MyStory

Katong:Growing up in Katong in a pre-war rental shophouse

The 5-foot way evokes many childhood memories for me as I have, as a child growing up in the 50s, run up and down it every day because my house opened into one.  I lived, from the time when I was barely five to my early twenties, in what is a local Straits Settlement 2-storey shop house, one in a row of about 30 such shophouses at Marshall Road, in Katong.  It faced another slightly shorter row of shophouses.

Then our 5-foot way was playground, peek-into-your-neighbours’ homes stretch and hangout place where you sat on creaky wooden benches to chit-chat, gossip and unintentionally (or intentionally) eavesdrop on conversations and domestic bickering. Or when it was raining heavily, you sat and watched the rain fall in torrents into the drains that ran all the way beyond the 5-foot way carrying the paper boats that you quickly and excitedly threw into them and hope that they will make it all the way down to house no. 45 or further.  It was where the Hakkayong tau foo (steamed toufu) seller or the ak bak (braised duck) seller set down his stove and heavy boiling pot of assorted tauhoo and  vegetables or braised duck, taukwa (fried bean curd)and hard boiled eggs to prepare you a dish for a few cents.  All of which they carried on their bent backs with the help of a thick pole from which the stoves slung, one on either side. Or where the kachang puteh ( a type of peanut) vendor  came with his assortment of nuts - biji gajus or cashews being my favourite but, at 20 cents a cone, were too expensive for me to afford.  The soft yellow kachang kudar at five cents for a few nuts in the paper twirled in a long narrow cone was all I could afford.

Home ownership was far from my father’s thoughts then. He preferred paying $50 a month rent, not seeming to pay a thought to the possibility that one day the landlord might not be satisfied with just that or that he may decide to sell off the entire stretch of shop houses when rent control was lifted.  So he dismissed the idea of buying a property when his brother-in-law broached the idea that he might want to consider buying a terrace house at Frankel Terrace. Why worry about some possibility that may never happen?

In the 5-foot way where I grew up, we knew in detail who lived in which house number, how many children they had and how they fared in their senior Cambridge "O" level examinations(the results were published in the Straits Times!). We knew who was carrying on with whom, whose children threw the best parties with the birthday girl dancing the hula hula in front of a gawking group of hot-blooded male friends. Or who had 11 toes, whose father was a seaman and who was a big shot in the Police Force, whose only young son was tragically killed in a road accident ….the list goes on, including which Eurasian family had the loveliest Christmas tree and decorations, which family could afford more than three new dresses for each of their seven daughters for Chinese New Year (and told their neighbours so)or which Hindu family had the prettiest shapes and patterns chalked onto the 5-foot way in front of the house during Deepavali.

Though we were a large family, we were not the only family with 12 children. There was at least one other family living in Marshall Road who also had 12 children; another family beat us by one child.  Many had a brood of at least five to six children, but there were also those with just two or had an only child -Balan was one of the latter apart from Bo Fatt, both of whom were good friends of two of my younger siblings.

Come Chinese New Year, Marshall Road was literally a sea of burnt red fire crackers. If only we had a camera then, with coloured film at that or a video! The smell of gun powder was heady and intoxicating! O the din! Our young eardrums were assaulted continuously from early morning when the first family started to light the string of crackers hung from a pole and held up by the man of the house. That would start a fire-cracker war as neighbour after neighbour competed with one another, letting out a longer string of crackers all in good fun and revelry.

Along the 5-foot way we would also walk over to a neighbour’s house each evening  to plonk a chair for our beloved Ko Po (Ker)Chit (grand aunt who lived with us) to watch television from their window while the rest of us kids clambered around her for a good view! Theirs then was one of the few households among the 40 or so families living there that were among the first to install a black-and-white television set in their homes. They were certainly very kind, tolerant and understanding about all that nonsense that was happening outside their window! Never once did the lady of the house, nor the man of the house- nor her kids for that matter- ever told us we were not welcome or even so much as shut their windows on us!  They invited my grand aunt to come in often but she politely declined and thanked them.

And we had the cheek(mungka terbal sekali!) in subsequent years to spend long evenings at one of our neighbour’s house - Ah Ee Choon Im and Ah Teoh who were also related to us - with our kerosi sendeh  lipat (foldable lounger) which we lugged along from home each evening! -to watch TV programmes like Dr Kildare from their home! Even when there was a curfew in 1964 in connection with the racial riots!

Not all homes had a telephone during those years - I am still talking 1950s to almost late 60s - and certainly not ours. So when we had to make a call, only urgent ones of course, we would run up all the way to one of the houses further up the street, to borrow their phone as my father knew their dads. We kept our conversations short of course as the ladies of the house kept a sharp ear out regarding what we spoke about and for how long, although, politely admittedly, pretending to do something else all the time.  The interesting part about the phone - the standard heavy big one with the rotary dial and weighty handset and curly coil -  which we used here was that it was shared between two Hokien families living next to each other. The men of the house were partners in a business I reckon. An opening was made in the dividing wall and the phone was placed on the ledge so both sides could have easy access to it!  Apart from their phone we sometimes also borrowed the phone of another neighbour. It was at times very awkward. I was therefore greatly relieved when a coin phone was subsequently installed at Odeon Katong cinema which is about a five-minute walk from my home. At least I would not feel obligated to anyone and can speak privately. By then, I was 17 going on 18 and had to make a phone call to a certain boyfriend now and then; he was one of the lucky ones with a phone at home.

What a far cry life was then without the convenience of a phone at one’s disposal.  When my brother was in Canada as a medical student in the early 60s , he hardly ever called home in all the  five to six years he was away and we hardly ever called him either. Not because he did not miss home or we did not miss him. I recall it cost something like $35 then for perhaps a five to ten-minute phone call and that was an astronomical sum in those days when we hardly barely enough  money for food, much less the luxury of an overseas phone call.  So we relied solely on, what today is snail mail ,correspondence via the letterheads as it was much more affordable, something like 20 cents a piece.

When we were growing up at Marshall Road, there were 21 of us living in the 2-storey shop house at its peak! Yes 21 and no exaggeration! Papa and Mummy, 12 children- eight girls and four boys -, Ah Kong and Mama,(my maternal grandparents) Ko Po Chit, Ah Poh(another grandaunt, older than Ko Po Chit), Ku Chek (a grand uncle) and our two Indonesian Chinese maids, Ah Yong and Ah Eng. We also had Ahmad the driver but he did not live with us.  He came in the morning to drive us to school and went back to his family and home in the late afternoon. We even had a dog - called Brownie- at one stage as well as several hens running around in our kitchen as Papa bred them for their freshly laid eggs. Papa and all of us ate the freshly laid eggs raw -chicken flu was unheard of in those days! One particular hen was affectionately called "Blackie Turning Koo" which was my younger brother ‘s favourite which he named after the hen’s comical habit of turning round and round! He often sang to it too: "Hey, my favourite Blackie turning koo"!

In this less than 2,000 sq ft two-storey house, there were just four bedrooms located on the second floor. One front bedroom was occupied by my maternal grandparents, the back master bedroom by my parents and several young children with the baby, whoever was then the littlest, sleeping in the ko ko jong or sarong cradle suspended from a beam via a spring. The remaining two rooms were occupied by the rest of the females, young and old.  We all laid down on the floor which had linoleum on it and slept, with just a pillow under our head and possibly a bolster. No blankets were needed as it was hot and sultry most nights and there was not a single electric fan to relieve the muggy heat.   I recall Ko Po Chit had a white steel bed in one of front bedrooms where we slept. The two older boys slept on foldable "camp beds" downstairs in the living room.

There was only one bathroom for the entire household - with just one huge tempayang (wide earthenware water vessel)in it where we would sendok(scoop) the cold water in a gayong (bucket) and shower . It was just after the kitchen sink at the back of the house.  There was also just one squat toilet for all to use.  It was situated at the end of the kitchen before the back door. The toilet originally operated under a "bucket system" that required daily emptying by the night soil workers who came through the back door in a truck with many doors, each just large enough to hold a bucket per household .  The toilet thus was a place we would want to spend a short a time as possible - just grit your teeth, do your business quickly and get out.  Thankfully, in a few years after we moved into Marshall Road, the toilet was upgraded to a flush toilet subsequently as sewer pipes were installed underground. 

  There being no toilet upstairs, we had to rely on the tumpui (large spittoon-shaped potty) for the nightly reliefs! I recall very clearly that it was my weekend duty when I was a little older to empty the tumpuis (one used by Ah Kong and the other by the rest of us every morning).

No such thing as air-conditioning in those growing up years. We did not even have any fans in the bedrooms nor any stand up or table fans to speak of all those years. The only fan in the house was the ceiling fan in the living room downstairs.  So it was sweltering in the daytime and also at night. We were not able to blame it on global warming as that phenomenon or term had not occurred or been in the lingua franca at that time.  Sleepily Ko Po Chit and Ah Poh used to fan us with their woven mat kepas(hand held fan).  "Juak, juak" ("Hot, hot")we would complain to them incessantly through the night and the sweet old souls will chide us gently but still patiently fan us to sleep. Ko Po Chit used to tell me that if I stayed still, I would feel cooler. I can vouch that was not always the case. So I stuck my legs out of the window through the wooden banisters at night. Or coiled my legs round the steel legs of Ko Po Chit’s bed as they were cool. I do not recall mosquitoes being a problem those days but bed bugs were! "Ah Poh peh, peh!"(Ah Poh, scratch, scratch!")were regular entreaties that my younger sisters would cry out to the old lady Ah Poh to scratch their itchy, and probably bug-bitten, backs or limbs besides badgering her to fan them harder. As we were Peranakan Hokien, we spoke to the older folks in Hokien mainly as illustrated above although we would use a smattering of Malay terms for example when referring to articles around the house.  Among our siblings and with our father, we would speak in English.

Heat and humidity were a constant bane. So when I grew up and made my first pay teaching part-time at LEMBAGA (an adult education institution) night classes, I immediately bought myself a table fan for $45 which I placed just next to my pillow so that I can dispel heat from my sleep forever!

Our living room was never tiled. Just cemented over in grey, and bare. We had a few kopi tiam type of chairs and a round table with ridged sides and a glass top. There was a black teak 3-door glass cupboard against the wall dividing the living room from the dining room behind it.  There was a heavy desk against one of the walls and papa’s foldable canvas kerosi sandar where he would laze after work to relax and read the papers. It would go "creak, creak" under his weight as he was rather tubby. These were all the furniture in the living room. Everyday lace or cotton curtains would be hung on the two front windows looking out onto the 5- foot way.  Except for the night-time, the main door would be wide open all day, without the luxury of a collapsible aluminium gate or swing pintu to provide privacy to the occupants within, unlike some of my better heeled neighbours who had one. From behind one their daughters could peek at the world outside and the neighbours passing by while coyly hidden from view.

The kitchen was austere like the rest of the house. No kitchen cabinets or oven. Just a concrete stand on which stood a burner or charcoal stove. A wooden cupboard that served as a pantry and food storage, standing on bowls with water and some oil to dispel the ants, cockroaches and lizards. We did not have a refrigerator till years later, a small Kelvinator.  When one of my sisters accidentally punctured the freezer with a fork when she tried to pry apart an ice-tray that was frozen over and stuck to the base of the freezer, it was like a family tragedy.  Papa had died and we were terribly out-of-pocket so we had to make do without a fridge till better times much later on.  A simple single sink which was used by the entire family to prepare food, clean the dishes and pots, brush their teeth, clean their faces and wash their hands. A kitchen god stood on the wall just outside the bathroom. There was the indispensable lesong(mortar and pestle) which Ko Po Chit used to pound her blachan(fermented shrimp paste) and spices for the daily meals. Preparation was always done on the kitchen floor where Ko Po Chit sat on her bangku(tiny stool) to persiang (peel) her towgay(Beansprouts), chop the meat and so on. There was no fan of course to make meal preparation more pleasant.  Just the hand-held kepas (fan made of mat)to keep cool with.

Despite the simplicity of the kitchen and lack of modern appliances, Ko Po Chit prepared the most memorable meals and treats for the entire household, consistently every day for years in that humble kitchen.  Her seraykaya(egg and coconut custard set on steamed glutinous rice), her pineapple kuey tart filling and her sambal lengkong(spicy fish floss) , the last made from fish which my brothers caught at some pond, were legendary.  The seraykaya was cooked slowly over a charcoal fire and stove for many hours till it was firm, golden brown and delicious.  Her kueh tart filling was painstakingly prepared in a copper kwali (wok)just like the sambal lengkong. The fragrance and taste of all these treats were out of this world. We would slap on the kaya and the sambal lengkong, separately, on thick Cold Storage butter plastered over hot roti pranchis (French baguette in today’s lingo), and savour each lovely bite.  Besides these, Ko Po Chit was a genius with her kuay chang(nonya glutinous rice dumplings with meat filling) which she bound in tight triangular parcels and steamed to soft perfection. So was her kuay ee(glutinous rice balls - in white, pink and red), also handmade from scratch.  The lap pok (fried tiny pieces of pork fat)which she regularly deep fried to a delicious golden crisp was to die for - we ate it up like peanuts and cholesterol was not in our vocabulary then! Everything so serono (meticulously prepared), nothing chin chye boh chye(slap-dash or haphazardly done).

How did we entertain ourselves in those days?  Apart from playing "golee"in the back lanes, hide-and-seek, "hantum bola", "chang kudah", and sneaking off for a swim in Marine Parade, we played card games. Not with money, which we did not have, but with cigarette packets as chips.  Indeed, we coveted the various brands of cigarettes that were widely smoked then.  In fact, all the older men in our household smoked in that era, before smoking was associated with cancer: my grandpa, my Papa, my Ku Chek.  Even my Mum, for a while till she found out that she had breast cancer and she stopped  the habit immediately.  Fortunately, the second generation did not follow suit then. At that time, we could  rattle off all the cigarette brands that were available - from the lowly Ace brand which Ku Chek  puffed on to the branded Peter Stuyvesent, Marlboro, Kent, Salem.  We knew the cigarette adverts by hard - "Come to where the flavour is, come to Marlboro country"! Be a real man, macho, like that handsome rugged cowboy riding his steed, rounding up the cattle and at the end of a real tough, and rewarding day, what can be more relaxing than a Marlboro cigarette?  Also, the Salem advert made cigarette smoking a really refreshing experience with the gushing waterfalls amidst cool green fronds that greeted us before the trailers in the cinemas came on.  In our innocence, these messages never struck us as insidious or enticing. Whenever we had the opportunity, we gathered all the cigarette packs that we can find by picking up discards along the 5-foot way, the backlanes, the drains, the Odean Katong lobby, in dustbins, at mah-jong games that the adults gather at, et cetera, never once washing our hands after the deed was done(and none the worse for it as we were seldom sick, immunised by all the dirt that was part of our lives from a young and tender age).

The boy we envied most for his wide and best collection of cigarette packs was Bo Fatt, a Hainanese boy who lived at the first house  on our row in Marshall Road.  He was the only child in the family, doted upon by his mother.  His father was a seafarer, always away at sea, so we never saw him.  His mum, a stern woman dressed in a blue samfoo and black silk pants, tolerated us when we called on him since we were his only playmates.  We loved his house as it was bare of any furniture, only clean cement. That way we can sit cross-legged on the cool floor and form a big circle of boys and girls to play Pak Kow. We played Time and 21 often; as a result, our addition skills were excellent. Give us any 3 cards and we can add up to 10 or 21 in a jiff!  His wide open floor allowed us to painstakingly stand the cigarette packs or cards upright, round and round the floor in circles, for a dramatic domino effect, which we simply loved to watch.

We owned no dolls, no soft toys, no teddy bears, no pretty crockery or cutlery set to call our own. No Lego or Meccano set.  No books outside of textbooks either. My parents simply could not afford any of that luxury and instinctively we knew never to ask.  If we wanted to read, we just ran and skipped to Joo Chiat Library to borrow books for free or hang around Ah Lau’s Second Hand bookstore to skim through comics, novels and magazines.  We certainly saw the dolls or toys which our school friends brought along to school on occasion or those that our better-heeled neighbours’ children owned and showed off to us. We quietly coveted them and that was it.  Perhaps one day, if we studied hard, found a good job, we could buy something that we really wanted to have but did not have then. Meanwhile, pretend play was the order of the day. 

We used our imagination to make up for the lack of toys and play things and it did us no harm but a lot of good.  For us girls, if we lacked pretty clothes, we took out a pencil and paper and played paper dolls, a vicarious activity. We drew girl doll figures with pretty faces and long curly hair and cut them out, sometimes pasting them on cardboard paper to stiffen the dolls. Then we would draw all the clothes which we wished we had - blouses with buttons and bows and frills; long or short sleeved, or cut in, showing off the shoulders.  All the skirts and pants we fancied. We used our Staedtler colour pencils to brighten them up.  Then we would cut each out and mixed and matched the tops and bottoms on our dolls to our hearts’ content.  That sure satisfied the urge for clothes and cost us nothing.  You would understand the urge better if you knew that most of us then owned probably only one or two going out dresses that were nothing to scream about, a number of home clothes we wore to death every other day and just a pair of Japanese flip flops. No going out shoes or if we did own a pair from Bata’s, it pinched too much or gave us blisters or were frankly quite old fashioned and quite clunky. If we fancied "new" clothes, we reconstituted the roomy skirts which my Mum’s more fashionable cousins handed down to us into "shifts"- straight sleeveless dresses which we learned to stitch together after attending sewing classes held at one of the houses in our neighbourhood.

Thank goodness for the movies at Odean Katong and Roxy , the two  main entertainment areas for us back then when there was no such thing as shopping centres. They helped to lift us out of our mundane, ordinary lives and transported us vicariously into the lives of more interesting and intrepid souls full of romantic adventures in faraway places which we had never then visited .  I saw the then major Hollywood films in Odean Katong -South Pacific, Blue Hawaii, Flower Drum Song, Summer Holidays, Pillow Talk, Sound of Music, All Mine to Give, From Here to Eternity, Ben Hur(Ko Po Chit’s favourite), Ten Commandments etc.  I sat entranced in the Shaw Brothers’ productions as well, starring starlets like Lin Dai, Grace Chan and Li Li Hua, and the child star Chan Poh Poh. I also had my initiation, and fascination, with Pontianak movies there, starring Maria Menando in the Cathay Kris production. For 50 cents a seat, Ko Po Chit would take three of us younger girls to watch any one of these movies.  If the usher were to stop her at the door, she would bravely argue that we would all be sitting on her lap or the arm of her seat and hence would not be taking up any other seat. I do not recall ever being told to go home after that. So we all squeezed on Ko Po Chit’s lap or sat on either arm of her seat and had a whale of a time! But quite often, we had to contend with baksats on the 50 cents seat.  Perhaps those sitting on the $1 or $1.50 seats did not have to contend with that irritation through the movies.  Those pesky bugs and increasing self-consciousness as we grew older and bigger, eventually saw less of us accompanying Ko Po Chit to shows for free.

Odean Katong was also our playground of sorts. When we were not in the cinema, we were often wondering round the foyer on the ground and upper floor where the premier circle seats were. We would dodge the ushers guarding the entrances to the cinemas and clamber over the open windows on the upper floor to sit on the parapet. Sucking on our 5-cent ice cream on sticks or ice balls and dangling our feet happily over the parapet with no railing to prevent us from toppling over down to the ground floor if we so much as missed a step.  What was fear? Never gave it a thought then nor ever considered something called "consequences".  It was very cool up there as we saw traffic whizzing by below.  No one ever noticed us perching up there and hence we were never chased away but sat there till we finished our ice-creams and were ready to embark on something else. No one squealed on us to our parents or the old folks who did not have the faintest idea what we were up to when we were out of the house.