Miracles of Life (5 page)

My earliest childhood writings began in the late 1930s,
perhaps as a response to the greater tension I sensed among
the adults around me. The outbreak of war in Europe and, later, the fall of France left my parents distracted and less
interested in what I was doing. My sister, aged three, irritated
me immensely, and I tried to devise entire days when I never
set eyes on her. Breakfast was always a problem, with school
deciding when I sat down to my mango and scrambled egg,
and having to endure my sister’s babbling across the table.
With a small boy’s logic, I took advantage of Mr Kendall-Ward’s
carpentry room to construct a large plywood screen
which I placed in the centre of the dining table. I equipped it
with a spyhole through which I could ferociously keep watch
on my astonished sister, and a miniature hatch cover that
I would flick into place when she noticed my staring eye.
Amazingly, my parents took all this with good humour, but
they drew the line when I joined them for lunch with friends
and arrived dragging my huge screen, which I urged No. 2
Boy to set up on the table.

But clearly I needed to be alone. I was always a keen storyteller,
and enjoyed school essays when there was a free choice
and I could describe some important event, real or imaginary.
At the Cathedral School the standard penalty for small
infringements was ‘lines’, which involved copying out a set
number of pages from a worthy book we were studying. So
it would be ‘Maxted, five pages; Ballard, eight pages,’ a considerable
chore on top of one’s regular homework. The
choice of text would usually be one of the Victorian writers
in the school library – G.A. Henty, Dickens (we read
A Tale
of Two Cities
, which I loathed for its deep gloom), or Charles Kingsley. One evening at home, laboriously transcribing
endless paragraphs from Kingsley’s
Westward Ho!
, a tale
about the Spanish Main, it occurred to me that I could get
along much more quickly if I invented the story and text
myself. So I wrote a swashbuckling pirate yarn. Like all the
boys, I took it for granted that the masters never read our
lines, but the day after handing in my penalty pages the
Reverend Matthews pointed sternly to me in front of the
scripture class and said: ‘Next time, Ballard, don’t copy your
lines from some trashy novel…’ This was my first review,
and recognition of a kind, and was a spur to more efforts for
my own amusement. It may have set my fiction in its subversive
mode.

Bridge parties seemed to take place continuously at 31
Amherst Avenue, involving two foursomes of my mother’s
women friends. I would sit on the stairs, listening carefully to
the flow of bids – ‘One diamond, two hearts, three no
trumps, double…’ – utterly baffled by the apparent lack of
any logic in the sequences. Eventually, at the age of 10 or so,
I nagged my mother into explaining the rules of contract
bridge to me, including a few of the conventions, which were
a code within a code. So thrilled was I at grasping the mystery
of bridge that I decided to write a ‘book’ explaining the
game to anyone as baffled as I had been. I filled about half an
exercise book, furnishing it with diagrams in the approved
style, and I remember clearly that there was even a section on
‘psychic bidding’, nothing to do with ESP but a form of bluff. I haven’t played bridge for fifty years, but that little
explanatory text might well have given me a taste as a writer
for the decoding of mystery.

The summer holidays in Tsingtao came to an end, but I still
have strong memories of a pretty, almost Riviera-style beach
resort. Tsingtao had been a German naval base at the start of
the Great War, and in a small cove near our hotel were the
rotting hulls of two German submarines, lying with their
bows on the sand like rusting dinosaurs. The Germans had
built a huge network of forts into the cliffs, and these were a
popular tourist attraction. My mother and I joined one tour
group, and we were guided through the dark, cathedral-like
vaults. Immense lifts raised the heavy guns to the firing
platforms, and through the gloom of damp concrete I could
see upper galleries that gave way to further galleries and
observation posts, and later reminded me of Piranesi’s
Prisons
. The Royal Navy bombarded the forts before its capture
of Tsingtao, and the Chinese guides were very proud of
the bloody handprints which they claimed were those of
German gunners driven mad by the British bombardment.

My memories of Tsingtao are extremely pleasant, but my
mother often told me that when I was a baby (in the summer
of 1931 or 1932) the amah pushing my pram missed her
footing on the grassy slope above the cliffs and lost control
of the pram. It sped downhill towards the cliff ’s edge, where a chance British visitor ran forward and caught the pram
before it went over the edge. Presumably he reported back to
my mother at her hotel, though she never explained to me
why a middle-aged Chinese woman, hobbling on her bound
feet, should have been given charge of a large pram and told
to walk along a cliff edge. Hitchcock would have revelled in
the scene, but I think there is a simpler explanation. Parents
in the 1930s took what now seems a remarkably detached
view of their children, whose welfare if they could afford it
was assigned to servants, whatever the hazards. My parents
had been born in the first decade of the 20th century, long
before antibiotics and public health concerns for vitamin-
enriched foods, clean air and water. Childhood, for families
of any income, was a gamble with disease and early death.
All this devalued the entire experience of childhood, and
emphasised the importance of being adult, an achievement
in its own right. Children were an appendage to the parents,
somewhere between the servants and an obedient labrador,
and were never seen as a significant measure of a family’s
health or the centre of its life. My mother claimed not to
have known of my dangerous cycle trips around Shanghai,
but many of her friends recognised me and waved from their
cars. Perhaps they too felt that it was scarcely worth mentioning.
And perhaps my mother was paying me a compliment
when she described how I managed to survive at the
cliff ’s edge.

My father, James Ballard, was born in 1902 and brought up
in Blackburn, Lancashire. I never met either of his parents,
who died in the 1930s. My father rarely talked about his
childhood, and I think that by the time of the Second World
War he had separated himself from his Blackburn background,
seeing it as part of an exhausted England that he was
glad to leave in 1929. He became a much-travelled businessman,
a lifelong admirer of the scientific world view and an
enthusiast of all things American.

But he remained a Lancashireman to the end, loving tripe,
Blackpool and Lancashire comedians. My mother Edna described
his own mother as very warm and maternal, and this
may have given him the confidence to leave England and see
the world. My impression is that family life was prosperous
and happy, but he told me once that he had fierce arguments
with his father when he left Blackburn Grammar School and

My father, James Ballard, in Shanghai in 1946
.

decided to work for a science degree rather than enter the
family drapery business. He believed in the power of science
to create a better world, and was proud of his first-class
honours degree from London University. He was always
optimistic and confident, was a great ballroom dancer and
even won a prize in a competition held in the Blackpool
Tower ballroom.

Most of his memories of Lancashire before and after the First World War seemed fairly bleak, and he would shake his
head as he described the dreadful poverty. Eating an apple as
he left school, he was often followed by working-class boys
badgering him for the core. He was a strong billiards and
bridge player, and was interested in wines and European
food. In Shanghai he was almost the only person I knew who
was interested in Chinese history and customs. He told me
that he once sang solo treble in Manchester cathedral. My
impression is that he was a popular and outgoing figure
in Blackburn, and later in Shanghai, something that, as an
introvert, he achieved by an effort of will.

My father joined the Calico Printers Association, the textile
combine that was then the ICI of the cotton world, in the
mid 1920s. He had taken his degree in chemistry, the science
that had transformed the printing and finishing of textiles,
and he often enthused to me about the brilliant work of
the great German chemists in the dyestuffs industry. By the
1920s the CPA found that Lancashire cotton could no longer
compete in the world’s markets with locally produced cotton
goods, in particular with the output of the Japanese mills in
Shanghai, which dominated the huge China market. The
CPA set up an overseas subsidiary in the city, and my father
was sent out in 1929 to run its operation there, the China
Printing and Finishing Company.

After the war he stayed on in Shanghai, and was present
when the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse-tung seized
the city in 1949. Under Chinese supervision he continued to run China Printing, but when the CPA head office in
Manchester refused to remit any further funds, my father
was put on trial. He told me that he was able to quote
numerous passages from Marx and Engels in his defence,
and so impressed the Communist peasant judges that they
dismissed the charges against him. In 1950, after a long
journey across China, he reached Canton, and crossed to
Hong Kong.

On returning to England he left the CPA and became a
consultant specialising in pharmaceutical textiles. He retired
with my mother to the New Forest, and died of cancer in
1967.

My mother was born in West Bromwich, near Birmingham,
in 1905, and died aged 93 in Claygate, Surrey, in 1999. Her
parents, Archibald and Sarah Johnstone, were lifelong
teachers of music. During the year that I lived with them,
after my mother and sister returned to Shanghai in 1947, two
practice pianos were going all day as a series of pupils came
and went. When I first met them, in early 1946, after landing
in Southampton, they were both in their late sixties, and
seemed to be living relics of the Victorian world. With their
rigid, intolerant minds, they never relaxed, hating the post-war
Labour government, uninterested in my sister or myself,
and barely interested in my mother and her wartime

My mother, Edna Ballard, in Shanghai in 1936
.

experiences in a Japanese camp. Life was intensely narrow
for them, living in a large, three-storey house where the
rooms were always dark, filled with heavy, uncomfortable
furniture and interior doors with stained-glass panels. Food
rationing was in force, but everything seemed to be rationed,
the air we breathed, hope of a better world, and the brief
glimpses of the sun. Even as a boy I wondered how my
mother and her sister, both lively and strong-willed women, had ever managed to bloom as teenage girls.

Yet in later years my mother told me that her father had
been something of a rebel in his younger days, and before his
marriage had scandalised his family by giving up his musical
training and forming a band, which played at dances and
weddings. I met him at the worst time, when England was
exhausted by the war. There had been heavy bombing in the
Birmingham area, and I suspect that they felt my mother’s
years in Lunghua were a holiday by comparison. The war
had made them mean, as it made a lot of the English mean.
I think they distrusted me on sight. When my grandmother,
a small and ungenerous woman, first showed me the single
bathroom in this large, gloomy house I blotted my copybook
for ever by asking: ‘Is this my bathroom?’