The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir. Lucy Lum

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       Seven

      As my father’s grasp of dialects and languages grew, so did his wages. When I was six we moved to Paterson Road, opposite the police station run by the English officer, the red-haired devil. As soon as I saw it I loved that big house, with its many windows and wide verandas. The first thing Popo did when we moved in was call in the feng-shui master to inspect it. He arrived wearing a Chinese jacket and looked very wise. For nearly an hour he spoke with Popo and my mother, pointing from time to time at a list he had placed in front of him on the table. On it were the names of each member of our family with the time, date and name of the animal year in which each of us had been born. I was curious about what he would do next so when he went out into the garden I followed him. I watched him take out of his jacket pocket a small, octagonal block of wood carved with elaborate decorations and with a compass set in the centre. With outstretched arms he held it out, turning in various directions, and mumbled, ‘Too many tombstones, too many tombstones.’ With a frown, he replaced it in his pocket, took out a piece of paper, made some notes, then walked to a different place and did it again.

      While the feng-shui master made his calculations Popo walked round the garden, followed by the gardener, to look at the flowers and fruit trees. In the far corner a bush of mauve bougainvillea had been trimmed into a ball, and was surrounded by orange bird-of-paradise, motherin-law’s tongue, gladioli and spider orchids. Gladioli and spider orchids were Popo’s favourite flowers for the altar and she told the gardener to put plenty of cow dung on the beds where they grew. When she got to a huge cactus, with flat fleshy stems and deadly needles, she said: ‘Ah, palm of spirit. How useful. I won’t have to travel to Chinatown for dried ones now.’ She used it to treat the sole of the foot for aches and pains. She would clip off the spines, roast the stems on charcoal and lay them on newspaper. The patient would stand on the hot cactus flesh while it drew the unhealthy wind from the body.

      There was another useful tree in the garden, the papaya. Popo did not like the fruit, but she used the leaves when she made a stew of pig’s stomach, garlic, tofu and mustard greens in dark soy sauce. She used them to scrub the pig’s stomach and remove the lining of slime and the nasty smell. We often ate pig-stomach stew. When Popo and Kung-kung had arrived in Singapore with little money, she had searched for the cheapest food and discovered that Europeans, Malays and Indians did not eat pigs’ stomachs, which could be bought for next to nothing. Of course, she never served such cheap food to guests.

      When the feng-shui master had finished in the garden, he returned to the house and went from room to room, pointing his compass. I wanted to follow him and watch everything he did, but one glare from Popo told me to stay where I was. I wondered whether he had come to cleanse the house of the spirits from the cemetery, but when his inspection was complete, he sat with Popo and told her that he had calculated the lucky date and position for the setting of the altar, then wrote a list of other things Popo had to do around the house so that we would enjoy the beneficial effects of chi. After he had gone Popo followed his instructions to the letter.

      I found that by climbing over the verandas I was able to get in and out of the house without using the front or back doors, which meant I could come and go unnoticed. While my brothers and sisters stayed at home, I would sneak off to the police-station courtyard to play with the policemen’s children. The station stood on two acres of ground at the corner of Orchard Road and Paterson Road. The main building was a typical two-storey colonial-style structure, bordered by verandas on all sides. The charge room, cells and some small offices were on the ground floor, and upstairs the offices of senior policemen and the administration staff, including my father. The red-haired devil’s room was the largest, and just outside his veranda a Union flag fluttered on a long pole. Apart from the main building, there were living quarters for about sixty policemen, the prisoner interrogation rooms, the canteen and the recreation hall. In the middle, screened from public view, was the quadrangle where the policemen had their daily parades and drills.

      When the drills were taking place, children were not allowed in the grounds, so I would watch from my friend’s house close by. As I looked at the policemen, sweat dripping down their foreheads and drenching their shirts, I wondered why they wore such warm clothes for their parades. Eventually I learnt from Father that they had to wear British uniforms – bluish-grey shirts, khaki shorts, knee-high woollen socks and woollen berets.

      When I was not at the police station or playing in the garden I would wile away my time on the veranda, watching the lorries pass with their loads of tin, rubber or timber on their way from the plantations in Malaya to the wharves where they would be loaded on to ships for export to Britain. I could always tell if a load of rubber had gone by as it gave off an unpleasant chemical smell that stayed in the air for a long time. The timber lorries carried huge logs held together with a few ropes, and a man sitting precariously on the top log. I thought those men deserved extra wages for being so brave, but my father told me they sat on the load because they had no choice: they needed the work. One day, walking home with my father, we saw a timber lorry brake suddenly and swerve to avoid colliding with a car. As it screeched to a halt, the man on the top log was thrown on to the road and, a split second later, crushed to death under the load of timber that followed him.

      With more money and a big house to show off, my grandmother and my mother began to transform themselves. They invited old and new friends to play mah-jongg and for meals, and we had visitors almost every day. When Father returned from work, he had to smile at people he hardly knew. My mother stopped doing housework and caring for us to spend most of her time attending to her makeup and going out with her friends. She would see our former neighbours from Tanglin, Mr and Mrs Khoo, and together they would go ballroom dancing and never missed a Sunday tea-dance. She bought a gramophone and invited them to our new house to practise the waltz, the quickstep and the tango. She urged my father to learn, but ballroom dancing was not for him, although he joined in to humour her.

      On most Friday evenings two square tables on the veranda were wiped down so that my parents, Popo and the same five friends could play mah-jongg. I was already an expert at setting the mah-jongg tables but although I felt СКАЧАТЬ