'Scared of a world outside you should go explore,Pull all the shades and wander the great indoors...' John Mayer, Great Indoors
One would think that with all the hard work put in at the Emergency Department that I would make use of the days off better. I mean, Melbourne is beautiful this time of the year, and the weather is picture perfect every day.
Which doesn't explain why it is that I spend most of it wandering the great indoors. I snuggle up in bed, draw the shades, and settle in with a good book instead.
I need someone to drag me out into the sun!
Thing No. 6: The Boy Goes to Skool (Darjah Dua)
People always think about school in terms of school time - your teachers, every period, recess, your friends, physical education sessions - but they often forget about the hours that matter, the hours spent milling about after school ended, especially on a Friday afternoon.
As a child, when school ended, only two things matter - what game will you be playing with your friends, and what you are going to be eating while you're playing those games.
I will save the games that we used to play for another entry, but today I want to remember the things we used to eat, or more importantly, the interesting people who sold them.
When school ended for the day, there was this huge compound outside our primary school where kids would invariably end up, and either start up a game of marbles, or play police and thief, or just mill about waiting for for their parents or schoolbus to pick them up.
And what better place than that grassy compound for the itinerant hawkers to come and sell their things to us:
1) There was Uncle Johnny, the perennially tanned, chubby, foul-mouthed, fortysomething ice cream and drinks seller who stayed with us into our high school years. I can remember his old motorcycle with the accompanying single wheeled sidecart where all the goodies were kept.
He would sell everything from the branded icecreams [Walls' Cornetto, Paddle Pop (Paddle Pop! Wow! Paddle Pop! Yeah! Superduperyummy!)] to the simple generic scoops which you could either have on a cone, or in between two wafers - an icecream sandwich, the best invention ever!
Somehow, Johnny had enough space in his metallic sidecart for bottles of soft drinks as well. Read that properly, we're talking Coke and Sprite and Fanta Orange and Sarsi in glass bottles. None of that recyclable aluminium cans, thank you very much. I loved those glass bottles - the bottle caps could be used for games, and there's just something authentic about drinking soft drinks from dirty glass bottles with the fading Coca-Cola or F&N trademark, you know.
2) His closest competitor was this old uncle, who was fat and was always in a singlet and gray shorts. He had none of Johnny's youth or enterprise, and he only had a bicycle.
On the back of this dilapidated bicycle was a metal box where he all he sold was aiskrim potong - red bean, corn, pandan - all for a measly five sen each. I had no idea how this man was making a living. Surely you cannot make an ice cream stick for less than five sen, right, uncle? Or are you a millionaire in disguise just bringing happiness to little kids?
What was interesting about this uncle was that on the metal box itself, was a rudimentary 'Wheel Of Fortune' like wheel made out of a circular wood and some rusty nails. You could spin the wheel for as many times as the ice cream that you bought. One time for one ice cream, two times for two ice creams, and so forth.
All along the wheel were slots reading 'Kosong' 'Satu' 'Dua' ('Zero' 'One' 'Two') which were the amount of sticks that you could potentially win. So, five sen for one stick, and a potential of winning two more ice cream sticks. Seriously uncle, this is your front for selling drugs right?
3) There was this Malay auntie who used to sell curry puffs, prawn fritters and popsicles who we absolutely adored. She was really mild mannered and had a very cute young daughter to boot
( I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no, she was too young, and which primary school kid thinks about those things... although, there would have been an endless supply of curry puffs and prawn fritters if I did marry her. Another one that got away.)
The lady would sit outside under the sprawling acacia tree, with her basket full of warm goodies, and we would rush to buy it from her. She would put your curry puffs and prawn fritters into these clear plastic bags, and you could always request for her to squirt in some homemade cili sos.
And the popsicles - oh the popsicles - all kinds of colours and flavours, from orange to lime and grape, but my favourite would have to be the one with the assam - it even had the assam seed at the bottom! She would cut off the top of the sausage like plastic bag which held the cold treat and we would greedily chew away at the plastic, sucking hard to eviscerate the icy innards.
Her husband was actually a gardener at our school, and they lived in a shed at the back of the school. During recess, we would venture to the back of the school, desperate for a curry puff or prawn fritter fix. Not even the fact that the shed lived right next to the dirtiest place in school - the primary school boy's toilet of unspeakable horrors - could deter us from eating there.
4) Finally, there was this ancient uncle, and by ancient, I mean that he was a mummy who somehow lost his tissue paper covering - this man was a skeleton with skin, and had none of his teeth left, so his mouth always looked like it caved in, and he probably had a cataract in one eye. He had the old man walk going on as well - shuffling slowly along, hunched in his grey trousers and dirty white collared short sleeve T-shirt so that he was always looking at the floor.
He would always carry around his white gunny sack of goodies with him (like a Tim Burton idea of a Santa), and, finding the spot under the tree away from the curry puff auntie, he would open the sack and lay down a mat where he would parade his wares.
He had everything a kid would want -
- those tiny playing cards with the random cartoons in front (I will explain the game later)
- the tiny boxes with the four small bubble gum balls in them (you remember them - bursts of strawberry or grape or blueberry, flavorful but useless for making bubbles)
- the sticks of fish satay - all glazed and sesame seeded for your eating pleasure!
- the bubble gums which I swear were made using the byproducts of heroin manufacturing - you know, the ones with the red or yellow wrappers with a bear blowing bubbles in the front, and the temporary tattoos on the inside? - the bubble gum itself had this eerie white powder around it, not that it stopped us from popping it into our mouths!
- marbles - from the milk ones to the cobras and the multicoloured glass ones
- the card games like Donkey, Old Maid, Happy Family (one happy family at home!) and Snap.
This uncle was like our own personal Willy Wonka, only deader.
Other hawkers came and went but these four were the perennials who I remember distinctly, unobtrusive witnesses to us, the children as we grew up in the sun of that grass courtyard in front of our school.
