Miracles of Life

Shanghai to Shepperton
An Autobiography

I was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November
1930, after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was
slightly built and slim-hipped, liked to describe to me in
later years, as if this revealed something about the larger
thoughtlessness of the world. Over dinner she would often
tell me that my head was badly deformed during birth, and
I feel that for her this partly explained my wayward character
as a teenager and young man (doctor friends say that there is
nothing remarkable about such a birth). My sister Margaret,
born in September 1937, was delivered by Caesarean, but I
never heard my mother reflect on its wider significance.

We lived at 31 Amherst Avenue, in the western suburbs of
Shanghai, about eight hundred yards beyond the boundary
of the International Settlement, but within the larger area
controlled by the Shanghai police. The house is still standing
and in 1991, when I last visited Shanghai, was the library of
the state electronics institute. The International Settlement,
with the French Concession of nearly the same size lying along its southern border, extended from the Bund, the line
of banks, hotels and trading houses facing the Whangpoo
river, for about five miles to the west. Almost all the city’s
department stores and restaurants, cinemas, radio stations
and nightclubs were in the International Settlement, but
there were large outlying areas of Shanghai where its
industries were located. The five million Chinese inhabitants
had free access to the Settlement, and most of the people
I saw on its streets were Chinese. I think there were some
fifty thousand non-Chinese – British, French, Americans,
Germans, Italians, Swiss and Japanese, and a large number of
White Russian and Jewish refugees.

Shanghai was not a British colony, as most people
imagine, and nothing like Hong Kong and Singapore, which
I visited before and after the war and which seemed little
more than gunboat anchorages, refuelling bases for the navy
rather than vibrant commercial centres, and over-reliant on
the pink gin and the loyal toast. Shanghai was one of the
largest cities in the world, as it is now, 90 per cent Chinese
and 100 per cent Americanised. Bizarre advertising displays
– the honour guard of fifty Chinese hunchbacks outside the
film premiere of
The Hunchback of
Notre
Dame
sticks in my
mind – were part of the everyday reality of the city, though I
sometimes wonder if everyday reality was the one element
missing from the city.

With its newspapers in every language and scores of radio
stations, Shanghai was a media city before its time, celebrated as the Paris of the Orient and the ‘wickedest city in
the world’, though as a child I knew nothing about the thousands
of bars and brothels. Unlimited venture capitalism
rode in gaudy style down streets lined with beggars showing
off their sores and wounds. Shanghai was important
commercially and politically, and for many years was the
principal base of the Chinese Communist Party. There were
fierce street battles in the 1920s between the Communists
and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces, followed in the
1930s by frequent terrorist bombings, barely audible, I
suspect, against the background music of endless night-
clubbing, daredevil air shows and ruthless money-making.
Meanwhile, every day, the trucks of the Shanghai Municipal
Council roamed the streets collecting the hundreds of bodies
of destitute Chinese who had starved to death on Shanghai’s
pavements, the hardest in the world. Partying, cholera and
smallpox somehow coexisted with a small English boy’s
excited trips in the family Buick to the Country Club
swimming pool. Fierce earaches from the infected water
were assuaged by unlimited Coca-Cola and ice cream, and
the promise that the chauffeur would stop on the way back
to Amherst Avenue to buy the latest American comics.

Looking back, and thinking of my own children’s
upbringing in Shepperton, I realise that I had a lot to take in
and digest. Every drive through Shanghai, sitting with the
White Russian nanny Vera (supposedly to guard against a
kidnap attempt by the chauffeur, though how much of her body this touchy young woman would have laid down for
me I can’t imagine), I would see something strange and
mysterious, but treat it as normal. I think this was the only
way in which I could view the bright but bloody kaleidoscope
that was Shanghai – the prosperous Chinese businessmen
pausing in the Bubbling Well Road to savour a thimble
of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to
a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits
beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches;
beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by (I
used to wonder what they would be like as my nanny, compared
with the morose Vera, who kept a sullen grip on my
overactive mind).

Nevertheless, Shanghai struck me as a magical place, a
self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far
behind. There was always something odd and incongruous
to see: a vast firework display celebrating a new nightclub
while armoured cars of the Shanghai police drove into a
screaming mob of rioting factory workers; the army of
prostitutes in fur coats outside the Park Hotel, ‘waiting for
friends’ as Vera told me. Open sewers fed into the stinking
Whangpoo river, and the whole city reeked of dirt, disease
and a miasma of cooking fat from the thousands of Chinese
food vendors. In the French Concession the huge trams
clanked at speed through the crowds, their bells tolling.
Anything was possible, and everything could be bought and
sold. In many ways, it seems like a stage set, but at the time

Myself in Shanghai in 1934
.

it was real, and I think a large part of my fiction has been an
attempt to evoke it by means other than memory.

At the same time there was a strictly formal side to
Shanghai life – wedding receptions at the French Club, where I was a page and first tasted cheese canapés, so disgusting
that I thought I had caught a terrible new disease.
There were race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse, for
which everyone dressed up, and various patriotic gatherings
at the British Embassy on the Bund, ultra-formal occasions
that involved hours of waiting and nearly drove me mad. My
parents held elaborately formal dinner parties, where all the
guests were probably drunk and which usually ended for
me when some cheerful colleague of my father’s found me
hiding behind a sofa, feasting on conversations I hadn’t a
hope of grasping. ‘Edna, there’s a stowaway on board…’

My mother told me of one reception in the early 1930s
when I was introduced to Madame Sun Yat-sen, widow of
the man who overthrew the Manchus and became China’s
first president. But I think my parents probably preferred her
sister, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, close friend of America and
American big business. My mother was then a pretty young
woman in her thirties, and a popular figure at the Country
Club. She was once voted the best-dressed woman in
Shanghai, but I’m not sure if she took that as a compliment,
or whether she really enjoyed her years in Shanghai (roughly
1930 to 1948). Years later, in her sixties, she became a veteran
long-haul air traveller, and visited Singapore, Bali and Hong
Kong, but not Shanghai. ‘It’s an industrial city,’ she
explained, as if that closed the matter.

I suspect that my father, with his passion for H.G. Wells
and his belief in modern science as mankind’s saviour, enjoyed Shanghai far more. He was always telling the
chauffeur to slow down when we passed significant local
landmarks – the Radium Institute, where cancer would be
cured; the vast Hardoon estate in the centre of the International
Settlement, created by an Iraqi property tycoon
who was told by a fortune-teller that if he ever stopped
building he would die, and who then went on constructing
elaborate pavilions all over Shanghai, many of them structures
with no doors or interiors. In the confusion of traffic
on the Bund he pointed out ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen, the then
famous bodyguard of Chinese warlords, and I gazed with all
a small boy’s awe at a large American car with armed men
standing on the running-boards, Chicago-style. Before the
war my father often took me across the Whangpoo river to
his company’s factory on the eastern bank – I remember still
the fearsome noise of the spinning and weaving sheds, the
hundreds of massive Lancashire looms each watched by a
teenage Chinese girl, ready to stop her machine if a single
thread was broken. These peasant girls had long been deafened
by the din, but they were their families’ only support,
and my father opened a school next to the mill where the
illiterate girls could learn to read and write and have some
hope of becoming office clerks.