Pulau Bukom... my (boyhood) island in the sun

Anniversary note: It was exactly one year ago (31 Oct 2010) when I first started to blog!

Growing up in Bukom

I was born in Pulau Bukom (delivered by a midwife at home) and I spent my childhood years there. There was no such thing as kindergarten (and of course no enrichment classes to kill my curiosity, so I had unfettered fun). There were just a few cars on the island of 5,000 people (Shell employees and their families); my mum never did have to worry about me, in my toddler years, running out of our ungated house onto traffic (because there wasn't any in our neck of the woods).

Oil storage tanks were everywhere, and there were even more of them after the refinery was built.

I learnt to ride a bicycle as soon as I could, in primary school -- Pulau Bukom English School (the island's only school) -- and life was carefree. There were free movies at the open-air amphitheatre every Wednesday night and Saturday night. A light drizzle brought out the brollies and raincoats. Heavy rain meant a no-show.

Because my dad was an executive, we had seats in a special area. Movie nights were also special because we -- ie my sister (who is three years older) and me -- got to eat jelly (the Jello type), bought from the clubhouse.

After I could ride a bicycle, on movie nights, I and my sister would cycle from our home in Tengah (that's in the central part of the island), then push our bikes up a hill slope road before we could ride again, towards the theatre, where we parked our bikes among countless others.

There was no need to lock our bicycles, and the amazing thing was that after the movie, everyone seemed to be able to find his or her bike.

That was the fun part, ie after a show. We would cycle till we got to the slope. Remember, we had to push our bikes from below to go up. Well, going downslope on our bikes was nothing short of exhilarating! My sis and I would race each other downhill. She fell once and needed a plaster cast on her leg.

On most nights, because the night sky was clear, we could see the stars clearly, and not infrequently there were shooting stars too.

There was no secondary school on the island, so my sis went "overseas" first -- to RGS, after her PSLE results. She had done very well in the exams.

My turn came three years later, and I went to Gan Eng Seng. There was too much cycling from one end of Bukom to the other (Timor to Barat) to do, and spider catching and kite flying too, after school, up till my PSLE.

Going to school "overseas" meant catching the ferry to the "mainland", then catching a bus to the secondary school (afternoon session). After school, it was a rush to catch the bus back to the jetty -- before the last ferry service ended.

At some point, my sister decided it was too much of a hassle and she moved in with my eldest sibling and her family, in the Guillemard Road area. I did the same when I got to Secondary 3.

How did I start to reminisce like this? An ST report today was the memory trigger.

Mr Lee Kuan Yew, speaking at the 120th anniversary celebration of Shell Singapore, recounted that Shell was the first oil major to set up a crude oil refinery on Bukom in 1961 (when I was 10 years old), two years after Singapore attained self-government.

Shell, Mr Lee said, has been in Singapore since 1891, when it acquired eight hectares on Pulau Bukom and set up an oil storage installation. Bukom is today a huge petrochemical complex, and there is no longer a community there. Only essential staff are now housed on the island which, from the pictures I've seen, I hardly recognise anymore.

I found the following diagram and aerial view of Bukom from the Internet (I believe the words "Incident location" refers to the big fire that took place on the island just last month, ie September):