The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (15 page)

Family photo in September 1946, before I sailed for England. Monica, Dennis, me, Freddy and Suan Yew standing behind my parents.

With Choo, in September 1946, at MacRitchie Reservoir. We were young and in love.

She belonged to a large family of eight children and had a happy, sheltered childhood in a conservative home. Her parents were moderately well off and there was always a car to take her to school, to Raffles College or wherever she needed to go. They also had a keen sense of propriety. On one occasion, after they moved to Devonshire Road, Choo arrived home from the library riding pillion on my motorcycle to the consternation of her mother. She was roundly rebuked for such improper behaviour. What would people think! Who would want to marry her! Soon afterwards, her family moved back to Pasir Panjang, where they had lived before. Fortunately, by then I had a car.

In the hectic months before September 1946 we spent a lot of time together. Before I left, I got my cousin Harold Liem, who was boarding with us at 38 Oxley Road, to take a whole series of photographs of us, all within a couple of days. We were young and in love, anxious to record this moment of our lives, to have something to remember each other by during the three years that I would be away in England. We did not know when we would meet again once I left. We both hoped she would go back to Raffles College, win the Queen’s scholarship to read law, and join me wherever I might be. She was totally committed. I sensed it. I was equally determined to keep my commitment to her.

When I left Singapore on my 23rd birthday, 16 September 1946, aboard the
Britannic
and waved to her from the ship’s deck, she was tearful. So was I. All my family and some friends, including Hon Sui Sen, were on the quay to wish me luck and wave me goodbye.

5. My Cambridge Days

The
Britannic
was a 65,000-ton Cunard Liner that sailed across the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York before the war. No ship as large or as fast did the Southampton to Singapore run. It was packed with troops on their way home for demobilisation. There were some 40 Asiatics on board, most of them Chinese, sleeping twice as many to a cabin as would have been normal for paying passengers. I was glad to be one of them.

I had no law textbooks with me to prepare myself for my studies, so I spent my time playing poker with some of the Hong Kong students. It was a relatively innocent pastime. I was shocked to see the unabashed promiscuity of some 40 or 50 servicewomen, non-commissioned officers and other ranks, who flirted with the officers. One night, a Hong Kong student, his eyes popping out of his head, told me they were unashamedly making love on the lifeboat deck. I was curious and went up to see for myself. What a sight it was! The deck was a hive of activity, with couples locked in passionate embraces scattered all over it. Some were a little less indelicate. They untied the canvas covers of the lifeboats to get inside them for a little privacy. But to see dozens of men and women openly engaging in sex contrasted sharply with my memory of the Japanese soldiers queuing up outside the “comfort house” at Cairnhill Road. “French letters”, now called condoms, littered the deck.

I received another shock when the ship passed through the Suez Canal. It proceeded slowly so that the waves would not wash down the loose sand on the banks. As we passed, a group of Arab workers on the shore started shouting obscenities and lifted their
gallabiya
– long garments like nightshirts – to flaunt their genitals at the British servicewomen,
who were on the deck watching the world go by in the torrid heat. The women shrieked in surprise and disgust, much to the delight of the Arabs, who put their hands on their penises and shook them. I had seen monkeys in the Botanic Gardens in Singapore do this to visitors who refused them bananas. Later, I learnt that they hated the British. Why, I did not know. It was the first time I had left Singapore to go overseas. I was being exposed to a new world of the hates and loves, the prejudices and biases of different peoples.

Nobody in Britain knew I was coming, so there were no arrangements for me to be met when the ship arrived in Liverpool on 3 October, 17 days after it left Singapore. However, knowing that the Hong Kong students sponsored by their government were being met by officials from the Colonial Office in London, I decided to latch on to them. Our train reached London late that night, and I followed them by taxi to a Victoria League hostel in Earl’s Court. There I was given a double-decker bunk like the one on the
Britannic
, in a cavernous room in a basement with no windows. I found myself in the company of some 20 African and Caribbean students. It was another shock. I had never seen Africans before in real life, only in photographs. I was unprepared for their strange body odours, quite unlike those of the racial groups we had in Singapore. I did not sleep well that night.

I had to look for somewhere to live, and after 12 days of temporary accommodation at the YMCA, I found myself a room at 8 Fitzjohn’s Avenue. It was a beautiful, quiet, tree-lined road only a short walk from Swiss Cottage tube station and the bus stop for the Number 13 that would take me straight to the Strand near the London School of Economics (LSE).

I still had to get a place at the LSE, which was not easy. Term had started two weeks before, and the universities were overflowing with returned servicemen. But I managed to see the head of the law faculty, Professor Hughes Parry. I explained to him my lost three and a half years,
and that I had got onto the earliest possible troopship, not knowing I could have sent my application by post. I produced my Senior Cambridge results as top student in Singapore and Malaya for 1939 to convince him that I would have no difficulty in catching up even though I was starting late in the term. He was sympathetic and took me in.

It was a strange life. The LSE resembled a busy hotel, totally unlike Singapore’s leisurely, gracious Raffles College, where students lived in halls of residence, sauntered to lecture rooms, sat around in junior common rooms and attended tutorials of two, three or four students at the most at a time. The LSE was a multi-storey building with students dashing up and down in the lifts, everybody hurrying to do something, somewhere. Lectures were a scramble. After one in the LSE, I would dash across the Strand to King’s College for another, and then take either the tube or a bus to Euston for a third at University College, London – the nicest of the three because it was away from the hubbub of central London, and with its hospital grounds had something of the atmosphere of a college.

One interesting incident took place early in the academic year in the entrance hall of the LSE. For about a week, students representing various clubs – the Labour Club, Liberal Club, Conservative Club, Socialist Club – stood by little booths, handing out pamphlets and recruiting new members. The most active in canvassing among the colonial students were the communists. They masqueraded under the name Socialist Club, but I soon discovered their Marxist colours and their trick of having attractive British women students on hand to lobby African, Caribbean and the few Asian undergraduates. I steered clear of them all.

I was suffering from culture shock before the phrase was coined. The climate, the clothes, the food, the people, the habits, the manners, the streets, the geography, the travel arrangements – everything was different. I was totally unprepared except for the English language, a smattering of English literature, and previous interaction with British colonials.

For a large bedsitter, I paid the princely sum of £6 a week, a big amount for someone who had stopped earning. Fortunately, it included breakfast. There was a gas fire and a retractable gas ring in the room, and I had to put shillings into a meter to light the fire and cook for myself. I was desperately unhappy about food. It was rationed, and the restaurants where I could eat without coupons were expensive. I did not know how to use the rations that I bought and they were never enough. I had no refrigerator. The book
Cooking in a Bed-sitter
had not yet been written. I had disastrous experiences with boiling milk, which spilt over, and frying bacon and steaks that shrank and filled the room with powerful smells. The odours refused to go away for hours even though, in spite of the cold, I opened the sash window and the door to create a through draught. They clung to the bedclothes and the curtains. It was awful. Lunches at any of the three college canteens were stodgy and dreadful.

It was cold and lonely at night. As I returned to Swiss Cottage each evening with British white-collar workers, I felt good about not going back to a colonial student ghetto. But I was always alone. In the house itself, everybody went to their own rooms and closed the doors, since there was no common dining room or sitting room, and in the morning they had breakfast brought up to them or made their own. When I ran into difficulties with my housekeeping, I approached some British girls, six young office secretaries who shared a room in the attic. I took advice from them on where to buy meat and how to keep butter and milk fresh without a refrigerator (leave them out in the cold on the window-sill, and not indoors where they would turn sour). From fellow students, I learnt that I could save a laundry charge of sixpence if I washed a handkerchief and left it to dry on the mirror above the washbasin. But I could not do that with shirts and underwear. And shirt cuffs and collars got grubby in less than a day with London soot. I was thoroughly unhappy over the little things I had always taken for granted in Singapore. My family provided everything I needed. My shoes were polished, my clothes were
washed and ironed, my food was prepared. All I had to do was to express my preferences. Now I had to do everything for myself. It was a physically exhausting life, moreover, with much time spent on the move from place to place. I was fatigued from walking, and travelling on buses and tubes left me without the energy for quiet study and contemplation.

One day, after a tutorial on constitutional law, I approached the lecturer, Glanville L. Williams. I had seen from the LSE calendar that he was from St John’s College, Cambridge, where he had taken a PhD. I asked him about Cambridge and the life there. He said it was a small town whose existence centred on the university, very different from London. The pace of life was more leisurely. Students and dons moved around on bicycles. It sounded attractive and I decided to visit it.

I went up in late November 1946, and met a Raffles College student, Cecil Wong, who had got into Fitzwilliam House, a non-collegiate body for poorer students where the fees were much lower. Cecil took me to see the censor of Fitzwilliam, W.S. Thatcher, who was the equivalent of the master of a college. Billy Thatcher was an impressive man. He had won the Military Cross in World War I for service in Flanders, where he had been badly wounded. His face was scarred, and because his palate had been injured, his speech was affected. He had strong Christian principles and great compassion for an underdog. Thatcher was much respected and loved by dons and students alike. I recounted my problems to him. He took a liking to me and offered to take me in that same academic year when the Lent term started in early January 1947, provided my friend Cecil would share his room with me. Cecil immediately agreed. I was overjoyed and grateful. I returned to London, wound up my affairs and packed my bags. In early January, I took a train from King’s Cross station, arrived at Cambridge some two hours later, and caught a taxi to Cecil’s rooms at 36 Belvoir Road.

Two weeks later, I wrote to Professor Hughes Parry to tell him I had decided to leave the LSE and go to Cambridge instead. I received an
angry reply. “I would remind you that I went out of my way to persuade the authorities of this school to accept you when we had turned others away,” he wrote. “Your conduct shows that I was wrong in my estimate of you and that I should not have been so ready to help.” On getting this letter, I decided to see him personally, to face him and take my medicine. I turned up at his office and explained how difficult life had been in my first term, that I came from a small town and felt totally lost in a big city of so many millions, so completely impersonal, with everybody hurrying around at a tremendous pace. Furthermore, I could not cater for myself.