Miracles of Life

warships were moored in the Whangpoo, and armed shore parties of American sailors and marines were moving around Shanghai. The German family who lived in the house across the drive were ejected, and two very likeable American intelligence officers took their place. They soon moved in their stylish Chinese girlfriends, educated and sophisticated women who brought my mother up to date with the latest fashion news. The Americans were part of the military administration of Shanghai, and would take me with them on trips around the city, visiting the stockades where Japanese soldiers and Chinese collaborators were imprisoned, in the grimmest conditions. In the evenings they would hold film shows and invite the Ballards over. We watched the Andrews Sisters singing ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, and joined in heartily, following the bouncing ball. The Americans had unlimited supplies of magazines and comics, but I was more interested in the wartime pocket editions of Hemingway and Steinbeck, which I devoured. The shortage of paper in Lunghua meant that I had done little writing, but Hemingway’s accounts of the Great War tallied with my own memories of war and the unwelcome truths it could expose.

My father arranged for me to be given a bicycle by a Chinese business friend, and I began to pedal around Shanghai again. I often went out to Lunghua airfield, and was invited aboard the huge American transport planes lined up beside the runway. The sense of American power was overwhelming. I also made regular visits to Lunghua Camp. At least half the internees still lived there two months after the war’s end, sustained by the American airdrops. These were Britons with no homes to return to, no jobs, and no source of income, waiting to be repatriated to England.

The atmosphere in Lunghua had clearly changed. When I dismounted from my new cycle at the gates I was stopped by a former D Block internee whose son had been a close camp friend. He wore a large American pistol in a holster, and affected the manner of a military policeman. He pretended not to recognise me, and refused to allow me through the gates until I had gone through a pantomime of convincing him who I was.

In G Block the families who remained had taken over the empty rooms, and the Ballard room was now a storehouse of air-dropped supplies. Ends of corridors were barricaded off, and visitors were no longer welcome. During one visit a B-29 dropping relief supplies misjudged the target, and the coloured parachutes sailed down into the untended paddy fields half a mile from the camp. Within a minute a posse of internees, some armed with rifles, left the camp and raced towards the drifting parachutes. I followed at a distance, and saw the violent confrontation between the internees and a group of destitute peasants dragging a canister towards their village. Needless to say, it never occurred to the internees that China had fought on the same side against the Japanese, and that their desperate citizens were even more deserving of relief.

Later, in England, I heard that many of the Lunghua internees were still living in the camp six months after the war’s end, defending their caches of Spam, Klim and cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

In many ways I missed the camp, and the hundreds of acquaintances I had made of all ages. I missed the chess games, and the American sailors, and the teenage girls teaching each other how to flirt. I felt more at home there than I did at 31 Amherst Avenue. Prison, which so confines the adults, offers unlimited scope to the imagination of a teenage boy. The moment I stepped out of bed in the morning, as my mother slept in her tattered mosquito net and my father tried to brew a little tea for her, a hundred possibilities waited for me.

At least Shanghai was coming alive again, as thousands of American servicemen filled the bars and nightclubs and careered around the streets in their jeeps and trucks. Pedicabs had appeared, large two-seater tricycles, pedalled by former rickshaw coolies, usually filled by two Americans and their Russian and Chinese girlfriends. Led by my father, China Printing began to produce the cotton goods that the Far East needed so desperately. Bizarrely, armed Japanese sentries, on the orders of the Americans, still guarded key locations in Shanghai, just as the French regaining control of Indo-China used Japanese military units in their battles against the Viet Minh forces, the forerunners of the Viet Cong.

I knew that I would be going to England with my mother and sister on one of the troopships that were repatriating the British internees, and also that I would be going to school in England, but it never occurred to me that I would make a final break with Shanghai and not return for forty-five years. No one had the faintest inkling that the lights of Shanghai would be switched off for decades when the Communists led by Mao Tse-tung took control. Every Westerner in the city took it for granted that the puritan self-discipline of the Chinese Communists would last just as long as it took them to climb from their tanks and stroll into the bars and brothels of downtown Shanghai.

At the end of 1945 my mother, my sister Margaret and I boarded the SS Arrawa, and set sail on the voyage to England. The Arrawa was a former refrigerated cargo vessel used as a troopship during the war, and the decks and holds were lined with miles of refrigeration piping. Some thousand British internees came aboard, and there was a huge send-off at the pier in Hongkew. Friends and relatives who were staying behind lined the pier and waved as the ship moved out into the Whangpoo, surrounded by scores of American landing craft sounding their sirens. My mother and sister were at the rail, somewhere amidships, but I moved to the stern to be on my own. At the last minute my father turned from my mother and waved to me, and for some reason I have never understood I decided not to wave back. I assume he thought I had lost sight of him, but I have always regretted not waving to him. Apart from a visit he made to England in 1947, when we drove all over Europe, I did not see him again until 1950. By then we had grown apart, and he played no role in the many decisions I had made about my future career.

The voyage was in some ways like a seaboard version of Lunghua in its earliest days, everyone in beachwear as we headed for Singapore and the equator. We docked briefly at Rangoon, and the captain told us that a party of thirty British commandos were joining us. He warned mothers of teenage daughters to be on their guard. These violent and ruthless men had been fighting the Japanese, and would pose a danger to any young English women they came across.

I and my friends were all agog at the prospect and keenly awaited developments. The commandos came aboard, heavily armed young men with sunburnt English faces. They stowed their weapons in the armoury, and then made straight for the passenger saloon on the upper deck, where they spent the rest of the voyage. Every morning when they arrived they would each buy ten bottles of beer from the bar and carry them to their tables, so that the entire surface was filled with beer bottles. Sitting back in the leather armchairs, they passed the rest of the day drinking, rarely saying anything to each other and taking no interest in the teenage English girls who came in to smile at them.

This deeply impressed me, and still does. I and my friends questioned them about the bitter battles they had fought with Japanese soldiers, many of them starving and suicidal, but the commandos were reluctant to talk. Now and then they would praise a dead comrade who had died beside them as they fought off the Japanese bayonet charges. At Southampton, when we moored, they snapped back into life, reclaimed their weapons and marched off smartly without a backward glance. That also impressed me. Some of them were only two or three years older than I was. They had seen death run towards them armed with a bayonet and a grenade, and had fought him to a standstill.

PART II

11 Take it on the Chin (1946)

Winter numbed, England froze.

The Arrawa docked at Southampton, under a cold sky so grey and low that I could hardly believe this was the England I had read and heard about. Small, putty-faced people moved around, shabbily dressed and with a haunted air. Looking down from the rail, I noticed that the streets near the docks were lined with what seemed to be black perambulators, some kind of mobile coal scuttle, I assumed, used for bunkering ships. Later I learned that these were British cars (all made pre-war), a species I had never seen before.

We travelled to London, and then went on to West Bromwich, where I met my grandparents. Our mutual suspicion was probably instant. After a month or so I entered The Leys School in Cambridge as a boarder, and my