Bungalow by the sea

Pasir Pan­jang Days: One of the con­cepts that never made it off the Tourism Board’s draw­ing board of national sym­bols? (See Cory Doctorow’s Flickr Set of Haw Par Villa).

“412 Pasir Pan­jang Road, Sin­ga­pore 5.“

That was how I used to recite my address to any­one who’d ask me where I lived. I must’ve been five or so, and attend­ing kinder­garten, where I stug­gled with Eng­lish and Man­darin because the ‘Ah Soh’ that my par­ents hired to look after me spoke only Hokkien.

The house at that address was rec­tan­gu­lar, and we had a gar­den out front, that at that time, to me, was the hugest gar­den I’d ever been in. There was a swing, a slide, and a dri­ve­way where I’d ride my bicy­cle, which, for some rea­son, liked to crash into my father’s car.

My father had his own accoun­tancy prac­tice, and by stan­dards of that time, must’ve been doing pretty well. He used to boast (to us only, he says) that the first car he owned in Sin­ga­pore was a Mer­cedes. I remem­ber us hav­ing a series of Mer­cedeses, the nicest one being a 280S with the num­ber plate QC21Y.

There was a makeshift bus ter­mi­nus right out­side our gate, and we used to get into all sorts of quar­rels with the bus dri­vers, who’d block our gate with their buses, and some­times, we’d even have to walk across the street to the police sta­tion to get it sorted out. They were more like thugs than ‘bus cap­tains’ in those days, and safety was never that big on their pri­or­i­ties. Some days we’d wit­ness the most hor­rific acci­dents, with vic­tims, mostly pedes­tri­ans, lying bleed­ing to death on the road before the ambu­lance came.

More impor­tantly, there was the sea across the road from our house. The sea’s no longer there. It’s been reclaimed. Or rather, land had been ‘reclaimed’ from the sea some time in the 1980s. Where the sea and a jetty were is now a road, a park and con­tainer wharfs.

On good days, my father would take us kids to the sea­side for a walk, and we’d watch as fish­ing boats unloaded their catch — there was a fish­mon­ger at the cor­ner of Pasir Pan­jang and Clementi Road who as late as 2003, still sold what he claimed to be fresh off the boat/sea fish.

On bad days, or rather, on one par­tic­u­lar day where I had been par­tic­u­larly bad, my father put me in one of those veg­etable bas­kets and car­ried me across the road and threat­ened to throw me into the sea. I saw my life flash before my eyes and in between the rat­tan slats of the bas­ket as my belly­ach­ing and wail­ing sub­sided into lit­tle whim­pers. I remem­ber being calmed by the salty air even though I was still fear­ful of being upended off the jetty.

On other days, when I’d be ordi­nar­ily bad (as opposed to par­tic­u­larly bad), all my father would do was threaten to call the police. Some­times, all he’d do was to point to the police sta­tion, and when a police­man did appear, I’d all but wet my pants.

When we kids were behav­ing our­selves, our par­ents would let the ser­vants take us out, but mostly either to Ah Heng’s the fishmonger’s, or down the road, by bus (so con­ve­nient — at our doorstep), to Haw Par Villa, where we’d won­der some more how good we had to be before we were treated to some­thing less hor­ri­ble than the grue­some depic­tions of the pun­ish­ment of sins.

There’s only so much rem­i­nisc­ing one can do with­out the aid of pho­tographs. So, does any­one have any pho­tographs of the Pasir Pan­jang area, pre-reclamation? I’d like to revisit places like the police sta­tion, and the jetty, and the sea.

Tech­no­rati Tags: 1970s, pasir pan­jang, sin­ga­pore