After completing pupillage in July 1956, Francis Seow joined the Singapore Legal Service. His description of the Singapore River scene is irresistible. “With an introductory letter from him [AP Rajah] to the attorney general in hand, I strode happily late one Saturday morning in July across bustling Raffles Place, along Battery Road towards the General Post Office, and skirted the Malayan Bank Building at flint Street. As I traversed the narrow Cavanagh Bridge, which spans the malodorous, muddy Singapore River, covered with the flotsam and jetsam of one of the world’s busiest seaports, a familiar scene greeted my eyes. Wooden lighters and Chinese junks with painted staring eyes, secured to one another by mooring ropes, were bobbing up and down in rhythm to the restless river, which ceaselessly jostled and justled them into myriad aqueous floral patterns. The bobbing boats were linked to terra firma by slender, swaying, timber gangplanks along which grunting, leathery Chinese coolies balancing precariously weighty loads on their bare shoulders staggered from the skittish vessels to unload them onto lorries waiting by the river bank, returning empty-shouldered to perform repeatedly this Olympian trial of strength and balance. The pungent, spicy morning air was punctuated with loud shouts of cautionary instructions from alert overseers. This picturesque riverine scene beloved of artists and photographers is now no more, banished forever by a fastidious, environs-conscious government.” … “Salad Days” in To Catch a Tartar by Francis Seow
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 03:46:56 +0000
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