Debbie Purdy - It’s Not Because I Want to Die

I spent a few months with Mildred in Houston, learning some facts about the music world that would stand me in good stead later on, and I grew to love Americans. After leaving Texas, I planned to continue westwards round the world to visit my uncle Tony, who was working in Hong Kong. The plane had to stop briefly in Tokyo, and though I very much wanted to see the city, the cost of breaking my flight was prohibitive, so it was straight on to Hong Kong. When we landed in Tokyo, though, an announcement was made. It seemed the plane was overbooked, so they wanted to know if anyone would be willing to stay the night in Japan, all expenses paid, plus $200. Of course my hand shot up at lightning speed. The next day was the same, and the one after that. I was staying in a much nicer hotel than I could afford, with all my meals paid for, and by now I had received more in compensation than my ticket had cost. By the time they had space on the onward flight, I’d met some people and been offered a job dancing in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, so I decided to stay for a while.

The men I came across were very respectful. I loved dancing and European girls did well in those bars, where if you had even the slightest bit of rhythm they thought you were Janet Jackson.

By day I had a few jobs making conversation in English with Japanese businessmen so they could polish up their language skills. I lived well enough, sharing a flat with another girl, but after about seven months I felt it was time to go. The wanderlust took over and it was off again, this time to Hong Kong.

I arrived to find that Uncle Tony wasn’t there any more, but on my very first night I went to the bar of a hotel where I planned to stay and there was Chris, the English singer I’d met in Oslo. I stayed with him and his wife while I looked for a job and found my feet.

A girl called Jane, who had been working with my uncle Tony before he left Hong Kong, helped me find a job. While looking though her photo album after dinner one night, I was stunned to see a photo of my ex-flatmate Joss, with whom I’d lived for a while. We compared notes and realised I had taken Jane’s old room when I moved in with Joss.

I did a couple of different jobs in Hong Kong. Jane introduced me to an ad agency based in the building where she worked, and I started working for them selling corporate sponsorship for a road-safety project called Constable Care. I had more time (and enthusiasm) than anyone else in the company, so ended up running it. Because of the experience I gained there of bringing together the Government Information Services (GIS), the police, army, kids with corporate sponsors and the media, I ended up helping Ogilvy & Mather PR set up and run the Keep Hong Kong Clean campaign. (The first taught me the power of the media, the second to deal with failure.)

When I’d got myself settled, Vera came over to join me from Oslo and she moved into my flat for a few months. She was now studying sociology and managed to get a grant. We figured that living in Hong Kong and reading her textbooks would probably be good study. The exchange rate and difference in the cost of living meant she could get by in Hong Kong for the academic year.

It was a brilliant place to live, with 24-hour music and parties. It was obsessed with money and hedonism, probably a bit like the City in London but with a better climate.

I lived in Hong Kong from 1988 to the end of 1990, and I was there when the students protested in Tiananmen Square and Chinese troops opened fire on them. Information wasn’t getting through to the Chinese public, who didn’t have access to Western media, so the South China Morning Post printed cut-out A4 pages explaining the situation and anyone who could faxed them to contacts on the mainland. The massacre caused consternation in Hong Kong because the 1997 handover had already been arranged and was fast approaching and locals were worried that this might be the way they would be treated under Chinese rule.

Meanwhile, back home, Mum’s health had been deteriorating over the years and she was now finding it difficult to look after herself. She was overweight, and that probably contributed to her lack of mobility, but it was also the reason why she wouldn’t ever consult doctors. ‘They’ll only tell me to lose weight,’ she complained, and I’m sure she was right. Unfortunately it meant that her diabetes was never diagnosed. Uncle Frank, the husband of Mum’s sister Beryl, was diabetic, so Mum would clip recipes out of magazines that would be suitable for him, while still eating sugary foods herself. She didn’t complain much about her health, but she needed someone to help her with shopping and housework and anything that required much energy. Carolyn had been doing it for years, and I now felt it was time I helped.

I flew back from 25° sunshine to cold, grey, rainy Bradford, a city I’d never lived in before and where I knew no one apart from Mum and Carolyn. I got a job in Leeds with a recruitment agency, Michael Page. I initially went to ask them to find me a job, but they laughed and offered me a job with them instead. I bought a house near Mum’s, a tall, narrow terrace on a steep hill. Mum was happy to have me at home, and I was happy to be able to spend time with her. I was nearly 27 years old and had had more than a dozen careers to date, so maybe it was time for me to settle down just a bit.

I really enjoyed getting close to Mum again, but we were to have limited time together because in 1992, just over a year after I came back to Britain, she died very suddenly. The shock left me reeling for the next couple of years. I couldn’t decide what to do with myself any more. I felt unbalanced, like a tree without roots or a house without foundations.

Dad came back and took a job in Cheltenham. I took a marketing job in Redditch, near Birmingham, and was able to live with him during the week and drive back to Bradford at weekends. The work was fine at first, but I soon got frustrated. When you keep changing profession, as I did, you never get a chance to work your way up to the interesting jobs at the top. No one’s going to offer you a massive new opportunity when you have a track record like mine. Some people stay with the same employer for decades and climb the ladder – my brother worked for the BBC for over twenty years – but it wasn’t in my nature to put my head down and work. So when Mildred rang and invited me out to Singapore in September 1994, I was ready to change jobs, homes, continents, everything.

Within a week of arriving, Mildred had introduced me to Peter and I’d got the job with Adventure Travel, a company that offered adrenaline-fuelled package breaks to expats living throughout the Far East. They needed someone who knew where the apostrophes should go and I persuaded them that punctuation was my specialist subject.

The job was like a dream come true for me, especially when Peter said he’d like me to go and check out some of the sporting activities and write copy myself – except that my MS diagnosis came only a few months after I’d started. Would I still be able to do all the things they needed me to? I was utterly determined that nothing would stand between me and my newfound love of scuba-diving, so in April 1995, soon after I returned to Singapore, I went to review an Indonesian dive site.

I could still swim and breathe in the mask, so I didn’t think there would be a problem. After a dive one day, though, I swam to the shore and was walking up the beach when I looked down and saw I’d left a trail of bloody footprints all the way up the sand. My feet had been cut to ribbons on the sharp coral and I hadn’t felt a thing. That was a bit of a shock. I was going to have to take a little more care of myself.

Peter sent me on a number of other trips: white-water rafting down rapids on the edge of a jungle in Borneo and more scuba-diving, but I learned to keep an eye on my legs because I couldn’t trust that I was feeling sensations in them accurately. They weren’t responding the way I’d been used to. I never thought I’d be doing this job for too long, but I’d figured a bit longer than this.