Authors: J. G. Ballard
In G Block the families who remained had taken over the
empty rooms, and the Ballard room was now a storehouse of
air-dropped supplies. Ends of corridors were barricaded off,
and visitors were no longer welcome. During one visit a
B-29 dropping relief supplies misjudged the target, and the
coloured parachutes sailed down into the untended paddy
fields half a mile from the camp. Within a minute a posse of
internees, some armed with rifles, left the camp and raced
towards the drifting parachutes. I followed at a distance, and
saw the violent confrontation between the internees and a
group of destitute peasants dragging a canister towards their village. Needless to say, it never occurred to the internees
that China had fought on the same side against the Japanese,
and that their desperate citizens were even more deserving of
relief.
Later, in England, I heard that many of the Lunghua
internees were still living in the camp six months after the
war’s end, defending their caches of Spam, Klim and cartons
of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
In many ways I missed the camp, and the hundreds of
acquaintances I had made of all ages. I missed the chess
games, and the American sailors, and the teenage girls
teaching each other how to flirt. I felt more at home there
than I did at 31 Amherst Avenue. Prison, which so confines
the adults, offers unlimited scope to the imagination of a
teenage boy. The moment I stepped out of bed in the
morning, as my mother slept in her tattered mosquito net
and my father tried to brew a little tea for her, a hundred
possibilities waited for me.
At least Shanghai was coming alive again, as thousands of
American servicemen filled the bars and nightclubs and
careered around the streets in their jeeps and trucks.
Pedicabs had appeared, large two-seater tricycles, pedalled
by former rickshaw coolies, usually filled by two Americans
and their Russian and Chinese girlfriends. Led by my father,
China Printing began to produce the cotton goods that the
Far East needed so desperately. Bizarrely, armed Japanese
sentries, on the orders of the Americans, still guarded key locations in Shanghai, just as the French regaining control of
Indo-China used Japanese military units in their battles
against the Viet Minh forces, the forerunners of the Viet
Cong.
I knew that I would be going to England with my mother
and sister on one of the troopships that were repatriating the
British internees, and also that I would be going to school in
England, but it never occurred to me that I would make a
final break with Shanghai and not return for forty-five years.
No one had the faintest inkling that the lights of Shanghai
would be switched off for decades when the Communists led
by Mao Tse-tung took control. Every Westerner in the city
took it for granted that the puritan self-discipline of the
Chinese Communists would last just as long as it took them
to climb from their tanks and stroll into the bars and
brothels of downtown Shanghai.
At the end of 1945 my mother, my sister Margaret and
I boarded the SS
Arrawa
, and set sail on the voyage to
England. The
Arrawa
was a former refrigerated cargo vessel
used as a troopship during the war, and the decks and holds
were lined with miles of refrigeration piping. Some thousand
British internees came aboard, and there was a huge
send-off at the pier in Hongkew. Friends and relatives who
were staying behind lined the pier and waved as the ship
moved out into the Whangpoo, surrounded by scores of
American landing craft sounding their sirens. My mother
and sister were at the rail, somewhere amidships, but I moved to the stern to be on my own. At the last minute my
father turned from my mother and waved to me, and for
some reason I have never understood I decided not to wave
back. I assume he thought I had lost sight of him, but I have
always regretted not waving to him. Apart from a visit he
made to England in 1947, when we drove all over Europe, I
did not see him again until 1950. By then we had grown
apart, and he played no role in the many decisions I had
made about my future career.
The voyage was in some ways like a seaboard version of
Lunghua in its earliest days, everyone in beachwear as we
headed for Singapore and the equator. We docked briefly at
Rangoon, and the captain told us that a party of thirty
British commandos were joining us. He warned mothers of
teenage daughters to be on their guard. These violent and
ruthless men had been fighting the Japanese, and would pose
a danger to any young English women they came across.
I and my friends were all agog at the prospect and keenly
awaited developments. The commandos came aboard,
heavily armed young men with sunburnt English faces. They
stowed their weapons in the armoury, and then made
straight for the passenger saloon on the upper deck, where
they spent the rest of the voyage. Every morning when they
arrived they would each buy ten bottles of beer from the bar
and carry them to their tables, so that the entire surface was
filled with beer bottles. Sitting back in the leather armchairs,
they passed the rest of the day drinking, rarely saying anything to each other and taking no interest in the teenage
English girls who came in to smile at them.
This deeply impressed me, and still does. I and my friends
questioned them about the bitter battles they had fought
with Japanese soldiers, many of them starving and suicidal,
but the commandos were reluctant to talk. Now and then
they would praise a dead comrade who had died beside
them as they fought off the Japanese bayonet charges. At
Southampton, when we moored, they snapped back into life,
reclaimed their weapons and marched off smartly without a
backward glance. That also impressed me. Some of them
were only two or three years older than I was. They had seen
death run towards them armed with a bayonet and a
grenade, and had fought him to a standstill.
Winter numbed, England froze.
The
Arrawa
docked at Southampton, under a cold sky so
grey and low that I could hardly believe this was the England
I had read and heard about. Small, putty-faced people
moved around, shabbily dressed and with a haunted air.
Looking down from the rail, I noticed that the streets near
the docks were lined with what seemed to be black perambulators,
some kind of mobile coal scuttle, I assumed, used
for bunkering ships. Later I learned that these were British
cars (all made pre-war), a species I had never seen before.
We travelled to London, and then went on to West
Bromwich, where I met my grandparents. Our mutual
suspicion was probably instant. After a month or so I entered
The Leys School in Cambridge as a boarder, and my mother
rented a house at Newton Ferrers, about ten miles from
Plymouth, near Shanghai friends. I joined her during the
holidays, but in 1947 she and my sister returned to Shanghai
with my father, and for the next year or so I spent the holidays with my grandparents in West Bromwich, the
lowest point in my life that I had by then explored, several
miles at least below the sea level of mental health. I hope that
I survived, though I have never been completely sure. My
mother returned to England with my sister in 1949, and
rented a house in the Aldwick Bay estate, to the west of
Bognor. After my father’s escape from China, when I was at
King’s College, Cambridge, they moved to Manchester.
When he left the Calico Printers Association they bought a
house in Claygate, near Esher, and in the early 1960s retired
to the New Forest.
My first impressions of England remained vividly in my
mind for years. They may seem unnecessarily hostile, but
they were no different from the impressions that England
made on countless American GIs and the Canadian and
American students I met at Cambridge. Even allowing for a
long and exhausting war, England seemed derelict, dark and
half-ruined. The Southampton that greeted me as I carried
my suitcase down the gangway had been heavily bombed
during the war, and consisted largely of rubble, with few
signs of human settlement. Large sections of London and
the Midlands were vast bomb sites, and most of the buildings
still standing were ruined and desolate. London and
greater Birmingham, like the other main cities, had been
built in the 19th century, and everything seemed to be
crumbling and shabby, unpainted for years, and in many
ways resembled a huge demolition site. Few buildings dated from the 1930s, though I never visited the vast London
suburbs that largely survived the war intact. A steady drizzle
fell for most of the time, and the sky was slate-grey with soot
lifting over the streets from tens of thousands of chimneys.
Everything was dirty, and the interiors of railway carriages
and buses were black with grime.
Looking at the English people around me, it was impossible
to believe that they had won the war. They behaved like
a defeated population. I wrote in
The Kindness of Women
that the English talked as if they had won the war, but acted
as if they had lost it. They were clearly exhausted by the war,
and expected little of the future. Everything was rationed –
food, clothing, petrol – or simply unobtainable. People
moved in a herd-like way, queueing for everything. Ration
books and clothing coupons were all-important, endlessly
counted and fussed over, even though there was almost
nothing in the shops to buy. Tracking down a few light bulbs
could take all day. Everything was poorly designed – my
grandparents’ three-storey house was heated by one or two
single-bar electric fires and an open coal fire. Most of the
house was icy, and we slept under huge eiderdowns like
marooned Arctic travellers in their survival gear, a frozen air
numbing our faces, the plumes of our breath visible in the
darkness.
More importantly, hope itself was rationed, and people’s
spirits were bent low. The only hope came from Hollywood
films, and long queues, often four abreast, formed outside the immense Odeons and Gaumonts that had survived the
bombing. The people waiting in the rain for their hour or
two of American glamour were docile and resigned. The
impression given by the newsreels we had seen in Shanghai,
of confident crowds celebrating VE and VJ Days, wasn’t
remotely borne out by the people huddling in the drizzle
outside their local cinema, the only recreation apart from
the BBC radio programmes, which were dominated by
maniacal English comedians (
ITMA
, totally incomprehensible)
or
Workers’ Playtime
(forced cheerfulness relayed
from factories).
It took a long while for this mood to lift, and food
rationing went on into the 1950s. But there was always the
indirect rationing of simple unavailability, and the far more
dangerous rationing of any kind of belief in a better life. The
whole nation seemed to be deeply depressed. Audiences sat
in their damp raincoats in smoke-filled cinemas as they
watched newsreels that showed the immense pomp of the
royal family, the aggressively cheerful crowds at a new
holiday camp, and the triumph of some new air-speed or
land-speed record, as if Britain led the world in technology.
It is hard to imagine how conditions could have been worse
if we had lost the war.
It came home to me very quickly that the England I had
been brought up to believe in – A.A. Milne,
Just William,
Chums
annuals – was a complete fantasy. The English
middle class had lost its confidence. Even the relatively well-off friends of my parents – doctors, lawyers, senior managers
– had a very modest standard of living, large but poorly
heated homes, and a dull and very meagre diet. Few of them
went abroad, and most of their pre-war privileges, such as
domestic servants and a comfortable lifestyle awarded to
them by right, were now under threat.
For the first time, I was meeting large numbers of
working-class people, with a range of regional accents
that took a trained ear to decode. Travelling around the
Birmingham area, I was amazed at how bleakly they lived,
how poorly paid they were, poorly educated, housed and fed.
To me they were a vast exploited workforce, not much better
off than the industrial workers in Shanghai. I think it was
clear to me from the start that the English class system,
which I was meeting for the first time, was an instrument of
political control, and not a picturesque social relic. Middle-
class people in the late 1940s and 1950s saw the working
class as almost another species, and fenced themselves off
behind a complex system of social codes.
Most of these I had to learn now for the first time – show
respect to one’s elders, never be too keen, take it on the chin,
be decent to the junior ranks, defer to tradition, stand up for
the national anthem, offer leadership, be modest and so on,
all calculated to create a sense of overpowering deference,
and certainly not qualities that had made Shanghai great or,
for that matter, won the Battle of Britain. Everything about
English middle-class life revolved around codes of behaviour that unconsciously cultivated second-rateness and low
expectations.
With its ancestor worship and standing to attention for
‘God Save the King’, England needed to be freed from itself
and from the delusions that people in all walks of life clung
to about Britain’s place in the world. Most of the British
adults I met genuinely thought that we had won the war
singlehandedly, with a little help, often more of a hindrance,
from the Americans and Russians. In fact we had suffered
enormous losses, exhausted and impoverished ourselves,
and had little more to look forward to than our nostalgia.
Should we have gone to war in 1939, given how ill-
prepared we were, and how little we did to help Poland, to
whose aid Neville Chamberlain had committed us when he
declared war on Germany? Despite all our efforts, the loss of
a great many brave lives and the destruction of our cities,
Poland was rapidly overrun by the Germans and became the
greatest slaughterhouse in history. Should Britain and
France have waited a few years, until the Russians had
broken the back of German military power? And, most
important from my point of view, would the Japanese have
attacked Pearl Harbor if they had known that they faced not
only the Americans but the French, British and Dutch
armies, navies and air forces? The sight of the three colonial
powers defeated or neutralised by the Germans must have
tipped the balance in Japanese calculations.