The Darkness in our Bedok Kampong

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With most of us having moved to brightly lit HDB estates following the relocation and redevelopment years, it is almost overwhelming to remember just how dark our kampong nights once were.

At our home at 10J Bedok Road, the rear of the house, where the main entrance door was actually located, faced a gravel road illuminated by only a handful of widely spaced incandescent street lamps. The front of the house, however, faced the sea and had no such lighting. Once dusk fell, a curtain of darkness would descend upon us.

This photograph captures the front verandah of our house, with its distinctive criss-cross timber lattice panels. Seated on a rattan armchair is our mother, then in her mid-thirties, in 1973. What is remarkable is that beyond the reach of the camera's flash lay complete darkness. The photographer was looking directly out from the verandah, yet there was virtually nothing for the lens to capture.

Looking at the image today, it is little wonder that kampong nights often fuelled childhood imaginations and the many superstitions that accompanied them.

The older of us boys vividly recall one evening on this very verandah when I was cutting my toenails. No sooner had I started than my father appeared and promptly scolded me.

"Don't cut your nails at night, boy, or the momok will come and get you," my father warned.

Those were the days when mysticism, folklore and traditional beliefs were woven into everyday life. And who was I to argue with him? Beyond the verandah stood clusters of banana trees, their dark silhouettes swaying gently in the night breeze.

To many kampong children of that era, banana groves were inseparable from supernatural stories of the local folklore. Whether the tales were true hardly mattered. In the darkness of a Bedok kampong night, with little more than the sound of rustling leaves and distant insects for company, our imaginations readily filled in the rest.

The nail-cutting stopped immediately and, as far as I can remember, never resumed at night.

Today, the memory brings a smile. Yet for those of us who grew up in Bedok kampong, such stories were part of the charm of kampong living, where darkness, imagination and a healthy respect for the unseen often went hand in hand.



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