Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography

by J. G. Ballard

  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.

  War in Europe (1939)

  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 pro
ud 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.

  My earliest childhood writings began in the late 1930s, perhaps as a response to the greater tension I sensed among the adults around me. The outbreak of war in Europe and, later, the fall of France left my parents distracted and less interested in what I was doing. My sister, aged three, irritated me immensely, and I tried to devise entire days when I never set eyes on her. Breakfast was always a problem, with school deciding when I sat down to my mango and scrambled egg, and having to endure my sister’s babbling across the table. With a small boy’s logic, I took advantage of Mr Kendall-Ward’s carpentry room to construct a large plywood screen which I placed in the centre of the dining table. I equipped it with a spyhole through which I could ferociously keep watch on my astonished sister, and a miniature hatch cover that I would flick into place when she noticed my staring eye. Amazingly, my parents took all this with good humour, but they drew the line when I joined them for lunch with friends and arrived dragging my huge screen, which I urged No. 2 Boy to set up on the table.

  But clearly I needed to be alone. I was always a keen storyteller, and enjoyed school essays when there was a free choice and I could describe some important event, real or imaginary. At the Cathedral School the standard penalty for small infringements was ‘lines’, which involved copying out a set number of pages from a worthy book we were studying. So it would be ‘Maxted, five pages; Ballard, eight pages,’ a considerable chore on top of one’s regular homework. The choice of text would usually be one of the Victorian writers in the school library – G.A. Henty, Dickens (we read A Tale of Two Cities, which I loathed for its deep gloom), or Charles Kingsley. One evening at home, laboriously transcribing endless paragraphs from Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, a tale about the Spanish Main, it occurred to me that I could get along much more quickly if I invented the story and text myself. So I wrote a swashbuckling pirate yarn. Like all the boys, I took it for granted that the masters never read our lines, but the day after handing in my penalty pages the Reverend Matthews pointed sternly to me in front of the scripture class and said: ‘Next time, Ballard, don’t copy your lines from some trashy novel…’ This was my first review, and recognition of a kind, and was a spur to more efforts for my own amusement. It may have set my fiction in its subversive mode.

  Bridge parties seemed to take place continuously at 31 Amherst Avenue, involving two foursomes of my mother’s women friends. I would sit on the stairs, listening carefully to the flow of bids – ‘One diamond, two hearts, three no trumps, double…’ – utterly baffled by the apparent lack of any logic in the sequences. Eventually, at the age of 10 or so, I nagged my mother into explaining the rules of contract bridge to me, including a few of the conventions, which were a code within a code. So thrilled was I at grasping the mystery of bridge that I decided to write a ‘book’ explaining the game to anyone as baffled as I had been. I filled about half an exercise book, furnishing it with diagrams in the approved style, and I remember clearly that there was even a section on ‘psychic bidding’, nothing to do with ESP but a form of bluff. I haven’t played bridge for fifty years, but that little explanatory text might well have given me a taste as a writer for the decoding of mystery.

  The summer holidays in Tsingtao came to an end, but I still have strong memories of a pretty, almost Riviera-style beach resort. Tsingtao had been a German naval base at the start of the Great War, and in a small cove near our hotel were the rotting hulls of two German submarines, lying with their bows on the sand like rusting dinosaurs. The Germans had built a huge network of forts into the cliffs, and these were a popular tourist attraction. My mother and I joined one tour group, and we were guided through the dark, cathedral-like vaults. Immense lifts raised the heavy guns to the firing platforms, and through the gloom of damp concrete I could see upper galleries that gave way to further galleries and observation posts, and later remi
nded me of Piranesi’s Prisons. The Royal Navy bombarded the forts before its capture of Tsingtao, and the Chinese guides were very proud of the bloody handprints which they claimed were those of German gunners driven mad by the British bombardment.

  My memories of Tsingtao are extremely pleasant, but my mother often told me that when I was a baby (in the summer of 1931 or 1932) the amah pushing my pram missed her footing on the grassy slope above the cliffs and lost control of the pram. It sped downhill towards the cliff ’s edge, where a chance British visitor ran forward and caught the pram before it went over the edge. Presumably he reported back to my mother at her hotel, though she never explained to me why a middle-aged Chinese woman, hobbling on her bound feet, should have been given charge of a large pram and told to walk along a cliff edge. Hitchcock would have revelled in the scene, but I think there is a simpler explanation. Parents in the 1930s took what now seems a remarkably detached view of their children, whose welfare if they could afford it was assigned to servants, whatever the hazards. My parents had been born in the first decade of the 20th century, long before antibiotics and public health concerns for vitamin-enriched foods, clean air and water. Childhood, for families of any income, was a gamble with disease and early death. All this devalued the entire experience of childhood, and emphasised the importance of being adult, an achievement in its own right. Children were an appendage to the parents, somewhere between the servants and an obedient labrador, and were never seen as a significant measure of a family’s health or the centre of its life. My mother claimed not to have known of my dangerous cycle trips around Shanghai, but many of her friends recognised me and waved from their cars. Perhaps they too felt that it was scarcely worth mentioning. And perhaps my mother was paying me a compliment when she described how I managed to survive at the cliff ’s edge.