3 - Turning Left

Summary

Raja arrived in London on 29 August 1935, and became homesick immediately. He felt he was in “a strange land with strangers all around you”. His boarding house at Steele's Road was basic and cold. Outside, the trees were almost bare. People hurried along the streets with their heads down and their hands in their pockets. The pensive mood in the city matched his own.

Raja longed for the familiar warmth and flurry of his relatives around him. Cast adrift from all that was dear, he drew solace from the presence of some students from Malaya who shared the same lodgings. “That mitigated the loneliness,” he recalled later. His misery would have deepened had he been surrounded by non-Malayans. The proximity of his cousin, A. P. Rajah, then reading for the Bar in Oxford, also helped. He represented “some kind of link to the homeland”, as Raja put it.

When they met up, the older Rajah proceeded to give the newcomer some advice on how to fit in and reportedly said: “You must wear a pin-striped suit and bowler hat and carry a brolly.” This fashion tip was ostensibly to transform the Malayan country bumpkin into an exquisite city gent, conjuring up an instant image of Englishness. Raja ignored this piece of advice and instead donned apparel that identified him with the intellectual class. In photos of that period, Raja cut an elegant figure in typical Oxford trousers, loose fitting with pleats, a smart coat over a V-necked jersey, and a shirt with a tie.

The two relatives would have many more serious disagreements in their later years. Neither of them could know that, after their return to Singapore, they would join politics and face off against each other on opposite sides of the bench in the Legislative Assembly. Rajah would join the pro-colonial Progressive Party, while the younger Raja would help form the anti-colonial People's Action Party. Certainly, no one could have predicted such a radical role for Raja in 1935 when he turned up in King's College at the Strand looking like a lost waif.

In October that year, Raja registered at the college for his threeyear law course. His apprehension deepened when he found out that his days henceforth would involve flitting from one college to another for lectures and tutorials.