I wonder how many people ended up in hospital while they were living in Singapore and Malaya in the 1960s? I've heard of many kids who ended up down the monsoon drains after coming off their bikes and there were stories of hookworms which, on a leaflet issued then, said that they could be contracted by walking around in bare feet. If that was the case then we should have all got them! I don't think I ever heard of anyone having any though.
I recently banged my head and when the concussion wore off, I started to think about the times I've banged my head before. If someone had asked me how many times it had happened in Singapore, I would have said just one but now I think about it, there were at least three times that I can remember. The first was just after we got there and I was three and, as I remember, I was standing up on the back of a pushchair. I would have been too old for a pushchair so maybe it was an ordinary chair. Anyhow, as I leaned on the back, it came crashing forward and I smashed my face on the front doorstep at Jalan Wijaya. I was taken to hospital where they put me under a huge x ray machine. My dad got the message at work that it was worse than it was and came rushing home and picked us up at the hospital. My face was a bit squashed and I didn't want to talk but my dad asked me if it hurt and after a while I replied, 'Of torse it hurts!' That's not a spelling mistake - I just couldn't talk properly! I can't remember how long it took me to get over it.
The second bang came when I was about a year older and I was pretending to be a kangaroo at Debbie Sharpe's birthday party. Debbie lived close to us at Jalan Dato Sulaiman. As I jumped, I cracked my head on the window and walked home, crying with blood pouring down my head. I've still got the scar!
The third time was when I was on my bike, it had stabilizers, and I went a bit too quick and fell off and hit the front gate. I'm sure I must have had other accidents like this but I can't remember them. I wonder how many other kids, who were there when I was, also ended up in hospital?
Nowadays, I just bang my head badly about every 10 years so this must mean that as I get older, I'm getting less clumsy. It certainly doesn't feel like it!
The photo shows me when I was very little and there's the doorstep in the background! I'm not sure if this was before or after the accident but I look very happy anyway.
I do remember being de-wormed every few months when we lived across the road from the Tanglin Barracks. It was a white powder that came in a white paper coin envelope (remember those for prescription pills?) mixed with water, followed by two tablespoons full of castor oil. Bloody awful stuff that.
ReplyDeleteMaybe all that banging helped to improve your retention of events from long ago.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I like that chair. We used to have a couple like that too.
Hi Chun See,
ReplyDeleteIt's funny, if you bang your head, or do something similar, you quite often remember all the events that happened on that day!
Those chairs followed us home to England and lasted until the late 1980s when they finally fell apart. Wish I still had one!