by Nunilo M. de Leon
After the excitement and bereavement of that week came the mundane day-to-day struggles of wartime life. The rice planting season was still months away and the harvest further away. Things were going to be increasingly harder until the harvest.
After the excitement and bereavement of that week came the mundane day-to-day struggles of wartime life. The rice planting season was still months away and the harvest further away. Things were going to be increasingly harder until the harvest.
The families who had come to attend the wake and funeral went back to Manila bringing home with them a little rice for the next few months. [Turo recalls that he had to stay in Tampoy after the funeral because he was stricken with a severe case of what was thought to be “rayuma”. He could barely stand up and had to stay for some weeks in a rocking chair. No wheeled chair was then available. Only after he had fully recovered was he able to follow the rest of his family to Manila.]
Many of those who, before the war, were gainfully employed were then jobless and depended on savings or odd jobs to survive. With much idle time, the Tampoy menfolk, longtime neighbors and friends, spent their time in “barkadahan” and “kuwentuhan”. They would congregate in the late afternoons and just chat. These sessions were held under a small tree in front of the Antonio house, the place where Tampoy curved. In more affluent times, these would have become drinking sessions but the lack of money to buy the wherewithal prevented this. The womenfolk, who had less leisure time, had their own “kumarehans”; during their daily trips together to the palengke and brief cook-ins in one another’s kitchens. Tatang went regularly to the Chong office in Canalate, helping them out, and did not have much time for these neighborhood gatherings.
The local rice mills were not operating. They ran on electricity, which was made available only during limited periods. We had to find a substitute for the rice mill, so the old wooden mortar and mallets were retrieved from the depths of the silong, where they had been stashed away for decades, and put them to use. There were three steps in this work. First, the palay was “babayuhin”, pounded on the “lusong” or wooden mortar (carved from a meter-high thick tree trunk), using the “masos”, large and heavy wooden mallets or hammers, to separate the chaff from the grain. Then the palay was winnowed or “itatahip”, which meant pouring the palay from a “bilao” or wide and flat bamboo-mesh basket held head-high, to a mat spread on the ground. This had to be done when there was a breeze. If the winnower had the right touch, the pounded palay would separate into three parts. The heavy brown rice grains or “pinawa” would fall vertically almost at the winnower’s feet. The lighter bran or “darak” would fall a little farther away. The much lighter “ipa” or chaff would fall farthest away. The “ipa” was placed in the bonfire, the “darak” was fed to the livestock and the “pinawa” stored in large wide-mouthed bamboo-mesh baskets called “bakol” and larger “tiklis”. The “pinawa” still had to undergo further processing. It had to be winnowed again to remove any remaining chaff. Then it had to be “pipilian” where the rice was spread on a “bilao”, the foreign objects like small pebbles, soil, remaining grains of palay, etc. were picked up and thrown away.
Those in my generation were assigned to this rice milling task. The older kids did the “pagbabayo”, the older girls did the “pagtatahip”, and the youngest kids, the “pamimili”.
Meals were skimpy but well-balanced, I think. The usual breakfast was carabao milk, “kesong puti” or carabao milk cheese, fried or boiled “kamote or “saging na saba” (sweet potato or banana) or fried rice and small salted fish “daing” or “tuyo”. For special occasions, we had one egg each, fried or soft-boiled. Instead of milk, the adults had what passed for coffee, made from roasted-until-almost-burned rice grains with “carriba” shavings as sweetener, or “salabat”, made from boiled and sweetened ginger root. “Carriba” was made from sugar cane juice, boiled to a very thick syrup, placed in half a coconut shell, or “bao”, cooled and dried, The result was a solid hemisphere of rock-hard, dark-brown sugar. It had to be shaved or broken into smaller pieces and dissolved before it could be used. Carriba syrup, mixed with coconut milk and then hardened, was our hard candy.
For lunch and supper, there usually was a cup of “pinawa” brown rice (only one cup to each person), a piece of cooked fresh fish, usually smallish asuhos, liwalo, biya, banak, gourami or kitang and plenty of vegetables. There were many options for merienda; “casta-niyog” (named after “castañas” or roasted chestnuts) which was coconut meat cut into pieces, marinaded in carriba syrup, and roasted, or the ancestors of the latter-day “kamote-cue” and “banana-cue”, then named simply “minatamis na kamote” and “maruyang saging”. For special events, which were rare and far between, we had “nilagang baboy o manok” or “tapang kalabaw”. There was also the farm food called “taghilaw” which was very welcome. It was cooked rice mixed with partially cooked shrimps or fish, salt and vinegar and then left to ferment for several days. Just before the mixture started to decay, it would be boiled to stop the fermentation process. Sauteed in garlic and served with nilagang “talong”, it was a very tasty dish. It is still served in Central Luzon eateries and now bottled and sold in supermarkets under the name “burong hipon” or “burong isda”. I do not recall eating any beef during that time.
For cigarettes, dried papaya leaves (sometimes, but very rarely, highly-valued tobacco leaves from the Ilocos), were shredded and rolled on specially chosen paper. Not just any type of paper would do; preferred was a certain kind of book paper, resulting in many books going up in smoke, happily not a single one from our library, which Tia Monang still held under lock and key. For cigarette-rolling, they used a home-made box-like device for rolling cigarettes, a quite common chore then. [Turo says that Tia Helen in Manila became quite adept at this cigarette-rolling. She was a heavy smoker.] There were plenty of hard drinks; “tuba” from the nipa and coconut palms, “sui hock tong” rice wine, “basi” and rum from sugar cane. No shortages there although no one in the clan indulged in them, as far as I know, except for occasional sweet “tuba ng sasa” from nearby swamps, which even Inang liked.
For entertainment, we rediscovered the phonograph in the living room. Its brand name was Victor and had, as its trademark, a dog, on its haunches, listening to a gramophone. It was purchased when Lolo’s children were in college and was well supplied with phonograph records, most of them classical. The spring-operated phonograph had to be hand-wound before playing a record. The playing heads were fitted with half-inch long steel needles, which had to be replaced or sharpened after some time. Records were two-sided hard wax disks, with only one song or tune per side. Each was twelve inches in diameter and revolved at 78 RPM. There was a larger record, fourteen inches in diameter, which had two songs per side. Although most of the recordings were operatic, there were a few popular ones, American and Tagalog. My favorite was Beer Barrel Polka by the Andrew Sisters. A variation was to spin the record by hand, which made for very strange and, sometimes, funny effects, like what present-day disc jockeys make.
And of course, there was the library where I spent much of my spare time.
After the declaration of independence, Japanese control of the civilian population was relaxed. The curfew was reduced to five hours every night, during the wee hours of the morning. Only Filipino policemen kept the peace in town. The only Japanese soldiers I saw were those who were on small-unit maneuvers. A squad or so would paddle stealthily up the creek in inflatable rubber boats to the landing in our backyard. They were fully armed, rifles with fixed-bayonets, and equipped for combat. They would pretend to make a surprise landing, deploy in the garden, silently slip out, one-at-a-time, through the front gate, leap-frog down the street to its end, crawl through the thickly overgrown “dulo” to the creek on the other side, and re-embark on their inflatables, which were waiting there. On other times, they did the reverse: land at the “dulo” tiptoe up Tampoy and wind up with a Banzai charge at the municipio. They did not seem to mind our watching them from the porch and windows of the house; in fact they seemed to enjoy having an audience. Strangely enough, the dogs never raised a howl when the Japanese soldiers were around. They must have been repelled by their strange but not unpleasant odor due to, some say, the strong Japanese military disinfectant soap they used. Or they might have been awed by their number, or their shouts of “banzai”, or the glinting of all those bayonets. Once, one of the soldiers charged at our corrugated iron gate, lunged and pierced it through and through with his bayonet, ending with a glance and a smile at the audience, probably trying hard not to finish with a bow. He was obviously just showing off. My classmates told me that the Japanese held similar exercises in their neighborhoods, those which were near a waterway.
There was then only one Japanese unit in town, a platoon-sized one based in the former Philippine Constabulary barracks behind the provincial capitol. Not all the towns had a Japanese contingent; in Bulacan only the bigger towns like Malolos, San Miguel, Baliuag and Meycauayan, probably only a reinforced company or two in the whole province.
Among the common past-times then was boxing. Boxing bouts were held in the town cockpit once or twice a month. Someone found out that the houseboy in the house of my classmate, Manuel Crisostomo, used to box in his home province, Negros Occidental. A small gym was put up on the ground floor of the Crisostomo’s house on Pariancillo St., a block away from Tampoy. The houseboy trained there and fought, perhaps once a month, in the Malolos cockpit and in other towns nearby. They named him Midget Dado. Of course, we were frequently in the gym to watch the training. He was less than five feet tall, probably a mini-flyweight. I was never able to watch his actual fights. They were held in the evenings and one had to pay to watch. I do not know what his fight record was.
Across the town square, there was another gym and another houseboy-boxer who also fought in the local boxing cards. He was named Baby Tura and was from Bohol. This gym was frequented by another group of boys, the “San Vicente” boys led by Jesus Tanchangco, whose house was at the foot of the bridge. During school vacations our neighborhood “Santo Niño” group engaged this “San Vicente” group in “tiraduran” battles, using “tiradors”, slingshots made from Y-shaped bayabas twigs and strips of rubber tire inner tubes, and fire-hardened clay pellets as missiles. Some of my classmates belonged to this other group. The usual battleground was the area around the municipio, including the square in front of it. For protection, we wore discarded automobile headlights (without the bulbs) as helmets. Many of us were hit during these skirmishes but I do not recall anybody being hurt so seriously that the elders had to know about it. The “tiraduran” skirmishes were held only during the early afternoon, when everybody else was on siesta. At other hours when the streets were busy, the church plaza and the square in front of the municipio were de-militarized zones, with the priests and police as peacekepers.
The town square and church plaza formed the boundary between the San Vicente boys and the Santo Niño kids. San Vicente was the street which led from the church to the market to the east. San Niño St. headed west from the church. The boundary was not a permanent one. It was in force only during “war periods”.
It was at the beginning of 1944 when Tio Toniong and his family finally made it back to Tampoy. They had quite an adventure. Tio Toniong was working in the Iloilo Provincial Hospital when the war broke out. When the Japanese army landed in Iloilo, Tio Toniong, Tia Lily and their baby, Lourdes or “Inday”, evacuated to the western part of Iloilo province. As the Japanese came closer, they evacuated farther away. Their exodus stopped when they reached the foothill towns, where they stayed for sometime, out of the Japanese’s reach. After the hostilities, when the hospitals reopened, they went back to Iloilo, worked in the provincial hospital and stayed there until the opportunity to travel back to Manila finally came, after a wait of almost two years. They were assigned Lolo Ramon’s former bedroom. Tio Toniong, who was much more sociable than Tatang, soon discovered the every-afternoon Tampoy “umpukan” and became a regular attendee.
The end of that school year coincided with the harvest season. Tio Toniong and Tatang went to each of the farms to preside over the sharing of the crop. The De Leon’s share of the harvest used to be stored in rice mill warehouses but these had closed down. The only practical option was to store the palay in the Tampoy silong, but the space was not big enough to accommodate the entire harvest. It would not have been wise to sell the palay; the Japanese-issued currency’s value was fast depreciating. The final decision was to try and cram the palay into all the available space in the Tampoy house and store the balance in the rice mill bodegas of some of our relatives in Malolos.
The first palay deliveries were stored in the usual bodega, the “sawali” bins in the silong. These would not be enough and the library was chosen as the auxiliary bodega. The long study table and the stand-alone book cabinets on two sides of the library were moved to the “sala” and the porch to make room for two huge rice bins, each one four meters in diameter and two meters in height, which were erected in the library. The bins were made of “sawali” or woven thin strips of bamboo. The bins occupied the greater part of the library and left only a half-meter-wide passageway on either side. Then the bulk of the harvest started to come, transported in big bancas via the creek. The palay were in sacks, carried bodily from the banca to the library, and emptied into the bins. The bancas had to shuttle to and from the farms. The sacks had to be brought back to the farm and filled again each time. There were not enough bancas or sacks. The process lasted for several days. When it ended the bins were filled to overflowing. What was left of the harvest was stored in two bodegas, I think; at the Antonio Bautista rice mill across the creek and at the Angel Tantoco rice mill in the Kamistisuhan area. Up to now, the library floor sags in the middle, proof of its brief bodega experience. (The sag has been corrected, thanks to Tessie’s restoration work, at the expense of the knothole on the library floor, which had served generations of Tampoy kids as a peephole into an imagined nether world.)
After the harvest, things eased up somewhat. Our food ration improved in variety, quality and quantity. Electrical supply improved and became available even during daytime. The water supply likewise improved. The rice mills began to operate and the mortar and pestles were again put in mothballs. There was enough palay to barter for the conversion of the old wood-fired Franklin stove into one fuelled with “ipa” or palay husk. Wood had become very scarce while “ipa” was available for the taking at the Bautista’s rice mill across the creek.
Because of the harvest, the family was no longer too financially hard-pressed and our household chores were considerably lightened. The rice mill began to operate a few hours a week and our rice-pounding task had been replaced by an easier one. Once or twice a week we would cross the creek on one of the family bancas. From the mound of freshly-milled palay hull at the rice mill, we would fill a few sacks and bring them back for use as fuel for our new ipa-fuelled cooking range. We no longer had to gather or buy firewood for fuel.
The rice harvest also paid for the installation of a manually-operated artesian well pump. The municipal water supply was spotty. It was run by electricity, which was not very reliable. For supplementary lighting, when electricity was off, we had coconut oil wick lamps.
We would also make visits to Tia Lioning’s sari-sari store at their home in Barrio Buhangin, on the way to Atlag. Tia Lioning had closed the refreshment parlor she had operated in the town center because of the poor business conditions. While she chatted with Inang upstairs, she would leave us kids to run the store, after briefing us on the selling prices. Acting as sales boys was a refreshing change for us. As our wages, we got some candy, a treat during those days.
The only means of transportation in Malolos, aside from bicycles, were horse-drawn caretelas and calesas, used on paved roads. Caritons pulled by carabaos were also used but mostly for use in the fields and over unpaved roads and paths. Horses were faster and could go over longer distances while carabaos were slow and needed frequent rests and cooling off.
One had to be extra alert when traveling, especially at night. Walking on the streets on foot was something like crossing a minefield or a sewage canal, with all the horse manure, carabao dung and urine scattered all over. Things were particularly bad in front of the public market. Its wide front plaza was used as a caretela and calesa parking lot, where horses were fed, watered and did their thing. That is one reason why thick-soled wooden clogs or “bakya” were common then. They kept one’s bare skin far enough away from the “landmines” and were easy to clean. Obviously, the present day “traditionalists and environmentalists” who advocate a return to animal transport have not experienced this. The church plazas, municipio front yard and school yard were for pedestrians only, which made them safer and more sanitary places to walk on.
Thus went that stage of World War II. It was a period of relative peace after the turbulence of its first months. This hiatus proved to be simply the lull in the eye of a typhoon. The much stronger gales of the typhoon’s tail were soon to hit us.
