The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (14 page)

Philip Hoalim helped to draw up the proposed constitution, but although I saw the draft, I had nothing to do with it. On their part, the communists considered all talk of constitutional change irrelevant. What they wanted was total power. The Malayan Democratic Union was merely
a front organisation to mobilise the English-educated to help them achieve it. But when they resorted to armed struggle against the British in 1948 to get it, the Malayan Democratic Union folded up.

Before that happened, however, there was plenty of action. Very soon after they emerged from the jungle, the communists started to flex their muscles, using the trade unions. On 21 October 1945, they got 7,000 workers in the dockyards at Tanjong Pagar and the Singapore Harbour Board to go on strike. A few days later, they held a mass meeting attended by 20,000 workers at which they inaugurated the General Labour Union. In typical communist fashion, the union took in workers from every conceivable trade and also self-employed groups. When it called a general strike on 29 January 1946, in a demonstration of strength after the British Military Administration had detained a few communists, some 170,000 workers from hospitals, shipyards, the Naval Base, rubber factories, cinemas, cabarets and public transport stopped work, and the shops closed. It was called a
hartal
, a word taken from the civil disobedience movement in India.

This stoppage was neither voluntary nor spontaneous but was enforced by intimidation and fear. The shops closed because if they did not they would be vandalised and wrecked. Workers who reported for work were beaten up. So not only hawkers, but trishaw riders, rickshaw pullers and taxi drivers played safe and took the day off. Life in the city came to a halt. But the communists suspected that they could not sustain the strike for long. Having demonstrated they could command overwhelming compliance for their
hartal
, they called it off after the second day.

My education in the unfairness and absurdities of human existence was completed by what I saw happening in the immediate aftermath of the war. If three and a half years of Japanese occupation had earned me my degree in the realities of life, the first year in liberated Singapore was my postgraduate course. It was very different from my memory of the
colonial thirties. Those British civil servants who survived internment had been sent home for medical treatment and recuperation, and temporary officers of the British Military Administration controlled what were improvised departments.

True, they were reinforced with a few of the pre-war generation who had been on leave when the Japanese came, or had got away in time. But they were out of touch with the changes that had taken place. The men now in charge – majors, colonels, brigadiers – knew they would be in power only until they were demobilised, when their wartime commissions would vanish like Cinderella’s coach. The pumpkin of civilian life to which they would then be reduced was at the back of their minds, and many made the most of their temporary authority. Their needs, alas, were similar to those of Japanese officers – something small, valuable and easy to secrete on the person to take home to England when their time was up. So the same items were in demand. In return, they granted permits and supplies of scarce materials to the locals, and therefore opportunities to make money. But they were not bullies and oppressors like the Japanese.

With the Japanese out of the way, many houses became vacant, and my mother and I looked for a suitable place to move into, for we had to leave the China Building, and the Victoria Street shophouse was unsuitable. In Oxley Road, a middle-class area where Europeans had vacated their homes in 1942 and Japanese civilians had taken them over, we came across two identical houses – Numbers 38 and 40 – built by a Jewish merchant, who named them Castor and Pollux. They were empty except for some heavy furniture, and we decided to make a bid for the tenancy of Number 38. It was a big, rambling house with five bedrooms, and three others at the back originally used as servants’ quarters. I saw George Gaw, a Java-born Chinese friend of the family who
was in charge at the office of the Custodian of Enemy Property, and he was happy to let us have it at its pre-war rental. The rent had now to be paid in Straits dollars – some $80 a month, a fairly sizeable sum – but we decided to take it.

My father went back to work for Shell, this time to be in charge of their depot at Pasir Panjang in Singapore. Meanwhile, I had to decide what to do. Trading on the open market was still profitable, but the range of goods had changed and this made it riskier. I could not predict which items in short supply would suddenly become plentiful if they were brought in for the troops. So, as an alternative, I approached various British officers in charge of public works to see whether they wanted any construction jobs done. After two or three attempts, I succeeded in clinching a deal with an Indian brigade that controlled Japanese army warehouses in Alexandra Road. I spoke to a major, a tall lanky Englishman, who needed labourers to move Japanese goods out of the warehouses and replace them with British army stores. My Shanghainese friend Low You Ling and I supplied him with some 100–150 workers at $2 a day, and my younger brother Dennis acted as cashier and paymaster. The army paid us after a head count at the end of each day and we then paid the workers. There were also some construction jobs to be done for which we were paid separately. The work started in October 1945 and kept me busy until May 1946.

In March 1946, Dennis met with a bad accident while cycling home one evening after collecting the money to pay the labourers. A passing lorry caught him and dragged him many yards along the road outside Victoria Memorial Hall. His left arm was almost torn from his shoulder and his face was injured. I dashed off to see him at the hospital. The first thing Dennis asked me was whether the money was lost. I felt a pain in my heart. It was just a few hundred dollars, but he took his job seriously. I comforted him as best as I could. The surgeon operated on him successfully, but he was in pain and incapacitated for many months.

All this while, I had also been preoccupied over what I was to do about my uncompleted education and my growing attachment to Choo. I did not feel optimistic about being able to finish my diploma course at Raffles College soon enough. The college would take at least a year to get restarted. Then I would need another one or one and a half years to graduate. In all, I would lose two to three years. I discussed the matter with my mother. We decided that, with her savings and jewellery, my earnings from the black market and my contract work, the family could pay for my law studies in Britain and those of Dennis. I planned to leave for England as soon as possible instead of returning to Raffles College to try to win the Queen’s scholarship.

In October-November 1945, I introduced Choo to the librarian at Raffles Library (now the National Library) and got her a temporary job there. Her family had moved to a bungalow in Devonshire Road, about a mile from our house, and I used to walk her home. Sometimes we would sit at a quiet spot in the grounds of the big Chesed-El Synagogue at Oxley Rise, close to where the
Kempeitei
had had one of their centres. But in November 1945, I could afford to buy a second-hand car, a pre-war Morris refurbished with spares now available from the British army. As my business improved, I sold it at a profit after a few months and bought a pre-war Ford V8, restored to good condition. It must have been used by a Japanese general during the occupation.

On New Year’s Eve, I took Choo to a party for young people at Mandalay Villa in Amber Road, the seaside mansion of Mrs Lee Choon Guan, doyenne of the Straits-born Chinese and a very wealthy widow. Just before the party broke up, I led her out into the garden facing the sea. I told her that I no longer planned to return to Raffles College, but would go to England to read law. I asked her whether she would wait for me until I came back three years later after being called to the Bar. Choo asked if I knew she was two and a half years older than I was. I said I knew, and had considered this carefully. I was mature for my age
and most of my friends were older than me anyway. Moreover, I wanted someone my equal, not someone who was not really grown up and needed looking after, and I was not likely to find another girl who was my equal and who shared my interests. She said she would wait. We did not tell our parents. It would have been too difficult to get them to agree to such a long commitment. This was the way we dealt with each other; when we ran into difficult personal problems, we faced them and sorted them out. We did not dodge or bury them. The courtship blossomed. I started to plan on leaving Singapore that year, 1946.

In March, I wrote to the Middle Temple, one of the four legal societies in London, enclosing my School Certificate results. Within a month, they replied that they would admit me if I presented myself in person and signed up as a student. With this letter, I approached the British major I worked for and asked him how I could travel on one of the ships that were then beginning to arrive at Tanjong Pagar to take troops back to Britain to be demobilised. The major put me in touch with the army transport officer, and in May I saw one of his staff. I was able to make an impression because in those days few locals could speak grammatical and idiomatic English without a strong accent. I explained my predicament, how my education had been interrupted by the war so that I had now lost three and a half years, but that I had now been admitted to the Middle Temple. I produced the Middle Temple letter and said I urgently needed a sea passage to Britain. He was sympathetic and promised to help. In July, he offered me a priority passage on a troopship that would get me to London by October.

In the frantic two months before I left Singapore, I scouted around with my mother for woollen clothes for the English winter. We found most of them at the Sungei Road flea market, which used to deal in stolen property before the war and had sprung back to life with items pilfered or bought from British troops, many of them flogged by soldiers who had been given them for their return to civilian life, or Civvy Street
as they called it. My mother bought a huge wooden trunk with metal caps at the corners and packed in it a rug, a quilt, an overcoat, two sports jackets, flannel bags and a suit made of RAF barathea by the best tailor in High Street.

Before I sailed, she also did her best to make sure I would leave Singapore committed to some Chinese girl, and therefore be less likely to return with an English one. Several students had come back with British wives, often with unhappy results. Their families were upset, and couples broke up or else went off to settle in England because they could not fit into British colonial society, where they were patronised if not publicly ostracised. She introduced me in turn to three eligible young ladies of suitable background and good social status. I was not enthusiastic. They were the right age, their families were comfortably off and they were presentable. But they did not arouse my interest. I was quite happy, having settled on Choo. Finally, I decided to confide in my mother. She was a shrewd woman. Once she realised I had really made up my mind, she stopped her search. Her attitude to Choo changed to one of the warm friendliness of a prospective mother-in-law.

I had earlier told her about Choo, the girl who had beaten me in the English and economics examinations at Raffles College. She had also met Choo during our gum-making days and had visited the family. Choo’s father, Kwa Siew Tee, a banker at the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, was a Java-born Chinese like my father and my paternal grandmother. Her mother was a Straits-born Singapore Chinese like my own mother. We had similar backgrounds, spoke the same language at home and shared the same social norms.

Choo had been educated at Methodist Girls’ School, and having passed her Senior Cambridge examinations, was only 16 when she went to the special class at Raffles Institution for students competing for the Queen’s scholarship, but she did not get it. She told me later she was waiting for her Prince Charming. I turned up, not on a white horse but a bicycle with solid tyres! In 1940, she went to Raffles College, and we met at dinners and picnics, but at that time I kept my distance as I was in my first year and having a difficult time adjusting. Moreover, I was not eager to get close to any girl because I was not ready for any commitment. The few times we met socially or in lecture rooms, we were friendly but casual. In 1943–44, however, we came together in a different setting – myself older by three years of Japanese occupation and seeing her with different eyes; Choo cooped up in a flat doing housework, learning Mandarin, reading whatever books she could get and ready for our gum-making venture.