Archive for the 'Family Memoirs' Category

Aaah, the 80s! Big shoulder pads, big hair, big earrings - those were the days… And I had ‘em all.

I was clearing out some cupboards the other weekend and came across these old passport photos. Hilarious!

I would often be mistaken for Brazilian or some such exotic Latina… Hola, chicos!

My father has picked up his pen again to continue his Memories of Malaya series, sharing his memories of his boyhood in Malaya.

He writes:

When I first went to the Victoria Institution it was into Form One. In addition to arithmetic we were introduced to geometry and algebra. For some reason I had difficulty in arithmetic although I was very good in the other two subjects. In arithmetic I think it was the question of language which was causing the difficulty. The problem was this: there are 3 rulers; ruler A is 3 feet long; ruler B is half as long as ruler A and ruler C is half as long as ruler A but is one and half times longer than ruler B. I may not have stated the question correctly but it was this kind of question.

But the odd thing is this: the boys who had come from Chinese schools still continued to do very well in arithmetic although the English language is not their strong subject; they did not seem to encounter any difficulties. After my brilliant results previously it was a great disappointment when I came out in the middle of my class in the half yearly examination. Father then started intensive coaching of me and I improved my position. So I crept up the form every year until about Form 3 when I began to come up to the top 3 in the class always competing with the other doctor’s son.

The school started streaming the two top classes when we were in Form 4. It was a simple process: the top forty boys in the form in the Form 3 exams were sent to the science stream in Form 4 and the next forty to the Arts streams. The rest went on to the lower classes in the form. In the science stream we had to do the 3 sciences, that is, Chemistry, Physics and Biology as three subjects and not one as general science. They were not all that difficult and I enjoyed them. Then came Form 5 when we were introduced to Additional Mathematics which I also enjoyed.

As I wanted to read law I started to take private tuition in Latin in preparation for taking the subject in Form 5. Again it proved not difficult because it was a logical language. Latin is helpful in two ways for learning the English Language: firstly if you have a large Latin vocabulary it helps with your English vocabulary and vice verse of course; secondly it also helps your English sentence construction; the dative and ablative cases make one aware of the use of prepositions in an English sentence.

One of the highlights of this period in school was the celebration connected with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The country organized parades and there was a street procession with the various communities contributing floats to go round the town. Every class held a tea-party on the day. We did not have television, so we did not see the proceedings but the school children were able to see a film of the coronation when the film came to the country much later on. We could hear the music of “Land of Hope and Glory” whenever we turned on the radio.

A less happy event was the killing of the High Commissioner for Malaysia whilst he was traveling to Fraser’s Hill on a Saturday: he was shot together with one or two of his military and police aides and escorts by the communists. The school scout troops were given the honour of lining the route where his cortege would pass on the way to the church. I was in the contingent. It was a great blow to the government - the country was still not independent - and demoralized it.

His successor was General Sir Gerald Templer who was a no-nonsense soldier. He would put a village or town under a twenty-four hour curfew if after some soldiers or police were killed and no one came to give information. There was a case that involved the small town of Tanjong Malim which created quite an outcry in the newspapers in England. There was no actual fighting with the communists in the large towns. Most of the confrontation was in rubber estates, secondary jungle and sometimes further inside.

One of the ways the government devised to combat the threat was to resettle all persons living in outlying areas into a settlement which was surrounded by barbed wire fence and guarded by special constables to prevent these villages from supplying food and medicine to the communists. According to official reports this method worked to a certain extent. The civilian population was not allowed to carry any food when traveling between towns and persons in buses and cars were searched at check points placed along the main and trunk roads. For the civilians this was the only contact with the military operations.

General Templer wanted to involve as many communities and as many people in the fight. Special constables and home guards were formed. Both were drawn from persons who had no military training but after a little bit of marching drill and practice with the rifle they were given a rifle and an arm band with the word “Special Constable” as they had no uniforms and their main job was to patrol the resettlement-villages or New Villages as they were called or to assist in manning road blocks. Boy scouts were called in to act as couriers to deliver mail amongst the military and police establishments. I was involved and went to a briefing but was never called upon to do anything.

A General du Fonblanque was assigned to organize the Home Guard. Their presence was not much in evidence in the towns as far as I can recollect. I met his daughter, Patricia, who was at Newnham at the time I was at Corpus Christi, Cambridge when she attended meetings of the Malayan Association of the University.

Photo: of Victoria Institution, thanks to hbp.usm.my with thanks

memmlya

My father continues his Memories of Malaya series, with more recollections of the joys of reading during his childhood.

He writes:

When we grew a little older my Mother would borrow books from the Kuala Lumpur Public Library which was well stocked with books of detective stories, mystery stories and books for teenagers.

The library was started by the British expatriates and it catered for the lonely planters in their rubber plantations and miners in their tin mines where the nearest neighbour could be some distance away. Most of them did not go in for literature. There were some books of literature which were for the civil servants. The books my Mother borrowed were by Enid Blyton: her famous five series which we found thrilling and “unputdownable” as the Americans say. Then we graduated to reading “Children of the New Forest” by Captain Marryat, Treasure Island (the abridged version) 20,000 leagues Under the Sea, etc.

Then there were the memorable few months when the whole family minus my Mother read Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield.” All four of us brothers would sit around a table each with a copy of the book. The four of us read the book together. Our ages ranged from ten, my youngest brother, eleven, twelve and thirteen, myself. So although my youngest brother was only ten he was going through the same exercise as myself. In fact this brother also joined us in the Chinese lessons when the tutor came to the house to teach all of us at the same time. This early start for my youngest brother meant that he grew up to be extremely able scholastically and I’m proud to say he topped the country in the Cambridge School Certificate in both the “O” and “A” levels.

My Father would be lying on a kind of sofa-bed holding his own copy of the book. Each of us would take turns to read a page or two from it. The reading would usually start about 9.00 pm after we have had dinner and it went on until eleven or so until my Father got tired when we would stop. We enjoyed the reading sometime but I became irritable when I became sleepy but we did not stop until my Father said so. We became fond of the characters like Mr Peggotty and Betsy Trotwood, the eccentric aunt who treated David Copperfield with kindness. I tended to identify Mr Murdoch, David’s stepfather, with my Father because they were both equally harsh and strict as my Father was with us sometimes. My Father would make us stop to look up in the dictionary if we could not give an accurate meaning of a word. I must say that my vocabulary was very much improved from these reading sessions.

I still remember learning the words “simultaneously” which appears in the first paragraph at the beginning of the book and “vicissitude” which is a chapter heading. We became so fond of the eccentric aunt that we name our two dogs, one “Betsy” and the other “Trotty” for Trotwood. Father would always tell us to enjoy the English language. When we finished the book my Father wanted to start it all over again but fortunately for some reason, I cannot remember, this second reading was not pursued.

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For as long as I can remember, books have been a part of my family. Family outings at the weekend would be to the bookshop. If we did well at school or were good at the dentist, our treat would be to choose a pile of books and comics to call our own. My Dad would come home from work and flop into bed with a good book. Here is a photo of me, aged six months, reading in bed just like my Dad!

So I was chuffed when my Dad emailed me his latest blog post for his series Memories of Malaya, all about the role of reading and books in his life.

He writes:

One of the principal pleasures in my life is reading without having any pressure to stop at a certain fixed time to go and do something else – like going to work or to the supermarket or to do household chores. Many of my friends ask me what I do when I visit London in the summer every year, besides visiting and keeping in touch with my grown-up children and their families. They think I am mad when I say that I am happy to read sitting by an open window with the cool summer breeze blowing in. I do not stay long enough to finish a novel or a full length biography, so my reading consists of essays, on social political and biographical subjects, and the main daily newspapers. I would like to watch an occasional play or to go to a concert but it would be difficult to get a ticket because my stay is short. And very often if I booked for a show some day ahead I may find myself too lazy, too tired or just not in the mood when the day of the show arrives and then it becomes a chore to make the expedition from the suburbs to the theatre. In my short stay I am however able to visit and browse in bookshops and buy some books. Our house is also quite well stocked with books left by the children who now no longer live with us. So there is no shortage of reading material, and, if I need other titles there is a public lending library within walking distance.

My three younger brothers and I come from a family surrounded by books. Though my late Father was a medical practitioner he had time to read what are considered the classics like Dickens Dumas Austen etc mostly published by Collins. He had the whole set of 7 volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and all the volumes of the History of England by Macauly. Although we were comfortably well-off my Father did not believe in furnishing the house with luxuries. But we always had good and nourishing food and money for the purchase of books.

When we were very young my Mother would buy comics which were shipped from England. They were Beano, Dandy, and Film Fun, etc. She would buy them from a small bookshop belonging to an Indian Muslim. Its name was MM Ally. It would hang out a little board with the Union Jack painted on it and the words, “Mail Arrived” to indicate that a new shipment of books, comics, newspapers etc from England had arrived and we would rush there to buy the comics.

I still remember some of the names of the comic characters like Korky the cat, Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, Lord Snotty, etc. The stories would follow the seasons of the year. In summer the story would be centred on the seaside and in the winter months it would be Christmas and Father Christmas. (Malaya has no seasons). When the characters had a Christmas feast there would be pies, legs of ham, strings of sausages. I became fascinated with pies and had wanted to try them which I did when I arrived in England but did not find them very exciting. When the characters spoke they were given bubbles with the words in them. Film Fun requires more literacy. Besides the bubbles, beneath each frame were full sentences describing the action in detail. At the beginning my Mother had to read this part to us. The characters that I remember, were Laurel and Hardy, Mother Riley and her daughter, Joe E Brown, Max Miller Bud and Costello and there was always a short story featuring Sexton Blake. I received most of my impression of English seaside towns with their piers, the snow, the small working class houses and dress from these comics.

mmlya

I really am. No, don’t laugh, I’m being serious. I’m not being vain or making it up. I really am beautiful.

I have a Dulwich Picture Gallery fridge magnet* proving it. Look, there it is, there’s my name on it: the Chinese ideogram “May” that means Beatiful. It’s more usually written in the Western-style as “Mei” or even “Mai” but my parents spelled it “May” on my birth certificate. They had always thought they’d send me to the UK and they wanted to make it easy for the Brits to spell my name. But all my life in the UK, everyone exoticises my name and refer to me variously as Yang-Mei or Yang-Mai. Sigh.

If you meet a Chinese woman, there is more than half the chance that her name is Something-Mei or Mei-Something. In most Chinese families, there will at least be one daughter with Mei in her name. Why? Because every family would love their daughter to grow up beautiful, of course.

As for the “Yang” bit of my name, it means “reflection”. So putting both parts of my name together, I am technically the reflection of beauty and not beauty itself. To understand why this is so, I need to tell you about my grandmother and her elder brothers and a Chinese belief in the greed of the gods. For the Chinese, the gods are jealous and dangerous. If they see that you have something of value that you treasure, they will take it from you - just because they can. Back in China, when my grandmother was young, she had two elder brothers whom the family loved dearly. Being a Presbyterian minister, her father had turned to the Christian God and left behind old Chinese superstitions. He had named his beloved sons with names that anointed them heavenly and perfect. And for a few years, it seemed that he had been right to forget the old Chinese gods. But these his sons did not live past their twenties, one of them dying slowly and painfully of tuberculosis. The gods coveted the young men’s pure essence and took the boys for themselves.

So for the future generations in the family, to fool the gods, we have never been named for the pure essence and I am just the reflection of beauty - worth nothing to the gods - and not the thing that they might desire, beauty itself.

The fridge magnet is a souvenir from the Lion & Dragon exhibition of photographs from Old China, currently on at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with stories of his school days at Victoria Institution.

He writes:

So one early January morning, being the beginning of the school year I found myself seated in the classroom of Form One of the Victoria Institution. I was one of forty boys seated in five rows each with a desk in front of him facing the class blackboard. The form teacher was a late middle age male Chinese. All the teachers were male until a few years later when we had the first female teacher, a Chinese, a graduate from Raffles College in Singapore in her early thirties.

This male form teacher was very conscientious. He was a typical minor civil servant type who did not want to be involved in anything which may cause him any trouble. But he was a kind man. He did not aspire to teach any higher forms and he was, I guessed, happy to have his untroubled sleep at night. It was he who introduced the class to the mysteries of geometry and algebra which I took to very easily.

We were also introduced to general science which was a combination of very elementary chemistry, physics and biology. The science labs were amongst the best equipped of all the schools in the town if not in the country. We looked with awe and fascination at the rows of chemicals and the glass utensils in the labs and fancied ourselves as scientist decanting, bubbling and smoking chemicals from one test-tube into another. We used a textbook written by a former headmaster, the late Mr F. Daniel. He had written textbooks on the subject for use up to form five and these textbooks were used by all schools in Malaya whether government or non-government.

Mr Daniel had just retired before I entered the school. He was known to have been a very strict disciplinarian and the school had the reputation of producing students with a strong science background. There was no school uniform. Mr Daniel had required that boys wore white shorts or white pants, and white shirts tailored so that they were worn hanging over the top of the trousers and not tucked in. This was a very sensible wear in the tropics. After he retired this form of dressing gradually stopped.

Each period was of 45 minute duration. The most painful period for me was the one for art. The art teacher was very good at his work but he had a loud voice which he used to chastise boys who did not draw well. I received a great deal of his shouting and threats to throw away my eraser because I was using it so often. In the examinations I managed to obtain only enough marks to pass this subject.

At that time using the radio to broadcast lessons to elementary classes was in vogue. The teacher in charge would bring a radio and a loud speaker attached to it and plug it on and tune it to the correct station and someone will read out whatever the subject is, with some sound effects to make it more interesting. The subject for our class was “hygiene”.

Then there were the physical training periods. There were two periods in a week - each one on a different day. One was held in the school field and the other in the school hall. For the one in the hall we used the usual gymnastic equipment.

Once a week on a Friday the whole school assembled in the school hall. The school had a stage where all the teachers sat and the students sat on the floor of the hall. Notices of the main school activities were announced by the headmaster, awards were presented to athletes and scholars and one award was given to the classroom that was adjudged by the prefects to be the cleanest for that week.

All the boys took turns daily to sweep the floor of their classroom and shine the hinges and doorknobs. The prefects went around during the interval awarding points on each aspect of cleanliness. The award consisted of a framed picture of the school crest. There was one class whose monitor was so dedicated to these tasks that he would do most of the cleaning himself to ensure that his class won the award every week. In a recent visit to the school for an Old Boys gathering I was told that they had discontinued requiring the boys to do this kind of cleaning because, the school authorities were of the opinion that, the students should not be doing this kind of work. This gives an indication of the changing values. Instead they want classes to teach civic behaviour and responsibilities and how citizens must keep their environment clean.

So amongst the forty boys in the best class in Form 1 there were boys from the Pasar Road School and boys from the Batu Road School, both feeder schools of the V.I. the number from each school was not equal. According to my present recollection there were more boys from Batu Road School than boys from Pasar Road School in the proportion of about 30 to 10. It would be interesting to know what the past records were like. Were there always more Batu Road boys than Pasar Road boys and if so were there any social reasons for this?

Those 10 Pasar Road boys in the class came mainly from families of the junior civil servants, clerks and the like and there were a few Indians and Malays; this can be expected because the school was situated in the midst of government quarters where there were families of different races which the government employed. Also the boys were more studious and were quite unused to going out of the house for their amusements e.g. to the cinema or loitering in the shops because they could not afford to. All those in my year from Batu Road School were Chinese because the school was in the midst of a busy street in the town which had a predominantly Chinese population. Most of these boys were not very studious but they appeared to be sharp, with a little cunning, what one, I suppose, would consider as street-smart. Most of them were very good at mathematics. This I do not know if it is because they are Chinese or because they live in the town with the necessity for quick calculation of all kinds or a combination of both. They came mostly from families of small businessmen and were generally better off than the salaried minor civil servants.

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My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with a response to my post about Doctors in the Family.

He writes:

Why do Chinese parents pressure their children to be doctors? The usual quick answer is that doctors make money and therefore that is the attraction. Looking more deeply into the question this may not be the only answer and is certainly not the most important answer. My remarks here on why parents pressure their children to be doctors are limited to my observations in Malaysia during the period starting about 1940s to the present day.

Most children who became doctors in the forties usually come from homes whose fathers were already doctors or members of the professional class like lawyers or engineers. So these children had come from reasonably comfortable homes and from their own experience these children knew that if they wanted to continue to have a comfortable life they should join one of the professions.

They would have seen and felt the respect given to their fathers as doctors and they also want to have that respect. Like most young people these children have a large dose of idealism too; they saw doctors doing good work with the sick and if the patients are poor, often, the doctors waived their fees and the cost of medication. Practising medicine had not become a business like the big private hospitals you have in the present day where you have to pay a deposit before you get to be seen by a doctor.

There are also children that come from poor homes who are idealistic and would want to serve the sick and who also want to be doctors but the medical course lasts for 6 to 7 years and their families could not wait for them for such a long time to contribute to the upkeep of the family. They could become lawyers or engineers but Malaysia in the forties did not have law or engineering schools which meant they had to go overseas and this the family could not afford; they would have to get a scholarship. A few did for engineering but there were no scholarships for a law degree.

All this is not to say that there was no father, who did not say to his son at the dinner table “Son/Daughter, you must study hard to become a doctor.” But by and large I believe a lot of people who became doctors have a large dose of idealism and humanity in them. The Chinese and their community have a great deal of respect for doctors because they know doctors have gone through a rigorous learning process and the Chinese instinctively respect learning and scholarship and also on the whole doctors have conducted themselves well in their community thereby earning its respect. Doctors, in my experience, are generally kindly, soft spoken, gentle and compassionate all qualities that appeal to the young idealistic and usually shy school boy. So there is little need for a father to exert a great deal of pressure to direct his son to read medicine if he is scholatiscally able.

Another reason for fathers wanting their children to take up medicine is this: in the history of the Chinese, the Chinese had always suffered the ravages and disasters from wars, civil wars and other local fighting from neighbouring warlords famines and floods. Any of these could occur at any time in the forties and before, especially, in China. So in the psyche of Chinese fathers their children must be able to move at short notice whenever any of these occurred, even from one part of the country to another in a vast country like China, or to move to another country and not only to move but to be able to earn a living in the new country. A doctor will often be accepted as an immigrant because he will not be a financial burden to the new country. (Actually being a scientist has this advantage too; Chinese children are also encouraged by their parents to take up science.) The recent generations are more relaxed about having to be prepared to suddenly drop everything and emigrate and then to earn a living. As a sign of this I have come across names of Chinese students from Singapore in the class lists of Greats in Oxford. It is well and good to want to do medicine as a safety net but it is also necessary to be able to pass the examinations. This requires concentration of the mind, attention to details and other intellectual abilities. The Chinese students appear to have enough of these mental requisites.

The new Chinese children now want to be rich in the quickest possible time when they grow up and being doctors do not bring in wealth quickly enough so they are going into studies in business, finance, banking, share brokering and such related subjects. Presently they can find employment in these sectors in their new country and in their own.

I have to declare my connection with the doctor profession. I am not a doctor but my Father and one of my siblings were, and my son and the wife of another sibling are. My wife’s Father was also a doctor and three of her siblings became doctors. My wife is the only one who is not and she is therefore regarded as a bit of a duffer by her family because she did not take a medical course but she did extremely well when she took up English literature instead. She is therefore not a duffer; she simply does not like to deal with blood and nasty sores and wounds and see people in pain.

Photo: thanks to laburbuja on flickr.com (CCL)

memmlya

My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with an account of the renowned Victoria Institution.

He writes:

So the years came and went without any major mishaps: no illness or injuries to the body. However when I was in Standard two I had to be away from school for six months to have my right eye taken out because there was a growth inside it. I felt a little disorientated when I came back but I soon caught up with the work.

This school where I was is called the Pasar Road School together with another school called the Batu Road School in another part of the town were the feeder schools of the grand secondary school called the Victoria Institution which had boys from form one to form five and later to form six, lower and upper. These three schools in the town of Kuala Lumpur were government schools which meant that they were built, maintained and had teachers all paid for by the colonial government administering Malaya and the boys had to pay only a token fee per month and one could be exempted if the school was satisfied that one’s family could not afford it and if a family had two boys in the school, one was automatically exempted. Eventually our family had 3 boys in the school but because father was a medical doctor we did not claim this privilege. Although Pasar Road School and Batu Road School were feeder schools it did not mean that all the boys were automatically fed into the V.I. Form one of the V.I. could take only 200 boys; the total number of boys in the class before Form one in both the feeder schools amounted to 400. So this meant that fifty percent had to be eliminated by means of a common entrance examination set for both schools. Those who did not make it to the V.I. had to find either jobs or join trade schools. The common entrance examination was a vigorous one but I was extremely happy to have been placed fourth in the combined results of 400 boys.

So I had realized one of the aspirations of every school boy to be a student of the Victoria Institution (V.I.). The V.I. is set in the town of Kuala Lumpur which is the capital city of the state of Selangor as well as of Malaya. The school is a solid building of two storeys standing on a slight hill. It has a playing field the size of six football fields and it has a swimming pool which is unique for a school. It also had science laboratories and other schools would send their students there when they had to do sixth form science.

The British Colonial Administration in the 1850s found the educational facilities inadequate for a regular supply of junior grade administrative and clerical officers who had hitherto been recruited from India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The founding of a school was mooted. With the lead provided by a British Resident donations were collected from magnates of the three races to build the school. Most of them are still remembered by the names of the school houses.

The school was ready to take in students in July 1884. It was then in another location and being near a river it was continually flooded during the monsoon seasons. Eventually it was moved to the present location where it stands till today.

Photo: thanks to kelvolution from flickr.com (CCL)

memmlya

My father emailed me a couple of weeks ago this recollection of his school days in Kuala Lumpur during the 1940s to continue his series of memoirs, Memories of Malaya.

He writes:

During the time I was in this school (about 1945 - 1949) there was one headmaster and about 30 teachers. There was a change of headmaster in about 1947; both were Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan). All the teachers were males and there were about 20 Chinese about 10 Indians and/or Ceylonese and the rest Malays. Only the headmaster was a university graduate, the rest were what we called “normal trained,” that is, after their fifth form they joined the teaching profession and were sent out to the schools to learn their craft as they worked. All the teachers taught their classes diligently and did not shirk except that they did not mark the work they had set. But this was not necessary because in arithmetic, a boy would exchange his exercise book with the boy sitting next to him and the teacher would give out the answer and the boy would mark it. The teacher would then ask if anyone had made a mistake and if there were he would work it out on the blackboard. In English, most of the exercises consisted of filling in the blanks with the appropriate word from amongst the words given. Again this was easy to correct by the same method.

Each form or standard had five classes designated with the first five letters of the alphabet with the “A” class, having the best forty boys in that form judged from the previous final year end examination results and going down academically to the “E” class. Those in this last class were usually older and more mature boys than those in “A” class because their education was delayed by the war and quite a lot of them had worked for a living during the war so they were not interested in going back to school but were forced to by their parents.

When I started I used to walk to school accompanied by my Mother about nine-tenths of the way. We parted before arriving at the school because she continued on her journey to work by bus and I would continue to walk the rest of the way. Later on when I was in standard one I was given a brand new Raleigh bicycle with white mud guards and a red triangular frame. During school hours I parked it in our aunt’s house which was near the school. Having an aunt so near had another advantage: if I were threatened by other boys to a fight after school, I would easily run to her house until my opponents became tired of waiting and left for home.

Most of the boys walked to school and some cycled but because the school took in boys that lived nearby where most of the households were from the lower clerical grades of the civil service no one was dropped by car. There were no school buses then. Cycling was a very common mode of transport not only for school children. The roads were fairly wide and there was little motor traffic and I bicycled even up to sixth form in 1955 for school activities in the afternoons. By then I had joined the senior school about 2 miles from home. The common brand of bicycles were Raleigh, BSA Rudge and like most manufactured things, imported from UK.

During the interval, I had mentioned that I was envious of all those who could buy their food from the tuckshop whilst I had to eat sandwiches brought from home. There were a couple of boys from rich families who had their nannies bring them a full-scale meal which they ate in the tuckshop with the nannies sitting by their side and clearing up after the meal. The aunt also invited me to her house during the interval to give me a meal. I did not accept because I did not want all the other boys to see me walking to her house from the school. I would not be able to live down the ensuing teasing.

The school did not require its boys to wear school uniforms. Most of us went in a white or a blue short-sleeved shirt and white, blue or khaki shorts with socks and white tennis or black leather shoes. Not being a sporting type I did not attend to any of the games that were held in the afternoon after school hours. The games were football, hockey and cricket. Only once I was forced by the P.E. teacher to try my hand at cricket. How to spin ball is still a mystery to me. During the school interval some of the bigger boys would kick around a football in the playing field and woe to the smaller boy who strayed into the field as the boys would slam a ball into his behind. I was a victim once and it was so painful that tears came to my eyes.

All the teachers were generalist that is to say they taught all subjects: arithmetic, history, geography, and there were no specialist. During my last year in this school amongst the other subjects taught was also history. The history book used consisted of the life stories of about 5 or 6 historical figures. I remember some of them being Buddha, Confucius, D’Alberquerque. Strangely there was no Jesus Christ or Mohamad. Because of the make up of the population the colonial government probably did not want to touch on any religious topics. The teacher was an Indian and he was very good at his work and to this day I remember some facts of these historical persons from his teaching.

Photo: thanks to CLF on flickr.com (CCL)

(Unfortunately, I don’t have any historic photos of old Malaya to illustrate this post. If you do and would like to share them on Fusion View, please do get in touch via the comments section or the Email Me link. )

I’ve never appreciated roast turkey with all the trimmings. I find it bland and lacking in celebratory festiveness. I am especially not fond of brussel sprouts! So the traditional Christmas meal is a bit of an ordeal for me. Which is not to say I don’t like turkey as such. We often eat turkey steak or turkey escalope or diced turkey throughout the year - but cooked with wine Italian-style or soy sauce or curry Asian-style.

The problem with the traditional roast turkey meal for me is that when I was a child in Malaysia, Christmas food was just so much more - more tasty, more spicy, more varied, more exciting. We would spend Christmas with my grandparents in Taiping and the preparations would start weeks in advance. As a child, I never was aware of all the effort and hard work that Grandma put into it - with the help of all the aunties, great-aunties, cousins and second cousins all over Taiping. But everyone in the large extended family would have got involved in the vast cooking marathon that would have been needed to lay on the feast that fed over a hundred people.

In the heat of the tropics, we would have a full-blown Christian Christmas, complete with tree, Santa and carols.

The kids’ job was to decorate the house. The older second cousins would be in charge - tall, good-looking Paul who seemed so grown up to us and broad-shouldered, grinning Jason. They would be the ones up the ladders stringing the paper chains, placing the balls on the higher reaches of the Christmas tree. We younger kids would drape tinsel on the lower branches of the tree, balance cards on shelves.

On the day of the big party itself, the living room would be cleared and chairs set out for the carol service. There would be a churchful of people in there, singing our hearts out. One of the fat great-uncles would always dress up as Santa in the red suit and jolly mask, arriving at the end of the service when the lights went out. He would have a sack full of presents and ho-ho-ho his way round the room, scaring the babies with the strange staring mask.

But when it came to the food, we celebrated Malaysian-style - with curries and spicy fried dishes, rice and satay: and enough to feed an army. Memories of delicious Asia will always be associated with festivities and celebration for me so a pallid turkey for Christmas, no matter how moist you might claim it is or how Christmas-y just does not do it for me at all.

What are your memories of childhood Christmases? Please add a comment and let me know!

Photo: thanks to Mr_Woo from flickr.com (CCL)