Part Two

CHAPTER 3

My Second and Last School

I found life in the English school to which I was sent after leaving the Chinese school to be so delightful that I ceased to think of the Siamese classical style of dancing, that had been the cause of my downfall in my career as a Chinese student.  I started off in the ABC class with about 30 other boys of almost my age, and by dint of many repetitions of the alphabet sung out by us in a chorus after the teacher I mastered it in a very short time;  thanks to that helpful method of mass recitation.  We then came to the construction of English words. I did not find it hard, because they were made of vowel and consonant sounds in the alphabet. The teacher spelt every word, and we in a chorus repeated after him.  Later on we came to sentences, when the teacher would spell out and pronounce a word at a time, and then the whole sentence, and we in one voice would repeat after him.  A sentence like 'this is a dog' would be learnt off that way, and by way of explanation, the teacher would give its meaning in Malay. The picture of a dog in my book also helped.  If Chinese had been taught in this way, how pleasant it would have been for me, but alas!  Chinese is not an alphabetical language.  It is like that of the Egyptians basically hieroglyphic, and has 214 basic characters and also a large number of component characters, the left component giving the sense and the right component the sound.

As for the teachers through whose hands I passed as I went on from class to class, I did not find them forbiddingly severe like my first one in that memorable Chinese school. They were more human.  I felt that they would listen to me If I had anything to tell them.  No doubt they each were provided with a cane, but they hit me with it not on the back with my face turned the other way.   They hit me on the palm of my outstretched right hand, giving it three sharp strokes in rapid succession. In time I learnt to hold out my palm flat out with the thumb tucked out of the way.  But then this punishment wasn't for just  a mistake in recitation.  It was for fighting in class or outside class, which happened whenever provoked by boys who put out their tongues at me, or looked at me with hating eyes.

There was another teacher who came into my life much later. I was then a boarder, paying $30 a month, which included a bedroom to myself.  He was Brother Benedict, a native of Ceylon. Instead of using the cane, he would threaten the misbehaving boy with "I'll break your head", or he would blow into his giant handkerchief and make a sound like that of a steamer's foghorn, and thereafter everything became normal again. He was a lover of songs, and knew a good number of them by heart. The advantage of being a boarder was that I could be near him when he felt like singing. In this way I picked up songs like 'The Minstrel Boy' and '0ld Folks at Home' and many others.  In this way too I came to know of Stephen C. Foster as a famous composer of plantation Negro songs; and felt as if I was an old friend of his, when I visited the place of his birth in America in 1961.  Another Brother was a cornet player and leader of our school band.  Here again it was lucky that I was a boarder, for otherwise I would not have had the advantage of knowing him as a bandmaster.  He was a short little man from Alsace-Lorraine with a red face and a pair of short red moustaches.   Being most probably half French and half German he couldn't pronounce 'recurring' properly;  so when it came to his teaching us 'rechorring' decimals, we refrained from  looking at him, for fear of showing facial signs of the queer feelings it aroused in us.

But transcending a11 others in holiness and saintliness was Mr. Marcian, an Irishmen.  He exuded piety and religiosity. He exercised a great influence not only over me but also many other boarders.  He was responsible for the wave of conversion which swept over the school. Owing to my mother's objection my conversion was postponed till my arrival in England. 

"From Confucianism to Christianity" in 1910 seems so bizarre in 1978, the year in which this is written.

Thus did it come about that I irrevocably parted with the Chinese written language and adopted an alien language, namely English and imbibed unconsciously a foreign culture with surprisingly quite an astonishing aptitude;  so much so that my school, St. Xavier's Institution, put me up as a candidate for the Queen's Scholarship examination, in which if I had come first among the students in English schools in the then three colonies of Penang, Malacca and Singapore I would have been entitled to go to Cambridge to study free of charge for three years either law or medicine; but as Fate would have it, I came out three times second in the three years I sat for it. I could not sit it a fourth time, because I had then ceased to be in my teens. I was too old at 20, though alright till I was nineteen.  If I had only had brains for mathematics, I would certainly have won the scholarship at the first try.

Now I know why I wanted to play football so much I didn't know then that I was a natural runner and loved nothing better than running.  I didn't know that it was because I was born with an arched instep on each foot. It was only many years subsequently when I happened for some reason to pay a visit to an American doctor in America.  The doctor asked me to take off my trousers and walk before him. On seeing me walk in this condition he lost no time in telling me that I must be good at running because of the prominently arched instep of both of my feet.  This wonderful discovery by him was quite true, because I was the champion 100 yards sprinter of the three English schools in Penang and also because I came out first in the Freshers' 100 yards sprint of the 1911 batch of students admitted into Clare College, Cambridge.  That sprint was a handicap race;  the runners being handicapped according to height. I was right in front, because I was the shortest and I finished right in front, an achievement which resulted in that rule of being handicapped according to height being abolished forever and ever. 

Even now though ninety years of age it is no effort at all for me to walk down the hill from Claremont, which is about 500 feet higher than any hill in Singapore and then immediately walk up back home. Not only can I thus walk but I can and do bathe in cold water two or three times a day - a habit I learnt when I was a boarder at St. Xavier's where all the boarders had to get up every morning at 5.30 and immediately undress and stand under the sky by a 100 feet long water tank and bathe, throwing buckets of water over the body and then scrubbing it for all it was worth. As a result I became hardened to the elements and have never suffered from colds or catarrhs. #

In later years the British colonial administration in a surprise move appointed Cheng Ean a relief magistrate for Georgetown, a post hitherto reserved for whites only. Already a hero to the locals Cheng Ean's popularity was boosted when he paid the fines of those who could not afford the penalties that the law demanded that he, as a magistrate,  should impose. Once more he made the headlines. 

When the Japanese invaded,  he, with the help of policing done by the former volunteers from the SS Volunteer Corps under their commander Lim Khoon Teck, was able to restore order in Ayer Itam to which the population of Georgetown had fled.  When the Japanese administration took over they appointed him Judge of the civil division which continued to administer the law of the Straits Settlements

After the war a delegation of the Malayan People's Anti Japanese Army called on him to thank him for his work in preserving order in Ayer Itam. A few years later the British asked him to consider the award of an OBE but he rejected the suggestion

Post Merdeka Penang, however, refuses to honour its most famous son; while there are roads named after Phuah Hin Leong and Lim Cheng Teik, not one sign bears his name.#