Miracles of Life (6 page)

After her death my grandfather went through a remarkable
transformation that seems to have begun as he walked
away from the funeral. He immediately sold the house and
its furniture, and set off with two suitcases for the south
coast of England, where he lived in a series of hotels, entirely
self-sufficient, moving on if he disliked the menu and facilities.
He was living in a Bournemouth hotel when he died
at 97. In his last years he would sometimes faint in supermarkets
and shops. One manageress, assuming he was dead,
rang my mother with the sad news, and was shocked out of
her skin when my grandfather, his heart rested, suddenly
lifted his head and spoke to her.

My mother rarely talked about her life in West Bromwich, or the large family of which the Johnstones were part. She
never gave me any idea if she was happy or unhappy. The
only thing she ever told me about her schooldays was that
the future film actress Madeleine Carroll was in the same
class at the West Bromwich Grammar School for Girls. For a
brief period she worked as a teacher in a junior school in
West Bromwich, and was appalled by the dreadful poverty of
many of the children.

She and my father met at a holiday hotel in the Lake
District, one of the hydros which were very popular with
young people in the 1920s. After their marriage, in the later
1920s, when my father had joined the Calico Printers
Association, they lived briefly in a rented house in the
Manchester area, and sailed for Shanghai in 1929.

My parents never spoke about their reasons for leaving
England, and it never occurred to me to ask them. Whether
or not they were fully aware of what faced them, they were
taking huge risks, not least with their health in a remote,
poverty-stricken country long before the era of antibiotics.
Cholera, smallpox and typhoid were rife in Shanghai. The
piped water was not safe enough to drink – our drinking
water was boiled and then stored in the refrigerator in old
gin bottles – but all dishes were washed in water straight
from the tap. Both my sister and I caught amoebic dysentery
and were severely ill. Shanghai was a large and violent city of
criminal gangs and murderous political factions. My mother
was a 25-year-old newly married woman who had never been out of England, except for a honeymoon trip to Paris.
Shanghai was five weeks away by P&O boat. There was no air
link, and the only direct contact with England was by cable.
I imagine that my father, always determined and optimistic,
convinced my mother that England would take years to
climb out of the recession, and that far more interesting
possibilities waited for them on the other side of the world.

The Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, the American naval
base near Honolulu, took place on the morning of Sunday, 7
December 1941, and brought Japan and America into what
was now a world war. In Shanghai, across the International
Date Line, it was already Monday, 8 December, and I was
lying in bed reading my Bible. This was not for religious
reasons – my parents were strongly agnostic. But scripture
was my best subject, perhaps because I responded to the
strong stories in the classroom versions of the Old
Testament. At any rate, I still remember the scornful tones in
which the Reverend Matthews announced the winner of a
Bible competition. ‘First, and the biggest heathen in the class,
is Ballard.’ A schoolmaster’s favourite phrase, no doubt, but
I took great pride in it. I remember telling everyone that not
only was I an atheist, but I was going to join the Communist
Party. I admired anyone who could unsettle people, and the
Communist labour organisers had certainly unsettled my
father.

I was preparing for the Christmas term exams, and the
scripture test was to be held that day. Then I heard what
sounded like tanks and military vehicles moving down
Amherst Avenue, and my father burst into my bedroom. He
stared around wildly, as if he had never seen my room
before. He ordered me to get dressed, and told me that Japan
had declared war. ‘But I have to go to school,’ I protested.
‘Exams start today.’ He then uttered the greatest words a
schoolboy can ever hear. ‘There’ll be no more school, and no
more exams.’

I took all this in my stride, but my father was clearly
rattled. He raced around the house, shouting at the servants
and at my mother. I assume he had heard on the local radio
stations that Japanese forces were entering the International
Settlement. They swiftly seized control, and their naval units
on the Whangpoo river sank the British gunboat, HMS
Petrel
, whose crew put up a spirited fight. Later, Japanese
officers visited the wounded survivors in hospital and, out of
respect for their courage, bowed to them in the best traditions
of bushido. The American gunboat, the USS
Wake
, was
captured without a shot being fired – almost all the crew
were ashore, asleep with their girlfriends in the hotels of
downtown Shanghai.

The French Concession was already under the control
of the Vichy government, and the Japanese army seized all
key sites within the Settlement. That day their Kempeitai
(the Japanese Gestapo) arrested several hundred British and American civilians, who were the first Allied nationals to be
interned. By luck my father was not among them, and we
remained in our house until March 1943. Those imprisoned
soon after the Pearl Harbor attack were brutally treated, but
in Shanghai, fortu-nately, there were a large number of Swiss
and Swedish nationals, and their presence may have
restrained the Japanese, though there were many violent
arrests and killings.

The old Shanghai ceased to exist from this point. There
were no more parties or film premieres, no more visits to
department stores and the swimming pool. The Country
Club became a Japanese officers’ club – my mother told me
in tones of great indignation that they had stabled their
horses in the squash courts. The Japanese army aggressively
enforced its presence throughout the Settlement, and street
executions of Chinese were common. All foreign cars were
confiscated, and my father bought a bicycle to take him the
five miles to his office.

The China Printing and Finishing Company still functioned,
presumably as a useful source of revenue for the
Japanese. There were two Japanese supervisors in the office –
one of them was an architect – and I think my father had
reasonable relations with them, though he was probably
forced to lay off staff. Once when I was with him in his office
he took me for a walk around the Cathedral cloisters nearby.
Eventually a middle-aged White Russian joined us, and my
father handed him some money. He thanked my father profusely and slipped away. As firms and factories closed,
jobs must have been difficult to find. The Russian seemed
desperately poor, and my father told me matter-of-factly
that the shirt and collar beneath his tie and waistcoat was a
tiny bib stitched together from rags, which he washed every
day in the river.

Social life in the British community came to an end, along
with my mother’s bridge and tennis parties. Except for the
chauffeur, who was rehired after the war, we employed the
same number of servants, including the latest in the line of
Russian nannies, and they stayed with us until a few days
before we were interned.

My parents spent hours listening to the short-wave radio
broadcasts from Britain and America. The fall of Singapore,
and the sinking of the British battleships
Repulse
and
Prince
of Wales
, devastated us all. British prestige plummeted from
that moment. The surrender of Singapore, the capture of the
Philippines and the threat to India and Australia sounded
the death knell of Western power in the Far East and the end
of a way of life. It would take the British years to recover
from Dunkirk, and the German armies were already deep
inside Russia. Despite my admiration for the Japanese
soldiers and pilots, I was intensely patriotic, but I could see
that the British Empire had failed. I began to look at A.A.
Milne and the
Chums
annuals with a far more sceptical eye.

Yet I remember, some time in 1942, my father pinning a
large map of Russia to the wall near the radio, and marking out the shifting front line between the Germans and
Russians. In many areas the Germans were in retreat, though
the Russian front advanced with agonising slowness, a village
at a time. All the same, my father had begun to recover
a little of his confidence.

I constantly asked him how long the war would last and I
remember that he was convinced it would go on for several
years. Here he was at odds with many of the English in
Shanghai, who still believed that the defeated British forces
in the Far East would rally and swiftly defeat the Japanese.
Even I, at the age of 11 or 12, knew that this was a dangerous
delusion. I had seen the Japanese soldiers at close quarters,
and knew that they were tougher, more disciplined and
far better led than the British and American soldiers in
Shanghai, who seemed bored and only interested in going
home. But many of the fathers of boys in my form still
assumed that the war would be over in a few months.

My one great disappointment was that the Cathedral
School reopened, within a month or so of Pearl Harbor. I
cycled to school, but always came straight home afterwards,
though sometimes I had to wait for hours to get through the
checkpoint at the end of the Avenue Joffre. Downtown
Shanghai was far too dangerous, as Japanese military vehicles
swerved through the streets, knocking rickshaws and
cyclists out of their way, and Chinese puppet troops harassed
any Europeans who caught their eye.

Despite these hazards, my father insisted that I attend school. One morning we cycled together to the Avenue Joffre
checkpoint and found that it had been closed as part of a
military sweep, along with all other checkpoints into the
International Settlement. Undeterred, my father wheeled his
bicycle through the crowd and set off with me along the
Columbia Road to the house of English friends. Their long
garden ended at the barbed-wire fence first erected around
the Settlement in 1937 and now in disrepair. Helped by the
English friends, we lifted our cycles through the loosened
wire and stepped into the grounds of a derelict casino and
nightclub named the Del Monte. Concerned that there
might be Japanese in the building, my father told me to wait
while he stepped through an open rear door. After a few
minutes I could no longer restrain myself, and walked on
tiptoe through the silent gaming rooms where roulette tables
lay on their sides and the floor was covered with broken
glasses and betting chips. Gilded statues propped up the
canopy of the bars that ran the length of the casino, and on
the floor ornate chandeliers cut down from the ceiling tilted
among the debris of bottles and old newspapers. Everywhere
gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict
casino into a magical cavern from the
Arabian Nights
tales.
But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality
itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any
moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything
appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.

I also felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the
world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it
had been when it was thronged with gamblers and dancers.
Abandoned houses and office buildings held a special magic
and on my way home from school I often paused outside an
empty apartment block. Seeing everything displaced and
rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the
surrealism of everyday life, though Shanghai was already
surrealist enough.

Then my father appeared through the shadows and led
the way to the rear door. We parted at the ramshackle gates
of the casino, and he cycled off to his office while I rode the
few hundred yards to the Cathedral School and another day
of Latin unseens.

Stranger days arrived in early 1943 when full-scale internment
began, and British, Belgian and Dutch civilians were
moved to the half-dozen camps that now ringed Shanghai.
Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, in the open countryside
five miles to the south, occupied a former training college for
Chinese teachers, but several of the smaller camps were in
the Shanghai suburbs. Private estates of some forty or fifty
houses (today’s gated communities) sharing a perimeter wall
and a guarded entrance were a popular feature in 1930s
Shanghai, and were generally occupied by a single nationality.
There was a German estate on Amherst Avenue, an
intimidating collection of white boxes that I never tried to
enter. Naturally, these well-guarded residential estates made ideal internment camps. The security measures that kept
intruders out worked just as well at keeping their former
residents in. One of these camps, in which the Kendall-
Wards were interned, even dispensed with the need for a
barbed-wire fence. As it happened, there were few escapes
from the camps. The most famous escaper was a British
sailor who walked out of the hospital where he was being
treated after the sinking of HMS
Petrel
and spent the war
with his Russian girlfriend in the French Concession.

Already, though, everything was becoming too uncertain
even for a 12-year-old who thrived on change. I went to visit
a close friend in the Avenue Joffre and found the door of his
family apartment open and unlocked. The family had left at
short notice, and discarded suitcases lay across the unmade
beds. Curtains swayed in the open windows, as if celebrating
their new freedom. I sat for a long time in my friend’s bedroom,
staring at his toy soldiers and the model aircraft we
had played with happily for so many hours.