1960: First Grade

In March 1960 Mei Lin, twenty, learns that she has passed the School Certificate with a first-grade certificate, good enough for the Higher School Certificate class. She takes the bank's clerk's post instead, at a wage higher than her father pays his own clerk. In April the rice merchant's family from Boat Quay asks formally for her hand for their second son. This time she is asked her mind, and she says yes. The families settle an engagement; no wedding date is fixed. The firm has a flat year, its first since 1955, and the household feels the pinch, though her wage now comes into it. Tan Cheng Huat works long hours and goes back to his specialist. Lim Swee Neo is asked onto a committee. Her husband's Malacca kin visit after the Emergency ends. Nobody in the family is seriously ill.

The Result

The results came out on the evening of the seventh of March. Her father would not go and look, and her mother would not go without him, so Mei Lin went to the school by herself the next morning and read her name on the list pinned up in the corridor, among girls three years younger who were crying and hugging one another. She had a first-grade certificate. The headmistress, passing, said that it was good enough for the Higher School Certificate class and that she hoped to see her there.

She did not go. In April she took up the post at the bank that the manager had promised her, a clerk's post upstairs among the ledgers, with a desk of her own, a wage of about two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and a gold-rimmed sign that said Enquiries which she sat behind on Saturday mornings. It was more than her father paid his own clerk. Her mother said nothing about the Higher School Certificate, and neither did she.

She still kept the firm's books on Sundays, because nobody else could find anything in them. Her father, who had once taken her off the counter at fifteen, began that year to bring the figures home and ask her what she made of them. In the evenings she read everything she could carry home from the bookseller's in Raffles Place.

The Engagement

The go-between came back in the week after the results, and this time the rice merchant's family asked formally for her hand for their second son. Her parents did not answer for them. Her mother took her into the upstairs room and asked her what she wanted, which nobody had asked her in 1952 or in 1958. Mei Lin thought about it for three days, and then she said yes.

The engagement was settled in the summer, with the cakes and the gifts sent between the two houses as was proper, and a dinner at which the young man, heavy and polite as before, talked to her a little more and to her father a little less. No date was fixed for the wedding. Her mother made the most of the year, as she had the year before: the cinema, a Sunday at the seaside, another sitting at the studio in Hill Street.

At the bank there was a young man at the next desk who brought her tea in the afternoons and asked about the books she carried. He was plain and polite, and he stopped asking after he saw the ring.

A Flat Year

For the first time in five years the firm did not grow. No customer failed to pay and no strike held up the goods. Swee Neo's accounts held, but she won no new one, and the second godown, taken on the clan's loan, was never full. In the autumn the household felt it, and the cook was told to buy fish twice a week instead of every day. Mei Lin's wage now came into the house, and it helped more than anyone said.

Cheng Huat worked the longer for it, and was seldom home before dark. In June, when he was tired in a way he did not like, he went back to the specialist in Orchard Road, who gave him a tonic and told him again to walk. Swee Neo had a quiet year. In the autumn she was asked onto a committee of a clan association.

The Emergency in the Federation was declared over at the end of July, and in August Cheng Huat's younger brother came down from Malacca with his wife, the first time in years they had made the journey without roadblocks. They stayed a fortnight, brought news of the family and of the nephew at the university, and asked, before they left, whether the firm might take on a cousin's boy.

On the evening the engagement was settled she sat up late over the firm's ledger, because her father had asked her what she thought of the year's figures, and she found that she could think about the figures perfectly well, and about nothing else at all.

Household income about $3,164 a month, against a peer median of $220: 14.4 times the median (nominal dollars; a model estimate).

The comic of this issue is still at the drawing board.