Miracles of Life (10 page)

The shower block was closed, and from then on we had to
carry buckets of warm water from the Bubbling Well and
Waterloo heating stations, an exhausting daily chore that I
performed for my mother (my father was working as a
stoker in the camp kitchens). The two dining halls were also
closed, and food arrived on metal-wheeled carts pulled by
two of the G Block internees. As ravenous as ever, I would
listen out for the metal creaking of the cartwheels, and then
rush to be first in the queue as our ration of congee and
sweet potato was doled out in the entrance hall. Later, while everyone recovered from their meal, I would help push the
cart back to the kitchens and be allowed to scrape the
bottom of the potato bin.

Lunghua winters were fiercely cold. We were living in
unheated buildings, and many people retired to bed for as
long as they could. My father learned from George Osborne
that many of the windows in the school classrooms had
lost their glass during the 1937 battles around Lunghua.
Somehow my father persuaded parents to contribute
whatever old pieces of cloth they had kept. He cut these into
dozens of small squares, melted candles into a shallow tray
and soaked the cotton in the molten wax. Tacked into place
by the teachers, they kept much of the icy wind from our
classrooms.

My mother liked to brew tea to keep warm, and one of my
chess opponents, a garage owner named Richards, taught me
how to build a chatty, a primitive Chinese stove constructed
from a five-gallon oilcan that we pilfered from the guards’
refuse tip. We gouged reinforcing bars from the flaking
concrete of the ruined buildings, slotted them through the
can above a draught door and then moulded wet clay to
form a venturi. The kitchen ovens burned a low-grade
coking coal, and in the tips outside the furnaces one could
find small pieces of coke. I squatted on the still-warm ash-
tips, poking with a bent piece of wire through the dust and
clinkers, and thinking of the Chinese beggar boys who
picked over the Avenue Joffre ash-tips. I remember reflecting on this without comment, and I make no comment now.

My father sometimes brought small portions of boiled
rice for my mother, but as a principled man refused to bring
any coal to fuel the chatty. In my roamings around the camp
I found a broken Chinese bayonet, a handle and three inches
of snapped blade. Over a few weeks I sharpened this to a
point, rubbing away at any hard stone I could find. One
evening, in the darkness an hour before curfew, I led Bobby
Henderson to the rear wall of the coal store behind the
kitchens, and used the bayonet to scrape away the mortar.
After removing two of the bricks, I drew out several handfuls
of coal, which I divided between us, then replaced the bricks
in the wall.

My father said nothing when I showed him the coal,
though he must have known that I had stolen it from the
kitchen storeroom. I soon had it glowing brightly in the
chatty outside the rear entrance to G Block, and my father
carried a warming cup of black tea to my bedridden mother.
Both of us knew that he had compromised his principles,
but at the same time I felt that I had gained no merit in his
eyes. I take it for granted that if the war had continued
for much longer the sense of community and the social
constraints that held the internees together would have
broken down. Moral principles, along with kindness and
generosity, are worth less than they might seem. At the time,
as the glowing coals warmed my hands, I wondered what
Henderson would do with his share of the coal. Later I saw him in the darkness, hurling the pieces into the deep pond
beyond the perimeter fence.

In late 1944 conditions in Lunghua continued to worsen, not
through deliberate neglect by the Japanese authorities, but
because they had lost all interest in us. The food supply fell,
and the internees’ health was eroded by malaria, exhaustion
and a general resignation to further years of war. The
Americans had advanced island by island across the Pacific,
but they were still hundreds of miles away. The huge
Japanese armies in China were ready to defend the Emperor
and the home islands to the last man.

Nowhere had Japanese soldiers surrendered in large
numbers. Fatalism, fierce discipline and a profound patriotism
shaped their warrior spirit. In some way, I think, the
Japanese soldier assumed unconsciously that he had already
died in battle, and the apparent life left to him was on a very
short lease. This explained their vicious cruelty. I can still see
two of the guards beating to death an exhausted Chinese
rickshaw coolie who had brought them from Shanghai. As
the desperate man sobbed on his knees the Japanese first
kicked his rickshaw to pieces, probably his only possession in
the world and sole source of income, and then began to beat
and kick the Chinese until he lay in a still and bloody pulp
on the ground.

All this took place some thirty feet from me by the rear entrance of G Block, and was watched by a large crowd of
internees. None of the men spoke, as if their silent stares
would force the two Japanese to end their torment. I knew
that this was a naive hope, but I also understood why none
of the British, all of whom had wives and children, had tried
to intervene. The reprisals would have been instant and
fearsome. I remember feeling a deep deadness, which may
have been noticed by one of my father’s friends, who steered
me away.

I think that by this time, early 1945, I was already (aged
14!) starting to worry about the future of Lunghua. I realised
that the state of Japanese morale was more important than
that of the internees, and I was glad to see the Japanese
guards helping the internee working parties to repair the
main gates of the camp and keep out the destitute Chinese
peasants who had crossed the stricken countryside and were
hoping to find sanctuary in Lunghua. Starving families sat
around the gates, the women wailing and holding up their
skeletal children, like the beggars who had clustered outside
the office buildings of downtown Shanghai. If the Japanese
abandoned Lunghua we would be exposed to roaming
groups of militia soldiers, little more than bandits, and to
units of the former puppet armies left to fend for themselves,
all armed and eager to ransack the camp.

I kept careful watch on the barbed-wire fence, and turned
my back on the younger children still playing the traditional
games that I forgot when I came to England and sadly never passed on to my own children – marbles and hopscotch, and
complicated skipping and ball games. I had read the camp’s
entire stock of magazines several times over, but I still visited
the American seamen. Cheerful as ever, they were obsessed
with their pheasant traps, which I helped them lay in the
open ground between E Block and the perimeter fence. I
suspect now that they were really marking out an escape
route beyond the eyes of the Japanese, in the event of a major
emergency like the sudden closure of the camp.

The first American air raids over Shanghai had begun in the
summer of 1944, and steadily intensified over the following
months. High-flying reconnaissance planes appeared in the
sky, strangely motionless as they hung between the clouds.
Soon after, squadrons of fighters, Mustangs and twin-engined
Lightnings, flew in from the south to attack
Lunghua airfield. As they approached, barely twenty feet
above the abandoned paddy fields, they hid behind the
three-storey buildings of Lunghua Camp, then swerved away
to strafe the parked Japanese planes and nearby hangars.
Lunghua pagoda had been turned into a flak tower by the
Japanese, and as I watched the attacks from the first-floor
balcony of the men’s washroom the pagoda was lit up like a
Christmas tree, gunfire flickering from its upper decks.

Whenever an air attack was imminent a warning siren
sent us to our quarters. Running back to G Block with other internees, I was once caught out in the open. Anti-aircraft
shells were exploding above us, and I stopped to pick up a
gnarled piece of steel, like the peel of a silver apple, that
gleamed on the pathway. I remember that it was still hot to
the touch. Often the Mustangs would shed their drop tanks
before making their attack, and these tail-less, bomb-shaped
structures were treated with immense respect by the guards,
who roped them off and waited for army engineers to
inspect them.

The air attacks on Shanghai took place almost daily, and
once Lunghua airfield had been neutralised the first waves of
B-29 bombers appeared in the sky, immense four-engined
aircraft that bombed the airfield, Shanghai dockyards and
railway junctions. They passed overhead and then seemed to
vanish into the clouds, and a moment later a thunderous
curtain of smoke rose from the ground as sticks of bombs
struck the hangars and parked planes. I can still see one
Mustang trailing smoke that turned and headed east towards
the sea, the pilot hoping perhaps to ditch his crippled plane
near a US warship. As the Mustang crossed the Whangpoo
he seemed to give up, and we saw his parachute open and a
truck filled with Japanese soldiers driving past the camp to
capture him.

The sight of these advanced American aircraft gave me a
new focus of adolescent veneration. As the Mustangs
streaked overhead, less than a hundred feet from the ground,
it was clear that they belonged to a different technological order. The power of their engines (the British-designed
Rolls-Royce Merlin, I later learned), their speed and silver
fuselages, and the high style in which they were flown, clearly
placed them in a more advanced realm than the Japanese
Zeros and the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the British
Embassy newsreels. The American aircraft had sprung from
the advertisement pages of
Life
and
Collier’s
, they embodied
the same consumer ethos as the streamlined Cadillacs and
Lincoln Zephyrs, the refrigerators and radios. In a way
the Mustangs and Lightnings were themselves advertisements,
400-mile-an-hour commercials that advertised the
American dream and American power.

I noticed that the American seamen in E Block took for
granted the superiority of the advanced aircraft flying over
their heads. Despite the catastrophe that befell the battleships
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
, the British internees still
spoke with a certain dogged pride of their country’s military
equipment. But the American seamen I visited said nothing
and never made a boastful claim.

All this led me to switch my boyhood admiration to a new
set of heroes. However brave the Japanese soldiers and pilots,
they belonged to the past. America, I knew, was a future that
had already arrived. I spent every spare moment watching
the sky.

One day in early August we woke to find that the Japanese
guards had gone. We assembled for the morning roll-call,
standing in the corridor outside our rooms, but the guards
failed to appear. We wandered away, listening to the empty
sky. One or two reconnaissance planes drifted high overhead,
but for the first time everything was silent. Had the
war ended? Rumours and counter-rumours swept the camp,
but Lunghua was sealed off from the world, surrounded by
the deserted villages and drained paddy fields.

Demoralised by the unending air offensive and the
sinking of most of their shipping by American submarines
near the Yangtze estuary, and by the loss of Iwo Jima and
Okinawa, the Japanese military responsible for Lunghua
Camp had finally abandoned this malaria-ridden group of
foreign internees. The food supply had been intermittent for
months, and I spent hours on the observation roof of F
Block, hoping for any sign of the Red Cross truck that would
bring the next day’s rations.

The perimeter fence ran within a dozen yards of G Block,
and a few of the internees began to step through the barbed
wire. They stood in the deep grass, inhaling the air outside
the camp, as if testing a different atmosphere. I followed
them and, rather than stay near the fence, I decided to walk
to a burial mound some two hundred yards away. I climbed
onto the lowest tier of rotting coffins, turned and looked
back at the camp, a view I had never seen before. It seemed
almost uncanny to be no longer part of the camp but staring
at it from a distance. Everything about its perspectives
seemed strange and unreal, though it had been my home for
two and a half years. I jumped down from the burial mound,
then ran back through the deep grass to the fence and
climbed through the wire, relieved to be back in the camp
and the only security I knew.

Emboldened by the absence of the Japanese guards, a
number of British internees decided to walk to Shanghai. I
was tempted to join them, but fortunately decided not to.
Within hours they were brought back to the camp, lying badly
beaten on the floor of a Japanese truck, part of a motorised
unit of military police that immediately re-established control
over Lunghua. I assume that at this time the first atomic
bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, but the Japanese had
not yet decided to surrender. The Japanese generals in China
were still prepared to fight on to the end, aware that most of
Japan’s principal cities and industrial areas had been reduced
to ash by the American bombing campaign.

The Japanese soldiers stepped down from their trucks,
and seized a number of internees and held them for interrogation
in the first-floor offices of the commandant and his
staff in F Block. Realising what might happen to their
husbands, a group of wives attacked the Japanese as they
crossed the assembly ground outside D Block, then formed
up below the balcony of the commandant’s offices, jeering
and screaming at the Japanese officers as they stared down
impassively at the raging women. The spit from their
mouths formed necklaces on their breasts as they swore and
shook their fists at the Japanese.