England and see the world. My impression is that family life was prosperous and happy, but he told me once that he had fierce arguments with his father when he left Blackburn Grammar School and
decided to work for a science degree rather than enter the family drapery business. He believed in the power of science to create a better world, and was proud of his first-class honours degree from London University. He was always optimistic and confident, was a great ballroom dancer and even won a prize in a competition held in the Blackpool Tower ballroom.
Most of his memories of Lancashire before and after the First World War seemed fairly bleak, and he would shake his head as he described the dreadful poverty. Eating an apple as he left school, he was often followed by working-class boys badgering him for the core. He was a strong billiards and bridge player, and was interested in wines and European food. In Shanghai he was almost the only person I knew who was interested in Chinese history and customs. He told me that he once sang solo treble in Manchester cathedral. My impression is that he was a popular and outgoing figure in Blackburn, and later in Shanghai, something that, as an introvert, he achieved by an effort of will.
My father joined the Calico Printers Association, the textile combine that was then the ICI of the cotton world, in the mid 1920s. He had taken his degree in chemistry, the science that had transformed the printing and finishing of textiles, and he often enthused to me about the brilliant work of the great German chemists in the dyestuffs industry. By the 1920s the CPA found that Lancashire cotton could no longer compete in the world’s markets with locally produced cotton goods, in particular with the output of the Japanese mills in Shanghai, which dominated the huge China market. The CPA set up an overseas subsidiary in the city, and my father was sent out in 1929 to run its operation there, the China Printing and Finishing Company.
After the war he stayed on in Shanghai, and was present when the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse- tung seized the city in 1949. Under Chinese supervision he continued to run China Printing, but when the CPA head office in Manchester refused to remit any further funds, my father was put on trial. He told me that he was able to quote numerous passages from Marx and Engels in his defence, and so impressed the Communist peasant judges that they dismissed the charges against him. In 1950, after a long journey across China, he reached Canton, and crossed to Hong Kong.
On returning to England he left the CPA and became a consultant specialising in pharmaceutical textiles. He retired with my mother to the New Forest, and died of cancer in 1967.
Edna Ballard, b. 1905, d. 1999
My mother was born in West Bromwich, near Birmingham, in 1905, and died aged 93 in Claygate, Surrey, in 1999. Her parents, Archibald and Sarah Johnstone, were lifelong teachers of music. During the year that I lived with them, after my mother and sister returned to Shanghai in 1947, two practice pianos were going all day as a series of pupils came and went. When I first met them, in early 1946, after landing in Southampton, they were both in their late sixties, and seemed to be living relics of the Victorian world. With their rigid, intolerant minds, they never relaxed, hating the post-war Labour government, uninterested in my sister or myself, and barely interested in my mother and her wartime
experiences in a Japanese camp. Life was intensely narrow for them, living in a large, three-storey house where the rooms were always dark, filled with heavy, uncomfortable furniture and interior doors with stained-glass panels. Food rationing was in force, but everything seemed to be rationed, the air we breathed, hope of a better world, and the brief glimpses of the sun. Even as a boy I wondered how my mother and her sister, both lively and strong-willed women, had ever managed to bloom as teenage girls.
Yet in later years my mother told me that her father had been something of a rebel in his younger days, and before his marriage had scandalised his family by giving up his musical training and forming a band, which played at dances and weddings. I met him at the worst time, when England was exhausted by the war. There had been heavy bombing in the Birmingham area, and I suspect that they felt my mother’s years in Lunghua were a holiday by comparison. The war had made them mean, as it made a lot of the English mean. I think they distrusted me on sight. When my grandmother, a small and ungenerous woman, first showed me the single bathroom in this large, gloomy house I blotted my copybook for ever by asking: ‘Is this my bathroom?’
After her death my grandfather went through a remarkable transformation that seems to have begun as he walked away from the funeral. He immediately sold the house and its furniture, and set off with two suitcases for the south coast of England, where he lived in a series of hotels, entirely self-sufficient, moving on if he disliked the menu and facilities. He was living in a Bournemouth hotel when he died at 97. In his last years he would sometimes faint in supermarkets and shops. One manageress, assuming he was dead, rang my mother with the sad news, and was shocked out of her skin when my grandfather, his heart rested, suddenly lifted his head and spoke to her.
My mother rarely talked about her life in West Bromwich, or the large family of which the Johnstones were part. She never gave me any idea if she was happy or unhappy. The only thing she ever told me about her schooldays was that the future film actress Madeleine Carroll was in the same class at the West Bromwich Grammar School for Girls. For a brief period she worked as a teacher in a junior school in West Bromwich, and was appalled by the dreadful poverty of many of the children.
She and my father met at a holiday hotel in the Lake District, one of the hydros which were very popular with young people in the 1920s. After their marriage, in the later 1920s, when my father had joined the Calico Printers Association, they lived briefly in a rented house in the Manchester area, and sailed for Shanghai in 1929.
My parents never spoke about their reasons for leaving England, and it never occurred to me to ask them. Whether or not they were fully aware of what faced them, they were taking huge risks, not least with their health in a remote, poverty-stricken country long before the era of antibiotics. Cholera, smallpox and typhoid were rife in Shanghai. The piped water was not safe enough to drink – our drinking water was boiled and then stored in the refrigerator in old gin bottles – but all dishes were washed in water straight from the tap. Both my sister and I caught amoebic dysentery and were severely ill. Shanghai was a large and violent city of criminal gangs and murderous political factions. My mother was a 25-year-old newly married woman who had never been out of England, except for a honeymoon trip to Paris. Shanghai was five weeks away by P&O boat. There was no air link, and the only direct contact with England was by cable. I imagine that my father, always determined and optimistic, convinced my mother that England would take years to climb out of the recession, and that far more interesting possibilities waited for them on the other side of the world.
5
The Attack on Pearl Harbor (1941)
The Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, the American naval base near Honolulu, took place on the morning of Sunday, 7 December 1941, and brought Japan and America into what was now a world war. In Shanghai, across the International Date Line, it was already Monday, 8 December, and I was lying in bed reading my Bible. This was not for religious reasons – my parents were strongly agnostic. But scripture was my best subject, perhaps because I responded to the strong stories in the classroom versions of the Old Testament. At any rate, I still remember the scornful tones in which the Reverend Matthews announced the winner of a Bible competition. ‘First, and the biggest heathen in the class, is Ballard.’ A schoolmaster’s favourite phrase, no doubt, but I took great pride in it. I remember telling everyone that not only was I an atheist, but I was going to join the Communist Party. I admired anyone who could unsettle people, and the Communist labour organisers had certainly unsettled my father.
I was preparing for the Christmas term exams, and the scripture test was to be held that day. Then I heard
