I was now in Secondary Three in Cedar Secondary School. It was located opposite our village, past Wan Tho Avenue and the Alkaff Lakes. Our uniform attracted lots of comments as it was unusual for that period, a grey pinafore over a sky-blue blouse, when most uniforms for girls were a dark blue pinafore with a white blouse. Prefects wore a skirt rather than a pinafore. Our principal, Mrs T, was known for her obsessive aversion to short skirts, and had been known to wait at the entrance of the school hall with a ruler, to measure the length of our skirts. Woe betide any girl if the length did not fall below the knee! It was detention, the ruler or the cane. Mrs T was a stickler for us to look decorous yet smart. She herself was never seen in anything but her calf-length cheongsam, with its buttoned high collar.
Our canvas shoes had to be pristine white. Every day after school, we had to blanco them with a kind of watery white chalk and then dry them in the sun, so that they were fresh and clean for her inspection. Of course, on rainy days we could not dry the shoes in the sun. Some of us only owned one pair of school shoes. Often, on those kind of days, I had no alternative but to wear the wet shoes to school. Despite putting on socks, the dampness was still yucky on the inside.
The worst thing was that when I put my weight on them, the wet chalky fluid would ooze out. As I put my feet down, the shoes squelched, creating white footprints of chalk all along the pavement as I walked. The other schoolkids thought this was hilarious.
“Ooooo... Chalky Girl! Chalky Girl!” they chanted, pretending to be fearful.
At that time, there was widespread horror of the Oily Man, or Orang Minyak in Malay, who was reputed to capture young children, especially girls. The story began in Malacca, circulated around Malaysia, then filtered down to us in Singapore. Whether he was real or just a figment of an overactive imagination we never discovered, but the myth of him terrorised the country. Some folks believed that he was a supernatural creature who coated himself with grease which was as black as his soul. It was for this reason that he was elusive and could not be caught, as he was too slippery. Wherever he had been, he left behind his mark—black, oily footprints and handprints.
“Orang Minyak, Orang Minyak,” people would scream, if they thought they saw him.
This was the faux-horrified tone the girls used, to make fun of my wet shoe-prints.
The problem with wet canvas was that it picked up dirt and smeared easily. By the time I arrived at the school hall for assembly, having walked through my muddy kampong, all the way along Sennett Estate and past the Alkaff Gardens, both my shoes would be in a horrible state. Whenever Mrs T called out my name in full in her booming voice, “Jo-se-phine!” I knew I was done for. To this day, I have an aversion of being called by my full name. I could not tell you how often my knuckles had been rapped by Mrs T’s metal ruler. In those days, teachers were allowed to cane and discipline pupils. Some days, she would even make me cut the grass in the school field under the blazing sun with a pair of small scissors!
Though my school was a government school, there was a distinct difference between students who came from kampongs and those from concrete housing estates with electricity, running water and flush toilets. The young ladies from the housing estates like Sennett Estate, Wan Tho Avenue and Braddell, came to school in chauffeured cars, and were given Straits Dollar paper notes for recess. I was given 30 cents per day, just enough for a bowl of noodles and a drink. Those other girls were the ones who played the piano and took music or ballet lessons outside school. They talked about things that were beyond the ken of kampong kids. Those days they were talking endlessly about the first discotheque that had recently opened on Tanglin Road, Gino’s A-Go-Go. I had no clue what a discotheque was!
“You swa ku!” one of the girls said, calling me a mountain tortoise, shorthand for stupid, really. “It’s a place you go to dance, lah!”
Each morning before school, before I put on my uniform, I would squeeze my nostrils tight, to pick up the family’s chamber pot with both hands, hurrying down the kampong lorong with extra caution, taking care not to spill its contents on my feet. I’d stand on the edge of the grassy, monsoon drain, tip the chamber pot over, to throw out its contents. I imagined a scene like mine repeated all over the country, women emptying chamber pots into the monsoon drains. Also, food and market stallholders squatted
