Authors: J. G. Ballard
Eventually the men were released, but still no one knew if
the war had ended. A few days later we heard of Hirohito’s
broadcast, calling on Japanese forces everywhere to lay down
their arms, but we were all unsure whether they would obey
him, even when the Japanese guards finally drove away from
Lunghua and left us to ourselves. The bombing raids had
ceased, but Japanese military units still occupied Shanghai
and the surrounding countryside.
It was several weeks before American forces arrived in
strength to take control of Shanghai. August 1945 formed a
strange interregnum when we were never wholly certain that
the war had ended, a sensation that stayed with me for
months and even years. To this day as I doze in an armchair
I feel the same brief moment of uncertainty.
* * *
I stayed in the camp, waiting until I was sure that the
Japanese had surrendered. All sense of community spirit had
left Lunghua, and nothing seemed to matter any more. The
school had closed, and children played their skipping games
while their mothers abandoned the family washing on the
lines behind G Block. But the water from the Bubbling Well
station was cold, and the Red Cross sent a daily tanker filled
with drinking water to the camp, along with enough rations
to keep us going. Clearly, though, the camp’s reason for
existence had passed. I wandered around the ruined
buildings with Cyril Goldbert, listening to him describe the
Shakespeare roles he would soon be playing, ‘his’ Hamlet,
Othello and Macbeth, aware that none of us in Lunghua had
any role at all.
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.
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 with 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.