By Satiman Jamin

The quartz clock was still in its infancy when I was growing up in the 1970s and our family relied on the spring-powered clock to tell the time. Every evening I would watch my father wind the springs with a key-like device. I still remember the clickety-click sound the clock made as the gears connecting the spring to the main mechanism were forced to move by the spring on the left side of the clock face. The spring on the right side of the clock was more interesting as it powers the hammer that would strike the chime to tell the hour. If the clock stopped at 1.30pm and we rewind it at 5.15pm, the chime will strike only tw0 times (for 2pm) at 6pm; it was stuck on the last hour that it struck. To this day, I still cherish the memory of watching my father reset the hammer timing gear and hearing the clock chime each of the missing time slots.

Kids can play whatever games they want but they must make sure to be home before noon and even when none of us kids had a watch, everyone knew when noon is approaching. At 11am sharp, a distant explosion would be heard. One cannot miss it even if one were deaf as you don’t need ears to feel the tremors caused by the explosion that the villagers simply called “tembak”. Tembak is short for “tembak batu”, for the daily explosion was caused by blasting works at granite quarries on Pulau Ubin in Singapore. Yes, our village was very near Pulau Ubin, so near that the villagers, including my father, used to go there in row boats. The quarries on the island were said to be the source of granite used to build the Harsbrough lighthouse on Pulau Batu Puteh; that was how long the quarries had been in operation by the time we kids use the blasting works as a mean to tell the time.

The biggest carbide cannons that the village’s teenagers built during Ramadhan could give deafening and earth-shaking explosions but nobody will mistake the cannons for the “tembak batu”. A cousin of mine once poured a large pail of calcium carbide into his cannon, which was actually a hole dug into the side of a small hill. The resulting explosion shook the hill but nobody bat an eyelid as we were so used to the more powerful, daily blast from the quarries on Pulau Ubin.

I was burning some rubbish one day when a loud bang threw some embers out of the fire and at the same moment a rock shot past me. It landed on some dry leaves quite a distance away, causing the leaves to catch fire. Instead of being scared, I started throwing rocks into the fire to find out if any of them would explode. I was disappointed when none of them gave a pop, let alone an explosion. I only know recently that some rocks can retain quite a bit of moisture and when rapidly heated, the trapped moisture became steam and the rock would explode when it can no longer hold the pressure.

My quest to find rocks that would explode led me to discover those that would burn instead. They are called “batu gala”. It looks like a rock, light brown in colour but much lighter than an ordinary rock of the same size. With a slight tap, a batu gala would easily break to reveal the shiny dark brown core. Its smell is similar to kemenyan (frankincense), only milder as both have the same origin, tree sap. Long after the trees that the sap had came from had rotted away, the sap remained in the form of batu gala. When heated the batu gala would melt and the resulting tar-like substance would catch fire. The largest batu gala that I found was about the size of a football. Unfortunately I have burned them all away in fiery glory so now I don’t have any in my rock collection.

I had forgotten all about the exploding rock incident until recently. I was trying to loosen a rusted bolt stuck on an equally rusted bracket. I set the bolt and bracket on the cement floor of my porch and heated them with a gas torch. It had been raining and the cement floor was damp. After just a few minutes the cement right under the bolt and bracket gave a loud pop, sending pieces of cement to the roof. Luckily the flying cement did not hit me. A tiny crater the size of a 20 sen coin was the only sign that the cement had exploded. I do not recommend doing this as it is quite dangerous. I did not tell my wife about it. Hopefully she does not come upon this article. She basically let me do as I please but I just do not want her to be worried whenever I turn on my blowtorch.

The noise of teenagers pushing their motorcycles to the limit in what was probably an illegal race a few nights ago made me yearn for the time when kids would go home at the sound of a quarry’s blasting works. The quartz crystal in all modern gadgets kids have nowadays vibrates 32, 768 times a second, to keep time thousands of times more accurate than any spring-powered clock could ever be, but accuracy has no bearing on how we value time. Knowing it was midnight has no meaning without knowing what should and should not be done at midnight.

As for me, I am just glad to be fortunate enough to observe time ticking away with every step of the clock gears on those days more than four decades ago.

Some of the author’s rock collection.