26 May 2009

A return after a 50-year break to a childhood haunt is a mind-warping experience bringing flashbacks of highs and lows, longings and regrets. It’s a roller coaster ride I experienced twice in the last year. The first time was in 2008 when, with my wife, I gingerly approached the front door of Woodsville house, quite unannounced.

Once I introduced myself and then spoke to Mrs Charles, who gave us a tour, the warmth of the house overtook me. Mrs Charles encouraged me to assemble some family memorabilia to contribute to the museum space as there was little there to commemorate the life of my father, one of the school’s principals. The same complex feelings returned a few weeks ago when I attended a short ceremony inaugurating the R. K. S. Adams memorial material within the school’s ground-floor museum.

My father, Canon R. K. S. Adams, was first a teacher and then principal of the school in the period 1927 to 1955. I was his fourth son, born in 1942 just as the first world war reached Singapore—there’s a fuller history in the museum. I returned with them after the war and lived in Woodsville House from 1946 to 1953. One of my first childhood memories is of being shown my bedroom, the room that’s now the vice-principal’s office with its trapezoidal vent above the door.

Standing recently in the middle of the ground floor, looking at the exhibits, many long-obscured memories were triggered. Looking down the hallway towards the front door and out to the porch I saw a shiny black Ford Prefect car standing to attention. Beyond was a grass roundabout with a rain tree in the centre—if you picked off the tip of the buds they made excellent one-shot water pistols. Beyond that I saw Beccles House, the vice-principal’s house with a Durian tree in the distance. Turning to my right, looking through the ground-floor louvered doors, I saw first an expansive lawn then a Kapok tree and a Bua Sentol tree at the top of the steep embankment that led down to the muddy, potholed, Meyappa Chettiar Road. In the distance the Potong Pasir lakes with atap houses and fishermen. The Kapok tree brought the pontianak ghost, or at least stories of it. As a child I used to scoff at the credence my local friends gave to the pontianak stories but it was hard not to be affected. One dark evening they dared me to run out and touch it. I summonsed up the courage and did so—as quickly as I could—breathing a huge sigh of relief on my return. Of course they then said I was orang putih so was immune.

Next to the Kapok tree the Buah Sentul tree was a childhood wonder as it had so much fruit. One of my local friends was an excellent shot with a catapult—even then illegal—and could shoot them down. It was such a tall tree that there was no other way.
Further around, towards the back of the house, were various garden plots. I planted some papaya trees and there was always a tapioca plot. Right at the back were vines on which lived some small black spiders. We collected them in the flat cigarette tins of the time and brought them out for spider challenges. Then there was a small bamboo plot. If one chose the right sized stick and cut off a section between nodes and then armed oneself with a mouth full of mung beans it made an excellent rapid-fire machine-gun blow pipe.

Around a bit further was a chicken coop with a Rambutan tree. We never could get ripe ones because someone would always pick them before they were fully ripened in case someone else got them—such is human nature.

Back inside the house I remember Sunday lunch at the dining table, the round-ended table that’s still there. Sunday lunch was always either curry or nasi goreng with fried eggs on top and I always ate so much I couldn’t progress further than the second step of the grand staircase where I used to lie to recover.

An incongruous element for me now, in the far corner of the ground floor, is the old, slightly kidney-shaped principal’s desk my father used to have in his office on the ground floor of the old school building. I would occasionally visit him there where he seemed a remote figure behind that desk.

But soon my thoughts returned to the present, to the well-preserved Woodsville House building in the centre of the school giving a sense of continuity with the past. It’s a tribute to the planning of Mrs Charles and others that Woodsville House has been preserved from the developer’s sweep. I felt privileged to be there and to be able to relive some of my past in that grand building.