In and Around No 43

A secondary school was in the neighbourhood - with its entrance less than 100 metre from our house. The school gate was seldom locked and even if it did - climbing over the 7 foot tall gate posed no problem. The gate opened into a gravel road flanked one one side by tall causarina trees which always attracting black beetles and adjacent to it was a wide open field. In 'drier' period the ground there hard and it was real fun to run 'amok' in the empty field in the cooling late evening or to collect the freshly mowed grass and layered them to form a thick bed of grass to 'trample' on or lying down and watching the blue blue sky and smell the earth. We used rectangular boards as high-speed 'frisbees' - we flung them at great force and watched them slicing through the air and soared to great height and eventually ended up on the opposite ends of the field. The field was mostly empty on weekends - we had the whole field to ourselves. The drainage out of the school was bad - as a result the concrete drains outside the classes and the basketball court often got flooded. Water stayed literally for weeks resulting in the best breeding grounds for water-borne insects and creatures - water spider, jelly-sticky frog - eggs , tadpoles in various stages of growth , cicada-like nymphs etc - a truely naturalist paradise for those who care to investigate. The school was surrounded by marshlands where water buffaloos roamed and 'water-bird' waded through muddy water infested with unseen leeches. Pockets of Simpoh ( the broad leaves were once used for wrapping toufo) , isolated seven candles with orange candle-like flowers, sendudok flashed pink/purplish flowers and panduan screwpines with bright orange red 'pineapple-like' fruits dotted landscape. I remembered we had encountered one huge lizard ( not monitor-lizard) size of a adult croc. In front of the gate were a desiel powered oil derrick which was connected to other passive oil derrick via inch thick cables. Nearby were rows of huge sedimentation tanks - for separating sand from the raw crude oil. Whenever oil wells were found, the crude oil formed a hard crust no plants life can strive for years. It was the same well that had caught fire on day.. I could see the thick black smoke some kilometers from my primary school not knowing then it was so close to my home.