John Harper Remembers Singapore - Part 6: Cultural Harmony – Racial Tension

Despite the fact that my mother was a Canadian, before coming to Singapore I had not been aware of cultural differences other than there being Scotsmen to the North of England and Welshmen somewhere out to the west. Other than in films I had never seen anybody with a different skin colour. Now here we were in Singapore with many different skin colours. The darkest were the Tamil Indians with their very dark almost black skin tones. Chinese with their supposed hint of yellow was something that I could never really make out. Malays were a sort of golden brown, whilst we Europeans had a range of colours from pasty white to golden brown tans with degrees of pinkness or just plain blistered red if they had just arrived. My eyes had been opened to the rich tapestry of skin colours and facial characteristics.

One couldn’t help but be aware that several different languages were being spoken and in many cases the Asians around you spoke more than one language including English albeit sometimes badly. It didn’t take too long to get used to the meaning an Asian was trying to convey in his fractured English. We knew a few Asian people. The daughter of Keng Wah Heng, the local shopkeeper at Lloyd Leas was a frequent visitor to our house and when we moved to Tengah there were several boys from the nearby village who were members of the scout group. There were about three of them that I would class as more than just acquaintances, even friends. None of this seemed unusual to me. My mother being Canadian, we were brought up to be tolerant of other people whatever their colour or creed simply because she was aware of what it was like to be different. We never did manage to teach to say ALU MIN IUM it always came out ALUME A NUM. Similarly Tomatoes were TOMAYTOS.

Racial tolerance was not the norm in Singapore. An email conversation I had with David Dance a former head boy of Alexandra Grammar School, he was head boy whilst I was a spotty faced first year, hints at a racially intolerant society. “The Tanglin Club was for Burrah Sahibs, very colonial, very pukkha. We were not members; very few service people were, although I suppose the odd General might have been. Singapore at that time was a very snobbish place, and racism was rife. I never at any time in my six years there mixed socially with anyone but a white person and neither did my parents.” This is in complete contrast to my mixing with Ah Chew from the shop and the village members of the Scout troop. My own feeling is that what is described here is a denial of experiencing a rich cultural experience.

Racism was not confined to between the Brits and the Asians. One day a Chinese peddler was doing the rounds of the camp selling cloth. My mother invited him in to show what he had to sell. After seeing a lot of different materials my mother asked our amah to come in and help her decide which would be best for making a dress. The peddler immediately flew into a rage and said he was not going to stay in the same room as our amah, packed up and left without making a sale. He then went a made a complaint at the guard-room about my mother letting a Malay amah come into the same room as him. My father was called in by his senior officer and told that the complaint had been made and what did he have to say. His reply was “as the man was invited into our home to display his wares he did not have any right to complain about who was invited in to look at his wares”. He also added, “I now wish to make a formal complaint about the peddler’s abusive tirade in the presence of my family and staff”. That particular peddler never was allowed back onto the base ever again.

After we had been in Singapore some months we started to hear, “Merdeka Merdeka Merdeka” on Radio Malaya about every half hour. This was during the lead up to Malaya gaining independence from Britain. Following Malaya gaining independence, Singapore remained as a British colony until preparations were complete for independence to be granted. For some people, independence for Singapore was not coming quickly enough. There were riots in the city and some service families made preparations to leave and go home. For us living in Changi at the time, we saw absolutely nothing of the disturbances except that for about two weeks there was an armed guard front and back on the gari taking us to and from School each morning. Our family decision was that it seemed to be centred in the city and we wouldn’t even think of leaving.

My father also spent some of his time socially with members of the Singapore Regiment he came into contact with. He visited some of them at their homes and also had meals with them. Whenever we went to “The Islamic” restaurant on Beach Road, he always said that he would have preferred to have eaten downstairs rather than up in the posh restaurant upstairs. So although I put some of my racial tolerance down to my mother I think that a large measure also came from my father. I also feel that it allowed me to gain much more experience from life than if I had been a racist bigot.

My youngest son is now going out with a Japanese girl and I know that some families in the UK would be horrified. My own feelings are pleasurable ones, I am pleased that my son is going out with a truly nice girl and that he is gaining a wonderful cultural insight into the Japanese way of life. He has paid two visits to Japan with her and visited her parents. In some ways I think that my love of Asia has rubbed off onto him.

John Harper Remembers Singapore - Part 5: Shopping

Singapore is and always has been a shop till you drop place. You can probably find goods from all over the world in Singapore. I can remember spending hours in Changi village just looking at the wares that were on offer. I found the plastic ornaments that mimicked ivory really absorbing. There were fishermen, rickshaws, fish, shells and animals. I have to admit to spending some of my pocket money on some of these items. They were used as gifts for my parents. To this day I do not really know whether they liked them or not. When we moved to Yorkshire they ended up stored in boxes because building work was going on. They never did resurface and to this day they are still boxed up as there is building work going on in my own house. I wonder if they might have accumulated some antique value yet as they were purchased in the late nineteen fifties. I do sometimes open the boxes and look at and I do still like them.

Carved wooden items from Bali were another favourite. I think that the wood was teak and we bought several pieces. My favourite piece was the head of a Balinese dancer complete with amazing head-dress. After my parents died, my youngest brother took the piece along with a carved camphor chest. Since his death, the pieces have returned to me and unfortunately because of the building work I have nowhere to display the items. Now that the front room has been finished and decorated we now have the camphor chest in the front room. It really is a magnificent piece of furniture



Behind the Wayang in Changi Village, there was a produce market with a whole host of vegetables, fruit, meat and fish. We often used to go down there to get squid or prawns to use as fishing bait. We would buy a half Katy of squid and it would last for several days fishing. At the end of each day we would wrap the squid up in newspaper and stash it behind the cricket screens and collect it the following day. As each day wore on the smell got stronger but the bait seemed to work better.

When we lived at Lloyd Leas, the general shop owned by Keng Wah Heng was just up the road and so my brothers and I would often be sent to get a few things from the shop. It was usually something like packets of Weet Bix and cans of dried milk that would have to be reconstituted for use with the breakfast cereal. The shop was an amazing place with tables outside if you wanted to have a cold drink. Then inside there was all manner of goods for sale from battery operated toys plus the batteries that you would need to operate them, ice cream, soft drinks, canned and dried goods. There was also a craze for knotted items done with coloured nylon fishing line. An amazing range of items was available from small birds, fish, dogs, cats and I recall seeing a model of a rickshaw with a man pulling it made of this nylon line. Keng Wah Heng was always dressed in navy blue shorts and a white aertex style sleeveless vest. His feet were always bare except if he went out from the shop when he would put on a pair of flip flops. Naturally enough, my very first pair of flip flops came from his shop. It took me about two weeks to get used to them and to harden up the skin between my toes so they didn’t hurt when they rubbed. It wasn’t too long before wearing flip flops was second nature to me and I would dash in from School throw off the sandals and white socks and on would go the flip flops.


A 1960’s photo of Changi Village; courtesy of (Memories of Singapore)


Changi Village was a mass of interesting shops. I remember furniture, from inexpensive rattan to more expensive teak and I think next door to them was a shop that sold model aeroplane kits, both plastic and the Keil Kraft balsa jobs. You could also buy lengths of balsa wood, tissue glue and doping resin to build something to your own design or from printed plans that they also sold. If memory serves me correctly, the grocery store in the village was called Jong Fat. One day a week, one of the restaurants made curry puffs and I would be despatched to go and buy some each week after we had moved to Wittering Road just round the corner from Changi Village. Opposite the Police Station was the Newsagent and Bookshop called Abdul Gaffer. Like all shops in the village it was loaded to the rafters with magazines, comics, newspapers and books. On a recent visit, as far as I could tell, Abdul Gaffers was no longer there and in its place, there is an eating place called “The Airfield”. There was a place with this name just round the corner opposite the transit hotel. There was a photographer in this building and I remember my brothers and I having to sit for a formal photograph that could be sent to relatives living in Canada.

For me the most amazing shopping expedition was when we caught a Changi Bus into the city. We got on at the top of the road from Lloyd Leas on the corner near the entrance to Changi Prison. The bus got more and more crowded the closer we got to the city, until there was standing room only. There were passengers hanging out of the doors and I was amazed as we went round a bend on a hill as these passengers swung with the momentum out over the drop down the hill. When we arrived in the city, we went first to the Union Jack Club for a cup of tea for my mother and Coca Cola for us boys. We then got into a taxi and drove around the city. It was an amazing experience with the driver shooting in out of different lanes at breakneck speeds and the horn blaring all the time. Traffic in Singapore nowadays seems better regulated and a lot less pushy. Eventually we ended up at Robinsons department store where we were glad to leave the taxi. This seemed to be the biggest department store I had ever seen in my life with department after department bulging with stock to be sold. It was time for another treat, more Coca Cola and this time some really posh cake with soft gooey icing that had to be eaten with a fork. This was new to me as we always ate cake at home by picking slices up with our fingers!


Raffles Place in 1959. Collection of National Archives of Singapore


As we walked around the city I was amazed at the variety of shops. The aroma of the city was quite different as well with a mix of spices, rotting rubbish in the monsoon drains, dried fish, sisal rope and the acrid smell of lubricating oils. Passing over the Singapore River in those days you would see Junks stretching from one side to the other. The water would also be full of rubbish and have a strong unpleasant smell. I’m sure Terry Pratchett must have used it as the inspiration for the River Ankh in Ankh Morpork in his Discworld series.

When we moved to Tengah, shopping was mostly done at the NAAFI on the base apart from the grocery deliveries that came from the city. The village at Tengah was very small with only about six shops. One where we used to buy firecrackers, a tailor shop and I think there was also a barbershop. In some ways it was a bit of a disappointment after the bustle of Changi Village. Some years later I visited a tailor in Batu Ferringhi on Penang and the tailor there, Vishnu, was the son of the tailor in Tengah village. He had come to Batu Ferringhi via the Australian Air Force base at Butterworth.

Shopping in those days was a lot of fun and a lot less antiseptic than today’s experiences in the shopping Malls.

.................. to be continued


Footnote: I wonder if John and his friends know that Robinson’s at Raffles Place was destroyed by a huge fire in 1972. I also read in Wikipedia that Robinson’s was the first departmental store in Singapore to be fully air-conditioned. – Lam Chun See


Collection of National Archives of Singapore

John Harper Remembers Singapore - Part 4: Food

My brothers, Tom and Bob with Sati, the Amah, in the garden at Meteor Road, Tengah

The great bard said “If music be the food of love – play on”. For me it was more a case of “Love the food – let the music play on”. Singapore food was and still is famed for its variety, quality and taste. You can find every taste of the globe in Singapore. It was a family ritual to go to the families club overlooking Changi airfield every Sunday for lunch. For the first few weeks, as my brothers and I were fairly young and unadventurous with food, it was egg and chips with lashings of tomato sauce. Each week our parents would try to persuade us to try something from the Asian food part of the menu. Each week we steadfastly refused and ordered egg and chips. I was the first to give in and was persuaded to try the special fried rice. There was ham, chicken and prawns in it. After the first mouthful I thought “wow, why have I been so silly and been insisting on egg and chips all these weeks”. I would like to say that I branched out into all sorts of dishes, but no, fried rice was safe and I stuck with that for some time. Eventually I did get more adventurous and started to work my way down the menu.

Old photo of food stall in Bugis Street; courtesy of (Memories of Singapore)

Once a week, one of the restaurants in Changi Village made curry puffs, a parcel of curried minced meat in puff pastry. Curry was something that we had experienced back home in the UK; you know the fairly mild stuff with apple and raisins in it. We quickly adapted to the stronger taste and heat of real curry and the curry puffs were a regular favourite. After a few months in Singapore, my father instituted a family tradition of going into the city on the first Sunday of each month. It was always fairly predictable, taxi in to the Union Jack club and we boys would spend a couple of hours in the swimming pool being fed Cocoa Cola when we got thirsty. Dad of course, would be slaking his thirst with Tiger or Anchor beer. After the pool we would then go to the Islamic restaurant on Beach Road. It was here that we were introduced to Indian curry. I have to admit I was a bit worried at the thought of possibly a very hot curry and went into defensive mode. “Do they have fried rice?” I asked. “Well sort of” my father replied, “ but it’s a little bit different to Chinese fried rice and it is called Briyani”. A little fearfully I said, “OK I’ll have a prawn Briyani”. Brother Tom followed suit and after a bit of humming and hawing Bob agreed to try it as well.

The food arrived and “Wow” Mum and Dad had ordered chicken curry of some sort and we were given side dishes of boiled egg, mango pickle, pineapple, peanuts and shreds of coconut. The three dishes of Briyani arrived with their dishes of curry sauce. The table was groaning under the weight of it all. The taste was absolutely out of this world. I had never tasted anything like it before in my life. The combination of spices, the fresh prawns and the flavoursome rice was the epitome of perfection. Instant conversion, even to this day, Prawn Briyani is one of my favourite dishes. I’m drooling at the thought of it even now almost fifty years later.

Curry now became a regular part of our diet. My mother even sent a recipe back to her friend in the UK who had originally given her the recipe for curry with raisins and apple in it. She included several side notes in it like, “Yes that really is dessert spoons and not teaspoons”, and a warning “You’ll find that it has a very warming sensation.”

Food seemed to be an integral part of being in Singapore. In fact one thing that you are often asked is not, “How are you?” but “Have you eaten yet?” As you walked along the five foot way you would often come across somebody sat with a clay pot charcoal barbecue cooking sticks of Satay. Satay is another of the wonderful dishes of Asia. Meat is marinated in a spicy sauce with chillies, ginger, lemon grass to name but a few of the ingredients and served with a spicy sauce containing coarsely ground roast peanut. As darkness fell, Changi Village would come alive with hawker stalls. Often the self-contained stall was built around a tricycle making it extremely mobile. They would be lit with a paraffin fuelled Tilley lamp. The most popular dish seemed to be noodles, which of course came in all sorts of shapes and sizes.



Photo of a satay stall of old; courtesy of (Memories of Singapore)

Food arriving on bicycle wheels seemed to be a normal part of everyday life. The Magnolia ice cream man would arrive, park his bike on the stand, one of those pull-down jobs on the back wheel that lifted the back wheel off the ground. The ice cream was in an insulated box mounted on the carrier over the back wheel. He would ring his hand bell as soon as he had parked his bike and be surrounded by mothers and children seeking to purchase his wares. Inside the insulated box must have been like a timelord’s Tardis because there were family sized blocks, wafer blocks in a variety of favours, and ice lollies, milky strawberry or plain milky, blackcurrant, strawberry and even Durian ice lollies.

Durian is a fruit that I can only describe as an acquired taste that I never managed to acquire just as I have never acquired a taste for some of the riper cheeses. To me the smell of the fruit was like an open sewer. Even on returning to the east several times over the intervening years, I find that I just cannot get my nose past that smell despite trying several times. It has been described as having the smell of a drain but a taste like heaven. It is a highly prized fruit for Asians and it is a great compliment to be offered a slice. I found that I had to mentally close my nostrils and try to keep them closed whilst I ate the fruit. It never really worked and it is probably the only fruit that I have never taken to despite my best efforts. My brother Bob however quite liked durian. His work often took him to Asia, (lucky man), and he used to tell the tale of how he once bought a couple of durians and walked through Robinsons department store. By the time he left the store, there were six female sales assistants following him and the aroma of his durians.

Fruit of course was another food that arrived on bicycle wheels. The fruit seller was known as Mary and she had an amazing variety of fruit for sale. There were pineapples, apples and oranges, mangosteens and my particular favourite rambutan. The rambutan is related to the Lychee but the skin has long hairy like protrusions that give it its name, as rambut is Malay for hair. This might sound a little off-putting but the red skin peels away easily just as if you were peeling a thick skinned orange and then inside you find what looks a little bit like a white plum. The white fruit covers a stone. Biting into the fruit it is juicy, fragrant and sweet without being excessively sour. Describing the fragrance is difficult and all I can say is that it is rambutan. If pressed I would describe it as floral, sweet maybe a hint of lavender, maybe a hint of orange but only the vaguest hint as the fragrance is so subtle. This might all sound a bit pretentious or even a bit wine buff, but I can only say; well that’s rambutans and I love them and I would gladly pay the air fare to go back and taste them again and again if only I could afford it.




Having mentioned Mary I must digress from the topic of food and in doing so I make no apologies as I am raising a very interesting and important point. Mary was an extremely exceptional lady, not only did she give rambutans to the children who patronised her stall, which in my book made her pretty special, she had also been awarded the O.B.E. She was really a special lady, as some of the prisoners of war in Changi Prison will testify. She played an important part in helping escaped prisoners and it was for this that she was warded the O.B.E. On the return to British rule, she was granted the freedom to sell her fruit anywhere on the military bases at Changi. I know this is only a short paragraph but Mary probably merits a whole book to herself and I hope that somebody will do the research one day on a topic that will reward the researcher tenfold.

So having made that important digression from the subject of food let us return to the topic in hand. I was going to say that one of the strangest fruit was the Pomello but there are probably other candidates with equal provenance to the claim. Anyway, the Pomello was a fruit we tried and it was a citrus fruit about the size of a melon that was like a cross between a grapefruit but not as bitter, and a fragrance with a hint of orange. The flesh inside was segmented in a typical citrus fashion but inside the segments the soft bead like structure of an orange or lemon was a bit more fibrous and you could remove little sachets of fruity, juicy material and pop them in your mouth one by one.


I mentioned Mangosteens earlier, the skin is semi-hard and purple and likely to stain whatever it comes into contact with. The flesh inside once again is juicy and distinctive, impossible to liken to anything from Europe. All I can say is, travel to the Far East and try for yourself.




To correct any impression you might have that life was one exotic eating orgy (maybe it was) the amah used to prepare what we consider as perfectly normal English dishes. Her repertoire included egg and chips, mince and mash, pork chops with peas and mash as well as the exotic dishes like curry. Sunday roasts were very rare though as it was the amah’s day off and we usually went to the families club for lunch (special fried rice).

Singapore changed my outlook on food. Rice was no longer a dish that was served as a sweet pudding. Rice had a thousand and one possibilities; it also came in many varieties although at this time I was only able to differentiate two types, short grain for rice puddings and long grain for savoury dishes. Nowadays I prefer boiled rice to boiled potatoes but I do have to admit that any form of fried potato is almost equal to any form of rice, boiled, fried or risotto. The one exception to this would be “congee” or rice porridge. It’s a nice non-irritant dish when you have diarrhoea but it has nothing else much to commend it although the Tanjong Pagar area of Singapore is noted for it where it is served with all sorts of extras (it needs it).

It was almost impossible to avoid soggy breakfast cereals with the high humidity and we very quickly adapted to the Australian version of Weetabix called Weet Bix. The biscuit was a lot harder and seemed very resistant to humidity problems. Fresh milk was virtually unheard of and so powdered milk (KLIM) was the norm. We had a special mixer for making up the milk. A tall glass cylinder was three quarter filled with water from the refrigerator, powdered milk added and then a plunger with perforations in the disc introduced into the cylinder to push the powdered milk up and down to get it to wet out and dissolve. It required several minutes of vigorous pumping to get all the powder to dissolve.

As well as the all time favourites Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola a whole range of soft drinks were available at the NAAF and swimming pool including Ice Cream Soda, Sarsaparilla, Lemonade, Orangeade, Cherryade and Ginger Beer. Ice cream soda was nice with a scoop of ice cream in it and was known as an Ice Cream Soda float. Other favourites at the pool were the Coconut Ice slabs and my good friend Raymond Clayton reminded me recently that you could also get giant pickled onions at the pool. I met up with Raymond 40 years after we had been in Singapore after bumping into his elder brother at a Singapore schools reunion that was held in London. The reunion is also a chance to relive the food as the group usually goes on to Soho for a Chinese meal.

I’m also pleased to say that I still enjoy food in Singapore whenever I have made visits related to my work. I am a fan of the food courts and hawker stalls. Early childhood influences have certainly their mark on my food preferences.

….. To be continued.


Here are some photos of a Pomelo farm in Tambun, near Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia. I visited this farm last year with my family. – Lam Chun See

Picture No. 1 – This is view of the pomelo farm. The pomelo trees are in the background. The farmers also plant vegetables to supplement their income.



Picture No. 2 – My 3 children and their cousins posing in front of a cluster of pomelo trees. Did you know that each tree can produce up to 200 fruits?



Picture No. 3 – Here’s a picture of a pomelo that not many Singaporean kids are familiar with.

John Harper Remembers Singapore - Part 3: Leisure Time

School was from 8:00 each morning until 12:30 each day and to make up the hours included Saturday mornings. So leisure time was all afternoon and evening plus Sundays. For many of us kids it was get the homework done and then head straight down to the swimming pool. These were particularly good pools going from about 2 foot 6 inches deep to 11 feet at the deep end with a springboard, ten foot board and twenty foot board. We would be in and out the water and there was always a session at the NAFFI kiosk, Coke or Pepsi and coconut ice. At the end of the afternoon it would be onto the bicycles and pedal back across the runway and back home for tea. Round about six in the evening it would get dark and that would be the signal to head for home, listen to Radio Malaya and then about eight in the evening it was off to bed ready to get up early in the morning. Next morning about 6:00 it was time to get up to head down to the city for another day at school.


Once a week there was a Scouts meeting and that was one of the few days that we were ever allowed to stay up late when there was school the next day. We had some amazing times. My first experience of camping was when we went off to the Singapore Scouts campsite at Jurong. At the gate into the camp we collected tents, pots and pans and duckboards for sleeping on. We wondered what these were for. The camp site was on bare clay and we erected the tents finding it difficult to knock the pegs in. There was also advice that we should dig a trench around the tent but the ground was so baked so hard that we managed to chip about an inch channel around the tent. Two days later when it rained the lesson of keeping everything off the ground and the need for a channel round the tent was quickly learned. With a typical tropical thunderstorm the minuscule trench quickly filled with water and within five minutes the tent was like a streambed. We quickly put on swimming trunks and went out in the rain with spades and dug the trench about six inches deep piling the soil between the trench and the tent to improve the barrier. Digging was of course much easier now that the clay was wet. The following day we rolled the sides of the tent up to allow all of the wet bedding and clothing to dry. Typically, having dug the trenches, there was no more rain all the time that we were there.




Jurong Park Scouts Camp. Collection of National Archives of Singapore

The site was plumbed with toilets and showers albeit cold showers but that was quite refreshing in the Singapore heat. Next to the site was a rubber plantation and each morning the tappers would come round to collect the accumulated latex and cut a new slice of channel to keep the latex flowing.

In the scout troop were several Asian boys from the Tengah village just next to the RAF Tengah base. There was Kim who was Chinese, Johari an Indian Moslem and Ranjit who was Indian Sikh. There were one or two others but my memory lets me down and I can’t remember their names. Mixing with Asians at this young age and having a Canadian mother taught me the value of racial tolerance. I feel that it greatly enriched me although I didn’t realise it at the time. We all mucked in together with general tasks, games and learning together.

One of the highlights of camping trip was a visit to the old Japanese submarine pens where we all went fishing. It was rumoured that there was an octopus in the pens and there was even a tale that a boy from the RAF Changi troop had slipped in the water and came out with octopus tentacles wrapped around his leg. It sounds a bit far fetched to me now but when I was eleven it sounded fairly plausible to me. On the way back to the campsite, Mike the Scoutmaster bought a load of pineapples for the lunch the following day. Each patrol was given some custard powder to make custard to go with the fruit. One lad said that he knew how to make custard and proceeded to make it whilst the rest of us got on and trimmed up the pineapples and created pineapple rings. Everybody lined up and was given their allocation of two pineapple rings and then the custard was poured on. We all sat down and before too long there was much groaning and moaning when we tasted the custard. Our custard expert had only forgotten to put the sugar in. Any way, once the custard was scraped off the pineapple rings were wonderful, there is nothing to compare with taste of fresh pineapple.

We had a few trips with Scouts and one that was really good fun was a trip to Pulau Ubin a small island just off the coast from Changi. We travelled over from Tengah and then caught a motorised canoe over to the small island where we bivouaced under army capes and cooked food over open fires. In those days the island had very few inhabitants and the main activity was quarrying. Much of the timber work in the quarry had been lashed together using square and diagonal lashings. The spot we camped on was directly under the flight path for aircraft coming in to land at Paya Lebar airport which was the main Singapore airport in those days. I can remember seeing Constellations with the triple tail and Brittanias.




Thanks to Acroamatic for these 2 beautiful photos of the Ubin quarries today (Pedal Ubin - a photoset on Flickr)

Aside from swimming and scouts, a gang of us would often gather on our bikes and go off to the scrubland at the end of road and meet in one of the perimeter fence towers. There we would usually gather some wood and make a fire and smoke the cigarettes we had pinched from our parents. It was all bravado stuff, I don’t think anybody ever inhaled the smoke. There was also a little bit of woodland with a few remains from a crashed Beaufighter nearby and we often used to gather round it and drift off into fantasies of being a pilot and shooting down Japanese warplanes. One time when we visited the wreckage I found a papery snake skin that had been shed. A few weeks later I was confined to home with a really bad cold. The group had met at the wreckage without me and my friend John Smith, and yes that was his real name, picked up what he thought was a shed snake skin. Oh no it was not! It was a sleeping cobra. Fortunately, before it could bite him, he was quick-witted enough to throw it away from himself and the snake slithered off into the undergrowth. Another gathering place was the old disused Japanese runway. Being boys, there had to be a gruesome tale attached to the runway and there may be an element of truth in it. The tale was that the runway was built by prisoners of war, many of who were slaughtered on the spot and thrown into the diggings to be covered over with foundation material. Out of respect for the dead prisoners, when the Japanese surrendered the runway was decommissioned and allowed to fall into disrepair.

Because we spent so much time at the swimming pool our hair turned dramatically lighter and picked up a green tinge. I’m not sure whether it was colouration caused by the chlorine in the water or whether it was being coloured by minute algae.

Whilst we lived at Lloyd Leas, one of favourite pastimes was to go down to Paradise beach for a swim and inspect the machine gun pill box that stood guard over the cove. I remember one day going down there and there was a very high tide so we laid on top of the sea wall and watched the small fish feeding around the wall. Suddenly the sky turned black and there was whizzing noise. When we looked up there was a whirlwind waterspout right in front of us. My mother shepherded us straight into the pill box where we watched it traverse the cove coming about two feet in front of the pillbox. And then make its way out to sea and fizzle out. It was an incredible sight.

Sunday afternoons were always quiet and I would sometimes save a few prawns from my Nasi Goreng that I always had at the families club for Sunday lunch. I would then head down to the fenced in swimming area next to Changi Yacht Club known as the Pagar and spend the afternoon fishing, using the prawns I had saved as bait. Sunday afternoons in Changi village would often see large groups of people playing Mah Jong and cards. The atmosphere in the village was always very relaxed on Sunday afternoons.

John Harper Remembers Singapore - Part 2: Acclimatisation

Acclimatisation was the process of getting used to the heat and the humidity. Arriving by ship had given us some time to get ourselves used to it. Nonetheless we were told that it would be two weeks before we were allowed to go to school because we needed to acclimatize. Yippee!!

A friend of my father was on leave at that same time and took us to the beach nearly every day. This of course had to wait until my plaster cast was removed. I am pleased to say that my father had arranged that for the day after we arrived. What a relief to get rid of that awful encumbrance. That first experience of the sea – so warm, the sun burning down, the perfect balance of water temperature and air temperature, we felt that we arrived in paradise. Despite the fact that Cleveleys is next to the sea, we had not learned to swim whilst living in Cleveleys. We were lucky if there were about half a dozen days per summer when it was warm enough to go to the beach. We were taught to wade out in the water up to waist height and launch ourselves forward and to float in on an incoming wave. The water was so warm that you didn’t stand about shivering on the water’s edge wondering if you dare go in.



Changi Beach in the Sixties (Photo courtesy of Memories of Singapore)


Soon I was going deeper and was going to chest depth. Next thing you know I was having a go at breast stroke and managing to do that fairly well. Our swimming sessions were at the beach that ran alongside the runway at Changi. Moored out in the channel was a raft and before the two weeks acclimatization was up I could swim out to the raft without help. With the land reclamation that has gone on since, I think the beach area where I learned to swim has now become a part of the airport. I have joked with colleagues as we landed at Changi airport that I learned to swim on the perimeter track on the seaward side!

During those two weeks we developed our tans, I think that was the real reason for the two weeks acclimatization as much as anything. Having blond hair also meant that our hair also lightened a few shades as well, the sun had a strong bleaching effect. During this period we met the local shop owner Keng Wah Heng. His shop was just up the road from our house. We called in there and were treated to a cold drink. It seemed very strange to be served by a Chinaman wearing a sleeveless cotton vest. Heng's daughter, Chew was of a similar age to us boys and often came to visit my mother whilst we lived at Lloyd Leas. Although my mother corresponded with Chew for some time when we returned to the UK, we lost touch during one of our moves. Also during this acclimatization period we were introduced to the Changi Bus company with a trip into the city. I think that in those days the drivers only knew two accelerator positions, foot flat to the floor or foot off and onto the brake for a screeching halt. They used to hurtle along at an incredible pace and it was inadvisable to step out in front of one.


First impressions of the city were of a multitude of smells and sights battering your senses. Exotic fruit, monsoon drains full of rotting detritus, Singapore River covered in Junks from bank to bank, crazy taxi drivers, bicycle trishaws, food vendors cooking on clay pots, Chinese and Indian music, all these assaults on your senses came at you from every corner you turned. The gentile western side of life was there as well with the department stores like Robinsons and eating places where you could get morning coffee and cream cakes. I must admit though that it was the exotic that really made an impression on me.



Hock Lam Street in the 1960's (Photo courtesy of Memories of Singapore)




The Singapore River covered in junks from bank to bank (Photo courtesy of Memories of Singapore)


As well as the trip into the city there was also a trip into Changi village to be fitted up for school uniform. Much time was spent selecting white cotton shirts, khaki shorts, white ankle socks and sandals. Then came the haggling over the price. "I do special price for Missey because you buy so much". I think my mother managed to get the price down by about another ten percent from his special price, which even by UK standards was fairly cheap. This was a skill that she honed to a much better perfection during our stay.





Changi Village in 1969 (Photos courtesy of Memories of Singapore)







Changi Village today (2006)

By the end of the second week I had realized that it was not a case of the Asians knowing my name was John, and that they all called English boys "Johnny". Up until then I had wondered how they knew my name, although I never did like being called Johnny, it sounded so childish (even to a boy of ten). When I heard my brother Tom being called Johnny, “clang”, it dawned on me "oh they call all English boys Johnny!"


After a few days we also started to explore Lloyd Leas estate on foot and I found that the Younger family who had been quarantined on the boat were living in the same road. So I ended up teaming up with Malcolm to further explore our surroundings. This took us down to Paradise Beach. This was a nice sandy cove with a sandstone cliff that had a house on top. Overlooking the cove was a pillbox that was said to have been built by the Japanese during World War Two; a fertile place for the imagination of young boys.







Sadly, the place that holds such beautiful memories for John and his brothers is today, part of a prison complex. All you see are walls and barbed wires. One of the sign says “Lloyd Leas Work Release Camp”. It is located at Cosford Road, off Upper Changi Road North …… Lam Chun See, July 2006