decided to stay on in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent. But the China Printing and Finishing Company was my father’s responsibility, and duty then counted for something. Many foreign-owned businesses run by the Swiss and Swedes were still functioning, and my father may have hoped that the demand for cotton goods was so vast that he would be allowed to compete with the Japanese mills in Shanghai. At the same time, it may have seemed inconceivable that the Japanese would launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States, and even try to extend their ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as far as India and Australia.
As I watched my father putting his coloured pins into the map of Russia, smiling a little wanly as the radio announcer spoke through the static about captured German steam locomotives, I may already have realised that there were limits to how far I could depend on my parents. When two senior officers in the Kempeitai came to our house and strolled around in their highly polished boots, my father watched them without a word, and was only concerned that I and my 4-year-old sister remain silent. The Japanese officers had not come to arrest my father, as he must have assumed, but were checking the facilities that the house offered once we were interned. My father had no answer to them, and I knew that the time might come when my mother and I, and my sister, would be alone. Few middle-class children in times of peace see their parents under severe stress, and I had been brought up to regard my father and his male friends as figures of confidence and authority. Now everything was changing, and a new kind of education had begun. The sight of English adults under stress replaced the Latin unseens.
By the end of 1942 the war in the Pacific began to turn against the Japanese. Their navy, which had caught the Americans by surprise at Pearl Harbor, suffered catastrophic defeats at the Battles of Midway and the Coral Sea. British resistance was stiffening in Burma, and in Europe there were the beginnings of what would become the heroic Bomber Command offensive against Germany. I wanted to encourage my father, whom I knew to be a thoughtful and brave man, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for the Japanese military with its centuries-old codes of discipline and its demands of absolute submission from any captured enemy.
Given the importance of Shanghai and its huge dockyards, the Japanese decided to intern the British and other Allied nationals. Lunghua Camp was sited in a notorious malaria zone (the Shanghai High School which now occupies the former camp is still plagued by mosquitoes, and in 1991 the British Airways Travel Clinic warned me to leave the area before dusk). My father and other members of the British Residents Association complained strongly to the Japanese authorities in Shanghai, but the construction of Lunghua Camp went ahead.
In March 1943 my parents, sister and I entered Lunghua, where we remained until the end of August 1945.
6
Lunghua Camp (1943)
Our assembly point for the journey to Lunghua was the American Club in Columbia Road, a mile from Amherst Avenue. When we arrived we found a huge press of people, mostly British with a few Belgians and Dutch, sitting with their suitcases around the swimming pool, many of the women in their fur coats. Some of the men carried nothing apart from the clothes they were wearing, still confident that the war would be over within days. Others had strapped tennis rackets, cricket bats and fishing rods to their luggage – we had been told that there were a number of large and very deep ponds within the camp. A few were drunk, aware that they faced long months far from the nearest bar. Together we waited around the swimming pool, sitting at the tables where the American members of the club had once sipped their bourbons and mint juleps. Then the Japanese guards arrived with a small fleet of buses, and we were on our way across the open countryside, among the last group of Allied nationals to be interned.
For an hour we trundled through the deserted countryside, past empty villages and recent battlefields that I remembered from earlier drives with my parents and their friends. We passed the pagoda at Lunghua, where Japanese soldiers were hoisting anti-aircraft guns onto the upper decks. Nearby was a military airfield, Zero fighters lined up in front of the hangars. On all sides there were derelict canals and untended paddy fields, a waterlogged land through which the great arm of the Whangpoo river moved on its way to Shanghai and the sea.
Then Lunghua Camp appeared, my last real childhood home, where I would spend the next two and a half largely happy years. As we drove past sections of brand-new barbed-wire fencing, the camp resembled a half-ruined college campus. There were three-storey concrete buildings, pockmarked by shellfire but still standing. Other buildings were mounds of rubble, cement floors concertinaed together as if after an earthquake. There was a guardhouse by the gates, Japanese soldiers staring at us stonily. There were smaller buildings with pitched roofs of red tile, and rows of freshly built wooden huts, each some fifty yards long. Washing hung everywhere on makeshift lines, but there was a faint smell of sewage on the air, shared with a million mosquitoes.
And then there were the internees. We stepped down from our bus, greeted by a friendly crowd who helped us with our suitcases and guided families with small children towards G Block, a two-storey building that held some forty small
rooms. Our bedding had been sent on ahead, and assembled for us by friends of my father. I remember how he and my mother sat together on one of the beds with my sister, staring at this tiny space, as small as the rooms in the servants’ quarters at 31 Amherst Avenue, which had also contained entire families. Keen to greet schoolfriends I had recognised in the crowd around the bus, I left my parents to their new domain and began my exploration of Lunghua Camp.
My first impression was of how relaxed and casual the internees seemed. All this would change, but the people around me were enjoying a ramshackle and rather pleasant holiday. I had known a Shanghai where the men wore suits and ties, but here they were dressed in cotton shorts and shirtsleeves. Many of the younger women, among them the rather formal mothers of boys at school, were in beachwear. There were few Japanese guards around, and most of the camp administration was left to the internees. The dining hall where we assembled for our first meal had the atmosphere of an unsupervised prison, children screaming, the husbands flirting with each other’s wives, young men playfully squaring off at each other. Later, still in a daze, I was shown around the camp by schoolfriends. There seemed to be humour, or at least the prison-camp version of drollery, in ample supply – earth and cinder road-tracks named Oxford Street and Piccadilly, the drinking-water stations that boiled our water signposted ‘Waterloo’ and ‘Bubbling Well’. On the observation roof of F Block a group of music lovers listened to a classical symphony on a wind-up gramophone. On the steps of the assembly hall the Lunghua Players rehearsed a scene from
All in all, this was a relaxed and easy-going world that I had never known, except during our holidays in Tsingtao, and this favourable first impression stayed with me to the end, when conditions in the camp took a marked turn for the worse. I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart.
But all that was two years away, and in the spring of 1943 I was happy to make the most of my new world. My parents were glad to let me stay out to all hours, and I set about exploring every corner of the camp, meeting a host of quirky, bored, pleasant and unpleasant characters.
E Block and F Block, the two largest buildings in the former teacher-training college, contained its classrooms, and these were occupied by single internees and married couples without children. Families with children were housed in D and G Blocks, in the rooms that once housed the Chinese student teachers. There was a shower block, which in the first months supplied hot water, a small ‘hospital’ where my sister was treated for dysentery, and a number of bungalows that had housed the college’s senior staff and were the quarters of the Japanese guards.
The camp lay over a substantial area, perhaps half a mile in diameter, ringed by a barbed-wire fence through which I often climbed to retrieve a ball or kite. Japanese soldiers patrolled the wire in a rather casual way, and once I had to hide in the long grass outside the fence when I was searching for a lost baseball and the other children warned me that the guards were approaching. About a third of the original site was excluded from the camp, and contained a number of derelict buildings. With the agreement of the camp commandant, a former diplomat named
