planking jutted untrimmed from somebody’s wall, forcing passers-by to dogleg around it. There, certain of the huts with upper storeys (houses, really) had fused together at head height and the path plunged into a slimy tunnel for yards at a stretch. In the dry season these thoroughfares set hard into the lumps and bumps left from winter’s mud, peppered with embedded bottle caps, wicks of plastic and stumps of wood polished by bare feet. Tiny stores opened their shutters onto the paths, their shelves lined with staple goods, a courtesy box of matches dangling on a string for those who bought their cigarettes singly. There were always surprises. Cold drinks and ice were often on sale, arguing a refrigerator. Behind curtained doorways or up stygian staircases more like bent ladders might be veritable parlours with a bamboo settee, a colour TV, an electric fan, as well as that hallmark of the returning overseas remittance man, a suitcase-sized radio cassette player. Such things gave San Clemente an illusory aspect of permanence. One could forget that these homes were often little more than huts cobbled together from scraps, resting on bare earth which at any time might be reclaimed. Indeed, a certain patina of age hung about them and in places it would have been impossible to say for sure how old a group of shanties was. At night, especially, or during brownouts when the little stores glowed yellow with candlelight, San Clemente might have been an impoverished souk of great antiquity.
Epifania Tugos – or Nanang Pipa, as she was generally known – ran a sewing cooperative from her house about a third of the way up San Clemente’s slope above the creek. This was perhaps a slight exaggeration since the business was really no more than a loose organisation of various families who had the requisite skill and access to a machine. It could never become a real cooperative, a legal entity with theminimum fifteen members and eligibility for bank loans, because it lacked a proper address. In all other respects, though, it was run very much as a business with outlets for its jeans, T-shirts and children’s underwear in Divisoria Market as well as with regular suppliers of material. There were links, too, with Nanang Pipa’s home province, where relatives of many of San Clemente’s inhabitants carried on the rag trade for their local markets. The people in her group had divided up their labour. Those without machines did the cutting or took the cartons of finished clothes down to the market. At almost any time one might meet a great bundle of bright material with a pair of polished brown legs beneath it threading its way adroitly through San Clemente’s mud lanes.
In the early days of this cottage industry harsh lessons had been learned by those living down near the creek. If one happened to be out at the time of a flash flood one might return to find the house partially demolished or, more likely, the ground floor room full of drowned rats and the sulphurous smell of drains, the walls black with mud up to the ceiling, the Singer sewing machine festooned with slime. The chief things the villagers feared most were floods and fire, followed by ghosts. (Much too far down their list came bulldozers.) Floods were quite bad enough, though, for those forced by lack of land to live within the danger zone. In the months of July to November someone tried to be always on hand, ready at the first sign of flooding to begin carrying everything upstairs or to safety in a house further up the hill. Often the first sign wasn’t mere heavy rain but the sudden appearance of cockroaches in unusual numbers. They, too, were headed upwards, swarming in the roof. In 1989 when Munding’s children were swept off by the Kapilang in spate the villagers remembered seeing two balls of beetles twirling away downstream: the children’s heads alive with cockroaches. (It was either a miracle or an iron grille at the entrance to the underground sewer which had
Epifania Tugos – or Nanang Pipa, as she was generally known – ran a sewing cooperative from her house about a third of the way up San Clemente’s slope above the creek. This was perhaps a slight exaggeration since the business was really no more than a loose organisation of various families who had the requisite skill and access to a machine. It could never become a real cooperative, a legal entity with theminimum fifteen members and eligibility for bank loans, because it lacked a proper address. In all other respects, though, it was run very much as a business with outlets for its jeans, T-shirts and children’s underwear in Divisoria Market as well as with regular suppliers of material. There were links, too, with Nanang Pipa’s home province, where relatives of many of San Clemente’s inhabitants carried on the rag trade for their local markets. The people in her group had divided up their labour. Those without machines did the cutting or took the cartons of finished clothes down to the market. At almost any time one might meet a great bundle of bright material with a pair of polished brown legs beneath it threading its way adroitly through San Clemente’s mud lanes.
In the early days of this cottage industry harsh lessons had been learned by those living down near the creek. If one happened to be out at the time of a flash flood one might return to find the house partially demolished or, more likely, the ground floor room full of drowned rats and the sulphurous smell of drains, the walls black with mud up to the ceiling, the Singer sewing machine festooned with slime. The chief things the villagers feared most were floods and fire, followed by ghosts. (Much too far down their list came bulldozers.) Floods were quite bad enough, though, for those forced by lack of land to live within the danger zone. In the months of July to November someone tried to be always on hand, ready at the first sign of flooding to begin carrying everything upstairs or to safety in a house further up the hill. Often the first sign wasn’t mere heavy rain but the sudden appearance of cockroaches in unusual numbers. They, too, were headed upwards, swarming in the roof. In 1989 when Munding’s children were swept off by the Kapilang in spate the villagers remembered seeing two balls of beetles twirling away downstream: the children’s heads alive with cockroaches. (It was either a miracle or an iron grille at the entrance to the underground sewer which had
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