When I was born, my eldest brother was already married and had two children who were born before me. Soon after my birth my eldest sister and my second brother also got married.

The house in Kampong Sabak Awor where I was born was a relatively big single-story attap-roof timber house with three big bedrooms, one kitchen and a big dining/living room. Each of my two elder brothers had a room for their families and my mother shared a room with her two unmarried daughters and her two younger sons. There wasn’t a toilet in this house; instead, each room had its own chamber pot. A family shower room with laundry was located about 300 metres away beside a small pond. Sited at the back of the house was a shed with a huge pit into which the chamber pots were emptied every morning. The contents were extracted by my mother every few days and diluted with water and spread over the crops planted on a vegetable plot near the front of the house. In those days there were no chemical fertilizers and so farmers had to resort to whatever nature provided.

In addition to this timber home, my father also built another one on stilts on Jalan Ismail, a kilometre away from the house in Sabak Awor. The house was on stilts because of low ground, which was located beside a stream called Parit Mohd Drus that emptied into Muar River about 200m behind the house. This was the house where my father resided and conducted his business with my elder siblings.

So though I was the youngest child of my parents I had some nephews and nieces to play and keep company with. Besides, there were others in the kampong, Malays and Chinese who were of my age and we had a good time playing and living happily during our carefree childhood days.

Sometimes we jostled and fought but soon made up if it was over some petty issue and no one was hurt. Occasionally, we got more physical and if one was badly hurt with a bloody nose or a swollen eye, he would go home crying. When his mother came to know about it, she would lug her child to the house of the offender with a cane. The two mothers would meet and find out the cause of the fight. Normally both parties were at fault. To settle the issue, the two mothers would cane their children in the presence of each other and admonished them not to get physically aggressive again, “Play only, don’t fight!” The two boys would shake hands and play together again the next day as if nothing had happened between them. This form of amicable resolution of quarrels amongst kids was prevalent in those days; whether the boys were of the same or different races.           

We often met and shared the fun of frolicking under coconut palms, mango, rambutan and durian trees. Depending on seasons or moods, we would fly our self-made kites, spin tops or play marbles in the front yard of our house.

Occasionally we would forage in the bushes looking for fighting spiders. We hunted for only the male spiders which had dark green rumps because they had better fighting quality. We kept them separately in match boxes. We each had at least two spiders and we pit them against each other to see which one would emerge the champion.

Also we would wade in streams up to our knees to catch colorful fighting fish with a net. Again, we only looked for male fighting fish because they were more colorful and had beautiful dorsal and tail fins. We put one fish in each bottle and placed the two side by side to enjoy seeing them trying to fight each other with their colorful tail fins flapping.

During the fruit seasons we would climb up rambutan or mangosteen trees to pluck the ripened fruits within our reach and eat them like the monkeys do. If the fruits were too high up in the trees we would use catapults to shoot them down. Many would fall and we would scramble excitedly to collect the fallen fruits. We would devour the ripe ones and keep the green and half-ripe ones for other days.     

Besides the rambutan and mangosteen trees, there were a few durian trees planted amongst the rubber trees near the house. Durian is completely different from other fruits. It has a hard and thorny covering and an overwhelming fragrant smell when ripe which some Mat Salleh call “a pungent smell from an unkempt toilet”. It drops when it is ripe, especially at nighttime. So we had to wake up early in the morning to go round the durian trees to look for them before we went to school. However, if the durian season happened to coincide with our school holidays, we would build a makeshift shed near the durian trees and spend the nights there waiting for the durians to drop. We would stay awake as long as possible and when we heard a durian drop, we would hurriedly go look for it with a kerosene lamp. At the first break of dawn we would, with blurry eyes, scan the area for more durians that fell while we were asleep.

After gathering all the fruit, we would squat around and enjoy to our hearts’ content the fruits of our labour. What was left after we had satisfied our appetite we would bring back to our house for the other members of our family.

(From young I learnt how to open a durian with ease using a knife or a sharp wooden stick. It is still a feat to open a durian. One has to find the exact location to make an incision. If one finds it, a good durian will open with the greatest reluctance. It opens slowly, inch by inch, until finally it bares all to impart its pleasures to all anxiously waiting friends. However, nowadays I have to wear a pair of gloves to open the durians because I’ve thinner skin now than when I was young!)

Most meals were nothing special and usually consisted of porridge, tapioca or sweet potatoes with salted vegetables or home-grown fresh vegetables and eggs from home-bred chicken. Only on special occasions we had chicken, pork and fish. However, during the Japanese occupation, rice was a luxury. Though the children never felt hungry, we grew up without a proper balance of diet. In spite of that, we responded well to the starchy food and they were no serious ailments amongst our family members. Other than occasional fevers or sprains we never heard of headache or toothache. None of us wore spectacles.

The vivid memory of my childhood days that I cherish most was of my mother breastfeeding me even after I had gone to school at the age of six. As I was the “beh-knia”, or the last in the family, I was my mother’s pet. I was so addicted that when I came back from school, the first thing I did was to look for my mother. However, there was a Malay woman who often passed by our house and whenever she saw me breastfeeding she would, with her forefinger brushing her cheek, said “Bongsu, malu-malu (shy, shy)!” Soon after I felt ashamed and had to forsake my most pleasurable habit!  

Chapter 4.  My Teen Days

In my early teens, I and my third brother frequently stayed overnight in the house in Jalan Ismail, located beside a tributary of the Muar River. This was the place where the family business was conducted; making of attap roof-sheets from nipah-palm leaves and copra from coconuts harvested from our family’s plantation near Sabah Awor. At that time my eldest brother had started his own business in operating a provision shop nearby. Also my second sister got married and my father went daily to the town to jolly with his friends. My second brother was left to take the, responsibility in running the family’s business. As more hands were needed, my third brother and I had to be around whenever possible to lend a hand.

At that period, my father was recognized by the Chinese community in the village as a “headman” and had to spend times and efforts to settle disputes among the villagers. Amongst others, he managed to settle one long-outstanding dispute between two men in the village over a monetary matter that had become the talk of the town. One man was demanding the repayment of a debt from the other man. The latter refused to acknowledge because, according to him, the sum was for some services rendered by him a couple of years earlier. After a few rounds of negotiations and yam seng, my father could not find an amicable solution. To settle it once and for all, he took out from his pocket the sum of money involved and handed it over the demanding party!     

Coming to this house, I became acquainted with the stream beside the house. I began to learn how to stay afloat in water and to row a canoe. We would get into the stream before the tide was on the ebb as the water level then was at its highest and the current at its slowest. We played with a rubber ball or splashed around just for pleasure. We would try to get out of the water before my father returned home from town as he felt it was too dangerous to play in the stream if one was not a good swimmer. One evening when he returned home after he had his fill of moonshine with his friends in town and saw us frolicking in the stream, he shouted at us, picked up a stone, aimed at us but threw it wide of the mark! Nevertheless we quickly scrambled ashore and got out of his way.

We had three canoes used by the workers to carry nipah-palm leaves from the mangrove swamp at the edge of the river or to fetch the dehusked coconuts from the coconut plantation. I would sometimes follow the boatman and with an oar helped him to pedal the canoe to the plantation. When filled with coconuts we would pedal it back home. The journey would be timed so that on our return journey the tide would begin to ebb so that it would help the loaded canoe to drift most of way home. And when we reached home, the tide would be still high and that would make it easier to unload the coconuts from the canoe.

Occasionally I would also follow the worker to go out at night with a canoe to catch crabs and prawns in the mangrove swamp by the river side. Armed with a touch I would shine it in the shallow water and look for crabs or prawns. In the dark of the night, if one were to shin a touch at a crab or prawn in the water, its eyes would flicker and two shining dots could be seen. If one crab or prawn were to be located this way, I would gingerly lower the home-made spear and strike it into the creature. Once I struck one, I would slowly withdraw it from the water in order not to scar away others in the nearby vicinity. In an hour or so and with a bit of luck we could each catch a dozen of the creatures.     

 go to pg 3                                                                  pg2                                                                   back to pg 1