My maternal grandma had a coconut plantation in Tampines [pronounced tam-pin-nees] in the north eastern part of Singapore, not far from Pasir Ris, edging on the new Changi International Airport. (Grandma’s plantation was, in fact, requisitioned for the expansion of Changi Airport.)
The two siblings immediately above me grew up on the plantation. My mother was renting a room in the suburbs (not far from Kovan on one side and Serangoon Gardens on the other), so there was no space for them there. Being the youngest, I was kept by my mother’s side.
Although my mother bought a bungalow with a big garden when I was five, it was still only a suburban space, compared to Grandma’s coconut plantation which also housed a chicken farm (for eggs) and two fish ponds (with two harvests annually). (The pigs went during the early 60s.)
For a child from the suburbs visiting during the school holidays and weekends, it was heavenly. I’d have breakfast, then go off wandering around the plantation on a bicycle, come back for lunch, then go off wandering around the plantation on the bike until dinner time.
Wandering around meant, for example, discovering, on the edge of a pond, a coconut tree that had keeled over for some reason, but not totally uprooted. It was lying over the water, so I could walk on it to its top end, sit there, with my feet dangling over the water, almost in the middle of the pond, completely surrounded by water — and silence.
I’d sit there for ages, just me and nature.
(Singapore, 1960s)
*The tampines tree in Singapore:(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloetia)
Sloetia is a monotypic genus (i.e. a genus that contains just one species) of plants in the mulberry family, Moraceae. The sole species is Sloetia elongata, a tree native to southeastern Asia, ranging from the Nicobar Islands to Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, Borneo, and Sulawesi. It has been described a number of times by different botanists, and thus has several synonyms.
No comments:
Post a Comment