I can just imagine a little boy, grimy face, peering out of the door, waiting for his father to come home with the milk. The doting father taking delight at the sight of his son happily sucking the milk. All the hardship must be worth it - to see the delight in the boy's face. Grandma often said dad was lucky to be able to have sweetened condensed milk everyday. By the time my second uncle was born, life was even harder and they could not afford to buy any more milk. Thus the second baby had to be fed with breast milk. Now we know that mother's milk is best but to those illiterate folks, they thought that mother's milk was inferior to the commercial brands. Grandma often reminisced : "Your poor uncle - we couldn't afford to buy milk and he was was constantly tugging at my breast." (That explains why grandma favoured 2nd uncle so much and spoiled him to bits)
Times were hard. Grandpa's job was barely enough to cover the rent and their living expenses. Besides, they felt obligated to send some money back to China to support their adopted parents . After my father, they had two more babies. One was stillborn. When the third baby came, they just could not cope and they decided to sell the baby. However the child died after a few days. Finally when my 2nd uncle was born, they decided to keep him. That was when the incident of the rickshaw happened. So they left Singapore.
My father's family came to Sri Gading in 1935 (when he was 8 years old). In Sri Gading, grandpa found a job as night soil carrier. Tough work but still not enough to feed the family. He then took on another job - selling fish. So after he had cleaned up from his first job, he would head to the market and bought on credit a box of fish. He would then peddled the fish to individual homes. By noon having sold off most of the fish, reserving some for the family, he would the return home for lunch and to rest a while. In the afternoon, he would cycle to the Malay kampongs and peddled sundries - flour, onions, ikan bilis... etc. In return he would buy bits of rubber from them and sell them to the rubber dealers.
There was a tiny school house - one classroom and a Chinese teacher taught rudimentary Chinese and numeracy to those who could afford to pay his fees. My grandparents could not afford to pay the fees so dad did not go to school. However he would hang around outside the school and watch the lesson being conducted. The teacher would chase him away . No money, no lessons. Shoo!! But dad would creep back and hid outside the classroom to catch some lessons. If he were caught again, more scoldings from the teacher. Scram!! This went on and on. The teacher complained to my grandparents. Finally grandparents managed to scrap some money and enrolled father in the school. he was already 9 years old when he started schooling.
Meanwhile, grandma had made quite a big clearing around the house. She planted vegetables, sweet potatoes, tapioca, chillies, sugar cane and these she would sell them to supplement the family income. She really worked hard on the land and I must say that she had green thumbs for her vegetable patch produced good yields. (Perhaps I inherited this love for planting from her).
Grandfather would ride his bicycle every other day to Batu Pahat to buy sundries for his mobile business in the Malay kampongs - Parit Yaani, Semburong, Sengkuang, Parit Butut, and many remote areas.
My father was no less enterprising. When he was free, he would hawk some fruits to his classmates. Sometimes there were free film shows by the government bodies - educational programmes. The whole village would flock to the open space to watch the shows. On and off, certain commercial companies would stage free films too. During these times, my father would buy some fruits - papaya, pineapples etc, as well as get the sugar cane from the garden . He would cut the fruits and sell them to the villagers. ( Mum recalled buying some fruits from him when she was a little girl). On weekends, he would rent a trishaw and cycle to Batu Pahat. There he would pick up passengers ( Like the modern day pirate taxis). Before returning home, he would then buy a tin of cooking oil and then sell the oil to the villagers (perhaps at a slightly lower price than the sundry shops). He was about 11 or 12 years then.
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