Miracles of Life (13 page)

In short, did the English pay a fearful price for the system of self-delusions that underpinned almost everything in
their lives? The question seemed to leap from the shabby
streets and bomb sites when I first came to England, and
played a large role in the difficulty I had settling down here.
It fed into my troubled sense of who I was, and encouraged
me to think of myself as a lifelong outsider and maverick. It
probably steered me towards becoming a writer devoted to
predicting and, if possible, provoking change. Change, I felt,
was what England desperately needed, and I still feel it.

Life at an English boarding school was part of the
continuum of strangeness that made up my adolescence. I
once said that The Leys reminded me of Lunghua Camp,
though the food was worse. In fact, by the standards
prevalent among English public schools, The Leys was
liberal and progressive. It had been founded in 1875 by rich
Nonconformists from the north of England, who wanted
the ethos and discipline of a public school without the
mummery and flummery of the Church of England. Most of
the founders were industrialists, and were strong supporters
of science. The large science block at The Leys was
remarkably well-equipped, with superb physics, chemistry
and biology labs, so much so that I rather looked down on
the tired and broken equipment I later found in the
University science laboratories. The school had a large swimming pool, the only indoor pool in Cambridge when
I was there, regularly used for University events. There was
no fagging, and though there was chapel twice a day, many
of the Sunday sermons were given by lay preachers, often
well-known scientists. The Methodist message was never
blatant.

Another advantage was that the school was in Cambridge.
Most public schools existed in an isolated world of their
own, but The Leys was within walking distance of the centre
of Cambridge. This was important to me, and meant that I
was able to visit friends from the classes above mine who had
entered the University a year ahead of me. It gave me an early
taste of college life, and access to excellent bookshops, specialist
journals and student magazines I would never have
seen otherwise.

Above all, there was the Arts Cinema, where I saw virtually
the entire repertory of French, Italian, Swedish and German
films screened in England after the war. I remember Carné’s
Les Enfants du Paradis
, a wonderful romp of wartime collaborators
led by Arletty; Clouzot’s
Le
Corbeau
and
Manon
(with the divine child-woman Cécile Aubry, apparently no
older than I was and impossible to get out of my 17-year-old
head); Cocteau’s
Orphée
, with another ‘divine’, María
Casares, incarnating Death: I was more than ready to die as
I recuperated in the Copper Kettle, a coffee shop on King’s
Parade, before going back to cottage pie and treacle pudding
in the school dining hall; Wolfgang Staudte’s
The Murderers
are Among Us
, the first revisionist German film, powerful but
hollow.

I also liked American films, especially the B-movies that
formed the lower part of a double bill. This was the heyday
of film noir, and I must have sneaked away on our free afternoons
to see everything that the Hollywood studios could
produce. I devoured
Double Indemnity
(Barbara Stanwyck
reminded me in some ways of my mother and her bridge-
playing friends, desperate women trying to break out of their
housewifely roles) and Robert Mitchum in
Out of the Past
,
but my favourite films of all were the ultra-low-budget crime
and gangster movies. These were often far more interesting
than the star vehicle topping the bill. Out of the simplest
materials – two cars, a cheap motel, a gun and a tired
brunette – they conjured up a hard and unsentimental image
of the primeval city, a psychological space that existed first
and foremost in the characters’ minds.

Writing my short stories in idle moments during evening
prep, I knew that the post-war film offered a serious challenge
to any aspirant writer. The novel thrived on static
societies, which the novelist could examine like an entomologist
labelling a tray of butterflies. But too much had
happened to me, and to the boys sitting at the desks around
me, in the wartime years. Continuous upheavals had
unsettled family life: fathers were away in the Middle East or
in the Pacific, mothers had taken on jobs and responsibilities
that had redefined who they felt they were. People had memories of bombing raids and beachheads, endless hours
of queueing and waiting in provincial railway stations that
were impossible to convey to anyone not actually there. I
never talked about my life in Shanghai or internment in
Lunghua even to my closest friends. Too much had happened
for even a race of novelists to digest. But I persisted
with my short sketches, gnawing away at the inner bone.

Despite its modern ways, The Leys was the model for the
very old-fashioned public school shown in the film
Goodbye,
Mr Chips
, based on a novel by an Old Leysian, the bestselling
writer James Hilton (author also of the Shangri-La novel,
Lost Horizon
). Mr Chips was modelled on a master named
Balgarnie, a familiar figure around the school during my
years there. When Hollywood made its version of the novel,
with Robert Donat, they chose a deeply self-enclosed, ivy-
clad Victorian institution far removed in spirit from The
Leys, all Gothic spires and hallowed cloisters.

In fact, the masters at The Leys were remarkably open-
minded. They lived in Cambridge, many had served in the
war, and none of them would have wanted to bring a sentimental
tear to the eyes of the boys they taught. The English
master, who had the closest access to the turmoil inside my
head, never chided me for the strange notions I set out in my
essays, which were virtually short stories, and encouraged
me to read as widely as I could.

As I entered the Science VIth at 16 I was spending more
and more of my time in the school library. The careers master assumed that I would go on to Cambridge University,
but I was still not sure what subject I would study. My
parents were in Shanghai, and I was thrown onto myself.
My grandparents were in many ways as remote from me as
the Chinese servants at 31 Amherst Avenue. Any kind of
discussion was impossible. They were obsessed with the
iniquity of the post-war Labour government, which they
genuinely believed to have carried out a military putsch to
seize control of the country, using the postal votes of
millions of overseas servicemen. If I made the mildest
comment in praise of the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee,
my grandfather would stare silently at me, his face turning
bright pink and then purple. Yet all around him was the
desperate poverty of the Black Country, with some of the
most ill-housed and poorly educated people in western
Europe, still giving their lives after the war to maintain an
empire that had never been of the least benefit to them. My
grandfather’s attitude was common, and based less on feelings
of social class than on a visceral resistance to change.
Change was the enemy of everything he believed in.

I spent the long months of school holiday with them
reading relentlessly, sketching out ‘experimental’ short
stories, which usually proved the experiment had failed, and
going to the cinemas in Birmingham. I liked to go in the
afternoons, when the vast auditoriums were almost empty,
and sit in the front row of the circle, the closest possible
communion with the world of the Hollywood screen. I avoided English films, apart from a select few –
A Matter of
Life and Death
, a posthumous fantasy in which a ‘dead’ pilot
walks ashore into an England he barely recognises, a
predicament with which I totally identified;
The Third Man
,
a masterpiece that might just as well have been set in
England (the bomb sites and black market, the air of compromise
and defeat, the sports jackets and shabby drinking
clubs straight out of Earls Court); and the wonderful Ealing
comedies, which sent up the English class system that everyone
secretly accepted, for reasons I have never understood.

The more I learned about English life, the stranger it
seemed, and I was unsure how I could shape my life to avoid
it. The contemporary novelists I read offered little help. I
enjoyed Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley
and George Orwell, but most English novelists were far too
‘English’. To save myself from the suffocations of English life,
I seized on American and European writers, the whole canon
of classic modernism – Hemingway, Dos Passos, Kafka,
Camus, Joyce and Dostoevsky. It was probably a complete
waste of time. I read far too much, far too early, long before
I had any experience of adult life: the worlds of work,
marriage and parenthood. I was focusing on the strong
mood of alienation that dominated these writers, and on
little else. In many ways I was rather lost, trying to find my
way through a dark and very grim funfair where none of the
lights would come on.

Then, at the age of 16, I discovered Freud and the surrealists, a stick of bombs that fell in front of me and destroyed
all the bridges that I was hesitating to cross.

Freud’s works, like Jung’s, were easy to come across in the
late 1940s, but reproductions of surrealist paintings were
extremely difficult to find. Many of the first paintings I saw
by Chirico, Ernst and Dalí were in books about abnormal
psychology, or in guides to modern philosophy, both very
popular in the years after Belsen and Hiroshima. Freud was
still something of an academic joke; the admissions tutor at
King’s assumed that I was being ironic when I mentioned my
admiration of Freud. The surrealists were still decades away
from achieving any kind of critical respectability, and even
serious newspapers treated them as a rather tired joke.

Needless to say, this rejection only recommended Freud
and the surrealists to me. I felt strongly, and still do, that
psychoanalysis and surrealism were a key to the truth about
existence and the human personality, and also a key to
myself. My head was filled with half-digested fragments of
Kafka and Joyce, the Paris existentialists and Italian neorealist
films such as
Rome, Open City
, the high tide of heroic
modernism, played out against the background of the Nazi
death camps and the growing threat of nuclear war.

All this pressed around me, but I was stuck in a deeply
provincial outpost, England in the late 1940s. Few of the
painters, philosophers, writers and film-makers I admired
were English, but at the same time I could see that I myself
was becoming more and more English, if only to get along more comfortably with everyone I met. By 1948 I knew that
the Communists under Mao Tse-tung would soon take over
the whole of China and that I would never go back to
Shanghai. Lunghua Camp and the International Settlement
would be swept away. England was my home for the indefinite
future, and the locks had been changed.

But surrealism and psychoanalysis offered an escape
route, a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful
world, where shifting psychological roles are more
important than the ‘character’ so admired by English schoolmasters
and literary critics, and where the deep revolutions
of the psyche matter more than the social dramas of everyday
life, as trivial as a tempest in a tea cosy.

Freud’s serene and masterful tone, his calm assumption
that psychoanalysis could reveal the complete truth about
modern man and his discontents, appealed to me powerfully,
especially in the absence of my own father. At the same
time, the surrealists’ rejection of reason and rationality, their
faith in the power of the imagination to remake the world,
resonated strongly with my efforts as a novice writer. I wrote
short stories and fragments of incomprehensible novels
which made complete sense if deemed to be surrealist. Ever
since childhood I had a flair for drawing, and in the art
department at The Leys I made plaster casts of the faces of
friends (I called them ‘death’ masks after those of Shelley,
Blake, Napoleon and other heroes). I nearly suffocated one
classmate when the plaster failed to set and I physically restrained him from clawing away the oozing carapace. To
my lifelong regret, however, I lacked the skill and facility
to become a painter, whereas my head was filled with short
stories and I had the beginnings of a knack for expressing
them.

Despite my efforts to fit in, I think I was a bit of a misfit at
school, an over-aggressive tennis player who would throw a
game so that I could slip away to see the latest French film at
the Arts Cinema. I was introverted but physically strong, and
knew from my wartime experience that most people will
back away if faced with a determined threat. One of my
classmates called me an ‘intellectual thug’, not entirely a
compliment, and my years in Lunghua had probably given
me a tendency to watch other boys’ plates in the dining hall.
I was also prone to backing up an argument about existentialism
with a raised fist.

I had a few close friends, an Anglo-Indian boy who went
up to Trinity a year ahead of me to study medicine, and an
American exchange student. There was also a boy called
Frank who was an Auschwitz survivor and had his number
prominently tattooed on his arm. He was adopted after the
war by an émigré Cambridge physicist and his wife, and
attended The Leys as a day boy. To begin with he spoke no
English, but he was well-liked. I was drawn to all of them
because they were foreigners, but when my parents returned
from Shanghai on a visit, my mother stepping from their
new Buick, dressed in the latest New York fashions, I thought rather critically of how un-English they seemed. I knew, as I
thought this, that it marked how English I was becoming,
despite all my efforts. The camouflage always imitates the
target.