17.8.25 - Last milestone: 17 August

Today is Ma's birthday. I got up and spent awhile chatting with her and she asked me to get her ingredients to make sambal buah keluak. So that I did. As I walked to NTUC to spend the last of the CDC Vouchers, I reminisced about the houses that were here. How this place used to be all single storeied dwellings. From the distance, as you approached Gardens, you'd see it as a sea of red terracotta roofs. Hence, the Hokkien name, Ang Sa Li - which translates to Red Roofs. It was a small - still is - modestly aspirational place. Many people still lived in so called 'landed property' - not the grand palatial black and white bungalows which the memsahibs would have been ensconced, but the little kampung houses, the houses by the sea, the houses on stilts where tides still came in and out, or shophouses. Like many of my friends' families would have had. The housing estate was still not all prevalent. My grandparents bought a house on the top of the Chartwell Drive hill. The estate was abandoned by the British after they pulled out in 1963. It was home to the British Army and many veterans whom I meet in the UK still tell me how they used to live here. It had a small garden where grew a rambutan tree and a smaller backyard where we spent many many afternoons and weekends pretending we were adventuring far away. 

As the years went by, at first, people improved their homes modestly, replacing window frames and doors, gates to the property, covered porches. No one got rid of the gardens. Sometimes people would pave up the front area, tired of having to cut the small weedy patch of grass. And that continued for several decades. Building restrictions meant that you could not build a second storey. And so that was the deal. Just tinkering round the edges. Airconditioning the living room and rooms - even though the houses were built for the tropical heat and never really got very warm... and digging up the terrazo floors - which is now thought of as sacrilege. 

But then came the Great Inundation. Building restrictions were lifted and at first, second stories, then third - and now fourth. Singaporeans, completely obsessed by having 'landed property' ironically decided to create stand along condos - four storied monstrosities with teeny tiny pools, even though there is a perfectly decently priced club which they could join for the price of the very small, two stroke at the most lapped pools they had dug in place of the gardens.

I watched, over the 40 years, as if I was in my own personal poignant Ghibli film, as Serangoon Gardens lost its gardens. Gardens were tiled and the land use was 'maximised' so that people could create these irrationally overly large houses which towered over everyone. Some even looked like shopping malls. What is the worst part of this mania? The worst part is that every house is completely different from the other one. Unless they have been developed as twins by the seller. These little houses, now almost 80 years old, unsung and uncelebrated, are now unceremoniously demolished to make way for something out of a Seussean fever dream. Literally, each one, unique, creating the effect of having tumbled down some LSD laced rabbit hole. Curiouser and curiouser. Uglier and uglier. As they attempt to outdo the other. Even tearing down houses which were perfectly good because they are only 2 or 3 storeys, and not 4. I kid you not. 

Where breezes swept through the entire estate, even on the hottest maddest doggiest of midday suns, there now is none. Instead, these concrete carbuncles capture and radiate heat - not just during the day, but through the entire night. Getting up at 4 am guaranteed that you could feel the coolness of the night still lingering until the sun burned it away around 9 am. Now there is no cool time. So, once again, airconditioning, to the rescue. 

Serangoon Gardens is now drowned in concrete.

But, like all stories of drowned towns and villages, where occasionally you catch the glimpse of a spire gleaming in the shadows when it catches the sun, occasionally, as you walk, you spy a red roof, hidden amongst the houses which tower on either side. Sometimes, the entirety of the compound is still preserved... the fittings, the side paths, the front garden, even the original garden gate. Works of mass produced iron wrought art from a bygone age. And because these homes are older, there is something of the genteel grace which the patina of age always confers upon those places which have been looked after and cared for. Despite the modest appearance, there is a richness which none of these other brash, oftentimes vulgar new homes have. For some reason, it feels as if the breezes still blow through these places, these singularly pristine capsules which now have mature trees, twisted bougainvilla shrubs, ginormous birdnests ferns... Serangoon Gardens should have been designated a heritage town. It should have been. But no one had the imagination to imagine it would be ruined so comprehensively.

My parents were not allowed to build two storys. My dad often says it was a good thing because then my sister would have never moved out. It is a bit of cope. I'm sure he would have loved to have had a two-storey house. But they were saved by the building regs. Because of them, they now live in a very uncomplicated home where they are able to move about without the hinderance or dangers of steps and split levels. Their bedroom is beside the toilet and the kitchen is just outside. The living room - which I have tidied up and opened out - is also on the same level. We are able to open the front of the house and they look into the garden. That said, they do have to put up with neighbours who take turns to demolish the houses they have just bought and bigger them - for what seems to be all year long. My heart sinks every time I see a house has just been sold, not just because an incredible act of vandalism will occur but also because the renovations will run into months and months, involve dump trucks, concrete lorries. pneumatic drills and a tremendous amount of noise. 

I always marvel at the fact that Serangoon Gardens is truly the Singaporean version of Holywood, Co Down, where I now live when I am in Ireland. Perhaps it was pure coincidence that I would stay in the Irish version of my childhood home... Perhaps not. 

I wonder what will happen in 30 years... I'll be 85. Today I helped my mother pound the ingredients for the sambal buah keluak. I thought, will I end up here one day? Living here? In one of the drowned houses, surrounded by the mania of the people who long for bigger and taller and sillier?