LIFE OF CONTRASTS

What a difference the sun  makes!

Last week was gloriously hot, and we thought summer had finally arrived! We were fooled again, as the rain showed no sign of stopping for three days. We tidied our terraces, planted more petunias and a hanging basket ready for summer, but the sun did not come out to play!
  

Front garden of Otter House

We gave up our Otter House ten years ago, as it needed a lot of garden work in the summer. Now we are in an  apartment with two terraces, a dozen blue pots, full of dwarf conifers, rose buses, hydrangeas and colourful annuals.  This is extremely manageable, even when we travel much of the winter months. However, in summer we do need to keep up with the watering as the pots dry out quite quickly, as we have a lot of windy days.





My Life's Journey in India continued in paradise,  around the foothills of the Himalayas .


In 1943 we spent many months between Siliguri and Kalimpong, the area south of Darjeeling was so restful that my parents felt it was their first real holiday for years, a contrast from their busy life in Calcutta, teeming with people, cows, bullock carts, and rickshaws, with lorries and cars honking at hundreds of people and coolies with heavy loads on their heads jogging along on paved thoroughfares.  If a vehicle were to knock anyone over, that driver would need to flee quickly, otherwise he would be beaten up by other pedestrians. One reason why my father preferred to cycle in the City.

Does anybody recognise someone in this photo?

In Kalimpong, my parents met many like-minded people, who had also escaped the chaos in Bengal. To pass the time, my mother and godmother played mah-jongg with these new friends and a couple of local ladies from Kurseong. 
The tiles of this Chinese game used to be made of bamboo and bones, engraved with characters and various suits, today you can buy the tiles made in plastic, and the game is being played all over south-east Asia, the jarring sound you hear is the noise of shuffling the tiles at      the end of each game.  

My mother got hooked on this game and really enjoyed playing it wherever and whenever there were four players met together, especially on birthdays, other festival and holidays.

We kids had lots of other children to play with, as we went on walks, picked wild flowers and chatted to each other, we generally had a lot of fun with hide and seek and learning new games.  My father, a keen photographer, enjoyed capturing everything at all events, so he, too, was having some good quality time.    

Not so back in Calcutta, as my father learned that the Province of Bengal was facing a severe famine in 1943, due to the severe bombing, the lack of administration and the inability to import rice when crops failed, so millions died of starvation in the cities and countryside. 

Once the Japanese fleet moved away from the Bay of Bengal, the bombing of Calcutta stopped and we returned to find lots of displaced families unable to make ends meet, begging became rife and more homeless people slept rough on the streets, under trees or doorways and shop-awnings.  The City took some months to assess the damage and set to work to clear and rebuild, some services like electricity and water supply resumed quite soon, but unsightly rubbish and garbage piled high for a while, with lots of poverty-stricken families salvaging whatever they needed. 

Our grocery shop opened intermittently during this period, only allowing known customers to enter, such as restaurants and other businesses requiring Chinese goods, sauces and preserved or dried produce.  We also had a section dealing with Chinese Herbal Medicine, popular with ex-pat Chinese, who knew what they needed for prevention or cure, and to re-balance their internal yin-yang system.  Strict weights and measures were followed from my father's medical book, which he inherited from his father.  As children, we drank many brews and teas, boiled or steeped in dried herbs, roots such as ginseng or donguai and special chrysanthemum flowers imported from China, which not only cured many common illness but restored calm and equilibrium.

My Father in 1943

My father was born in the early 1890’s, in Penang, Malaya, where his father worked in Chinese herbal medicine.  My father was only 8 years old, when his father died, so his mother took the family of four children back to China, to the Lai family village in Guangzhou, known to us then as Canton.  My father and his siblings were named according to the Chinese characters of the four compass points:  Tung (East - oldest), Nan (South - second), Xi (West - third) and Bei (North - youngest), my father being second was named Nam-Hing as pronounced in Cantonese or Nan-Xing in Mandarin Chinese.

With hardly any time spent in school, my father was mainly self-taught, reading anything that came his way; he soon left the village to earn a living in the big city of Canton, where he met up with a partner in business, setting up the import/export venture that took him to India.  Somehow he became really proficient in writing Chinese characters with brush and ink, his calligraphy was so good that many Chinese customers used to ask him to write words of good omen for wedding banners, presentation, or other celebration.

We lived above the Chinese grocery shop and at the back was a Soya Sauce factory, with rows of four-foot high ceramic jars for fermenting soya beans in the sun, and when the sauce was ready, it was siphoned off into bottles, capped and labelled for sale.  We also made hot chili and tomato sauce, and in the dry winter months all hands on deck to clean ducks for preservation and pork minced and mixed to my father's special recipe for sausages that were hung on poles inside a netted cage, to air-dry on our sunny flat-roof terrace.

There were activities going on all the time that kept my Uncle Poon and staff of two Chinese and two Indian employees busy all year round, whilst my father liaised with our Chinese Agent Mr. Au in Hong Kong, with our export of herbs and spices, in return for import of Chinese herbal

My Mother in 1940

medicine, produce and dried ingredients. Above the Sauce Factory was a spacious warehouse, where goods were stored waiting for export, or shelves of grocery goods for re-stocking the shop.  

My mother, with her limited English and Hindi, managed to produce shipping lists of items for customs clearance, and when the huge wooden crates arrived, she would attend the Docks, often for the whole day or two, waiting for an official stamp on importation paperwork, so they could confirm transportation for a delivery date.  These long days of hanging around the docks with no lunch or proper sustenance had contributed to my mother developing diabetes, for which, she had to give up starch, sugar and so many Chinese food she liked.


I was five years old by the time WW2 came to an end when I started going to Chinese school with my older brother Yee Leong, who was three years older than me and was a really good brother all my life.

Speak to you again in a fortnight or so.