Snapshots of Mandalay Road

Mom's birthday was on Monday and she turned 63 - which I still consider very young, especially for someone with her joie de vivre. Family celebrated with a steamboat dinner at Golden Mile (very yum!) and a cake at home. Mom and I have always said we'd go to Italy together - she because she wants to see Rome and Venice and I because I think its cool to travel with mom. I've been thinking of this for years and I think its time. If I wait for all my kids to grow up, we might never have the chance to do this - mom is not getting any younger. So I think I'd like to fix it for next year - May/June in the spring or late Sept/Oct in the autumn. But the planning starts now.

Yesterday in the car coming home from Ikea, mom was reminiscing about the Mandalay Road days. I love to listen to her - love to imagine my mom as this young girl, in the spring of her life, training to be a teacher, her friends, her romances, my dad as this gangly young man courting her. I've always liked that time in the past - the 60s, 50s etc.

"Mother Angela, Mother Campion... Sister Holy Child..." those were the names of the FMDM nuns who trained mom and her gang to be nurses. Mom was only about 17 then and back then, training meant living in the hostel at Mandalay Road. There were 15 of them in the hostel, training to be nurses. The bungalow was an old colonial with wide verandas running round the upper floor. The girls' bedrooms were on the upper floor. The 15 girls were split into three rooms - 6 in one, then 3, then 6. Mom was one of the 3 in the middle room. There was a classroom on the same floor and another classroom on the ground floor - and that one held all the bones - real human bones - which the girls studied for anatomy class. There was also a full skeleton which the girls affectionately called Jimmy. And in the classroom upstairs, a mannequin the girls called Deborah.

The bungalow was terribly spooky and was in fact, haunted. "We would hear footsteps but there would be no one there. Then the phone would ring downstairs in the middle of the night but when we answered, it would be dead. We could hear a voice calling... and Margaret actually saw a woman combing her long hair right next to her one night! We were so scared that we would push our beds together to sleep! But the nuns didn't like that of course and we would be scolded terribly if they found out. So we always had to push the beds back in the morning!"

The kids were all agog and for once, the car was silent as they listened to mom. "Apparently," mom went on, "the house was haunted by the ghost of a doctor's wife who hanged herself in the main stairwell."

But it wasn't all about ghosts. It was fun too. "The nuns were strict. We would be scolded and scolded for little things. When it was lights out, they meant it. We could not read or talk. So if we wanted to read the comics or talk to each other in other rooms, we'd sneak off to the toilets in a group. The lights from the toilet could not be seen from the nuns' quarters! And one night, when we were really scared and pushing the beds together, we accidentally broke a wall! And the nuns were furious!"

Then there was The Scratcher - a man who rode around on motorbikes with a razor, slashing women's faces. Mom was not clear if this was real, because they never caught him, or if it was an urban legend. But she remembers the nuns contemptuously scolding the girls, "All of you are so vain! You think people really want to scratch you?? Who would want to?" And then there was the Orang Minyak or Oily Man, who would slick himself with oil and molest women and because he was so slippery with oil, no one would ever be able to catch him. Another urban legend?

Then there were the boys. Who drove up to the nurses' quarters and flashed their headlights at the girls' rooms. And then there was my dad, tall and thin, who called himself Sinoran - and I only first heard of this a couple of days ago and it just floored me! - which meant, according to mom, an amalgamation of two words - sino which refered to Chinese and 'ren' which was man. So I guess it meant something like 'chinaman'. Everyone called him that. Mom's friends still refer to him with that today. Martin Christopher was just his baptism name which he took on in order to be baptised, in order to marry mom. (It was that or no wedding, my grandma threatened. See the things we do for love?)

Why I am writing this? I think these are snapshots of an era gone by. Its a form of oral history. If I don't record this, it will be gone with mom when she passes on. And I think memories are a great way of reliving the past and remembering the life of a person. So when I think of mom, its not just in the context of her role as a mother or a grandmother, but as a woman, a girl, a daughter.

I hope with this blog, maybe my kids will see a different side to me one day as well.