Much of Singapore’s shoreline has been altered through land reclamation, although it once resembled a hard-baked cookie cracked and crumbling at the edges and placed in a puddle of water. There used to be many inlets and rivers making their way beyond the shoreline and finding residence in basins and other low-lying areas a few miles in from the sea. It was common for kampongs to be found in these basins, and with them their usual and unique characteristics.
A kampong’s closest western relation is a village. However the word ‘village’ reminds us of one similar to Dibley, with a little parish church, a village school, a duck pond and a pub, all with the usual rural lifestyles and idiosyncrasies. A kampong would have an uneven distribution of houses, a couple of village standpipes and the informal gathering place of an open space, usually beneath a clump of trees, where folk gathered to exchange gossip and news while the children played.
Typically, there would be about twenty to forty houses in a kampong, each house being individually built and therefore different from any other in the same kampong. Depending on the majority of the population of the homes kampongs were known as Malay, Indian or Chinese kampongs. Each of these had their own characteristics. For example, the majority of Malay kampong houses were built off the ground, and there would be more coconut trees than fruit trees. Fruit trees would feature more in a Chinese kampong where houses were at ground level but with little shrines to accommodate worship to their gods. At the edge of a Chinese kampong would be a small general store, while residents of a group of Malay kampongs would have a mosque nearby. An Indian kampong would have much more space between the houses, with goats and cows being the main livestock found there. Predictably every single village had their own scandal and gossip, bicycles and livestock, a trollop and an idiot, all loose, on the move and changing with each year.
I grew up in a village which differed from kampongs on several features. For one thing, a road went right through our village, whereas commonly a road went into a kampong and ended there. If you drove your car into a kampong, you’d have to park it in whatever space you could find then get out and walk between the unevenly spaced houses to the one you wanted. On leaving the village, you simply turned it around with much participation from the residents and drove out, minding the children and livestock on the way. Another difference was that the boundaries of the homes in our village were all well-marked. There were fences, hedges or drains clearly indicating territory. A typical kampong would not have these – everyone kept their whole kampong clean. You knew roughly where your own patch was, and everyone else’s in the kampong. You also knew who owned which hen or goat, and did not covet them.
Fruit trees bore fruit for anyone in the village – you just helped yourselves as you needed them. If you wanted a coconut, you’d ask one of the young men to climb up and get one for you, and encourage his climb. As he was up the tree, he would gather a few more, pile them up beneath the tree to save another climb in the near future, and he would be thanked with a cool drink and much flattery. A spike would be in the ground beneath the clump of coconut trees, so that you could use it to remove the thick husks from the nut. These husks would be neatly stacked, so that someone could take it to use in their compound to place around plants or young trees, or use as kindling. In our village, we all had our own fruit trees.
However, like all kampongs, ours had a standpipe. These were installed by the government so that the residents could have clean water to use there or take back to their homes for their own purposes. From about four o’clock in the afternoon, people would begin to gather at these standpipes. Typically it stood in the middle of a concrete 3-metre square specially built with a low wall and decent drainage. There would be two taps on each, much like your own outside garden tap, but with a bracket around it so that you could not attach a hosepipe to it. People would turn up with buckets, fill them up and carry them home on a pole across their shoulders. Young children would be bathed by their mothers. Men would wash their bikes there. In the morning, women washed their clothes. Ours was right next to the road, therefore was not very popular. I stopped going to ours when I was about seven, because I did not like the stares I received.
Although a number of homes had plumbed water, most kampongs had several communal bathrooms with wells. We had our own wells in our own bathrooms in our own compounds.
Very few kampong houses had electricity. Food was cooked either on bottle-gas stoves or, more commonly, kerosene stoves or wood fires. Each evening you could smell your neighbour’s cooking, which always seemed better than your own. Kerosene lamps lighted up the homes at night, and were blown out at bedtime. Unless it was cloudy, light from the moon and stars was just enough to make out shapes in the night. Every household had a battery torchlight, and every outside toilet had a nail for you to hang these on.
Most of the families living along our village road were Chinese. From this road branched common paths, each leading to miniature Malay kampongs: a dead-end and several houses. Our house was the first one off one of these branches, and I played with the Malay and Chinese children in the neighbourhood.
The games we played as children were either five stones, hop-scotch, ‘chateh’, geling-geling (if you were a boy and could run fast!), ‘balong’ (if there were enough of you) or the usual hide-and-seek, tag, police and thieves, marbles and of course, football were one around. The older men played sepak raga and the women chongkat, allowing children to join in only to make up the numbers.
All of these kampongs have now been demolished to accommodate modern housing in the form of high-rise flats, condominiums, shops and office space. While life may have become more efficient with individual plumbing, electricity, privacy and space, I consider myself lucky to have had some experience of village life of sorts. Kerosene, firewood, other people’s cooking, salt in the sea air, rotting fruit and other people’s soap at the standpipe are all smells which will stay with me for a long time yet.