Mum-meries 6: Of Toys made from handkerchiefs

We are a family of 7 kids. My parents didn’t have high paying jobs and though we were never hungry or in great want, we also never had luxuries. Well, not many anyway.

I remember once, when I was in the midst of the chaos involved in ferrying 3 kids up to KL for the New Year or whatnot, talking with my Mum about travelling and holidays and family excursions. Struggling already with just the 3, I wondered aloud how she managed with the 7 of us when we went to the movies and so on. Her reply was short and simple ‘We never went out.’

I cast my mind back and realised she was right - I had not one recollection of us trooping off to the cinema or to some new attraction, much less a shopping mall. She explained that they just couldn’t afford to go out. They concentrated on the neccesities and though by the time I’d come along things were more settled, our holidays were simple affairs - Port Dickson with aunts, uncles and cousins who all shared a bungalow at the 3rd mile called Sandytide being an example - and if I was taken along to the movies, it would be with one of my brothers.

My Dad used to take the boys off to the East Coast during the school holidays and I remember those with affection too but there was only one time I travelled long distance with my mother.

I must have been just 3 or 4 years old and it’s one of my earliest memories now. My father had gone to Penang and I think it was for an Orchid show. For some reason Mum decided to take me there too by train. I have a brief recollection of an unpainted-steel train parked at night at what must have been the main station in KL. Mum and I shared the top bunk of the sleeper and I recall too looking out onto the corridor and seeing the rows of bunks. There was a group of young men travelling together just a little ways down and Irecall two of the men sitting on their lower bunks and talking across the aisle. One of their friends was on the upper bunk and I watched fascinated as he hopped across to the facing top bunk without descending to the floor.

My Mum pulled me back in and we drew the curtains though the conversational noise continued to come through.

Smetime later, I was still awake and Mum took out a handkerchief, then knotted it here and there and suddenly in her hands was a little doll, a toy man. We played with it for some time and though the intervening 45+ years has blurred the memories, I can still see her hands holding the arms of this toy man she’d made, manipulating them and I have a visual recollection of her mouth moving, making toy man noises, no doubt, though the sounds have been lost to the winds of time.

In Penang I recall seeing my Dad smiling, and I remember too staying at their friends’ house. Just little flashbacks - looking up from a mattress on the floor towards a woven rattan wall and the window above it, moonlight streaming in.

This was the only trip I, as a child, ever made with Mum and though this is a nothing-memory, an ethereal set of fleeting images and sounds, there is still something touching and heartwarming about it that I’ve treasured for years. At some subliminal level perhaps this is why I, until today, eschew tissues for handkerchiefs.