Miracles of Life (3 page)

At home I spent a great deal of time on my own. Social life
in pre-war Shanghai was a career occupation for my mother,
playing tennis at the Country Club, bridge with her friends,
shopping and lunching in the downtown hotels. In the
evenings there were dinner parties and nightclub visits.
Often my mother would help me with my Latin homework,
but much of the day I was alone in a large house where the
Chinese servants never looked at me and never spoke to me,
while the nanny read my mother’s novels and played dance
music on the radiogram. I would sometimes listen to one of
the dozens of English-language radio stations (I liked to
phone in record requests under the alias ‘Ace’) or play chess
with the nanny; my father taught me to win, and I taught the
nannies to lose. The succession of White Russian girls must
have been bored to death by me, and one of them told me
that the sound of thunder that startled me was ‘the voice of
God – he’s angry with you, James.’ I remember being unsettled
by this for years. For some reason I almost believed her.

Now and then I would go with my mother or the nanny
to the cinema, one of the vast art deco theatres that loomed
over Shanghai. The first film I saw was
Snow White
, which
frightened the wits out of me. The wicked queen, the purest
essence of evil radiating across the auditorium, reminded me
too much of my friends’ mothers when they tired of me rearranging
their furniture.

Most of the children’s books I read, such as the
Arabian
Nights
, the Grimms’ fairy tales and
The Water-Babies
, were
deeply disturbing, with illustrations inspired by the Pre-
Raphaelites and Beardsley, full of airless gothic interiors and
lantern-lit forests. They probably prepared me for the surrealists.
I read children’s versions of
Gulliver’s
Travels
and
Robinson Crusoe,
which I loved, especially
Crusoe,
and I can
still hear the sound of waves on his beach. I devoured
American comics, which were on sale everywhere in
Shanghai and read by all the English boys –
B
uck Rogers,
Flash Gordon
and, later,
Superman. Terry and the Pirates
was
my favourite, about an American mercenary pilot in the Far
East, part of it set in the Shanghai where I lived. Later I read
American bestsellers, such as
All This and Heaven Too,
Babbitt, Anthony Adverse
and
Gone With the Wind
. My
parents subscribed to a number of magazines –
Life, Time,
the
New
Yorker
, Saturday Evening Post
and so on, and I spent
hours turning their pages and revelling in their American
optimism.

Then there were the
Chums
and
Boy’s Own Paper
annuals,
aggressive compendiums of patriotic derring-do. A.A. Milne
and the
Just William
series together portrayed a mythical
middle-class England, a Home Counties,
Peter Pan
world far
more remote from reality than
Life
and
Time
were from the
realities of American life. However, it seemed to be confirmed
by the British doctors, architects, managers and
clergymen I met in Shanghai. They might have driven
American cars and had American refrigerators, but in speech and manner they weren’t too far from the doctors and
schoolmasters I came across in my reading.

All this gave the British adults in Shanghai a certain
authority, which they lost completely a few years later after
the sinking of the battleships
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
and
the surrender of Singapore. The British lost a respect which
they never recovered, as I discovered when Chinese shopkeepers,
French dentists and Sikh school-bus drivers made
disparaging remarks about British power. The dream of
empire died when Singapore surrendered without a fight
and our aircraft proved no match for the highly trained Zero
pilots. Even at the age of 11 or 12 I knew that no amount of
patriotic newsreels would put the Union Jack jigsaw together
again. From then on I was slightly suspicious of all British
adults.

My closest friends were an English family called the
Kendall-Wards, who lived at the far end of Amherst Avenue,
and were a happy exception to every rule of expatriate
English life. During the holidays I would cycle over and
spend most of the day with them. There were three brothers,
whom I remember well, but it was the parents who made a
powerful and lasting impact on me. Mr Kendall-Ward was a
senior executive with the Shanghai Power Company, but he
and his wife were free spirits who rarely mixed on a social
level with other British residents. The father was a model
railway enthusiast, and the enclosed veranda on the first
floor, a room some thirty feet long, was filled with a vast landscape of tunnels, hills, villages, lakes and railway lines,
laid out on a waist-high platform fitted with trapdoors
through which he would emerge without warning to make
some track adjustment. Once he had filled this huge space he
began to colonise the nearby rooms off the veranda, building
narrow ledges around the walls which carried the miniature
railway lines ever deeper into the house.

Mrs Kendall-Ward presided over this friendly chaos, welcoming
and cheerful, surrounded by four Airedale dogs,
nursing a new baby and asking me about the latest news
from downtown Shanghai. She listened with apparent interest
as I told her in detail about a new French or Italian
warship moored off the Bund. She spoke fluent Chinese
to the amahs, an unheard-of skill that amazed me, and
addressed them by their names. Uniquely among Shanghai
residents, she employed only women servants, some six or
seven amahs. According to my mother, this was an act of
charity on the Kendall-Wards’ part – these middle-aged
spinsters would otherwise have found it difficult to survive.

The Kendall-Ward home was the complete opposite of 31
Amherst Avenue, and an influence that has lasted all my life.
My mother was amiable but distant with any friends I
brought home. Relations between parents and children were
far more formal in the 1930s and 1940s, and our house
reflected this, an almost cathedral-like space of polished
parquet floors and blackwood furniture. By contrast the
Kendall-Ward home was an untidy nest, full of barking dogs, arguing amahs and the sound of Mr Kendall-Ward’s power
saws slicing though plywood, the three brothers and myself
roller-skating through the rooms and generally running
wild. I knew that this was the right way to bring up children.
Appearances counted for nothing, and everyone was encouraged
to follow their own notions, however hare-brained. Mrs
Kendall-Ward openly breastfed her baby, something only
Chinese women did. If she was driving us around Shanghai
in the family Packard, and stopped to buy American comics
for her sons, she always included a comic for me, something
I noticed that neither my own mother nor any of the other
English mothers ever did. Her kindness and good nature I
remember vividly seventy years later. I was rarely unhappy at
home, but I was always happy at the Kendall-Wards, and I
think that I was aware of the difference at the time.

In 1937 the street spectacle that so enthralled a small English
boy was bathed in a far more chilling light. Led by its
military chiefs, and with the silent blessing of the Emperor,
Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. Its armies
seized all the coastal cities, including Shanghai, though they
did not enter the International Settlement. For several
months there was bitter fighting in the outlying areas of the
city, especially the Chapei and Nantao suburbs. Relentless
Japanese bombing and naval bombardment from their warships
in the Whangpoo river levelled large areas of Shanghai.
For the first time in the history of warfare a coordinated air,
sea and land assault was launched against Chiang Kai-shek’s
Chinese armies, who greatly outnumbered the Japanese, but
were poorly led by corrupt cronies of Chiang and his wife.

One bomb, dropped by accident from a Chinese aircraft,
struck the Great World Amusement Park near the racecourse
in the heart of the International Settlement, which was filled
with refugees from the outlying districts. The bomb killed a thousand people, at the time the largest number of casualties
ever caused by a single bomb. The Chinese pushed the
Japanese back towards the river, until they were fighting
from trenches that filled with water at high tide. But the
Japanese prevailed, and Chiang’s armies withdrew into the
vast interior of China. The new national capital became
Chungking, 900 miles to the west.

There was desperate fighting in the open countryside only
a mile from our home. At one point artillery shells from the
rival Chinese and Japanese batteries were passing over our
roof, and my parents closed the house and moved with the
servants to the comparative safety of a rented house in the
French Concession.

Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming
pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained
pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a
way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill
the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty
presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare
down at its canted floor. I could hear the bombing and gunfire
all around Shanghai, and see the vast pall of smoke that
lay over the city, but the drained pool remained apart. In the
coming years I would see a great many drained and half-
drained pools, as British residents left Shanghai for Australia
and Canada, or the assumed ‘safety’ of Hong Kong and
Singapore, and they all seemed as mysterious as that first
pool in the French Concession. I was unaware of the obvious symbolism that British power was ebbing away, because no
one thought so at the time, and faith in the British Empire
was at its jingoistic height. Right up to, and beyond, Pearl
Harbor it was taken for granted that the dispatch of a few
Royal Navy warships would send the Japanese scuttling back
to Tokyo Bay. I think now that the drained pool represented
the unknown, a concept that had played no part in my life.
Shanghai in the 1930s was full of extravagant fantasies, but
these spectacles were designed to promote a new hotel or
airport, a new department store, nightclub or dog-racing
track. Nothing was unknown.

Once the Chinese armies had withdrawn, life in Shanghai
resumed as if little had changed. The Japanese surrounded
the city, but made no attempt to confront the contingents of
British, French and American soldiers, or to interfere with
their warships in the river facing the Bund. The Japanese
cruiser
Idzumo
, a veteran of the Great War, sat in midstream,
but Shanghai’s hotels, bars and nightclubs were as busy as
ever.

With their villages and rice fields destroyed, thousands
of destitute peasants from the Yangtze basin flocked to
Shanghai and fought to enter the International Settlement.
They were viciously repelled by the Japanese soldiers and by
the British-run police force. I saw many Chinese who had
been bayoneted and lay on the ground among their bloodstained
rice sacks. Violence was so pervasive that my parents
and the various nannies never tried to shield me from all the brutality going on. I knew that the Japanese were capable of
losing their tempers and lunging with their fixed bayonets
into the crowds pressing around them. Later, when I was
eight or nine and began my long cycle rides around
Shanghai, I was careful to avoid provoking the Japanese
soldiers. They always waved me through the checkpoints, as
they did the Europeans and Americans. Sometimes they
would check our family Buick, but only when the chauffeur
was driving.

I assume that the Japanese leadership had decided that
Shanghai was of more value to them as a thriving commercial
and industrial centre, and were not yet prepared to
risk a confrontation with the Western powers. Most of my
earliest memories date from this period, and life in Shanghai
seemed to be an endless round of parties, lavish weddings,
swimming club galas, film shows laid on by the British
Embassy, military tattoos staged on the racecourse, glossy
film premieres, all under the bayonets of the Japanese soldiers
who guarded the perimeter checkpoints around the
Settlement.

As soon as the fighting ended, the Cathedral Boys’ School
moved from the cloisters of Shanghai Cathedral, not far
from the Great World Amusement Park, and took over part
of the Cathedral Girls’ School on the western edge of the
International Settlement. I could now cycle to school, and no
longer needed to be chauffeured in the family car, with the
nanny keeping an interfering watch over me. I began to take longer and longer rides around the city, using the excuse that
I was visiting the Kendall-Wards or other friends. I liked to
cycle down the Nanking Road, lined with Shanghai’s biggest
department stores, Sincere’s and the vast Sun and Sun Sun
emporiums, dodging in and out of the huge trams with their
clanging bells that forced their way through the rickshaws
and pedestrians.

Everywhere I turned, a cruel and lurid world surged
around me. Shanghai lived above all on the street, the beggars
showing their wounds, the gangsters and pickpockets,
the dying rattling their Craven A tins, the Chinese dragon
ladies in ankle-length mink coats who terrified me with their
stares, the hawkers wok-frying delicious treats which I could
never buy because I never carried any money, starving peasant
families and thousands of con men and crooks. Weird
quarter-tone music wailed from Chinese theatres and bars,
fireworks crackled around a wedding party, a radio blared
out the speeches of Generalissimo Chiang, interrupted by
commercials for a Japanese beer. I took all this in at a glance,
the polluted and exciting air I breathed. If they were in the
mood, the British soldiers in their sandbag emplacements
would invite me into their dark interior world, where they
lounged about cleaning their equipment. I liked these
Tommies with their strange accents I had never heard before,
and they let me clean their rifles and use the pull-throughs
to ream the rust from their barrels, then gave me a bronze
cap badge as a present. They told wonderfully broad stories of their service in India and Africa, and Shanghai to them
was just another name on the map. I explored almost every
corner of the International Settlement, and schoolfriends
and I would play games of hide-and-seek that covered the
whole city and could last for months. It amazes me now that
none of us ever came to any harm, and I assume that the
thousands of plain-clothes Chinese police agents in effect
kept watch over us, warning away any petty crook tempted
to steal our cycles or pull the shoes from our feet.