THE Lims needed to be persuaded to talk about the hero in their family. Eldest son Leong Geok, now 59 and Executive Director of the MRT Corporation, had allowed his father's wartime diary to go on display at the National Museum. But, apart from a few brief comments, he declined to be interviewed when approached by The Sunday Times.
Try my eldest sister, he said through his secretary.
Mrs Leow Woon Geok, 61, said no at first. When she eventually relented, she confessed that for years after the war, she had felt embarrassed to be identified as "hero Lim Bo Seng's daughter".
Her father was a hero, but in the family, he was Papa - a man who was stern, but kind and loving too.
"Papa loved us very much but he was also very strict," she says.
"He would get angry when he found us girls playing near the gate of our house. 'Girls should never be exposed like this,' he would reprimand the maid who had taken us there for our recreation."
He loved children
He was stricter with the boys and sometimes the second eldest son, Whye Geok, having pulled some gadget apart without being able to put it together again, would scamper to the safety of a dark corner when he heard his father's car approaching.
But Lim Bo Seng also enjoyed his children immensely. He loved small children and always wanted to have a baby in the house. As testimony to that, five of the seven children were born a year apart of each other.
He was crushed when a favourite daughter died after a fall at the age of two, and would talk about it many years later to his wife.
Mrs Leow remembers the 1930s as the happiest of times for the older children and their father, especially on Saturdays.
"Papa would take us children for a treat to the Polar Cafe in High Street every Saturday," she says.
"And after that we would head for the Ensign Bookshop - one of his favourite haunts. There he would be engrossed in books on history and literature while we browsed through story and picture books.
"After that, we would go downstairs to the TMA Music Store. He liked Western semi-classical music, made sure the kids learnt music and he would watch us practise."
When the older children were young, they lived in the old family home in Upper Serangoon Road. It was a big house with its own tennis court.
The Lims had a prospering biscuit and brick manufacturing business, Hock Ann & Co, a 58-ha rubber estate, and were part owners of a saw mill and granite quarry.
Lim Bo Seng ran the family business, though he never relished it, regarding it as work he had to do for the family's sake.
For a while the family rented a house near the sea at Katong, after doctors found a patch on one of his lungs and recommended rest and fresh air.
Mrs Leow remembers those as halcyon days of beach picnics and fun with Papa. When his health improved, they moved into their own home at Palm Grove Avenue.
He was never a very robust man, and for much of his adult life he was plagued by acute piles.
A love marriage
Mrs Leow says that even as a child, she could see the deep bond which existed between her parents.
Theirs had been a love marriage, unusual in those days when matchmaking was common. Gan Choo Neo was a year older than Lim Bo Seng and used to come to his house to tutor his sisters.
She was a Straits-born Christian nonya who spoke English and Malay, and he was a China-born Taoist Hokkien who spoke English and Chinese. They fell in love and were married.
Mrs Leow recalls how her father once took his wife away for a second honeymoon to Cameron Highlands in Malaya.
"Papa used to keep insisting on a holiday and Mama would always refuse because of us, so one day he whisked her away alone for a week," she says.
"He was a keen amateur photographer and there's this picture that he took of Mama there, with a bunch of roses in her arms. He even developed and coloured it himself."
Toward the late 1930s, family life changed as Lim Bo Seng became increasingly involved in resistance activities. The children saw less of him, and their Saturday outings to High Street stopped.
"We knew he was doing some dangerous work without knowing the details, but we were too young to worry.
"There were times when we hardly saw him at all. He used to come back late at night after we'd all gone to bed," says Mrs Leow.
First published in The Straits TImes, Feb 16, 1992
Next: "Mama was our heroine"
Copyright © 1998 Singapore Press Holdings. All Rights Reserved.
