Racket Boy – Search for Country
It was the start of another decade, but from racing on highways my life was dipping into the slow lane. It was a feeling I could not help despite a vibrant routine in a deeply inspiring medieval mountain village in Europe’s dream destination.
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Along came the Covid-19 lockdowns offering me the perfect lifeline. Pace and adrenaline returned! I dug deep into my collection of decades-old diaries and photo albums uncovering memories: propped on my father’s shoulders witnessing Malaya’s independence from the British; huddled in a local bus in India clamoring with Aiyappa pilgrims; hitch-hiking all over England; playing international sports; washing backsides in a mental hospital; strapped in a bullet-proof vest in Ecuador before negotiations with a petro giant over a kidnap gone wrong; delivering a much-memorised speech as the first non-white President of the Law Society of Lancaster and Morecambe; and, of course, my various achievements and escapades with the chief navigator of my life – the badminton racket.
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You know how when you set your mind to something the universe picks it up? A phone call in early 2021 to my childhood friend in Malaysia landed me a friendship with a writer trained in memoir writing to assist me with my project and here we are with Racket Boy, my autobiography.
In 1970 I landed in England a sports-crazy 18-year-old carrying half a dozen badminton rackets and an acceptance letter from the Whittingham Hospital in Lancaster to train as a psychiatric nurse. Nursing was not something I would admit to that Aeroflot flying via Russia full of young Malaysians chasing medicine, engineering, accountancy and law, but Whittingham Mental Asylum was my only ticket to freedom from several shackles, least of all my father’s deep-rooted belief that only “proper” education would provide the key to great things.
In my new country, I was swept away by Geoffrey Knowles, partner of Whiteside and Knowles, one of Lancaster and Morecambe’s foremost law firms. It became a friendship for the ages, the kind that has left me with the responsibility of recording it for posterity.
The Morecambe Library redrosecollections.lancashire.gov.uk
Geoffrey Knowles was one of Lancashire’s great sons and part of a remarkable generation, whose lionheart contribution to country and society I deeply admired. I’d had the privilege of following this giant of a man with a generous reserve of humanity as he schooled me on English humor or the art of catching the moment. Along with my experiences in Malaysia and India, it was my bond with Geoffrey that provided me with the tools to survive parochial middle England, even as my personality changed expression over the decades with a conflict of loyalty between the East and the West.
Racket Boy explores my early difficulty with authority figures, led by my cavorting, opinionated immigrant father and a school environment not favorable to the restless mind of a boy who preferred the library’s Pathé News, Life, or World Atlas; devouring cinema, music, travel, sports, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Che Guevara… that is, when not on the badminton court, the school field or Limau Manis, a dreamy tropical forest on the periphery of the vast rubber estate where on one occasion I established a spiritual connection with a loin-clothed, bow-and-arrow-bearing Sakai, a tribal man who drew his energy from the forest. The Sakai’s deep silence remained with me, helping me understand the workings of the world.
As a Field Conductor, my father fought his own battles with authority, namely the English manager Mackintosh of the topmost bungalow of the estate’s “hierarchical” hill. The Gurkha-guarded bungalows at the crown of the hill were the exclusive purview of the home counties’ cohort. My mother stood by her firebrand husband for taking her hand without a dowry notwithstanding his indiscretions and fits of temper. Realizing her husband was tortured by the gap between his ideals of a first-born son and the reverse reality, Mum was always there to cover for me, even long after I left the shores of Malaysia for England and she for Kerala when hopes and dreams in a liberal, progressive Malaysia took a nosedive after KL’s 1969 race riots caused mayhem and massacre.
Totally cut off from my family and thrust into an all-English society in the zeitgeist of the roaring 1970s and 80s, I dealt with hardship, loneliness, temptations, and discrimination, as well as considerable benevolence, buoyed by the same migrant energy of my father. But not his fierce loyalty to roots or outright refusal to be treated as a Macaulay heathen. Instead, I consciously flirted with the white man’s world – the only world I knew from age eighteen onwards – unknowingly turning into an Uncle Tom. It led to a flourishing legal career which came a full circle with a recommendation to join the judiciary.
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I’d arrived in England believing its institutions, namely education, media and government, were the best in the world only to find them instead to be the very agents perpetuating discrimination and division. My disillusionment with England’s suffocating ignorance of its sullied legacies, increasingly pervasive intolerance throughout its society and the way the practice of the law was rapidly turning into a cost-cutting, fee-worshipping environment, meant it was time to wander again.
At retirement, I took a leap of faith. Searching for a home that embodied the Sakai’s freedom and spirituality, yearning to escape a country that had shed the idealism and liberalism of decades past, seeking redemption for having permitted my Eastern manners to be appropriated in the name of assimilation. From globe-trotting for the World Cups, the Olympics, Cannes for the films, South America for Che Guevara-type trails to donning the top hat for the races at Royal Ascot, the hoi polloi from a rubber estate has had it all.
What now?
Racket Boy – Where’s my Country? releases in October 2023.
Philip George lives in a rugged mountain village close to the Apuane Mountains, in Garfagnana, Tuscany. For one who at 18 left his country of birth, Malaysia, to make something of himself in England for over four decades, before happily retiring to Italy, he indeed has stories aplenty.
A retired solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales, Philip played international-level badminton and county-level squash, ran twenty-five international marathons and cycled extensively in England and Vietnam. An avid fan of many sports, he has attended three World Cups, three Olympics, three Commonwealth Games, several Formula One races and for good measure one Royal Ascot. He is now a member of CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sports) headquartered in Switzerland. He also offers legal consultancy on a Pro Bono basis. Philip’s autobiography titled Racket Boy, releases in October 2023.
For updates: https://philgeorgeracketboy.com/
