerable grand-aunties were trained pharmacists; grandfather was a scholar and a physician who could diagnose just by observation and acute listening (both to the patient and to the patient's body). My other grandparents were teachers with radical pedagogical methods; I will never forget my maternal grandfather's teaching machines and shelves of books all designed to help a person teach himself, and my maternal grandmother was able to infuse the word 'learn' (as in 'you WILL learn') with such trenchant force that neurons automatically aligned in military order when she spoke. It was a given that everyone ought to go to university, and I (naïve and very young) didn't realise how unusual that was.

I suffered in my first year at school. I had a second language, Mandarin, that nobody spoke – at home, we had many Chinese dialects, Malay, English, but none of that peculiarly harsh administrative tongue. I failed in the first semester and got an A in every final examination thereafter till the end of primary school. My granduncle the savant laughed and said, "Right now, three-quarters of all the people can't speak Mandarin at all; I can't do it myself. But when I'm done, 80% will speak some of it."

I was ten years old when they decided they would sell the land. It was terrible to see the broken hulk of the house, the devastation and ruin that followed as my childhood self-destructed. I have photos. I seldom look at them. They are taking too long to fade. It was the year that my father bought me my first encyclopaedia, a small five-volume set that seemed enormous. I treasured it then, and still do although it is now somewhat out of date. I began to study alchemy, and learnt the Mendeleevian model of the elements by heart. And it was then that I knew I would teach it some day.

My sister was born that year, early and purplish-red. Mother was fine one evening, helping with the preparations for Lunar New Year celebrations. That night, she was taken away while I lay sleeping. Dad told me to get back to sleep; everything was OK and Mum was off to the hospital. I woke and went to school, and after school my grandfather accosted me with the news that I had a sister. It was the year that I saw Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher drag the unwilling Harrison Ford into battle against the Death Star. It was a great year. And I was only ten.