Hyashi, who had spent time at the London embassy and spoke fluent English, one of these buildings became the camp school. Each day the gates were opened to allow the children to and fro, and we entered the rather eerie world beyond the camp.
There were many open spaces in Lunghua, uncultivated ground littered with stones and war rubble from the fierce fighting that had taken place in and around the buildings of the training college. Over the next year, as our rations fell, groups of internees began to clear the ground and cultivate modest vegetable plots. I helped my father to hoist buckets of sewage from the G Block septic tank, which we used to fertilise our tomatoes, melons and runner beans, though the results of all this labour seemed strangely puny and stunted.
For all the open spaces that surrounded the buildings in the camp, including the assembly ground where football matches were played, inside the crowded dormitories there was a desperate competition for space. In E and F Blocks, the former classrooms that housed married couples were divided into a maze of cubicles by sheets hung from lines of string and rope. Pieces of cardboard, sections of wooden packing cases and anything else to hand helped to provide a minimum of privacy. Within the small family rooms of D and G Blocks the parents had no defence against the children who shared their tiny spaces, and no doubt this explains why my mother and father were happy to let me roam around the camp for as long as I wanted. In many ways the camp became my new Shanghai, with a thousand sights to be investigated and savoured, a hundred errands to be run in return for an old copy of
All men in the camp were assigned jobs – running the kitchens, unloading the supplies of food and coal trucked into Lunghua from Shanghai, boiling our drinking water, maintaining the electricity supply, teaching the children and conducting religious services. Single women helped wherever they could, nursing and caring for malaria victims. Married women with small children were excused duties of any kind, and my mother rarely left G Block and the tiny room that became our home. During the day my father raised his mattress against the wall, and in the small space we set up a card table at which we ate our meals. Much of the time my mother remained in our room, reading by the window as she kept an eye on my sister playing in the yard outside with the other toddlers.
Families with only a single child were obliged to take in one of the children separated from their parents and interned alone. In G Block a boy named Bobby Henderson was so resented by the couple on whom he was billeted that he constructed a cubicle like a beggar’s hovel around his narrow bed. This was his private world that he defended fiercely. He was dressed in cast-offs, and saved his shoes for the winter months. In the summers he wore a pair of wooden clogs with the heels completely worn away, leaving two slivers of wood that ended in his insteps.
Bobby was a close friend, though I never really liked him, and found something threatening about his tough and self-reliant mind. I sensed that circumstances had forced him to fight too hard to survive, and that this had made him ruthless not only with others, but with himself. He allowed me to tag along with him, but regarded my endless curiosity and roaming around the camp as a waste of time and energy, and my interest in chess, bridge and kite building, and in the complex skipping games that some of the girls brought into camp with them, as frivolous and distracting. His parents were interned in Peking, but he never spoke about them, which baffled me at the time, and I suspect that he had forgotten what they were like. Thinking of him now, I realise that part of him had died, and I hope that he never went on to have children of his own.
On the whole, however, Lunghua seemed full of easygoing and agreeable characters. What I liked most was that everyone, of almost any age, could talk to anyone else. Striding around E Block or the assembly hall with my chessboard, I would be affably hailed as ‘Shanghai Jim’ (for constantly telling anyone who would listen about some strange Hardoon temple I had found on my cycle rides). I would then settle down to a game of chess with a man of my father’s age who might be an architect or cinema manager, Cathay Hotel bartender or a former jockey. At the end of the game, which generally involved the transfer from my opponent of a goodly amount of internment camp wisdom, I might be lent an old copy of the
During the first year a host of camp activities took place – amateur dramatics, with full-scale performances in the dining hall of Noel Coward and Shakespeare plays, lighthearted revues (‘We’re the Lunghua sophomores, we’re the girls every boy adores, CAC don’t mean a thing to me, for every Tuesday evening we go on a spree…’). I forget what happened on Tuesday evenings, and there may have been dances from which all children were excluded. CAC stood for ‘Civilian Assembly Centre’, an exalted term for our collection of run-down and half-ruined buildings.
Generally I would be somewhere in the audience, fascinated by a lecture on Roman roads or airship design. My father once delivered a lecture on ‘Science and the Idea of God’, a tactful dismissal of the Almighty from human affairs, which drew many of the English missionaries in the camp. Until the day we left Lunghua I was frequently stopped by one or other of the up-country parsons and told what an excellent lecture it was, so
Since there were so many professionally trained men in the camp – engineers, architects, bankers, industrial chemists, dentists and doctors – there was no shortage of lecturers. And, alas, no shortage of teachers for the camp school that soon opened. A full-scale syllabus was set out, which met the requirements of the then School Certificate, and we were taught maths, French, English and Latin, history and general science. Since there were few books our tuition was largely blackboard-driven, but I don’t think that any of us fell behind our counterparts at school in wartime England, and in some cases we were well ahead. I find it difficult to explain this, but my guess is that there were far fewer distractions in Lunghua than I imagined at the time, for either teachers or pupils, and that we progressed rapidly in the way that long-term convicted prisoners pass one university degree after another.
Lunghua Camp held some 2000 internees, of whom 300 were children. Most of them were British, Dutch and Belgian, but there was a group of thirty American merchant seamen, captured on board an American freighter. As civilians, they were not sent to a POW camp, and must have realised their good luck. They passed their time loafing on their beds in E Block, though now and then they would rouse themselves and amble out to the assembly ground for a game of softball. I liked them immensely, for their good humour, verbal inventiveness and enormously laid- back style. Life in their company was always interesting, and they remained cheerful to the end, unlike many of the British internees. They always seemed glad to see me, throwing back the curtains of their miniature cubicles, and would go to elaborate lengths to make me the butt of friendly practical jokes, which I took in good part. Among their other virtues, the Americans had a substantial stock of magazines –
What was happening, without my realising it at the time, was that I was meeting a range of adults from whom my life in Shanghai had screened me. This was nothing to do with class in the English sense, but with the fact that pre-war Shanghai attracted to its bars and hotel lobbies a number of devious and unscrupulous characters who were very good company, and often far more generous with a sweet potato than the tight-fisted Church of England missionaries. Many of these ‘rogues’, as my mother termed them, had well-stocked minds (perhaps based on their extensive prison-cell reading in England) and could come up with arresting ideas about everything under the sun. Years of property and financial scams, of rigged bets at jai alai games and the Shanghai racecourse, had added salt to their easy wit. I hung on every word, and even tried to model myself on them, without success. When I first tried ‘the university of life’ on my mother she stared at me without speaking for a full minute.
But I loved hearing adults talk together. I would sidle up unnoticed to a group of G Block adults discussing the servant problem in Shanghai, their last leaves in Hong Kong or Singapore, the refusal by some fellow internee to do his share of the lavatory-cleaning fatigue, pre-war gossip about Mrs So-and-so, until they noticed my keen ears and gleaming eyes and ordered me to hop it.
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
