Miracles of Life

by James Graham Ballard

  Unaware of all this, I went on wheedling tattered copies of Life and Popular Mechanics from the American sailors in E Block, setting pheasant traps (we never caught a bird) and flirting with the skinny but attractive teenage girls in G Block who had grown into puberty with me. Fortunately the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs brought the war to an abrupt end. Like my parents, and everyone else who lived through Lunghua, I have long supported the American dropping of the bombs. Prompted by Emperor Hirohito’s surrender broadcast, the still-intact Japanese war machine ground to a complete halt within days, so saving millions of Chinese lives, as well as our own. For a hint of what might otherwise have happened, we can look at the vicious battle for Manila, the only large city in the Pacific War fought for by the Americans, where some 100,000 Philippine civilians died.

  By the summer of 1944 the conditions in Lunghua Camp had changed markedly for the worse. Japanese forces in the Pacific were falling back under fierce attacks by American air and naval power, and US submarines were taking a heavy toll of Japanese shipping to and from the home islands. Japanese cities were one by one being devastated by American bombers. The Tokyo high command could barely feed its own soldiers, let alone the groups of civilian internees scattered throughout the Far East.

  The behaviour of the Japanese guards in Lunghua became more brutal as Japan faced defeat. Far from wanting to ingratiate themselves, the guards would lash out at the male internees during the roll-calls. The Japanese soldiers making up the original force of guards were replaced by older recruits, and then by Korean conscripts who had themselves been brutalised by the Japanese NCOs, and were particularly vicious.

  After the war we learned that throughout our internment there had been three clandestine radios in the camp, and that an inner group of internees were closely following the progress of the war. Sensibly, they kept their news to themselves, for fear that the few collaborators in the camp would tip off the guards. A married Englishwoman in G Block spoke fluent Japanese and worked in the commandant’s office, and she was widely suspected of passing on information to the Japanese, knowingly or otherwise, perhaps in return for medicines for her sick son.

  I assume that she knew nothing about the camp radios, but the encouraging news about the war may have prompted the first escape from the camp in 1944. A group of five or six men stepped through the wire and set off for the Chinese lines 400 miles away, and they were followed by others. One group made it to freedom, but others were betrayed by Chinese villagers terrified of ferocious reprisals from the Japanese.

  An immediate result was the sacking of the camp commandant, Hyashi. Lunghua was placed under the direct command of the Japanese military, and a harsher regime followed. The food ration was cut, and a second inner barbed-wire fence was built around the central cluster of buildings that housed the unmarried internees. The gates were shut at 7 o’clock, which meant that G Block was cut off from much of camp life in the evenings. Presumably the Japanese decided that married men with children were not likely to escape. Roll-calls were stepped up, and took place twice daily, when we stood wearily in the corridor outside our rooms as the guards laboriously checked that we were all present. Whenever there was a major infraction of camp regulations, or a significant defeat of their forces in the Pacific, the new commandant would impose a curfew and close the camp school, sometimes for two or three days, a real punishment for the parents forced to endure their fractious children.

  The shower block was closed, and from then on we had to carry buckets of warm water from the Bubbling Well and Waterloo heating stations, an exhausting daily chore that I performed for my mother (my father was working as a stoker in the camp kitchens). The two dining halls were also closed, and food arrived on metal-wheeled carts pulled by two of the G Block internees. As ravenous as ever, I would listen out for the metal creaking of the cartwheels, and then rush to be first in the queue as our ration of congee and sweet potato was doled out in the entrance hall. Later, while everyone recovered from their meal, I would help push the cart back to the kitchens and be allowed to scrape the bottom of the potato bin.

  Lunghua winters were fiercely cold. We were living in unheated buildings, and many people retired to bed for as long as they could. My father learned from George Osborne that many of the windows in the school classrooms had lost their glass during the 1937 battles around Lunghua. Somehow my father persuaded parents to contribute whatever old pieces of cloth they had kept. He cut these into dozens of small squares, melted candles into a shallow tray and soaked the cotton in the molten wax. Tacked into place by the teachers, they kept much of the icy wind from our classrooms.

  My mother liked to brew tea to keep warm, and one of my chess opponents, a garage owner named Richards, taught me how to build a chatty, a primitive Chinese stove constructed from a five-gallon oilcan that we pilfered from the guards’ refuse tip. We gouged reinforcing bars from the flaking concrete of the ruined buildings, slotted them through the can above a draught door and then moulded wet clay to form a venturi. The kitchen ovens burned a low-grade coking coal, and in the tips outside the furnaces one could find small pieces of coke. I squatted on the still-warm ash-tips, poking with a bent piece of wire through the dust and clinkers, and thinking of the Chinese beggar boys who picked over the Avenue Joffre ash-tips. I remember reflecting on this without comment, and I make no comment now.

  My father sometimes brought small portions of boiled rice for my mother, but as a principled man refused to bring any coal to fuel the chatty. In my roamings around the camp I found a broken Chinese bayonet, a handle and three inches of snapped blade. Over a few weeks I sharpened this to a point, rubbing away at any hard stone I could find. One evening, in the darkness an hour before curfew, I led Bobby Henderson to the rear wall of the coal store behind the kitchens, and used the bayonet to scrape away the mortar. After removing two of the bricks, I drew out several handfuls of coal, which I divided between us, then replaced the bricks in the wall.

  My father said nothing when I showed him the coal, though he must have known that I had stolen it from the kitchen storeroom. I soon had it glowing brightly in the chatty outside the rear entrance to G Block, and my father carried a warming cup of black tea to my bedridden mother. Both of us knew that he had compromised his principles, but at the same time I felt that I had gained no merit in his eyes. I take it for granted that if the war had continued for much longer the sense of community and the social constraints that held the internees together would have broken down. Moral principles, along with kindness and generosity, are worth less than they might seem. At the time, as the glowing coals warmed my hands, I wondered what Henderson would do with his share of the coal. Later I saw him in the darkness, hurling the pieces into the deep pond beyond the perimeter fence.

  In late 1944 conditions in Lunghua continued to worsen, not through deliberate neglect by the Japanese authorities, but because they had lost all interest in us. The food supply fell, and the internees’ health was eroded by malaria, exhaustion and a general resignation to further years of war. The Americans had advanced island by island across the Pacific, but they were still hundreds of miles away. The huge Japanese armies in China were ready to defend the Emperor and the home islands to the last man.

  Nowhere had Japanese soldiers surrendered in large numbers. Fatalism, fierce discipline and a profound patriotism shaped their warrior spirit. In some way, I think, the Japanese soldier assumed unconsciously that he had already died in battle, and the apparent life left to him was on a very short lease. This explained their vicious cruelty. I can still see two of the guards beating to death an exhausted Chinese rickshaw coolie who had brought them from Shanghai. As the desperate man sobbed on his knees the Japanese first kicked his rickshaw to pieces, probably his only possession in the world and sole source of income, and then began to beat and kick the Chinese until he lay in a still and bloody pulp on the ground.

  All this took place some thirty feet from me by the rear entrance of G Block, and was watched by a l
arge crowd of internees. None of the men spoke, as if their silent stares would force the two Japanese to end their torment. I knew that this was a naive hope, but I also understood why none of the British, all of whom had wives and children, had tried to intervene. The reprisals would have been instant and fearsome. I remember feeling a deep deadness, which may have been noticed by one of my father’s friends, who steered me away.

  I think that by this time, early 1945, I was already (aged 14!) starting to worry about the future of Lunghua. I realised that the state of Japanese morale was more important than that of the internees, and I was glad to see the Japanese guards helping the internee working parties to repair the main gates of the camp and keep out the destitute Chinese peasants who had crossed the stricken countryside and were hoping to find sanctuary in Lunghua. Starving families sat around the gates, the women wailing and holding up their skeletal children, like the beggars who had clustered outside the office buildings of downtown Shanghai. If the Japanese abandoned Lunghua we would be exposed to roaming groups of militia soldiers, little more than bandits, and to units of the former puppet armies left to fend for themselves, all armed and eager to ransack the camp.

  I kept careful watch on the barbed-wire fence, and turned my back on the younger children still playing the traditional games that I forgot when I came to England and sadly never passed on to my own children – marbles and hopscotch, and complicated skipping and ball games. I had read the camp’s entire stock of magazines several times over, but I still visited the American seamen. Cheerful as ever, they were obsessed with their pheasant traps, which I helped them lay in the open ground between E Block and the perimeter fence. I suspect now that they were really marking out an escape route beyond the eyes of the Japanese, in the event of a major emergency like the sudden closure of the camp.

  The first American air raids over Shanghai had begun in the summer of 1944, and steadily intensified over the following months. High-flying reconnaissance planes appeared in the sky, strangely motionless as they hung between the clouds. Soon after, squadrons of fighters, Mustangs and twin-engined Lightnings, flew in from the south to attack Lunghua airfield. As they approached, barely twenty feet above the abandoned paddy fields, they hid behind the three-storey buildings of Lunghua Camp, then swerved away to strafe the parked Japanese planes and nearby hangars. Lunghua pagoda had been turned into a flak tower by the Japanese, and as I watched the attacks from the first-floor balcony of the men’s washroom the pagoda was lit up like a Christmas tree, gunfire flickering from its upper decks.

  Whenever an air attack was imminent a warning siren sent us to our quarters. Running back to G Block with other internees, I was once caught out in the open. Anti-aircraft shells were exploding above us, and I stopped to pick up a gnarled piece of steel, like the peel of a silver apple, that gleamed on the pathway. I remember that it was still hot to the touch. Often the Mustangs would shed their drop tanks before making their attack, and these tail-less, bomb-shaped structures were treated with immense respect by the guards, who roped them off and waited for army engineers to inspect them.

  The air attacks on Shanghai took place almost daily, and once Lunghua airfield had been neutralised the first waves of B-29 bombers appeared in the sky, immense four-engined aircraft that bombed the airfield, Shanghai dockyards and railway junctions. They passed overhead and then seemed to vanish into the clouds, and a moment later a thunderous curtain of smoke rose from the ground as sticks of bombs struck the hangars and parked planes. I can still see one Mustang trailing smoke that turned and headed east towards the sea, the pilot hoping perhaps to ditch his crippled plane near a US warship. As the Mustang crossed the Whangpoo he seemed to give up, and we saw his parachute open and a truck filled with Japanese soldiers driving past the camp to capture him.

  The sight of these advanced American aircraft gave me a new focus of adolescent veneration. As the Mustangs streaked overhead, less than a hundred feet from the ground, it was clear that they belonged to a different technological order. The power of their engines (the British-designed Rolls-Royce Merlin, I later learned), their speed and silver fuselages, and the high style in which they were flown, clearly placed them in a more advanced realm than the Japanese Zeros and the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the British Embassy newsreels. The American aircraft had sprung from the advertisement pages of Life and Collier’s, they embodied the same consumer ethos as the streamlined Cadillacs and Lincoln Zephyrs, the refrigerators and radios. In a way the Mustangs and Lightnings were themselves advertisements, 400-mile-an-hour commercials that advertised the American dream and American power.

  I noticed that the American seamen in E Block took for granted the superiority of the advanced aircraft flying over their heads. Despite the catastrophe that befell the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales, the British internees still spoke with a certain dogged pride of their country’s military equipment. But the American seamen I visited said nothing and never made a boastful claim.

  All this led me to switch my boyhood admiration to a new set of heroes. However brave the Japanese soldiers and pilots, they belonged to the past. America, I knew, was a future that had already arrived. I spent every spare moment watching the sky.

  9

  The Railway Station (1945)

  One day in early August we woke to find that the Japanese guards had gone. We assembled for the morning roll-call, standing in the corridor outside our rooms, but the guards failed to appear. We wandered away, listening to the empty sky. One or two reconnaissance planes drifted high overhead, but for the first time everything was silent. Had the war ended? Rumours and counter-rumours swept the camp, but Lunghua was sealed off from the world, surrounded by the deserted villages and drained paddy fields.

  Demoralised by the unending air offensive and the sinking of most of their shipping by American submarines near the Yangtze estuary, and by the loss of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Japanese military responsible for Lunghua Camp had finally abandoned this malaria-ridden group of foreign internees. The food supply had been intermittent for months, and I spent hours on the observation roof of F Block, hoping for any sign of the Red Cross truck that would bring the next day’s rations.

  The perimeter fence ran within a dozen yards of G Block, and a few of the internees began to step through the barbed wire. They stood in the deep grass, inhaling the air outside the camp, as if testing a different atmosphere. I followed them and, rather than stay near the fence, I decided to walk to a burial mound some two hundred yards away. I climbed onto the lowest tier of rotting coffins, turned and looked back at the camp, a view I had never seen before. It seemed almost uncanny to be no longer part of the camp but staring at it from a distance. Everything about its perspectives seemed strange and unreal, though it had been my home for two and a half years. I jumped down from the burial mound, then ran back through the deep grass to the fence and climbed through the wire, relieved to be back in the camp and the only security I knew.

  Emboldened by the absence of the Japanese guards, a number of British internees decided to walk to Shanghai. I was tempted to join them, but fortunately decided not to. Within hours they were brought back to the camp, lying badly beaten on the floor of a Japanese truck, part of a motorised unit of military police that immediately re-established control over Lunghua. I assume that at this time the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, but the Japanese had not yet decided to surrender. The Japanese generals in China were still prepared to fight on to the end, aware that most of Japan’s principal cities and industrial areas had been reduced to ash by the American bombing campaign.

  The Japanese soldiers stepped down from their trucks, and seized a number of internees and held them for interrogation in the first-floor offices of the commandant and his staff in F Block. Realising what might happen to their husbands, a group of wives attacked the Japanese as they crossed the assembly ground outside D Block, then formed up below the balcony of the commandant’s offices, jeering and screaming at the Japanese
officers as they stared down impassively at the raging women. The spit from their mouths formed necklaces on their breasts as they swore and shook their fists at the Japanese.

  Eventually the men were released, but still no one knew if the war had ended. A few days later we heard of Hirohito’s broadcast, calling on Japanese forces everywhere to lay down their arms, but we were all unsure whether they would obey him, even when the Japanese guards finally drove away from Lunghua and left us to ourselves. The bombing raids had ceased, but Japanese military units still occupied Shanghai and the surrounding countryside.

  It was several weeks before American forces arrived in strength to take control of Shanghai. August 1945 formed a strange interregnum when we were never wholly certain that the war had ended, a sensation that stayed with me for months and even years. To this day as I doze in an armchair I feel the same brief moment of uncertainty.

  * * *

  I stayed in the camp, waiting until I was sure that the Japanese had surrendered. All sense of community spirit had left Lunghua, and nothing seemed to matter any more. The school had closed, and children played their skipping games while their mothers abandoned the family washing on the lines behind G Block. But the water from the Bubbling Well station was cold, and the Red Cross sent a daily tanker filled with drinking water to the camp, along with enough rations to keep us going. Clearly, though, the camp’s reason for existence had passed. I wandered around the ruined buildings with Cyril Goldbert, listening to him describe the Shakespeare roles he would soon be playing, ‘his’ Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, aware that none of us in Lunghua had any role at all.