By DAVID KRAAL
Wail of siren revives memories of war horrors - and provides a reminder that one cannot be complacent
THIS happened to me recently and it has bothered me since and will continue to bother me for a long, long time.
This young friend, honest to a fault, said: "You set yourself up as an arbiter of good manners, you condemn the people who pursue the dollar at a hectic pace, you grumble about the lack of civic-consciousness here, you gripe about selfish drivers on the road.
"But who are you to judge? You live in a semi-detached in District 10 and drive a car and tell everyone you are off to France for the World Cup and sip wine in the evenings. You are middle-class and comfortable. So who are you to judge your fellow Singaporeans who may not be as well-off as you are?
"You don't know how hard life can be. You have never suffered. Don't you feel a bit of a fake?"
He was right, of course. And he was wrong.
Flashback to December 1941...on the heels of the air invasion came heels of another kind, as Japanese troops
marched in to occupy the land
YES, I am middle-class and have a good life, short of a Lexus, swimming pool, flat in London, weekly dinners at Raffles and golfing holidays in Hawaii. But we certainly know what suffering is. Let me tell you, we still suffer.
We may forgive; indeed, we must forgive. But we will never forget. War will always be the ultimate imprint on my mind.
When the sirens sounded at noon on Feb 15, a little over two weeks ago, I started to tremble. I was rooted to the spot. Part of my mind told me this was 1998 and what I heard was just a reminder of the fall of Singapore 56 years ago.
However, another part of my mind took me back to the war years; pictures of pain were forcefully replayed in fast-forward mode in the back of my eyes. I suffered and I remembered ...
The bombs fell in December 1941. There was a shelter dug in the sand in the garden of my grandmother's attap-roofed house in Lorong Stangee.
When the sirens wailed, she would grab my hand and run with me and place me on a low wooden table in the middle of the shelter.
My mother and father, Grandpa and the dog, aunts and uncles and cousins stood in the water that flooded the shelter. No one spoke.
You heard the planes coming over. You felt the bombs thud as they landed. The shelter shook and sand cascaded down the sides.
After the all-clear, we came out and saw bits of red-hot metal lying around.
This was shrapnel from a bomb that had fallen on the Boy Scouts headquarters 100 m in front of our house and from another that had landed on a home 100 m behind our kitchen.
Confused days followed. Tears and hugs and goodbye kisses.
Aunts and uncles and cousins caught one of the last ships out, bound for India. They begged my mother to let me go with them, but she was staying, so I was staying.
Mum was seldom home as she nursed war victims at the General Hospital. Dad was in for a quick hello to his mother and father and out again in his volunteer uniform.
Then one day the bombing stopped and soon I saw my first Japanese soldiers.
They marched into our home and talked to Grandpa in a language I could not understand. They searched the house and left with most of the women's clothes.
Life settled down after that, but life was hard. Ah Siong, the family cook for 15 years, kept us alive. This I learnt later. He dealt on the black market and brought home small amounts of rice, sugar, salt and fish.
From the garden came tapioca. The flesh was the main dish. The leaves, boiled with coconut milk and a touch of salt, was our staple vegetable dish. The skin, sliced fine with chillies and belachan, made a fair sambal.
FATHER was seldom around. Later, I learnt he took cigarettes to the survivors after the sinking of the British battleships, the Repulse and the Prince Of Wales. He was arrested for this and other "crimes" and had his fingernails torn out. He died soon after.
By the time I was seven, I had seen bombs fall. I had seen the bloody victims of war strewn on the streets. I had seen severed heads displayed on poles put up around town.
I was seven and I had never seen a radio, never tasted a chocolate bar or a slice of white bread, never had a toy that I did not make myself - except for the condoms that my friends and I bought from the corner shop and blew up into balloons.
Then suddenly it was all over. The planes that flew overhead were American bombers. They dropped leaflets, not death.
Soon I was eating Mars bars and waving paper Union Jacks and the Stars and Stripes and the Hammer and Sickle, bought from the shop that sold the condoms.
Skeletal uncles came home from prisoner-of-war camps. Dad did not come home. Every family we knew had its own tragic tale to tell. Everyone knew someone who had lost loved ones.
The sirens had stopped. I was standing in my middle-class sitting room in my semi-detached home in District 10. The year, 1998. I could move my legs again.
I want to thank my young friend. He was right. I was becoming a bit of a fake. Complacency had certainly been setting in. I needed that traumatic jolt that came with the sirens.
I vowed that I will visit the Kranji war cemetery where my father is buried more often than once a year.
I vowed that I will stand there and give thanks for the good things in life that have come my way.
I vowed that I would always remember, sirens or no sirens: I would remember that we cannot assume that things will always be rosy.
First published in The Straits Times, Mar 4, 1998
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Copyright © 1998 Singapore Press Holdings. All Rights Reserved.
