by Guy Lilburne
All this meant that I would spend time on my own in my house near the beach in Chon Buri, usually sitting in the sunshine, while Aon worked on the farm for a few weeks at a time in Buriram. Aon had transformed my garden and now, each day when she was away, I had to water all the flowers and vegetables that she had grown. Although food is pretty cheap in the markets in Thailand, there was something very satisfying about growing our own fruit and veg. I had loved growing vegetables ever since I was a small child. From my late teens and well into my 40’s I had dreamed of having a smallholding and being self-sufficient. But that was one dream that just never happened. I really liked Aon and I missed her when she was in Buriram. But I liked my life living just 4 minutes away from an unspoilt tropical beach and I was only 20 minutes’ drive from the city of Pattaya with all the big shops and shopping malls. My life was comfortable and I was happy. As I am writing this Aon has been back in Buriram for the last two weeks. I went to play golf today with my great mate Maurice Birchall and a couple of other friends.
Maurice is my golfing inspiration. He only started playing golf when he was my age now. He is now 70 years old and usually plays a 90 to 100 shot round. Brilliant! We played on a golf course overlooking the Gulf of Thailand, about 20 minutes’ drive from my house. The views all around the course are just stunning. From every tee you are either looking at the sea or the mountains. The course itself is lovely, with lots of lakes and rivers that claim so many of my golf balls. We always tee off at 7:00am to avoid the heat. When we got to the 18th hole, which played down towards the beach, I said to Maurice;
“Do you ever think how lucky we are to be living this life?”
“No. I think I was really unlucky on that last hole.”
“I wish I was a better golfer, but I’m just missing something,” I said wistfully.
“Yes, the ball!”
“Haha!”
“Actually I do know what your problem is.”
My ears pricked up. I was always happy to receive helpful hints and advice that might improve my game.
“What?” I asked.
“You are standing too close to the ball.”
I nodded thoughtfully.
“After you have fucking hit it,” laughed Maurice.
That’s Maurice! After the golf it is always food and then beer for the rest of the afternoon. Happy days! At one time I was playing twice a week. But I found that it was taking up too much of my time and I wasn’t writing enough, so I cut it down to one day a week. But it was a day I looked forward too. A good day in nice company. That is what life is all about.
I have to say that Maurice Birchall was a lovely man. Everybody liked him. The reason why is because he never said anything bad about anyone. If somebody in his company said something negative about someone else he would speak up. He always started off by saying;
“Well you can say that, but….” or “I can understand why you think that, but…” and he will go on to defend the victim of the character assassination. He was a delightful person and I was happy he was my friend.
If Maurice hadn’t had spent his life working in factories and driving lorries, then I’m sure he would have made a great diplomat or a fantastic defence lawyer.
Chapter 20 - Nothing stays the same
Nothing stays the same and that is as true in Thailand as anywhere else in the world. People, places and relationships, all change. In the few short years that I have been living here in Bang Saray the village has changed so much. They have built condos and developed along the beach. Ok, it’s not on the same scale as the bigger holiday towns, but the fact is it has changed and I liked it better as it was before. All along the Sukhumvit Road from Pattaya to Sattahip the land has been developed on both sides of the road. Gone are the fields and views over the Gulf of Thailand as you drove south along the Sukhumvit. Now it is all hotels and shops, water parks and coffee houses, apartment blocks and housing estates. Thailand was changing before my very eyes and not always for the better. I still loved the place and I am certain that I will be here until the day I die. It’s not just the physical changes that change a place. People change, people move away and people die.
My friend Jim Dixon sold his coffee shop, moved up to Buriram with his wife and daughter and opened ‘Jimmy’s Sports Bar’. American Mike died. Gay Mike moved back to England. Fingers Brian moved back to England after falling out with his Thai wife and losing everything. Old Tony had died of course.
My friend Nick Drew died of a heart attack one Saturday morning when he was out walking. Nick was only 57 years old and had a wife and a young son aged three. I had bought my house from Nick. His sister is the famous Linzi Drew, who made her name as a porn star in the 1980’s. Her son is Tiger Honey Drew, who is the actor who played Jake in the sitcom ’Outnumbered’. Nick had told Linzi that I was a writer and I met her at Nick’s funeral. She spent a lot of time talking to me. She was writing a book along the lines of ’Fifty Shades of Grey’. She stayed for a week and she wanted to know everything about writing a book. She told me that she had read a couple of my books. She had all sorts of questions about character development and dialogue between characters. She was really taking it very seriously and her ambition now was to become a successful author. She was a lovely lady and I hope she finds her book. I was flattered that she wanted any help or advice that I could give her. I told her what I tell all aspiring writers.
“Write it and send it off to the publishers and see what happens.”
I also told her to buy ‘The Writers and Artists Yearbook’ by Blacks. It really is the writer’s bible. I bought my first copy in 1980 and I have been buying it every year since then.
As 2014 meandered its way through the second half of the year I felt as if I was coming to a cross roads in my life. I was in a very happy and loving relationship with Aon, but there was pressure. Aon still had to keep returning to Buriram to help her mother and her sister on her farm and she also still had an interest in her Spa business. It was always difficult being apart and although I did spend a lot of time in Buriram and even more time driving between Buriram and Chon Buri, I never felt entirely happy there. For a start I liked cooking and I needed a proper kitchen like I had in my own house. I was cooking a lot of Thai and English food. Sometimes I cooked a fusion of the two. I made recipes notes and everything. I was turning into Rick Stein, but without the charming personality. I was always very happy to be back in my own home, either with or without Aon, but somehow now my own home didn’t feel quite the same when Aon wasn’t there with me. Aon thought that I would be happier if I built our own house on her mother’s land in Buriram. She said that we could live in a nice house, just like my house in Chon Buri and I could develop part of the farm any way that I wanted to. I could keep chickens and pigs and grow vegetables. I thought long and hard about it. I was an adventurer and this would certainly be an adventure. I could become a farmer and still be a writer. I started to research farming in Thailand and started to visualise myself building a farm. Keeping animals and growing things to sell. I also thought about everything I would be giving up. My life living so near a tropical beach was already perfect. Well, for me anyway. I was playing golf at least twice a week again and I liked the fact that I could drive for 20 minutes and be in the middle of Pattaya with all the shopping malls and superstores. I could buy anything I wanted when I wanted it. I knew all the places where I could buy English tea bags, cheese, pickled onions, Branston pickle, Walkers crisps, crackers, Cadbury’s chocolate, pork pies and sausages. All the things you never realise you miss so much until one day you just do realise. For the first year I was in Thailand I never ate anything else but Thai food. It was cheap and delicious and easy to cook. But after a while, I just wanted a proper English breakfast or beans on toast. When you find English food to buy it is like finding treasure and about as expensive as treasure too. You have to stop comparing the prices with what y
ou used to pay back in England. If you wanted these items then you just have to pay the prices, but it is worth every penny or Baht. There is something very satisfying about eating the foods that you have spent your whole life eating. So what if you have to pay £6 for a small tin of corned beef!
I was under pressure and I think that Aon was under pressure too. She had her children and family to think about and her farm. Although we wanted to be together we were sometimes apart. Aon was spending less and less time in Buriram and more and more time in Chon Buri, but I always knew that it was her dream for us to relocate there. We talked about it many times and Aon was always hopeful that I would say yes to the idea. But one day I told her that I didn’t want to leave Chon Buri and the life that I had made for myself. The one dream that we did share was to have a baby. We talked about it a lot when we first started to fall in love and we both loved the idea, but it just didn’t happen. Aon had been at my house permanently from the July to September 2014 but on 1st October she had to go to Bangkok to complete another course in physiotherapy. That was going to take ten days and after that she was going to be attached to a hospital for two months, after which she would have another certificate which she thought was very important in her work. I drove her to Bangkok on 29th September and we were both a bit sad in the car. It was going to be the longest time that we had ever been apart since we had met. I don’t think that either of us knew what the future would hold for the two of us, if indeed it was going to hold anything at all! I got lost driving around Bangkok because Aon didn’t know exactly where she needed to go. I was getting tired and frustrated doing U-turns and getting stuck in traffic. After an hour of Bangkok traffic with tension between Aon and myself growing in the car, I stopped the car, gave her 1000 baht and told her to get out of the car and get a taxi. I was angry that she didn’t know where she was going and I couldn’t understand that she hadn’t got the full postal address, so I could have put it in the sat-nav and gone straight there. Aon was angry that I was angry. She got out of the car and grabbed her bag off the back seat and walked off along the busy Bangkok street. We didn’t even kiss goodbye! An hour later she sent me a text message saying that she was sorry, but I was still too angry to reply. She would have to wait for a few days before I calmed down enough to reply to her messages. I feel terrible now, but I didn’t reply to many of her messages. I wasn’t angry anymore. I just needed some thinking time. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I was becoming frustrated with the way the relationship was. Somehow her life in Buriram and my life in Chon Buri had to merge. Now she was going to be gone for the next two or three months and I was starting to think ‘What’s the point?’. I didn’t know what was going to happen over the next two or three months. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe we would just drift apart or maybe she would be back after Christmas and everything would be just like before. I just didn’t know and I didn’t know if I was happy or sad about it. It was all out of my hands, so I guess I would just have to wait and see.
Everything else in my life was just the same. Just normal really. I had grown some tomatoes and lettuce in the garden which tasted fantastic. I met my friends on a Saturday afternoon in The Wilkris Resort for a few beers and a game of dominoes. I was still busy writing new books and I was still playing golf every Monday and Thursday on some of the many beautiful golf courses that Chon Buri is so blessed with and now shooting rounds of 102, I was sure I would be breaking the 100 soon!
I was very happy that my golf game was slowly but surely coming along. I loved the whole event of playing golf - the courses, the company, the banter and jokes, the scenery. Above all I liked the challenge. Golf was without doubt the hardest game that I had ever tried to play, but I loved it. I was by far and away the weakest link in our circle of players. But slowly my scores were coming down as I started to hit more and more pars and I even started hitting the occasional birdie. Maurice took me out one day and gave me four or five hours coaching. It was so beneficial to me. The very next day, for the first time ever, I beat Maurice and the rest of the guys that I was playing with that day, which clearly shows that Maurice is a better coach than he is a player!
I wasn’t expecting to see Aon before Christmas, but on 21st October she caught a bus from Bangkok and came to see me. She had only been gone for twenty days. She looked a bit nervous and a little scared, even though we were both very happy to see each other again.
“Darling, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“I have something very big to tell you and I not sure if you happy or not.”
“What darling?”
“I’m two months pregnant. We are going to have a baby. I scare you not want anymore and I have to take care of baby alone. Do you still love me, tee rak?”
“Oh my God! Of course I do and I’m so happy if we really are going to have a baby. I didn’t think it was going to happen. Aon, are you sure you are pregnant?”
“Yes, I sure. I take test. Have blue line sure!”
“Let’s take another test. I really want to see for myself.”
“Okay, tee rak.”
I jumped on my motorbike and went off to the Chemist shop. All sorts of thoughts were spinning around in my mind, but most of all I had an over whelming feeling of excitement. Whenever I had gone to any of the beautiful temples in Thailand I always prayed to Buddha and asked him for the same things; “Stop the mosquitoes from biting me, find me a good lady, and let us have a baby…….Oh! And help some poor sick people, but remember the mosquito thing is quite important.”
Anyway I bought a pregnancy test kit and dashed home again. We did the test together and it was romantic …in a way. Aon peed into the little plastic dish and I sucked it up with the little plastic syringe and dripped it onto the blue test paper. Within a couple of seconds the blue line appeared across the test paper. We were pregnant and I was thrilled. We hugged and kissed and knocked the dish of piss over. But we were in the bathroom so it was Ok.
Aon had completed her course in Bangkok and had yet another certificate. But now things had changed and she didn’t want to work in a hospital for two months. She wanted to stay with me and I wanted her with me too.
Loy Katong is a lovely festival in Thailand and held in the first week of November. It traditionally marks the end of the rainy season. People light candles, which they float across water on banana leaves and flowers. Any bad luck from the previous year floats away with the candles and wishes are made for good luck for the coming year. It is also a very romantic festival in Thailand. Lovers will often go to the festival together and wish for love, luck and happiness in the coming year with their partner. I went with Aon to the festival held on Bang Saray beach. The festival is always held after dark and rivers, lakes, canals and ponds all around Thailand are lit up with floating candles. It is a very beautiful festival and both Aon and I made wishes for our own future. We watched the thousands of flickering candles floating out across the Gulf of Thailand as we sat on the beach and drank milk from coconuts.
