The staff in The Straits Times personnel department admired our exuberance and youthful energy grudgingly. We would take them on at the negotiating table and then return post-haste to complete our work. They were amazed at the boundless depths of our energy.
The company drivers had the unenviable task of picking up the reporters to and from their assignments. As head of crime desk in 1971, I had the use of an office car, with a radio telephone on board — a very primitive instrument that cackled and hissed and occasionally went on the blink, but it helped keep us linked with the news desk. The Young Turks were quite happy to accompany me on the nightly crime patrols. Perhaps they thought they could learn the ropes of crime reporting. Perhaps they had nothing better to do. So once the morning stories were completed, we would hop into the crime car and go on a drive around the island, hoping to spot anything newsworthy. Most of the time, it would be road accidents, and I would dictate a short story over the telephone to the desk.
Old man Yatim would usually be the one to drive — at the very sedate pace of about 40 kilometres per hour. Our route would invariably be towards the east, stopping first in Sims Avenue for dinner, before heading over to Changi Point for a glass of tea. The drive back would be timed such that we could make supper at Owen Road for Teochew porridge before heading back to Times House at 11pm, before The Straits Times was put to bed. Most times, nothing untoward happened, but the ride and the food stops gave the Young Turks ample opportunity to vent their frustrations at the company and think up ways to get the better of a high-handed management.
Some of the women reporters — they only worked the day shift then — often stayed back to join us on the night crime patrols. They were fresh graduates and thought it was a glamorous beat as we sallied forth into the night to battle all manner of criminals. In time, they stopped joining us guys on these nightly excursions. I guessed they got bored by the, ahem, exacting demands of crime reporting. Perhaps they felt the way to scale the professional heights lay in other areas of journalism. Perhaps they did not see us as worthy life partners, being the scruffy lot that many of us were.
The police would occasionally let us join them on their raids. They would scare the hell out of the brothel operators in the Geylang/Telok Kurau area. We would stay close on their heels as the plainclothes detectives swooped in on the red-light area, like angels of doom, banging on doors and flushing out the women of the night in various stages of undress. They would check the women’s papers and nab those who had overstayed, or were below age. As is often the case today, customers were allowed to slink away sheepishly, after putting on their clothes. We reporters were sometimes mistaken for the police although I thought my glasses were a dead giveaway, and there were no tell-tale bulges on my person which could have passed off as a policeman’s revolver. Still, it gave me an odd sense of power to see hardened brothel owners cowering before the might of the law. Those were the days when ladies of the night went about their business in sleazy premises whose location was indicated by the presence of red lanterns. Today, brothels in Geylang have become a somewhat sanitised operation, but the red lanterns still hold sway.
Clifford Pier was also a magnet for such activity. It did have a red beacon atop the building, hence it was known to all and sundry as Ang Teng (red light), but that was more for the direction of small craft in the Inner Roads, tongkang (lighters) and the like, which ferried passengers to and from the larger vessels that had dropped anchor in the Outer Roads. A mile-long mole shielded vessels in the Inner Roads from the vicissitudes of the monsoon. Women boarded the tongkang to get to ships moored at the Outer Roads where sex-starved seamen would partake of their services for a much higher fee than what they would have paid on land. In the 80s, Thai women would throng Clifford Pier to greet the hordes of seamen coming ashore. Once, President Devan Nair, who was on his way to attend a function in Neptune Theatre, was quite pleased when scores of women waved to him as he passed by in his official car. He thought he was being accorded a warm welcome and waved back dutifully. Only later did he learn who the women were but, truth be told, they were only doing what came naturally, that is, waving to a passing head of state. The women were soon cleared from the area and another colourful period of Singapore’s development faded away into history.
In the late 60s and early 70s, Singapore was invaded by another phenomenon — Flower Power. It had its roots in non-violent opposition by pacifists in the west to the Vietnam War, which raged literally on Singapore’s doorstep.
I once hastened to Napier Road when traffic was being held up outside the Botanic Gardens. There, I found a young Caucasian couple lying on their backs in the middle of the road, holding hands and gazing at the sun. They looked all right and seemed oblivious to the honking motorists. I squatted down beside the man and asked him for his name. He said without hesitation: “I am Mr Flower and [pointing to the woman lying beside him] that is Mrs Flower.” Upon my further questioning, he said he was not aware of the consternation he was causing. “We are just looking at the sun,” he told me. The police did not take too kindly to such sun gazing, and hauled the couple away.
I reported the strange behaviour of the couple, faithfully giving their names as Mr and Mrs Flower, blissfully unaware of the connotation. The news desk asked me to investigate further, especially the drugs and group sex activities of the flower people. I tracked down Mr and Mrs Flower to a boarding house near Holland Circus, a large rambling bungalow festooned with psychedelic graffiti. It was a fascinating sight. These people were way ahead of Singapore American School student Michael Fay who, in 1984, was fined, jailed and got four of the best strokes (two discounted following President Bill Clinton’s request) for spray-vandalising cars. Mr and Mrs Flower, however, proved to be quite ordinary people despite my attempts to conjure a story about drugs and group sex around the way they led their lives. They were just backpackers out to see the world on the cheap. They were quite happy people. In my constricted view at the time, I concluded they had to be on a perpetual high induced by the joys of marijuana. I thought I was a streetwise young man who had seen it all. Ah, sweet ignorance.
On another occasion, a colleague back from a raid on a ship with the police gave me a handful of ganja. I asked no questions as to how he had acquired so much grass, and passed some of it on to my friends who had recently graduated as doctors for a get-together they were planning that night. I dropped by the houseman quarters near the Singapore General Hospital later that night after work with a woman colleague. The party room was in semi-darkness and I was greeted by the distinct acrid odour of marijuana fumes. My colleague, an innocent rookie, was stunned to see the young doctors lolling about, in various stages of ganja-induced euphoria. They too in turn were stunned to see that I had come with a reporter. They feared she would rat on them. I left hurriedly and told my colleague to keep mum about the scene she had just seen. Just chalk it down to experience, I told her. We will have other scoops to bag, I assured her. She nodded meekly. But she left the arduous field of journalism soon afterwards to travel down the easier road of public relations.
Some of my other friends who discovered the joys of ganja at the time found themselves on a slippery slope that eventually led to their destruction as they went on to the use of harder drugs. One of them, I recall, wrote me a letter from Kabul where he had gone on holiday. “Hey Clement, I am watching the stars, sitting on the roof of the world. The place is awash with all manner of drugs. It’s paradise.” He became an addict and spent the rest of his short life drifting in and out of rehab. He died in his early 40s.
Yes, those were the days when we would sit in a circle, sharing a joint or two, letting the mystical strains of the Hare Krishna group wash our consciousness away. Another friend, who took to ganja like a fish to water, jumped off a building to his death when he fell into a state of severe depression. What we thought was a passing fad of the 60s and the 70s became an epidemic of hideous proportions. Thank God, I never fell prey to the insidious influence of drugs.
As budding journalists, we sometimes joined our senior colleagues for beer sessions, on the rare occasion when we had a few dollars to spare. In time, some of us became confirmed alcoholics. We tended to blame the stress of journalism for forcing us to turn to drink, and great quantities did some of us quaff, often on credit.
Our drinking sessions would start in the transvestite-glorified area of Bugis Street and end at dawn in some sleazy watering hole. R. Chandran, easily the best writer in our era, had a bloodstream so chockfull of alcohol that just a glass of beer would tip him over into a drunken stupor in his later years. Years of succumbing to drink to ease his sorrows took a dreadful toll on him. No one knows how this came about. He was stateless and so had no passport. He was unable to leave the shores of Singapore. He was a virtual prisoner. In the final stages of his crumbling career, he would stagger into the office and demand that I send a reporter to Batu Pahat to cover a terrorist attack that existed only in his mind. He had definitely lost his marbles by then. His mind had probably wandered to the days of Konfrontasi, a period when Indonesia’s Soekarno had spread terror and calamity in Singapore and Malaysia. The red-brick MacDonald House in Orchard Road was hit by a bomb blast which killed a number of people in the lift. For days, pedestrians reported hearing the wails of a woman as they walked past the building in the evening. I would take a protesting Chandran from his desk and put him in a taxi for home. The next day, Chandran would turn up, fresh and neatly dressed in well laundered clothes. He would get through his work, but in the evening, he would head for Tivoli in Orchard Road and sit there for hours nursing a glass of beer, lost to the world.
I once joined chief sports reporter Lim Kee Chan, who was a flyweight champion before he hung up his gloves to become a journalist, at his favourite watering hole, Jack’s Place, in Killiney Road. Group editor T.S. Khoo also loved that place and would often talk about its succulent, yet affordable, steaks. The night I was with him, Lim, very much the worse for wear after several drinks, got into a fight with one member of a group of westerners who had bumped into him. The confrontation wended its way down the rickety stairs — Jack’s Place was on the upper floor of a shophouse — and continued on the five-foot-way which was drenched by gusty rain. Lim threw beautiful left jabs and made a mess of his opponent’s nose. The enraged foreigner rushed at Lim, who ducked, staggered, or slipped as he executed a feint. He was dead drunk. His attacker flew over his shoulder and ended in a crumpled heap. In fine British tradition, his friends and I stayed out of the fight. Just then, a passing taxi stopped. The window wound down. Someone inside yelled: “Hey mate, you need some help?” To my relief, our foreigners said: “No mate, all’s fine.” The taxi rolled away. Our foreigners felt they had had enough excitement for the night and ambled away, ignoring Lim who was still bobbing and weaving and yelling all manner of belligerent insults. I shushed him and put him in a taxi for home. Such was the lot of a chapel father, or branch union chairman, in my time.
But even more powerful than ganja or alcohol was the addiction of the byline. To see one’s name in 12-point Gothic Bold gave one a high that lasted for days. Our colleagues would be singing our high praises and readers would call to tell us what lovely prose we wrote.
On occasion, some government officials or public relations people would invite us to dine with them at five-star establishments. Perhaps they did know the awful truth about our meagre remuneration, which meant we could not hope to return them the compliment. But the office loan sharks knew of our downtrodden situation. Come payday, they would be standing quietly at the exit of the building, their eyes scanning the passing faces for a debtor who might attempt to slip past, unnoticed. One of my colleagues, who was in debt up to his gills, once pulled off this stunt to get through the office exit: He “collapsed” while at work and was carried through the exit on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance.
And what of the high life? I once naively accepted an invitation to a charity dinner at the Shangri-La Hotel featuring a bevy of beautiful European models. But what could I write about this parade of flesh, shackled as I was mentally by the strictures of moral rectitude then? In vain did I search for the right words to describe those leggy beauties who had paraded in front of my eyes. My mind swam with the caviar and champagne that my host had earlier lavished on me. My eventual effort was reduced to a single paragraph — a filler — by the news desk, who saw it for what it was, a piece of fluff and badly written too. Yet I was amazed when my host called me and thanked me profusely for writing about his event. Was he being sarcastic or truly grateful for that iota of publicity? I never knew, but I did not give it too much thought. However, I did my best to avoid such mind-numbing assignments from then on.
So there we were, weary to the bone, working long and ungodly hours, earning barely enough to keep body and soul together, living in a world of make-believe, hoping that we would one day become a James Reston, the writer that graced the op-ed pages of the New York Times. But before that new dawning, we had to make ends meet. One way was to feed the wire agencies with the stories that we generated. For rookies like me and the other Young Turks, our stories — relatively unimportant minor court stories — would be telephoned over to United Press International (UPI). We would sometimes pick up other stories from the IN basket, like vultures pouncing on choice carrion. For a month’s work, I could pick up about $60 from UPI. This scavenging work, which we described as chakalaka, was done by virtually everybody from news editor Sit Yin Fong downwards. Even those on the news desk were also in on this act of entrepreneurship. They would be busy between 5pm and 6pm, shaping the bigger stories into wire agency copy for the major agencies such as Associated Press (AP), which paid a whole lot better than UPI. Peter Lim went for the big fish. He worked for Time magazine as a stringer and, on occasion, we would help him by doing the legwork.
Did the company know of our part-time work to bring in the extra dollar? Our editorial chiefs certainly knew; many were part of the act. Did managers like Ronald Scott know? I doubt they did — their superciliousness rendered them unable to see beyond their arched noses. We got the impression that they operated in a world of their own. They were the orang puteh, the sahib, nursing their whisky stengah (a half measure of whisky and soda water, served over ice) on the broad verandahs of their bungalows. I doubt if their daily trips to and from their homes traversed the HDB districts in which most of us lived our frugal lives. We were young industrious beavers, but James Reston we never became. Many of us would eventually drift away from the profession, disillusioned. But in the winter of 1971, discontent and anger among the journalists rose to fever pitch. And when the tipping point came, the workers of The Straits Times, led by the Young Turks, lashed out at the company in dramatic fashion.