Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography

by J. G. Ballard

  My Parents

  James Ballard, b. 1902, d. 1967

  My father, James Ballard, was born in 1902 and brought up in Blackburn, Lancashire. I never met either of his parents, who died in the 1930s. My father rarely talked about his childhood, and I think that by the time of the Second World War he had separated himself from his Blackburn background, seeing it as part of an exhausted England that he was glad to leave in 1929. He became a much-travelled businessman, a lifelong admirer of the scientific world view and an enthusiast of all things American.

  But he remained a Lancashireman to the end, loving tripe, Blackpool and Lancashire comedians. My mother Edna described his own mother as very warm and maternal, and this may have given him the confidence to leave England and see the world. My impression is that family life was prosperous and happy, but he told me once that he had fierce arguments with his father when he left Blackburn Grammar School and

  My father, James Ballard, in Shanghai in 1946.

  decided to work for a science degree rather than enter the family drapery business. He believed in the power of science to create a better world, and was proud of his first-class honours degree from London University. He was always optimistic and confident, was a great ballroom dancer and even won a prize in a competition held in the Blackpool Tower ballroom.

  Most of his memories of Lancashire before and after the First World War seemed fairly bleak, and he would shake his head as he described the dreadful poverty. Eating an apple as he left school, he was often followed by working-class boys badgering him for the core. He was a strong billiards and bridge player, and was interested in wines and European food. In Shanghai he was almost the only person I knew who was interested in Chinese history and customs. He told me that he once sang solo treble in Manchester cathedral. My impression is that he was a popular and outgoing figure in Blackburn, and later in Shanghai, something that, as an introvert, he achieved by an effort of will.

  My father joined the Calico Printers Association, the textile combine that was then the ICI of the cotton world, in the mid 1920s. He had taken his degree in chemistry, the science that had transformed the printing and finishing of textiles, and he often enthused to me about the brilliant work of the great German chemists in the dyestuffs industry. By the 1920s the CPA found that Lancashire cotton could no longer compete in the world’s markets with locally produced cotton goods, in particular with the output of the Japanese mills in Shanghai, which dominated the huge China market. The CPA set up an overseas subsidiary in the city, and my father was sent out in 1929 to run its operation there, the China Printing and Finishing Company.

  After the war he stayed on in Shanghai, and was present when the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse-tung seized the city in 1949. Under Chinese supervision he continued to run China Printing, but when the CPA head office in Manchester refused to remit any further funds, my father was put on trial. He told me that he was able to quote numerous passages from Marx and Engels in his defence, and so impressed the Communist peasant judges that they dismissed the charges against him. In 1950, after a long journey across China, he reached Canton, and crossed to Hong Kong.

  On returning to England he left the CPA and became a consultant specialising in pharmaceutical textiles. He retired with my mother to the New Forest, and died of cancer in 1967.

  Edna Ballard, b. 1905, d. 1999

  My mother was born in West Bromwich, near Birmingham, in 1905, and died aged 93 in Claygate, Surrey, in 1999. Her parents, Archibald and Sarah Johnstone, were lifelong teachers of music. During the year that I lived with them, after my mother and sister returned to Shanghai in 1947, two practice pianos were going all day as a series of pupils came and went. When I first met them, in early 1946, after landing in Southampton, they were both in their late sixties, and seemed to be living relics of the Victorian world. With their rigid, intolerant minds, they never relaxed, hating the post-war Labour government, uninterested in my sister or myself, and barely interested in my mother and her wartime

  My mother, Edna Ballard, in Shanghai in 1936.

  experiences in a Japanese camp. Life was intensely narrow for them, living in a large, three-storey house where the rooms were always dark, filled with heavy, uncomfortable furniture and interior doors with stained-glass panels. Food rationing was in force, but everything seemed to be rationed, the air we breathed, hope of a better world, and the brief glimpses of the sun. Even as a boy I wondered how my mother and her sister, both lively and strong-willed women, had ever managed to bloom as teenage girls.

  Yet in later years my mother told me that her father had been something of a rebel in his younger days, and before his marriage had scandalised his family by giving up his musical training and forming a band, which played at dances and weddings. I met him at the worst time, when England was exhausted by the war. There had been heavy bombing in the Birmingham area, and I suspect that they felt my mother’s years in Lunghua were a holiday by comparison. The war had made them mean, as it made a lot of the English mean. I think they distrusted me on sight. When my grandmother, a small and ungenerous woman, first showed me the single bathroom in this large, gloomy house I blotted my copybook for ever by asking: ‘Is this my bathroom?’

  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 Attack on Pearl Harbor (1941)

  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 shad
ows 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.