Authors: J. G. Ballard
On the whole, however, Lunghua seemed full of easygoing
and agreeable characters. What I liked most was that
everyone, of almost any age, could talk to anyone else.
Striding around E Block or the assembly hall with my
chessboard, I would be affably hailed as ‘Shanghai Jim’ (for
constantly telling anyone who would listen about some
strange Hardoon temple I had found on my cycle rides). I
would then settle down to a game of chess with a man of my
father’s age who might be an architect or cinema manager,
Cathay Hotel bartender or a former jockey. At the end of
the game, which generally involved the transfer from my
opponent of a goodly amount of internment camp wisdom, I might be lent an old copy of the
Saturday Evening Post
,
which I understood, or
Punch
, with its incomprehensible
humour that my tired mother would have to explain.
During the first year a host of camp activities took place –
amateur dramatics, with full-scale performances in the
dining hall of Noël Coward and Shakespeare plays, lighthearted
revues (‘We’re the Lunghua sophomores, we’re the
girls every boy adores, CAC don’t mean a thing to me, for
every Tuesday evening we go on a spree…’). I forget what
happened on Tuesday evenings, and there may have been
dances from which all children were excluded. CAC stood
for ‘Civilian Assembly Centre’, an exalted term for our
collection of run-down and half-ruined buildings.
Generally I would be somewhere in the audience, fascinated
by a lecture on Roman roads or airship design. My
father once delivered a lecture on ‘Science and the Idea of
God’, a tactful dismissal of the Almighty from human affairs,
which drew many of the English missionaries in the camp.
Until the day we left Lunghua I was frequently stopped by
one or other of the up-country parsons and told what an
excellent lecture it was, so
interesting
, and I wonder if any of
them or their high-minded wives had seen the point.
Since there were so many professionally trained men
in the camp – engineers, architects, bankers, industrial
chemists, dentists and doctors – there was no shortage of
lecturers. And, alas, no shortage of teachers for the camp
school that soon opened. A full-scale syllabus was set out, which met the requirements of the then School Certificate,
and we were taught maths, French, English and Latin, history
and general science. Since there were few books our
tuition was largely blackboard-driven, but I don’t think that
any of us fell behind our counterparts at school in wartime
England, and in some cases we were well ahead. I find it
difficult to explain this, but my guess is that there were far
fewer distractions in Lunghua than I imagined at the time,
for either teachers or pupils, and that we progressed rapidly
in the way that long-term convicted prisoners pass one
university degree after another.
Lunghua Camp held some 2000 internees, of whom 300
were children. Most of them were British, Dutch and
Belgian, but there was a group of thirty American merchant
seamen, captured on board an American freighter. As
civilians, they were not sent to a POW camp, and must have
realised their good luck. They passed their time loafing on
their beds in E Block, though now and then they would
rouse themselves and amble out to the assembly ground for
a game of softball. I liked them immensely, for their good
humour, verbal inventiveness and enormously laid-back
style. Life in their company was always interesting, and they
remained cheerful to the end, unlike many of the British
internees. They always seemed glad to see me, throwing back
the curtains of their miniature cubicles, and would go to
elaborate lengths to make me the butt of friendly practical
jokes, which I took in good part. Among their other virtues, the Americans had a substantial stock of magazines –
Life,
Time, Popular Mechanics,
Collier’s
– which I devoured, desperate
for the kind of hard information on which my
imagination fed.
What was happening, without my realising it at the time,
was that I was meeting a range of adults from whom my life
in Shanghai had screened me. This was nothing to do with
class in the English sense, but with the fact that pre-war
Shanghai attracted to its bars and hotel lobbies a number of
devious and unscrupulous characters who were very good
company, and often far more generous with a sweet potato
than the tight-fisted Church of England missionaries. Many
of these ‘rogues’, as my mother termed them, had well-
stocked minds (perhaps based on their extensive prison-cell
reading in England) and could come up with arresting ideas
about everything under the sun. Years of property and
financial scams, of rigged bets at jai alai games and the
Shanghai racecourse, had added salt to their easy wit. I hung
on every word, and even tried to model myself on them,
without success. When I first tried ‘the university of life’
on my mother she stared at me without speaking for a full
minute.
But I loved hearing adults talk together. I would sidle up
unnoticed to a group of G Block adults discussing the servant
problem in Shanghai, their last leaves in Hong Kong or
Singapore, the refusal by some fellow internee to do his share
of the lavatory-cleaning fatigue, pre-war gossip about Mrs So-and-so, until they noticed my keen ears and gleaming
eyes and ordered me to hop it.
What all these adults shared, of which I took full advantage,
was the crushing boredom of camp life. The war was far
away and the news we received, percolating through delivery
drivers and Red Cross visits, was months late. The Lunghua
internees were living in an eventless world, with little to
distract them other than the sound of a few Japanese planes
taking off from the nearby airfield. An hour’s chess with a
talkative 12-year-old was an hour less to endure, and even a
discussion about the relative merits of the Packard and the
Rolls-Royce could help the afternoon along.
The adults in the camp were also coming to terms with
the most significant change in their lives, almost on a par
with the war itself, and one which histories of internment
often overlook – the absence of alcohol. After years and
sometimes decades of heavy drinking (the core of social and
professional life in the 1930s), Lunghua Camp must have
functioned for its first months as a highly efficient health
spa. One serious hazard still remained: malaria. The
Lunghua area, with its stagnant paddy fields and canals, was
notorious for its malaria, though luckily the Ballard family
was immune. My mother later claimed that 50 per cent of
the internees caught malaria. This sounds high to me, but I
have seen official post-war estimates of 30 per cent.
Our food supply was a serious problem from the start.
Hungry children will eat anything, but my parents must have shuddered at the thought of another day’s meals. At no time
during the years of internment did we see milk, butter,
margarine, eggs or sugar. Our meals consisted of rice congee
(rice boiled into a liquid pulp), vegetable soup that concealed
one or two dice-sized pieces of gristly horse meat, a
hard black bread baked from what must have been godown
sweepings and filled with bits of rusty wire and stony grit,
and grey sweet potatoes, a cattle feed that I adored. Later
there was a cereal called cracked wheat, another cattle feed
that I took a great liking to. Somehow my parents and the
other adults forced this down, but I always had a strong
appetite, and to this day I find it difficult to leave food on my
plate, even if I dislike its taste.
In the last eighteen months of the war our rations fell
steeply. As we sat at the card table in our room one day,
pushing what my mother called ‘the weevils’ to the rim of
our plates of congee, my father decided that from then on we
should eat the weevils – we needed the protein. They were
small white slugs, and perhaps were maggots, a word my
mother preferred to avoid. It must have irritated my parents
when I regularly counted them before tucking in lustily –
a hundred or so was my usual score, forming a double
perimeter around my plate and visibly reducing my portion
of boiled rice.
A close friend of my father was a senior Shell executive
called Braidwood, who was chairman of the internees
committee that ran the camp administration. In the 1980s his widow sent me the typed minutes of the committee
meetings, some of which my father attended. These describe
a wide range of daily problems and there are copies of formal
letters addressed to the Japanese commandant and the
military officers who replaced him. They cover the general
health of the internees, abusive behaviour by the guards, the
lack of medicines, the scarcity of fuel for the drinking-water
boilers, the need for Red Cross supplies of clothing (much of
which was pilfered by the guards) and, above all, the inadequate
food rations – all problems in which the Japanese
military had not the slightest interest. According to
Braidwood’s records, the daily calorie count in 1944 was
approximately 1500, and fell sharply to 1300 during 1945. I
can only guess what fraction of that figure was represented
by the weevils.
I thrived in Lunghua, and made the most of my years there,
in the school report parlance of my childhood. My impression
is that, during the first year of internment, life in the
camp was tolerable for my parents and most of the other
adults. There were very few rows between the internees,
despite the cramped space, malaria mosquitoes and meagre
rations. Children went regularly to school, and there were
packed programmes of sporting and social events, language
classes and lectures. All this may have been a necessary
illusion, but for a while it worked, and sustained everyone’s
morale.
Hopes were still high that the war would soon be over, and
by the end of 1943 the eventual defeat of Germany seemed
almost certain. The commandant, Hyashi, was a civilised
man who did his best to meet the internees’ demands.
Almost a caricature short-sighted Japanese with a toothbrush
moustache, spectacles and slightly popping eyes, he
would cycle around Lunghua on a tandem bicycle with his small son, also in glasses, sitting on the rear saddle. He would
smile at the noisy British children, a feral tribe if there was
one, and struck up close relationships with members of the
camp committee. Among the documents Mrs Braidwood
sent me was a letter which Hyashi wrote to her husband
some time after he had been dismissed as commandant, in
which he describes (in English) his horse rides around
Shanghai and sends his warm regards. After the war my
father flew down to the war-crimes trials in Hong Kong and
testified as a witness for Hyashi, who was later acquitted and
released.
I also made friendships of a kind with several of the young
Japanese guards. When they were off duty I would visit them
in the staff bungalows fifty yards from G Block, and they
would allow me to sit in their hot tubs and then wear their
kendo armour. After handing me a duelling sword, a fearsome
weapon of long wooden segments loosely strung
together, they would encourage me to fence with them. Each
bout would last twenty seconds and involved me being
repeatedly struck about the helmet and face mask, which I
could scarcely see through, every dizzying blow being
greeted with friendly cheers from the watching Japanese.
They too were bored, only a few years older than me, and
had little hope of seeing their families again soon, if ever. I
knew they could be viciously brutal, especially when acting
under the orders of their NCOs, but individually they were
easy-going and likeable. Their military formality and never-surrender ethos were of course very impressive to a 13-year-old
looking for heroes to worship.
For me, the most important consequence of internment
was that for the first time in my life I was extremely close to
my parents. I slept, ate, read, dressed and undressed within a
few feet of them in the same small room, in many ways like
the poorer Chinese families for whom I had felt so sorry in
Shanghai. But I revelled in this closeness, which I assume has
been a central part of human behaviour throughout most of
its evolution. Lying in bed at night I could, if I wanted to,
reach out and take my mother’s hand, though I never did. In
the early days when there was still electric power my mother
would read late into the night, hidden inside her mosquito
net only a few feet away, as my father and sister slept in their
beds behind us. One night a passing Japanese officer spotted
the light through the home-made blackout curtain. He burst
into the room, barely a foot from me, drew his sword and
slashed away the mosquito net above my mother’s head, then
thrashed the light bulb into fragments and vanished without
a word. I remember the strange silence of people woken in
the nearby rooms, listening to his footsteps as he disappeared
into the night.
Somehow my mother survived, but she and my father
struck up few close friendships with the other G Block
internees. Though all had children, the families kept their
distance from each other, presumably to maintain their
privacy, a desperately short commodity when an evening curfew was introduced and we were confined to quarters for
the hours of darkness.
But I flourished in all this intimacy, and I think the years
together in that very small room had a profound effect on
me and the way I brought up my own children. Perhaps the
reason why I have lived in the same Shepperton house for
nearly fifty years, and to the despair of everyone have always
preferred make-do-and-mend to buying anew, even when
I could easily afford it, is that my small and untidy house
reminds me of our family room in Lunghua.
I realise now just how formal English life could be in the
1930s, 40s and 50s for its professional families. The children
of doctors, lawyers and company directors rarely saw their
fathers. They lived in large houses where no one shared a
bedroom, they never saw their parents dressing or undressing,
never saw them brush their teeth or even take off a
watch. In pre-war Shanghai I would occasionally wander
into my parents’ bedroom and see my mother brushing her
hair, a strange and almost mysterious event. I rarely saw my
father without a jacket and tie well into the 1950s. The vistas
of polished furniture turned a family home into a deserted
museum, with a few partly colonised rooms where people
slept alone, read and bathed alone, and hung their clothes in
private wardrobes, along with their emotions, hopes and
dreams.