Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography Page 6
What all these adults shared, of which I took full advantage, was the crushing boredom of camp life. The war was far away and the news we received, percolating through delivery drivers and Red Cross visits, was months late. The Lunghua internees were living in an eventless world, with little to distract them other than the sound of a few Japanese planes taking off from the nearby airfield. An hour’s chess with a talkative 12-year-old was an hour less to endure, and even a discussion about the relative merits of the Packard and the Rolls-Royce could help the afternoon along.
The adults in the camp were also coming to terms with the most significant change in their lives, almost on a par with the war itself, and one which histories of internment often overlook – the absence of alcohol. After years and sometimes decades of heavy drinking (the core of social and professional life in the 1930s), Lunghua Camp must have functioned for its first months as a highly efficient health spa. One serious hazard still remained: malaria. The Lunghua area, with its stagnant paddy fields and canals, was notorious for its malaria, though luckily the Ballard family was immune. My mother later claimed that 50 per cent of the internees caught malaria. This sounds high to me, but I have seen official post-war estimates of 30 per cent.
Our food supply was a serious problem from the start. Hungry children will eat anything, but my parents must have shuddered at the thought of another day’s meals. At no time during the years of internment did we see milk, butter, margarine, eggs or sugar. Our meals consisted of rice congee (rice boiled into a liquid pulp), vegetable soup that concealed one or two dice-sized pieces of gristly horse meat, a hard black bread baked from what must have been godown sweepings and filled with bits of rusty wire and stony grit, and grey sweet potatoes, a cattle feed that I adored. Later there was a cereal called cracked wheat, another cattle feed that I took a great liking to. Somehow my parents and the other adults forced this down, but I always had a strong appetite, and to this day I find it difficult to leave food on my plate, even if I dislike its taste.
In the last eighteen months of the war our rations fell steeply. As we sat at the card table in our room one day, pushing what my mother called ‘the weevils’ to the rim of our plates of congee, my father decided that from then on we should eat the weevils – we needed the protein. They were small white slugs, and perhaps were maggots, a word my mother preferred to avoid. It must have irritated my parents when I regularly counted them before tucking in lustily – a hundred or so was my usual score, forming a double perimeter around my plate and visibly reducing my portion of boiled rice.
A close friend of my father was a senior Shell executive called Braidwood, who was chairman of the internees committee that ran the camp administration. In the 1980s his widow sent me the typed minutes of the committee meetings, some of which my father attended. These describe a wide range of daily problems and there are copies of formal letters addressed to the Japanese commandant and the military officers who replaced him. They cover the general health of the internees, abusive behaviour by the guards, the lack of medicines, the scarcity of fuel for the drinking-water boilers, the need for Red Cross supplies of clothing (much of which was pilfered by the guards) and, above all, the inadequate food rations – all problems in which the Japanese military had not the slightest interest. According to Braidwood’s records, the daily calorie count in 1944 was approximately 1500, and fell sharply to 1300 during 1945. I can only guess what fraction of that figure was represented by the weevils.
Chess, Boredom and a Certain Estrangement (1943)
I thrived in Lunghua, and made the most of my years there, in the school report parlance of my childhood. My impression is that, during the first year of internment, life in the camp was tolerable for my parents and most of the other adults. There were very few rows between the internees, despite the cramped space, malaria mosquitoes and meagre rations. Children went regularly to school, and there were packed programmes of sporting and social events, language classes and lectures. All this may have been a necessary illusion, but for a while it worked, and sustained everyone’s morale.
Hopes were still high that the war would soon be over, and by the end of 1943 the eventual defeat of Germany seemed almost certain. The commandant, Hyashi, was a civilised man who did his best to meet the internees’ demands. Almost a caricature short-sighted Japanese with a toothbrush moustache, spectacles and slightly popping eyes, he would cycle around Lunghua on a tandem bicycle with his small son, also in glasses, sitting on the rear saddle. He would smile at the noisy British children, a feral tribe if there was one, and struck up close relationships with members of the camp committee. Among the documents Mrs Braidwood sent me was a letter which Hyashi wrote to her husband some time after he had been dismissed as commandant, in which he describes (in English) his horse rides around Shanghai and sends his warm regards. After the war my father flew down to the war-crimes trials in Hong Kong and testified as a witness for Hyashi, who was later acquitted and released.
I also made friendships of a kind with several of the young Japanese guards. When they were off duty I would visit them in the staff bungalows fifty yards from G Block, and they would allow me to sit in their hot tubs and then wear their kendo armour. After handing me a duelling sword, a fearsome weapon of long wooden segments loosely strung together, they would encourage me to fence with them. Each bout would last twenty seconds and involved me being repeatedly struck about the helmet and face mask, which I could scarcely see through, every dizzying blow being greeted with friendly cheers from the watching Japanese. They too were bored, only a few years older than me, and had little hope of seeing their families again soon, if ever. I knew they could be viciously brutal, especially when acting under the orders of their NCOs, but individually they were easy-going and likeable. Their military formality and never-surrender ethos were of course very impressive to a 13-year-old looking for heroes to worship.
For me, the most important consequence of internment was that for the first time in my life I was extremely close to my parents. I slept, ate, read, dressed and undressed within a few feet of them in the same small room, in many ways like the poorer Chinese families for whom I had felt so sorry in Shanghai. But I revelled in this closeness, which I assume has been a central part of human behaviour throughout most of its evolution. Lying in bed at night I could, if I wanted to, reach out and take my mother’s hand, though I never did. In the early days when there was still electric power my mother would read late into the night, hidden inside her mosquito net only a few feet away, as my father and sister slept in their beds behind us. One night a passing Japanese officer spotted the light through the home-made blackout curtain. He burst into the room, barely a foot from me, drew his sword and slashed away the mosquito net above my mother’s head, then thrashed the light bulb into fragments and vanished without a word. I remember the strange silence of people woken in the nearby rooms, listening to his footsteps as he disappeared into the night.
Somehow my mother survived, but she and my father struck up few close friendships with the other G Block internees. Though all had children, the families kept their distance from each other, presumably to maintain their privacy, a desperately short commodity when an evening curfew was introduced and we were confined to quarters for the hours of darkness.
But I flourished in all this intimacy, and I think the years together in that very small room had a profound effect on me and the way I brought up my own children. Perhaps the reason why I have lived in the same Shepperton house for nearly fifty years, and to the despair of everyone have always preferred make-do-and-mend to buying anew, even when I could easily afford it, is that my small and untidy house reminds me of our family room in Lunghua.
I realise now just how formal English life could be in the 1930s, 40s and 50s for its professional families. The children of doctors, lawyers and company directors rarely saw their fathers. They lived in large houses where no one shared a bedroom, they never saw their parents dressing or undressing, never saw them brush the
ir teeth or even take off a watch. In pre-war Shanghai I would occasionally wander into my parents’ bedroom and see my mother brushing her hair, a strange and almost mysterious event. I rarely saw my father without a jacket and tie well into the 1950s. The vistas of polished furniture turned a family home into a deserted museum, with a few partly colonised rooms where people slept alone, read and bathed alone, and hung their clothes in private wardrobes, along with their emotions, hopes and dreams.
Lunghua Camp may have been a prison of a kind, but it was a prison where I found freedom. My parents were always at hand to answer any query that crossed my mind – a difficulty with my French prep, the existence or otherwise of God, or the meaning of ‘you play on my mistakes’, a phrase uttered sagely by my adult chess opponents when they were on the point of losing. In no sense did I think of myself as a misfit (which was certainly true once I came to England in 1946), and nor did anyone else, as far as I can remember. In many ways I was the opposite of a misfit, and adapted too well to the camp. One of my chess partners, a likeable architect named Cummings with a haemophiliac son who became a huge success in Hong Kong after the war, once remarked: ‘Jamie, you’ll miss Lunghua when you leave…’
Until I arrived in England I had been lucky to have a happy childhood, and any shocks that shaped my character came not from my family but from the outside world – the sudden scene-shifting I witnessed in 1937 and 1941. If anything, the years in Lunghua offered the first stability I had known since I had been a small child, a stability that the adult internees around me had done little or nothing to create. I felt fairly sceptical about the adult world and the notions of good sense and decisive thought promoted by my parents and teachers. War, I knew, was an irrational business, and the sensible predictions of architects, doctors and managing directors had a marked tendency to be wrong.
I have given a general picture of Lunghua Camp in my novel Empire of the Sun, which is partly autobiographical and partly fictional, though many incidents are described as they occurred. At the same time, I accept that the novel is based on the memories of a teenage boy, who responded more warmly to the good cheer of the American sailors than to the rather torpid Brits, many of whom had held modest jobs in Shanghai and probably regretted ever leaving England.
In my novel the most important break with real events is the absence from Lunghua of my parents. I thought hard about this, but I felt that it was closer to the psychological and emotional truth of events to make ‘Jim’ effectively a war orphan. There is no doubt that a gradual estrangement from my parents, which lasted to the end of their lives, began in Lunghua Camp. There was never any friction or antagonism, and they did their best to look after me and my sister. Despite the food shortages in the last year, the bitterly cold winters (we lived in unheated concrete buildlings) and the uncertainties of the future, I was happier in the camp than I was until my marriage and children.
At the same time I felt slightly apart from my parents by the time the war ended. One reason for our estrangement was that their parenting became passive rather than active – they had none of the usual levers to pull, no presents or treats, no say in what we ate, no power over how we lived or ability to shape events. Like all the adults, they were nervous of the highly unpredictable Japanese and Korean guards, they were often unwell, and always short of food and clothing. At one point, when my shoes had fallen to tatters, my father gave me a pair of heavy leather golfing shoes with metal studs, but the sound of me stamping down the stone corridors in G Block brought the internees swiftly to attention outside their doors, assuming that the Japanese had called a sudden inspection. I would find myself desperately trying to get to the Ballard room before anyone noticed who was actually inspecting them. Needless to say, I soon had to return the shoes to my father, and G Block was able to relax.
Thoughts of food filled every hour, as they did for the other teenage boys in Lunghua. I don’t remember my parents ever giving me their own food, and I’m sure that no other parents shared their rations with their children. All mothers, in prison camps or famine regions, know that their own health is vital to the survival of their children. A child who has lost its parent is in desperate danger, and the parents in Lunghua must have realised that they needed all the strength they had for the uncertain years ahead. But I scavenged what I could, stealing tomatoes and cucumbers from any unwatched vegetable plot. The camp was, in effect, a huge slum, and in any slum it is the teenage boys who run wild. I have never looked down on the helpless parents in sink housing estates unable to control their children. I remember my own parents in the camp, unable to warn, chide, praise or promise.
All the same I regret the estrangement, and realise how much I have missed. The experience of seeing adults under stress is an education in itself, but bought, sadly, at too heavy a price. When my mother, sister and I sailed for England at the end of 1945 my father remained in Shanghai, returning for a brief visit to England in 1947, when we toured Europe in his large American car. I was 17, about to go to Cambridge, unsure whether to be a doctor or a writer. My father was a friendly but already distant figure who played no part in my decision. When he returned for good in 1950 he had been away from England for more than twenty years, and the advice he gave me about English life was out of date. I went my own way, ignoring him when he strongly urged me against becoming a writer. I had spent five years learning to decode the strange, introverted world of English life, while he was happiest dealing with his professional colleagues in Switzerland and America. He telephoned to congratulate me on my first novel, The Drowned World, pointing out one or two minor errors that I was careful not to correct. My mother never showed the slightest interest in my career until Empire of the Sun, which she thought was about her.
As an itinerant chess player and magazine hunter, I got to know a huge number of Lunghua internees, but few reappeared in my later life. One was the headmaster of the camp school, a Methodist missionary called George Osborne. Knowing of my father’s strongly agnostic and proscientific beliefs, he generously urged him to send me to his old school, The Leys in Cambridge, founded by well-to-do Methodists from the north of England and very much science-oriented. Osborne was an unworldly figure, blinking through his glasses and tireless in his efforts to keep the camp together, and the best kind of practising Christian. His wife and three children were in England, but once the war ended his first thoughts were for his Chinese flock at their upcountry mission station, to which he returned rather than sail home. After a year there he paid a brief visit to England, taking me out to lunch whenever he was in Cambridge. By chance, in the 1960s, I became close friends with a north London doctor, Martin Bax, who edited a poetry magazine with his wife Judy. A decade later I learned that Judy Bax was the Reverend Osborne’s daughter. As she admitted, I knew her father far more closely than she did.
Another Lunghua acquaintance was Cyril Goldbert, the future Peter Wyngarde. Separated from his parents, he lived with another family in G Block, and amused everyone with his fey and extravagant manner. Theatre was his entire world, and he played adult roles in the camp Shakespeare productions, completely dominating the bank managers and company directors who struggled to keep up with him. He was four years older than me, and very witty company, with a sophisticated patter I had rarely come across. He had never been to England, but seemed to be on first-name terms with half of Shaftesbury Avenue, and was a mine of insider gossip about the London theatre.
Cyril was very popular with the ladies, distributing the most gallant flattery, and my mother always remembered him with affection. ‘Oh, Cyril…’ she would chortle when she saw him on television in the 1960s. Throughout her life my mother had an active dislike of homosexuals, understandable perhaps at a time when a conviction for homosexual acts brought not just the prison cell but social disgrace. Every married woman’s deep fear must have been that husband, breadwinner and father of her children might have a secret self in a carefully locked closet. When I was in my late teens she saw me reading a collection of
Oscar Wilde’s plays, and literally prised the volume from my hands, although I was already showing a keen interest in girls of my age.
I once strolled with Cyril through some ruined buildings on the outskirts of the camp, listening to him set out his plans for his conquest of the West End. He tore a piece of charcoal from a burnt roof beam, and with a flourish drew on the wall what he said would be his stage name once he returned to England: Laurence Templeton. A name wonderfully of its time, and far grander than Peter Wyngarde. I met him in the early fifties in the Mitre pub in Holland Park Avenue in London, and he was in a poor way, with bad teeth and tired eyes. But ten years later he achieved huge success, not on stage but on television, as Jason King. I saw him in St James’s Park, camel-hair coat stylishly slung over an elegant suit, a tilted homburg and dazzling teeth. I started to speak to him but he cut me dead.
American Air Raids (1944)
My parents’ memories of Lunghua were always much harsher than my own. I was often hungry, but I revelled in camp life, roaming everywhere, at the centre of a pack of boys my own age, playing chess with bored internees in the men’s huts and quizzing them between moves about the world. At the same time I knew nothing about the progress of the war, and our likely fate at the hands of the Japanese.
Occasional Red Cross supplies kept us going, but the adults must have been weak and demoralised, with no end in sight to the war. Many years later, my mother told me that in 1944 there were strong rumours relayed from the Swiss neutrals in Shanghai that the Japanese high command planned to close the camp and march us all up-country, where they would dispose of us. The Japanese armies in China, millions strong, were falling back to the coast, and intended to make their last stand near the mouth of the Yangtze against the expected American landings. This must have deeply alarmed my parents and other adults in the know, however uncertain the rumours.