Miracles of Life (4 page)

In fact, the greatest danger we faced probably came from
the Sunday afternoon trips we took with our parents and
their friends to the recent battlegrounds to the south and
west of Shanghai. Convoys of chauffeur-driven Buicks and
Chryslers would move through the stricken land, wives in
their silky best. The battlefields must have reminded some of
the older British of the Somme, with their endless networks
of eroded trenches, crumbling earth blockhouses and
abandoned villages. Around our feet when we stepped from
the cars was the bright gold of spent cartridges, lengths of
machine-gun ammunition, webbing and backpacks. Dead
horses lay by the roadside, enormous ribcages open to the
sky, and in the canals were dead Chinese soldiers, legs
stirring as the current flowed through the reeds. There was a
feast of military souvenirs, but I was never allowed to keep
even a bayonet – many European sightseers had been killed,
and a boy at school lost a hand when a grenade exploded.
Then the convoy would roll on, carrying everyone back to the safety of the International Settlement and large gins at
the Country Club.

Another treasure hunt to which I very keenly looked forward
took place when we visited friends of my parents in the
countryside to the west of Shanghai. They held large lunch
parties, after which the children were left to themselves while
the nannies gossiped and the chauffeurs polished their cars.
I would slip away, duck through a gap in the fence and run
across two dried-out rice paddies to an abandoned Chinese
military airfield. There was a single empty hangar, but on the
edge of the airfield, forgotten in the long grass, was the shell
of a Chinese fighter plane. I managed to climb into the
cockpit, and would sit on the low metal seat, surrounded
by the grimy controls. It was a magical experience, more
exciting than any funfair ride, not because I could imagine
the sounds of battle, machine-gun fire and rushing air, but
because I was alone with this stricken but mysterious craft,
an intact dream of flight. I visited it three or four times,
whenever there was a lunch party, and if one of the adults
saw me slipping through the fence I would say that I was
looking for a lost kite, which in a sense I was. On my last
visit, as I stepped out onto the airfield, several Japanese
soldiers were inspecting the hangar and ordered me away.
Years later, this small airfield became the site of Shanghai
International Airport. In 1991, when I stepped down the
gangway of the Airbus that had brought me to Shanghai
from Hong Kong, I could almost sense the presence of a small boy still sitting in his Chinese fighter, unaware of the
years that had flown past him.

My sister Margaret (now Margaret Richardson, until
recently director of the Soane Museum) was born in 1937,
but the seven-year gap between us meant that she never
became a childhood friend. When I was 10 she was still a
toddler. I was busy with my exploration of the International
Settlement, and my prolonged but unsuccessful attempts to
fraternise with the Japanese soldiers who manned the check-points
into the city. There was a strain of melancholy in the
Japanese that I responded to, although I myself was never
sad. I had a natural optimism that I only lost when I arrived
in England, and I was probably hyperactive, in today’s
jargon. I was always on the go, whether playing my intense
private games with my model soldiers, leading the Kendall-
Ward boys on an expedition to a ruined factory I had discovered,
or exploring some unknown corner of the Shanghai
suburbs.

The most visible features of the flat landscape beyond
Amherst Avenue were the family burial mounds built onto
the retaining walls of the paddy fields. The water table was
only three feet below the surface of the ground, and none of
the villagers buried their dead beneath the soil (at one time
I went through a well-digging phase, sinking half a dozen
wells into the flowerbeds in our garden until the gardener
protested). The mounds could be six to ten feet high, a
pyramid of coffins covered with soil that the heavy rains would wash away. Unless regularly maintained, the coffins
would emerge into the daylight.

There was a burial mound on the edge of an abandoned
paddy field three hundred yards from our house. One day,
on my way back from school, I made a small detour to the
mound, climbed up the rotting pyramid and peered into one
of the lidless coffins. The skeleton of a forgotten rice farmer
lay on what seemed like a mattress of silk – the soil around
him had been endlessly washed and rinsed by the rains. Years
later, as a Cambridge medical student, I would sleep in my
college room with my anatomy skeleton in a coffin-like pine
box under my bed. I was told that the skeleton’s modest
height did not mean it was that of a child – most anatomy
skeletons were those of south-east Asian peasants.

Despite my heroic cycle trips, my insulation from Chinese
life was almost complete. I lived in Shanghai for fifteen years
and never learned a word of Chinese. Although my father
had a large Chinese workforce, and at one point took
Chinese lessons, he never uttered a syllable of Chinese to any
of our servants. I never had a Chinese meal, either at home
or during the many hotel and restaurant visits with my
parents and their friends. We ate roast beef and roast lamb,
American waffles and syrup, ice cream sundaes. My first
Chinese meal was in England after the war. Today, British
and European émigrés to the third world have been educated by television to take an interest in the local history and
culture – its cuisine, architecture, folklore and customs. This
was not the case in 1930s Shanghai, in part because there was
so little of that history and culture available in Shanghai, and
partly because of the standoffishness of the Chinese.

And perhaps, after all, too little was hidden in Shanghai.
Even as a 10-year-old who had known nothing else, the
extreme poverty of the Chinese, the deaths and disease and
orphans left to starve in doorways, unsettled me as it must
have unsettled my parents. I assume that both had emotionally
distanced themselves from what they saw in the
Shanghai streets. There were many foreign-run charities
which they actively supported, but they probably knew there
was very little that even the most sympathetic Westerners
could do for the millions of destitute Chinese. My mother
travelled everywhere in her chauffeur-driven car, and may
well have seen less of poverty than her forever-cycling son.
There were also huge numbers of destitute European
refugees – White Russians, German and eastern European
Jews fleeing from the Nazi threat, English expats down on
their luck, political refugees from all over the world who
needed no visas to enter Shanghai. As the thousands of bars
and nightclubs toasted the even better years to come, and
the dancers continued to dance, I cycled up and down the
Avenue Foch and the Bubbling Well Road, always on the
lookout for something new and rarely disappointed.

In Shanghai the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me, and I think now that
my main effort as a boy was to find the real in all this make-
believe. In some ways I went on doing this when I came to
England after the war, a world that was almost too real. As a
writer I’ve treated England as if it were a strange fiction, and
my task has been to elicit the truth, just as my childhood self
did when faced with honour guards of hunchbacks and
temples without doors.

Meanwhile, there was a host of treats to look forward to:
children’s parties with their conjurors and tumblers; the
gymkhana at the riding school where I would pretend to
steer my docile nag around a figure-of-eight course, all the
beast could remember; the premiere of
The Wizard of Oz
,
attended by the whole school; Saturday ice cream sundaes at
the Chocolate Shop, a happy bedlam of small boys, amahs
and exhausted nannies; the American Hell-Drivers at the
racecourse, crashing their cars through burning walls; a visit
to the Chinese theatre in the Old City, a nightmare of earsplitting
gongs and grimacing masks; a trip to the jai alai
stadium with its ferocious Chinese gamblers and Filipino
players with huge scoop-rackets that seemed to propel the
ball at rifle speed (the fastest ball game in the world, my
father said, which greatly impressed me, as did anything that
was fastest, tallest, highest and deepest); chasing the trucks
that carried the ever-friendly US Marines, cheering me on
until my front wheel jammed in a tramline and I pitched
headlong among the Chinese shoppers outside Sincere’s; and regular trips to see the
Idzumo
moored off the Bund. Yet
with all these excitements, I still found myself thinking for a
few moments at least of the Chinese beggar-children on the
ash-tips near the chemical works by the Avenue Joffre,
picking away in the coldest weather for the smallest lumps of
coke. It was the gap between their lives and mine that
bothered me, but there seemed no way of bridging it.

That gap, and Shanghai itself, would close sooner than I
could have guessed.

In September 1939 the European war began, and quickly
reached across the world to Shanghai. Outwardly, our lives
continued as before, but soon there were empty places in my
class at school, as families sold up and left for Hong Kong
and Singapore. My father spent a great deal of time listening
to the short-wave radio broadcasts from England, which
brought news of the sinking of HMS
Hood
and the hunt for
the
Bismarck
, then later of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain.
School was often interrupted so that we could visit one of
the cinemas for screenings of British newsreels, thrilling
spectacles that showed battleships in line ahead, and Spitfires
downing Heinkels over London. Fund-raising drives were
held at the Country Club, and I remember the proud
announcement that the British residents in Shanghai had
financed their first Spitfire. There was constant patriotic
activity on all sides. The German and Italian communities
mounted their own propaganda campaigns, and the swastika
flew from the flagpoles of the German school and the German radio station, which put out a steady stream of pro-
Nazi programmes.

Newsreels soon became the dominant weapon in this
information war, many of them screened at night against the
sides of buildings, watched by huge crowds of passing
pedestrians. I think I saw the European war as a newsreel
war, only taking place on the silver square above my head, its
visual conventions decided by the resources and limits of
the war cameraman, as I would now put it, though even my
10-year-old eyes could sense the difference between an
authentic newsreel and one filmed on manoeuvres. The real,
whether war or peace, was something you saw filmed in
newsreels, and I wanted the whole of Shanghai to be filmed.

The English adults began to talk now about ‘home’, a rose-
pink view of England that seemed to consist of the West End
of London, Shaftesbury Avenue and the Troc, a glittery
sparkle of first nights and dancing till dawn, overlaid by a
comfortable Beverley Nichols world of market towns and
thatched roofs. Did my parents and their friends convince
themselves, or were they keeping their morale up? They
played cricket at the Country Club, usually after too many
gins, and subscribed to
Punch
, but they drove American cars
and cooled their vermouth in American refrigerators. They
talked about retiring, not to the Cotswolds, but to South
Africa, with its abundant cheap servants. I think that, despite
themselves, they had been internationalised by Shanghai,
and their Noël Coward/
Cavalcade
notions of England were a nostalgic folk memory (when we arrived in England in 1946,
some of us were assumed to be American, and not because
of our accents).

This probably explains why many of the British residents
stayed on in Shanghai even though it was clear that war
against Japan was imminent. There was also the firm belief,
racist to a large extent, that while the Japanese had easily
routed the Chinese armies they would be no match for the
Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Japanese pilots flew
inferior planes and had notoriously bad eyesight, according
to cocktail-party wisdom. But the blinkered vision lay in the
eyes of the British, a strange self-delusion bearing in mind
that my parents and their friends had seen the ruthless
courage of the Japanese soldiers and the skill of their pilots
at first hand since 1937.

In many ways life in Shanghai instilled a kind of
unconscious optimism in the European residents. Living in
a centre of unlimited entrepreneurial capitalism, everyone
believed that anything was possible. In the last resort, money
would buy off any danger. The vast metropolis where I was
born had been raised within not much more than thirty
years from a collection of low-lying swamps (selected by the
Manchu rulers as a sign of their contempt), and attracted
bemused visitors from all over the world, from George
Bernard Shaw to Auden and Isherwood.

There was also a pleasantly tolerant climate of what now
seems unbelievably heavy drinking. When I mentioned the ‘two-martini lunch’ to my mother at the time I was writing
Empire of the Sun
, she retorted: ‘Five martinis…’ As a small
boy I took it for granted that drinks were served at any hour,
and the pantry cupboards resembled a medium-sized off-
licence, with shelves of gin and whisky bottles. Many of the
people my parents knew remained slightly drunk all day, and
I remember the family dentist whose breath always reeked of
something stronger than mouth-rinse. But this was common
in the Far East, partly a social convention, an extension of
wine with one’s meals to every other human activity, and
partly a response to living in a city without a museum or
gallery, and where the houses in the nearby streets were
thirty years younger than the residents. I asked my mother
about drugs, and she insisted that no one in her circle took
them, though she knew people who were morphine addicts.
But bridge, alcohol and adultery are the royal cement that
holds societies together, and too many sedative drugs would
have shut down a large part of Shanghai. In England in the
1960s my parents were abstemious drinkers, having a whisky
soda before dinner and a single glass of wine, at a time when
I was drinking half a bottle of Scotch a day. My mother was
rarely ill and lived to the age of 93.