AMAZINGLY, even after six decades, the sight of any of these: charcoal fire, hammer, machetes, and bellows or air blower — still evokes vivid memories of a communal blacksmith’s shop in my village, Kampung Ta-ee in Serian.
It was located just metres away from the boundary of our house compound with a pebbled public path running between it and our perimeter fence.
As far as I can remember, there were two smithies in the village in the 1950s — one each for the northern and southern ends of the village. The third one for the central part was built near our house sometime in the 1960s.
My whole family had love-hate feelings for the smithy. The hate was mainly due to the noise pollution whenever the annual smithing season came around. Love was when the knives, machetes and other iron or steel tools came out well-shaped, sharp and ready for the next round of farming.
Father tolerated it because he found the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. For one thing, he no longer needed to use the other two smithies that were always overcrowded and were quite far from our house.
A smithing season never lasted long, being spread out over a few days before Gawai Dayak and for a week or two after that, just before the new paddy farming season started in earnest. It was one of the compulsory rituals in the village where sharp tools were highly desired and valued.
The cacophony of tuneless noises of hammers striking the anvils; files scratching and scraping metal surfaces; the whoosh-whoosh of the double-chambered hand bellows accompanied by the cracking and crackling of the charcoal fire, plus the loud talk and crude jokes of the blacksmiths took some getting used to.
The men were by and large good people but rough and illiterate, and so were prone to sharing jokes that would be out of place in a genteel company. Nevertheless, I learned a thing or two about blacksmithing from them; not because they took time to teach me, but because I spent a lot of time watching what they were doing.
Unlike most of the men, Father liked working alone and preferred waiting until everyone had finished all the smithing that needed to be done. The problem with that was he had no one to turn to when he needed help. When making objects from a red-hot iron, some tasks are better done with the help of another person.
Thus, when I was old enough — which was around the time I was in Primary 4, 5 and 6 (1963 to 1965) — it was my job (more like a duty) during weekends or school holidays to operate the bellows for him. That was my practical introduction to the arcane art of blacksmithing.
Operating the bellows required more brawn than brain which was fine by me, but it was mind-numbingly boring. All I did for hours on end was sit or stand on a platform above the bellows from which to push-pull the double-chambered air pumps. Both hands must be used as there were two vertical handles attached to piston-like disks that alternately went up and down inside the chambers, sucking in or pushing air out in the process. The bellows won’t work if only one chamber was operated.
Since the spot above the chambers was right above the blazing fire, the heat was almost unbearable. The trick, therefore, was to operate the disk handles at a speed and force that pushed out just enough air to keep the fire hot. Push down the disks aggressively and the airspeed would cause the fire and its heat to shoot upward and outward.
The boredom, though, was impossible to kill. I told Father about it but it was like telling the rain to stop falling during the monsoon season. His prime concerns were the family’s old knives, machetes, axes and various other tools that must be repaired, restored, or improved before the coming farming season. Sometimes, the family needed new tools but the question of spending money on what could be made at home never even came up.
So, over time I insisted on taking short breaks to drink some water and lay down on our veranda. Short as they were, the few minutes of rest always recharged my motivation and energy. Sure, the whispers of temptation to go and play with my friends were ever-present. However, just thinking about it was enough to make me feel guilty about leaving Father to work by himself.
If you have never even stepped inside a blacksmith’s shop, let me tell you that it can be intimidating to the uninitiated. First of all, it is damn hot because of the fiery hearth. Secondly, it is extremely noisy due to the hammering and filing. Thirdly, it is dirty from being covered with a thin layer of powdered carbon everywhere no matter how much the place is swept and wiped. Put your hands anywhere and chances are they will come away black. Black-faced blacksmiths were a common sight during the smithing season because they could not help but touch their faces to wipe their sweat or scratch an itch.
Our smithy was a basic wall-less building, about 15 feet wide and 20 feet long. There were four big posts and as many beams made from round timber. It had wooden roof shingles.
At one end of the building was a narrow waist-high rectangular mound of compacted earth on which were the hearth and bellows.
There were two anvils, one on each side of the hearth. From the view of a person facing the hearth, the big anvil was on the left while the small one was on the right.
Near the big anvil was a wooden trough where the blacksmiths rapidly quenched their hot iron in water to make them hard like steel. This stage of blacksmithing was what I liked the most. To my young eyes, it seemed to have a magical quality to it. I found it amazing that a hot blade dipped quickly in water could become hard and retain its sharpness much longer than an unquenched blade.
I noticed that once a workpiece has turned a nice even red, the blacksmith let it get just a bit hotter until the material got slightly orange. After several minutes, the iron was quenched. It was always very satisfying to hear the hissing sounds and see the steam plume rising from the trough.
At the other end of the building, opposite the hearth, was a filing station, which looked like a scarred old horizontal ladder. Blackened, scratched and battered by years of blacksmithing, it was where the iron/steel workpieces were tied down, choked or clamped while being filed down to their final shapes.
Eventually, the boredom of operating the bellows did become too painful to bear. It made me easily tired and irritable. Despite my efforts to hide the pain, Father must have noticed it somehow.
One day, after heating a blade till it was red-hot, he asked me to hold its handle, which was wrapped with a dripping wet old rag. He explained that he wanted to split the chipped edge lengthwise with a chisel.
The first time he hit the chisel with his hammer, the machete almost flew out of my hands. I felt the violent vibrations travelling from the blade through my small hands and shooting up my arms and elbows, right up to the shoulders. Man, that was one hell of an instant boredom killer for a 10-year-old boy!
Father re-heated the iron and we repeated the process until the unwanted edge was no more. In the few minutes that it took to complete the task, I gained a whole new perspective of and next-level respect for blacksmithing. And I sweated buckets too, partly due to the physical exertion and partly out of fear that the hot iron might fly out of my hands again and hit me.
Weeks later, while Father was preparing our paddy farm for the new planting season, I found the unfinished blade hanging by its handle between two nails on a wall of our house. Mother said it had become too thin to be of further use, but Father did not want to throw it away. Instead, he hung it there to remind him of their good old days together.
Father never explained why he asked me to help him split the blade when he knew it was already useless. I guess he was trying to teach me something and that was his best effort then. He did not know it, but the splitting of the blade triggered a deep dormant interest that I did not know was inside me.
A day after I found the blade on the wall, I took it to the forge and worked on it with a little hammer. Its original handle was cracked, so I fashioned a long new one from the root of a durian tree. It had to be long because I didn’t want my hands anywhere near the fire. What resulted was a rather crude-looking knife. It was sharp, though, and could slice fruits, vegetables, fish, and even chop a small banana tree.
Over the years, Father and I made several more machetes and I made a few more little knives using leftover bits of steel or discarded parangs.
Unfortunately, blacksmithing came to an end for me when I finished secondary school and moved to Kuching. Now and then, though, the memories would return and I would feel the urge to hammer on a piece of iron to see if I still could make a blade.
A few years ago, while working on my new kitchen, I began hammering on a scrap piece of steel rebar (reinforcing bar) after heating it with a gas burner. It almost looked like a knife when I came to my senses. I realised that a terraced house was not the proper place to use as a pseudo blacksmith’s shop. No knife was made that day, but the hammering consoled my yearning heart and put the blacksmith in me to sleep.
Still, if sh** hits the fans (as the Americans often say) and the world goes to hell, I believe that I can still make a survival knife as long as there is a fire, a hammer, an iron rod, and a small chunk of steel as an anvil. It’s not complicated; just keep on striking while the iron is hot and before long it becomes a knife.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the New Sarawak Tribune.
