what sounded like tanks and military vehicles moving down Amherst Avenue, and my father burst into my bedroom. He stared around wildly, as if he had never seen my room before. He ordered me to get dressed, and told me that Japan had declared war. ‘But I have to go to school,’ I protested. ‘Exams start today.’ He then uttered the greatest words a schoolboy can ever hear. ‘There’ll be no more school, and no more exams.’
I took all this in my stride, but my father was clearly rattled. He raced around the house, shouting at the servants and at my mother. I assume he had heard on the local radio stations that Japanese forces were entering the International Settlement. They swiftly seized control, and their naval units on the Whangpoo river sank the British gunboat, HMS
The French Concession was already under the control of the Vichy government, and the Japanese army seized all key sites within the Settlement. That day their Kempeitai (the Japanese Gestapo) arrested several hundred British and American civilians, who were the first Allied nationals to be interned. By luck my father was not among them, and we remained in our house until March 1943. Those imprisoned soon after the Pearl Harbor attack were brutally treated, but in Shanghai, fortu-nately, there were a large number of Swiss and Swedish nationals, and their presence may have restrained the Japanese, though there were many violent arrests and killings.
The old Shanghai ceased to exist from this point. There were no more parties or film premieres, no more visits to department stores and the swimming pool. The Country Club became a Japanese officers’ club – my mother told me in tones of great indignation that they had stabled their horses in the squash courts. The Japanese army aggressively enforced its presence throughout the Settlement, and street executions of Chinese were common. All foreign cars were confiscated, and my father bought a bicycle to take him the five miles to his office.
The China Printing and Finishing Company still functioned, presumably as a useful source of revenue for the Japanese. There were two Japanese supervisors in the office – one of them was an architect – and I think my father had reasonable relations with them, though he was probably forced to lay off staff. Once when I was with him in his office he took me for a walk around the Cathedral cloisters nearby. Eventually a middle-aged White Russian joined us, and my father handed him some money. He thanked my father profusely and slipped away. As firms and factories closed, jobs must have been difficult to find. The Russian seemed desperately poor, and my father told me matter-of-factly that the shirt and collar beneath his tie and waistcoat was a tiny bib stitched together from rags, which he washed every day in the river.
Social life in the British community came to an end, along with my mother’s bridge and tennis parties. Except for the chauffeur, who was rehired after the war, we employed the same number of servants, including the latest in the line of Russian nannies, and they stayed with us until a few days before we were interned.
My parents spent hours listening to the short-wave radio broadcasts from Britain and America. The fall of Singapore, and the sinking of the British battleships
Yet I remember, some time in 1942, my father pinning a large map of Russia to the wall near the radio, and marking out the shifting front line between the Germans and Russians. In many areas the Germans were in retreat, though the Russian front advanced with agonising slowness, a village at a time. All the same, my father had begun to recover a little of his confidence.
I constantly asked him how long the war would last and I remember that he was convinced it would go on for several years. Here he was at odds with many of the English in Shanghai, who still believed that the defeated British forces in the Far East would rally and swiftly defeat the Japanese. Even I, at the age of 11 or 12, knew that this was a dangerous delusion. I had seen the Japanese soldiers at close quarters, and knew that they were tougher, more disciplined and far better led than the British and American soldiers in Shanghai, who seemed bored and only interested in going home. But many of the fathers of boys in my form still assumed that the war would be over in a few months.
My one great disappointment was that the Cathedral School reopened, within a month or so of Pearl Harbor. I cycled to school, but always came straight home afterwards, though sometimes I had to wait for hours to get through the checkpoint at the end of the Avenue Joffre. Downtown Shanghai was far too dangerous, as Japanese military vehicles swerved through the streets, knocking rickshaws and cyclists out of their way, and Chinese puppet troops harassed any Europeans who caught their eye.
Despite these hazards, my father insisted that I attend school. One morning we cycled together to the Avenue Joffre checkpoint and found that it had been closed as part of a military sweep, along with all other checkpoints into the International Settlement. Undeterred, my father wheeled his bicycle through the crowd and set off with me along the Columbia Road to the house of English friends. Their long garden ended at the barbed-wire fence first erected around the Settlement in 1937 and now in disrepair. Helped by the English friends, we lifted our cycles through the loosened wire and stepped into the grounds of a derelict casino and nightclub named the Del Monte. Concerned that there might be Japanese in the building, my father told me to wait while he stepped through an open rear door. After a few minutes I could no longer restrain myself, and walked on tiptoe through the silent gaming rooms where roulette tables lay on their sides and the floor was covered with broken glasses and betting chips. Gilded statues propped up the canopy of the bars that ran the length of the casino, and on the floor ornate chandeliers cut down from the ceiling tilted among the debris of bottles and old newspapers. Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the
I also felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it had been when it was thronged with gamblers and dancers. Abandoned houses and office buildings held a special magic and on my way home from school I often paused outside an empty apartment block. Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life, though Shanghai was already surrealist enough.
Then my father appeared through the shadows and led the way to the rear door. We parted at the ramshackle gates of the casino, and he cycled off to his office while I rode the few hundred yards to the Cathedral School and another day of Latin unseens.
Stranger days arrived in early 1943 when full-scale internment began, and British, Belgian and Dutch civilians were moved to the half-dozen camps that now ringed Shanghai. Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, in the open countryside five miles to the south, occupied a former training college for Chinese teachers, but several of the smaller camps were in the Shanghai suburbs. Private estates of some forty or fifty houses (today’s gated communities) sharing a perimeter wall and a guarded entrance were a popular feature in 1930s Shanghai, and were generally occupied by a single nationality. There was a German estate on Amherst Avenue, an intimidating collection of white boxes that I never tried to enter. Naturally, these well-guarded residential estates made ideal internment camps. The security measures that kept intruders out worked just as well at keeping their former residents in. One of these camps, in which the Kendall-Wards were interned, even dispensed with the need for a barbed-wire fence. As it happened, there were few escapes from the camps. The most famous escaper was a British sailor who walked out of the hospital where he was being treated after the sinking of HMS
Already, though, everything was becoming too uncertain even for a 12-year-old who thrived on change. I went to visit a close friend in the Avenue Joffre and found the door of his family apartment open and unlocked. The family had left at short notice, and discarded suitcases lay across the unmade beds. Curtains swayed in the open windows, as if celebrating their new freedom. I sat for a long time in my friend’s bedroom, staring at his toy soldiers and the model aircraft we had played with happily for so many hours.
Preoccupied with myself and the fate of my friends. I probably had no idea of the stress my parents endured as they faced the prospect of internment. Looking back from the vantage point of 2007, it puzzles me that they
