Page 23 - BOOK inside pages as at Aug 8

Childh Forewardood Days

Chapter 2: Childhood Days

was born in Bentong, Pahang on August 15, 1957. It was
I a Thursday, just two weeks before Malaysia’s Father of
Independence and first Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman
Putra Al-Haj declared, “Merdeka! Merdeka! Merdeka!” on the
historic Saturday of August 31. If I had been born just two
weeks later, I would have been a Merdeka baby. I am as old as
the country since its independence from the colonial masters.
My parents were rubber tappers. They earned an average
income of RM150 a month back in the seventies, and stretched
that to feed all eleven of us children – my siblings and I made
up a “football team”. I had two elder brothers and two elder
sisters, and three younger brothers and three younger sisters.
I was the fifth in the family. The age gap between my eldest
brother and me was 10 years, and my youngest sister and I
were 20 years apart.
Our parents were busy making ends meet and had little
time for us, but I realised later in life that they had done
everything that they could for us. It was not easy raising
eleven young ones with so few resources. I really appreciate
them for their sacrifice and love for their children.
With the country still in its infancy, we had nothing but
the bare necessities. Our home was just a wooden shack in
a New Village in Bentong. Many people had been relocated
to such New Villages set up throughout the country by the
British colonial government under the Briggs Plan, named
after Sir Harold Briggs who was Director of Operations in the
war against communism in Malaya in the 1950s.
It was part of a military strategy to segregate civilians
from insurgents in the then Malayan Races Liberation Army
(MRLA). The latter had been trained by the British to fight the
invading Japanese army but soon after the defeat of Japan,
they sought independence from their colonial masters. They
later formed the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). From 1948

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BOOK inside pages.indd 23 08/08/2018 05:43 PM