Miracles of Life (27 page)

nothing remained of the original camp. The Japanese guardhouse,
the dozen or more ruined buildings and the wooden
huts had all been cleared away. New buildings had been
built, and the old ones refurbished.

I wandered around the site for an hour, ignoring my
camera but taking a thousand snapshots inside my eye.
Everywhere trees had been planted shoulder to shoulder, as
a result of some Maoist diktat in the 1960s. The children
were away on holiday, and we were able to enter G Block.
The Shanghai High School is solely for boarders, and all the
rooms were locked except for the former Ballard room,
which was now a kind of rubbish store. A clutter of refuse,
like discarded memories, lay in sacks between the wooden
bed frames, where my mother had read
Pride and Prejudice
for the tenth time, and I had slept and dreamed.

Lunghua Camp was there, but it was not there.

I arrived back at Heathrow feeling mentally bruised but
refreshed, as if I had completed the psychological equivalent
of an adventure holiday. I had walked up to a mirage,
accepted that in its way it was real, and then walked straight
through it to the other side. The next ten years were among
the most contented of my life.

My daughters Fay and Beatrice had made very happy
marriages, and each soon had two children, over whom I
doted from the day of their birth. There is no doubt that grandchildren take away the fear of death. I had done my
biological duty, and completed the most important task on
the genetic job list. My son remains a confirmed bachelor,
happy with his computers, his weekend walks and pints of
ale.

I was lucky to meet two fellow writers and their lively
wives, with whom Claire and I frequently share a meal. Both
Iain Sinclair and Will Self are much younger than me, but we
fill the gap with shared enthusiasms, and an interest in the
world beyond the London literary scene. Sinclair is a poet
and mesmerist, tracing out the ley lines of the imagination
in his heroic walks around London, making the connections
between Templar churches and the archaic ghosts of east
London and the Thames Gateway. He is also the Odysseus of
the M25, and has walked the 120-mile circuit, threading
19th-century fever hospitals and the graveyards of mysterious
parish churches onto his bow. Will Self is another
remarkable writer, almost seven feet in height and with a tall
man’s constant surprise at the mundane world far below
him. He is richly generous in thought and speech, forever
taking new ideas from the top shelves of his mind and laying
them out in front of you with a flourish. Both Sinclair and
Self have a wholly original take on the world, and I have
never heard them utter a single cliché or commonplace in all
the brilliant books by them that I have read, or in all the
meals we have shared together.

I still think about Shanghai, but I know that the city is

Claire Walsh in 1990
.

undergoing another of its unending changes. One image that
stays in my mind was the glimpse I had of an old man
squatting behind a small stool outside the entrance to the
Cathay Hotel. He seemed to have nothing for sale, and I
couldn’t help thinking about another old man under his
eiderdown of snow in Amherst Avenue. But this old man
seemed confident, and was eating his lunch from a small china bowl, using his chopsticks to fork in a modest portion
of rice and a single cabbage leaf.

He was very old, and I wondered if this would be his last
meal. Then I looked down at the stool and realised why he
was so confident. Lying face up to the passing tourists and
office workers, the titles in the Chinese characters of their
Hong Kong distributor, were three Arnold Schwarzenegger
videos.

In June 2006, after a year of pain and discomfort that I put
down to arthritis, a specialist confirmed that I was suffering
from advanced prostate cancer that had spread to my spine
and ribs. Curiously, the only part of my anatomy that did
not seem to be affected was my prostate, a common feature
of the disease. But an MRI scan, a disagreeable affair that
involves lying in a coffin wired for sound, left no doubt.
Originating in my prostate, the cancer had invaded my
bones.

I moved into the care of Professor Jonathan Waxman,
in the Cancer Centre at Hammersmith Hospital in west
London. Professor Waxman is one of the leading prostate
cancer specialists in this country, and he rescued me at a
time when I was exhausted by the intermittent pain and the
fears of death that blotted everything else from my mind. It
was Jonathan who convinced me that within a few weeks of
the initial treatment the pain would leave me and I would
begin to feel something closer to my everyday self. This proved true, and for the past year, except for one or two
minor relapses, I have felt remarkably well, have been able to
work and enjoyed my restaurant visits and the company of
friends and family.

Jonathan has always been completely frank, leaving me
with no illusions about the eventual end. But he has urged
me to lead as normal a life as I can, and he supported me
when I said, early in 2007, that I would like to write my autobiography.
It is thanks to Jonathan Waxman that I found the
will to write this book.

Jonathan is highly intelligent, thoughtful and always
gentle, and has that rare ability to see the ongoing course of
medical treatment from the point of view of the patient. I
am very grateful that my last days will be spent under the
care of this strong-minded, wise and kindly physician.

Shepperton, September 2007

The Drowned World
The Voices of Time
The Terminal Beach
The Drought
The Crystal World
The Day of Forever
The Disaster Area
The Atrocity Exhibition
Vermilion Sands
Crash
Concrete Island
High-Rise
Low-Flying Aircraft
The Unlimited Dream Company
The Venus Hunters
Hello America
Myths of the Near Future
Empire of the Sun
The Day of Creation
Running Wild
War Fever
The Kindness of Women
Rushing to Paradise
A User’s Guide to the Millennium
Cocaine Nights
Super-Cannes
The Complete Short Stories
Millennium People
Kingdom Come

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