They had lost control of the oceans and their ships were being sunk by Allied submarines.

Even Thailand, a traditional rice exporter, could not get its rice to Singapore, either because the Japanese did not want to pay the Thais for it or because they could not transport it to the island.

Reduced to eating old, mouldy, worm-eaten stocks mixed with Malayan-grown rice, we had to find substitutes.

My mother, like many others, stretched what little we could get with maize and millet and strange vegetables we would not normally have touched, like young shoots of sweet potato and tapioca plants cooked in coconut milk. They could be quite palatable, but they had bulk without much nutrition.

It was amazing how hungry my brothers and I became one hour after each meal. Meat was a luxury.

There was little beef or mutton. Pork was easier to buy and we could raise chickens ourselves, but there were no leftovers to feed them.

My mother's resourcefulness was sorely tested during the occupation. When the combined salaries of my father, my brother Dennis and myself became negligible because of inflation, she started all manner of businesses.

As a daughter in a Straits Chinese family, she had learnt how to cook and bake. Now she made cakes for sale. Wheat flour and butter were soon unobtainable, so she used tapioca flour, rice flour, sago flour, coconut milk and palm sugar.

She also made sweetened condensed milk from fresh milk. She was a good cook.

Later, when I was prime minister, she filled in her time teaching Straits Chinese cooking to expatriate wives, including wives of the diplomatic corps. She wrote Mrs Lee's Cookbook, which sold well even after she died.

Everything was in short supply. Motorcars had disappeared, except for those used by the military and important Japanese civilians.

The few local people who had their own cars could not get petrol for them.

Taxis were converted to run on charcoal and firewood. Stocks of bicycle tyres and tubes soon ran out. Local manufacturers could only produce solid bicycle tyres, which made for bumpy going, but that was better than riding on steel rims.

Textiles were scarce, so we converted curtain fabrics and tablecloth into trousers and shirts. All imported goods had become precious.

Liquor kept well and was much sought after by wealthy black marketeers and Japanese officers.

The key to survival was improvisation. One business I started changed the course of my life.

While brokering on the black market, I met Yong Nyuk Lin, a Raffles College science graduate who was working in the Overseas Assurance Corporation in China Building, in Chulia Street.

Nyuk Lin and I both frequented a goldsmith's shop in High Street run by two Hakkas, another Raffles College graduate and his elder brother. The shop was a meeting place for brokers like myself who traded in little bits of jewellery.

I had been asked by Basrai Brothers, Indian stationers in Chulia Street, if I could get them stationery gum, which was in short supply -- there was little left from pre-war stock.

Could I perhaps make some myself? I asked Nyuk Lin whether he could make gum. He said he could, using tapioca flour and carbolic acid. So I financed his experiments.

Nyuk Lin's method was to take a big cylindrical pot, fill it with tapioca flour, and place the pot in a big wok of boiling oil. He used palm oil, which was freely available and cheap.

He kept the oil at a constant high temperature to heat the tapioca flour, which needed to be stirred all the while until it became a deep golden brown dextrine.

It looked and smelt like beautiful caramel. He added water to the "caramel", which dissolved it into mucilage or gum, and finally carbolic acid as a preservative to prevent mould from setting in.

The gum was poured into empty Scotts Emulsion bottles, which I discovered were plentiful and cheap.

I marketed the gum under the name "Stikfas", and had an attractive label designed by an artistic friend with the word in light brown brushwork against a white background.

The gum turned a decent profit, and we made it in two centres. One was my home, with my mother and sister helping; the other was Nyuk Lin's home, where he was helped by his wife and her younger sister, Kwa Geok Choo, the girl who had done better than me at Raffles College.

I had seen her again when I first looked for Nyuk Lin in his flat in Tiong Bahru, riding my bicycle with its solid tyres.

She was sitting on a veranda when I arrived, and when I asked where I could find him, she smiled and pointed out a staircase around the corner.

Now we were meeting under different circumstances. She was at home, at a loose end, doing domestic chores as there were no maids. Making gum was one chore that gave her pin money, and my visits to check on production led to a friendship that developed over the months.

By September 1944, we knew each other well enough for me to invite Nyuk Lin, his wife and Geok Choo (now simply Choo) to my 21st birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant at the Great World, an amusement park.

It was the first time I had asked her out. True, she was escorted by her brother-in-law, but in the Singapore of that era, if a girl accepted an invitation to a young man's 21st birthday dinner, it was an event not without significance.

The gum-making lasted for some six to seven months until late 1944. By then, the war was going badly for the Japanese. Few merchant ships came through and trade was at a standstill; business dwindled and offices did not need gum.

I discontinued gum-making, but continued to visit Choo at her Tiong Bahru home to chat and keep up the friendship.