Final Notes From a Great Island

by Neil Humphreys

  But credit must go to those at the Ministry of Defence. Not only did they accede to local residents’ demands and keep the hot spring open, they also renovated the compound and replaced the dirt track with a cemented path and some bougainvillea bushes in mid-2002. Hoping to be cured of their various aches and pains, the crowds returned to the revamped spring while the Singapore Tourism Board examined its potential to attract foreign visitors. And then, nothing happened. Interest from the media and the public waned and the attraction certainly did not end up in STB guidebooks. But it was still open and I was eager to see what had become of Singapore’s legendary hot spring.

  I bounded off the bus at the junction of Sembawang Road and Gambas Avenue. The spring was just a couple of minutes walk down Gambas Avenue, although it was easy to miss. There was no sign. No mention of the hot spring at all, in fact. Perhaps the Ministry of Defence hopes to downplay the fact that it sits within a restricted area. If that was the intention, it has worked. The Sembawang Hot Spring undoubtedly holds the distinction of having the ugliest entrance to an attraction that I have ever seen. Prisons boast more attractive façades. The fence around the compound stood at least 3 metres high and was topped off by the ubiquitous roll of barbed wire. Although there was no indication of what was actually inside, there was still a sign ordering visitors not to cycle, litter, skateboard, play sports, walk dogs and, best of all, sell ice creams. Guess my swimming friend is screwed then. In addition, the Ministry of Defence could not be held responsible for any injuries sustained and visitors entered at their own risk. I now understood why the coach parties were not queuing up.

  The path was also bordered by green fencing and barbed wire. I ambled along for about 25 metres until the path abruptly turned right and there it was, the exotic Sembawang Hot Spring. Now I do not know about you, but when I think of a hot spring, I conjure images of the great Roman baths with their flawless, mosaic floors within magnificent temples that stood several metres high or the religious sanctuary at Lourdes in southern France, with its castles, apparitions and spas. What did the Sembawang Hot Spring offer? A concrete compound and half a dozen taps. I was devastated. I needed a pint of hot spring water just to overcome my sense of disappointment. The unprepossessing concrete square was about 30 metres across and surrounded by the omnipresent high, green fencing. In the middle were four taps, from which the hot spring flowed continuously from 7am to 7pm. There was no religious miracle before and after those hours—the Ministry of Defence turned off the taps. I noticed a few more taps in the corners of the compound, but they were slightly obscured by plastic buckets and chairs that kind souls had left for others to use.

  But then, the kampong spirit still prevails here. The moment I entered, an elderly chap told me to help myself to one of the plastic chairs that hung over the fence. I realised later that he was the caretaker; his office nothing more than a tatty old shed. He directed me to an upturned bucket beside the four taps.

  “Take, take. Spring, spring,” he said, gesturing towards the bucket. But I hesitated. Being even more obtuse than usual, I had foolishly assumed that the hot spring was under the bucket. I was momentarily paralysed by the thought that I would lift up the bucket and unleash a roaring spurt of boiling water into the air, like a geyser at Yellowstone National Park.

  “What’s underneath?” I asked, taking a couple of tentative steps towards the bucket.

  “It’s okay. Take, take. Spring, spring.”

  That is it, I thought. There was a volatile geyser under the bucket just waiting to blow my head off. I flipped the bucket over and jumped back to avoid the thousands of litres of nothing. The bewildered caretaker was offering me an empty bucket to fill at the taps. Now he hesitated. He was clearly not sure whether to hand me a second bucket or call the staff at Woodbridge Hospital.

  I filled my bucket, returned to my plastic chair and waited an hour for the boiling water to cool. Aside from the caretaker and myself, I counted four other people. A middle-aged Chinese couple massaged their feet in a bucket beside me while, in the far corner, another Chinese couple, possibly in their early sixties, treated the Hot Spring as a day out. Singing along to the tunes blaring out from a Chinese radio station, the guy relaxed in an old bathtub filled with spring water while the woman washed their clothes in a bucket before stepping into her bathtub—a blue plastic barrel cut in half. Oh, she did look a treat.

  I dipped a big toe into my bucket, but the water had not cooled sufficiently. I am not a hypochondriac, just listen to this. In 2002, a 57-year-old carpenter lost six toes here. A desperate diabetes sufferer, he came here looking for a cure but ended up in hospital with gangrenous toes. Unfortunately, his medical condition contributed to his injury. His poor blood circulation meant that he did not feel the water scalding his feet and burning through his skin until it was too late. So I was more than happy to bide my time. Besides, the soothing atmosphere was addictive. There was a real sense of collectivism here. Everyone shared chairs and buckets and talked to each other. The caretaker knew every visitor and even tried to converse with me but my appalling Mandarin let me down. The couple beside me explained the procedure of cooling the water through hand gestures and some quite gifted miming. There might have been a hi-tech airbase next door and a swanky condo complex on the other side of Gambas Avenue, but the socialist kampong spirit had at least survived in here.

  After the couple beside me cleaned up and cycled away, I was left with a singing Chinese bathtub and a woman lying in a plastic barrel. It was time to leave. I stood up to wave goodbye to the caretaker and almost knocked my chair over. He was nothing more than a floating head. No one had said that this place was haunted. On closer inspection, the caretaker had somehow contorted his body so it could descend into a barrel smaller than a beer keg. Only his head was visible. The barrel was filled to the brim with steaming spring water, which gave the surreal impression that a dislocated head floated over it. The caretaker’s ghostly face appeared through the steam and smiled back at me, the woman in the blue barrel waved and her partner belted out another Chinese ballad from his bathtub.

  It had been a fabulous day.

  CHAPTER 20

  Anyone who grew up in or around London in the early 1980s will be familiar with the concept of “red bus rovering”. Before the uninspiring, all-inclusive travelcard was introduced, London Transport sold a one-day pass called a Red Rover, which essentially allowed you to travel on any red bus in London and its surrounding boroughs, including Barking and Dagenham, for the price of one ticket. It was marvellous. Children travelled out of their Essex housing estates around the city’s fringes and into the exciting labyrinth of the nation’s capital. Back then, the sun always shone, the buses and telephone boxes were always red and Ross and I could not get anyone to snog us in the school playground. And when you did not have a girlfriend to watch Rocky III with, you went “red bus rovering” with your best mate instead. The ticket was a gateway to a hedonistic metropolis that was a million miles away from the monotonous terraces of Dagenham. Any bus, any time, any place and as often as we wanted. Soho, Camden, Petticoat Lane, Tottenham Court Road, Notting Hill and Covent Garden— London called to us. The only problem was that our mums would not let us travel that far.

  “Let’s go red bus rovering,” I would say excitedly as we watched Mickey’s funeral in Rocky III.

  “Yeah, all right, and this time let’s go all over London. Even further than last time,” Ross would reply as Rocky searched for his eye of the tiger.

  “Where did we go last time?”

  “Barking.”

  Barking is the town beside Dagenham. It was like buying a farecard in Toa Payoh and spending the day in Bishan. It was time to stretch our wings. We were almost 12 after all.

  “We won’t go to Barking again. Only spam heads go there. Let’s go somewhere different up London.”

  So we went “up London”. All the way to Upton Park, the home of West Ham United, and waited for Trevor Brooking to catch us kicking a tennis
ball around the forecourt, whereupon he would immediately recommend us to the club’s scouts. You see, we thought that the players lived in the stadium and we would join them once we had signed professional forms. But Upton Park is only 15 minutes away from Dagenham on the Tube. For all our bluff and bluster, Ross and I only ever went “red bus rovering” to the neighbouring Essex towns of Barking or Romford or to West Ham’s Upton Park to demonstrate our ball control. We hardly needed a London A-Z as a guide.

  And then it happened. We finally realised that we had exhausted every hang-out possibility in Barking and Romford, we were not going to dislodge Tony Cottee and Frank McAvennie from the West Ham first team and, more importantly, we had heard that you only needed to glance at a girl “up London” and her knickers would fall off. So Ross and I ventured into the city. We traipsed along to every major landmark we knew: the Tower of London, Madame Tussauds and the famous cinemas of Leicester Square. We only looked at them, mind you, as we lacked the funds to go inside any of them. Of all of London’s landmarks, I loved Piccadilly Circus the most. With its gaudy advertising billboards, the statue of Eros and that roundabout leading to all the major shopping streets, the lively area seemed so glamorous to a 12-year-old. It was like standing on a real Monopoly board. Since then, I have taken every opportunity to visit Piccadilly Circus whenever I have returned to London.

  And here I was once again, watching the cars, taxis and buses in Piccadilly Circus. Something was not quite right though. First, I did not have Ross beside me saying, “That girl across the street just winked at me. The one with the twitch. She definitely just winked at me. I reckon I could shag her.” Second, I was not in London. I was in Seletar in northern Singapore. But it was Piccadilly Circus nonetheless, a mini-roundabout that was once the gateway to Britain’s Royal Air Force and their largest airbase outside of the country in the 1930s. I had taken the MRT to Yio Chu Kang and then the No. 86 bus, which drove past the famous prata shops of Jalan Kayu and dropped me at the entrance of what is now the Seletar Camp of Singapore’s Armed Forces. The former officers’ village is also home to Singapore’s oldest airport, 300 colonial properties and a cluster of bizarre street names that stand as a legacy to Britain’s former military presence here. From where I stood at Piccadilly Circus, Edgware Road was the first exit, Maida Vale the second and Piccadilly the third. There was also Lancaster Gate, Knights Bridge, Battersea Road, Regent Street, Hyde Park Gate and The Oval, among many others; all in the quiet, remote Singaporean village of Seletar. Before you ask, there were no billboards, giant screens or statues at Piccadilly Circus. There was nothing except a sense of humour. It was just a mini-roundabout with a patch of grass in the middle and a miniscule road sign that cheekily said “Piccadilly Circus”. I loved the irony. It was the only mini-roundabout I had ever come across that actually had a name, never mind one so historic and grandiose.

  The black-and-white colonial bungalows and two-storey houses were lovely, with many complemented by large, well-tended gardens. Unlike the almost exclusively British community around Dover Road and “Little Kent”, the Seletar village had a more cosmopolitan and homely feel. These houses looked like homes, rather than temporary stations for military personnel. The bungalows and gardens around Maida Vale were lived in, varied and inviting, probably due to the estate’s eclectic mix of residents. Although there are a number of expatriates living here, there are also a number of Singaporeans, well-known names in some cases, from the arts and academic communities. And it all seemed more genuinely bohemian than the superficial Holland Village.

  I strode down Park Lane, hoping to take a short cut to Seletar Airport, but a couple of soldiers at the School of Logistics halted my progress. That was a real Monopoly moment. I had gone round Oxford Street and passed Park Lane, only to be stopped and told to go back to the beginning and start again.

  “You can’t pass this way,” the officer said. “Go back down Park Lane and head up West Camp Road to reach the airport.”

  “But if I don’t pass ‘Go’, can I still collect $200?”

  He had obviously not played Monopoly before. But I took the longer route to the airport, via Bays Water Road, where the houses and gardens were bigger, as were their snarling dogs. For heaven’s sake guys, we all get the message. Your houses are palatial fortresses, the envy of Piccadilly and the rest of Singapore, but please, shut those bloody dogs up.

  The breezy walk down West Camp Road was wonderful. The road was largely deserted and the welcome silence was only occasionally interrupted by a small private plane coming in to land on the runway to my right. Each flew so low overhead that I could make out the pilot’s face. I waved at them as they approached but none of them turned and waved back, the miserable bastards.

  Unlike the pilots, however, I almost missed Seletar Airport. Having been inculcated with the mantra “We’ve got the best airport in the world” so many times, I naively expected something of Changi Airport’s proportions. After all, Seletar Airport had once been a magnet for the rich and famous, including actor Douglas Fairbanks and playwright Noel Coward. Today, however, it is almost hidden among old hangars, a roadside canteen and run-down buildings.

  Opened in 1929, Seletar Airport consists of a small cluster of attractive single-storey buildings, reminiscent of other smaller airports in the region, such as Lahad Datu in Sabah, where they combine the services of baggage handling and customs. In other words, one man collects the cases from the plane, pushes them across the tarmac on a trolley, opens the doors to the terminal and throws them onto a table. Of course, nothing so slapdash would be tolerated at a Singaporean airport. I watched with not a little admiration as the staff effortlessly guided several shuffling passengers through the appropriate channels before they boarded a plane bound for Tioman Island. Then I went for a pee.

  How many countries are there in the world where you can find yourself in a remote, tiny airport and yet the toilets are pristine, cleaned on an hourly basis and, best of all, free? Proudly take one step forward, Singapore. As I relieved myself, a bearded Scottish businessman joined me at the urinal. For reasons best known to themselves, middle-aged Scotsmen tend to favour beards. They also like to respond to every question and comment with the word “fine”. This particular Scotsman did both, although he was reluctant to engage in any conversation initially, probably because I had a pen in one hand, my peeing equipment in the other and a notepad in my mouth. I have really got to stop taking notes in public toilets.

  “So, er, what ye doin’?” he asked, not looking up.

  “Oh, I’m researching a travel book on Singapore.”

  “Fine.”

  “So you’re off on holiday then?”

  “Aye. Well, been here on business. Now I’m off to Tioman for a few days.”

  “Oh, it’s one of the best snorkelling places in the world.”

  “Fine.”

  I fancied asking him if, like most tourists, he thought Singapore was a “fine” city but he was bigger than me. I left the quaint Seletar Airport to find a bus stop in West Camp Road. There were a number of private planes parked on Seletar’s tarmac. It can still be the airport of choice for those rich or famous enough to warrant a discreet arrival and departure. In 2002, Tom Cruise and his then girlfriend Penelope Cruz landed at Seletar to promote their film Vanilla Sky here. Tom and I have actually got quite a lot in common, you know. We have both been to Seletar Airport.

  I took a bus back to Piccadilly Circus and meandered over to Baker Street. It was a sentimental journey. My mother was working at Marks & Spencer’s old head office in London’s Baker Street when she met my stepfather’s backside. He was a porter; she was a secretary. He suggested he won her over with his sense of humour; she claimed he came in to empty her bin and provided her with a brief glimpse of his exposed crack. Either way, my youngest brother was the eventual result of that encounter. As one London street had inspired Sherlock Holmes, a fine song by Gerry Rafferty and my little brother, I felt the very least I could do was visit its Sin
gaporean namesake.

  Unfortunately, Baker Street could be a contender for the scruffiest street on the island. The untidy weeds gave it an unkempt look that was out of place among the tidy lawns of the neighbouring streets. There were skips full of car scrap and a shack with clothes hanging everywhere that resembled squatting quarters. Two empty boarded-up colonial houses only added to the eerie atmosphere. Even if a porter did come in and stick his backside in your face, you really would not want to live here.

  I turned into the optimistically named Hampstead Gardens, which managed to be spookier than Baker Street (an impressive feat in itself) and was home to Singapore’s creepiest house. Facing the Seletar Base Golf Course, a boarded-up, derelict property loomed large. The paint was peeling, weeds grew through rusted holes in the roof, the floorboards creaked and cracked and mould covered the walls. If Norman Bates ever bought a holiday home, this would be it.

  I waded through the knee-deep undergrowth that bordered the front of the property, climbed over the barbed wire on the top of the fence and peered through a crack in one of the windows. The room was dank, dusty and full of cracked tiles. A filthy plastic chair was in the middle of the room. It looked like an interrogation room for the dead. Even in daylight, there was a sense of trepidation about the place. As I returned to the road to take in the dilapidated shack, I noticed a sizeable monitor lizard’s head stick up above the grass beside the fence. It eyed me for a few seconds, then slunk off down the side of the house. In a country famous for its urban density and high-rise living, this crumbling hovel felt entirely incongruous.