Remembering Peacetime

They’ve long been dead, I suppose, Filipinos who were still around during that supposedly most idyllic period in our history – now called Peacetime. Oh yes, there must still be a few survivors, men and women in their 70s, 80s and 90s, who look on that decade just before World War II as the Philippines’ honeymoon with peace. It was a breathtaking calm, a stride through Arcadia, a handful of stardust. The few oldtimers still around gush and shed a happy tear when they remember Iyong panahon ng peacetime.

I too remember. It was during the 30s when I grew into a boy, a stripling in short pants who marveled at almost everything I saw. And I saw a lot. There was, to begin with, Pasay beach. There was no Roxas Boulevard yet. And our neighborhood in Lourdes street sloped down to a beach that was pristine, Pasay’s pride, Manila’s pride, the dappled bay of Manila behind, and withal as far as the eye could follow, Bataan and Corregidor. What gorgeous days, months and years we experienced bathing and swimming in those crystalline waters, emerald almost. Pasay Beach.

The sands were ample, not the white of Boracay, but a slate of medium grey, so clean and fine we rubbed them on our body. Sand castles sprouted all over, all sorts of sand figurines, and many buried their bodies in sand. It was good for the health. So popular did Pasay Beach become that hordes of vacationers from all over came to swim. Others rode bancas with outriggers to go over to the la-ot and fish. The catch was almost always plentiful. That song Red Sails in the Sunset always produced a catch in my throat long after Pasay Beach was gone. I remember the many years it was a part of my life, growing up as a Filipino. And there were indeed sails in the sunset.

The girls bathed and gamboled in decent one-piece bathing suits which didn’t make them less sultry, sexy and undulating with curves. The bikini was at course unheard of, or anything skimpy. for those were the days when women still prided their bodies and a one-piece jantzen was superb. Of course the oldies came in knee-length Mother Hubbard outfits, splashing around like women of Renoir with their bonnets and ribbons. And the youngsters, the children! Pasay beach teemed with them.

It was a little world at play. The whole of the Philippines, an archipelago of over 7000 islands, was at peace. The population then was probably only about 10-12 million, no Huks yet, no NPA guerillas. Although occasionally, we heard rumblings from the Moros in Mindanao. This was when Christian settlers started to be drawn to the lush, alluvial soil of that resource-rich island. Alas, Mindanao has grown to such proportions of Christian and Muslim – a religious and social tinderbox – as to haunt us today.

Peacetime. I roll that word like candy in my nostalgic mouth.

The 6th volume titled Under Stars and Stripes of the Readers Digest Series has this article "A Clean and Orderly Manila" written by Ma. Luisa Camagay. It quotes Joseph Hayden, American vice governor of the Philippines (1933-35) as saying Manila "has become one of the most beautiful, healthiest, and safest cities in the Far East." Whaat? One wouldn’t know that at all, looking at Metro Manila today, ugly, littered with garbage, its air terribly polluted, squalid slums and shanties almost everywhere, a city of terribly poor and terribly rich, its skyline punctuated by gleaming malls and high-rise buildings, its groundline twisting monster coils of traffic and sooty neighborhoods.

But Peacetime we go back to. I don’t think we shall ever see anything such as Peacetime, the Peacetime of my youth, ever again.

To the many friends and acquaintances who keep asking me what Peacetime was like – Was there really such a thing as Peacetime? – my reply always starts with the flickers of a smile. It is a smile that is happy and wounded at the same time, the same smile I suppose that accompanied that TV refrain: Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to graveyards, everyone. Peacetime was when you could go anywhere in Manila, leave your bike or your schoolbag, without worrying one whit it would be stolen. Peacetime was when I was a UP high school first year student, ogling the girls in shorts at the gymnasium, then coming out with a long, low whistle when they broke ranks and danced the Big Apple, the Lambeth Walk, and of course, the conga to the tune of somebody playing the piano.

For the love of me, I don’t know how the Big Apple and the Lambeth Walk are danced anymore. All I remember is the end-line: Doing the Lambeth Walk – hey! There was a pirouette of some sort, a naughty toss of the head, a little naughty bump of the derriere. The boogie of course came afterward, as did the tango, the samba and the rhumba. And yes, the slow drag, and the lovely, lingering, romantic strains of Stardust. Oh, how I loved that song! Peacetime was when I played sandlot basketball and baseball with the underprivileged in our neighborhood. There was no such thing yet as a yawning gap between the affluent and the non-affluent and in sports we mixed easily and cordially. In the joyous banter of the very young.

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Peacetime was when our favorite neighborhood sport was boxing and street-fighting. Oh yes, we donned those boxing gloves pretty well and rare was the house without a pair of boxing gloves. Street-fights came a baker’s dozen. The two scrappiest fist-tossers in our neighborhood were Francisco (Ecot) Villa, the crack NBI agent who later arrested Harry Stonehill and backed him up against a wall, and, ehem, myself. Peacetime was when Manila Hotel was the hotel, where the glittering and extremely lavish balls of Kahirup and Mancommunidad were held. Peacetime was when air-conditioning slipped in towards the end of the decade. And then you had the Winter Garden at the Manila Hotel. You didn’t belong if you never danced "the light fantastic" at the Winter Garden.

Peacetime was when we kids awaited the US fleet set anchor at Manila bay. Their uniformed baseball contingents stormed ashore and often we heard the Yankees shout: "And a hubba-hubba, pokinenni, give him a strike!" When they got tired of old gloves, baseball bats, specially catcher’s mitts (I was a catcher), they gifted them to us and, boyoboyoboy, that was a treat better than Christmas. Peacetime was when Spanish ceded pride of place to English as the medium of instruction and education. The elite lost no time shedding most of their Spanish manners and soon aped the surface values of the Yankee. Peacetime was when Filipino girls started to wear American style low-waist dresses, replacing he traditional baro’t saya.

Peacetime was when the Spanish sport jai-alai was introduced to Manila. The jai-alai fronton sprang overnight and with it the Keg Room which vied with the Manila Hotel as the nocturnal igloo of the elite. Peacetime – and I didn’t know it at the time – was when the "little brown brothers" came into being, in the words of Secretary William Howard Taft. And little brown brothers we remain to this day. Peacetime was when there were relatively few first class restaurants and eating places. And so Chinatown was a favorite, particularly Antigua and Rice Bowl and Ramon Lee. Occasionally on paydays, Papa brought the whole Benigno family to Antigua.

Peacetime was when, according to the Readers Digest’ series, "the country’s economic managers were lulled into complacency by the false progress brought about by preferential tariff agreements with the US." And then, according to the same series, Peacetime was when the legendary Thomasite schoolteachers, launched the educational program that utilized "social engineering" instruments that "resulted in the Filipino people’s miseducation." My, my. I never felt the quivers of that "social engineering’ during those youngling days. Naive perhaps we were, too trusting, too impressionable. Even High Commissioner Paul Vories Menutt "lamented" that US economic policies encouraged the development of agriculture based on cash crops "which in turn entrenched an economic elite wilfully blind to the Philippines’ need for independent economic development and agrarian reform." In retrospect, that is all very true. But all that I remember of Peacetime was that we were happy and carefree and gliding on wings that, looking back, was a flight through the fairyland of emerging youth.

Always the opening stanza of that poem comes back: "It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea, there lived a maiden whom you may know by the name of Annabel Lee. She was young and I was young in our kingdom by the sea, and we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee." In Pasay, we indeed lived by the sea. It was our kingdom. And many of us had our memories of our own Annabel Lee when love was platonic and the touch of a girl’s hand was heaven.

Peacetime was when the Japanese we knew operated halo-halo, mongo con hielo and mais con hielo parlors, tended lush gardens or were hemp manufacturers in Mindanao, besides owning a few stores along Avenida Rizal. Now we are told that many of them were operating as spies. And the reckoning came when virtually the whole Japanese fleet bombed Pearl Harbor and from there proceeded to the Philippines.

Peacetime. As the poet said: Oh for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is gone." Leave me with my memories of Peacetime, for they are mine and mine alone. It was an enchantment, never to be experienced again.