On Wednesday, 12 September 1945, at about 10:30 in the morning, I walked to City Hall, where the surrender ceremony would take place, and waited on the Padang across the road. The wait was worth it. I saw a group of seven high-ranking Japanese officers arrive from High Street, accompanied by British military police wearing their red caps and armbands. They were led by General Itagaki, commander-in-chief of the forces in Malaya and Singapore. Unlike so many Japanese officers, they did not shuffle; they walked properly. The crowd hooted, whistled and jeered but the Japanese were impassive and dignified, looking straight ahead. They had come to sign the formal surrender in obedience to their emperor’s orders. Many officers were later seen at various locations laying down their long samurai swords in a pile. They were acknowledging defeat, were disarmed, and became prisoners of war. But the seven generals who now walked up the steps of City Hall represented an army that had not been routed in battle. They would have fought to the death, and they left the people of Singapore who hated them in no doubt that they would have preferred to go down in flames, bringing everyone else down with them, rather than surrender.
Some 45 minutes later, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the British commander-in-chief, South East Asia Command, appeared, wearing his white naval uniform. He was accompanied by his generals and admirals, and some seven or eight officers representing the Allied forces, including Indians, Chinese, Dutch and others. He raised his naval cap high with his right hand and gave three cheers to the troops that formed the cordon in front of the steps. He loved uniforms, parades and ceremonies.
These were moments of great exhilaration. The Japanese occupation nightmare was over and people thought the good times were about to return. The signs were favourable. The troops were generous with their cigarettes – Players Navy Cut in paper packets, unobtainable for the last three years. Good quality beer, Johnnie Walker whisky and Gordon’s dry gin found their way into the market, and we believed that soon there would be plenty of rice, fruit, vegetables, meat and canned foods. This was not to be for some time. But during those first few weeks, there was jubilation. The people were genuinely happy and welcomed the British back.
By early 1946, however, people realised that there was to be no return to the old peaceful, stable, free-and-easy Singapore. The city was packed with troops in uniform. They filled the newly opened cafés, bars and cabarets. The pre-war colonial business houses could not restart immediately, for their British employees had died or were recuperating from internment. Ship arrivals were infrequent and goods were scarce in Britain itself. It looked as if it would be many years before the pre-war flow of commodities resumed. Even locals who had worked for the government could not just go back to their old offices, and many remained unemployed. It was a world in turmoil where the hucksters flourished in Singapore as they did in Britain (where they were called spivs). Much of the day-to-day business was still done on the black – now the free – market.
There were numerous army jeeps and motorcycles in the streets, but no new motorcars or buses. The trolley buses were dilapidated, and the roads full of potholes; telephones were old and the lines unclear because replacements were not available; electricity was still in short supply. It was going to take some time to put things right. We had lived too much in anticipation of the “good old days” during those years of suffering. Our hopes, based on nostalgia, were too high, and we were bound to be disappointed. The infrastructure had run down, property had been lost or destroyed, people had died, become old or sick. Life had to go on but it was not going to be like the good old days.
Nevertheless, the British Military Administration, whatever its shortcomings, was an immense relief after the terror and oppression of its Japanese predecessor. British officers and civilians knew that the locals welcomed them back, and they reciprocated the warmth we showed them and did their best for us. Many soldiers and officers shared their army rations as well as their cigarettes and liquor with the people they dealt with. Many in Singapore understood the English language, English culture and the English form of government. Even the uneducated were vaguely familiar with those parts of the British colonial system with which they came in contact.
It was to be expected that the Straits Chinese in particular would be happy with the return to a form of society into which they had been for long assimilated. Although they retained much of their Chinese culture, many had stopped speaking their own dialects, and conversed only in Baba Malay. They were the descendants of early immigrants who had not brought their womenfolk with them from China and had therefore contracted mixed marriages with local women. They were for the most part loyal to the British, and they sent their children to local English schools, many in the hope that they would eventually become professionals and government servants in a colony administered in the English language. The most loyal joined the Straits Chinese British Association and were popularly known as the King’s Chinese. Their leading members were made knights.
But the King’s Chinese formed only about 10 per cent of the community. The remainder were the Chinese-speaking Chinese who had come to Singapore more recently. They spoke not English but their own dialects – mainly Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese. Their children went to Chinese schools, where they learnt Mandarin. Their contact with the British authorities was minimal, they led a separate existence and they were no more assimilated after the war than they had been before it.
Their loyalty was to China, not Britain. It was they who went into the Malayan jungle to fight the Japanese, as guerrillas in the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party. They were looking ahead to the day when they would expel not only the Japanese, but also the British. In the power vacuum created when the Japanese surrendered suddenly before the British could invade, they spelt trouble.
In Malaya, they took over some of the smaller towns, put up arches to welcome the guerrillas as the real victors in the battle against the Japanese, and acted as the de facto local authority. Mercifully, they did not try that in Singapore, but they caused turmoil enough. They appeared in the streets in assorted khaki uniforms with cloth caps modelled on those of the Chinese Communist 8th Route Army – soft, floppy, oddly shaped, with three red stars on the front over the visor. In the flush of victory, they were high-handed. They forcibly requisitioned property and set up people’s courts to mete out summary justice to collaborators of all races. In one instance 20 Chinese detectives were rounded up and put into pig crates pending trial.
There was extortion and subtle blackmail of businessmen for their past collaboration with the enemy. Many prominent people were psychologically or physically compelled to make generous contributions to the MPAJA to make up for their past misdeeds. Young hooligans went around town openly using MPAJA credentials to wring money or goods from those who had had dealings with the Japanese. The British forces could not reestablish law and order in the face of the MPAJA’s aggressiveness and the opportunism of gangsters who pretended to have played a part in the resistance. Fortunately, because they had no means to travel down to Singapore, most of the MPAJA remained stuck in Malaya, where they operated more effectively as it was familiar territory.
The British Military Administration offered the MPAJA $350 for every guerrilla who handed in his weapons. From December 1945 to January 1946, some 6,500 did so, including several hundred in Singapore. On 6 January, the British held a ceremony outside City Hall at which a small, uniformed MPAJA contingent marched past Lord Louis Mountbatten, who pinned medals on 16 of their leaders. Chin Peng, described in the newspapers as a communist guerrilla commander, received the Burma Star (1939/45) and War Star, after which he gave a clenched-fist salute. Official recognition of the MPAJA’s contribution in defeating the Japanese gave them a status that they exploited to the utmost to extend their power. Meanwhile, they secretly stored many weapons for future use.
The communists were able to recruit some of the English-educated into the united front they were creating. A group of so-called intellectuals – lawyers, teachers, Raffles College graduates and students back from Cambridge – formed the Malayan Democratic Union, which had its headquarters in some shabby rooms above the dance hall at the Liberty Cabaret in North Bridge Road. They had inveigled Philip Hoalim Senior, a lawyer and our family friend, into lending it respectability by becoming its chairman. They needed him as cover in order to manipulate the organisation, and I became a casual visitor to their proceedings through my acquaintance with him. Its purpose appeared legitimate enough. The British had announced the formation of the Malayan Union, which would include the nine Malay states and the Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca, but not Singapore. This meant that Singapore would remain a British colony. That was unacceptable, and the Malayan Democratic Union demanded the independence of both Malaya and Singapore as one unit.
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.