Buying a Beer In Kuala Lumpur

    At the end of most days I enjoyed the pleasure of a cold beer. The heat and humidity of the day would fade and I would rest, away from the dust of the street and the rigours of an idle life. Here in the quiet of a local restaurant, I could sit and watch life around me unfolding as it did, day in and day out, whether I was there or not. I took this time out from sight seeing or exploring the city or countryside and found some cool, dark place to sit and enjoy one or two cold drinks. Sometimes, when I was in a city of some size I would change my usual clothes, don something that was as close to respectable as I could muster and would visit some up-scale hotel. There, amid the air conditioning, the potted plants and the piped in music I would sit and watch the tourists coming and going in their crisp, clean clothes. I could only imagine the lives of the men, all shaved and cologned and the women perfumed, not a hair out of place and wonder what it was like to have such money to afford this existence. I knew that I could watch it but that I would never live it. I lived in hostels and cheap hotels that had toilets down the hall. I washed my clothes in the sink at night and ate from food stalls, flirting with dysentery with each bite. A cold sore from a dirty glass was the worst I ever had to bear. I count myself lucky. But here in the lap of luxury I could only be amazed as I was treated with deference by waiters dressed in stylized local costumes who would bow at the waist, take my order and accept my money. They were aware of my charade. I looked the life I led even when dressed to try and disguise it. After an hour of this I would have had enough and would head back out to the heat and the dusty streets that were my part of the city.

   It was nice, upon occasion, to be treated as if I belonged and not as if I were sent as some cosmic test upon the owner or waiter of some back street food stall. At these places, where I more often than not would go in the late afternoon to quaff a cold one I seemed to be a phenomenon encountered for the first time. I was a white person, a white person who sat at a table and appeared to want something. Deference was not on the mind of those who were about to assume some sort of responsibility for my being there. This scene played out all over South East Asia and was played out with little variation regardless of the country or the number of white tourists in the vicinity. So long as I chose a place to have a drink that was a couple of blocks away from the main tourist area it ran true to form, as though there had been a script handed out for just such an occasion. 

    There were two main brands of beer that I remember, Tiger and Anchor and they came in two different size bottles, large and small. Every place had at least these two different brands and had the two different sizes. I, for whatever reason happened to favour Anchor brand beer and for economy of time if not cash would order the large size. The script was, as I said, always the same. The location and ambience of the place were the only variables but these didn’t matter. 

    I would see a place on my route back to the hostel/cheap hotel and decide on a beer. I’d walk in through the open door to the gloom of a small room lit only with the light from the window and a florescent tube at the rear of the establishment where a small group of men were engaged in a conversation. All but me were oriental, all but me spoke Chinese. I chose a table by the window so I could watch the street and waited. The conversation, which had been in full swing when I entered, now stopped and the only sounds were those from the street and the hum of the cooler full of beer. If I had looked I would have seen all heads turned, all eyes on me and then one short, staccato burst of Chinese would be spoken. There would be a reply or two and again silence. More words and then in the silence I would hear the slap, slap of a pair of thongs coming my way. A slight, middle aged Chinese man would appear wearing the national, cheap eatery uniform, a white undershirt called a singlet, a baggy pair of pants too short by correct sartorial standards, the thongs and a cigarette held in the lips and bleeding smoke into one eye. And the play would begin….

“What you want?” This was as much an accusation as a question as though I were there to cause some sort of, as yet undiscovered mischief.

“I’d like a beer please, a large Anchor beer.” I held my hands up indicating the size of a large bottle while I carefully enunciated ‘beer’, aware of the language differences.

“You want beer?” It was again more of an accusation than a question. There was a murmur from the back of the room and then once more, silence.

“Yes please, an Anchor beer,” my hands rose, “a large Anchor beer.” and now were held between us, shaking back and forth slightly to indicate the size of the bottle. 

“What kind of beer you want?” Now the tone changed slightly from pure accusation to part challenge as though if I ordered the wrong type of beer he’d have caught me dead to rights in some sort of conspiracy.

“I’d like an Anchor beer please, a large Anchor beer.” I glanced at the cooler. 

“You want Anchor beer?” His tone was now close to hostile as though the whole plot, the whole reason for my being there, was about to be revealed.

“Yes, a large Anchor beer.” My one hand held at the approximate height above the table my other indicating a drinking motion. 

“What size Anchor beer you want? You want large Anchor beer or you want small Anchor beer?” 

I thought I’d better get this right as it would be my last chance to get what I was after. One wrong word and I’d end up with nothing or a small coke. “I’d like a large beer, a large Anchor beer please.” My hands once more were held to indicate a large bottle. The group at the back were so engrossed in the play that a cigarette burnt down to the fingers of one man and a flurry of words and activity suddenly erupted. My waiter turned and for a moment I thought that I was about to be out of luck at this place but he once again resumed the script.

“You want large beer?” He forgot to say the brand. Did this mean that we’d have to begin the whole thing over again? 

“Yes please, a large Anchor beer.” This was the pivotal moment, it all was about to happen or was going to fall apart and I’d be told that there was no beer even as the cooler hummed away in the distance. 

“Large Anchor beer?” For the first time I thought I might be winning, it was a statement that verged on being a question. 

“Yes.” It was all in his hands now. Would I drink or move on, parched, to the next place I could find? He looked at me as though trying to decide what to do or if he had heard me correctly and then he turned and walked away.

    The conversation at the back of the room once again began in earnest. My waiter spoke with the group, all looked at me, a man spoke and gestured, I smiled. Then he walked to the cooler and took out a bottle of the beer I had been asking for. A glass was found, one of those small, firm glasses usually seen in the bathrooms of hotels and both would be brought to my table and laid before me. An opener was produced and the bottle uncapped. I tilted the bottle, already laden with dew in the humidity of the afternoon and poured a glass full as the waiter retreated and for the moment I could be ignored if not forgotten. 

    In the street outside nothing of consequence took place other than the daily routine of a world that was fascinating for me because of the unfathomable secrets that it held. If I lived there for the rest of my that life I felt I’d die an old man still trying to figure out the mysteries of the place. 

    Some times as the sun would begin to set and as my drink was about to finish I would hear the sounds of the kitchen. Pots and pans would be set heavily down and something would be tossed into a heated wok and the hissing and spluttering of cooking would remind me that I hadn’t eaten yet and so I would begin act two of the play. 

    A look at the back of the room revealed a menu in two or three languages hung on the wall. Usually I could figure out what was being offered and so would decide on some special of the day. After some studious ignoring I would finally get the attention of the same benighted man that had first been forced to deal with me. He would slowly disengage himself from the rest of the group and make his way to my table. 

    “What you want?” He was as eager to serve as always. I would point to the menu and ask for the meal of my choice. He would turn to gaze at the board as though it were the first time that he had ever realized it was there. He paused as if contemplating some greater reality and then turned again to me. “No got food!” Dishes clattered beyond the beaded curtain that separated the two rooms. I would begin to protest but a wave of the hand and another “No got food!” would dismiss me and he would turn to rejoin the group. I was left standing in the middle of the room, the smells of spiced chicken and sesame noodles wafting on the air and I would turn to leave, defeated at last. Just then an old man bearing a tray of food would come through the curtain and into the room. Some, if not all of the men would turn to look my way, hoping perhaps that I was gone or at least dull enough to not realize what was on the tray. I’d look and smile and all would turn again to the task at hand and I would be forgotten. 

    The street corners were occupied with men selling chicken satay cooked over charcoal fires or roti makers tossing and stretching the dough in the Asian way and so tonight I would eat standing up on a darkened corner of a side street in Kuala Lumpur. 

1973.

 The second in a series written for the newsletter of the Upper Ottawa Valley Genealogical Group. Published in a slightly shorter form, July, 2016.

The Hesitant Beginning of the Pembroke Collegiate Institute.

It all began with an innocuous little item in the April 6th, 1922 edition of the  Pembroke Observer,  “School Problems Were Discussed, Committee to Locate High School Site.” A committee was indeed formed to “go into the matter of locating a site for a New High School.”  With this seemingly simple task began three years of debate, fighting, government intervention and more newspaper ink than had ever been used on one story in the history of the paper.

The old high school on Isabella Street was overcrowded and the new head of the fire department, Chief Blackler had inspected the building and essentially called it a fire trap that was not suitable as a school without major repairs. Something had to be done.

It all seemed so easy. By the first of June two sites had been selected, one at the corner of Peter and Herbert Streets on a piece of land that was owned by the Public School board and was about to be used by them for the proposed new East Ward School. However they were willing to sell off three acres at a reasonable cost to be used to build the high school.

The other was at the end of Moffat Street on the parcel of land known as Moffat’s Point. Neither was deemed acceptable.

For a year things sat at an impasse. Meetings were held but nothing of note reached the press until the first day of school in the fall of 1923 when there were more students than there were places to put them. A temporary and  wholly unsuitable arrangement was made to have some students attend classes at the town hall but a  week after this began Trustee, Mrs. Gus. Schroeder, visited the temporary school and declared it a “tragedy” that was fair to neither the pupils, their parents or the teachers. Classes were separated by thin cotton curtains strung on wires, there were no suitable washroom facilities available and the noise of multiple lessons being taught at the same time was not conducive to learning.

An option had been taken out on the O’Kelly Park site for $20,000 but when this price was accepted the nitpicking began and at the next council meeting the O’Kelly site was rejected and so as the season turned to winter the situation remained as it had been in the spring of a year and a half ago.

While all the debating and the bickering was going on over the high school the East Ward Public School had been proposed, designed and built and was, as 1924 began, about to be opened to the students who had been in the old school on the corner of William and Alfred Streets. This old school that had been in too poor a condition to fix was now going to be partially taken over by the students of the high school as their new temporary classrooms.

By March the town had been visited by a high school inspector who had handed into the board a report that “is said to be a very black one.”  An ultimatum was given, if a new high school building wasn’t soon begun there would be a withholding of all high school grants. Then the principal quit. Mr. U.J. Flach, feeling he did not have the confidence of his staff as teachers were threatening to resign due to the stress of overcrowding, handed in his resignation and it was accepted by the board. The Premier of Ontario, had by this time, heard of the Pembroke situation and at the request of the local Board of Education he sent a representative here to meet with the board.

Six sites were reviewed, and although it was deemed to be too far in the east end the board eventually asked the town for $4,500 to purchase the W.R. White property on the southeast corner of Cecilia and Esther Streets. This, along with the O’Kelly site were the only two deemed suitable by the government but now the council vetoed the request with the excuse that the cost of leveling the site and installing water and sewer lines would be too costly. Now a new location was put forward, the Miller-Munro site and although this never seemed to get serious consideration it was, from time to time brought up as an alternative site to whatever was being proposed at the moment.

September opened with two hundred and forty boys and girls registering in the high school. A week after the opening bell was rung the board was once again debating the merits of different sites.  One sticking point was the policy of the provincial government that a high school needed at least three acres of land to be situated on. Every suitable site in town that had been suggested was less than this minimum and so a delegation was formed to meet with the Minister of Education in Toronto to see if this rule could be bent a little, given the local circumstances. However Premiere Ferguson said there was little he could do and suggested that the town leave off the matter of a new school for a year or two or to perhaps renovate and enlarge the old school by expropriating adjacent homes.

Meanwhile the new principal, Mr. Willoughby, met with the board to discuss his school. He told of a lack of proper equipment for teaching chemistry, of overcrowded classrooms and conditions that “startled his hearers.”  of having only one working typewriter out of eleven in the commercial class and of teenage students attending the east ward annex having to sit in seats meant for junior pupils.

The year closed with no movement towards a solution of the school question and by the first meeting of the board in February of 1925 it was hoped that this would be the year of success. But instead the first meeting ended in disarray with members hurling insults and accusations. The next session again met without success at deciding on a location but did throw in two more properties to consider. One was the Hale-Scott property on Pembroke Street east but this was eventually vetoed due to the fact it would be located opposite a factory, the Superior Electric Company. The other, mentioned for the first time was the Mackie property at the other end of the main street near the corner of Christie Street. This was thought to be not an appropriate site as it was on the main street and the government wanted schools to be located away from busy thoroughfares. A vote was held to try and select a property and in the end all five properties were voted down.

Meanwhile the fire department was looking into taking over the old high school to be used as a fire hall but when this was found to be economically unfeasible the board once again began looking into expropriating the surrounding properties and fixing the old place up.

Then around the first of April, 1925, after two years of debate a property was decided upon. The Mackie property was purchased, the old school was sold to the Separate School Board, by the end of the month architect's plans were being inspected and one was selected. By the end of July all the contracts had been awarded and by mid August excavation work had begun. Then, as work was progressing, some of the trustees, while strolling past the construction site, thought it would look better if it were set back another ten feet. And so a new excavation was begun.Then as it progressed it uncovered an underground stream that ran through the property,  went under McGaughey’s corner eventually finding an outlet in the hill behind the library. This new development required building a cofferdam around part of the excavation, adding time and cost to the building of the foundation.And so a new excavation was begun adding time and cost to the building of the foundation but it was built and the school would be open it time for the new academic year in September of 1926.

The school year of 1925/26 ended and on the evening of July 2nd the students of the old high school met on the grounds to reminisce around a bonfire. Wet wood forced them into the building where they rounded up the High School Orchestra and held an impromptu dance. Old students and teachers from years gone by dropped in to chat and at midnight a farewell cheer was raised to the old school, the National Anthem was sung and the old building ended its career as a public high school.

On September the seventh the new school welcomed its first students. Later in the month, on September twenty fourth the official opening was held with a host of dignitaries attending the event including the Premier of the province who was undoubtedly happy to be hearing the last of Pembroke and its high school woes.

During that year and in the years that followed the high school auditorium became the venue for plays, talks and meetings. The students began writing a weekly column in the Standard-Observer and that first spring saw the beginning of a long tradition with the printing of the first edition of the Nexus.

Now with the high school problem solved the town council could turn its attention to that other perennial problem that seemed to defy a solution. Where to relocate the town offices?

The Sad Case of Rebecca Jenkins

To see a clearer copy click on each of the cells. 

 

 (addendum - Thomas Jenkins died on May 21, 1886)