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 shadows 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.
Already, though, everything was becoming too uncertain even for a 12-year-old who thrived on change. I went to visit a close friend in the Avenue Joffre and found the door of his family apartment open and unlocked. The family had left at short notice, and discarded suitcases lay across the unmade beds. Curtains swayed in the open windows, as if celebrating their new freedom. I sat for a long time in my friend’s bedroom, staring at his toy soldiers and the model aircraft we had played with happily for so many hours.
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.
6
Lunghua Camp (1943)
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.