guava trees. There were lots of banana trees, one big pomelo tree, and a very healthy kamias tree growing on an anthill. In a big, open laundry area by the backdoor, the maids would leave big tubs and barrels of water to soak up the morning sunshine and give us warm water for washing. Without a shower, we would use a tin can to pour water on ourselves, under the maids’ supervision.
The big, heavy, wooden kitchen door was barred at night. We had a maid who was quite determined to amputate the tails of all the cats in the neighborhood. She would hide behind the door and wait for the cats that raided the kitchen regularly. They would follow the smell of fresh fish, and she’d slam the door on their tails.
I remember the terrifying and exciting business of crossing the river that flowed between the house and the town proper. We had to use a wooden suspension bridge, holding on to a rope. It was a long walk to the bridge, but there was some compensation. In season, we would stop at a big aratiles tree and gather some fruit.
The major drama I recall was when Jan fell from a tall guava tree and into a big rubbish pit and broke his arm. Mom put his arm in a splint and hired a jeepney to take the two of them all the way to the National Orthopedic Hospital in Manila.
(Norman)
PAMPANGA WAS A way station to Manila, where my parents wanted to relocate and where Ryan was being treated for polio. Dad obtained another transfer, to work at San Miguel Beer Brewery near Malacañang and eventually other San Miguel plants—the Fleischmann’s Dry Yeast Plant, the Central Machine Shop, and the old Insular Ice Plant in Plaza Lawton. We rented a house near Auntie Fe’s in Roxas district. Ishmael Jr., nicknamed Jun, was born while we were there in 1957. My parents eventually tried to buy the house they were renting, as well as another unit in Project 8 in Quezon City, but both deals fell through. These failures weighed heavily on my parents, as if they had failed to give the family a proper home.
In Iloilo, the family lived on Lopez Jaena Street. In front (from left) are Norman, Emilie, Jan, Nathan and Caren. Behind are Lillian, Mom and Ryan (1956).
(Susan)
IN 1960, THE family moved to 538 Second Street in San Beda Subdivision, a short walk to the two schools my other siblings attended—San Beda College for the boys and Holy Ghost College for the girls. Like the Calvert School in Iloilo, our parents made sure these were schools known for discipline and academic excellence. And like the Calvert School, the tuition was beyond the family’s means.
538 Second Street was a two-story wooden house reminiscent of the airy houses built by the Americans during their colonization of the islands. The second floor was rented out to the Lee family, who were Chinese-Filipino; the first floor was our home. It had three bedrooms, each blessed with large windows with cast-iron grillwork. Its bathroom was dark and musty; a single bulb would cast enough light to occasionally expose a spider as huge as a man’s hand. The paint peeled, the floors were uneven, and the house itself seemed old and weary. Though it was unappealing, the house had one outstanding feature; it was surrounded by a yard, large by Manila’s standards. Trees stood sturdily every few meters, often laden with fruit—guava, cacao, mango and star apple.
The old house acquired the rural qualities of its new occupants. With the family came a host of pets befitting a farmhouse—ducks, dogs, a turkey, turtles, cats, parakeets, and the occasional hens and roosters. Clotheslines, thick wires suspended from erect metal T-posts, were installed along the width of the house. Close to the stone walls that surrounded the old house, we tended a vegetable patch with tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and the crawling, purple-veined alugbati, a popular vegetable on Panay Island. Behind the house, an outdoor kitchen evolved consisting of huge, thick aluminum pots propped up by construction bricks and firewood on the side, ready for camp-style cooking. Here, my mother and the laundry woman she hired would squat for hours either fanning the flames or doing the laundry, their skirts tucked between shin and thigh.
It was in this house where my mother expertly managed the household. Although my father’s salary was considered a sizable income, it was barely adequate to support a family of 12. It was my mother’s role to bear and rear children, and to provide my father her unconditional support. At the end of each work period, my father surrendered to her his brown pay envelope with his entire salary in it, as it was then the norm among married couples. As spouses and as parents, they had fixed functions—he was the breadwinner, she was everything else.
(Nathan)
OVER THE YEARS, prices of goods and tuition rose steeply, and Dad and Mom could hardly make ends meet. Mom often wracked her brains thinking of ways and means to save or earn a little money, and to put food on the dinner table. Somehow we never missed a meal. Well, not exactly. I usually brought tuna or cheese pimiento sandwiches to school but the bread was so inferior and light that I often felt hungry again after an hour or two.
When the family was really hard up, we were down to eating rice and eggs, day in and day out. The rice was bought at the market, but the eggs were a different story. Our Aunt Toyang, my father’s sister, had a modest poultry farm and she sold eggs to Mom at a very low price. There was very little money for buying eggs, but Mom was too proud to ask if she could have them for free. Instead, she asked to buy the abnormal eggs and the rejects—eggs with cracked shells, eggs without shells, extra-large eggs, extra-small eggs, eggs with reddish spots. Aunt Toyang just gave them to her, insisting that these were of no commercial value anyway. Sometimes an old White Leghorn chicken came with the eggs.
Susan, the youngest, is with Lys, the eldest, at 538 Second Street in Manila, where Susan was born (1962).
One day Mom brought home from the poultry farm some gaily-designed muslin sacks used for B-Meg chicken feed. After washing the sacks thoroughly, she cut and sewed shirts, dresses, shorts, and pajamas for us, and sold the rest of the sackcloth to neighbors. Soon, sackcloth, best used for rags, became an important source of extra income for the family and our daily wear.
(Lys)
I WAS EMBARRASSED to take my friends to our house on Second Street because the living and dining rooms were so shabby—our furniture had torn upholstery that we tried covering with sackcloth, and Dad’s work table that overflowed with greasy tools and sooty machine parts was right next to the dining table. This would have been all right if you didn’t compare your house to the houses of your friends. And imagine coming from an elite school like Holy Ghost College and then wearing dresses made from B-Meg feed sackcloth! Of course I came to know better as I grew older, but the norms and the social milieu of the early 1960s were different.
(Norman)
DAD WAS A strict disciplinarian. I gathered from him and his siblings that this was, among other reasons, the result of their father’s having been a gentleman raised in the tradition of the Spanish colonial families. For Lolo Jose, the whip was the standard disciplinary tool. But being part of the tradition was only half of the story. My father and his siblings were raised in a mix of Spanish religiosity and American Bible faith. The version that reached us, the children of Ishmael, had a decidedly American flavor. Our preteen years were nurtured by the stories from a set of books called The Children’s Hour, published by an American Protestant sect. The books, a collection of Bible stories and stories set in contemporary American neighborhoods and inspired by Christian themes, always had a moral lesson to bring across.
I remember only two stories from those books. One was about a boy who liked to play with firecrackers. He was warned by his mother time and time again to be careful, but he was too stubborn. Bored with just lighting the firecrackers in open spaces, he experimented with the
