What Mdm Kwa Geok Choo saw in Mr Lee Kuan Yew

They started out as school rivals.

To Mr Lee Kuan Yew's horror, he came in second behind Miss Kwa Geok Choo in English and Economics at Raffles College in 1940. Seven years later, they were married in a secret ceremony in England.

In 2003, Mrs Lee Kuan Yew speaks about her marriage of 56 years in an e-mail interview with ST Senior Correspondent M. NIRMALA.

ST: How did you know, when you first met Mr Lee, that he had the qualities you wanted in a man to spend your life with? What were these qualities? And what are the qualities you admire most in SM?

Mrs Lee:
When I first met Kuan Yew in Raffles Institution in 1939, I did not know that one day I would marry him.

Between then and 1947, I did not spend any time listing the qualities I wanted in a husband, and ticking them off one by one each time I met him to see if he had any, or all of them.

The qualities I admire most in him are his powers of persuasion:

(a) He persuaded me to marry him, but I would have to wait for him for three years while he studied in England to qualify as a lawyer.

(b) He persuaded a British army officer to give him a priority passage on the troopship Britannic to get him to England.

(c) When he got to London, he persuaded Professor Hughes Parry, head of the Law Faculty of London School of Economics, to take him in two weeks after term had started, although he had turned others away.

(d) After a few miserable weeks in London, he persuaded W. S. Thatcher, the Censor of FitzWilliam House, Cambridge, to take him in one term late.

(e) When I was awarded the Queens Scholarship in July 1947, he persuaded W. S. Thatcher to write to the Mistress of Girton College about taking in his girlfriend, me.

(f) He met the Mistress and persuaded her that I was exceptional and worth taking in for that academic year.

(g) The Education Department in Singapore doubted that I had been offered a place in Girton College; they had not been able to get Eddie Barker a place in Cambridge even though he had won the Queens Scholarship the previous year (1946). Eddie did not get in till the following year. Kuan Yew persuaded Girton College to send a telegram to the Singapore authorities to confirm they would take me in 1947, and so they sent me to England in September that year.

So I did not have to wait three years before he married me.