I bid farewell to Seletar Village by dancing down a little street and singing a song my nan used to croon to me from her armchair:
“Any time you’re Lambeth way
Any evening, any day
You’ll find us all
Doin’ the Lambeth Walk.”
And I did the “Lambeth Walk” in Singapore’s Lambeth Walk! London’s original Lambeth Walk was known for its street market before World War II but became famous for the song of the same name in the 1937 musical Me and My Girl. It was a jaunty, Cockney ditty and its walking dance was nothing more than a cocky, playful strut down the street. My nan always sang it with such panache before finishing with her trademark—a quick flash of her knickers. We were used to her skirt-lifting, but it could get a bit embarrassing, especially when she did it in the supermarket. If my old nan sang “Silent Night” with a church choir on Christmas Eve, she would round it off by lifting her skirt and showing off her bloomers.
So I felt it only right to offer a poignant tribute to my beloved grandmother and one of her favourite songs by “Doin’ the Lambeth Walk” in Singapore. So if anyone living there recalls an ang moh flashing each house by lifting an invisible skirt, do not worry. It was only me.
I ended up lost in Seletar West Farmway 4. Well, I did not think I was lost. On the contrary, I was enjoying a decent amble around the Jalan Kayu countryside. But when I reached the end of Seletar West Farmway 4, I found myself standing before an unnamed property and was about to turn back when a Malay chap on a bicycle appeared and informed me there was nothing to see here. So I strode irritably back down Farmway 4, blundered through a spider’s web, removed the fractious spider from my forehead and ended up outside The Animal Resort in Seletar West Farmway 5. It was a real hidden gem and a fine place to take children. A 2.2-hectare animal farm, The Animal Resort serves as a care centre and a hotel for pets. As soon as I wandered in, some geese ran across my feet. Many of the animals roamed around freely. There were goats, horses, rabbits, dogs and an enormous wood stork that was standing guard over a turtle pond. Now there probably is an uglier bird than the wood stork somewhere on the planet but I have never seen it.
The high point of my brief visit was undoubtedly the School of Pet Grooming. As the title suggests, trainee pet groomers and stylists come here to learn how to give Lassie a ponytail or Rover a tight perm. There were three silver tables similar to a room service trolley, with a pampered dog on each one. Nervous stylists hovered over each dog, snipping, trimming, stroking and brushing. For some inexplicable reason, all the pets were those tiny, minime dogs like Chihuahuas and Shih Tzus with bows in their hair. One stylist was in the process of giving a toy poodle what I can only call furry pigtails. It looked preposterous. As she fussed over the yapping midget, I admired the stylist’s restraint. She obviously wanted to push Toto off the table. The walls were covered with framed certificates of achievement for pet grooming. The awards included bizarre categories like Best Poodle Perm, Cutest Poofy Tail and Closest Scrotum Shave. I would gladly give out the certificates for that one.
“I’ve seen some dogs’ bollocks in my time,” I would say. “But I’ve never seen a pair shaved this well before. I’m not sure why Fido is whimpering; that’s one flawless scrotum he’s got there. They look like a couple of fine fish balls.”
As I finished the day in Jalan Kayu, I feel it only appropriate to acknowledge the man who supposedly gave the street its name. As the principal building officer for the British Royal Air Force in the Far East in the 1920s, C. E. Woods designed the airbase at Seletar. In recognition of his sterling work, Jalan Kayu, the road that leads to the airbase, shares his name. In Malay, kayu means “wood”. But in recent years, and particularly since the Malaysia Cup era, the word kayu has taken on negative connotations. “Referee kayu”, for instance, means that the man in black is wooden or dim-witted. So if you translate it literally, Jalan Kayu will always be dedicated to the man who shaped Seletar’s airbase and colonial village. A plank.
CHAPTER 21
I was on a mission. I planned to track down Singapore’s last kampong. Somewhere out in Lorong Buangkok there was not just a traditional Malay village of wooden homes, there were the final remnants of a country’s past. A world of collective spirit, shared hardships and togetherness. In its race to build a first-world economy in the 1960s and 1970s, Singapore swept away the kampongs of its founding generations without batting an eyelid. Attap huts, crumbling timber homes, inadequate sanitation and polluted streams were all systematically bulldozed, cleaned up and drained to make way for the city of concrete we all know and love today.
But one survived. Hidden from public view, the small kampong of fewer than 20 rustic homes escaped the blueprints of the Urban Redevelopment Authority to allow its mostly Malay residents to continue a rural way of life not dissimilar to their great-grandparents. Being an endangered species, the village enjoys an almost mythical status. Singaporeans are vaguely aware of the country’s last kampong being somewhere in Lorong Buangkok, but few have actually seen it. I wanted to catch a glimpse of Singapore’s past before the future took it away once and for all.
Following a short bus ride from Ang Mo Kio MRT Station, I sauntered past the brand new HDB blocks of Buangkok Link and ventured into the living time capsule in Lorong Buangkok. Little more than a country lane, it was not signposted and a wonky lamp post with a smashed light encapsulated the street’s spookiness. I trotted up the slight incline as quickly as I could. With Woodbridge Hospital to my right and whistling trees to my left, there really was not the inclination to loiter. I came to the end of Lorong Buangkok and discovered, to my consternation, not a kampong but a retirement community called Surya Home. It was a rather run-down establishment, and not the first time I had seen the poor elderly folk of Singapore get the short straw for living in a country that does not subscribe to welfarism. I called out to a couple of Filipino nurses to ask for directions, but an elderly Chinese woman appeared from nowhere and took charge of proceedings.
“You want kampong? I find you kampong,” she cackled.
She was certainly a peculiar woman. She held a pink toothbrush aloft like an Oscar, but there was not a single tooth left in her mouth. That made it difficult to concentrate for two reasons. First, I could not work out what she actually used the toothbrush for. And second, it is difficult to understand someone whose organs of speech are limited to a pair of gums.
“Yeah, I’m looking for a kampong. In Lorong Buangkok.”
“This is kampong. Kampong is home,” she mumbled vaguely through her toothless mouth. “This is my home. This is kampong. Kampong here.”
“No, no, I’m looking for the old Buangkok kampong, not too far from Jalan Kayu.”
“Wah, Jalan Kayu had a lot of kampongs last time. Wah, so many. Now no more already.”
“That’s great, thanks. But what about the one in Lorong Buangkok?”
“That one here, look. Kampong here. Surya Home. My kampong, Buangkok kampong.”
Clearly medication time, the nurses ushered the poor woman and her toothbrush away and left me none the wiser. I was plodding off back into Lorong Buangkok when a middle-aged Chinese chap chased after me. His unkempt hair had been cut several different lengths and he had only three or four tooth stumps left in his mouth. Were the nurses dipping their patients’ toothbrushes in sulphuric acid? His fingers were yellow and he constantly sucked on a cigarette stub that was neither lit nor fresh. The reek of tobacco made me nauseous.
“You want kampong at Lorong Buangkok?” he asked, grinning a toothless smile.
“Yeah, that’s right. You know where it is?”
“Yeah, yeah I do. You are very tall,” he replied.
“That’s true. But do you know where the Buangkok kampong is?”
“Yah, yah, I know where, I know where ... Wah, you very tall, ah.” He was mad. Friendly and eager to help, but mad. “My father was tall, you know. You look like my father. Do you know my father? Do you know where my father
lives? Where does my father live?”
I thanked him and wished him well but he continued to shout out to me as I marched back down Lorong Buangkok, asking me where his father lived. Poor sod.
I retraced my steps and found another single lane off Buangkok Link. Once again, the dirt track was not signposted and appeared to double up as a coach park and a dumping ground. When the road ended, I went behind it and into the forest. Stone pillars ensured the path was only accessible on foot and a statue of Buddha had been placed on one of the pillars. I squeezed between the pillars and stepped over a man-made barrier of sticks and twigs tied together. The dense foliage was not inviting. The wild elephant grass towered above me in some places while my clomping around triggered slithering noises through the undergrowth every few paces. I was certainly apprehensive. Pythons and cobras are extremely common here. In the distance, I heard chickens and made out the tops of zinc roofs. But they were too scruffy to be part of a kampong and it quickly became clear that I had inadvertently stumbled across a group of squatters. A stray dog picked me out through the grass and started howling. Now, if I have learnt one thing during my tour of Singapore, it is that feral dogs are not solitary creatures. Suddenly, half a dozen of them were running towards me. I did not wait for a formal introduction. I was eager to keep my testicles. I sprinted back through the elephant grass. My arms flapped around in front of me in a vain attempt to see where I was going. I crossed a stream, startled a few lizards, hurdled the man-made barrier and almost knocked over the sacred Buddha before ending up on a muddy path in front of a ramshackle workshop.
At a stroke, I had gone back 40 years. I had found the kampong. The workshop was made of timber, with a sloped zinc roof. There were a number of Chinese deities on shelves in one corner, next to countless tins of Milo. At least half a dozen bicycles were tied to a tree and there was a broken washing machine stuck in the mud. I nervously called out. Although the workshop’s owner was not around, his possessions and tools were laid out in front of me. Remember when your parents said that in their day, they could leave their doors and windows open all day long and no one would steal anything? Well, this was their day.
Behind the workshop, I glimpsed a couple of wooden houses and stepped tentatively inside Singapore’s last kampong. I realised that I had missed the village earlier because it was almost entirely camouflaged by the forest. Coconut and banana trees served as natural borders for the kampong, along with a few mango trees and the ever-present elephant grass. Some workmen were laying pipes at the entrance of the kampong, providing the only telltale sign of modernity. The first two houses I passed were dilapidated and on the verge of collapse. The roofs had caved in and coconuts from the trees above had performed the role of the Dambusters’ bouncing bombs, smashing through the walls and floors. It was a terrible sight.
I crossed a stream via a tiny bridge constructed from two old wooden doors that creaked ominously and had a peek at two intact houses next door. They were enormous. Taking into account the gardens, each property was at least twice the size of my four-roomed flat. And according to one of the residents, they only pay $13 a month in rent. No wonder families are reluctant to move.
As I peered around one of the houses, the owner appeared. And at the risk of making a facile comparison, I have wandered around some of the more upmarket estates and postcodes of Singapore and been greeted with indifference, suspicion and the odd devilish dog specialising in human castration. The kampong owner, however, invited this nosy stranger into his home.
“You want to see how big it is? Come, I’ll show you the back garden,” the amiable Malay chap said.
Well, his garden was indeed bigger than any other that I have seen in Singapore. It was a veritable menagerie. The guy had a dozen caged birds, five dogs that I counted and other animals that I did not manage to identify. The garden also incorporated a veranda, a table and chairs, two old wells previously used for sanitation, an electricity generator and a stream, all for $13 a month. The guy had been born in the kampong and returned to take care of the property after his parents died. We walked over to the stream where there were hundreds of empty oyster shells on the bank.
“They’re not all from this tiny stream, surely?” I asked incredulously. My host did not wait for an answer. Instead he jumped into the ankle-deep stream and fished around in the water for no more than five seconds before producing an oyster. I thought I was in the presence of a native from a forgotten rainforest tribe. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Once a village boy, always a village boy,” he said. Two of his dogs then bounded off down the stream.
“They’re looking for snakes,” said my indifferent host. “That’s why I keep them. They’ve caught two pythons for me in this stream. And I had to cut down all the trees behind the stream to keep out the cobras.”
The rustic simplicity of this man’s life was difficult to take in. Everything seemed so incongruous. I was only 15 minutes from the air-conditioned modernity of Hougang Green Shopping Mall and his kampong faced the expensive private properties of Gerald Drive on the other side of the canal. And here we were plucking out oysters with our bare hands and chasing snakes down the stream. My pessimism suggested it could not last, but my host was adamant that his way of life would be preserved for at least another eight or nine years.
“Those pipes they’re putting in where you came in are to improve the sanitation of all the houses,” he said. “They wouldn’t bother if they were going to knock us down. We need them though. We’ve always had problems with flooding.”
That is an understatement. During the monsoon season, flood waters reach knee-level here and the kampong is often washed out. In the 1970s, frustrated residents bestowed a new name upon the village, Kampong Selak Kain, which is Malay for “lift up your sarong”. I just love that. But my new friend was not going anywhere just yet. As he walked me to the home-made bridge across the stream, he said, “I’ve got to paint the place and do a lot of work, but I hope to stay. It was my parent’s house. I can’t let it fall apart.”
I admired his optimism and I sincerely hope Kampong Selak Kain is spared the HDB bulldozers. And I am not patronising the residents. Nor do I pity them. They neither need nor crave my pity; they just want to be left alone to live quietly in their family homes. But then, the kampong in Lorong Buangkok is not there for my benefit. Nor should it remain solely to enable tourists to turn up and marvel at the rural simplicity of life in equatorial Asia. The kampong must stay because it is the only one in the country. Through the commendable work of the National Heritage Board, the government is finally accepting that no amount invested in interactive museums and fancy 3-D exhibits can resurrect dead history. There is no substitute for living, breathing history. If those traditional wooden homes ever pay the price for urban redevelopment, then one of the most vibrant, colourful and proud chapters of the Singapore Story closes forever. And the elusive kampong spirit dies with it.
CHAPTER 22
I left the past and quickly returned to the present when I took the train to the most controversial station in Singapore. When the doors opened at Buangkok Station, I was astonished. The station is an architectural marvel. Flawlessly designed with dazzling local artwork around its fringes, Buangkok feels more like an art gallery than an MRT station. But then, more people probably visit an art gallery. Only nine other people alighted with me. As I passed through the turnstile at the cavernous but deserted station, I noticed one lonely guy manning the information counter. As he looked thoroughly bored, I took it upon myself to cheer him up a bit.
“Excuse me, sir,” I asked, gently tapping on the window. “Can you tell me where the white elephants are?”
He was stunned. “You want to see the white elephants?”
“Yeah, of course. They’re very famous, you know. They made news all over the world and, as you can see, I’ve come a long way to see them.”
“No, no, they’ve been taken down already.”
“Oh dear. That’s tragic. Has th
e art exhibition finished? Are the white elephants now displayed somewhere else?”
“No. They were taken down almost immediately. They were just cartoon elephants. Nothing serious.”
“Oh, I see. Why were they put up here? Outside Buangkok MRT?”
“It was nothing. Just someone playing a joke. It was nothing very serious.”
I beg to differ. The white elephant debacle was a joke, but a serious one. In 2005, residents and grassroots leaders in Buangkok had just about had enough. A gleaming, brand new $80 million MRT station sat proudly on the edge of their town, with trains trundling through every few minutes on the North-East Line. But the trains did not stop at the station because it was not open. Train operators had originally suggested Buangkok Station would open in 2008 when there would be enough housing units in the area to justify the expenditure. This did not please residents, to say the very least, many of whom had moved to the new town on the proviso that they would be provided with adequate transportation services. So the empty, ghostly station sat there every day: a giant white elephant in the heart of an expanding community.
Then in late August 2005, eight cardboard white elephants mysteriously appeared around the station’s grounds to coincide with a ministerial visit. I loved the impudence and applauded the residents’ sense of humour. Others did not. The cardboard cut-outs led to a police probe to find the culprits, who had not obtained the necessary permit. Not for the first time, Singapore threatened to become a laughing stock on the international stage. But on this occasion, common sense prevailed. It was a great day for Singapore. Not because residents had actively engaged in a benign political protest, but because the white elephant furore showed that everyone from the top down was finally taking this business of a sense of humour seriously. A local politician once remarked that Singapore must take this business of a sense of humour seriously; arguably the daftest remark ever uttered by any parliamentarian anywhere in the world. But ironically, the government is trying really, really hard to do just that.
Final Notes From a Great Island Page 18
