Supplementary History (part 2)

That was how ‘Supplementary History’ dawned on my school. How this subject destructed is unclear. Destruction is not always a sudden catastrophic event like an earthquake or when lightning strikes a tree. Rome was not built in a day but nor did Rome fall overnight. The Roman empire fell on two fronts: the Western empire in 410 A.D and the Eastern Empire succumbed to Turkish invaders 1000 years later in 1453. ‘Supplementary History’ crumbled inside and outside the classroom. Because, like Rome, its rigid structure could not face up to the shock of the new. The class was taught by a new teacher called Mr. Arthur Sutherland. Mr. Sutherland is due to return to the UK by the end of this term. I bumped into him in the corridor, and he told me that in spite of his sacking (forced resignation), he has enjoyed teaching us and we really brightened his short tenure at our school.
The feeling was mutual: Mr. Sutherland’s lessons were different and more interesting than Core History. He taught us that ‘history’ comes from the Greek word, ‘historia’, which means ‘inquiry- asking questions and, investigation- getting answers’, as first used by Herodotus. Mr. Sutherland even compared a historian to a crime scene investigator, reconstructing a sequence of events from all available evidence, and examining their cause and effects.
But inquiry is not a simple matter of asking questions and getting answers. History and forensics do not easily give up their answers, although both subjects share common methods of investigation. For example, in Forensic Facial Reconstruction, the face of a dead victim or criminal is reconstructed from a skull or facial bone fragments. This technique is also used by archaeologists, who have successfully reconstructed the faces of Egyptian mummies, such as King Tutankhamen and Nefertiti.
During class Mr. Sutherland tried his best to put flesh and blood back on to the dry bones of History. He showed us scans of old newspaper headlines; two copies of the Straits Times, one dated 31st August 1957, the other dated 9th August 1965. We watched grainy black and white Second World War newsreels uploaded on Youtube, seated around Mr. Sutherland’s laptop. He gave us the first three chapters from Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf (translated into English) to read. After that lesson, Mr. Sutherland was summoned to Mr. Foo’s cramped Head Of History office. During the following lesson, Mr. Sutherland remarked that the school had reminded him to only teach the facts (and nothing but the facts) about Adolf Hitler and other dictators. With typical English sense of irony and a young teacher’s rebellious streak, Mr. Sutherland moved our class to the audio-visual room and treated us to a screening of, ‘The Last King of Scotland’. Angie Wibono grabbed the seat at the back of the room, whereas Shawna Tan and I sat in front, near the DVD player. Shawna yawned and whispered to me that she’d seen ‘The Last King Of Scotland’ already;
‘This film is a historical fiction, just like your Changi prison essay. Very entertaining but not true.’
‘Well, thank you,’ I whispered back.
Shawna Tan looked at me sideways: obviously I was missing her point.
‘It’s all about using history to create a diversion,’ and she directed my attention to the back of the activity room, where Mr. Sutherland sat next to Angie. They seemed to be huddled too close together.
Mr. Sutherland entertained us until June. Mr. Sutherland’s holiday project heralded the downfall of ‘Supplementary History’. The main objective of holiday projects is to enable students to apply skills learnt to situations outside the classroom. For the mid-year break in June, Mr. Sutherland assigned to the class, a project called ‘Your History’ which meant writing about the history closest to us. I took the phrase, ‘flesh and blood’ too literally. Dry bones translated to dead bones, and I inadvertently stumbled on a skeleton lurking at the back of the closet.
My project was on my grandfather. Long before Mr. Sutherland or even Mr. Foo, my first history teacher was my grandfather, on my mother’s side. He could have been a historian if he had gone to school. He could have been a Malaysian Herodotus if he had written down all his stories about his life in post-war London and Malaya. A week before the June holidays, Granddad finally succumbed to stomach cancer. Yet, for History and Forensics, the dead can still speak to us.
In the case of oral history, the living speak for the dead. When I went back to my family in Kuala Lumpur, my mother’s side of the family talked about Granddad after his funeral as if he was still alive. About how he always ate the same breakfast of toast and milky Earl Grey tea every morning, how he retained the odd British expression in his speech, such as ‘Bloody awful’ and ‘dearie.’. Mum found this eccentric, after all these years, However I thought it was charming, for example, “Let Grandfather tell you about his life working on those bloody awful East London dockyards, dearie! And about how those British bastards kicked me out in 1953, for overstaying my welcome!”
Three days after Granddad’s cremation, Mum handed me a battered, rusty orange tin, with the words, ‘Jacob’s Cream Crackers’ on the lid, and a faded stencil of an English drummer boy dancing below the words.
“Granddad wanted you to have this.” Mum told me.
“What’s inside?”
Mum shrugged, “His stuff from England, he insisted that you were the right person to have it, since you loved his stories so much.”
The lid of the tin was loose from repeated openings and closings, so it easily gave way. I was very honoured; Granddad had passed down to me his keepsakes and souvenirs. Stamps bearing the regal profile of King George IV and commemorating the coronation of his daughter, youthful Elizabeth II in 1953, bus ticket stubs, scraps of lace, a frail Cadbury’s chocolate bar wrapper smoothed out like a pressed flower. Excellent material for my project.
I dug deeper into the side of the tin, certain that the ultimate prize lay at the bottom. My fingers hit layers of thick paper, which turned out to be a stack of yellowed envelopes. The topmost envelope contained a letter and a oval black and white photograph the size of a watch face. The image was of a woman but her face had been smudged and faded. The photograph’s oval size and shape that reminded me of a locket. I peeked at the letter- saw the date ‘30th July 1954’, the address was from a street in the Limehouse district of London, and the letter, written in a shaky feminine hand, began with ‘Dearest-‘Our children are well.’ The next line was a question, ‘ When I will see you again?’ Yours M.
The rest of the envelopes contained similar brief letters from ‘M’, dated throughout 1954 and 1955, although the references to, ‘our children’, later change to ‘our boys.’ Correspondence between Granddad and this mystery woman suddenly stops in early 1956. There is an empty envelope, from Granddad, with a Malayan 30 cent stamp and postmarked, dated, ‘24th January 1956’. Over the London address, British Royal mail have stamped the words, ‘Return to sender, address unknown.’
I shoved everything- letters, stamps, and wrappers, back into the tin. But I was too late- Granddad had not honoured me with safeguarding his prized possessions, instead he had burdened me with a secret. The ghost of M had lain sealed within this biscuit tin for over fifty years, away from Mum and the rest of the family, but now Granddad had tricked me into letting M out. My history project was stuck. A direct account of Granddad’s life was impossible now.
At the end of June, I took the tin back to Singapore, for Mr. Sutherland to examine its explosive contents, and to get his expert opinion before the project’s submission date at the start of term. Mr. Sutherland’s desk in the staffroom had been cleared, he was not in school. The notice-board outside the staffroom announced that ‘Supplementary History’ class had been cancelled until further notice. At lunchtime, seated at a long canteen table, Shawna told me that Mr. Sutherland had been sacked and Angie Wibono had been taken out from school.
Angie Wibono’s parents called up the school to complain about Mr. Sutherland. (Suspicious parents are ultimately forced into conducting their own investigations) Angie Wibono had too many history project consultations with Mr. Sutherland throughout the June holidays. During which, according to Shawna, Angie had made full use of his ‘laptop’.
“What about our project?” I protested.
“It’s finished!” Shawna exclaimed, ‘It’s history! Just like Mr. Sutherland’s career. Move on!” and she got up from the canteen table, chuckling at her own joke.
Move on, I despaired. Easy for Shawna to say. She was not carrying around a cream-cracker tin full of secrets. I took the tin out of my bag, and set it on the canteen table. The tin suddenly felt as heavy as an urn. Mr. Foo walked past my table on the way to Core History class, and stopped when he saw the tin.
‘How interesting...my uncle used to collect old biscuit tins...’ Mr. Foo said. I was far from being his favourite student, but Mr. Foo’s curiosity sidestepped that fact for the moment.
‘This tin belonged to my granddad.’ I told him.
Mr. Foo nodded, impressed. ‘May I?’ he asked me, pointing to the lid.
‘Yes,’ I said. After all, Mr. Foo, in his own strait-laced way, was also a fellow historian.
Mr. Foo lifted the lid, and the small oval photograph of M lay on top of the envelopes, where I had last put them.
‘Your grandmother’s photo?’ asked Mr. Foo, picking it up.
‘No,’ I shook my head and told Mr. Foo about it. The photograph could not be explained properly without telling Mr. Foo about Mr. Sutherland’s holiday project, about my Grandfather and his recent death, about how this tin came into my possession and about this woman called ‘M’ that Granddad had left behind in London. No one in my family had known about ‘M’ until I opened the tin.
Desperate for expert advice, I asked Mr. Foo, ‘Should I tell my family about this woman?’
Mr. Foo put the photograph back in the tin and closed the lid.
‘Your grandfather left you with a choice. In the end, it is up to you. Ask yourself if your family can handle this kind of revelation.’
‘I don’t know.’ I said.
‘Hah!’ Mr. Foo exhaled sharply, ‘that is good! Ignorance is sometimes bliss. That’s why you don’t learn everything at once.’
He pointed to the book he held under his arm, but I did not need to look, I knew the title well: A Comprehensive History Of Malaya and Singapore for Upper Secondary
‘No need to shine a light into every dark corner of history- you may not like what you find.’ Mr. Foo said, and he added, ‘See you in class next week.’