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

Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and other British institutions, to study medicine, law and engineering.
    In 1936, I entered Raffles Institution together with about 150 top students from 15 government primary schools. Admission was on the basis of merit. Students were of all races, all classes and all religions, and included many from Malaya. The early headmasters were Englishmen who modelled the institution on the English public school.
    The syllabus prepared students for the empire-wide examinations for Junior Cambridge and Senior Cambridge School Certificates. The textbooks, especially those for English language, English literature, history of the British Empire, mathematics and geography, were standard for all the colonies, adapted I suppose from those used in British schools. The teaching was entirely in English. Many years later, whenever I met Commonwealth leaders from far-flung islands in the Caribbean or the Pacific, I discovered that they also had gone through the same drill with the same textbooks and could quote the same passages from Shakespeare.
    There were four grades in secondary school: standards VI and VII, Junior Cambridge and Senior Cambridge. I was not very hardworking, but I was good at mathematics and the sciences and had a solid grounding in the English language. At the end of standard VI, therefore, I was among the better students and promoted to standard VIIA, where I usually came in among the top three without much effort. I was still not very attentive in class, and tried to catch up by peeking into the notebook of the boy who sat next to me. Teo Kah Leong was not only top of the class, he kept beautiful notes of our lessons. But he would cover the pages with hishands. My form master, an Indian named M.N. Campos, nevertheless wrote on my report card these words of praise and encouragement: “Harry Lee Kuan Yew is a determined worker for a place of distinction. He is likely to attain a high position in life.”
    I went on to Junior A, the best class of the standard. The form master, an Englishman called A.T. Grieve, was a young Oxford graduate with a head of thick, sandy hair and a friendly and approachable manner. He was a bachelor in his late 20s, and doing his first stint overseas. Grieve had no colour prejudice, probably because he had not been in the colony long enough to learn he had to keep a certain distance from the locals, which was deemed necessary for British dominance to be upheld. He improved my English language enormously and I did well, coming in first in school in the Junior Cambridge examinations, my first major examination with papers set and marked in Cambridge. I also won two awards that year, the Raffles Institution and the Tan Jiak Kim scholarships. Together, they yielded the huge sum of 350 Straits dollars. It was enough to buy me a beautiful Raleigh bicycle for $70, with a three-speed gear and an encased chain box—I rode to school in style and still had money to spare. But even better was to come.
    I had set my heart on distinguishing myself in the Senior Cambridge examinations, and I was happy when the results in early 1940 showed I had come first in school, and first among all the students in Singapore and Malaya.
    I enjoyed my years in Raffles Institution. I coped with the work comfortably, was active in the Scout movement, played cricket and some tennis, swam and took part in many debates. But I never became a prefect, let alone head prefect. There was a mischievous, playful streak in me. Too often, I was caught not paying attention in class, scribbling notes to fellow students, or mimicking some teacher’s strange mannerisms. In the case of a rather ponderous Indian science teacher, I was caught in the laboratory drawing the back of his head with its bald patch.
    Once I was caned by the principal. D.W. McLeod was a fair but strict disciplinarian who enforced rules impartially, and one rule was that a boy who was late for school three times during one term would get three