Something has to give...

As I promised...a little more on my present reading material...Never Learn to Type by Margaret Joan Anstee.

Dame Margaret Anstee served the United Nations between 1952-1993 and in 1987 was the first woman to become Under-Secretary General. Although the majority of her professional life was spent in South America, she also spent time in Manila and the Middle East.

Her descriptions of growing up in war-time Britain are amazing...so incredibly graphic and it really shows how real the fear of invasion was:

"We really did believe that the Germans would land at any moment, and that those of us who lived near the eastern coasts would be the first to face them. The bells of the village church, fallen silent on the outbreak of war, would announce their coming. Signposts were torn down, so as to give the enemy no help; any stranger in our midst was regarded with utmost suspicion...We really did keep pitchforks, and a motley array of other rustic implements readily to hand, with firm intention of wielding them against the invaders."

However, it is her descriptions of Manila that captivated me...she was writing about the Manila of the 1950's...but it could well have been the Manila of today...please excuse me whilst I quote extensively in this post.

I was told the other day that one of the most regular news stories that occur in Manila are stories about the oddest reasons for people killing each other...Anstee writes...

"...just read about a squabble between to teenagers over a ping-pong game that ended in 16 deaths and a jeepney accident..."

Anyone who has been to Manila will recognize present day buses in this quote:

"At the bus hurtled along the conductor hung out of the doorway, clinging by his little finger and the corresponding digit of one foot, bawling at passers-by a curious, raucous sound resembling the squawk of a startled duck...'Quia-a-apoquiapoquiapoquipo'. It would have been less dangerous, less vocally exhausting for the conductor, and more readily informative to would-be passengers, had the bus carried a destination plate, but that would negate the whole purpose..."

"There was no municipal bus service...It was quite usual to see a couple of buses from rival firms racing hell for leather...in order to see which could be the first to pounce upon some unsuspecting citizen..."

And on taxis:

"Despite centuries of Spanish occupation, bullfighting never caught on in the Philippines, but there was so much of the same Death in the Afternoon atmosphere about Manila traffic that driving seemed the local substitute for the corrida. Taxi-drivers stuck up a dog-eared postcard of Christ or the Virgin on the dashboard, as a matador might hang a crucifix around his neck before entering the arena, draped a miniature wreath of everlasting flowers over the mirror, mercifully obscuring whatever might be going on behind, and then drove like the devil, confident that they had made their peace with the next world. The taxi would swerve in and out of traffic, lurch drunkenly round corners on the wrong side, and squeal to an abrupt and unsignalled halt...When the taxi finally arrived at your destination the driver flashed such a triumphant and slightly astonished smile that all the bitter words you had been saving up evaporated."

On the rich/poor divide:

"But the poor lived at the gates of the rich, in a jumble of tumbledown huts cobbled together from corrugated iron, petrol cans and driftwood..,babies...played beside open drains that ran past shack and mansion alike, thick and blackish-green."

And finally...on the rain, roads and lack of drains....

"Every rainy season floods rendered even main streets impassable. Nothing was ever done to prevent this predictable annual disaster. Newspapers blamed the Spaniards for failing to lay a proper drainage system, blithely overlooking the fact they had been gone more than 50 years."

It is incredible that the above quotes describe a Manila of over 50 years ago...and yet I can still see present day Manila so clearly in all of the above.