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Linda Lim’s MGS SCHOOLDAYS

My Family at MGS

The first person from my family to study at the Methodist Girls‟ School (MGS) was

my great-grandmother, Siauw Mah Li. The daughter of a Kapitan China (leader of the

Chinese community) in Medan, Sumatra (then colonized by the Dutch), she was

"adopted" at the age of six by Sophia Blackmore, the Australian missionary who in 1887

founded the Methodist Girls' School in Singapore for the American Methodist Mission.

Mah Li‟s mother was ill (and died shortly thereafter), and her father wanted her to have a

proper education and to learn English, so he “brought her to Miss Blackmore”. In an

article in the April 1899 issue of Malaysia Message about Nind Home on Mount Sophia,

where Mah Li, and later her daughters, boarded while studying at MGS next door, Miss

Blackmore wrote:

Two of our girls have married from the home. The first was Mah Li, who was

brought to me by her father in 1887. She grew up in our home, was baptised on

Christmas Day 1892, and was one of the first members of our Malay Church.

For several years Mah Li has been a successful teacher. Her husband is an

earnest Christian and an active worker. His mother is not a Christian, and her

friends tell her that her children are lost to her because they are Christians.

“I cannot see how that can be”, she replies. “First, my children do not gamble.

They do not smoke opium. They do not go to places of iniquity and my daughter-

in-law does not spend all her time dressing up before a looking-glass, but keeps

her eyes open to see how she can help me.”

Miss Blackmore‟s report is cited in my ACS teacher Earnest Lau‟s column, A Page

from the Past, entitled “Training for life: Young girls picked up skills to be good

homemakers”, in the Methodist Message, April 1998, with the photo below of Mah Li

with her eldest daughter Kim Neo. Footnotes note that Mah Li was the first Chinese girl

at MGS, that she taught there, and that her husband, T.S. Kung, “was an active preacher”.

Siauw Ma Li, 1899 Empire Cinema, Kung Tian Siong at left

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Siauw Mah Li with daughter Kung Kim Neo

Mah Li apparently met my great-grandfather, Kung Tian Siong, in church. He was born

in 1876 in Malacca, educated at the Anglo-Chinese School in Singapore (the male

equivalent of MGS), and set up the first cinema in Singapore, the Empire Cinema in

Tanjong Pagar. Before he died in 1958, he was an occasional lay preacher at the Geylang

Methodist Church in Singapore, where he gave sermons in English and Malay.

My great-grandparents had three daughters: Darling Kim Neo, Susie Gin Neo, and Edna

Gek Neo, my maternal grandmother who died in Singapore in October 2003 at the age of

93. My grandmother and her two older sisters spent only a brief time in Nind Home. By

the time I was in school in the 1950s, the house was used for other purposes by the

Methodist church which owned it, and was rumored to be "haunted". Mah Li later became

a schoolteacher at the Ipoh MGS where, according to my grandmother, she apparently

gave evening lessons in “Arabic”—perhaps the Malay Jawi script--to Chinese and Malay

men. Her letters to my grandmother that we have are written in perfect English and in the

most beautiful handwriting script. She died in Ipoh in 1934.

Darling sent her daughter (my Auntie Happy), to MGS, which Susie‟s two daughters,

Dorothy and Barbara, also attended for a time. But my mother‟s father, R.B. Ooi (Ooi

Chor Hooi), a journalist and newspaper editor who had been educated at the ACS in

Bukit Mertajam followed by the Penang Free School, would not allow his daughters to go

there as he “did not want religion crammed down their throats”. More importantly, he

wanted them to speak “proper English” and not the “Malayan English” spoken by the

Peranakans (Straits-born Chinese) who spiced their English with Malay words. So my

mother Irene and her sisters Violet and Sylvia ended up attending Raffles Girls‟ School.

There my mother was a classmate and friend of Lee Siok Tin, my friend Min‟s mother;

they had both received “double promotion” so were younger than other classmates. When

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Auntie Happy‟s granddaughter, Joy-Marie Toh, graduated from MGS in 1989, she was

the fifth generation of our family to do so. That year, she was Head Prefect and I gave the

graduation speech as a “distinguished” visiting “Old Girl” from America.

MGS Classroom circa 1918

Edna Kung is the girl sitting in front of the girl standing at the back

Left to right: Darling, Edna and Susie outside their family home in Emerald Hill (later

occupied by the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School)

My father‟s mother, Lee Yew Teck, was also educated at the Singapore MGS. Her

father, Lee Wan Loke, was a Presbyterian minister who had come from China to

proselytize among the Chinese in the Nanyang (southern ocean). His wife (my great-

grandmother) Sarah Goh Sat Lap, was a “Bible woman”, who went from house to house

to teach the scriptures to women who could not read; she herself read classical Chinese in

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Hokkien, the family dialect. The Lees were founders of the Presbyterian Church at Paya

Lebar Road in Singapore. All their nine children, six daughters and three sons, of whom

my grandmother was the eldest, were schooled at MGS (for the girls) and ACS (for the

boys). My grandmother later became a founding member of both the Telok Ayer

Methodist Church, and with her youngest brother Lee Teck Hock, and her three ACS-

educated sons (my father Lim Hee Seng and his brothers Hee Yang and Hee Chin), of the

Paya Lebar Methodist church.

Miss Sophia Blackmore (center) in black, Lee Yew Teck (third from right, front row).

Edna Kung (second from right, back row), 1935

After she retired, Miss Blackmore returned to Singapore in 1935 for a visit and a

reunion with her former students, with whom she was photographed in the garden of

Nind Home. An article with the photo entitled “Old Girls of Nind Home Fete Miss S.

Blackmore” appeared in the April 12, 1935 issue of The Straits Times. My paternal

grandmother (whose name is wrongly listed in the news article) is seated in the front row,

wearing a loose cheongsam and not the Chinese “Bible woman‟s” garb (a mandarin-

collared jacket with a long full skirt) that she wore all her life, her hair pulled back in a

tight “bun”. Standing in the last of three rows of Miss Blackmore's former MGS

students, is my maternal grandmother, who was twenty years younger and dressed in a

more tailored cheongsam, with short permed hair. They were both MGS girls, a

generation apart.

"

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Primary School

I was to start primary school in January 1957, three months after my sixth birthday.

But unfortunately, I could not get into a “good school”. Admission preference was given

to students whose parents or siblings had been to the same school. Thus my elder sister

Laurette had got into Raffles Girls‟ Primary School as our mother had gone there, but the

school then decided to phase out its primary classes, so there was no Primary One intake

the next year, when I would have entered. Instead, my parents enrolled me in a small

private school called The Clifford School, which rented the premises of Wesley Church

for its classes during the week. My class was taught by an Englishwoman, nearly all my

classmates were foreigners, probably mostly English, and we didn‟t have school

uniforms. At recess or “elevenses” we had “Gem” biscuits—plain round biscuits topped

with hard sugar icing in pastel colors—which I loved. Every Friday I received a pin

saying “FIRST” which I then wore for the whole of the next week. The student who

ranked second wore a pin saying “MONITOR” and got to help the teacher with various

classroom tasks, like erasing the blackboard and distributing the Gem biscuits during

break, while the student who was third just wore a pin saying “THIRD”. Every week I

got the “FIRST” pin except for the last week, when I got the “THIRD” pin instead. I was

quite oblivious about the whole process, and nonchalant about wearing the “FIRST” pin,

taking it for granted until the day when I suddenly did not get to wear it.

I stopped attending Clifford School when a place was finally found for me in MGS.

My grandmother Edna‟s daughter (my mother‟s half-sister) Vivien Cheah had been

admitted to MGS because her mother was an alumna. But their family was now moving

to Penang, as her father, Uncle Cheah Guan Chye, had been transferred there with his

employer, Malayan Airways. So her place in MGS‟ Primary One B class was “given” to

me, no doubt because of the “family connection” with the School. My first day of school

was March 1, 1957, which I remember because it was Laurette‟s birthday. The class

teacher, Miss Ho, exclaimed that I was “very tall” ( a fact that had previously escaped

me), and sat me in the back row of the classroom, next to Rachel Zachariah, a “short-

haired” Indian girl (“short-haired” Indian girls tended to be Christian, while “long-haired”

and especially “two-plait” Indian girls were usually Hindu—Rachel‟s family were

Christians from the Kerala Mar Tho Mar church founded by Jesus‟ disciple St. Thomas

when he went to India). Rachel invited me to accompany her to recess, and gave me a

locket with a cow‟s head on it the next day. We have been friends ever since.

MGS was located at the top of Mount Sophia, named after the wife of Singapore‟s

“founder” Sir Stamford Raffles, and not Miss Sophia Blackmore. Mount Sophia was a

hill in the center of town, high above the busy junction of Serangoon Road and Orchard

and Bras Basah Roads. The “Hundred Steps” stairway led down from the School to the

Cathay cinema building, one of the earliest multi-storied buildings. The drive up was

through Sophia Road, which also led to several other smaller schools in the

neighborhood. Mount Sophia was a leafy shaded side-road lined with old colonial

bungalows and other Methodist institutions, including Nind Home, and Trinity

Theological College, where many years later I was to give political economy classes to

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radical Christian pastors-in-training, one of whom, Vincent Cheng, ended up in jail as a

political prisoner in the 1987 mass arrests.

The Lower Primary (One to Four) classes were located at the lowest elevation of the

School‟s property, in a long two-storey, tiled-roof building with a balcony on each long

side. On one side, stairs down a slope led down to the toilets. From time to time, the

toilets were also suspected of being “haunted”, including by “Oily Man”, a perhaps

mythical naked Indian man covered in oil who occasionally made “appearances”

elsewhere in Singapore besides school toilets. Although I never saw him myself, I was

once deputed by the other girls to report his appearance to our Primary One

schoolteacher Miss Ho, who was distinctly unimpressed, despite my adding “and he has

blue legs” to the report. Below the toilets was the barracks-like housing of school

caretakers and their families.

On the other side of the Lower Primary building was a green lawn edged with a thick

hedge interspersed with tall leafy “saga seed” trees (these hard red seeds were used to fill

bean bags that we used in sports), and furnished with a couple of see-saws. Each

classroom had four doors, two each opening out to each balcony on the second floor, with

windows in-between. All were always kept open, to cool the room with cross breezes.

Each classroom accommodated about forty-four students, who sat at wooden lift-up desks

with attached chairs, arranged in long rows. The teacher‟s desk was raised on a small

platform in front, with a chalk blackboard occupying the entire wall behind it.

In Primary One, Miss Ho taught all our classes, except for Chinese, which was taught

by Miss Yuen, also a “maiden lady”, as was Miss Foo Sah Moi, the Primary School

principal. Like most of our schoolteachers, they dressed in loose cheongsams, like my

mother (who herself was frequently mistaken for a schoolteacher). Miss Ho had adopted

a daughter whom she named Mana (Malay for “where”), and was a few years younger

than we were.

We all wore school uniforms. These were loose tunics, with a sleeveless white top

sewn on to a navy pleated skirt that reached to mid-calf, and topped with a short-sleeved,

pull-over blouse with a collar that ended in a vent that was pinned shut with the school

badge. This was metal, about an inch long, with the intertwined letters M, G and S in

curly script. We wore white canvas lace-up shoes which were stiff from daily

applications of a thick white paste called “Blanco”, and white ankle socks. “Permed”

curly hair and any jewelry, except for watches and pierced ear-rings, were forbidden. For

outdoor sports or P.E. (physical education) which we had once or twice a week, we wore

large navy bloomers—like our school uniforms, they had to be specially ordered and

made by a seamstress.

Schooldays began at 7:35 am with the class standing up and chanting in sing-song

unison, “Good morning, Miss (teacher‟s name)”, and ended at 12:30 pm with a similar

“Good afternoon”. At 1 pm the afternoon school session began in the same classrooms.

“Morning school” students were considered to be better students, perhaps only because it

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was harder to get into, and preference was given to girls with familial or Methodist

church connections, who tended to be from more well-to-do, English-educated families.

After Primary One, annual promotion based on academic performance meant that “A”

class students were better than “B” class students. The school year from January to

November was divided into three terms, each separated by a one-week break, with five

weeks at the end of the year. We received report cards at the end of every term which

noted our numerical scores for each subject, our class rank (out of 44), our “conduct”,

marked as “very good”, “good”, “fair” or “poor”, and any additional comments by the

teacher. Great excitement attended the delivery of report cards, which had to be signed

by a parent before return to the teacher.

Since this was a Methodist school, even though the vast majority of students were not

Christians, there were daily devotions read by the Primary School principal over the

intercom or public address system that was in every classroom. On Monday mornings,

there was Chapel. The whole Primary School filed down to the open-sided sports hall

where we sang hymns accompanied by a teacher on a piano, prayed, and sat cross-legged

on the floor listening to the principal give lectures on good behavior—such as her

frequent retelling of how she once washed a student‟s mouth out with soap when she was

caught using “bad language”.

When I joined Primary One at age six, I was one of the youngest in the class, which

had girls born in 1949 and 1950 (my birthday was in September 1950). Given my prior

education at Sunnyway kindergarten, I could already read, write and do arithmetic

(multiplication up to the five times table only!), but the class was being taught the English

alphabet (many of the girls were from Chinese-speaking families), numbers and basic

arithmetic. I do not know what I did in class, but my class rank at the end of the first term

was 13/44 (it subsequently went up to within the top ten in the next two years), with my

conduct “very good” (the only time—subsequently it fell to only “good” as I had a

propensity for talking in class). I found Chinese difficult, however, as we were learning

Mandarin which I had never heard before, and it proved to be my weakest subject every

year.

The scariest things about school for which you were punished were, first, arriving late

in the morning, after classes had started, and second, forgetting to bring a textbook or

homework. I cannot remember what the punishments were, so they can‟t have been very

severe; it was the “shame” of being scolded by the teacher in front of everyone which

provided the terror. Once, after arriving in school late (perhaps the only time that

happened), I sat in my seat and cried profusely, in anticipation of the punishment or

shame. Miss Ho gently tried to find out what I was crying about—which took a while.

There was a twenty- to twenty-five minute recess period in the middle of the morning,

when everyone rushed to the “tuck-shop” to buy a snack. Our tuck-shop was an open-

sided shed with cement floor and tiled roof; when it rained, heavy “chicks” (bamboo

blinds) were lowered to keep the rain out. Inside the tuck-shop were various stone tables,

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each occupied by a different food vendor. There were long tables and benches in the

center of the tuck-shop where students sat while slurping down noodles from the hot-food

sellers. As soon as the recess bell rang, there would be a massive rush of girls to the tuck-

shop to line up to buy food, all of which ranged between five cents (e.g. for a packet of

peppermint sweets) to thirty cents (for a bowl of prawn noodle soup).

My friends and I usually made a bee-line for the kacang puteh man, an Indian who

sold an assortment of local dry snacks, such as sugar-coated peanuts, broad beans (boiled

and soft in skin or shelled, baked and crispy), water-melon and parrot seeds, chickpeas,

salted crispy green peas, and various other nuts and pulses. Upon taking your order, the

kacang puteh man would deftly roll a sheet of discarded exercise book paper into a cone,

filling it with a fistful of the desired snack from one of his large glass jars, then hand it

over while pocketing the requisite payment of five or ten cents. Sometimes he would ask

us for old exercise books to replenish his stock.

Besides kacang puteh, I often snacked on a pink-and-white nonya jelly, sold in slices.

After a while, my parents thought I should have something better than this “junk food”,

so sent me to school with a buttered brown bread sandwich. I was embarrassed to eat a

sandwich from home instead of tuck-shop food, however, so the sandwich usually

languished uneaten in my schoolbag, once even turning mouldy, when it was discovered

by my mother. Since the bag did not accumulate multiple sandwiches, I must have

thrown some out, but do not recall doing so. Anyway, after the discovery of the mouldy

sandwich, I was spared from taking them to school any more.

After snacking at recess, we would play around the classroom building, either running

around on the grassy lawn, or sliding down a smooth concrete slope adjacent to the

stairway which led up to the school drive and Primary School principal‟s office. The

Malay and Indian girls did not have to take Chinese lessons, so during that period they

would run and play outside, occasionally distracting those of us who would look

longingly at their antics through the window. Unlike other cohorts, ours had a large

number of Indian girls, so they made up quite a troupe. Once, in an attempt to stop their

play from disturbing the rest of us, a teacher assigned them to picking up trash in the

grounds around the classroom building, which so incensed Mala‟s father A.P. Rajah (a

lawyer-politician and future chief justice and ambassador to the UK and Australia) that he

had it stopped. According to Chum, who had known Mala since they were in

kindergarten together, Mala directed most of their Chinese-period play sessions, with

“Indian funeral” wailing being one of the noisier activities.

1957 was a significant year in a couple of ways. Soon after I arrived, we celebrated

the School‟s 70th

anniversary. At the weekly Primary School assembly in the sports hall,

Miss Sah Moi recounted Miss Sophia Blackmore‟s founding of the School. She then

announced that one of the students in the school was the fourth generation of her family

to attend MGS, and uttered my name. Everyone turned to stare at me. I was caught

completely by surprise, and only confirmed that this was so when I went home and told

my parents about it.

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During that week, we also had a celebratory show. I remember Shadiah Alkaff, an

Arab girl in Primary One, and some of the Indian girls, doing acrobatics on the stage in

the School auditorium, which was for the Secondary school, so we hardly ever went

there. But the highlight was a pageant on the founding of the School, with Shadiah‟s

older sister Shams, who was very fair and European-looking, dressed up in 19th

-century

garb as Miss Blackmore, and several of my class and year-mates dressed up in Indian

dress (short blouse and long gathered skirt) as the “nine little Indian girls” who were her

first pupils, as Chinese families at first refused to let their daughters go to school. The

comment was made that the pageant could not have been staged at all if we did not have

such a large crop of Indians in Primary One; it was more typical for there to be at most

one or two in each class.

Founder’s Day pageant, 1957

Shams Alkaff with “nine Indian girls”

Mala at extreme left and Benita on Shams’ left, next to Leela Subramaniam

1957 was also the year when Malaya became independent of the British, on August 31,

but without Singapore, which the British insisted on holding on to, to protect their

considerable plantation and mining assets in the peninsula. No doubt repeating what I

had heard in my pro-British home, I became a scare-monger, telling my classmates that

on August 31, people of different races would have to fight each other, “Malays against

Chinese, Chinese against Indians” etc. which we somehow excitedly imagined would

extend to fights among ourselves. When the day came and passed without incident, I lost

a lot of credibility.

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Acrobatics at Founder’s Day concert, 1957

Shadiah Alkaff on extreme left, on the floor.

Sometime in the year we were visited by the Ministry of Health school doctor and

nurses, who gave us all a check-up, which required us to undress down to panties only.

When my turn came, the nurse started speaking to me in a language I did not understand,

but instead of saying so, I just nodded or shook my head at the end of every apparent

question. Only when she examined the mottled skin on my left shoulder, muttering to

herself, did I blurt out “scalded”, referring to an incident when I had run down the

corridor at home before dinner and crashed into our servant Ah Sam who was carrying a

bowl of hot soup from the kitchen to the dining table. The boiling soup spilled on me and

Dr. William Heng was called. He removed the burnt skin with a butter knife, then put

some sort of dressing on the wound. Only after several hours of crying would I deign to

see Ah Sam, who had been weeping herself at the mishap. Eventually the wound healed,

but left the scar that the nurse exclaimed over. Taken aback when I said “scalded”, she

complimented me on my “very good English”, and proceeded to ask me questions again,

this time in English instead of Hokkien (which she had assumed I spoke based on my

surname Lim); it turned out that one of the questions I had unknowingly said “Yes” to

was, “Do you have worms in your stool?”

In those days, Singapore was still poor, tuberculosis was endemic, smallpox was still

around, and there were periodic epidemics of cholera and typhoid. In and out of school

we received vaccinations and inoculations from time to time, and in Primary One and

Primary Six received TB tests and, when required (i.e. no previous exposure or immunity

to TB), the dreaded “BCG” inoculation which left a big bump on your upper arm.

The film “The Ten Commandments” starring Charlton Heston was released in 1957,

and class trips were organized to Cathay cinema down the hill for students to see it

(presumably because we were a Christian school). My older sister Laurette got to see the

film, but I did not, my parents having ascertained that I would be “scared” by parts of it,

particularly the coming of the Angel of Death and the drowning of the Egyptians in the

Red Sea. I recall feeling rather aggrieved at being one of only a handful of students who

had to stay behind in class while the others went to the cinema.

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In Primary Two, I moved to the “A” class where our teacher, Mrs. Tan, was very

skinny, with a thin, high-pitched voice and glasses, and I picture her always wearing long

loose yellow cheongsams. I do not remember much about that school year, except that I

continued to sail through my lessons without studying, and enjoyed singing class, where

we learned songs like “My bonnie lies over the ocean”, and played games like “Lucy

Locket lost her pocket”. This involved girls sitting in a circle and one walking around the

outside of the circle with a handkerchief, that she would surreptitiously deposit behind

one of the seated girls, who had to get up and chase her until she sat down in that girl‟s

vacated space, when the game would continue. Mala and I were appointed class monitors

or prefects, as shown in the photo of what were called “Teacher‟s Little Helpers” that

appeared in our school magazine.

Nirmala Rajah (fifth from left), Linda Lim (sixth from left), Low Seok Ching (next to LL)

During recess in Lower Primary school, groups of girls would get together to play five

stones (seed-filled cloth pyramids), jacks (played with a bouncing ball and four small

metal jacks), kuti kuti, (which involved using the thumb and forefinger to flick little

colored plastic tokens in the shapes of various figures, mostly animals, “against” each

other—you won if your token “went over” the competing token, which then became

yours), and marbles. We also played “obeysom” (for three or more) and “chiam chiam

pas” (for two), which involved “bird-stone-water” and “stone-scissors-paper” as means of

selection. Some girls played versions of sepak raga, a Malay game where you bounced a

rattan ball, or a shuttlecock, or a blow-up multi-colored Japanese paper-ball, on your foot,

knee or shin, without touching it with your hands, trying to keep it going as long as

possible. Once in a while, daring girls would go down to Adis Road, which was just

behind the school and “out of bounds”, to buy ice-balls—balls of crushed ice flavored

with sweet “Rose syrup” which we were forbidden to eat as they were considered

unsanitary.

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Our Primary Three teacher, Mrs. Soon, wore shirtwaist dresses and doted on her only

daughter (who was quite a bit older than we were). From time to time, she would tell us

stories about the Japanese occupation, including how the soldiers would try and take

away young girls to be their “comforters”. Classmates then recounted to me their

mothers‟ tales of being locked in the basement wearing black and with hair pulled back,

to try and avoid this terrible fate. The war had ended some time ago, of course, but there

was still evidence of it around, not only in family stories, but also in the huge piles of

worthless green “banana notes” that we used to play with as kids.

Mrs. Soon appointed Mala and me as class monitors again. I, but not Mala, promptly

turned into a fascist dictator. Being monitor simply meant that we were to keep the class

in check whenever the teacher had to leave the room, which could otherwise result in

bedlam and mayhem. I did this by writing down the names of any girls who talked or

otherwise misbehaved, and handing the list to the teacher when she returned to class.

They would be punished, usually by “writing lines” like “I must not talk in class” over

and over for, say, fifty times, in the “Marian Richardson” cursive script we had been

taught. I was very strict on this, whether out of conscientiousness or power-madness, I

cannot say—even the slightest whisper would earn your name on my “list”. Once, Mrs.

Soon was amazed to find the names of fully three-quarters of the silent class on the list.

Another time, I had everyone write “I am sorry (for misbehaving) and promise to resolve”

(which I was informed was incorrect use of the word). I suppose I must have eventually

tired of this, as I did not continue this behavior into subsequent years; strangely, it did not

seem to earn the rancor of my friends—I was not ostracized at recess or anything like that

that I can remember.

Two other significant events marked my year in Primary Three. First, I started

wearing glasses (prescribed by our gentle eye-doctor Dr. Oh), at the age of eight—and

was perhaps only the third or fourth girl in class to do so. The others called us “Four

Eyes”, but as the years passed, the same thing happened to the majority of the class.

Second, for the first time, I did poorly in my academic work, falling to the unheard-of

rank of 33 out of 44. Fortunately my report card with this information was brought home

by Laurette (who by this time had also moved to MGS) when I was sick in bed with the

mumps, so I escaped any punishment. My sense is that by Primary Three, I started to

exhaust the “human capital” of knowledge I had built up in kindergarten, which had

enabled me to do well in class without studying at all. I particularly remember never

studying for spelling or dictation, my strongest subjects, until some time in the middle of

Primary Four.

Our teacher in Primary Four was Mrs. Taye, younger sister of Miss Seow (who also

taught us), and mother of Mervyn Taye who became friendly with some of us much later

in ACS. Both Mrs. Taye and Miss Seow were shirtwaist dress wearers, though

occasionally on some special occasion Mrs. Taye would show up in a slim cheongsam.

That year, at the annual end-of-year school concert, Sing Chee and I sang Chinese songs

with a group of other girls from our class. I must have been the only singer who was not

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good in Chinese, but I remember one song in particular, about how throughout the whole

world, only mother is good.

Singing Chinese songs at MGS annual concert, 1960.

Back row: Linda Lim (third from right), Ling Sing Chee (second from right).

Middle row: Liang May Yue (extreme right,) next to Chou Onn Kee

Our Primary Five classroom was in a different building—a square two-story building

behind the Primary School office building. We were on the second floor, and from the

windows on three sides of the room overlooked much of the school compound, which

could be a distraction. Our class teacher was Mrs. Soh, who like Mrs. Soon dressed in

shirtwaist dresses, wearing cheongsams only on special days like Founder‟s Day.

Unusually for that time, she was divorced and wore thick pink make-up.

Early in the year, Mrs. Soh highlighted me twice. First, after we had turned in our first

writing assignment, she said to the whole class that she had been told my handwriting

was terrible, but was pleased that in this exercise it was very neat (a deliberate special

effort which mostly went by the wayside soon enough). Second, after we had been taught

how to tack or hem in sewing class, she held up my work as an example of what should

not be done; I was confused about what the end result should be so had made the stitches

on the “back”/”inside” very small and those on the “front”/”outside” very large, when the

reverse was required. That year we made navy blue shorts to wear during sports. In an

earlier year, perhaps Primary One, we had sewn “cross-stitch” patterns on to thick cloth

which was then backed and made into the cover of a folding stool (this also occurred in

Sunnyway kindergarten).

Despite my untidy work and bad sewing, Mrs. Soh rather liked me because my

academic work was good, and she used to lend me copies of her “American version” of

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Readers‟ Digest magazine to read (my family only subscribed to the “British version”

which was much thinner). Many years later my father became her accountant and she

became quite close to my parents through their church. According to them, she was

vigorous and independent, every day walking up five flights of stairs to her apartment

where she lived alone. By then she wore “blouse and slacks”. She died in her eighties,

knocked down by a car while waiting to cross a road.

MGS Primary School Teachers 1959

Front row: Mrs. Soh (extreme left), Miss Sah Moi (center), Miss Seow (third from right),

Mrs. Soon (second from right), Mrs. Tan (extreme eight)

Back row: Miss Ho (extreme left), Mrs. Lau (fifth from left), Mrs. Taye (fifth from right),

Mrs. Koh (fourth from right), Miss Yuen (third from right)

By this time my friends and I had begun to be somewhat competitive over our

schoolwork, though in a friendly fashion. For example, whenever our exercise books

with our weekly essays in them were returned, we would immediately share what we had

scored. I usually had the highest, or one of the highest, scores, 9 or 91/2 out of 10,

because I wrote well and had virtually no grammatical errors. The language “bible” we

used since Primary Three was “First Aid in English”, a blue textbook with a black cross

on it that had grammar and idioms which we loved. I was also good in mathematics, but

my overall class rank was usually between third and fifth, being “pulled down” by below-

average performance in Chinese and sewing.

There was a library (several locked cabinets filled with shelves of books) outside our

Primary Five classroom. By this time we had outgrown much of Enid Blyton, our

previous favorite storyteller, though we still read some of her series like the Famous Five

(schoolboy and schoolgirl detectives). The Primary Five library contained a wealth of

schoolgirl stories like Nancy Drew, tales of fourth and fifth form English girls‟ boarding

15

schools, and a series by one Eleanor M. Brent-Dyer, called The Chalet School, about an

English boarding school in the Tyrolean mountains of Austria. I fell in love with this

series and even joined “The Chalet Club” which gave me a little metal pin and sent

newsletters a couple of times a year. The only other girl in MGS I knew of who also

belonged to “The Chalet Club” was Vivien Goh, a talented violinist a couple of years

older than we were, who became Head Prefect and also “top girl” in her year.

Primary Six was our one and only year in “afternoon school”, due to a new system

whereby you alternated years between the day and afternoon session. Our teacher was

Mrs. Koh, who was very fair and wore pastel cheongsams. She turned out to be the aunt

of Cinda‟s future husband Chua Boon Chye, and died early of a stroke. Our classroom

was in the modern secondary-school building, just above the sports hall where we had

Chapel and played during recess. That year, a group of girls other than my friends and I

put on a second play (besides ours) at the end of the year. It was “The Princess and the

Pea” with Jennifer Ng in charge, and Esther Lim (whose family soon emigrated to

Australia) took the part of the Princess. Marguerite Liang, Ong Yong Bok, Liang May

Yue and Lee Yoke Teng were also involved. They did a wonderful job.

Every year, Founder‟s Day was usually commemorated with a school-wide concert

and special assembly featuring speeches and “Old Girl” visits and reminiscences. It was

probably at one of these concerts—I believe when we were in Primary Four—that we put

on a play in Chinese, “Six Blind Men and the Elephant”. Cinda made an elephant out of

cardboard and it stood on a table while six of us Chinese girls, dressed in Chinese

pyjamas, walked around it with our eyes closed, feeling different parts of the elephant—

its trunk, sides, legs, etc.—and proclaiming it to be, respectively, like a snake, wall, tree

trunk etc. Sing Chee (who among us was the best in Chinese) fell down and was nursing

a bloody graze on her knee throughout the sketch. Concerts also featured classical piano

pieces by some of our highly talented students (like Jenny Wong), and a couple of times

Cinda‟s oldest sister, Esther Lee, dressed up in flowing Chinese costume and did a

spectacular “ribbon dance” in the school driveway outside the auditorium.

16

“Six Blind Men and the Elephant” (1960)

Left to right: Linda Lim, Lim Kay Han (behind elephant), Cinda Lee, Watt Yoke Lan,

Ling Sing Chee

“Six Blind Men and the Elephant” (1960) from school magazine

Left to right: Linda Lim, Seah Guay Choon, Lim Kay Han, Watt Yoke Lan, Ling Sing

Chee, Cinda Lee, Jennifer Ng Seok Chin (sighted elephant keeper)

Once a year, we had Sports Day, where we were divided into four teams named after

various early missionary teachers, such as “Blackmore” and “Olson” (the Olson sisters

from Wisconsin). The teams competed in various games involving running, and using

hoops and balls. The winning team would receive a “silver” cup or trophy decorated with

navy blue ribbons, the school color, and members would also get small trinkets for

prizes—all awarded by some “V.I.P.” or other. Not being good at sports, I rarely if ever

brought home any prizes. Sometimes our P.E. lessons included learning to do English

folk dances, to recorded music. I think it was in Primary Five that our class got picked to

learn the maypole dance. Somehow the School had acquired a genuine maypole, a tall

17

wooden pole with long colored ribbons attached to the top. We danced in pairs (in our

white blouses and navy bloomers), each holding on to a ribbon and skipping over, under

and around each other until we had woven one of several patterns with the ribbons. Mala

was my maypole dance partner since we were arranged by height

Maypole dance, Sports Day, 1961

Linda Lim and Nirmala Raja to the right of the maypole, at the back

There was also an occasional “Fun Fair”, when classes set up individual food and

handicraft stalls and sold tickets to raise funds for the School. For some years, my

contribution to Fun Fair stalls, as well as to the class party at the end of the year, was

coconut candy made by my mother from former MGS principal Ellice Handy‟s recipe

book—cut in squares, the brown candy was chocolate-flavored, the green one mint-

flavored, and the pink one vanilla-flavored. They were always a great hit.

Friends

It was in Primary Two or Primary Three that a group of us began to coalesce as friends

in the “A” class. Nirmala Rajah (Mala) joined Rachel and me at the back of the class,

due to our heights, as did Cinda‟s cousin Bette Lee, who paired up with Mala at recess

time. Benita Catherasoo, who was short and sat in front, was Mala‟s cousin. Geh Min

(Min) and Bharathi (Rose) Vaithinathan (Chum) were a pair at recess time; sometimes I

joined them and we made a threesome. Chum got to know Min in Primary Three when

Mrs. Soon sat them next to each other as Min was “quiet and good” whereas Chum was

“noisy”. They discovered they read and liked the same books, especially the legends of

Greece and Rome, and the stories of Ancient Egypt. Min would draw pyramids and

hieroglyphics, and the two of them even devised their own secret “Egyptian” word,

written in a special way. Min had a wonderful library at home, from which she lent

Chum many books. Cinda Lee I knew from Wesley Church Sunday School. I believe

18

Mala, Chum, Benita and Cinda had all gone to the Good Shepherd Convent kindergarten.

Min, Lim Kay Han and I went to Sunnyway kindergarten, although we were in different

classes there. I remember Min as the quiet “good girl” who was brought from another

class to join in my class‟s Christmas party, where she was given an extra party hat for

“being good”, and I remember Kay Han as the “bad girl” screaming away as a teacher

dragged her along by the arm in the hallway.

I‟m not sure how we got together. We were all “good students”, and Cinda, Min,

Chum, myself and Ling Sing Chee (Singo) used to rotate the top few positions in class,

followed by the others. From time to time, we also as a group intervened when Kay Han

terrorized a girl named Liang May Yue (see Chinese song photo), who was fair, pretty

and prone to tears, or as Kay Han herself once said, “like tau fu—white and soft and

when you press it, water (tears) comes out”. The “tough” (sporty) girls—Mala, Rachel,

Shadiah (below) and Low Seok Ching (Socker)—would fight (wrestle) Kay Han one by

one at the front of the class, if she picked on May Yue when the teacher was out of the

class. It was like a gladiator‟s match, with hand-to-hand combat, but its desired deterrent

effect must have been limited, or it would not have happened repeatedly.

Another big fight with Kay occurred over the casting of Cinderella in one of our class

plays (see below). Kay had been cast as an ugly sister and wanted to be Cinderella

instead. She proposed that the fairest way to resolve the issue was to have a wrestling

match, with the winner taking the role of Cinderella. Min, whom everyone had in mind

as Cinderella, was obviously not going to fight Kay, so Mala and Shadiah were appointed

as her champions, fighting Kay in turns. It might have been this fight in which Kay bit

Mrs. Soon by mistake when the latter rashly tried to separate the two contestants, and the

school principal was sent for.

Around this time, after Primary Three or Four, Shadiah Alkaff left us to return with

her family to Aden in the Hadramout (now Yemen) on the Arabian Peninsula. She was

the youngest of four Arab sisters whose mother had died in a car crash in Singapore when

Shadiah was three—one of the older sisters wrote a poignant poem about her which was

published in our school magazine, while the eldest, Shams, worked in Miss Sah Moi‟s

office after she finished school, since they were “not allowed to work outside”. Shadiah

was a tomboy, and life was hard for her when they returned to her father‟s mother‟s care

in the desert. Her older sisters soon escaped to Aden to be married, so Shadiah was left

alone in the desert. For a while she wrote us mournful letters about her longing to eat an

apple—“Here there is nothing, only dates”—and about being locked up indoors in a

chador, watching the dust from sandstorms. Later, she said she was ashamed to write

because she had forgotten her English, though once she mentioned she had become “quite

pretty”. At fifteen, she sent us her wedding photograph--she had been married off to a

28-year-old man, who in the photo was clad in a Western pin-striped suit, while she was

in a white Western wedding dress. The letters stopped coming, but many years later,

before we were thirty, we heard that she had become a grandmother!

19

Fights with Kay aside, we most likely got together to organize end-of-year class

concerts, which I do not think other classes had, so I am not sure why we did. There were

usually several acts e.g. Mala and/or Benita would perform Indian classical dance,

Josephine Teng (Josie) would dance ballet in a white tutu (she later performed with

Martha Graham‟s dance company in New York for a while), I once played my recorder,

etc. The main act, however, was always a play of a fairy tale—like Cinderella, Snow

White, and so on. Min, who was fair and pretty, was always the princess, and I

(presumably because of my height) was always Prince Charming. Mala had the liveliest

roles—the villain or a witch—and Chum and Cinda played mothers or older women.

Over time, our audience expanded to include other Primary classes, who were invited to

watch us perform in the sports hall and, later, in the big auditorium.

I have a vague recollection of our group getting into trouble with the Primary Four

teacher, Mrs. Taye, and being punished by having to stand outside the classroom in the

corridor for a while. I remember this because Bette told me that Cinda said, “Let us

pray”, which Bette, not being Christian, did not care to. This might have been the year

that our end-of-year concert and drama production was “upgraded” to the sports hall and

other Primary classes were also invited to it. By now my group of friends (the future

“Nuttes”) was tighter, playing together at every recess period. I particularly remember us

holding hands while standing on the see-saw, moving ourselves to make it bump hard

when it hit the ground on each side, at which point we yelled loudly. While on the see-

saw we would sing “Boney was a warrior”, a ditty about Napoleon Bonaparte that we had

learned in singing class. Other favorites from singing class at this time included “Oh

Susanna”, “Barbara Allen”, “The Ash Grove” and other English and American folksongs.

In Primary Five I became close to Bette Lee, who sat next to me at the back of the

class and talked to me all the time, mostly about “grown-up” movies that her older sister

had taken her to see. To me, she seemed very sophisticated, and had a glamorous family

connection. Her father, D.C. Lee, was a brother of Cinda‟s father, T.F. Lee. They were

Shanghainese who had escaped from China in advance of the Communist takeover in

1949, and her father‟s first wife (they later divorced) had published a book about her trials

during World War Two. Her daughter (Bette‟s half-sister) had been lost at sea when the

ship they were in sank south of Singapore. She was later recovered on an island,

identified in part because she wrote capital E backwards—I read the book and was most

impressed that Bette was related to someone who was in a book. (Later, in Secondary

School, Bette would talk to me about Dostoevsky‟s Crime and Punishment and similar

books she was reading. Bette studied journalism at college in the U.S., after which she

and another classmate of ours who went to university in Australia, Yoke Lan, were

recruited by Pan American Airways to be flight stewardesses. In the big local media blitz

accompanying this, it was emphasized that those chosen had to be university graduates

who knew European languages other than English, and were thus highly selected.)

The highlight of every schoolday was recess, and our large group played together

every day. By now it comprised myself, Mala, Rachel, Benita, Chum, Min, Cinda, Kay

Han (whom Cinda had taken under her wing), Sing Chee (who was usually top student in

20

class as she was very good in Chinese as well as other subjects), Jennifer Ng, Marguerite

Liang (Maggie), probably Josephine Teng, and occasional others. While most girls

walked about quietly in pairs, we played vigorous games in the sports hall. “Police and

thieves” was a great favorite, and so rough that occasionally uniforms were torn, and even

someone‟s (Esther Lim‟s) arm broken once. The “Indian girls” were usually consigned to

form one team of “thieves” while the Chinese, more numerous but less athletic and less

adept at fighting, were the “police”. The year of the China-India border war (1962), we

had a tug-of-war between the Chinese and Indian girls.

One recess in Primary Five our group managed to get nearly our whole class to

participate in a “funeral” for a beautiful navy-blue-and-black small butterfly that one of us

found lying on the grass as we walked out to recess. It was probably Mala‟s idea. The

details escape me now, but I believe we found a small box in which to encase the

butterfly corpse, then dug a hole in the school garden where we buried it, with a large

crowd standing around wearing our white handkerchiefs on our heads “as a sign of

respect”. I think we also installed a small wooden cross and may have prayed or sang a

song before quietly filing back to our classroom.

Another game we played that involved two teams was rounders (like softball).

Almost invariably, the rounders ball would bounce over the fence into the grounds of the

uninhabited Eu Tong Sen villa next door, a 1930s folly known in some quarters as

“Bluebeard‟s castle”, complete with turrets and shuttered windows, and looking definitely

“haunted”. We would then line ourselves up against the chain-link fence, chorusing

“Thamby, thamby” (a term used for Indian workers) until the Indian caretaker emerged,

picked up the ball and threw it back over the fence to us.

We also played “Robin Hood and his Merry Men”, a game which we continued into

Secondary School. Mala was Robin Hood (of course), I was Little John (of course) and

Min was Maid Marian (of course). Poor Benita, who was smaller than the rest of us, was

forced to be the Sheriff of Nottingham, and given at most one or two hapless assistants.

We would hide and she/they would have to “raid” us but given the unequal numbers (and

size) the game inevitably ended with the Sheriff being chased, overpowered, and on

several occasions, dumped into a wicker basket in the storeroom which normally held

sports equipment. We also played “Farmer in the Dell”, in which Benita was invariably

chosen as the cheese which would then be violently patted on the head as we sang “We

all pat the cheese”. I suppose we bullied Benita but not because we did not like her—she

was very much a friend and “one of us”, and Mala‟s cousin to boot (Mala‟s line remained

Hindu but Benita‟s became Christian so, like Chum and Rachel, she had short curly hair).

Cinda introduced us to the game of “Sardines”, where everyone closed their eyes, and

the designated first girl would go off and hide—usually in a storage closet somewhere on

the primary school premises. Min invented the game “tortures and deaths”, which

involved imaginary hits by cars when we walked on the school driveway during recess.

21

Outside of school, Cinda and I saw each other weekly at Sunday School at Wesley

Methodist Church, also attended by Esther Lim. Later, in Secondary School, Min joined

us to sing in the girls‟ choir, which also included my sister Laurette and Cinda‟s younger

sister Ruby. Min and Kay Han used to have mathematics tuition classes together, and

Kay Han, Jenny and Josie also had some organized home activities together.

Other than that, we sometimes visited each other‟s homes—mostly bungalows with

lawns--for birthday parties. Everyone would wear some frilly party frock and bring a

wrapped gift for the birthday girl, who would unwrap them all after we had sung „Happy

Birthday” and enjoyed our birthday cake, other snacks and a fizzy drink. This would take

place toward the end of the party, after we had run around the garden or the house

vigorously playing games like “hide- and-seek”, “tug-of-war”, “treasure hunt”, “pin-the-

tail-on-the-donkey” or “musical chairs”. We would depart with a small party favor each.

One year, for Min‟s birthday, a group of us went to a movie, with her mother and her

cousin Fiona. I remember that Min was in a beautiful new dress that her aunt had sent

from New York—a pale green sleeveless shirtwaist with a pink rose on a large white

collar, quite unlike anything the rest of us wore. In the cinema, the butterscotch ran out

before Fiona could get a piece, to Min‟s mother dismay. Later, at the end of Secondary

Three in 1965, Cinda had a Christmas party for us at her house.

Cinda’s house at Christmas, 1965.

Left to right: Chum, Mala, Cinda, Yoke Lan, Linda, Rachel, Singo

Secondary School

My friends and I started Secondary School in January 1963, after all successfully

passing the important national Primary Six School Leaving exam and winning promotion

to the MGS Secondary School, which consisted of three day and three afternoon classes

in each of four years of school. Here we were joined by new girls from other schools,

notably Ho Ai Lian, Mah Choon Hong and Katherine Liao from Paya Lebar MGS.

22

We were all still together in the “A” class, where our Secondary One teacher was Mrs.

Goh, remembered mostly for the “maths incident”. One day while she was teaching us

mathematics, she made a wrong calculation which some of us noticed, and Min brought

to her attention—unfortunately after the offending sum had been erased from the chalk

board! Mrs. Goh then asked who else agreed that she had made an erroneous calculation,

and most of our group raised our hands. Furious, she made us stand outside the

classroom (a much more humiliating punishment for “big girls” like we now were),

refusing to let us back into the class unless we retracted. Later, Cinda (who had not

joined us) was sent out to the pavement to plead with us to retract, but we refused. I

cannot remember how the issue was resolved then, but Mrs. Goh never forgave us (and

vice versa). She gave us “Poor” marks for Conduct that term, except for Min who got

“Very Poor” instead of the “Very Good” she usually received. The written comment in

my report card for the term was “Talks unnecessarily during lessons”!

Mrs. Mendis and the School Magazine Editorial Board, 1966

Left to right: Front row: Cinda, Linda

Back row: Chang Shook Ling, Min, Mala, Singo, Chum

Another Secondary One teacher we liked a lot was Mrs. Mendis, who was very nice,

and years later told us that we had been the brightest class in the school. She also told my

mother once that we were the brightest but also the naughtiest class that she had had, but

that she enjoyed teaching our rowdy lot more than my sister Laurette‟s year-older class

who were very quiet and well-behaved and seldom raised their hands in class to comment

or ask questions, which we apparently did all the time. (In the photo above, Mala has

what we call her “Hiawatha” look—chiseled face, noble and proud—we loved the

Longfellow poem that we had read in class for English literature.)

Some teachers said we were “naughty” because many of us had been born in the Tiger

Year (1950), believed to be bad for girls, who if born during “Tiger time” (midnight to 2

am or so) would end up “devouring” (causing the early death of) their parents or their

husbands. For that reason, in “olden days” many girls born in the Tiger year were given

away to other families, or never married, and to this day birth rates in Chinese societies,

23

including Singapore, fall in a Tiger year. One teacher also told us to be careful to marry

only men born in the year of the Rabbit (one year younger or 11 years older). But most of

our group were Cows, born in 1949, the same year as Laurette. Only Mala (March 1950),

Benita (August), Kay Han (December) and I (September) were Tigers. Min, however,

was born a few weeks early, at the end of January 1950, just before Chinese New Year, so

could be really a Tiger and not a Cow. Cinda was the oldest of us because her mother had

her repeat Primary One in Good Shepherd Convent kindergarten in order to keep her

younger sister Ruby company there, and there was no place in Primary Two when she

finally came to MGS. Besides myself, Cinda, Sing Chee and Rachel had older sisters in

MGS, and Cinda and I also had younger sisters in the school.

We now had different teachers for specialized subjects, many if not most of whom

were among the earliest women graduates of the University of Singapore (previously

Raffles College). In those days teaching was about the only occupation open to educated

women, so our teachers were drawn from the educated elite of Singapore women. By our

time, women graduates much more readily became doctors, lawyers, diplomats and,

especially, bankers, so that the brightest women tended not to become schoolteachers.

In Lower Secondary Science, we adored Miss Yeong Poh Yee, a fresh University of

Singapore graduate from Ipoh who was in her first year of teaching when we were in

Secondary One. She team-taught together with Mrs. Chen Su Pin, the Penang-born wife

of Dr. Chen Chi Wei, whose entire family of doctors were accounting clients of my

father‟s. It was in her biology class that we first observed the dissection of a

chloroformed rabbit—which led Mala to exclaim, “Let it live!” when the laboratory

assistant subdued the animal.

Compared with our other teachers, Miss Yeong was young and lively, wore sheaths

rather than shirtwaists, and was “daringly” frank, speaking to us openly about

menstruation and other such usually taboo topics. She was engaged to Wong Nang Jang,

older brother of Wong Sing Chee, an older girl in MGS whose family ran the Nang Heng

music company on Selegie Road, selling pianos and other musical instruments and books.

He was plump and jolly and seems to have been the only teacher spouse we ever knew,

perhaps because he sometimes drove her to and from school. We thought he and Miss

Yeong were a most romantic pair, as they remain to this day. Miss Yeong stayed our

teacher through her marriage, when she became Mrs. Wong, and had their first child, a

boy named Kevin. Then she left to accompany her husband on his tour of duty as a

banker with what was then called First National City Bank, in New York

All this seemed exciting and glamorous to us then. Mrs. Wong was the first teacher

we ever had whom we saw as a “role model”—meaning we could imagine ourselves

being “career women” like her. However, several years later she had become

disillusioned by life as a banker‟s wife in New York City, complaining that she had to

“wash toilets” there (a task always handled in middle-class families by household

servants in Singapore and Malaysia at the time), and saying to us girls, “Why study so

hard? You will only end up like me, washing toilets in New York.” She and Mr. Wong

24

went on to have three more children after Kevin. Later, they returned to Singapore and he

became president of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), when I began

seeing them again as part of my parents‟ OCBC social circle. They are as lively and

humorous and close to each other as ever.

Most of our own mothers were “housewives”. The exceptions were Kay Han‟s

mother, the Ministry of Health school doctor, Chum‟s and Benita‟s schoolteacher

mothers, and Min‟s mother who was an English lecturer at the University of Singapore

and occasionally came to MGS to evaluate student teachers for their Diploma in

Education. Our fathers were mostly “professional men”—schoolteachers (Chum‟s and

Benita‟s), other civil servants (Rachel‟s), doctors (Kay Han‟s and Josephine‟s), a lawyer

(Mala‟s), an accountant (mine), an architect/engineer (Cinda‟s) and various businessmen

(e.g. Min‟s and Sing Chee‟s). What seemed to distinguish our group was that all our

parents were English-educated, then only a small minority of the population. Looking at

the “Father‟s Occupation” column in our Secondary School teachers‟ attendance book

revealed that most of the other girls‟ parents were “merchants” and, probably, Chinese-

educated. Most of us also came to school in family cars, either driven by chauffeurs or by

one or the other parent. My mother was the first and most consistent mother-driver, but

several other mothers (Min‟s, Cinda‟s, etc.) also drove, whereas most of our classmates

came to school by public bus, or by taxi. Our lack of familiarity with taking the bus was

embarrassingly revealed one day when we walked down the Hundred Steps to Orchard

Road and decided to take a bus down it “for fun”. Unused to the normal lurching of the

vehicle, some of us lost our balance while hanging on to the ceiling straps, and were

glared at by the other passengers.

Many of us took private music and dance lessons, learning to play the piano (most of

us) and dance ballet (fewer). We loved our singing lessons in school, where our most

frequent and well-loved music teacher was Mrs. Lau, the wife of Earnest Lau who later

taught some of us history in ACS (and became its principal). Mrs. Lau‟s older sister,

Mrs. Cheah, wife of Mala‟s father‟s law partner and their neighbor, also taught us in the

Upper Secondary School. Another sister, Mrs.Yong Nyuk Lin, wife of a PAP cabinet

minister, had been our family hairdresser when I was young, with a beauty salon in

Cairnhill, and yet another, Mrs. Lee Kuan Yew, the wife of Singapore‟s Prime Minister,

handed us our „O-level‟ Cambridge school certificates when we graduated from

Secondary Four. Mrs. Lau was very sweet, but she was sickly and died relatively young,

some time after we had left MGS. All the sisters—from the Kwa family--had studied at

MGS. Whenever my family visited the Yong Nyuk Lin family in Emerald Hill, Mr. Yong

would try (unsuccessfully) to persuade my father to join the People‟s Action Party (PAP),

while my sister Laurette and I played “paper dolls” upstairs with the two Yong girls, Siu

Lian and Siu Li, who were also at MGS many years ahead of us. Siu Lian did her dental

degree at the University of Michigan, which her son also attended. When I met him in

Ann Arbor in the 1990s, he greeted me with, “You know my mother and my

grandmother”.

25

Assistant Librarians with Mrs. Cheah, 1966

Front row: Mala (extreme left), Min (third from left), Cinda (fifth from left), Linda (fifth

from right). Second row: Rachel (second from right)

The most momentous event of our Secondary One year was Singapore‟s independence

from British colonial rule and its merger with Malaysia, which occurred in September

1963. As part of the School‟s celebration of the event, our class staged a Malaysian

version of the music suite, “The Persian Market”, which we renamed “The Malaysian

Market”. This was a pantomime-pageant featuring characters dressed up in various

ethnic costumes interacting in a marketplace. For example, Rachel was an Indian snake-

charmer all swathed in white, while Mala was all in black as her “snake”. Min and I

dressed up as a Malay bride and bridegroom respectively, whose wedding procession

moved through the crowd. Singo was a “gypsy woman”, Chum a sari-clad Indian

woman, and Josephine and Cinda wore Chinese samfoo. Most memorable were Kay Han

dressed as an “American gangster” in a dark man‟s suit with penciled-in moustache,

slicked-back hair and a panama hat, puffing on a cigar, and Benita clad in rags as a beggar

eating a banana—unfortunately the banana she got was rotten but she had to eat it on

stage anyway. The production was very well-received and we even had an inquiry (I do

not know from whom) about the possibility of our reproducing it for the national

celebration that would take place on the steps of City Hall in front of the padang.

Alas, two years‟ later, on August 9, 1965, Singapore was ejected from Malaysia to

become an independent Republic. I do not recall if we had any celebrations at that

unwilling birth, but we all remember hearing the explosion of the bomb that Indonesian

saboteurs placed in the McDonald office building on Orchard Road just down the hill

from the school. President Sukarno of Indonesia had launched a “Confrontation” against

the formation of Malaysia (including Singapore) in1963, and this lasted till he was

overthrown by a military coup in 1966, which we cheered because he was a “communist”.

North of us, Vietnam was about to burst into full-blown war for the rest of our schooldays

in MGS and ACS, and our undergraduate years.

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“Malaysian Market” September 1963

Left to right: Front row: Rachel Matthews, Kay Han, ?, ?, Augusta Naw

Second row: Miss Naby, Fadilah Alwi, Marguerite, Min, Linda, Josephine Teng, Cinda,

Mrs. Goh

Back row: Sing Chee, Rachel, Esther Lim, Mala, Ong Yong Bok, Chou Onn Kee

“Malaysian Market” September 1963

Esther Lim more clearly seen, Benita with rotten banana added

Also in Secondary One, a group of us got together to take private French lessons from

an Australian nun, Sister Alfonsa of the Maris Stella Convent on Holland Road. This was

initiated and arranged by Min‟s mother, and the motivation was to prepare us to take “O”

27

levels in French since a foreign language was required for application/admission to

Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and at that time Chinese lessons--at which none of

us was very good anyway--ceased after Secondary Two. Cinda recalls that we hated

Chinese so much that in Secondary Two we became more defiant and bolder, and would

quite often skip Chinese class to hobnob with our lucky Indian friends who still had their

“free” period then. I have no such recollection, however, and it is possible--though not

likely--that I did not do this while she did.

Thus it was that every Saturday morning five of us—Min, Cinda, Chum, my sister

Laurette and myself—would gather at a raised colonial bungalow in the extensive

convent grounds of green lawns and thick shady trees, for French with Sister Alfonsa,

who frequently reminded us not to confuse French with the Malay that we had also

learned in Primary School (especially “dan” for “et”). She had a bad stutter about which

Cinda remembers us giggling and making faces behind her back, but I do not. It was on

one of these Saturdays that one of us brought the others the news of President John

Kennedy‟s assassination. We did end up taking French as an extra “O” level subject, and

I also studied Latin individually with Sister Alfonsa while in Pre-University—I recall I

was the only student in the hall being proctored by three teachers when I took the

Cambridge exam. In the end, I was the only one who ended up at Cambridge from

Singapore (after Pre-University at ACS). Kay Han went to Oxford from English boarding

school the same year, and Mala went to Cambridge a year ahead of us, after doing her „A‟

levels in London. The others did their undergraduate and medical studies in Singapore

except for Cinda and Benita, who went to Canada, and Maggie, who studied accountancy

in London.

Our Secondary Two A class teacher was Miss Wong Hee Hua, whom we called “two-

plait Wong” to distinguish her from Miss Wong Lan Eng, the Upper Secondary

Geography teacher, also known to us as “Geog Wong”. Miss Wong Hee Hua was one of

a number of sisters who apparently vowed when they were starving during the war that if

they all survived, they would not cut their hair (or so legend had it). All kept their hair in

long plaits which they wound around their heads, dressed plainly in long cheongsams or

shirtwaist dresses, and wore no make-up. All but one (I think) were unmarried. The most

famous, Dr. Ruth Wong, had a Ph.D. and was Director of the Institute of Education. Miss

Wong taught us mathematics and history, and was a creative and enthusiastic teacher.

Once, she had us perform a skit on American history, which we staged at the main

auditorium to an audience of one—her.

28

Music Society Committee with Miss Wong Hee Hua, 1966

Left to right: Front row: Min, Ruby Lee, Cinda, Miss Wong, Chum, Benita, Linda

Our skit started with the slave trade from Africa to the United States. Roles were cast

according to skin tone. One half-Chinese, half-Indian girl, Evelyn Pung, and a dark-

skinned Chinese girl, Maureen Kwee, were cast as Arab slave traders. They pranced

around with white cloths affixed to their heads with circular wood embroidery frames,

cracking whips at Indian girls who played African slaves by sitting on long benches and

“rowing” their slave-ships. The slaves were clad in our white school blouses and navy

bloomers, each with a white handkerchief tucked into the front of the bloomers and

hanging out to simulate a loin cloth. When the curtain came down on that scene, I peeked

out and saw Miss Wong sitting in solitary splendor in the front row of the big hall. She

was shaking with silent laughter and tears were streaming down from her eyes. I took the

role of Abraham Lincoln, no doubt because of my height again. This was further

enhanced by my wearing black men‟s boots with elevated heels, borrowed from the

brother of Hooi Lai Hoong, a Malaysian girl who had recently joined our school. I also

wore a top-hat. It had been made by my mother, a faithful producer of many of our props

through the years. She used a cylindrical Menglembu Groundnuts tin as a mold for the

hat which was made out of stiff paper, and painted black, with a black rim. Min was

Mary Lincoln. When I was shot by John Wilkes Booth (played by Kay Han in yet another

“American gangster” role), I crashed to the floor (hurting my back or leg in the process),

and Min ran screaming off stage. Miss Wong continued to tremble and weep with

laughter.

Probably our most memorable collective theatrical effort, done for the Christmas

concert at the end of Secondary Two in 1964, was Louisa May Alcott‟s Little Women,

which was one of our recreational reading favorites together with Anne of Green Gables,

books by Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, and other similar “girls‟ classics”. I cannot

remember if we performed Little Women from an established script or whether we created

the dialogue and screenplay ourselves. Casting was done by personality: Cinda was

29

Marmee (of course), Singo was Meg, the oldest sister, Mala was Jo (of course), Min was

Amy (ditto), and Chum was Beth. I was the stern but rich Aunt March (with wrinkles

drawn on my forehead, and allowed to wear my glasses on stage), and Rachel was

Hannah, the maid. Our costumes all came out of the backstage cupboards in the

auditorium. Presumably sewn or otherwise acquired by previous generations of MGS

thespians, they were long 19th

-century European ladies‟ gowns complete with frills and

padding, and definitely helped transport us to another place and time.

“Little Women”, 1964

Left to right: Two poor children (Barbara Chee on right), Ng Hwee Miang, Cinda, Min,

Singo, Linda, Mala, Chum, Rachel

“Little Women” 1964

Left to right: Min (Amy), Mala (Jo), Cinda (Marmee), Singo (Meg), Chum (Beth)

30

Beginning in Secondary One, our recess-time play became more “organized”. Our

most constant game played on the Secondary School playing field was “Netstone”—

which was netball played with a stone wrapped around with exercise book paper and a

rubber band. Fortunately no-one was ever hit in the head with this. The game required us

to be organized into two teams. Min and I were the worst players, so we were put in

different teams and assigned to “guard” each other at distant points of the field. Often we

were chatting and missed the “ball” when it whizzed by us. Another time, we were

playing “twos and threes” when I slipped and fell running around the circle of girls when

I became a “three”, and broke my collar-bone. We also continued with “Robin Hood” and

other games which required us to roam around the school grounds.

One day, in Secondary Two or Three, the famous “banana tree incident” occurred.

While wandering through the grounds we happened upon a banana plant with a bunch of

ripe bananas hanging from a tall stalk. Probably at Mala‟s instigation, we tried to bring

down the bananas, by shaking the plant, throwing stones at the branch, trying to jump on

it, etc. Finally, the branch broke off and crashed to the ground, whereupon we all fled,

pretending that nothing had happened. The next day, the Principal (Miss Lau Miau Eng)

warned all girls over the intercom to “be careful”, since “vandals” had been in the school

grounds. We kept mum.

We were now fourteen to sixteen years old, and as “tomboyish” as ever. Wearing

make-up and going out with boys (or even being seen with them) was anathema. Once, in

Secondary One, someone (Jennifer?) reported that Cinda had been seen “wearing lipstick

and kissing a boy” at the Island Country Club Teenage Ball (something like that). We

decided to ostracize her, refusing to talk to her or acknowledge her presence during one

recess period when we were sitting in a row in one of our favorite places—the passage-

way between the Science and Domestic Science building and the Secondary classrooms,

where we could enjoy the hilltop breeze, looking down on Cathay Building and the city

below. Cinda got very upset and burst into tears, so we decided to “forgive” her.

It is difficult in retrospect to identify who most often orchestrated our group play.

Much of it was spontaneous, based on someone‟s idea of the moment. My recollection is

that Mala most often came up with the ideas (especially “naughty” ones), followed by

Cinda, who tended to suggest more sedate activities like rounders or Sardines. Min and

Chum were also occasional instigators. I was mostly an enthusiastic follower. Our

behavior, especially our physical antics, were apparently considered unusual for girls of

our rapidly advancing years. In Upper Secondary, we heard that some of the girls in

younger classes—particularly Min‟s ladylike cousin Fiona‟s classmates who were two

years‟ our junior—even complained to the teachers that our behavior was “disgraceful”

and especially that we did not wear petticoats under our uniform tunics (which would

have been too hot as well as hampered our mobility). Once, in Secondary Four, I clearly

recall Mala removing her half-petticoat on the balcony outside our classroom during

recess, because she was too hot.

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It was also in Secondary Four that during one recess we decided to perform a song-

and-dance routine from the movie musical The Sound of Music, which we all loved (but

not as much as Serene Chia, one of our classmates who saw it thirteen times!). The song

was “I am sixteen going on seventeen”—our age at the time. We sang lustily as Mala

danced on top of a bench outside the auditorium building as “Liesl” while I was the

“boyfriend”. Imagine our surprise when suddenly a window of the building opened and

Mrs. Cheah‟s head appeared, causing us to scatter in embarrassment. Somehow, she did

not look very surprised.

Secondary Three marked the first split among us. At the end of Secondary Two, we

were tracked into the “Science” (“C” class) and “Arts” (“A” and “B” class, with “B” class

having the better students) streams. Most of our friends went to “Science” class but

Mala, who was not too good in mathematics, was going into “Arts” and I wanted to go

into “Arts” too (at the time, my favorite subject was English and I thought I might

become a writer). But the School needed one additional student to go into the “C” class,

and I was chief candidate, having the highest mathematics and science scores of the

remaining girls. I cried, threw a tantrum, and was sent to the Principal‟s office, remaining

adamant all the way. Eventually another candidate (Ng Hwee Miang) was found instead

and she turned out to be very good in science and mathematics. In the meantime, Kay

Han left us to go to boarding school at Cheltenham Ladies‟ College in England, which we

all thought would be wonderful, based on the English girls‟ boarding-school stories on

which we had grown up.

I joined Mala, Socker, Chang Shook Leng, Ida Ow, Lai Chew Fong and others in

Secondary Three and Four B where, with less academic competition, I was routinely the

top student. Our class teacher in Secondary Three was Mrs. Cheah, while the Science

class girls had Miss Ellen Crabbe, who was part-English and part-Malay and whose

brother Harry was a well-known news broadcaster at Radio and Television Singapore. I

cannot remember who they had as their class or “form” teacher in Secondary Four, but we

had Miss Wong Lan Eng, who was quite chic and shapely, with a girlish manner despite

her middle years, dressed in cheongsams, and sported a white streak in the front of her

upswept hair.

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Geography Society Committee, 1966

Front row: Mala (second from left) next to Miss Lau Biau Hee (Mrs. Pok) and Miss Wong

Lan Eng, Singo (extreme right), Maggie (second from right)

Back row: Linda (center), Jenny (second from right)

School Prefects, 1965 with Mrs. Tan Yong Tai

Second row: Cinda (third from left), Singo (fourth from left), Linda (center), Min (fifth

from right)

Mrs. Tan Yong Tai taught art. She was tall and elegant, always carefully made-up

with the thinly-arched penciled eyebrows and black beauty spot popular with her

generation (my grandmother‟s). She too dressed in long cheongsams and had upswept

hair. One day, there was an announcement over the intercom that she had lost her

33

precious opals, which were her birthstones and which she had worn in her hair. Mrs. Tan

was considered to be very “fierce” and was known to rap girls on the arm or hand with a

stick if they misbehaved or failed to do an accurate representation of whatever was the art

object of the day (I remember gladiolus blooms). I was not good in art—my worst

subject next to Chinese and Domestic Science—but she knew my grandmother Edna and

was always civil and kind to me.

Besides our academic lessons, we also had to take Domestic Science. On alternate

weeks we did sewing (with the best work exhibited on Founder‟s Day or sold off at Fun

Fairs) and cooking, which was in a large kitchen on the ground floor of the auditorium

building, next to the Science labs. We were in teams of four, selected alphabetically, so

Kay Han (another Lim) and Singo (Ling) were my team-mates, with another girl I forget.

None of us was very “domestic”, so our products usually did not turn out well. We

seemed to cook mostly desserts, like blancmange, following mostly colonial-era recipes

from Mrs. Handy’s Cookbook. Our cooking teacher, Miss Kam, always dressed in a white

uniform, loved to give us long lectures on hygiene, including repeated exhortations to

refrain from using tooth-picks, a Chinese habit which she considered disgusting.

Secondary School Teachers 1965

Front row left to right: Miss Wong Lan Eng, Mrs. Tan Yong Tai, Mrs. Cheah, Mrs.

Mendez, Miss Lau Miau Eng (Principal), Mrs. Goh, Miss Kam, Mrs. Soon, Miss Wong

Hee Hua

Back row left to right: Mrs. Gaw (school clerk), Mrs. Tan (domestic science), Miss Ellen

Crabbe, Mrs. Anna Tham, Mrs. Chen Su Pin, Mrs. Cheong, Chinese teacher, Mrs. Wong

Poh Yee, Mrs. Pok (Lau Biau Hee)

The Singapore school system was changing, and I believe it was in Secondary Three

that “points” began to be awarded for official “extra-curricular activities” or “ECA”. The

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School had always had student clubs, like the Girls‟ Brigade, and sports teams that

competed with other girls‟ schools, but now new ECA clubs began to proliferate.

Suddenly all the activities that we had done spontaneously became “organized” and we

set to work establishing clubs, each under the watchful eye of a teacher advisor. In

Secondary Three and especially Secondary Four, most of the club committees were

dominated by my friends and I. I think I must have sat on four or five committees,

including as President of the brand-new Literary, Debating and Dramatic Society, having

been nominated by Mala and “voted” in by all my friends—I was so stunned that Mala

stepped in to give my opening/acceptance “speech”. I was also Vice-President, Secretary

or Committee Member of other clubs like the Music Society (Cinda was President),

Geography Society (Mala was President, selected by Geog Wong who said she wanted “a

live wire” in that role), etc. Like several of my other friends (Cinda, Min, Chum), I was

also a Prefect (Cinda was Head Prefect), meaning we had to go around with neckties

down the front of our white blouses and “police” the other girls (making sure they did not

talk too loudly or drop sweet-wrappers and other rubbish on the grounds). Many of us

were also Librarians (meaning we staffed the School Library which Mrs. Cheah ran), and

members of the Editorial Board of the School Magazine, to which we all contributed.

Min, Cinda and I also played in the Chess Club.

Chess Club, 1966

Front row: Min (center) Back row: Cinda, Linda

To our amateur concerts was now added an annual “Talentime” or talent contest. For

one such event, six of us formed a group we called the “Jim-Jams” and sang Schubert‟s

“Trout” song (“I stood beside a brooklet……”), dressed as “fishermen” complete with

fishing net and rod. Sing Chee, Chum and Rachel sang soprano, and Cinda, Min and I

sang alto. Our signature song was actually “Glowworm”, but I cannot remember when we

35

sang it. In the Secondary Three Talentime, I was missing from the “Jim-Jams” who were

a Secondary Three C entry.

“The Jim-Jams”, Talentime 1965

Left to right: Cinda, Min, Rachel, Singo, Chum

A second group, with Jennifer strumming on the banjo, and including Maggie, Hooi

Lai Hoong and Augusta Naw, called themselves the “Jailbirds”, and sang an American

folk song—perhaps “She is coming round the mountain”. They tied their hair into two

bunches and wore striped mini-skirted sleeveless sheaths. This must have been in

Secondary Two, because the next year they were clad differently as a Secondary Three C

entry. That year, as Secondary Three B entries, Mala did a jazzy pop-song solo with a

male band (I don‟t know where it came from), while I crooned a low-pitched song whose

lyrics I have forgotten.

“The Jailbirds”, Talentime 1964

Left to right: Augusta Naw, Hooi Lai Hoong, Jennifer Ng, Marguerite Liang, Lim Kay

Han

36

,

“The Jailbirds”, Talentime 1965

Left to right: Jenny, Maggie, Lai Hoong, Augusta

Mala singing solo at Talentime 1965

We had also begun annual drama competitions, when different classes presented plays

to be judged by a panel of usually teachers and “Old Girls”. While still all together in the

same class (in Lower Secondary), we used to take trips down to the United States

Information Services (U.S.I.S.) library at the U.S. Embassy in Armenian Street, where we

would pour over plays and borrow books with scripts in them. I cannot remember any

specific plays, so they cannot have been very memorable. I do remember one of the

judges telling us once that it was better to do a good play badly than a bad play well. In

Upper Secondary, we were split up into the Arts and Science classes, and for the first

time were on opposing sides of the competition. I cannot remember the details, but there

was an occasion in Secondary Four when the competition got quite ugly and some sort of

altercation occurred between the Arts and Science girls, I believe because we both wanted

to use the stage at the same time for a rehearsal. Somewhat appropriately, the play the

Science Nuttes put on was called Strained Relations.

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For our Arts class, Secondary Four B, Mala and I decided to write an original play,

entitled Strange Happenings, which was set in (what else?) a British girls‟ boarding

school during the Second World War. I was an English male teacher with pipe and

bowtie, Mala a female French teacher (complete with chignon and accent), and Chang

Shook Ling the portly male German teacher who turned out to be a spy for the Nazis.

Tham Ying Peng played a histrionic female teacher, and Linda Tung and Lai Chew Fong

were two other female teachers. We did a good job and won first prize in the school

competition. Thus it was that we became our school‟s entry in the National Drama

Festival held at the old National Theater in (then) King George V Park. Alas, we were

judged third of the three entries. Our intimate “staff room” play did not at all translate

well into the cavernous National Theater. During the same National Youth Festival, our

school choir was a finalist. The song we sang was “I think that I shall never see/A poem

lovely as a tree…..” but I do not recall how we fared in the competition.

“Strange Happenings”, First Prize, Drama Festival 1966

Left to right: Shook Ling, Mala, Linda, Linda Tung, Ying Peng, Chew Fong

Secondary Four was the year we took our “Cambridge School Certificate” (soon to be

called „O‟ Level) examinations. Every year, for English literature, we would study a

Shakespeare play, and that year it was Julius Caesar. Once, earlier, the school had

engaged a traveling troupe to perform excerpts from Twelfth Night. The troupe turned out

to be a British family—father, mother and daughter—who were itinerant play-makers in

India whose story was subsequently made into a black-and-white movie, Shakespeare-

wallah. One of the scenes they performed was Malvolio‟s “yellow stockings” soliloquy.

Another year, a group of us went with Miss Wong Hee Hua to distribute “white

gifts”—items wrapped in white paper--that had been donated by girls at the School to

“underprivileged” Malay fishing communities situated on the southern islands of

Singapore, where they lived in typical kampong “stilt houses”. We stopped at two

islands, where we distributed the gifts at a local community or school hall. We were

quite taken aback at the furious rush of the children and adults who practically snatched

the “gifts” out of our hands, without any thanks. . It was all quite awkward, and later

became scary when it rained and the sea became very choppy just when we had to transfer

38

from the sampan on which we had rowed into one of the islands, back on to our

motorboat for the ride back to the “mainland”.

“White gift” distributors, 1965

Back row from left: Min, Linda, Mala, Miranda Chua

Nuttes

Once our schooling at MGS was over, we would be scattered, as indeed some of us

already were e.g. Kay Han and Josie to girls‟ boarding-schools in England. In particular,

Mala would continue her „A‟ levels in London, to which her father was being posted as

Singapore High Commissioner (ambassador), and Marguerite would take her „A‟ levels

(then still called “Higher School Certificate” or HSC) at St. Andrew‟s Pre-University

instead of at ACS, to which the rest of us were bound. Cinda was also going to spend a

year away on a Rotary Club scholarship in New Zealand.

With the upcoming separation in mind, we came up with the notion that we should

create an identifying moniker for our group, which was the “Nuttes”. Cinda thinks she

was the one who first broached the idea, but I clearly recall that it was Min who suggested

it to Mala and me while we were sitting on some steps during recess, at the end of

Secondary Three. Min and Cinda may have discussed it beforehand. Anyway, each of us

would be a “nut” which represented something about ourselves. Cinda was dubbed

Coconut, because of her smooth, round, shiny black head of hair. Min became Chestnut,

since she was “nuts” about chess. I was Walnut, because it “looks like a brain”. Chum

was Hazelnut, because of her lightish brown eyes (versus the darker browns the rest of us

had). Mala said she wanted to be “the most expensive nut”, so became Cashew-nut,

while Maggie wanted to be “the toughest nut to crack”, which was Brazil-nut. Rachel

was christened Peanut because of her relatively small head on top of a long beanpole

body, and Singo was beetle-nut because she liked the Beatles pop singing-group. Benita

was Doughnut (because we were rapidly running out of nuts we knew) and Jennifer was

“Ginger-nut” (because of her lightish brown hair and freckles), which probably does not

exist. Kay Han was away, so she became “Un-identified nut” when she returned on

holiday.

39

Somewhere along the line in Secondary School, we had also invented silly songs for

each of us. Mala‟s was a Mala-variant of the scouts-and-guides campfire song that would

no doubt be considered politically incorrect today, “Ratnasamy fond of toddy”, and went:

“Nirmala Rajah fond of kacang/Yan-ah-lay, yan-ah-lay/Got her Tony from Pulau Ubin/

Yan-ah-lay, yan-ah-lay/Father‟s name was A.P. Rajah/Mother‟s name was don‟t-know-

what/Father mother fond of Mala/Yan-ah-lay, yan-ah-lay”. (Tony was the name of a boy

that Mala and Min met when they went to Outward Board camp on Pulau Ubin in

Secondary Three, from which Min returned much more boisterous than before.)

Singo‟s song went: “Singo loves Ringo/Ringo loves Singo/Mug and Swot/

Mug and Swot …..” --instead of “Twist and Shout”, referring to the fact that Singo was

very studious. Ringo was Ringo Starr, one of the Beatles.

I cannot remember any of the others, but mine went like this, sung to the tune of a

popular song of the time, and revealing the problems of collective composition: “Oh

Linda Lim/Her dear Bin Sin/Is feeling low/‟Cause he‟s no dough/To hurry home/To

Singapore/To see her more, to see her more/When he held you/He stuck like glue/ Pelican

brand/Oh, it was grand/He had to scrub/With soap and water/But it didn‟t matter/ For he

grew fatter.” Goh Bin Sin was the name of the organist at Wesley Church, chosen by

Cinda for its rhyming quality. He had just left for London to pursue music lessons, which

provided some of the inspiration for the lyrics. I also had a second song, invented by

Mala, which went thus: “Oh Linda Lim Yuen Ching Ing Ing/She can dance, she can sing,

she can fly/But she can never ever never ever never ever tell a lie.” I am not sure if the

tune was original, but the lyrics I am sure were.

Post-MGS

Before the Nuttes scattered, we returned to MGS as a group to get our School

Certificate („O‟ level) results after they came from Cambridge in late January or

Februrary 1967. I was so disappointed that I only obtained seven distinctions (4 A1‟s, 3

A2‟s and 1 C3 for French) out of the eight subjects we took, and had only the second

highest “aggregate” (sum of best six grades) in our year, though the highest among the

Nuttes, that I cried publicly. Some people thought I must have failed! The “top girl” was

Tan Swee Sim, not one of the Nuttes, whose family emigrated to Canada shortly

thereafter. Decades later, I heard from Cinda‟s husband, Chua Boon Chye, that Sunny

Menon, an ACS cohort mate who worked on Wall Street, was still recounting my

“crying” incident (though he was not there and I do not know how he heard about it). But

all was forgotten by the day that we returned to the Old School for our “graduation”.

“Old Girl” Mrs. Lee Kuan Yew, wife of the Prime Minister and sister of our teachers

Mrs. Lau (primary school) and Mrs. Cheah (secondary school) handed us our diplomas on

the school stage. At the time, the wives of four Singapore Cabinet Ministers, including

the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister Toh Chin Chye, had been educated at

MGS, in those days when turning out “good wives and mothers” was a matter of pride for

the School. That evening the Jim-Jams sang at the Founder‟s Day dinner evening concert,

probably the medley of Caribbean calypsos and “Negro spirituals” that we had performed

at the ACS Talentime, when the boys‟ catcalls totally drowned out our voices.

40

MGS Graduation, 1967

Left to right: Singo, Min, Linda, Rachel, Maggie, Cinda, Chum

“The Jim Jams”, MGS Graduation, 1967

Left to right: Front row: Min, Singo, Chum, Back row: Cinda, Linda, Rachel

Our next scattering was in 1969, after we had finished our Cambridge Higher School

Certificate (HSC) examinations at ACS. Some of us were already studying at the

University of Singapore, while the rest were preparing to leave for university studies

overseas. Sometime then Cinda had a tea party in her home for the Nuttes and some

other girls from ACS.

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At Cinda’s house, 1969

Left to right: Front row: Benita, Linda

Second row: Min, Chum, Singo, Kay Han, Maggie

Back row: Rachel, Cinda, Mala

The next time a large number of us met up was after our first graduations from

university. In August 1972, we had a sleepover at Kay Han‟s house in upper Bukit

Timah. There was also a dinner we had at a Chinese restaurant the same month,

probably organized by Cinda since her sister Ruby was with us, as well as Ng Su Sane

and Chou Onn Kee.

At Kay Han’s house, August 1972

Left to right: Singo, Rachel, Cinda, Kay, Linda

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At Kay Han’s house, August 1972

Left to right: Linda, Singo, Min, Kay, Rachel

At Kay Han’s house, August 1972

Left to right: Benita, Linda, Min, Singo, Chum

At this time, Rachel (economics and English) and Singo (economics) had obtained

their BAs from University of Singapore. Min and Chum were still in medical school at

the University of Singapore, while Kay Han had her Oxford degree and was doing

clinicals for her medical degree in London, and Cinda was in medical school at the

University of British Columbia. I had my Cambridge BA in economics and was about to

leave to do my MA at Yale. Benita was studying economics at the University of Calgary

in Canada. Jennifer graduated from the University of Singapore and was about to start

doctoral studies in biochemistry at the University of California-Davis.

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Lunch or Dinner, August 1972

Left to right: Linda, Cinda, Su Sane, Singo, Jenny, Kay

Lunch or Dinner, August 1972

Left to right: Min, Ruby, Benita, Onn Kee, Rachel

The Nuttes Today: Forty-Plus Years On

In 2006 our 1966 graduating class from MGS celebrated our fortieth “anniversary”

with a reunion in Singapore that the ones overseas could not attend. Here is what has

happened to all of us since 1966. Sadly, none of our daughters attended MGS. Subsets

of us meet up occasionally, usually in Singapore when Mala or I visit. Min‟s and my

family have taken many holiday trips together over the years.

44

Benita Catherasoo obtained her BA and MA in economics at the University of Calgary

in Canada. She lives in Singapore, helping her Australian husband with his professional

practice as an arbitrator in maritime disputes.

Dr. Geh Min is in private practice as an ophthalmic surgeon. She obtained her medical

degree from the University of Singapore and did her specialist‟s training in London. Min

has served as a Nominated Member of Parliament, and as President of The Nature Society

of Singapore. She is married to a Singaporean heart surgeon and has one daughter.

Marguerite Liang (Maggie) trained as a chartered accountant in the UK, and has been

involved in various businesses since then, including accounting, software, restaurants and

nutritional supplements. She and her Singaporean husband are in business in Singapore,

but make frequent visits to the U.S., where they lived for 10 years.

Dr. Cinda Lee-Chua obtained her medical degree from the University of British

Columbia, and is in private practice in Toronto as a pediatrician. Her Singaporean

husband, an ACS classmate, is a psychiatrist and they have three children.

Dr. Irene Lim Kay Han graduated from Oxford and qualified in London as a medical

practitioner and radiologist. She is married to a British-Canadian radiologist and has

worked in private practice, non-profits, and various hospitals in Singapore.

Dr. Linda Lim graduated in economics from the Universities of Cambridge (BA), Yale

(MA) and Michigan, where she is Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business,

and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. She is married to a retired

American professor and has one daughter.

Dr. Ling Sing Chee obtained her BA in economics from the University of Singapore, her

MBA from Michigan State University and her PhD from the University of Western

Ontario. She retired from her academic position at the National University of Singapore

Business School to devote herself to church and other volunteer activities.

Dr. Jennifer Ng graduated from the University of Singapore, obtained her PhD in

biochemistry from the University of California-Davis, and is Professor of Pediatrics at

Georgetown University in Washington DC. She is married to a British-American White

House security analyst and has one daughter.

Nirmala Rajah-Bamford (Mala) obtained her BA in archaeology and anthropology at

Cambridge University, then qualified as a solicitor in the UK. She has worked in the law,

and in the antiques and property businesses. Her husband is a British lawyer and they

have three children.

Josephine Teng (Josie) studied dance in New York, performing in Martha Graham‟s

dance company and in other Broadway shows. She interrupted her practice as a massage

therapist in New York, to spend his last years with her father in Singapore.

45

Dr. Bharathi Vaithinathan (Rose/Chum) obtained her medical degree and her Masters

in Public Health at the University of Singapore and served in several senior positions in

the Singapore Ministry of Health before retiring in 2008. She is married to a Malaysian-

Singaporean medical professor and they have two daughters.

Rachel Zachariah-Menon graduated from the University of Singapore and recently

obtained her MA in early childhood education. A former foreign service officer and

educational entrepreneur, she now teaches at a polytechnic in Singapore. She is married

to a retired Singaporean foreign service officer, and they have two children.

Revised 21 March, 2010, Singapore

Left to right: Rachel, Josie, Singo, Chum, Benita in Singapore 2003

Left to right: Maggie, Josie, Linda, Benita in Singapore 2004

46

Left to right: Linda, Cinda, Katherine Liao, Fiona Chew in Stratford, Canada 2004

(Standing) Rachel, Chum (Sitting) Linda, Sing Chee, Benita, Maggie with assorted

spouses and friends at Rachel’s son’s wedding in Singapore, 2007

47

Left to right: Singo, Linda, Min, Chum, Rachel at The Old School at Mount Sophia, 2008

(old MGS premises converted to commercial use)