In Between: The Early Years

Davao City and Mindanao

Mama often told me that I couldn't have remembered events that I occasionally recounted to her, because in her mind, I was just too young to remember them. She was skeptical that I would remember events from those "too-young days." Perhaps, she often offered, I had simply heard specific stories from someone else and, over the passing of time that stretched into many years, I had somehow reinforced details enough to be convinced I had lived or witnessed such happenings. I discounted her explanations, however. Now recent research has shown that some kids start remembering early, while others recollect events at a much later stage of their lives, the latter of which is probably more common.

I remember well that Mama used to shout this epithet at us when we kids were young and grubby from playing outside: "You kids look like the skimmings of hell." We knew then that she had been momentarily frustrated by our activities and resulting unacceptable appearance. Now, if her premise is correct about me remembering later childhood events, not the early ones, how could I remember her observation of events that occurred before the war? Remember: I was born in 1937, so when Japanese troops invaded and occupied Davao City, Philippines, where we lived, I was only four and a half years old.

Marciana was a helper to our mama and also a nanny to us kids. Without her help, our whole tenure in Davao City would have been a bad deal, and likely our family would not have survived the war. When I was a child, she removed the scab from an old wound on my knee, perhaps generated a month before through some antic that kids of that age attempt. "It will heal faster," she told me, but the process of removing the scab hurt, and taking advantage of a childhood situation, I managed to create a picture of pain and discomfort accompanied by large tears.

As soon as the scab was removed, a passing fly immediately assumed ownership of the wound. Of course I shooed it away, but it was pesky and returned. I remember killing it with two hands, much as if I were clapping, because as Papa had shown me, two hands are much better than a quick overhead slap. No matter how quick one's hand is, a fly will jump sideways from under a slapping hand because it has pressure sensors on its back. Thus, a fly can tell when an object, such as a descending open hand, is above it. But it doesn't have sensors on its sides. That's a simple explanation of why a fly will invariably escape a downward whack with a flat hand but won't escape when two hands exert pressure upon its sides, which have no sensors. That is the secret of success in killing a fly: use two hands. I learned all this from my papa while I was just a young kid.

During my childhood development, I expressed frustration and anger with temper tantrums, during which I would pound my forehead on anything that was hard. Marciana used to commiserate with me, but Mama would laugh at my antics. I could hear her in the next room, stating, "Maybe he will pound some sense into his head!" Of course, that response would drive me to continue my childhood tantrums more vigorously. Excellent candidates included the hardwood floor and our wood table, the legs of which ended with hand-carved paws of a very large jungle cat. My papa once told me that the table was of narra wood from the interior of the Philippines and that the wood was the hardest and toughest in the world. I think he was right about narra wood.

Many years later, but still a youngster, I one day discovered a chunk of narra and attempted to drive a small new nail into it with a hammer. The nail bent and did not go into the wood; its fibrous grains are situated too close together to allow a foreign object, such as the point of the nail, to enter the space between them. Of course there exists a good probability that the youth in me was trying to prove a point, but I am convinced that narra is the toughest wood in the world.

Books and the Sunday comic pages were a fascination for me even before I could read them myself. One of my early memories from the colorful Sunday comics is lying on the floor and learning about a young girl and her friend, a mouse. She would speak magic words whenever she wished to join the small world of her friend, a mouse with a name and human characteristics who lived in a nice home of his own. I recall that I always wanted to join the girl and her mouse friend because I thought the mouse could possibly be a good friend for me too. The mouse was always dressed up and I thought he would be a wonderful partner for me to play with. Of course, the face of the little girl — human, huge, and startling — would appear on the other side of a windowpane in the mouse's home. She would be looking inside to see if her mouse friend was at home, and if so, she would speak her magic words: "Puff, puff, piffle!" and she would become small like the mouse. Marciana or Mama were reading these types of children's stories to us and sharing the Sunday newspaper comic pages in the days before my idealistic world crashed as a Japanese soldier's boots hammered up the back stairs and then kicked in the kitchen door at the start of WWII in Davao City. (But that's a story for chapter 2.)

On a Typically Hot Day

I once shared with Marciana an early incident I remembered, and she told me I would have been about fifteen months old when I experienced the details I related to her. Our black cars were traveling in a convoy from our Mapa/Jacinto home where we lived in Davao City to our farm. I must diverge a moment to explain — Mama often called the farm Catalunan Pequeño (literally "Little Catalonia"). I now think she did so because our farm was considerably smaller when it was compared to the one adjacent to it, which was named Catalunan Grande.

Much later during the war, we renamed our farm from Catalunan Pequeño to Sunny Brook Farm because of Becky, my little sister. "Becky" was a shortened name for her long name, which was "Rebecca," but we kids called her by her short name all the time. She was a toddler when Mama changed the name of the farm. I remember Mama saying to us, "Our doing that shouldn't confuse anyone." We kids were not confused at all, and we nodded our heads in agreement, fully knowing that to express something along the line of disagreement would be a simple waste of time — at least where our mama was concerned.

Mama insisted on changing the name of the farm to Sunny Brook because it had more meaning to everyone. After all that, she went on to explain that we also had a creek that ran through our farm. Well, yes, that was so if we wanted to call the runoff from Mount Apo a brook. "Remember," she added, "ours is two words: 'Sunny' and 'Brook,' not the same as the title of the popular story [which used only one word — 'Sunnybrook']." To us, her argument was valid all the way.

Now back to the story that I recounted to Marciana. I remember our two black cars stopping. The drivers got out of the cars, but Mama, Marciana, and I remained seated in the back of one of the cars. We had stopped near a banana plant grove close to the main entrance of the dirt track leading to our farm, where the track connected to the rudimentary road that led to the huts and shacks of Mintal, a small town about a quarter of a mile away. There was some shouting, and then one of our laborers (synonymous with "tenant" and "tao" and "campesino") came out of the local jungle growth and went to the small group near the cars. Evidently he had been running back to the parked cars with a message, because he had drops of sweat on his forehead.

I must have been getting fussy, because Marciana reacted quickly. Two bottles of milk were ready for me, and I immediately drank them. Papa grabbed a rifle from one of the cars and followed the adults into the jungle and disappeared. I probably drank my milk too fast or something, because I remember vomiting all the milk onto my chest and making a mess.

I also remember the mungo beans that grew on our farm. They were about the size of a BB. These beans were boiled and made into a soup that tasted similar to split pea soup. Mungos were a staple of our household.

One Sunday morning, Mama took me to church along with my brother Bob. Papa stayed at home because he had projects to work on. While we were at church, the priest was berating the audience about some issue. I studied his face and his actions. He was an angry man!

"Mama," I said aloud, "I think the priest is angry at us." All around us, members of the congregation twittered and pointed and made comments to one another about my wisdom. I basked in the attention and then did silly things like pick my nose. The next Sunday when they went to church, I was left behind with my dedicated father, who always worked at home on Sundays. I was miffed that the family group simply went to church without once consulting me.

Screams in the Middle of Night

When I was less than four years old, bedtime was literally a nightmare for me because I would invariably wake up screaming in fear. In the process I would wake up the entire household. In my nightmares, a fearsome cleaning woman would have caught me and sunk her hands into my chest. Or she would be hiding in a dark corner, just waiting for me to drift off to sleep; then I would be vulnerable to her murderous attack — and so would the entire household, because I then wouldn't be able to warn anyone that after she was done with me, she would come after them, one by one! Every little child has a monster that hides under the bed. My monster happened to have more human features than other monsters. Mine always wore a white cleaning apron, and I could never see her malevolent face because it was always hidden under a fold of her white cleaning bonnet.

She would search the hallways for me, locate my bed, and creep up on me during the night while I was sleeping to do me great harm of some sort. I would drift off to sleep again knowing that soon she would sneak up on me and get her claws into my chest.

While awake, I would perspire profusely while looking into the terrorizing darkness, wondering what corner she had discovered she could hide in until I drifted off to sleep once more. I would become vulnerable to her attack after I fell asleep. Her sudden rush at me would be unstoppable, and I would wake up and scream, waking up the whole household in the process.

Much later, I analyzed that blood rushing through my vascular system was under such pressure that its incessant pounding in my head exactly matched the sounds of her footsteps. Just hearing her footsteps get closer and closer terrified me all the more, and my system would pump blood faster and faster until even my eardrums would feel my blood rushing past them. My eardrums would roar, of course. It all meant to me that she had somehow located me in the darkness and I was vulnerable once more because I had fallen asleep. Actually, I had generated a closed-loop fear mechanism: my heart began pounding whenever I would conjure up the image of my monster — the cleaning woman. Also, the more intensely my heart would beat, the closer her footsteps came to me. And when I thought she had missed finding me, of course the intensity of my heartbeat would lessen and then I would no longer have an inclination to scream. I didn't carry this childhood habit into my adult years, thank goodness.

It wasn't until many years later, after retiring from the US Air Force more than thirty years ago, that I finally came to terms with my early childhood nightmares. Louise and I were walking through an annual festival in Larkspur, Colorado, one fine summer day when I noticed a discarded container of household cleanser. I recognized it immediately. There was a cleaning lady on the can, her face completely obscured by her white-winged cleaning cap. I realized this was the image I had found so frightening as a child. She was the horrifying culprit who had caused my frequent nightmares. I was amazed when I recognized the icon of the faceless cleaning woman on the side of this discarded cleanser can. Brazen and bold in the daylight, there was my childhood nemesis! Finally I knew who my nighttime stalker was, and she was faceless as always, except she was much more acceptable to me because I had also grown to adulthood.

This little excursion about twenty years ago gave me an opportunity to review most of the factors associated with the causes of my screams in the middle of the night when I was a child. Finally I was able to dismiss the thought of her, and the faceless cleaning lady who had terrified me when I was a youngster finally went away forever.

Like many young families, we had special words we learned to use, mostly regarding the bathroom and other personal issues. Urine was boo, and moots were encrustations we occasionally found around our eyes and nostrils when we woke up in the mornings. Fecal matter was oh-ho, probably from earlier sessions with potty training in which an accident occurred, resulting in a child's assessment of the entire episode as "uh oh!" Yes, even at the age of seventy-eight, I still use my childhood euphemisms. Need I write more?

The Spider in the Bathroom

I found the bathroom spider terrifying. It just plainly terrified me. Why our mama thought it was such a beautiful thing, I'll never know. The spider was black, very large, and hairy, and it tended to stay in a corner of the bathroom. I saw it move just a little at times, and each time it did, I was prepared to run toward the kitchen and more light. I learned many years later that it was a species of tarantula. It had somehow wandered into the white-tiled bathroom.

Actually, the light color of the stone tiles might have made the spider seem huge in my eyes, but much later, I concluded the spider was so large that it stayed in the bathroom because it was just too big to crawl under the bathroom doors during the night. I once came into the bathroom but could not find the spider. I froze and could not move — until I was able to locate the large black hairy thing once more in a far corner toward the window.

I concluded it was trying to find a way out of its confinement and had moved toward the source of light. I would sit on the stool but in the process keep an eye on the spider, ready to jump and run to the closed door if it moved. Mama had sternly told us to leave it alone because it ate insects. She was quite stern about it, so we kids heeded her warning.

One time I was using the toilet in the bathroom when the spider moved. I saw the movement and almost screamed. Whenever I had to use the bathroom, I always looked for the spider before making any move toward the toilet.

Music, Poetry, and Mama

I still remember some of the songs Mama used to sing to herself when I was a young child before the war. They were the common verses all young children understand, with directions to clap hands, stamp feet, or reach up to the sky, with perky little rhymes and rhythms that fascinate and make everyone think the world is a magical, wonderful place. Most of the ones I remember best are the same ones enjoyed by youngsters all around the world.

One song I heard from Mama before and after the war was a Thanksgiving tribute. It always impressed me that the words were written by a religious reformer hundreds of years earlier but they still had meaning for me.

Not everything Mama shared with us was musical. She seemed to have memorized many powerful poetic stanzas from the classical greats. I was too young at the time to really understand the words and their originally intended meanings. I definitely was left with the intended emotions and could draw my own conclusions based on where we were as Mama recited the powerful words to us. She probably was also doing it for her own purposes of trying to maintain a sensible existence when things all around us were not very encouraging.

I was three or four years old, and I still remember many of these lines. I had so many questions about them, and I was probably a pesky preschooler asking questions all the time. There just were not enough hours each day to answer them all. But then the war broke out, and we were often reminded by our mama that we needed to be thinking more about what it would take to survive.

The Neighborhood

Our next-door neighbors were evidently Spaniards with backgrounds in education. Mr. Santos had been tasked with something to do with schools. Inasmuch as Spain had owned the Philippines archipelago before it was awarded to the United States, Spain was previously responsible for educating the populace. How best to do this? Send a Spaniard with a background in education, of course. (During my childhood, the United States "owned" the Philippines, having received it as a wartime reparation from Spain, and was therefore responsible for educating its population.)