One day in the early or mid sixties, when I was aged 10 or 11, my mother’s [younger] sister, who was a nurse, brought home a little boy about a couple of years younger than I.
The first thing San Yee (as we called her for Third Aunty) did was to strip the boy, which we found rather odd.
It turned out she was inspecting him for cane marks and bruises to treat his wounds.
It turned out she was inspecting him for cane marks and bruises to treat his wounds.
Billy’s mother was very careful to beat and pinch him in places hidden by clothing. She used to beat him regularly for all sorts of things, and by inviting him over to our house to stay, San Yee was giving him (and his mother) some respite.
When Billy was a few days old, he’d fallen off the bed he was sharing with his mother, landing on his head. As a result, his mental development was a bit slower than it should be, and he would fidget and twitch constantly, which irritated his mother Angie no end. This inability to control his twitching also meant that he regularly dropped—and broke—things, which would earn him corporal punishment each time.
It didn’t help that Billy’s father had left Angie either before or soon after his birth, so Billy also served as a constant and bitter reminder of his feckless father, as well as a form of recrimination of her own carelessness in letting the baby fall off the bed.
She had subsequently re-married and borne two children — a boy and a girl. We never heard any more about this new man, but the two children were normal children, which made Billy’s slow-wittedness even more pronounced. His step-sibling brats, in spite of being younger (and therefore needing to show respect, according to the Chinese tradition), would mock and ridicule him, pinch him, and snitch on him, adding to his list of punishments, which included being made to stand in the tiny space (just about shoulder-wide for a boy of 5 or 6) between the larder and the wall, next to the toilet. The choice of the tiny space was supposedly to contain his twitching. He’d be made to stand there until he was given permission to leave. Sometimes Angie would forget about him and go to bed, so he’d end up standing there all night, not daring to leave without permission.
One of the testaments to his constant mistreatment was when we first tried to stroke his head or his shoulder, as a sign of affection or encouragement, and he’d flinch and cower as if we were about to hit him. It took many subsequent visits for him to realise that it was a gesture of love.
Taking pity on him, my aunt would bring him home every now and then for a fortnight or so.
There were five of us children, with a dog and a cat, plus six children and a dog next door, so he had plenty of jolly company.
We’d play all sorts of games like hop-scotch, setting up market stalls, and rounders — the dogs always caught the ball first and would refuse to give it back, so the game would degenerate into us chasing them around the garden for it. All very boisterous and hilarious, which was a huge contrast to Billy’s home life.
We had a huge garden with fruit trees to climb up and eat the fruits in, and to fly kites from. (We’d heat up cow hide and add ground-up glass, and apply this mixture to the kite strings, so as to literally cut down the competition when the kite strings crossed in the sky.)
Apart from the staple dog and cat, we also had a menagerie that would make Gerald Durrell very green with envy: a monkey, a home-built aviary (big enough for an adult to walk around inside to replenish water and seed supplies) for budgerigars and canaries, a mynah bird (that lived in a separate cage from the other birds, for some reason, with its own perch), a guinea pig, a dozen crocodiles and a tortoise (called Tick Tock) that lived with them, a rooster (saved from next door from being fed alive as a chick to their copy-cat crocodile farm), and an aquarium. (More about our informal zoo and my Heath Robinson of a father in another posting.)
Whenever we took him out for a drive, Billy would ask all sorts of questions, “What is this? What is that called? What are they doing?”
One day, we drove past a wedding cavalcade, so he learned that it was a wedding procession.
Later, we drove past a funeral procession, which is a very noisy affair in the Chinese custom, with banging of gongs and crashing of cymbals, sounding very jolly to the casual uninformed bystander. Billy stuck his head and arms out of the car window, waving merrily and shouting at them, “Wedding! Wedding!” The mourners were quite upset and gave us murderous looks.
We told Billy that it was a funeral and that someone had died. To the next noisy gathering of people we came across, Billy cried out, “Funeral! Funeral! Someone’s died! Someone’s died!” It turned out to be a wedding.
One day, I was going into the garden when I spotted an upturned plastic bucket sitting on the veranda, which then began to creep a few inches along! If I had any hairs on my arms, they’d have stood up on end. Then a bemused and tentative “meow” emanated from inside it. Billy had put the bucket over the cat, and gone away, leaving her wondering what had happened.
On another occasion, I came across Billy with his hand in the aquarium, chasing a goldfish round and round and round. When he finally caught it, he put it onto his palm and said soothingly, stroking it, “Poor you, poor you, you must be cold, you must be cold. I’ll keep you warm.”
One day, Billy found a huge black insect in the garden and we told him it was a Dung Beetle. One night during the monsoon season (in December), when it’d bucket down daily, we were in the covered patio area playing board games when the toads started their night chorus, as is their wont after the rains, whining in a tinny sound (rather than the usual harsh throaty croaking). Billy was most distracted by this and could not concentrate on the board game. He kept looking up and peering into the darkness of the bottom of the garden from where the noise was wafting over, wearing a look of great concern. After a few more times of this, he called out into the pitch black space, “Bung Deetle(1), Bung Deetle, why are you crying? Are you cold? Shall I get you a blanket?”
A few years later, when he would’ve been 12, my aunt came home one day with the news that Billy had died.
He’d been ill for a few days, but his mother, who was a nurse of all things, had not done anything about it. Too late she found out that it was cholera, and it was only in the ambulance as he lay in her arms on the point of dying that she finally said, “I’m so sorry, son, I’m so sorry! Please forgive me.”
(1) The original, in my Teochew dialect, for dung beetle is goo sai koo, which Billy had mis-pronounced as goo tai koo. Spoonerising the English name is the best way to convey Billy’s mistake, I felt, but perhaps I should just leave it in Teochew...
(Singapore, 1960s)
PS: Billy and Angie are not their real names.
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