He suggested "Kuan Yew", the dialect rendering of the Mandarin guang yao, meaning "light and brightness". But my grandfather's admiration for the British made him add "Harry" to my name, so I was Harry Lee Kuan Yew.

My two younger brothers, Kim Yew and Thiam Yew, were also given Christian names -- Dennis and Freddy respectively.

At that time few non-Christian Chinese did this, and at school later I was to find myself the odd boy out with a personal name like "Harry".

When my youngest brother, Suan Yew, was born in 1933, I persuaded my parents not to give him a Christian name since we were not Christians.

WE FOUGHT WITH KITES, MARBLES

I OFTEN played with the children of the Chinese fishermen and of the Malays living in a nearby kampung, a cluster of some 20 or 30 attap or zinc-roofed wooden huts in a lane opposite my grandfather's house. The fishermen worked along Siglap beach, then about 200 yards away.

It was a simpler world altogether. We played with fighting kites, tops, marbles and even fighting fish. These games nurtured a fighting spirit and the will to win.

I do not know whether they prepared me for the fights I was to have later in politics. We were not soft, nor were we spoilt.

FROM BULLOCK CART TO CONCORDE

FOR holidays, the family would spend up to a week at a wooden house in my grandfather Chua's rubber estate in Chai Chee. To get to the estate from Changi Road, we rode down a track in a bullock cart, its two bullocks driven by my grandmother's gardener.

The cart had wooden wheels with metal rims and no shock absorbers, so that half-mile ride on the rutted clay track was hilariously bumpy.

Fifty years later, in 1977, as I travelled in a Concorde from London to New York and crossed the Atlantic in three hours, I wondered if any of my fellow passengers had ever experienced the joy of a bullock-cart ride.

SPURRED ON BY MUM's SACRIFICES

SHE devoted her life to raising her children to be well-educated and independent professionals, and she stood up to my father to safeguard their future. My brothers, my sister and I were very conscious of her sacrifices; we felt we could not let her down and did our best to be worthy of her.

As I grew older, she began consulting me as the eldest son on all important family matters, so that while still in my teens, I became de facto head of the family. This taught me how to take decisions.

CANED BY THE PRINCIPAL

ONCE I was caned by the principal. D.W. McLeod was a fair but strict disciplinarian who enforced rules impartially, and one rule was that a boy who was late for school three times during one term would get three strokes of the cane.

I was always a late riser, an owl more than a lark, and when I was late for school the third time in a term in 1938, the form master sent me to see McLeod.

The principal knew me from the number of prizes I had been collecting on prize-giving days and the scholarships I had won.

But I was not let off with an admonition. I bent over a chair and was given three of the best with my trousers on. I did not think he lightened his strokes.

I have never understood why Western educationists are so much against corporal punishment.

It did my fellow students and me no harm.

A PLAYFUL, MISCHIEVOUS STREAK

I ENJOYED my years in Raffles Institution. I coped with the work comfortably, was active in the Scout movement, played cricket and some tennis, swam and took part in many debates.

But I never became a prefect, let alone head prefect. There was a mischievous, playful streak in me.

Too often, I was caught not paying attention in class, scribbling notes to fellow students, or mimicking some teacher's strange mannerisms.

In the case of a rather ponderous Indian science teacher, I was caught in the laboratory drawing the back of his head with its bald patch.