DEAR Ser Luck,

You are far too young - buy me the kopi later, alas, not from Minah Stall - to have known Farrer Park for ECA.

(If, by the time you got to Secondary school ECA had already re-acronymed to CCA, boy, that's youth barely out of its shorts.)

Anyway, what I want to say is, while we concur that air-conditioning and YouTube are two of the greatest inventions this century, I reserve judgement about lifts on every floor.

I know upgrading of estates in not in your purview, Ser Luck, but I'm slowly getting there. Thanks to elevators, the men from Courts and Ikea have had their backbreaking jobs alleviated somewhat.

No thanks to lifts stopping on every level, neighbours no longer know who their neighbours are, because there's no more opportunity nor room for hello-how's-your-mother.

In the time you enter with your Carrefour bags and hit the button, you're at your front door.

Once bolted, only an earthquake would force you out of your air-con unit. (Speaking from personal experience years ago when tremors from a Sumatra quake brought us all down into the open field.)

The open field is what I want to draw your attention to, Ser Luck.

The wide open fields of Farrer Park were once six football pitches. If you can run to ground an old kacang putih man - when it was spelled kachang puteh - he will vouch for that. (I would offer to buy his coloured tikam sticks.)

He would know what school team was playing who and in which field the match was on.

This delightful piece of information I received from two neighbours not seen in three years. We live on different floors in the same block. (We used to live in the same kampung before this.)

Last night, three of us were going in and out of the same lift, and dinners were put on hold while we caught up.

Reflections on our former compound, how members of the citizens' consultative committee would walk up four flights, knock on every door to find out any young children, encourage the parents to have the kids join in the CC's sporting activities. And in some needy cases, even help out with money.

Talk settled on Farrer Park, the first heartbeat of sports in Singapore. (Singapore Sporting Club 1842, don't play-play.)

Our palpable fear's that sooner or later those fields of green that were both birthplace and stomping ground of Singapore's greatest sportsmen and women may go the way of piling and construction, an Erecto set to malls and flats we so don't need, for years yet.

Every babyboomer who made seconday school has painfully great memories of ECA in Farrer Park.

Pre-aircon days, heat and thirst slaked by tap water in the lavatories, or those lucky enough to have money for a Green Spot or Red Lion.

Learning to swim - with your broad shoulders you should take up swimming - for 15 or 30 cents through the turnstile to the Farrer Park Swimming Pool.

Tennis, you always thought sure rich students, because of the price of a racquet. This then surely was where to meet boys?

Were the boys interested to tackle the girls? 'No lah, we were there for the games and the Indian and Chinese rojak, and the sarabat stall!'

One of my girlfriends took up sports solely so she could eat there every week (her parents were the ham sandwich type who forbade hawker food).

The word 'bitumen' which separated those exsi (showoff) in English and not, that was the athletics track. Ask sporting fraternity like C Kunalan who must have left some blood and skin in the early sand there. (His wife's nickname 'Koyok' for plaster, what you guys call Band-aid today.)

'Uncle Choo' (Seng Quee), the Quah brothers, Ernest Frida, Tan Eng Yoon, who was who in track, field, court and pool all ate grass and bit dust, literally, there.

My man at the wheel said, 'I grew up there, with Dollah Kassim, sometimes not enough people they call you to play, 6-kosong team.'

The roar from the Grandstand is long gone, Sports House consumed in flames in 1985, but the cheering crack of ball against bat is still heard today, especially weekends. And you're one of those we're counting on, Ser Luck, to keep forever green the pleasant pastures seen (excuse me, Blake) of Farrer Park.

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