Miracles of Life (7 page)

Preoccupied with myself and the fate of my friends. I
probably had no idea of the stress my parents endured as
they faced the prospect of internment. Looking back from
the vantage point of 2007, it puzzles me that they decided to
stay on in Shanghai when they must have known that war
was imminent. But the China Printing and Finishing Company
was my father’s responsibility, and duty then counted
for something. Many foreign-owned businesses run by the
Swiss and Swedes were still functioning, and my father may have hoped that the demand for cotton goods was so vast
that he would be allowed to compete with the Japanese mills
in Shanghai. At the same time, it may have seemed inconceivable
that the Japanese would launch a pre-emptive attack
on the United States, and even try to extend their ‘Co-
Prosperity Sphere’ as far as India and Australia.

As I watched my father putting his coloured pins into the
map of Russia, smiling a little wanly as the radio announcer
spoke through the static about captured German steam
locomotives, I may already have realised that there were
limits to how far I could depend on my parents. When two
senior officers in the Kempeitai came to our house and
strolled around in their highly polished boots, my father
watched them without a word, and was only concerned that
I and my 4-year-old sister remain silent. The Japanese
officers had not come to arrest my father, as he must have
assumed, but were checking the facilities that the house
offered once we were interned. My father had no answer to
them, and I knew that the time might come when my
mother and I, and my sister, would be alone. Few middle-
class children in times of peace see their parents under severe
stress, and I had been brought up to regard my father and his
male friends as figures of confidence and authority. Now
everything was changing, and a new kind of education had
begun. The sight of English adults under stress replaced the
Latin unseens.

By the end of 1942 the war in the Pacific began to turn against the Japanese. Their navy, which had caught the
Americans by surprise at Pearl Harbor, suffered catastrophic
defeats at the Battles of Midway and the Coral Sea. British
resistance was stiffening in Burma, and in Europe there were
the beginnings of what would become the heroic Bomber
Command offensive against Germany. I wanted to encourage
my father, whom I knew to be a thoughtful and brave
man, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for the
Japanese military with its centuries-old codes of discipline
and its demands of absolute submission from any captured
enemy.

Given the importance of Shanghai and its huge dockyards,
the Japanese decided to intern the British and other
Allied nationals. Lunghua Camp was sited in a notorious
malaria zone (the Shanghai High School which now occupies
the former camp is still plagued by mosquitoes, and in
1991 the British Airways Travel Clinic warned me to leave
the area before dusk). My father and other members of the
British Residents Association complained strongly to the
Japanese authorities in Shanghai, but the construction of
Lunghua Camp went ahead.

In March 1943 my parents, sister and I entered Lunghua,
where we remained until the end of August 1945.

Our assembly point for the journey to Lunghua was the
American Club in Columbia Road, a mile from Amherst
Avenue. When we arrived we found a huge press of people,
mostly British with a few Belgians and Dutch, sitting with
their suitcases around the swimming pool, many of the
women in their fur coats. Some of the men carried nothing
apart from the clothes they were wearing, still confident that
the war would be over within days. Others had strapped
tennis rackets, cricket bats and fishing rods to their luggage
– we had been told that there were a number of large and
very deep ponds within the camp. A few were drunk, aware
that they faced long months far from the nearest bar.
Together we waited around the swimming pool, sitting at the
tables where the American members of the club had once
sipped their bourbons and mint juleps. Then the Japanese
guards arrived with a small fleet of buses, and we were on
our way across the open countryside, among the last group
of Allied nationals to be interned.

For an hour we trundled through the deserted countryside,
past empty villages and recent battlefields that I
remembered from earlier drives with my parents and their
friends. We passed the pagoda at Lunghua, where Japanese
soldiers were hoisting anti-aircraft guns onto the upper
decks. Nearby was a military airfield, Zero fighters lined up
in front of the hangars. On all sides there were derelict canals
and untended paddy fields, a waterlogged land through
which the great arm of the Whangpoo river moved on its
way to Shanghai and the sea.

Then Lunghua Camp appeared, my last real childhood
home, where I would spend the next two and a half largely
happy years. As we drove past sections of brand-new barbed-
wire fencing, the camp resembled a half-ruined college
campus. There were three-storey concrete buildings, pockmarked
by shellfire but still standing. Other buildings were
mounds of rubble, cement floors concertinaed together as if
after an earthquake. There was a guardhouse by the gates,
Japanese soldiers staring at us stonily. There were smaller
buildings with pitched roofs of red tile, and rows of freshly
built wooden huts, each some fifty yards long. Washing hung
everywhere on makeshift lines, but there was a faint smell of
sewage on the air, shared with a million mosquitoes.

And then there were the internees. We stepped down from
our bus, greeted by a friendly crowd who helped us with our
suitcases and guided families with small children towards G
Block, a two-storey building that held some forty small

The former F Block in Lunghua Camp, in 1991
.

rooms. Our bedding had been sent on ahead, and assembled
for us by friends of my father. I remember how he and
my mother sat together on one of the beds with my sister,
staring at this tiny space, as small as the rooms in the servants’
quarters at 31 Amherst Avenue, which had also contained
entire families. Keen to greet schoolfriends I had
recognised in the crowd around the bus, I left my parents to
their new domain and began my exploration of Lunghua
Camp.

My first impression was of how relaxed and casual the
internees seemed. All this would change, but the people
around me were enjoying a ramshackle and rather pleasant
holiday. I had known a Shanghai where the men wore suits and ties, but here they were dressed in cotton shorts and
shirtsleeves. Many of the younger women, among them the
rather formal mothers of boys at school, were in beachwear.
There were few Japanese guards around, and most of the
camp administration was left to the internees. The dining
hall where we assembled for our first meal had the atmosphere
of an unsupervised prison, children screaming, the
husbands flirting with each other’s wives, young men playfully
squaring off at each other. Later, still in a daze, I was
shown around the camp by schoolfriends. There seemed to
be humour, or at least the prison-camp version of drollery,
in ample supply – earth and cinder road-tracks named
Oxford Street and Piccadilly, the drinking-water stations
that boiled our water signposted ‘Waterloo’ and ‘Bubbling
Well’. On the observation roof of F Block a group of music
lovers listened to a classical symphony on a wind-up gramophone.
On the steps of the assembly hall the Lunghua
Players rehearsed a scene from
The Pirates of
Penzance
,
though what the young Japanese soldiers in the front row on
the opening night actually made of it I can’t imagine.

All in all, this was a relaxed and easy-going world that I
had never known, except during our holidays in Tsingtao,
and this favourable first impression stayed with me to the
end, when conditions in the camp took a marked turn for
the worse. I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge
number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult
life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered
my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and
many of the adults had lost heart.

But all that was two years away, and in the spring of 1943
I was happy to make the most of my new world. My parents
were glad to let me stay out to all hours, and I set about
exploring every corner of the camp, meeting a host of
quirky, bored, pleasant and unpleasant characters.

E Block and F Block, the two largest buildings in the
former teacher-training college, contained its classrooms,
and these were occupied by single internees and married
couples without children. Families with children were
housed in D and G Blocks, in the rooms that once housed
the Chinese student teachers. There was a shower block,
which in the first months supplied hot water, a small ‘hospital’
where my sister was treated for dysentery, and a number
of bungalows that had housed the college’s senior staff
and were the quarters of the Japanese guards.

The camp lay over a substantial area, perhaps half a mile
in diameter, ringed by a barbed-wire fence through which I
often climbed to retrieve a ball or kite. Japanese soldiers
patrolled the wire in a rather casual way, and once I had to
hide in the long grass outside the fence when I was searching
for a lost baseball and the other children warned me that
the guards were approaching. About a third of the original
site was excluded from the camp, and contained a number
of derelict buildings. With the agreement of the camp commandant, a former diplomat named Hyashi, who had
spent time at the London embassy and spoke fluent English,
one of these buildings became the camp school. Each day the
gates were opened to allow the children to and fro, and we
entered the rather eerie world beyond the camp.

There were many open spaces in Lunghua, uncultivated
ground littered with stones and war rubble from the fierce
fighting that had taken place in and around the buildings of
the training college. Over the next year, as our rations fell,
groups of internees began to clear the ground and cultivate
modest vegetable plots. I helped my father to hoist buckets
of sewage from the G Block septic tank, which we used to
fertilise our tomatoes, melons and runner beans, though the
results of all this labour seemed strangely puny and stunted.

For all the open spaces that surrounded the buildings in
the camp, including the assembly ground where football
matches were played, inside the crowded dormitories there
was a desperate competition for space. In E and F Blocks,
the former classrooms that housed married couples were
divided into a maze of cubicles by sheets hung from lines of
string and rope. Pieces of cardboard, sections of wooden
packing cases and anything else to hand helped to provide a
minimum of privacy. Within the small family rooms of D
and G Blocks the parents had no defence against the children
who shared their tiny spaces, and no doubt this explains why
my mother and father were happy to let me roam around
the camp for as long as I wanted. In many ways the camp became my new Shanghai, with a thousand sights to be
investigated and savoured, a hundred errands to be run in
return for an old copy of
Life
or an unwanted screwdriver.

All men in the camp were assigned jobs – running the
kitchens, unloading the supplies of food and coal trucked
into Lunghua from Shanghai, boiling our drinking water,
maintaining the electricity supply, teaching the children and
conducting religious services. Single women helped wherever
they could, nursing and caring for malaria victims.
Married women with small children were excused duties of
any kind, and my mother rarely left G Block and the tiny
room that became our home. During the day my father
raised his mattress against the wall, and in the small space we
set up a card table at which we ate our meals. Much of the
time my mother remained in our room, reading by the window
as she kept an eye on my sister playing in the yard
outside with the other toddlers.

Families with only a single child were obliged to take in
one of the children separated from their parents and
interned alone. In G Block a boy named Bobby Henderson
was so resented by the couple on whom he was billeted that
he constructed a cubicle like a beggar’s hovel around his
narrow bed. This was his private world that he defended
fiercely. He was dressed in cast-offs, and saved his shoes
for the winter months. In the summers he wore a pair of
wooden clogs with the heels completely worn away, leaving
two slivers of wood that ended in his insteps.

Bobby was a close friend, though I never really liked him,
and found something threatening about his tough and self-
reliant mind. I sensed that circumstances had forced him to
fight too hard to survive, and that this had made him ruthless
not only with others, but with himself. He allowed me to
tag along with him, but regarded my endless curiosity and
roaming around the camp as a waste of time and energy, and
my interest in chess, bridge and kite building, and in the
complex skipping games that some of the girls brought into
camp with them, as frivolous and distracting. His parents
were interned in Peking, but he never spoke about them,
which baffled me at the time, and I suspect that he had forgotten
what they were like. Thinking of him now, I realise
that part of him had died, and I hope that he never went on
to have children of his own.