Mother's day thoughts

Sunday 12th May will be Mother's Day. so here am I having some thoughts on this important day in our calender/

I wonder where would I be today had it not been for my mother who made great sacrifices to bring up four children. She was illiterate and could not speak a word of English. She spoke her own dialect Teochew and Malay and brought the family up using these two languages.

She was married at the age of 16 to my father much older than she. He had been a stowaway from China at the age of 12. Penniless and with no friends or relatives in Singapore, he went to a construction site, got himself a job and became a brick layer. We did not see much of father, but when he did come home, he was quite often drunk. So mum made all the decisions for the family.

Much against my father's will, she insisted that the three boys should attend English School. She did not see any reason to send the eldest a girl to school! After all girls would just stay home to cook and do housework!

There was no such thing as kindergarten in those days, so I started in Primary 1 at the Rangoon Road Afternoon school. I can still remember my first teacher, Mrs. de Souza.

Mother laboured as a washerwoman; washed clothes for several families in the morning, then rushed home to take me to school, then back again to do the ironing. She did this  in the initial months, till I knew the way to and from school, each day walking from Lorong Limau to Rangoon Road and back. Well, we all survived living from hand to mouth. She gave me one cent a day to get a drink from what we called the 'tuck shop.'

She also worked as a caretaker at The Salvation Army Balestier Road. It was a shop house, so there was not much to do, except to sweep and wash the cement floor once a week. She was invited to the Home League and the ladies were kind to her. Before I started school I used to attend the Home League with her.  O I loved the Home League for one good reason - the ladies would always give me cakes to eat! Home League to me was the best meeting, much better than Sunday school.

Then the war came and life changed for us all. I had three and a half years 'school vacation' after the fateful day when the Japanese invaded Singapore on Chinese New Year 1942.