BALAN MOSES nurses a Penangite devotion to Brickfields where he grew up. His book “Brickfields: A place, a time, a memory” is a loving collection of bits and pieces of that district, which started life as an “Indian” settlement made up of  Ceylon Tamils. 

School began with a trishaw ride in 1961 to St Mary’s Kindergarten, a box-shaped wooden building on concrete stilts, with its swings and slides; to the Brickfields Primary School, with 10 cents for pocket  money for ice cream, ice balls, winning money when the “tikam man” came, and stealing mee at the tuckshop which cost 5 cents per bowl, and remembering the teacher Mr Ng who bicycled to school, being pinched as a punishment, ice cream and iceballs. Then the Vivekananda Secondary School where the Baratha Natyam dance was taught, and friends for life were made. Also remembering the buses of wood and glass waiting to take the girls to the Senior Methodist Girls School. 

Games included kite wars, where top-class glass string controlled kites swooped down on the enemy, slicing through their inferior lines and sent them waltzing down to the ground in defeat, with the kids chasing after them to claim the abandoned warrior. Moses doesn’t tell us but the kite warriors must have used Size 40 thread as we kids in Penang did. There was football in the grounds of The Zion Lutheran Cathedral; and badminton at the Brickfields Post Office. They also played  “catching”, and a game called  “gng gng”. 

We learn that in the 1960s the civil service (customs, immigration, railway and telecoms - Moses must have meant the telephone service - lived in The Hundred Quarters and paid their maids, usually the wives of municipal workers from the “coolie lines”, workers in the KL Sanitary Board, $10 a month. Strange to say, the maids dressed in blouses and sarongs and doubled as sharp-eyed watchers over the children of the neighbourhood. They cooked  with firewood, then charcoal, then kerosene stoves and, when gas came, gas stoves.

Itinerant hawkers brought Chinese, Malay and Indian food to their doorstep. There was char koay tiau, mee and the usual delights, as well as ice champor which to the delight of the author he was to find also in Penang, along Penang Road; shopping was done with the mobile supermarkets on bicycles which probed the streets.

Lim Kean Chye