The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew by Lee Kuan Yew Read Free Book Online

strokes of the cane. I was always a late riser, an owl more than a lark, and when I was late for school the third time in a term in 1938, the form master sent me to see McLeod. The principal knew me from the number of prizes I had been collecting on prize-giving days and the scholarships I had won. But I was not let off with an admonition. I bent over a chair and was given three of the best with my trousers on. I did not think he lightened his strokes. I have never understood why Western educationists are so much against corporal punishment. It did my fellow students and me no harm.
    Nevertheless, I was learning to take life seriously. My parents had pointed out to me how some of their friends were doing well because they had become lawyers and doctors. They were self-employed, and therefore had not been hit by the Depression. My father regretted his misspent youth, and they urged me to become a professional. So from my early years I geared myself towards becoming a lawyer, a professional and not an employee. My plan was to read law in London.
    But in 1940 the war in Europe was going badly. France was under severe threat, and about to be occupied. Going to London to study law was best postponed. Having come first in Singapore and Malaya in the Senior Cambridge examinations, I was offered the Anderson scholarship, the most valuable then available, to study at Raffles College. I decided to take it. It was worth $200 more than the other government awards and was enough to pay for fees, books and boarding, and leave something to spare.

    Raffles College was founded in 1928 by the Straits Settlements government. It taught the arts (English, history, geography, economics) and the sciences (physics, chemistry, pure and applied mathematics).The government had designed handsome buildings for it, with quadrangles and cloisters constructed of concrete with mock stone facing, like those at Oxford and Cambridge but with concessions to the tropical climate.
    As a scholarship student, I had to stay in one of the halls of residence. It was a difficult adjustment. To suit Singapore’s hot, humid climate, the architects had designed big dormitories with high ceilings. Each was divided into 20 rooms with french windows leading to open verandas. Partitions between rooms were only seven feet high, slightly above head level, to allow air to circulate freely. This meant that noise also circulated freely above 20 rooms and around 20 verandas occupied by 20 youthful undergraduates.
    Each student had to take three subjects. I read English, which was compulsory for all arts students, and concentrated on it to improve my command of the language, and to help me when I studied law later; mathematics, because I liked it and was good at it; and economics, because I believed it could teach me how to make money in business and on the stock market – I was naive! After the first year, a student had to choose one subject as his major field of study. I chose mathematics.
    At the end of each of the three terms in the academic year there were examinations, and for the first of these I was the best student in mathematics, scoring over 90 marks. But to my horror, I discovered I was not the best in either English or economics. I was in second place, way behind a certain Miss Kwa Geok Choo. I had already met Miss Kwa at Raffles Institution. In 1939, as the only girl in a boys’ school, she had been asked by the principal to present prizes on the annual prize-giving day, and I had collected three books from her. She had been in the special class preparing to try for the Queen’s scholarship two years running. I was disturbed and upset. There were only two Queen’s scholarships a year for the whole of the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang and Malacca), and they would not necessarily go to the two top-scoringstudents. Above all, I feared an even-handed geographical distribution designed to give a chance to entrants from Penang and Malacca. The scholarship board