MyStory

I have fond memories of the old civilian airport at Paya Lebar.

I was then a boy of no more than 7 years old. My family was big and we couldn't afford childcare. On occasions when there was no sibling or adult to look after me, I would accompany my mother to the airport when she started her shift as an airport cleaner.

I can remember clearly today the smell of the cleaning solutions that she used to keep the airport spick and span as I use to accompany her on her rounds. I too have fond recollections of running around in the airport concourse.

Most vivid for me is the memory of sharing a simple meal of vegetables and rice with her, out of a vacuum container, seated at a corner of the cleaner's closet next to the washroom. I can still see the colour of that container, a dull green which I will forever associate with a simpler time.

I can also remember the journey to the airport, on bus no. 90 which would travel past pig and vegetable farms along today's Paya Lebar Road. I will never forget the smell and the look of the last few kilometers towards the airport. Looking at Paya Lebar, Ubi Road vicinity today, no one can imagine how agricultural the place look back in the 1970s.

To me, the memories of Paya Lebar, the journey and the airport are as fresh today as it was 30 over years ago, because it represented quality time with my mother when I was but a growing child.

Today, in the midst of our hectic and busy schedules, what little time I have with my mother on Saturday evenings will always remind me of the growing, formative years that I spent with her in that little cleaner's closet. And I remind myself that the cleaner that we see around us today is also someone's mother, working hard to bring up her children and give them a decent life and the hope for a better tomorrow by providing them with the means for an education that my mother has given me.

Article migrated from original My Story Portal 2007.
Author. Sweeney1582