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Saturday, 23 August 2014

Childhood Paths

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. So began L.B. Hartley's epochic novel on childhood, published at mid-century in 1953. I could have been writing a similar book, except for two rather glaring differences - I'm flattering myself a great deal, and I can no longer speak of my early years as being in the same century.

It is a lot simpler, however, to visit the places where our pasts unfolded, than it is to revisit the past altogether. Mary and I did just that today, since in any case we wanted to take a walk.

Below: memory lane, first door from the left was Ah Ma's before she moved away and the unit at the end of the corridor was ours.


I spent the first of my prancing years in the Jalan Minyak (Oil Street in Malay) vicinity, literally on a little hill known as York Hill. Ah Ma (my maternal grandmother) always referred to the place in Hokkien as Ho Hong Teng (Teng here is short for hilltop). According to my parents, there was once a factory by the same name situated at that very spot. The street got its name from a soy sauce factory that operated in the area before the flats were built.

A gently-sloping road, the only way in and out for vehicles, led southwards towards Pearl Hill, Outram and Chinatown beyond. The north slope, facing Robertson Quay and Jalan Muhammad Sultan, was steeper and today remains clad in luxuriant vegetation. Pythons were not an uncommon sight then for my paternal family in their ground floor flat.

Below: the view north from the Jalan Kukoh estate, and the first time I've taken a lift to the top floor in all my years there; sometimes on weekends my parents would ask if I'd like to visit Daimaru, which was what I knew Liang Court by. Yaohan was Plaza Singapura (where we hung out as a family quite often too), and Sogo was Raffles City.



Below: more familiar views from Block 6 where I grew up. Landmark Tower (leftmost) has always been a pun, Pearl Bank Apartments (centre) always resembled a distant castle on a distant horizon and the pink and white building in front of Pearl Bank wasn't always a spruced-up hotel - it used to be my Dad's primary school (though he was actually schooled in the older compound on the other side of the hill).



Both Dad's (Block 4) and Mum's (Block 6) families moved in when the estate was completed in 1964. There they went to school (at the nearby Outram Secondary School), met, dated and got married. My parents rented a two-room flat in Block 6, on the same level as my maternal grandparents' flat. It meant, until 1990 when we moved away, I had very convenient Chinese New Years.

Below: Mary posing in front of my the flat where Dad grew up; the main gate of Outram Secondary School used to be up the road and to the left - a long uphill slog for those aiming to beat the bell.



I remember my kindergarten days at the Kreta Ayer People's Action Part Community Foundation (PCF) vividly. Mornings in school would be followed by afternoons at Ah Ma's. Lunch would be either buttered slices of Gardenia or plain Jacob's crackers, both liberally dunked in Milo before consumption. This would be served at half past three to coincide with the reruns on Channel 8 (then Singapore Broadcasting Corporation) of its 1980s drama series. The most memorable was 雾锁南洋 (The Awakening, starring a dashing Huang Wenyong and a lithe Xiang Yun). At five, the almost daily battle for the television began when Ah Gong (my maternal grandfather) returned from work (he sold fruits at Chinatown) - he wanted his Cantonese drama and I my cartoons. My victories depended on the vigour of Ah Ma's intervention.

On some evenings Ah Gong would bring me downstairs, where I would sometimes play with the other children in the neighbourhood on the little slope between Blocks 6 and 5. On other evenings I would stagger with my bucket of Duplo over to my neighbour's flat (this couple whose three sons were between nearly ten years older than me and who treated me like their own), where I would build spaceships in Rastafarian colours (I only had red, yellow, green and blue bricks). The time to get back home was announced at six with the proclamation over Chinese radio of the winning lottery numbers. If my parents were held up at work, I would create bunkers in my grandparents' bedroom with pillows and blankets and Ah Ma would tell me about the time the sirens signalled the arrival of Japanese bombers.

Things, predictably, are no longer the same. Half the slope between Blocks 6 and 5 has been removed to accommodate an electrical substation. We chatted briefly with Jessica, who lives now with her children and grandchildren in the flat once occupied by my family. "I know who you are, I moved here in 1991!" was her startling response when I introduced myself. She then went on to an even more startling revelation. "This place was a bit dirty, but we pray to Jesus and all is well now." It was a good thing we didn't know, or feel, a thing about it. I also learnt from Jessica that my neighbour next door had already moved away for two or three years already. She would have been that last link to my Jalan Minyak years.

Below: Mum was once robbed on this flight of stairs between Blocks 2 and 4, before I was born. The shelter is new, as are the evenly-spaced steps, which used to be cracked and narrow. Coming and going always felt like walking through an enchanted forest to get to Ah Ma's, sans fruit basket and bold fashion statement. The tall, dark trees - one of which once housed a little red Taoist shrine - and their drooping vines have since been removed. As has the innocent sense of adventure proffered by nocturnal passage.


Below: a squirrel enjoying his buah long long. Ah Gong used to take me on these occasional foraging trips where we'll pick up all the ripe fruits that have fallen to ground. Sometimes, he wields a stick (formidably, I must add) and would throw these at the fruits still hanging from the branches and which were on the verge of ripening.


Below: a view of the Chin Swee tunnel as we cross Chin Swee Road (what we told taxi drivers, because nobody knew where Jalan Minyak was) towards Pearl Hill. I remember standing on the brand-new, gravelly road on the day the tunnel opened with Auntie Ah Tiu, my neighbour who indulged my Duplo fantasies. I also remember waving to a passing bus full of friendly old folks who waved back, as we waited in vain for the President to drive by.



Above: Pearl Bank Apartments - it took me several years to learn that people actually lived there.

I had my first pre-school experience at Lower Delta Road, not very far from my office in Grange Road today. Some mornings my grandfather would carry me in his arms to the bus stop along Havelock Road, where a handful of buses took me to school. If it rained my grandmother was on hand with an umbrella. Today, the path all the way to Block 6 is completely sheltered, and the steep, uncertain steps repaved. But nothing compared to the shelter of childhood days, as eternal as they were ethereal.

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