I Miss My Childhood

We had one of those wells at the back of the house. Mom was afraid we would fall in and drown so she put a huge rusty wok to cover it. When I came to the kampong, I always thought that wells came with woks. I never knew there was water in them. This back door opened towards the yard where the chicken coops were erected and it stank quite badly. I much preferred it without those squawking chickens.

Further back before those chickens came, before the coops were mounted on cemented ground, the backyard was green and soft. I remember treading the earth which was a rich dark brown colour and it was often littered with bright red saga seeds that I loved to pick. There were the buah susu tree and the rambutan tree which swished and swooshed on windy days and sent noisy twigs raining down on our zinc roof when the heavens opened and sent the torrents. On hot afternoons, music was the orchestrated screech of cicadas.

On many hot afternoons, Sis and I loved filling the other modified well in the bathroom and jumping into it like it was a swimming pool. That bathroom had a rough brown floor which I always thought looked repulsively dirty. Its small window looked into the backyard. Our towels hung on strings tied crudely from one wall to the other in that small dingy bathroom. It was a kind of childish pleasure immersing ourselves within the rough walls of that old well and pretending that it was some luxurious bath tub. We stayed in there until our fingers and toes shrivelled and soon Sis would remove the towel that plugged the gap at the bottom of that old well and release the water. Those afternoons, the sun baked the earth warm as we drank our tea.

Mom would often tell us that some family down the road had moved into flats and soon it would be our turn. I often looked out that back door and peered into the hedge beyond the toilet shed and wondered what the world looked like on the other side. Maybe one day I would get my own bath tub, I used to think, or better still, have an apartment with a swimming pool. How strange it all seems now.