Miracles of Life

by James Graham Ballard

  My first impressions of England remained vividly in my mind for years. They may seem unnecessarily hostile, but they were no different from the impressions that England made on countless American GIs and the Canadian and American students I met at Cambridge. Even allowing for a long and exhausting war, England seemed derelict, dark and half-ruined. The Southampton that greeted me as I carried my suitcase down the gangway had been heavily bombed during the war, and consisted largely of rubble, with few signs of human settlement. Large sections of London and the Midlands were vast bomb sites, and most of the buildings still standing were ruined and desolate. London and greater Birmingham, like the other main cities, had been built in the 19th century, and everything seemed to be crumbling and shabby, unpainted for years, and in many ways resembled a huge demolition site. Few buildings dated from the 1930s, though I never visited the vast London suburbs that largely survived the war intact. A steady drizzle fell for most of the time, and the sky was slate-grey with soot lifting over the streets from tens of thousands of chimneys. Everything was dirty, and the interiors of railway carriages and buses were black with grime.

  Looking at the English people around me, it was impossible to believe that they had won the war. They behaved like a defeated population. I wrote in The Kindness of Women that the English talked as if they had won the war, but acted as if they had lost it. They were clearly exhausted by the war, and expected little of the future. Everything was rationed – food, clothing, petrol – or simply unobtainable. People moved in a herd-like way, queueing for everything. Ration books and clothing coupons were all-important, endlessly counted and fussed over, even though there was almost nothing in the shops to buy. Tracking down a few light bulbs could take all day. Everything was poorly designed – my grandparents’ three-storey house was heated by one or two single-bar electric fires and an open coal fire. Most of the house was icy, and we slept under huge eiderdowns like marooned Arctic travellers in their survival gear, a frozen air numbing our faces, the plumes of our breath visible in the darkness.

  More importantly, hope itself was rationed, and people’s spirits were bent low. The only hope came from Hollywood films, and long queues, often four abreast, formed outside the immense Odeons and Gaumonts that had survived the bombing. The people waiting in the rain for their hour or two of American glamour were docile and resigned. The impression given by the newsreels we had seen in Shanghai, of confident crowds celebrating VE and VJ Days, wasn’t remotely borne out by the people huddling in the drizzle outside their local cinema, the only recreation apart from the BBC radio programmes, which were dominated by maniacal English comedians (ITMA, totally incomprehensible) or Workers’ Playtime (forced cheerfulness relayed from factories).

  It took a long while for this mood to lift, and food rationing went on into the 1950s. But there was always the indirect rationing of simple unavailability, and the far more dangerous rationing of any kind of belief in a better life. The whole nation seemed to be deeply depressed. Audiences sat in their damp raincoats in smoke-filled cinemas as they watched newsreels that showed the immense pomp of the royal family, the aggressively cheerful crowds at a new holiday camp, and the triumph of some new air-speed or land-speed record, as if Britain led the world in technology. It is hard to imagine how conditions could have been worse if we had lost the war.

  It came home to me very quickly that the England I had been brought up to believe in – A.A. Milne, Just William, Chums annuals – was a complete fantasy. The English middle class had lost its confidence. Even the relatively well-off friends of my parents – doctors, lawyers, senior managers – had a very modest standard of living, large but poorly heated homes, and a dull and very meagre diet. Few of them went abroad, and most of their pre-war privileges, such as domestic servants and a comfortable lifestyle awarded to them by right, were now under threat.

  For the first time, I was meeting large numbers of working-class people, with a range of regional accents that took a trained ear to decode. Travelling around the Birmingham area, I was amazed at how bleakly they lived, how poorly paid they were, poorly educated, housed and fed. To me they were a vast exploited workforce, not much better off than the industrial workers in Shanghai. I think it was clear to me from the start that the English class system, which I was meeting for the first time, was an instrument of political control, and not a picturesque social relic. Middle-class people in the late 1940s and 1950s saw the working class as almost another species, and fenced themselves off behind a complex system of social codes.

  Most of these I had to learn now for the first time – show respect to one’s elders, never be too keen, take it on the chin, be decent to the junior ranks, defer to tradition, stand up for the national anthem, offer leadership, be modest and so on, all calculated to create a sense of overpowering deference, and certainly not qualities that had made Shanghai great or, for that matter, won the Battle of Britain. Everything about English middle-class life revolved around codes of behaviour that unconsciously cultivated second-rateness and low expectations.

  With its ancestor worship and standing to attention for ‘God Save the King’, England needed to be freed from itself and from the delusions that people in all walks of life clung to about Britain’s place in the world. Most of the British adults I met genuinely thought that we had won the war singlehandedly, with a little help, often more of a hindrance, from the Americans and Russians. In fact we had suffered enormous losses, exhausted and impoverished ourselves, and had little more to look forward to than our nostalgia.

  Should we have gone to war in 1939, given how ill-prepared we were, and how little we did to help Poland, to whose aid Neville Chamberlain had committed us when he declared war on Germany? Despite all our efforts, the loss of a great many brave lives and the destruction of our cities, Poland was rapidly overrun by the Germans and became the greatest slaughterhouse in history. Should Britain and France have waited a few years, until the Russians had broken the back of German military power? And, most important from my point of view, would the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor if they had known that they faced not only the Americans but the French, British and Dutch armies, navies and air forces? The sight of the three colonial powers defeated or neutralised by the Germans must have tipped the balance in Japanese calculations.

  In short, did the English pay a fearful price for the system of self-delusions that underpinned almost everything in their lives? The question seemed to leap from the shabby streets and bomb sites when I first came to England, and played a large role in the difficulty I had settling down here. It fed into my troubled sense of who I was, and encouraged me to think of myself as a lifelong outsider and maverick. It probably steered me towards becoming a writer devoted to predicting and, if possible, provoking change. Change, I felt, was what England desperately needed, and I still feel it.

  The Leys School, 1946–49

  Life at an English boarding school was part of the continuum of strangeness that made up my adolescence. I once said that The Leys reminded me of Lunghua Camp, though the food was worse. In fact, by the standards prevalent among English public schools, The Leys was liberal and progressive. It had been founded in 1875 by rich Nonconformists from the north of England, who wanted the ethos and discipline of a public school without the mummery and flummery of the Church of England. Most of the founders were industrialists, and were strong supporters of science. The large science block at The Leys was remarkably well-equipped, with superb physics, chemistry and biology labs, so much so that I rather looked down on the tired and broken equipment I later found in the University science laboratories. The school had a large swimming pool, the only indoor pool in Cambridge when I was there, regularly used for University events. There was no fagging, and though there was chapel twice a day, many of the Sunday sermons were given by lay preachers, often well-known scientists. The Methodist message was never blatant.

  Another advantage was that the school was in Cambridge. Most public schools existed in an isolated wor
ld of their own, but The Leys was within walking distance of the centre of Cambridge. This was important to me, and meant that I was able to visit friends from the classes above mine who had entered the University a year ahead of me. It gave me an early taste of college life, and access to excellent bookshops, specialist journals and student magazines I would never have seen otherwise.

  Above all, there was the Arts Cinema, where I saw virtually the entire repertory of French, Italian, Swedish and German films screened in England after the war. I remember Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, a wonderful romp of wartime collaborators led by Arletty; Clouzot’s Le Corbeau and Manon (with the divine child-woman Cécile Aubry, apparently no older than I was and impossible to get out of my 17-year-old head); Cocteau’s Orphée, with another ‘divine’, María Casares, incarnating Death: I was more than ready to die as I recuperated in the Copper Kettle, a coffee shop on King’s Parade, before going back to cottage pie and treacle pudding in the school dining hall; Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers are Among Us, the first revisionist German film, powerful but hollow.

  I also liked American films, especially the B-movies that formed the lower part of a double bill. This was the heyday of film noir, and I must have sneaked away on our free afternoons to see everything that the Hollywood studios could produce. I devoured Double Indemnity (Barbara Stanwyck reminded me in some ways of my mother and her bridge-playing friends, desperate women trying to break out of their housewifely roles) and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, but my favourite films of all were the ultra-low-budget crime and gangster movies. These were often far more interesting than the star vehicle topping the bill. Out of the simplest materials – two cars, a cheap motel, a gun and a tired brunette – they conjured up a hard and unsentimental image of the primeval city, a psychological space that existed first and foremost in the characters’ minds.

  Writing my short stories in idle moments during evening prep, I knew that the post-war film offered a serious challenge to any aspirant writer. The novel thrived on static societies, which the novelist could examine like an entomologist labelling a tray of butterflies. But too much had happened to me, and to the boys sitting at the desks around me, in the wartime years. Continuous upheavals had unsettled family life: fathers were away in the Middle East or in the Pacific, mothers had taken on jobs and responsibilities that had redefined who they felt they were. People had memories of bombing raids and beachheads, endless hours of queueing and waiting in provincial railway stations that were impossible to convey to anyone not actually there. I never talked about my life in Shanghai or internment in Lunghua even to my closest friends. Too much had happened for even a race of novelists to digest. But I persisted with my short sketches, gnawing away at the inner bone.

  Despite its modern ways, The Leys was the model for the very old-fashioned public school shown in the film Goodbye, Mr Chips, based on a novel by an Old Leysian, the bestselling writer James Hilton (author also of the Shangri-La novel, Lost Horizon). Mr Chips was modelled on a master named Balgarnie, a familiar figure around the school during my years there. When Hollywood made its version of the novel, with Robert Donat, they chose a deeply self-enclosed, ivy-clad Victorian institution far removed in spirit from The Leys, all Gothic spires and hallowed cloisters.

  In fact, the masters at The Leys were remarkably open-minded. They lived in Cambridge, many had served in the war, and none of them would have wanted to bring a sentimental tear to the eyes of the boys they taught. The English master, who had the closest access to the turmoil inside my head, never chided me for the strange notions I set out in my essays, which were virtually short stories, and encouraged me to read as widely as I could.

  As I entered the Science VIth at 16 I was spending more and more of my time in the school library. The careers master assumed that I would go on to Cambridge University, but I was still not sure what subject I would study. My parents were in Shanghai, and I was thrown onto myself. My grandparents were in many ways as remote from me as the Chinese servants at 31 Amherst Avenue. Any kind of discussion was impossible. They were obsessed with the iniquity of the post-war Labour government, which they genuinely believed to have carried out a military putsch to seize control of the country, using the postal votes of millions of overseas servicemen. If I made the mildest comment in praise of the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, my grandfather would stare silently at me, his face turning bright pink and then purple. Yet all around him was the desperate poverty of the Black Country, with some of the most ill-housed and poorly educated people in western Europe, still giving their lives after the war to maintain an empire that had never been of the least benefit to them. My grandfather’s attitude was common, and based less on feelings of social class than on a visceral resistance to change. Change was the enemy of everything he believed in.

  I spent the long months of school holiday with them reading relentlessly, sketching out ‘experimental’ short stories, which usually proved the experiment had failed, and going to the cinemas in Birmingham. I liked to go in the afternoons, when the vast auditoriums were almost empty, and sit in the front row of the circle, the closest possible communion with the world of the Hollywood screen. I avoided English films, apart from a select few – A Matter of Life and Death, a posthumous fantasy in which a ‘dead’ pilot walks ashore into an England he barely recognises, a predicament with which I totally identified; The Third Man, a masterpiece that might just as well have been set in England (the bomb sites and black market, the air of compromise and defeat, the sports jackets and shabby drinking clubs straight out of Earls Court); and the wonderful Ealing comedies, which sent up the English class system that everyone secretly accepted, for reasons I have never understood.

  The more I learned about English life, the stranger it seemed, and I was unsure how I could shape my life to avoid it. The contemporary novelists I read offered little help. I enjoyed Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, but most English novelists were far too ‘English’. To save myself from the suffocations of English life, I seized on American and European writers, the whole canon of classic modernism – Hemingway, Dos Passos, Kafka, Camus, Joyce and Dostoevsky. It was probably a complete waste of time. I read far too much, far too early, long before I had any experience of adult life: the worlds of work, marriage and parenthood. I was focusing on the strong mood of alienation that dominated these writers, and on little else. In many ways I was rather lost, trying to find my way through a dark and very grim funfair where none of the lights would come on.

  Then, at the age of 16, I discovered Freud and the surrealists, a stick of bombs that fell in front of me and destroyed all the bridges that I was hesitating to cross.

  Freud’s works, like Jung’s, were easy to come across in the late 1940s, but reproductions of surrealist paintings were extremely difficult to find. Many of the first paintings I saw by Chirico, Ernst and Dalí were in books about abnormal psychology, or in guides to modern philosophy, both very popular in the years after Belsen and Hiroshima. Freud was still something of an academic joke; the admissions tutor at King’s assumed that I was being ironic when I mentioned my admiration of Freud. The surrealists were still decades away from achieving any kind of critical respectability, and even serious newspapers treated them as a rather tired joke.

  Needless to say, this rejection only recommended Freud and the surrealists to me. I felt strongly, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality, and also a key to myself. My head was filled with half-digested fragments of Kafka and Joyce, the Paris existentialists and Italian neorealist films such as Rome, Open City, the high tide of heroic modernism, played out against the background of the Nazi death camps and the growing threat of nuclear war.

  All this pressed around me, but I was stuck in a deeply provincial outpost, England in the late 1940s. Few of the painters, philosophers, writers and film-makers I admired were English, but at the same time I could see that I myself was bec
oming more and more English, if only to get along more comfortably with everyone I met. By 1948 I knew that the Communists under Mao Tse-tung would soon take over the whole of China and that I would never go back to Shanghai. Lunghua Camp and the International Settlement would be swept away. England was my home for the indefinite future, and the locks had been changed.

  But surrealism and psychoanalysis offered an escape route, a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world, where shifting psychological roles are more important than the ‘character’ so admired by English schoolmasters and literary critics, and where the deep revolutions of the psyche matter more than the social dramas of everyday life, as trivial as a tempest in a tea cosy.

  Freud’s serene and masterful tone, his calm assumption that psychoanalysis could reveal the complete truth about modern man and his discontents, appealed to me powerfully, especially in the absence of my own father. At the same time, the surrealists’ rejection of reason and rationality, their faith in the power of the imagination to remake the world, resonated strongly with my efforts as a novice writer. I wrote short stories and fragments of incomprehensible novels which made complete sense if deemed to be surrealist. Ever since childhood I had a flair for drawing, and in the art department at The Leys I made plaster casts of the faces of friends (I called them ‘death’ masks after those of Shelley, Blake, Napoleon and other heroes). I nearly suffocated one classmate when the plaster failed to set and I physically restrained him from clawing away the oozing carapace. To my lifelong regret, however, I lacked the skill and facility to become a painter, whereas my head was filled with short stories and I had the beginnings of a knack for expressing them.