Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography Read online

  When I was 6, before the Japanese invasion in 1937, an old beggar sat down with his back to the wall at the foot of our drive, at the point where our car paused before turning into Amherst Avenue. I looked at him from the rear seat of our Buick, a thin, ancient man dressed in rags, undernourished all his life and now taking his last breaths. He rattled a Craven A tin at passers-by, but no one gave him anything. After a few days he was visibly weaker, and I asked my mother if No. 2 Coolie would take the old man a little food. Tired of my pestering, she eventually gave in, and said that Coolie would take the old man a bowl of soup. The next day it snowed, and the old man was covered with a white quilt. I remember telling myself that he would feel warmer under this soft eiderdown. He stayed there, under his quilt, for several days, and then he was gone.

  Forty years later I asked my mother why we had not fed this old man at the bottom of our drive, and she replied: ‘If we had fed him, within two hours there would have been fifty beggars there.’ In her way, she was right. Enterprising Europeans had brought immense prosperity to Shanghai, but even Shanghai’s wealth could never feed the millions of destitute Chinese driven towards the city by war and famine. I still think of that old man, of a human being reduced to such a desperate end a few yards from where I slept in a warm bedroom surrounded by my expensive German toys. But as a boy I was easily satisfied by a small act of kindness, a notional bowl of soup that I probably knew at the time was no more than a phrase on my mother’s lips. By the time I was 14 I had become as fatalistic about death, poverty and hunger as the Chinese. I knew that kindness alone would feed few mouths and save no lives.

  Myself aged 5 at my riding school in Shanghai.

  I remember very little before the age of 5 or 6, when I joined the junior form of the Cathedral School for boys. The school was run on English lines with a syllabus aimed at the School Certificate examinations or their pre-war equivalent, heavily dominated by Latin and scripture classes. The masters were English, and we were made to work surprisingly hard, given the nightclub and dinner-party ethos that ruled the parents’ lives. There were two hours of Latin every other day and a great deal of homework. The headmaster was a Church of England clergyman called the Reverend Matthews, a sadist who was free not only with his cane but with his fists, brutally slapping quite small boys. I’m certain that today he would be prosecuted for child abuse and assault. Miraculously I escaped his wrath, though I soon guessed why. My father was the chairman of a prominent English company, and later vice-chairman of the British Residents Association. I noticed that the Reverend Matthews only caned and slapped the boys from more modest backgrounds. One or two were beaten and humiliated almost daily, and I’m still surprised that the parents never complained. Bizarrely, this was all part of the British stiff-upper-lip tradition, no match as it would turn out for another violent tradition, bushido, and the ferocious violence meted out by Japanese NCOs to the soldiers under their command.

  When the Reverend Matthews was interned he underwent a remarkable sea change: he abandoned his clerical collar and spent hours sunbathing in a deckchair, and even became something of a ladies’ man, as if at last able to throw off the disguise imposed on him by a certain kind of English self-delusion.

  Outside school I remember a great many children’s parties, every child escorted by its refugee nanny, a chance for White Russian and German Jewish girls to exchange gossip. During school holidays we would drive every morning to the Country Club, where I spent hours in the swimming pool with my friends. I was a strong swimmer, and won a small silver spoon for coming first in a diving competition, though I wonder if the prize was awarded to me or to my parents.

  At home I spent a great deal of time on my own. Social life in pre-war Shanghai was a career occupation for my mother, playing tennis at the Country Club, bridge with her friends, shopping and lunching in the downtown hotels. In the evenings there were dinner parties and nightclub visits. Often my mother would help me with my Latin homework, but much of the day I was alone in a large house where the Chinese servants never looked at me and never spoke to me, while the nanny read my mother’s novels and played dance music on the radiogram. I would sometimes listen to one of the dozens of English-language radio stations (I liked to phone in record requests under the alias ‘Ace’) or play chess with the nanny; my father taught me to win, and I taught the nannies to lose. The succession of White Russian girls must have been bored to death by me, and one of them told me that the sound of thunder that startled me was ‘the voice of God – he’s angry with you, James.’ I remember being unsettled by this for years. For some reason I almost believed her.

  Now and then I would go with my mother or the nanny to the cinema, one of the vast art deco theatres that loomed over Shanghai. The first film I saw was Snow White, which frightened the wits out of me. The wicked queen, the purest essence of evil radiating across the auditorium, reminded me too much of my friends’ mothers when they tired of me rearranging their furniture.

  Most of the children’s books I read, such as the Arabian Nights, the Grimms’ fairy tales and The Water-Babies, were deeply disturbing, with illustrations inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and Beardsley, full of airless gothic interiors and lantern-lit forests. They probably prepared me for the surrealists. I read children’s versions of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe, which I loved, especially Crusoe, and I can still hear the sound of waves on his beach. I devoured American comics, which were on sale everywhere in Shanghai and read by all the English boys – Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and, later, Superman. Terry and the Pirates was my favourite, about an American mercenary pilot in the Far East, part of it set in the Shanghai where I lived. Later I read American bestsellers, such as All This and Heaven Too, Babbitt, Anthony Adverse and Gone With the Wind. My parents subscribed to a number of magazines – Life, Time, the New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post and so on, and I spent hours turning their pages and revelling in their American optimism.

  Then there were the Chums and Boy’s Own Paper annuals, aggressive compendiums of patriotic derring-do. A.A. Milne and the Just William series together portrayed a mythical middle-class England, a Home Counties, Peter Pan world far more remote from reality than Life and Time were from the realities of American life. However, it seemed to be confirmed by the British doctors, architects, managers and clergymen I met in Shanghai. They might have driven American cars and had American refrigerators, but in speech and manner they weren’t too far from the doctors and schoolmasters I came across in my reading.

  All this gave the British adults in Shanghai a certain authority, which they lost completely a few years later after the sinking of the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales and the surrender of Singapore. The British lost a respect which they never recovered, as I discovered when Chinese shopkeepers, French dentists and Sikh school-bus drivers made disparaging remarks about British power. The dream of empire died when Singapore surrendered without a fight and our aircraft proved no match for the highly trained Zero pilots. Even at the age of 11 or 12 I knew that no amount of patriotic newsreels would put the Union Jack jigsaw together again. From then on I was slightly suspicious of all British adults.

  My closest friends were an English family called the Kendall-Wards, who lived at the far end of Amherst Avenue, and were a happy exception to every rule of expatriate English life. During the holidays I would cycle over and spend most of the day with them. There were three brothers, whom I remember well, but it was the parents who made a powerful and lasting impact on me. Mr Kendall-Ward was a senior executive with the Shanghai Power Company, but he and his wife were free spirits who rarely mixed on a social level with other British residents. The father was a model railway enthusiast, and the enclosed veranda on the first floor, a room some thirty feet long, was filled with a vast landscape of tunnels, hills, villages, lakes and railway lines, laid out on a waist-high platform fitted with trapdoors through which he would emerge without warning to make some track adjustment. Once he had filled this huge space he began
to colonise the nearby rooms off the veranda, building narrow ledges around the walls which carried the miniature railway lines ever deeper into the house.

  Mrs Kendall-Ward presided over this friendly chaos, welcoming and cheerful, surrounded by four Airedale dogs, nursing a new baby and asking me about the latest news from downtown Shanghai. She listened with apparent interest as I told her in detail about a new French or Italian warship moored off the Bund. She spoke fluent Chinese to the amahs, an unheard-of skill that amazed me, and addressed them by their names. Uniquely among Shanghai residents, she employed only women servants, some six or seven amahs. According to my mother, this was an act of charity on the Kendall-Wards’ part – these middle-aged spinsters would otherwise have found it difficult to survive.

  The Kendall-Ward home was the complete opposite of 31 Amherst Avenue, and an influence that has lasted all my life. My mother was amiable but distant with any friends I brought home. Relations between parents and children were far more formal in the 1930s and 1940s, and our house reflected this, an almost cathedral-like space of polished parquet floors and blackwood furniture. By contrast the Kendall-Ward home was an untidy nest, full of barking dogs, arguing amahs and the sound of Mr Kendall-Ward’s power saws slicing though plywood, the three brothers and myself roller-skating through the rooms and generally running wild. I knew that this was the right way to bring up children. Appearances counted for nothing, and everyone was encouraged to follow their own notions, however hare-brained. Mrs Kendall-Ward openly breastfed her baby, something only Chinese women did. If she was driving us around Shanghai in the family Packard, and stopped to buy American comics for her sons, she always included a comic for me, something I noticed that neither my own mother nor any of the other English mothers ever did. Her kindness and good nature I remember vividly seventy years later. I was rarely unhappy at home, but I was always happy at the Kendall-Wards, and I think that I was aware of the difference at the time.

  Japanese Invasion (1937)

  In 1937 the street spectacle that so enthralled a small English boy was bathed in a far more chilling light. Led by its military chiefs, and with the silent blessing of the Emperor, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. Its armies seized all the coastal cities, including Shanghai, though they did not enter the International Settlement. For several months there was bitter fighting in the outlying areas of the city, especially the Chapei and Nantao suburbs. Relentless Japanese bombing and naval bombardment from their warships in the Whangpoo river levelled large areas of Shanghai. For the first time in the history of warfare a coordinated air, sea and land assault was launched against Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese armies, who greatly outnumbered the Japanese, but were poorly led by corrupt cronies of Chiang and his wife.

  One bomb, dropped by accident from a Chinese aircraft, struck the Great World Amusement Park near the racecourse in the heart of the International Settlement, which was filled with refugees from the outlying districts. The bomb killed a thousand people, at the time the largest number of casualties ever caused by a single bomb. The Chinese pushed the Japanese back towards the river, until they were fighting from trenches that filled with water at high tide. But the Japanese prevailed, and Chiang’s armies withdrew into the vast interior of China. The new national capital became Chungking, 900 miles to the west.

  There was desperate fighting in the open countryside only a mile from our home. At one point artillery shells from the rival Chinese and Japanese batteries were passing over our roof, and my parents closed the house and moved with the servants to the comparative safety of a rented house in the French Concession.

  Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor. I could hear the bombing and gunfire all around Shanghai, and see the vast pall of smoke that lay over the city, but the drained pool remained apart. In the coming years I would see a great many drained and half-drained pools, as British residents left Shanghai for Australia and Canada, or the assumed ‘safety’ of Hong Kong and Singapore, and they all seemed as mysterious as that first pool in the French Concession. I was unaware of the obvious symbolism that British power was ebbing away, because no one thought so at the time, and faith in the British Empire was at its jingoistic height. Right up to, and beyond, Pearl Harbor it was taken for granted that the dispatch of a few Royal Navy warships would send the Japanese scuttling back to Tokyo Bay. I think now that the drained pool represented the unknown, a concept that had played no part in my life. Shanghai in the 1930s was full of extravagant fantasies, but these spectacles were designed to promote a new hotel or airport, a new department store, nightclub or dog-racing track. Nothing was unknown.

  Once the Chinese armies had withdrawn, life in Shanghai resumed as if little had changed. The Japanese surrounded the city, but made no attempt to confront the contingents of British, French and American soldiers, or to interfere with their warships in the river facing the Bund. The Japanese cruiser Idzumo, a veteran of the Great War, sat in midstream, but Shanghai’s hotels, bars and nightclubs were as busy as ever.

  With their villages and rice fields destroyed, thousands of destitute peasants from the Yangtze basin flocked to Shanghai and fought to enter the International Settlement. They were viciously repelled by the Japanese soldiers and by the British-run police force. I saw many Chinese who had been bayoneted and lay on the ground among their bloodstained rice sacks. Violence was so pervasive that my parents and the various nannies never tried to shield me from all the brutality going on. I knew that the Japanese were capable of losing their tempers and lunging with their fixed bayonets into the crowds pressing around them. Later, when I was eight or nine and began my long cycle rides around Shanghai, I was careful to avoid provoking the Japanese soldiers. They always waved me through the checkpoints, as they did the Europeans and Americans. Sometimes they would check our family Buick, but only when the chauffeur was driving.

  I assume that the Japanese leadership had decided that Shanghai was of more value to them as a thriving commercial and industrial centre, and were not yet prepared to risk a confrontation with the Western powers. Most of my earliest memories date from this period, and life in Shanghai seemed to be an endless round of parties, lavish weddings, swimming club galas, film shows laid on by the British Embassy, military tattoos staged on the racecourse, glossy film premieres, all under the bayonets of the Japanese soldiers who guarded the perimeter checkpoints around the Settlement.

  As soon as the fighting ended, the Cathedral Boys’ School moved from the cloisters of Shanghai Cathedral, not far from the Great World Amusement Park, and took over part of the Cathedral Girls’ School on the western edge of the International Settlement. I could now cycle to school, and no longer needed to be chauffeured in the family car, with the nanny keeping an interfering watch over me. I began to take longer and longer rides around the city, using the excuse that I was visiting the Kendall-Wards or other friends. I liked to cycle down the Nanking Road, lined with Shanghai’s biggest department stores, Sincere’s and the vast Sun and Sun Sun emporiums, dodging in and out of the huge trams with their clanging bells that forced their way through the rickshaws and pedestrians.

  Everywhere I turned, a cruel and lurid world surged around me. Shanghai lived above all on the street, the beggars showing their wounds, the gangsters and pickpockets, the dying rattling their Craven A tins, the Chinese dragon ladies in ankle-length mink coats who terrified me with their stares, the hawkers wok-frying delicious treats which I could never buy because I never carried any money, starving peasant families and thousands of con men and crooks. Weird quarter-tone music wailed from Chinese theatres and bars, fireworks crackled around a wedding party, a radio blared out the speeches of Generalissimo Chiang, interrupt
ed by commercials for a Japanese beer. I took all this in at a glance, the polluted and exciting air I breathed. If they were in the mood, the British soldiers in their sandbag emplacements would invite me into their dark interior world, where they lounged about cleaning their equipment. I liked these Tommies with their strange accents I had never heard before, and they let me clean their rifles and use the pull-throughs to ream the rust from their barrels, then gave me a bronze cap badge as a present. They told wonderfully broad stories of their service in India and Africa, and Shanghai to them was just another name on the map. I explored almost every corner of the International Settlement, and schoolfriends and I would play games of hide-and-seek that covered the whole city and could last for months. It amazes me now that none of us ever came to any harm, and I assume that the thousands of plain-clothes Chinese police agents in effect kept watch over us, warning away any petty crook tempted to steal our cycles or pull the shoes from our feet.

  In fact, the greatest danger we faced probably came from the Sunday afternoon trips we took with our parents and their friends to the recent battlegrounds to the south and west of Shanghai. Convoys of chauffeur-driven Buicks and Chryslers would move through the stricken land, wives in their silky best. The battlefields must have reminded some of the older British of the Somme, with their endless networks of eroded trenches, crumbling earth blockhouses and abandoned villages. Around our feet when we stepped from the cars was the bright gold of spent cartridges, lengths of machine-gun ammunition, webbing and backpacks. Dead horses lay by the roadside, enormous ribcages open to the sky, and in the canals were dead Chinese soldiers, legs stirring as the current flowed through the reeds. There was a feast of military souvenirs, but I was never allowed to keep even a bayonet – many European sightseers had been killed, and a boy at school lost a hand when a grenade exploded. Then the convoy would roll on, carrying everyone back to the safety of the International Settlement and large gins at the Country Club.