Miracles of Life (9 page)

Lunghua Camp may have been a prison of a kind, but it
was a prison where I found freedom. My parents were always at hand to answer any query that crossed my mind – a
difficulty with my French prep, the existence or otherwise of
God, or the meaning of ‘you play on my mistakes’, a phrase
uttered sagely by my adult chess opponents when they were
on the point of losing. In no sense did I think of myself as a
misfit (which was certainly true once I came to England in
1946), and nor did anyone else, as far as I can remember. In
many ways I was the opposite of a misfit, and adapted too
well to the camp. One of my chess partners, a likeable architect
named Cummings with a haemophiliac son who
became a huge success in Hong Kong after the war, once
remarked: ‘Jamie, you’ll miss Lunghua when you leave…’

Until I arrived in England I had been lucky to have a happy
childhood, and any shocks that shaped my character came
not from my family but from the outside world – the sudden
scene-shifting I witnessed in 1937 and 1941. If anything, the
years in Lunghua offered the first stability I had known since
I had been a small child, a stability that the adult internees
around me had done little or nothing to create. I felt fairly
sceptical about the adult world and the notions of good
sense and decisive thought promoted by my parents and
teachers. War, I knew, was an irrational business, and the
sensible predictions of architects, doctors and managing
directors had a marked tendency to be wrong.

I have given a general picture of Lunghua Camp in my novel
Empire of the Sun
, which is partly autobiographical
and partly fictional, though many incidents are described as
they occurred. At the same time, I accept that the novel is
based on the memories of a teenage boy, who responded
more warmly to the good cheer of the American sailors than
to the rather torpid Brits, many of whom had held modest
jobs in Shanghai and probably regretted ever leaving
England.

In my novel the most important break with real events is
the absence from Lunghua of my parents. I thought hard
about this, but I felt that it was closer to the psychological
and emotional truth of events to make ‘Jim’ effectively a war
orphan. There is no doubt that a gradual estrangement from
my parents, which lasted to the end of their lives, began in
Lunghua Camp. There was never any friction or antagonism,
and they did their best to look after me and my sister.
Despite the food shortages in the last year, the bitterly cold
winters (we lived in unheated concrete buildlings) and the
uncertainties of the future, I was happier in the camp than I
was until my marriage and children.

At the same time I felt slightly apart from my parents by
the time the war ended. One reason for our estrangement
was that their parenting became passive rather than active –
they had none of the usual levers to pull, no presents or
treats, no say in what we ate, no power over how we lived or
ability to shape events. Like all the adults, they were nervous
of the highly unpredictable Japanese and Korean guards, they were often unwell, and always short of food and
clothing. At one point, when my shoes had fallen to tatters,
my father gave me a pair of heavy leather golfing shoes with
metal studs, but the sound of me stamping down the stone
corridors in G Block brought the internees swiftly to
attention outside their doors, assuming that the Japanese
had called a sudden inspection. I would find myself desperately
trying to get to the Ballard room before anyone
noticed who was actually inspecting them. Needless to say, I
soon had to return the shoes to my father, and G Block was
able to relax.

Thoughts of food filled every hour, as they did for the
other teenage boys in Lunghua. I don’t remember my
parents ever giving me their own food, and I’m sure that no
other parents shared their rations with their children. All
mothers, in prison camps or famine regions, know that their
own health is vital to the survival of their children. A child
who has lost its parent is in desperate danger, and the parents
in Lunghua must have realised that they needed all the
strength they had for the uncertain years ahead. But I
scavenged what I could, stealing tomatoes and cucumbers
from any unwatched vegetable plot. The camp was, in effect,
a huge slum, and in any slum it is the teenage boys who run
wild. I have never looked down on the helpless parents in
sink housing estates unable to control their children. I
remember my own parents in the camp, unable to warn,
chide, praise or promise.

All the same I regret the estrangement, and realise how
much I have missed. The experience of seeing adults under
stress is an education in itself, but bought, sadly, at too heavy
a price. When my mother, sister and I sailed for England at
the end of 1945 my father remained in Shanghai, returning
for a brief visit to England in 1947, when we toured Europe
in his large American car. I was 17, about to go to
Cambridge, unsure whether to be a doctor or a writer. My
father was a friendly but already distant figure who played
no part in my decision. When he returned for good in 1950
he had been away from England for more than twenty years,
and the advice he gave me about English life was out of date.
I went my own way, ignoring him when he strongly urged
me against becoming a writer. I had spent five years learning
to decode the strange, introverted world of English life, while
he was happiest dealing with his professional colleagues in
Switzerland and America. He telephoned to congratulate me
on my first novel,
The Drowned World
, pointing out one
or two minor errors that I was careful not to correct. My
mother never showed the slightest interest in my career until
Empire of the Sun
, which she thought was about her.

As an itinerant chess player and magazine hunter, I got to
know a huge number of Lunghua internees, but few
reappeared in my later life. One was the headmaster of
the camp school, a Methodist missionary called George Osborne. Knowing of my father’s strongly agnostic and pro
scientific beliefs, he generously urged him to send me to his
old school, The Leys in Cambridge, founded by well-to-do
Methodists from the north of England and very much
science-oriented. Osborne was an unworldly figure, blinking
through his glasses and tireless in his efforts to keep the
camp together, and the best kind of practising Christian. His
wife and three children were in England, but once the war
ended his first thoughts were for his Chinese flock at their
upcountry mission station, to which he returned rather than
sail home. After a year there he paid a brief visit to England,
taking me out to lunch whenever he was in Cambridge. By
chance, in the 1960s, I became close friends with a north
London doctor, Martin Bax, who edited a poetry magazine
with his wife Judy. A decade later I learned that Judy Bax was
the Reverend Osborne’s daughter. As she admitted, I knew
her father far more closely than she did.

Another Lunghua acquaintance was Cyril Goldbert, the
future Peter Wyngarde. Separated from his parents, he lived
with another family in G Block, and amused everyone with
his fey and extravagant manner. Theatre was his entire
world, and he played adult roles in the camp Shakespeare
productions, completely dominating the bank managers and
company directors who struggled to keep up with him. He
was four years older than me, and very witty company, with
a sophisticated patter I had rarely come across. He had never
been to England, but seemed to be on first-name terms with half of Shaftesbury Avenue, and was a mine of insider gossip
about the London theatre.

Cyril was very popular with the ladies, distributing the
most gallant flattery, and my mother always remembered
him with affection. ‘Oh, Cyril…’ she would chortle when
she saw him on television in the 1960s. Throughout her
life my mother had an active dislike of homosexuals,
understandable perhaps at a time when a conviction for
homosexual acts brought not just the prison cell but social
disgrace. Every married woman’s deep fear must have been
that husband, breadwinner and father of her children might
have a secret self in a carefully locked closet. When I was in
my late teens she saw me reading a collection of Oscar
Wilde’s plays, and literally prised the volume from my hands,
although I was already showing a keen interest in girls of my
age.

I once strolled with Cyril through some ruined buildings
on the outskirts of the camp, listening to him set out his
plans for his conquest of the West End. He tore a piece of
charcoal from a burnt roof beam, and with a flourish drew
on the wall what he said would be his stage name once he
returned to England: Laurence Templeton. A name wonderfully
of its time, and far grander than Peter Wyngarde. I
met him in the early fifties in the Mitre pub in Holland Park
Avenue in London, and he was in a poor way, with bad teeth
and tired eyes. But ten years later he achieved huge success,
not on stage but on television, as Jason King. I saw him in St James’s Park, camel-hair coat stylishly slung over an elegant
suit, a tilted homburg and dazzling teeth. I started to speak
to him but he cut me dead.

My parents’ memories of Lunghua were always much
harsher than my own. I was often hungry, but I revelled in
camp life, roaming everywhere, at the centre of a pack of
boys my own age, playing chess with bored internees in the
men’s huts and quizzing them between moves about the
world. At the same time I knew nothing about the progress
of the war, and our likely fate at the hands of the Japanese.

Occasional Red Cross supplies kept us going, but the
adults must have been weak and demoralised, with no end in
sight to the war. Many years later, my mother told me that in
1944 there were strong rumours relayed from the Swiss
neutrals in Shanghai that the Japanese high command
planned to close the camp and march us all up-country,
where they would dispose of us. The Japanese armies in
China, millions strong, were falling back to the coast, and
intended to make their last stand near the mouth of the
Yangtze against the expected American landings. This must have deeply alarmed my parents and other adults in the
know, however uncertain the rumours.

Unaware of all this, I went on wheedling tattered copies of
Life
and
Popular Mechanics
from the American sailors in E
Block, setting pheasant traps (we never caught a bird) and
flirting with the skinny but attractive teenage girls in G Block
who had grown into puberty with me. Fortunately the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs brought the war to an
abrupt end. Like my parents, and everyone else who lived
through Lunghua, I have long supported the American
dropping of the bombs. Prompted by Emperor Hirohito’s
surrender broadcast, the still-intact Japanese war machine
ground to a complete halt within days, so saving millions of
Chinese lives, as well as our own. For a hint of what might
otherwise have happened, we can look at the vicious battle
for Manila, the only large city in the Pacific War fought for
by the Americans, where some 100,000 Philippine civilians
died.

By the summer of 1944 the conditions in Lunghua Camp
had changed markedly for the worse. Japanese forces in the
Pacific were falling back under fierce attacks by American air
and naval power, and US submarines were taking a heavy toll
of Japanese shipping to and from the home islands. Japanese
cities were one by one being devastated by American
bombers. The Tokyo high command could barely feed its
own soldiers, let alone the groups of civilian internees
scattered throughout the Far East.

The behaviour of the Japanese guards in Lunghua became
more brutal as Japan faced defeat. Far from wanting to
ingratiate themselves, the guards would lash out at the male
internees during the roll-calls. The Japanese soldiers making
up the original force of guards were replaced by older
recruits, and then by Korean conscripts who had themselves
been brutalised by the Japanese NCOs, and were particularly
vicious.

After the war we learned that throughout our internment
there had been three clandestine radios in the camp, and that
an inner group of internees were closely following the
progress of the war. Sensibly, they kept their news to themselves,
for fear that the few collaborators in the camp would
tip off the guards. A married Englishwoman in G Block
spoke fluent Japanese and worked in the commandant’s
office, and she was widely suspected of passing on information
to the Japanese, knowingly or otherwise, perhaps in
return for medicines for her sick son.

I assume that she knew nothing about the camp radios,
but the encouraging news about the war may have prompted
the first escape from the camp in 1944. A group of five or six
men stepped through the wire and set off for the Chinese
lines 400 miles away, and they were followed by others. One
group made it to freedom, but others were betrayed by
Chinese villagers terrified of ferocious reprisals from the
Japanese.

An immediate result was the sacking of the camp commandant, Hyashi. Lunghua was placed under the direct
command of the Japanese military, and a harsher regime
followed. The food ration was cut, and a second inner
barbed-wire fence was built around the central cluster of
buildings that housed the unmarried internees. The gates
were shut at 7 o’clock, which meant that G Block was cut off
from much of camp life in the evenings. Presumably the
Japanese decided that married men with children were not
likely to escape. Roll-calls were stepped up, and took place
twice daily, when we stood wearily in the corridor outside
our rooms as the guards laboriously checked that we were all
present. Whenever there was a major infraction of camp
regulations, or a significant defeat of their forces in the
Pacific, the new commandant would impose a curfew and
close the camp school, sometimes for two or three days, a
real punishment for the parents forced to endure their
fractious children.