The villagers helped Pansy to gather empty fruit crates and placed them under the shade of the banyan trees to act as desks and chairs, and there she began her lessons, on the sandy beach, the vast sea serving as backdrop, the constant moving tide as background music. She tried to make the learning fun for her pupils, so she taught verbs and nouns through nursery rhymes and songs. She was hoping too that the English rhythm would induce her young charges to want to learn proper poems. The Malays, like the Peranakans, had a natural ear for poetry as they often recited pantuns and sang folk songs in the evening in their yards, at their communal gatherings. The children turned up for the makeshift school bare-bodied and in homemade drawstring shorts. They shouted in heavily accented English:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the King’s horses
And all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Pansy wondered if she should change the words “all the King’s men” to “all the Queen’s men” in June 1953 when Queen Elizabeth would mount the throne. The children’s cheerful chorus skidded over the waves; they dramatised ‘Who has seen the wind?’ and skipped to:
Father, Mother, I am sick
Call for the doctor quick, quick, quick!
Every month, each parent would pay Pansy in cash or its equivalent in cooked food, fresh fish, hen eggs, cakes, fruits like durians, mangoes, rambutans and mangosteens, herbs or flowers.
Even before Hock Chye had died, Kim Guek was already selling her jamu potions and treating the village folk. People came to her to ask to cure a persistent migraine, fevers, colds, stomach ache, backache, period pains, and other common maladies. Some more optimistic love-struck youth would even come to her for love potions. She had also acted as the bidan or midwife, delivering babies and helping women to regain their figures after giving birth, by massaging their abdomens with her herbs and bindings. And yet Kim Quek had never been to school, never been trained medically. Her skills were intuitively assimilated. Besides her numerous roles she had also sold the fish Hock Chye caught, sometimes preparing, salting and sun-drying the ikan sepat and ikan kurau to make into the delicacy ikan masin, dried salt fish, that locals liked to eat with plain rice or porridge. Many of the other villagers too preserved surplus fish in this way after the menfolk hauled in good catches. They scaled the fish and dried them in the sun, on the field of wooden racks at the front of the houses in the sandy yards, or hung them from wooden poles. Since Kim Guek was Teochew Peranakan, she also used the Teochew method of salting and steaming the fish as soon as they were brought in, to retain its freshness. Ikan selar or mackerels and small shrimps called geragok were particularly good for this method, and when fried for eating, they released a unique and distinctive flavour.
Their seaside villages were famed for their salted fish, especially the Teochew variety; and Kampong Tepi Laut was particularly well known for Kim Guek’s bunga rampay and nasi ulam. This was going to be a special week. The country was in a celebratory mood, all geared up to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Festivities in the country were starting on 30 May and ending on 6 June, though she was to be crowned on Tuesday, 2 June. There was some anti-colonial feeling after the war, but a celebration was a celebration. It was not every day that one got to experience a coronation, even if it was from a distance. The rigours of city life hardly intruded on their village, especially since Kampong Tepi Laut was one of the hidden villages. It hardly ever saw an ang moh in their midst. If the villagers wanted the excitement of the coronation, they would have to travel into town. There was going to be a huge outdoor parade at the Padang, padang meaning ‘field’ in Malay, a designated stretch of turf, in front of City Hall and the government offices on the day; parties would be held across the island. Pansy wanted to go. But how? Young women were not permitted to venture out unchaperoned. She wished she was a boy.
So the villagers anticipated a surge of shoppers for their fresh produce. Especially the rich Peranakan matriarchs and tau kay neos, with amahs trailing. But the village’s delicacies were only for those who were prepared to walk or cycle the rest of the way, as Koh Sek Lim Road ended in potholes even before it reached the coastal kampongs, sparing the villagers intrusion from casual visitors and nosy tourists. That was why people called their villages, the ‘hidden villages’, hidden by vast acres of farmland and the two rivers Sungei Bedok and Sungei Ketapang. The kampongs were more easily accessible via the sea than by land.
On Sunday, motorcars started from town in the early morning, trundling along the coastal thoroughfare, East Coast Road, which afforded an expansive view of seaside bungalows on raised concrete pillars, palm trees, sandy beaches and sea. This road went through Katong, the enclave of the Peranakans and Eurasians, past Siglap Road with its sea-wall and small cluster of attap houses, before it became Upper East Coast Road. At the very end of Upper East Coast Road was a very sharp left turn which led traffic into unpaved Bedok Road. This was Bedok Corner, its spot marked by a massive banyan tree. The tree had a magnificent crown of leaves and sea figs, its firm aerial roots seeming to prop up the whole tree. Cascading from its branches were thick long vines, which children loved to swing from, pretending they were being Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan. The banyan tree looked across the road to Kampong Bedok, with its food stalls and curved beach of white sand called Long Beach, the anglicised
