Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Elpidio Quirino succeeded Manuel Roxas as president upon the latter’s death on April of 1948. My aunt tells me of flowers dropping from an airplane during the president’s funeral and I am not sure if it was a child’s imagination playing on me, but such a scenario persists in my memory as if I actually saw it. I guess every kid has a kaleidoscope of one’s earliest insights. This must have started my awareness of nation building and curiosity about politics.


I recall the day when my mother took me for a walk some two corners away from the quonset hut. She showed me a house that was being built. I suppose she had to explain what it was as that was the first time I ever saw something being built. I recall seeing the wooden structures and the carpenters working on the trusses of the roofing. Mother said we were building a new house. “We” turned out to be just her, my father and me. I never gave it a thought why my grandmother and aunts did not move would us then.

When playing with the alphabet blocks Herman sent me from the U.S. I would see the workmen working on the trusses. Much later, when I came across J.D. Salinger’s story which was first published in The New Yorker on November 1955“ the same backdrop of my early childhood flashed back in my mind. To this time and age, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” still does.


And so we moved to our new home, me and my parents, even if some of the finishing work remains to be done. One of the windows did not have shutters and for a while, we covered it with a canvass to keep the rain out. We had no door locks so my father improvised using a metal oar, one of those the military used to paddle inflated rafts, to bar the door. A very humble house indeed, but it was our own and my parents were proud of it.

The Quonset Hut

My earliest recollection of my childhood was lying on a banig with my parents in theit bedroom which had no bed. We were staying in one of those Quonset huts the G.I.s left as their troops moved on. This Quonset stood at the property of my grandmother so we all moved out of the barber shop and lived in this military innovation.



Next to the Quonset hut was a vacant lot owned by the parish. It became the stockyard of my father’s surplus G.I. sheets. Although he continued to ran the barber shop, There was an extension to the hut which was rented out to a Chinese named Vicente who ran a sari-sari store. One of my aunts raised orchids and some florist bought her mariposas and cattleyas. Another aunt sold rice while the eldest worked in Chinatown for a big hardware store.



Outside, right beside the door was a guava tree. It must have been just after liberation as I recall we would have family get togethers at the living room and it seems to me that my aunts and their guests were all sitting on the floor. I can’t recall whether the piano stayed at barber shop extension or brought to the Quonset.

The time must have been after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and I must have been at least three years old. One evening, a rocket flew of the sky and ended with a loud bang. It turned out that some scavengers found this bomb by the river and accidentally detonated it. A few blocks away, there was a big yard filled with surplus war materials, mostly jeeps and trucks.

While Manila was putting away the remnants of war, the "Noble and Ever Loyal City". will never be the same. A certain sadness lingers in my heart.