Miracles of Life

by James Graham Ballard

  Then, in the last days of August, I was on the roof of F Block when a B-29 flew towards the camp at a height of about 800 feet. Its bomb doors were open, and for a few seconds I assumed that we were about to be attacked. A line of canisters fell from the bomb bays, parachutes flared and the first American relief supplies floated towards us. A stampede followed, as everyone helped to drag the canisters back to their blocks. Each one was a cargo of treasure, but a sensible rationing system saw that every family received its fair share. There were tins of Spam and Klim, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, cans of jam and huge bars of chocolate. I remember vividly our first meal on our little card table, and the extraordinary taste of animal fat, sugar, jam and chocolate. The vast lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world. The camp came alive again, as the internees found a new purpose in their lives. Everyone hoarded and guarded their new supplies, listening out for the sound of American engines, quick to point out the smallest unfairness.

  Tired of all this, and revived by the Spam and chocolate, I decided to walk to Shanghai. I had spent years staring at the apartment houses of the French Concession, and I was eager to see Amherst Avenue again. Without telling my parents, I set off for the fence behind the old shower blocks. Confident that I could walk the five miles to the western suburbs of Shanghai, I stepped through the wire.

  The camp fell behind me more quickly than I expected. Around me was a silent terrain of abandoned paddy fields and burial mounds, derelict canals and bridges, ghost villages that had been deserted for years. I skirted the perimeter of the airfield, where I could see Japanese soldiers patrolling the burnt-out planes and hangars, and decided not to test whether they agreed that the war was over. I passed the wrecks of canal boats and trucks caught in the air attacks, and the bodies of Chinese puppet soldiers.

  After an hour I reached the Hangchow–Shanghai railway line, which circled the western perimeter of Shanghai. No trains were running, and I decided to walk along the embankment. Half a mile in front of me was a small wayside station, no more than a concrete platform and a pair of telegraph poles. As I approached I could hear an odd singsong sound, and saw that a group of Japanese soldiers was waiting on the platform. They were fully armed, and sat on their ammunition boxes, picking their teeth while one of them tormented a young Chinese man in black trousers and a white shirt. The Japanese soldier had cut down lengths of telephone wire and had tied the Chinese to a telegraph pole, and was now slowly strangling him as the Chinese sang out in a sing-song voice. I thought of leaving the embankment and walking across the nearby field, but then decided it would be best to walk straight up to the soldiers and treat the grim event taking place as if it were a private matter that did not involve me.

  I drew level with the platform and was about to walk past it when the soldier with the telephone wire raised a hand and beckoned me towards him. He had seen the transparent celluloid belt that held up my frayed cotton shorts. It had been given to me by one of the American sailors, and was a prized novelty that no Japanese was likely to have seen. I unbuckled the belt and handed it to him, then waited as he flexed the colourless plastic and stared at me through it, laughing admiringly. Behind him the young Chinese was slowly suffocating to death, his urine spreading across the platform.

  I waited in the sun, listening to the sing-song voice as it grew weaker. The Chinese was not the first person I had seen the Japanese kill. But a state of war had existed since 1937, and now peace was supposed to have come to the mouth of the Yangtze. At the same time I was old enough to know that this lost Japanese platoon was beyond the point where life and death meant anything at all. They were aware that their own lives would shortly end, and that they were free to do anything they wanted, and inflict any pain. Peace, I realised, was more threatening because the rules that sustained war, however evil, were suspended. The empty paddy fields and derelict villages confirmed that nothing mattered.

  Ten minutes later, the Chinese was silent and I was able to walk away. The Japanese soldier never told me to go, but I knew when he had lost interest in me. Whistling to himself, the plastic belt around his neck, he stepped over the trussed body of the Chinese and rejoined his companions, waiting for the train that would never come.

  I was badly shaken, but managed to steady myself by the time I reached the western suburbs of Shanghai. Perhaps the war had not really ended, or we had entered an in-between world where on one level it would continue for months or even years, merging into the next war and the war beyond that. I like to think that my teenage self kept his nerve, but I realise now that I was probably aware of nothing other than the brute fact that I was alive and this unknown Chinese was dead. In most respects, sadly, my experiences of the war were no different from those of millions of other teenage boys in enemy-occupied Europe and the Far East. A vast cruelty lay over the world, and was all we knew.

  At last I reached the western suburbs of Shanghai, and set off for the Kendall-Ward house. I needed to see them again, after a lapse of nearly three years. I knew the boys would have grown, and the Airedales would be older, but Mrs Kendall-Ward would be the same, a little thinner but as welcoming as ever. I could already hear her chatting in Chinese to her tribe of amahs, as the dogs bounded around her.

  The gates were ajar, and I walked up the drive past the untended garden, listening for any sounds of the family. I reached for the doorbell, and looked through the open door at the sky. It took me several moments to realise what had happened. The house was a shell. Everything had been looted and stripped away, every door frame, joist and floorboard, every roof beam and tile, every electric cable and water pipe. Nothing remained except the raw brickwork. The unguarded house had become, in effect, a free carpentry store and hardware shop, where local Chinese had helped themselves to whatever electrical switch or faucet they needed. I remember feeling a profound sense of loss, as if a large part of the happiness I had known in pre-war Shanghai had been erased for ever. It was a grave mistake to rely on one’s memories, which were as much a stage set as the gutted house whose doorbell I was trying to ring.

  After resting on the doorstep, I walked down Amherst Avenue to the Ballard house at 31, expecting to find it similarly stripped. I climbed the steps, and heard the doorbell ring. A young puppet soldier, a Chinese youth not much older than I was, opened the door and tried to bar my way with his rifle. I pushed past him, saying: ‘This is my house.’

  A Chinese puppet general had occupied the house, but had fled the scene, no doubt in a complete panic after the Japanese surrender. The house was untouched, every piece of furniture and kitchen equipment in place. I walked around the airless rooms, watching the sunlight play on the swirls of dust that followed me. I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, and lay on the bed, counting the screw-hooks from which I had hung my model aircraft. The house seemed strange, and I felt that it should have changed, like everything else in Shanghai. It was almost as if the war had never happened.

  10

  War’s End (1945)

  Shanghai soon opened all its doors and turned on all its lights, greeting its new American visitors in its time-honoured way, with thousands of bars, prostitutes and gambling dens. An American cruiser moored off the Bund, and American aircraft landed at Lunghua airfield, but the transfer of power took several weeks to become effective. Disbanded puppet troops and aimless militia units still roamed the outskirts of the city, and most of the Lunghua internees remained for the next month within the comparative safety of the camp.

  I went back to Shanghai several times, walking or cadging lifts from Red Cross drivers, or riding on top of the tanker that brought fresh water to the camp. One afternoon in Shanghai I set off on the five-mile walk back to Lunghua, following the road that led to the airfield. An hour later a Japanese army truck passed me. I ran after the wheezing vehicle and then clambered uninvited over the tailboard. Half a dozen armed Japanese soldiers watched me as I sat down next to them, and one took the water bottle from my hand. He tasted the water wit
h a grimace, perhaps hoping for something stronger, and passed it back to me. When I jumped down at the next crossroads and set off across the paddy fields for Lunghua one of them might easily have shot me, for they must have had only the faintest idea of Hirohito’s surrender broadcast. But they may have realised that in some way I was on their side.

  The Ballard family left Lunghua at the beginning of September, and returned to their house in Amherst Avenue. A staff of servants signed on, though I’m not sure if they included any of those dismissed when we went to Lunghua. Our former chauffeur returned, driving a Chrysler that my father had bought from one of his Chinese business contacts. Huge quantities of gifts arrived daily at our house, straw panniers filled with fresh peaches and mangoes, canned goods and bottles of pre-war Scotch whisky. I remember live chickens strutting and squawking around the hall until they were seized by the cook and taken off to the kitchen.

  I at last made contact with the Kendall-Wards, who had survived the war and were now living in a rented house to the north-west of the city. I was glad to see the boys again, and Mrs Kendall-Ward greeted me warmly. But I felt slightly uneasy with them all. Miraculously, they seemed unchanged by the war, as charming and amiable as ever. But I had changed, and I knew that childhood had passed for good.

  Yet within a surprisingly short time something very close to our previous life resumed. Dozens of American 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 armch
airs, 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 mother rented a house at Newton Ferrers, about ten miles from Plymouth, near Shanghai friends. I joined her during the holidays, but in 1947 she and my sister returned to Shanghai with my father, and for the next year or so I spent the holidays with my grandparents in West Bromwich, the lowest point in my life that I had by then explored, several miles at least below the sea level of mental health. I hope that I survived, though I have never been completely sure. My mother returned to England with my sister in 1949, and rented a house in the Aldwick Bay estate, to the west of Bognor. After my father’s escape from China, when I was at King’s College, Cambridge, they moved to Manchester. When he left the Calico Printers Association they bought a house in Claygate, near Esher, and in the early 1960s retired to the New Forest.