THE SEVENTEENTH of July nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, a landmark day of the social history of Singapore, the first intake of National Service, a day of anger and uncertainty. Anger at the unfairness of fate, why-me? Uncertainty and fear, not so much a fear of the physical rigours or the mental disciplining of army life, but a fear that they may fail to meet the expectations of parents, teachers, officers who were going to turn them into fighting digits. In some of them the stupidity of it all boiled up. In others, a secret romantic adolescent pride arose, firing them with the thought that they were the first in Singapore’s history who would hold the guns to defend their families, their friends, their new sweethearts, their new nation, when the call came. But in every one of them the tearing forces and pains of anger, pride, fear, confidence and doubt raged. The age-old tests of manhood of primitive societies in new ritualistic forms bore down on them. In the boys from the U.P. and pre-U classes it was a more painful conscious conflict.
They were split in two.
Four hundred and nineteen to the Third S.I.R., the Third Singapore Infantry Regiment, and four hundred and nineteen to the Fourth S.I.R.
Andrew Lee, Ignatius Rosario and Cheng Ho were drafted into the Third S.I.R.
They were the first batch. There were no stories from those who had been through it all, like the stories they’d heard before going into pre-U classes to comfort them or make them more nervous. Only some tales from the old men about their days in the volunteers which they ignored as that was over twenty-five years ago.
The first big shock to those who had been protected by a middle class or a strict traditional Chinese style of life was the order to strip naked for their medicals. The swimmers and rugger players laughed at the embarrassed ones, which made it worse. They saw that the blows to their pride and feelings would come not only from the drill sergeants but also from their fellow recruits.
There were haircuts, uniforms thrown at them, tin plates and mugs like the Scouts used to have, queuing for everything, and always the orders barked at them as though they were animals.
When Andrew Lee got snapped at for trying to object, ever so politely, about the size of shirt he had been issued with, they realised blind acceptance was the best attitude to take.
Ignatius found himself in a line with young men his age who didn’t speak or even understand a word of English or bazaar Malay. At first he thought they didn’t want to answer his social opener questions, then he realised there were so many with whom he had no language to communicate.
He overheard a conversation between two boys behind him in a queue die off as one spoke only Cantonese and the other only Hokkien. He recognised the different dialects, including Hakka, because he used a word of Chinese now and then. Even when speaking English. The Chinese boys who spoke Mandarin seemed to isolate themselves from the other Chinese boys who did not speak it.
The basic military drill orders were in Malay, but spat out with such speed that it was unintelligible to him. It was a new garbled, gruffly, grunted language to all of them.
They were pushed to extremes of their physical endurance and to limits of their individuality. Ignatius saw they were being put through successive mangles of stress, crushing them to flatten them into standard forms like smoked rubber sheets, every one of them pale brown and ribbed with the diamond pattern of the mangle rollers.
He had heard a rumour that they would be trained by Israelis who would call themselves Mexicans, but this was apparently false. Their instructors and N.C.O.s were Chinese, Malays and Indians.
Andrew Lee, Cheng Ho and he were not always together. They slept in different barracks initially. But at times they found themselves standing side by side or fairly close on the parade ground, on a run, or at the shooting range. They tried to sit together at meals but Ignatius ate many meals in silence, listening to the Hokkien, interspersed with the coarse words he knew, all around him.
But there were laughs and times when their individual pride was allowed to return to their souls. Ignatius was held up to the others once as an example in the way he bayonetted the sack and his great moment came when he topped the group as a marksman. The platoon joker from Dunman High, who could not understand the sergeant’s English, explained he was ‘Chinese helucated’. The sergeant roared with laughter. And from that day he referred to the Chinese-educated boys as Chinese helicopters.
Ignatius hit the nadir of his two years in the army the evening after a terrible day when every muscle of his body had been pushed to its very limits and his spirits had recovered in the shower. He had wolfed down the tasteless dinner and flopped into bed, his mind rushing like a madman to Naomi, when the call came to assemble in the square in F.B.O., full battle order. He had no choice. Not like the morning after he had had too much to drink at Lettie’s birthday party the night before and told Mum he must have got the ’flu and couldn’t go to U.P.
Once he saw Andrew and Cheng far ahead in an early morning run, vying with each other for first place. He smiled. They had pitted themselves against each other in college tests, in quiz games at parties, when meetings were thrown open to the floor. Andrew with his polished speech finding himself seriously challenged by Cheng fumbling with tenses, singulars, genders and plurals, but driving home points with logical punches that hit Andrew hard and painfully. And their romantic skirmishes for Siti, first, and Lettie later. But they had never been in the same fighting ring in any sport. Cheng did not swim. Nor did he play basketball. Andrew did not play tennis, and to him rugby and cricket were stupid games, cluttered with complex rules.
The day eventually came when they were let out.
When they reported back to camp all of them had the same thing to say. They had spent the big day they looked forward to so eagerly in bed, catching up with their sleep. Seeing the queue at the public telephone, Ignatius did not telephone home. He could not stand up any longer. He took the bus back. Although he had to change at Newton Circus, at least he could sit down in the bus.
Unlike the others, he had not changed into ordinary clothes. It was too much of an effort. In the bus people stared at him in his army uniform, but he was too exhausted to care. Or to respond to the dear old lady who asked him if he was one of the pioneers of ‘our Singapore army’, with a certain pride in her voice.
The first thing he said to Mum who opened her arms to embrace him as he walked in was, “Don’t touch me. I stink.” But Mum had hugged him anyway. The second thing he said to her was, “Please! Don’t tell Naomi I’m back home.”
He had dreamt of holding Naomi close to him as soon as he was let out, planned to haunt the Takanashi place almost every night, but now he was drained of all feeling, all desire, all love.
Mum and Dad and Al and Eva and Phyllis and Robert and Maggie hurled endless questions at him at breakfast the next morning. He answered the very minimum so that he did not make them feel bad. Mum never forgot his answer when she asked, “What do you have to drink in the morning, coffee or tea?” He had said, “Don’t know. They don’t tell us what it is.”
But much later the leave became a wonderful respite to all, Chinese helicopters and everyone else. Ignatius spent a lot of time at the Takanashis’. He saw that Lettie was always out when they were released.
“Andrew?” he asked.
“Both. Cheng and Andrew Lee, the two-timing flirt.”
He laughed at Naomi’s flash of jealousy. He had got to know Naomi in the days when he’d called at her home to take Lettie out.
“That’s not my kind of girl,” he said.
The family had a second car now. A beauty. A nippy little bright red Morris mini-minor. They were very considerate when he first started getting released and Al and Eva gave him first call for the car. It changed later. Eva began saying as soon as he walked in that she was using the car that night. Or the mini was just not there because Al had gone off fishing in Johore.
Wheels became a major need in his life. One night, lying in his bed in the camp, he thought he had found the solution. On his next release, he sounded Naomi out on the possibility of borrowing the Takanashis’ VW to take her out. Not a chance, she said. Lettie had taken it over completely after Gerard bought himself a Honda.
Andrew Lee had the same problems. His brothers and sisters fought over the third family car, a Hornet. The basic mini with icing and more chrome and less seconds to reach whatever from a standing start. Andrew initiated a system of booking the car in a diary left on his father’s desk. Just like organised Andrew. When he knew he had leave he rang his mother to make the booking for him.
One night when Andrew did have the car Lettie had to go with her parents to her grandfather’s birthday party. Or was it her Uncle Joe’s? It didn’t register. It seemed such a waste of opportunity. But he had had a great time with Lettie the night before. He rang Siti.
Siti was overjoyed to hear him on the phone. Dinner at the Islamic? Yah! Sure, man!
Siti was looking even more gorgeous than she had looked in the U.P. days. They talked of old times. Toni Ng, the pimply girl from T.K.G.S., Luis, the P.E. teacher, Miss Wee, Ignatius Rosario … David was in the army too, she said. But not in their regiment.
Something stirred in him as he looked at Siti in her soft silk blouse across the table. Andrew suggested that they drive around before he dropped Siti off home.
“Why not?” Siti’s favourite phrase. She was always so relaxed, so natural.
He drove to MacRitchie Reservoir. Siti looked at him as he turned the car into the entrance. She didn’t object. Good old Siti, he thought. Same old Siti.
The carparks were full. He slowed down to a crawl, looking for a parking space, his headlights high.
Siti helped him.
“There! … Ah no, no, no … there’s a little Civic there …”
Then he suddenly saw the Takanashis’ VW. Lettie’s car. An explosion erupted inside him.
“There, Andrew. Next to the Falcon.”
He parked the Hornet.
“Let’s walk,” he said gruffly as he switched off the engine.
Siti looked at him in surprise. The almost full moon was high in the sky and she could see his face clearly. She had expected his arms around her at once, knowing Andrew. It would have been so exciting and romantic to feel his mouth on hers after all those years … well, two. Or two and a half? Not that she yearned for him. It would have been a little titillation. A change from Zakariah.
Andrew grabbed Siti’s hand roughly and started walking.
It puzzled her. He had begun to rake up memories of the old days when they’d kissed one evening in the doorway of Lecture Theatre One at U.P. And now he had suddenly backed off.
As they walked along the top of the dam she thought how beautiful the still lake looked in the moonlight. Zak had never taken her there. It was too public for him. A cloud around the moon floated away and the dented orb hung like a ball of golden fire, of flame and passion in her sky. The doors that Andrew had opened for her in those first weeks at U.P.J.C. were opening again.
Andrew’s hand suddenly gripped hers. It was his old grip of steel. She turned to him. He was not looking at her but down at the grass slope of the earth dam, his eyes wide open, his nostrils dilated. She followed his gaze to a couple on the grass bank. The man was on top of the woman, kissing her. A big-built man … no, a boy.
Siti screwed up her eyes to focus them and recognised him. Cheng! Hey, that’s Cheng, she was about to say when she saw the blackness of Andrew’s face. She looked at the couple again. Concentrating. Lettie. Lettie was the girl under him.
A thousand thoughts rushed into her mind. Lettie. Lettie Takanashi. The brazen Japanese-Eurasian girl with the big susu. Lettie had turned her slimy charm onto Andrew when she, Siti, had decided to cut the fun and get down to it. She had to get into medicine if it killed her. And she had got in. Andrew had then cut into Cheng’s jalan, Cheng’s road.
She had no ill feelings towards Lettie. She can have them, she had said to herself in those days. Both the Chinese guys, Cheng and Andrew. Her rejects.
She looked at the couple again. Yes. It was Cheng and Lettie. But she frowned. Their position and his movement did not shock her. That was not Lettie, she told herself. Lettie was as solid in her stupid Roman Catholicism as she was in her own Islamic faith. Lettie wouldn’t. Siti was sure.
The moonlight was almost as bright as daylight. Siti narrowed her eyes again. Then the tension in her seeped away.
Stupid things, she thought. Pretending. Or perhaps too stupid to see where such a road would end. She had learnt a lot from Zak and her medical student colleagues since those U.P. days.
Her thoughts were cut short by the pain in her hand. Andrew was crushing her hand. His eyes were bloodshot and wild.
“Andrew!” she snapped at him. “Let me go.”
He released his grip but didn’t say anything. He stood like a statue looking down the slope.
“Let’s go, Andrew. I’m not feeling so good,” she lied.
He walked her back to the car. He didn’t say a word.
As soon as she saw the way he crunched the first gear in, she leant over the gear lever and put her arm around his shoulder.
“Andrew …”
His foot went down hard on the accelerator pedal as the car turned into Thomson Road.
“Andrew, listen.”
He shot a glance at her.
“I understand, Andrew … But cool it. You’ll kill the both of us if you, you, you … don’t calm down.”
He eased his foot off the accelerator.
He took her back to her Geylang home in silence.
Siti kissed him on his tightly closed mouth.
“For old time’s sake, Andrew. But listen to me. She’s not worth it. You deserve a better woman than Lettie.” She lied again. Her words seemed to have run off him like water off a duck’s back.
“Andrew. Thanks for the dinner. There’s many other fish …”
Siti didn’t continue. He was not listening. She slid out of the car and walked up to her house.
The car roared off like an animal enraged. Siti stood in front of her door and watched the taillights disappear.
Her heart was heavy with a dull pain, yet calm with a relief she did not understand at the moment. Andrew Lee, the perfect guy, the perfect man of my 1965.
She had almost lost her heart to him. But his huge passion for her was not the only fire raging in him when she knew him at U.P. There were fires as fierce as his lust for her body, his admiration for her as a person, his drive to win, win, win. Not a fear of losing. An all-consuming passion to be Andrew, overall winner. Not for his ego. She never understood it. But she had sensed the instability of the guy after the first rush. As she listened to the roar of the Hornet engine dying away she felt sorry for him.
His surprise invitation had thrilled her. And now, standing in the moonlight alone, she felt a pain in knowing that the lingering affection she had nursed for Andrew had just died.
He dissolved into the past of those halcyon U.P. days with Cheng, Toni Ng from Ipoh, Miss Wee, Miss Rosario, Lettie Takanashi, David, Ignatius Rosario …
IGNATIUS HAD shaved and showered and put on his uniform and his boots. He looked at them again to make sure they were really shiny. Eva had promised to drive him to the camp. He was just about to ring Naomi to say a last goodbye for the fifth time that afternoon when his father called out, “Is that you, Ignatius?”
“Yah.”
“Can you get us two bottles of soda, please?”
“O.K., Dad.”
Only then did he notice they had visitors and Mum and Dad were out on the front verandah talking to them. About three or four people, he thought, from the sound of their voices.
He brought the bottles from the fridge and heard his father’s loud voice just before he walked through the front door, “Bertha. Did you actually say you won’t have a brandy?”
A woman of about thirty, her eyes crinkled, her mouth half open in a wide smile and her face slightly tilted up, in a simple white sleeveless dress in the centre of the group, caught his eye at once.
There was something hauntingly attractive about her. He saw she had a body that seemed to be so much younger than her face. Her arms and her legs, browned in the sun, were perfect to him. All the goddesses of the screen he adored, Ursula Andress, Sue Lyon, Doris Day appeared to him to come together in her brown-fleshed, black-haired figure. She was that epitome of the mature sexy woman that he dreamed of these days now that he was twenty, a man.
She saw after a few seconds how he was gaping at her as though she was an apparition that had loomed up suddenly in front of him.
“Hello, soldier boy!” she said, a sparkle in her eye, seeing him in uniform. He blushed.
Antonio saw his son blush. And his dream thrust itself into his consciousness. He felt a cold hand clasp his heart.
“My son, Ignatius. He’s our number three,” Antonio said and introduced the visitors. Dad had begun to treat him as an adult like Al since he had been called up.
“Inspector Hartono.”
Ignatius started to put his hand out to the big square-shouldered Malay-looking man sitting next to the stunning woman.
“Oi. That’s me,” she said, laughing.
“I should have said, Inspector Bertha Hartono,” Antonio said.
“Even that would be wrong, Antonio. I use my maiden name.”
“Inspector Bertha Rodrigues, then.”
“Mr and Mrs Lopez from Malacca. Come to get away from the ulu.” Mrs Lopez, in brown batik, was as fair as a Caucasian. She too looked as though she was in her early thirties. Ignatius could see she must have been a beautiful woman when she was younger and slimmer. But she did not have the eyes and the smile of the woman police officer. Lopez looked Eurasian.
Mrs Lopez nodded and Lopez waved an open hand in the air in a relaxed way, saying “Hello, Ignatius.”
“Mr Hartono.”
The big man stood up and took his hand with a “Hi.”
“National service, eh?” Hartono said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Bertha was our hockey star, Ignatius …”
“Gosh, Antonio. That was years ago.”
“And don’t forget the Negri star is here too,” his mother added.
“Nowhere near Bertha, Gloria,” Mrs Lopez said. Her accent was so English, Ignatius thought.
“Hey! Antonio, don’t forget, also one ballroom prizewinner, here,” Lopez said with a laugh.
Hartono added at once, “And me nothing.”
“He can’t forget that miserable prize he won … with that Toft girl, lah.”
“True love is when your wife is still jealous …”
“Didn’t you play for the Malacca state football team, Antonio?”
“Yeah … only a few games …”
“Ran out of stamina.” Gloria added with a laugh.
Antonio put his hand on Ignatius’ shoulder, “And here we have the top marksman of his platoon …”
“Company, Anton,” Gloria corrected him.
Hartono smiled at him and pointed to his wife. “Like my wife when she was young …”
“Younger, he means, of course,” she said with one of her lovely smiles.
“Sorry. I’ve been neglecting my duty. Are you quite sure, Bertha, you won’t have anything?”
“Yes, Antonio. I’m going out tonight. Have to check up on our chaps. Late, tonight.”
“Exciting secret operation, eh?” Antonio asked.
“No lah. Just routine surveillance.”
“You still go out on surveillance jobs?”
“No. Unless it’s a biggie. Tonight I have to go out late because if the team picks up what I think they will, we will have to move at once.”
“You must be one of the very few women inspectors, Mrs Hartono?” Ignatius asked her.
“Pretty face gets quick promotion,” Mr Hartono started to speak, but was cut off by his wife at once.
“Don’t you listen to him. There’s only one way up …”
“Blood, sweat, toil and tears,” Ignatius finished for her.
“I say, you Singapore guys are quick, uh?” Mrs Lopez said.
Ignatius said he had to go. Back to camp. He rang Naomi.
After she told him about the movie on TV she had been bursting to talk about, prefaced with “It’s just like us”, he said he had just met a striking woman. Did she know her? Inspector Bertha Rodrigues?
“Of course, the hero girl.”
“Please! Heroine, lah!”
“Heroine then. Why? She drugged you, huh?” Naomi laughed at her joke on the phone.
“Ha ha!” Ignatius did his forced laugh act. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, you’ll be an older and sexier woman soon.”
“Older yes … but shit in sixty years …”
“She’s not that old, Naomi.”
Naomi giggled. “Guess I got to be happy that you only look at older women, huh, my handsome one?”
“Ah, for Gawd’sake, Ignatius. Leave the child alone,” Eva’s voice boomed in his other ear. “C’mon. It’s time to go. Two seconds to say your sloppy stuff. I’ll bring the car round to the front. Two seconds.”