“I’d like to know how come you know the place so well,” says Emily, sounding disgruntled and slightly suspicious. “I don’t know the point of resurrecting places that have long gone. People should learn to move on…”
“Haji Salam Road rings a bell but I’m not sure if I know why…”
“Don’t you remember, mum?” says Anthony. “That’s where grandpa’s house used to be before he and grandma moved to their house on Nassim Road. But Haji Kahar’s heritage house with the green shutters is still there.”
Oh, Pansy thinks. Now I remember. That’s where George came from. The wealthy neighbourhood. I teased him about it. What did I say? Something about the fact that he looked like “the kind who lives in a house with a flush toilet”. But what did he say in response? What did he say? Oh I wish my brain was not so befuddled. But I remember he laughed, such a hearty laugh…
“How did you know that I know about Haji Kahar’s house?” Pansy asks aloud, looking at her son curiously.
“Don’t you remember?” Anthony says. “You used to tell me the story of the day you met dad. And how you had noticed Haji Kahar’s house on the hill with the green shutters? I don’t know why but the way you described it made it stay in my mind. And when I returned to Singapore for my NS, I went to look for the house and was surprised to see it still standing. It was not difficult to trace, as it’s the only house on the hill that’s traditionally built. And the shutters were still painted green! You also told me how dad was on a runaway bicycle being chased by a buffalo and he nearly landed in the lake…”
As Anthony speaks, that day comes back to Pansy as if it was happening now. Her first sight of George. The day that changed her life forever. It all comes flooding back. It shows that the memory has been there all along, slipped into the many folds of her brain, hidden even from her debilitating consciousness.
“Did I tell you all that? Amazing that you should remember…”
“Wah, so funny! Grandpa being chased by a buffalo,” says Winona. “Did anyone take a video of it? I can post it on my Facebook account or YouTube. Sure to get lots of ‘likes’.” “Did we really have buffaloes in Singapore in the old days?” Andie asks. “I mean, real animals roaming around Singapore? Did we have hens and ducks? How about wildlife?
Did we have elephants and tigers?”
“A lake! Oh, goody. Is it like a reservoir? Can we swim in it? Can we go and see it, grandma?” Goldie asks.
“Sadly, no,” says Anthony, before Pansy can respond. “The lake has been filled in. Now the area has been taken over partly by the NEWater manufacturing plant and partly by SMRT, which uses it as their Changi Depot, to store the MRT trains. All the forest in that area has been cleared…”
The ache that catches Pansy at the news that her Windermere is gone surprises her. Why should it matter now? After all, she and George had gone to the Lake District and had seen the real Windermere. Sister Catherine had described the Lake District to her so many times when Pansy was at Convent school and had always enthused so much over its beauty that Pansy almost expected to be disappointed.
So for Pansy to see the lake for herself for the first time was a hugely emotional experience. She could hear Sister Catherine’s voice, telling her about this and that. All those years of longing, those hours of imagining it, and she was now seeing the region for herself. The place was more beautiful than she could have imagined, the fresh air, wide open spaces, hills, green fields, craggy outcrops of rock and of course the various lakes themselves—Windermere, Buttermere, Grasmere. The names that George had told her on the day they met. She remembers how she and George had stood on the hill the first time, their hair windswept, looking down at the vast Windermere, and they had laughed, comparing it to the piddling little pond in Singapore which she had nicknamed after it.
George had made her dream to see Wordsworth’s country come true, had kept his promise, and showed her William Blake’s cottage in Felpham, John Keats’s home in Hampstead, Rudyard Kipling’s in East Sussex, Thomas Hardy’s in Dorset. The greatest regret was that she didn’t get to see Sister Catherine again. By the time, they arrived in England, Sister Catherine was already in her seventies and had died. They only got to put a posy of pansies on her simple grave in the convent churchyard.
“Do you know that the Lake District is also Beatrix Potter’s country?” George had asked her, the day they stood on the hill overlooking Windermere. “We will introduce her Peter Rabbit books to Anthony. Beatrix Potter had moved up here from London and had fallen in love with the area. To prevent the countryside from being destroyed for development of housing estates and shopping precincts, she had bought large farms and huge tracts of land with her own hard-earned income and bequeathed them to the people so that the countryside would remain beautiful, open and accessible.”
“What an amazing lady.”
“Indeed. She overcame huge odds and became an author in the nineteenth century, when it was not easy for a woman to be published. She loved the countryside and animals with a passion and drew them as illustrations for her own books. But one tragedy marred her life. She had fallen in love with her editor, Norman Warne, but her parents objected to their marriage as his social standing was not on par with theirs. But because she was adamant, her father relented and said that if after three months of their summer in the
