Miracles of Life (26 page)

MystFest was interesting to me because it demonstrated
the peculiar psychology of the jury system. The six jurors,
with Claire as supernumerary, enjoyed our meals together in
Viareggio’s best restaurants, including Puccini’s favourite. It
seemed to me that we were in agreement about everything,
sharing the same taste in films, whether European, Japanese
or American. I was sure we would come to a speedy conclusion when we sat down to decide on the winner.

Halfway through the festival, when we had seen five films,
Jules Dassin called a meeting. ‘The films are rubbish,’ he told
us. ‘We’ll give the prize to Roeg.’ We had not yet seen Roeg’s
film,
Cold Heaven
, and I pointed out that there were six films
waiting to be screened for us. ‘They’ll be rubbish too,’ Dassin
said. I suspect that he was under pressure from the festival
management to steer the best film award to Roeg. Bob
Swaim, the American director of
Half Moon Street
and
La
Balance
(‘I always sleep with my leading ladies.’ This left me
agog. ‘You’ve had sex with Sigourney Weaver? Tell me more.’
‘No, not Sigourney.’) and I insisted that we see all the films,
though the other jurors were ready to follow Dassin.

In the event, sadly, Roeg’s film was not one of his better
efforts, and at our final meeting Dassin gave up his attempt
to award the prix d’or to him. But our problems had only
just begun. As we discussed the eleven films it soon became
clear that we would never agree. Each member of the jury
had his or her favourite, which the other jurors dismissed
with contempt. We stared at each speaker as if he had
announced that he was Napoleon Bonaparte and was about
to be taken away by the men in the white coats. Every choice
other than my own seemed preposterous. I assume that sitting
collectively in judgement runs counter to some deep
and innate belief that justice should be dispensed by a single,
all-powerful magistrate. How jurors at murder trials ever
come to a unanimous verdict is beyond me.

Aware that we were becoming tired and fractious, Dassin
wisely called a halt to the discussion. He passed around
pieces of paper and asked us each to write down our top
three films, in descending order. This we did, and it is
remarkable that the eventual winner did not feature in the
list of any member of the jury.

Utter deadlock loomed, and tempers rose. No one was
prepared to yield an inch. We were saved by one thing alone
– our desperate need for lunch. We were tired, angry and
starving. At last we seized gratefully on a compromise candidate,
a German thriller about a Turkish detective in Berlin.
This had been shown without subtitles, and had been barely
comprehensible. But it would have to do.

The German woman director was flown in for the prize-
giving but the festival organisers were most displeased.
Roeg’s honour was satisfied, though not in the way we had
expected. At the gala evening, in front of massed TV cameras
and journalists, we found that our deliberations had been
demoted to the status of a ‘jury’ prize. The festival grand
prix, newly created for the occasion, went to Nick Roeg. As
the jury retreated from the rear of the stage, well aware of its
humiliation, I wished that we had heeded the wise old Jules
Dassin and awarded Roeg the prize in the first place.

My novel
The Kindness of Women
, a sequel to
Empire of
the Sun
, was published in 1991, and the BBC TV series
Bookmark
decided to make a programme about my life and
work. Most of it was filmed in and around Shepperton, but
I spent a week in Shanghai with the film crew and its director,
James Runcie. He was the son of the then Archbishop of
Canterbury, which may have had some bearing on the help
that the Chinese gave us. Two English-speaking executives
from the Shanghai television service were with us throughout
the week. I have no doubt that part of their job was to
keep an eye on us, but they went out of their way to lay on
an air-conditioned bus and car and smooth our path around
any obstacles.

Without their navigation skills we might never have discovered
Lunghua Camp, now completely swallowed by the
urbanisation of the surrounding countryside. In the 1930s
our house in Amherst Avenue had stood on the edge of the
western suburbs of Shanghai. Standing on the roof as a boy, I would look out over the cultivated farmland that began
literally on the far side of our garden fence. Now all this had
gone, vanishing under the concrete and asphalt of greater
Metropolitan Shanghai.

The return to Shanghai, for the only time in forty-five years,
was a strange experience for me, which began in the Cathay
Pacific lounge at Heathrow. There I saw my first dragon
ladies, rich Chinese women with a hard, fear-inducing gaze,
similar to those who had known my parents and terrified me
as a child. Most of them got off at Hong Kong, but others
went on with me to Shanghai. We landed at the International
Airport, on one of the huge runways laid across the grass
airfield at Hungjao where I had once sat in the cockpit of a
derelict Chinese fighter. As the dragon ladies left the first-
class compartment their immaculate nostrils twitched disapprovingly
at the familiar odour that stained the evening
air – night soil, still the chief engine of Chinese agriculture.

We drove into Shanghai down a broad new highway.
Lights glimmered through the perspiring trees, and above
the microwave air I could see vast skyscrapers built in the
1980s with expat Chinese money. Under Deng’s rule,
Shanghai was returning rapidly to its great capitalist past.
Inside every open doorway a small business was flourishing.
A miasma of frying fat floated into the night, radio
announcers gabbled, gongs sounded the start or end of a work shift, sparks flew from the lathes of a machine shop,
mothers breastfed their babies as they sat patiently by pyramids
of melons, traffic horns blared, sweating young men in
singlets smoked in doorways … the ceaseless activity of a
planetary hive. There are only two words in the Chinese
bible: Make Money.

The Bund was intact, the same vista of banks and trading
houses still faced the Whangpoo river, crowded with ships
and sampans. The Nanking Road seemed unchanged,
Sincere’s and the great Sun and Sun Sun department stores
crammed with Western goods. The racecourse was now an
immense parade ground, the only visible trace of the
authoritarian regime. I had hoped that we might stay at the
former Cathay Hotel (now the Peace Hotel) on the Bund, a
crumbling art deco palace. We later filmed a scene in the
karaoke bar, where drunken Japanese tourists bellowed their
way through Neil Diamond hits. But the Cathay, where Noël
Coward had written
Private Lives
, lacked fax links to the
outside world, and we moved to the Shanghai Hilton, a tall
tower not far from the former Cathedral Girls’ School.

Memories were waiting for me everywhere, like old
friends at an arrivals gate, each carrying a piece of cardboard
bearing my name. The next morning I looked down at
Shanghai from my room on the seventeenth floor of the
Hilton. I could see at a glance that there were two Shanghais
– the skyscraper city newer than yesterday, and at street level
the old Shanghai that I had cycled around as a boy. The Park Hotel, overlooking the former racecourse and a vast brothel
for American servicemen after the war, had been one of the
tallest buildings in Shanghai, but was now dwarfed by gigantic
TV towers and office buildings that stamped ‘money’
across the sky. The Hilton stood on the edge of the old
French Concession, still today one of the largest collections
of domestic art deco architecture in the world. The paint-
work was shabby, but there were the porthole windows and
marina balconies, fluted pilasters borrowed from some car
factory in Detroit in the 1930s. Curiously, the TV towers,
broadcasting the new to the people of Shanghai, seemed
rather old-fashoned and even traditional, as seen everywhere
from Toronto and Tokyo to Seattle. At the same time, the
dusty and faded art deco suburbs were bracingly new.

I was due to rendezvous with Runcie and his crew at
9 a.m. in the Hilton lobby, but an hour earlier I slipped out
of the hotel and began to walk the streets, heading in the
general direction of the Bubbling Well Road. The pavements
were already crowded with food vendors, porters steering
new photocopiers into office entrances, smartly dressed
young secretaries shaking their heads at a plump and sweating
60-year-old European out on some dishevelled errand.

And I was on an errand, though I had yet to grasp the true
nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self,
the boy in a Cathedral School cap and blazer who had played
hide-and-seek with his friends half a century earlier. I soon
found him, hurrying with me along the Bubbling Well Road, smiling at the puzzled typists and trying to hide the sweat
that drenched my shirt. On the last leg of our journey from
England, as we took off from Hong Kong, I worried that I
had waited too long to return to Shanghai, and that the
actual city would never match my memories. But those
memories had been remarkably resilient, and I felt surprisingly
at home, as if I was about to resume the life cut off
when the
Arrawa
set sail from its pier.

But something was missing, and that explained the real
nature of my breakfastless errand.

Shanghai had always been a European city, created by British
and French entrepreneurs, followed by the Dutch, Swiss and
Germans. Now, though, they had gone, and Shanghai was a
Chinese city. All the advertising, all the street signs and neon
displays, were in Chinese characters. Nowhere, during our
week in Shanghai, did I see a single sign in the English language,
except for a huge hoarding advertising Kent cigarettes.
There were no American cars and buses, no Studebakers and
Buicks, no film posters in twenty-foot-high letters announcing
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Robin Hood or Gone
With the Wind
.

Shanghai had forgotten us, as it had forgotten me, and the
shabby art deco houses in the French Concession were part
of a discarded stage set that was slowly being dismantled.
The Chinese are uninterested in the past. The present, and a modest down payment on a first instalment of the future, are
all that concern them. Perhaps we in the West are too preoccupied
with the past, too involved with our memories,
almost as if we are nervous of the present and want to keep
one foot safely rooted in the past. Later, when I left Shanghai
and returned to England with Runcie and the film crew, I felt
a great sense of release. I had visited those shrines to my
younger self, stood in silence for a few moments with my
head bowed, and driven straight to the airport.

At 9 on that first morning we gathered in the Hilton lobby
and then set off for the Ballard home in the former Amherst
Avenue. The house was still standing, though in a state of
extreme dilapidation, its gutters propped up by a scaffolding
of bamboo poles that was in turn about to collapse. At the
time of our visit the house served as the library of a state
electronics institute, and metal book-racks filled with international
journals and magazines had replaced the furniture
on all three floors, a change that might have pleased my
father. Nothing, otherwise, had changed, and I noticed that
the same lavatory seat was in my bathroom. But the house
was a ghost, and had spent almost half a century eroding its
memories of an English family that had occupied it but left
without a trace.

The next day we set off in our air-conditioned bus for
Lunghua, and spent most of the morning trying to track it

The former Ballard house in Amherst Avenue, Shanghai
,
in 2005. The fountain, garden sculpture and wall
decoration are recent additions
.

down. A vast urbanised plain stretched south from the
Shanghai that I had known, a haze-filled terrain of flats,
factories and police and army barracks, linked together by
motorway overpasses. Now and then we stopped, and
climbed to the roof deck of a workers’ apartment block,
where I scanned the countryside for any sight of the water
tower. Eventually, one of our translators hailed an old man
dozing outside a bicycle shop. ‘Europeans, imprisoned by the
Japanese…?’ He thought about this. ‘There was a camp – I
don’t remember which war…’

Ten minutes later we arrived at the gates of the former
Lunghua Camp, now the Shanghai High School. Almost

Standing outside the former G Block in 1991
.

The Ballard family room in the former G block
.