I love bourbons. Not the alcoholic drink, of course. The biscuits. Bourbon biscuits.
(And no, they don’t contain alcohol either.)
Bourbons are long, sweet, and chewy, with two biscuits sandwiching a delightful chocolate cream in each delectable rectangle of delight. But bourbons by themselves are what I consider to be an “okay” kind of biscuit. If I were presented with a spread of biscuits and cookies, I would sooner reach for round, big, chewy chocolate chips than bourbons, if we are to compare these biscuits based on taste and texture alone.
The same goes for custard creams.
What are custard creams, you ask? Custard creams are also rectangles of delight, though they are more square than the bourbon. They are these light yellow biscuits with a sweet white cream on the inside. When you eat a custard cream, the best part (in my highest, most well-informed opinion) is the texture on the outside of the biscuit, giving you just that bit of tactile interest before the explosion of sweetness and joy.
But let’s be real—there are many other superior cookies and biscuits to bourbons and custard creams.
These two biscuits, however, have a special place in my heart.
Before I talk about the significance of bourbon and custard cream biscuits in my life, I’d first like to share a bit of experience of living…the nomadic life (I exaggerate, but come on, have we met?).
I had experienced a lot of moving around when I was a kid. When I was five, I spent two years of my childhood at the US, then came back to Malaysia and was enrolled into Standard One. Throughout the six years of my primary school, we moved houses once, but I switched schools twice—once for SK, once for SRA. This meant attending four different schools, rather than the typical two for relatively “normal” kids.
Then we moved countries again, to the UK, and while I was able to stay at the same high school for the four years I was there, we moved houses three times in four years.
Home, therefore, at least during my childhood and teenhood, had never really been associated with a specific location. For sixteen years of my life, we had lived in at least seven or eight houses. So it comes as no surprise that back then, when I thought of home, I did not think of a house. I thought of people, like my parents and my siblings. And I also associated the concept of home with items. Home, to me, was captured by the presence of my laptop where I wrote my stories. Home was in my favourite copy of Sherlock Holmes the Complete Collection by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And, for a while… it was captured in bourbon and custard cream biscuits.
When we first came to the UK, I had left my friends and extended family with the promise that we would be back soon. “We’ll just be gone for three years, maybe four,” I had said. It never occurred to me that in four years, so many things could happen. I did not expect to lose two grandparents while we were there, or to see two of my cousins fall very sick. I did not expect the surrounding area around our house to change so much, that there would be so much development in the land. Even in the UK, the houses we lived in during those four years were not constant.
The constant, therefore, was actually my school.
There’s something quite interesting about the school I attended. It wasn’t like any of the schools I attended in Malaysia. In Malaysia, each student was assigned a class, and each class was assigned a classroom. When the bell rang to signal the end of a class, the teacher would clear her desk, pick up the books, and head to her next class.
The classroom for each student was constant. There was no moving around. The classmates they have were also constant. Those were your classmates until the end of the school year.
In the UK, in my school, it wasn’t like that. In my school, when the bell rang, it’s us students who needed to clear our desks and move to the next classroom. Each teacher had their own classroom, so it’s us students who moved around. I also had different classmates for each subject. Some of my classmates enrolled in engineering, or woodworking, or IT classes, whereas I opted for history, sociology, and fine art.
So I did not have a dedicated classroom of my own for an entire year, nor did I have dedicated classmates. It was very much unlike how I had been used to in Malaysia.
For four years of my life, the school was my constant, and the constant in the school was the school library. And this library was cared for by an absolutely wonderful school librarian—another constant in my life. I’ll call him Mr. Penguin.
During my four years of attending school in the UK, the library was my safe haven. I distinctively recall, one day, of running into the library after being chased by school bullies who tailed after me right into the library doors. I had hid in the closet where all the board games and old magazines were stored, listening shakenly as Mr. Penguin shouted at the bullies and told them to get out. Those were the early days of my school—I’m happy to report that the bullied stopped after a year or so.
Back then, I had often appreciated then how much Mr. Penguin looked out for me. He would make sure the bullies stayed out of the library. He would ask me if I was alright. He would give me book after book, and ask me to write reviews so he could display them around the library. He contacted some of my most favourite local authors, inviting them to come to our school, where I got to listen to them and speak to them and get signed books from them. He would take me to the Sheffield Children’s Book Awards, for three years, and even involved me in the selection process of shortlisting books. Mr. Penguin looked out for me, and instilled in me a love for books and writing that I cannot even remotely express in this blog post as I am writing this now. The library became my safe haven, my most favourite place in all of the United Kingdom. It also became a second home to me.
I was happiest when I was in the library. Surrounded by my dearest friends and chess games and books and the wonderful Mr. Penguin, what else could I have asked for? If you asked me then, I would say that I was living my happiest, most creative life.
Little did I know, spending all my breaks and lunch hour and after school hour at the library did cause some concern to Mr. Penguin, even if I personally knew and felt like I was living my best life.
You see, I did not eat all that much in school. In fact, I could confidently say that most days, I did not eat at all.
I think I can count, with my fingers and toes, the number of times I had bothered going to the dining hall to have my lunch during those four years. Usually I would only do so if the library was closed, which happened very rarely. By default, as soon as the lunch bell rang, I would immediately go to the library and stay there until the hour was over. Several times, I recall Mr. Penguin asking me with concern, whether I had had anything to eat. And I would say I wasn’t hungry—because I truly wasn’t. Intermittent fasting had nothing on me, as a young teenage girl. I could fuel my body from morning to night with nothing but potato chips, such is the wondrous life of energetic teenhood.
But then something weird started to happen.
Sometimes, we would have after-school clubs at the library. A reading club. A chess club. A club to play board games. I don’t even remember what clubs there were, because if there was an opportunity to be at the library, I would be there, no matter what “club” there was. And so, when the bell rang at 3.30pm signalling the end of school, I would go to the library and hang out for whatever supposed club was on at the time, and enjoy my time there with my best friends.
I cannot recall when Mr. Penguin started bringing out custard creams and bourbon biscuits, but this began to happen quite frequently during those after school sessions.
I’d hang around in the library to read or talk books or play chess, and Mr. Penguin would come out with bourbons or custard creams—sometimes both. As a student librarian, I also began to notice that the back store room would have a ready supply of these biscuits. Never in my life had I thought to ask Mr. Penguin where those biscuits came from. Never had I wondered whether they were purchased with his own money, or whether it was through an allocation by the school.
Now, as an academic, I wonder about the source of those biscuits. To me, it would make no sense for the school to allocate an amount for a library to buy biscuits, unless if Mr. Penguin had specifically asked for it as part of their administrative budget. And the only reason he might have asked for that budget, or even bothered to buy the biscuits with his own money, is because he knew that there were students—like me—who every single day would skip both breaks and the lunch hour without eating any food.
It probably didn’t help that we also never turned down any offer of the biscuits.
Fifteen years have passed, and I am now an academic, serving university students full-time. I have had to deal with so many odd bureaucracies that has made me appreciate, more than ever, what Mr. Penguin had done. It is such a thankless duty, what he did. I had never thought to thank him for the biscuits, because what did I know back then? Wrapped in my own self-centered, teenage angst ignorance, it never occurred to me where and how he had gotten those biscuits. All I knew was that the library was safe, that Mr. Penguin was always there, and that there were those comforting, sweet, tasty biscuits.
It made me appreciate that now, I can actually be that presence for someone. I can be constant. A caring soul, for a person whose life may be filled with instability and uncertainty. And so I tell my students, that when they graduate, they can still come to me, for their worries or woes. Because I do see myself just…staying here, at this university. Constant for the next thirty years.
I feel some kind of envy towards people who have childhood homes. People who can say that that at a specific place, stands a specific house where they grew up. People who had memories from young until adulthood, captured under an old tree or a door that has creaked since all eternity, or a window that has never opened since they could remember. These people have a constant, a kampung.
I cannot call any place my kampung, really. But I do have the blessing of associating home with many people, and many items and places.
Once upon a time, home was captured in two of my closest friends, who I would see almost every single day, except for weekends. Not seeing any one of them on days where I was supposed to would make me feel like I was living with a missing limb, that there something missing, something dearly missed. It only took a smile, a glance from them, for me to feel that missing piece settling into place. Every day, one of them would see me, and nod. And I would nod back.
It was our secret code for, “Alright?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
That exchange is captured, daily, in us sharing that nod. And that felt like home.
To this day, I can walk into any library from anywhere in the world, and feel instantly at home. Seeing the spines of books haphazardly placed on shelves, would bring me back to memories of how I had once arranged books at the shelves in my school library. I would sort the books by last name, by series, by height and colour. It didn’t matter to me that the next day those books would be all haphazardly placed again, with some horror books mysteriously finding themselves in the comedy section, and some magazines shelved between reference books. There is something therapeutic in the methodical way we librarians arrange books on shelves, putting things back in its rightful place.
I also love the feeling of a book, any book, in my hands. No item can make me happier than a book can, no matter the subject. I remember the last two weeks before we left the UK, to move back to Malaysia. Home for me then was captured in my very old, very battered copy of Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I knew that it would take several weeks before I’d see all my belongings again, packed away and shipped in a large container as it was, so I only had Twilight to keep me company. I would read it, cover to cover, on repeat for those long few weeks. When we boarded the flight to Malaysia, I even had it in my hand luggage. The book was my tether, the familiar item from the UK that I brought home with me.
You don’t have to be a person with a childhood home, or a kampung, to associate anything or anyone with home. But I do feel like there is comfort in having that presence, that a person or item can have for us. When I went to the US a few weeks ago, I did not need a physical book with me. But you can bet that I had my Kindle, and I absolutely came home with a number of books in my luggage. And nothing made me feel more at home than walking past the doors at Arrivals and seeing my husband and two kids there.
Home is everywhere, if we let it. It’s in the people we love, and the items we cherish. And I suppose, it is also in such things as bourbon and custard cream biscuits.
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