Chew Wai Leong and Danish Hilman

Chew Wai Leong:

Dated 1964 when I was a primary 3 student at Guillemard Primary School. It was a rainy day, I happily ran to school under the rain. I was drenched when I reached school and used my handkerchief to dry my face.

When my teacher called the class to pay the school fee of $3, I recalled that my school fee was tied to my handkerchief.

I sat down at my seat and shed tears because I realised that I’d dropped my precious $3. Back then, my daily allowance was 5 cents to 10 cents per day. I could not bring myself to tell my parents, canning was inevitable if my parents knew it.

Thankfully, my teacher was kind and allowed me to pay by installment after knowing my predicament. I had to save my daily allowance and pay my teacher.

I kept this incident to myself for 53 years and only told my mother about it after my father passed away last year.

It was a very hard and difficult time during my generation. Whatever monetary allowances given to us must be treasured.

Danish Hilman:

Similarly to Mr. Chew, my carelessness led me to losing one of the most essential items in our everyday lives which is the Ezlink card. Although this incident happened some time ago last year, the incident that occurred to me is still etched in my mind till this day. Unfortunately for me, I was not as lucky as Mr chew to be able to hide this secret away from my mom for a very long time.

I cannot remember vividly the date of the event. However, it was a scorching hot day and I felt like as if I was being cooked alive. Although the air-conditioner was working fine on the bus, I was drenched in my own sweat. A few stops after boarding the bus, I finally had reached my stop. I reached for my Ezlink card in my uniform pocket to pay the bus fare and then alighted.

Not thinking too much about it, I mistakenly put my Ezlink card into my pants right pocket which had a huge hole in it. At that time, I had my ears plugged with my headphones and could not really hear it dropping. I walked back home not realising I had just lost my Ezlink card.

I only realised the mistake that I had made when I started emptying all my pockets to wash my clothes and realised my Ezlink card had vanished into thin air. For the next two weeks, it was the most dreadful period of time ever in my life. I had to start getting used to waking up earlier to walk to school. Sometimes if I am feeling tired, I had no choice but to ask my mom for money to take the bus. 

However, I had to come up with an excuse like I wanted to buy a drink at the vending machine before going to school. After school, I had no choice but to walk from my school back home. My school is located at Lakeside MRT while my house at that point of time was at Jurong East St 32. So that was at least a good 6km walk to and back from school.

However, that was not even the worst of it all. Since I am under the financial assistance scheme, I used my Ezlink card to purchase my food. Since I had no Ezlink card, I could not buy food at school and I could only get by the day with the $2 my mother gives me every day. $2 may seem quite a lot but a can drink at my drink stall costs $1.20 while a plate of my go-to stall’s fried noodles costs $1.50. I would go back starving and would stuff my face with all the food my mom had cooked for me.

My mother started seeing weird changes in my character and suspected something fishy was going on over the last two weeks. Changes like me being the first to wake up and me being more tired and hungry after school. Also, she had received numerous complaints from several different teachers of me sleeping in their classes.

Eventually, she found out when she checked my wallet and realised that my Ezlink card was missing. I reluctantly confessed my mistake and apologised. My mom then gave me the longest lecture ever on how to be responsible when taking care of my personal items. She also expected me to save up money to replace my Ezlink card which was about $25. Eventually, I grew tired of saving up to buy a new Ezlink card as it was tiring. I made a deal with my mom to do the house chores for her and in return, she gets me a new card.