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

who had died soon after the younger son was born. She bore Chua seven children before dying in 1935. He died in 1944 during the Japanese occupation of Singapore.
    My mother was the eldest child of this union, and when she was married in 1922 at the age of 15, the fortunes of both families were still healthy. She even brought with her, as part of her dowry, a little slave girl whose duty, among other things, was to help bath her, wash her feet and put on and take off her shoes. All such symbols of wealth had disappeared by the time I became conscious of my surroundings at the age of 4 or 5. But memories of better times survive in old photographs of me – an infant over-dressed in clothes imported from England, or in an expensive pram. Chua’s house in Telok Kurau was a large wood and brick bungalow. He and all the children by his third wife lived in that house, my mother, as the eldest daughter, together with my father and five of us children occupying one big bedroom. Ours was a large and reasonably happy household, all of us living together harmoniously but for occasional friction, mostly over mischievous and quarrelling grandchildren. I thus grew up with my three brothers, one sister and seven cousins in the same house. But because they were all younger than I was, I often played with the children of the Chinese fishermen and of the Malays living in a nearby kampong, a cluster of some 20 or 30 attap or zinc-roofed wooden huts in a lane opposite my grandfather’s house. The fishermen worked along Siglap beach, then about 200 yards away.

Grandfather or “Kung”, Lee Hoon Leong, the Anglophile, complete with waistcoat in the hot tropics.

After his return to Dapu, Guangdong province, in 1882: great-grandfather Lee Bok Boon, in the robes of a Qing official Grade 7.

It was a simpler world altogether. We played with fighting kites, tops, marbles and even fighting fish. These games nurtured a fighting spirit and the will to win. I do not know whether they prepared me for the fights I was to have later in politics. We were not soft, nor were we spoilt. As a young boy, I had no fancy clothes or shoes like those my grandchildren wear today.
    We were not poor, but we had no great abundance of toys, and there was no television. So we had to be resourceful, to use our imagination. We read, and this was good for our literacy, but there were few illustrated books for young children then, and these were expensive. I bought the usual penny dreadfuls, and followed the adventures of the boys at Greyfriars – Harry Wharton and Billy Bunter and company. I waited eagerly for the mail boat from Britain, which arrived at Tanjong Pagai wharf every Friday, bringing British magazines and pictorials. But they too were not cheap. When I was a little older, I used the Raffles Library where books could be borrowed for two weeks at a time. I read eclectically but preferred westerns to detective thrillers.
    For holidays, the family would spend up to a week at a wooder house in my grandfather Chua’s rubber estate in Chai Chee. To get to the estate from Changi Road, we rode down a track in a bullock cart its two bullocks driven by my grandmother’s gardener. The cart had wooden wheels with metal rims and no shock absorbers, so that half mile ride on the rutted clay track was hilariously bumpy. Fifty years later in 1977, as I travelled in a Concorde from London to New York and crossed the Atlantic in three hours, I wondered if any of my fellow passengers had ever experienced the joy of a bullock-cart ride.

Myself, age 4, as a page boy at my aunt’s wedding, dressed in the traditional costume of the time.

Life was not all simple pleasures, however. Every now and again my father would come home in a foul mood after losing at blackjack and other card games at the Chinese Swimming Club in Amber Road, and demand some of my mother’s jewellery to pawn so that he could go back to try his luck again. There would be fearful quarrels, and he was sometimes