There was little traffic -- many bicycles, but only a few private cars and some buses and trucks. Most of the dons, the fellows of colleges, tutors, lecturers and professors, and even the censor of Fitzwilliam rode bicycles.

I bought myself a second-hand bicycle for £8 and cycled everywhere, even in the rain. This was a very basic bike handed down from student to student over the past 20 or more years.

I soon got used to my new routine. And I had less trouble with meals. The food in hall was wholesome, with enough carbohydrates and proteins, although very British and very pallid.

The deep-sea cod and halibut were tough and not tasty like the inshore fish I was used to in Singapore. There were no garnishes, everything had to be seasoned with salt and pepper.

In spite of the cycling in clean but damp fenland air and the adequate meals, when I got back to Singapore, an X-ray of my lungs showed I had had a touch of tuberculosis when I was in England.

Fortunately, it had healed and showed up only as a white patch in the X-ray. Still, I was grateful I had got a place in Cambridge. I am sure it would have been worse had I stayed on in London.

For exercise, I decided to join the Boat Club. I had first to practise, not by going out on the boat, but by "tubbing" on the river bank: Sitting in a stationary tub, and being instructed how to hold the oar, how to stretch myself and pull it back, where to put my feet.

After two practices per week for three weeks, I made it to a boat. On the afternoon of my second scheduled outing, a snowstorm broke and I assumed the practice was cancelled. I was severely reproached. Seven others and the cox had turned up but could not take the rowing eight out because I was missing.

I decided that the English were mad and left the Boat Club. Thereafter, cycling around Cambridge to get from my digs to lectures and from lectures to Fitzwilliam House for meals provided my exercise.

The first year Qualifying One class of law students was small, some 30 compared with 200 in London. Most students who came up to the university were ex-servicemen who were given special dispensation to take a degree in two years instead of three, and therefore went straight into the second year.

Unlike them, I had to do a Qualifying One first, and take three years. The British undergraduates studying with me were young people of 18 or 19 straight from school. I was 23.

There were a few men from Malaya including Yong Pung How, about 20 years old and from Kuala Lumpur. (He was to be the Chief Justice of Singapore in 1990.)

As I had missed the first term, Pung How readily lent me his notes. They were in a neat hand, comprehensive and a good synopsis of the ground I had missed. They were most useful because the Cambridge syllabus had different subjects from my first-year London course.

During the Easter vacation, I swotted up what I had missed and caught up with my work. By May, when the Qualifying One examinations were held, I was fairly well-prepared. Three weeks later, in June, when the examination results were posted up at the Senate House, my name was among the few in Class I. I cabled home the good news.

I was glad I had not disappointed the censor, who had taken me in one term late on the strength of my academic record. Billy Thatcher, as he was affectionately known by all his students, met me outside Fitzwilliam as I was parking my bicycle to go in for lunch in hall.

He paused to congratulate me. I could feel that he was pleased. He had told me when I saw him in December 1946: "Lee, when you come up to Cambridge, you are joining something special, like joining the Life Guards and not just joining the army. You have to stand that extra inch taller."

When I replied that I would try to get a First Class, he looked gravely at me and said: "Lee, don't be disappointed if you don't. In Oxford and in Cambridge, you need that divine spark, that something extra before you get a First."

I was relieved that my Cambridge examiners had decided I had that something extra.

In high spirits, I bought myself a second-hand motorcycle, an old army surplus Matchless, not much to look at but with a lovely engine. It cost about 60.

Suddenly I was mobile. I went wandering all over the Cambridge countryside and saw places that were not accessible by bus or railway. I would stop and buy cherries or strawberries where the farmers had put up placards inviting people to come and pick them or buy them.

At the end of June, Choo wrote that she had taken a Class I diploma. She now stood a good chance of winning the Queen's scholarship to study in England. I was optimistic.

Towards the end of July came the best news of all, a cable from Choo that she had been awarded the Queen's scholarship. But the Colonial Office could find no place for her in any university for the academic year beginning October 1947. She would have to wait until 1948.

Stirred into action, I puzzled over how to get her into Cambridge.

I looked up Mr Barret, the chief clerk at Fitzwilliam. He was a tubby, competent and experienced man in his late 40s. He had seen hundreds of young students come and go. He knew that the censor liked me.

I told him of a lady friend in Singapore, very bright, who had won the top scholarship to study in England. She wanted to read law. How could she get into Cambridge in time for the Michaelmas term?

With a twinkle in his eyes he said: "You know, the censor knows Miss Butler, the mistress of Girton, very well. Now, if you could get him to speak to the mistress of Girton, that could make a difference."

I was excited at this possibility. There were only two months to go before the new academic year began. I asked to see the censor. Not only did he see me, he was also willing to help. On Aug 1, he wrote to Miss Butler, and for good measure to the principal of Newnham, the other women's college in Cambridge.

Both replied immediately. Newnham offered a place in 1948. Miss Butler was more positive. She was willing to offer a vacancy in October 1947 that Girton kept for special cases, provided Choo had the qualifications for admission.

Thatcher wrote sending me both replies. I dashed off to the Examinations Syndicate near Silver Street along the river Cam. I gave them the year Choo had taken her Senior Cambridge -- 1936. They traced her results and gave me a certified copy -- she was the top student of her year.

I then wrote and asked to see Miss Butler at Girton. She was willing to see me, and I turned up at the appointed time on the morning of Aug 6.

I told her that my friend, Miss Kwa, was a very bright girl, brighter than I was, and that she had come top of the list, ahead of me in Raffles College on many occasions. I added that I had come up to Cambridge one term late and taken a First in my Qualifying One examination, and I had no doubt that she would do likewise.

Miss Butler was a friendly, white-haired lady with glasses, somewhat plump and benign-looking. She was amused at this young Chinese boy talking in glowing terms of his lady friend being a better student than he was, and intrigued by the idea that perhaps the girl was exceptional.

That same day I cabled Choo: "Girton accepts. Official correspondence following. Get cracking." She boarded a troopship in Singapore in late August. I was waiting impatiently at the docks when she finally arrived in Liverpool in early October, and was overjoyed to see her after a long year of separation. We went off at once to London by train and after five days there we went on to Cambridge.

By now, I had got myself organised and knew my way around. But there were new problems. Mr Pounds, the junior tutor and bursar of Fitzwilliam, had given me rooms some three miles to the south of Cambridge.

I was aghast. Girton was to the north of town. I tried hard to get a room nearer to Choo but to no avail. Mr Pounds was unrelenting. I appealed to the censor. His reply was fatherly, but spiced with a touch of dry humour:

"My dear Lee,

A week later, I found a room near Fitzwilliam at Captain Harris' Stables. Captain Harris kept horses and foxhounds. I was his one student boarder. He charged an exorbitant price, some 9 a week just for bed and breakfast, with baths and everything else extra. I had no choice. It was convenient. I was to stay there for the next two years until I came down from Cambridge in the summer of 1949.

Now it was Choo's turn for culture shock. She was not accustomed to the thick woollen suit she had bought with her clothing coupons, the heavy overcoat, and later the fleece-lined boots for winter.

They weighed her down. And Girton was two miles from town. She could not cycle, and had to take a bus. Her sense of direction was never good. It was her time for disorientation.

After a few weeks of hectic adjustments, she told me she found me a changed man. I was no longer the cheerful, optimistic go-getter, the anything-can-be-done fellow, bubbling with joie de vivre.

Despite the favour I had been shown, particularly the kindness of Billy Thatcher, and my happy mood during the glorious summer of 1947, I appeared to have become deeply anti-British, particularly of the colonial regime in Malaya and Singapore, which I was determined to end.

One year in London and Cambridge had crystallised in me changes that had started with the Japanese capture of Singapore in 1942. I had now seen the British in their own country and I questioned their ability to govern these territories for the good of the locals.

Those on the spot were not interested in the advancement of their colonies, but only in the top jobs and the high pay these could give them; at the national level they were primarily concerned with acquiring the foreign exchange that the exports of Malayan rubber and tin could earn in US dollars, to support an ailing pound sterling.

After Choo's revelation, I began to examine myself to see how it had happened. It may have begun with my experience of the colour prejudice of the British working classes, the bus conductors and conductresses, the salesgirls and waitresses in the shops and restaurants, and the landladies in Hampstead I encountered in my search for digs.

Several times I had gone to houses listed in "rooms vacant" notices near Swiss Cottage tube station, only to be told, once they saw that I was Chinese, that the rooms had already been taken. Later, I pre-empted such problems by telling them on the phone that my name was Lee, spelt "L, double e", but that I was Chinese. If they did not want a Chinese, they could put me off then and save me the bother of travelling to their door.

The British people I met at the upper end of the social scale -- the professors and teachers, the secretaries and librarians at Cambridge and at the Middle Temple were cultured, polite and helpful, if a little reserved.

The British students were by and large well-mannered, even friendly, but always correct. But of course there was colour prejudice when it came to competition for places on sports teams, for college colours or university "blues" and "half blues".

Singaporeans and Malayans were very good at badminton, which rated a half blue, and in fact they did win some, but it was almost impossible for an Asiatic to get into the team for a major sport like cricket, rugby or, most prestigious of all, rowing.

The discrimination may not have been due entirely to colour prejudice. It was the class system -- another strange phenomenon for someone coming from a young, mobile society of migrants.

Even among the white students, those from the "right" public schools had the advantage. And like the rest, they coveted college colours because they would prove an asset in the future, when they could list them on their CVs.

They were stepping stones to great things -- anyone with a rowing blue had his career made. Similarly, being president of the Cambridge Union Society helped one to become a prospective candidate for a Labour or Conservative constituency, or to get a job in the research department of one of the parties.

There was also keen rivalry among Asiatics, mostly Indians, for election to office in the Union Society, but in their case it was difficult to understand, since by 1947, India and Pakistan were on their way to independence. One Ceylonese student at Trinity Hall got as far as being elected secretary of the Students' Union. I wondered how that would help him become a leader in a free Ceylon.

I was not interested in these extras. I decided to concentrate on getting my First, because that would make a difference when I went back to Singapore.