For an hour we trundled through the deserted countryside, past empty villages and recent battlefields that I remembered from earlier drives with my parents and their friends. We passed the pagoda at Lunghua, where Japanese soldiers were hoisting anti-aircraft guns onto the upper decks. Nearby was a military airfield, Zero fighters lined up in front of the hangars. On all sides there were derelict canals and untended paddy fields, a waterlogged land through which the great arm of the Whangpoo river moved on its way to Shanghai and the sea.
Then Lunghua Camp appeared, my last real childhood home, where I would spend the next two and a half largely happy years. As we drove past sections of brand-new barbed-wire fencing, the camp resembled a half-ruined college campus. There were three-storey concrete buildings, pockmarked by shellfire but still standing. Other buildings were mounds of rubble, cement floors concertinaed together as if after an earthquake. There was a guardhouse by the gates, Japanese soldiers staring at us stonily. There were smaller buildings with pitched roofs of red tile, and rows of freshly built wooden huts, each some fifty yards long. Washing hung everywhere on makeshift lines, but there was a faint smell of sewage on the air, shared with a million mosquitoes.
And then there were the internees. We stepped down from our bus, greeted by a friendly crowd who helped us with our suitcases and guided families with small children towards G Block, a two-storey building that held some forty small
The former F Block in Lunghua Camp, in 1991.
rooms. Our bedding had been sent on ahead, and assembled for us by friends of my father. I remember how he and my mother sat together on one of the beds with my sister, staring at this tiny space, as small as the rooms in the servants’ quarters at 31 Amherst Avenue, which had also contained entire families. Keen to greet schoolfriends I had recognised in the crowd around the bus, I left my parents to their new domain and began my exploration of Lunghua Camp.
My first impression was of how relaxed and casual the internees seemed. All this would change, but the people around me were enjoying a ramshackle and rather pleasant holiday. I had known a Shanghai where the men wore suits and ties, but here they were dressed in cotton shorts and shirtsleeves. Many of the younger women, among them the rather formal mothers of boys at school, were in beachwear. There were few Japanese guards around, and most of the camp administration was left to the internees. The dining hall where we assembled for our first meal had the atmosphere of an unsupervised prison, children screaming, the husbands flirting with each other’s wives, young men playfully squaring off at each other. Later, still in a daze, I was shown around the camp by schoolfriends. There seemed to be humour, or at least the prison-camp version of drollery, in ample supply – earth and cinder road-tracks named Oxford Street and Piccadilly, the drinking-water stations that boiled our water signposted ‘Waterloo’ and ‘Bubbling Well’. On the observation roof of F Block a group of music lovers listened to a classical symphony on a wind-up gramophone. On the steps of the assembly hall the Lunghua Players rehearsed a scene from The Pirates of Penzance, though what the young Japanese soldiers in the front row on the opening night actually made of it I can’t imagine.
All in all, this was a relaxed and easy-going world that I had never known, except during our holidays in Tsingtao, and this favourable first impression stayed with me to the end, when conditions in the camp took a marked turn for the worse. I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart.
But all that was two years away, and in the spring of 1943 I was happy to make the most of my new world. My parents were glad to let me stay out to all hours, and I set about exploring every corner of the camp, meeting a host of quirky, bored, pleasant and unpleasant characters.
E Block and F Block, the two largest buildings in the former teacher-training college, contained its classrooms, and these were occupied by single internees and married couples without children. Families with children were housed in D and G Blocks, in the rooms that once housed the Chinese student teachers. There was a shower block, which in the first months supplied hot water, a small ‘hospital’ where my sister was treated for dysentery, and a number of bungalows that had housed the college’s senior staff and were the quarters of the Japanese guards.
The camp lay over a substantial area, perhaps half a mile in diameter, ringed by a barbed-wire fence through which I often climbed to retrieve a ball or kite. Japanese soldiers patrolled the wire in a rather casual way, and once I had to hide in the long grass outside the fence when I was searching for a lost baseball and the other children warned me that the guards were approaching. About a third of the original site was excluded from the camp, and contained a number of derelict buildings. With the agreement of the camp commandant, a former diplomat named Hyashi, who had spent time at the London embassy and spoke fluent English, one of these buildings became the camp school. Each day the gates were opened to allow the children to and fro, and we entered the rather eerie world beyond the camp.
There were many open spaces in Lunghua, uncultivated ground littered with stones and war rubble from the fierce fighting that had taken place in and around the buildings of the training college. Over the next year, as our rations fell, groups of internees began to clear the ground and cultivate modest vegetable plots. I helped my father to hoist buckets of sewage from the G Block septic tank, which we used to fertilise our tomatoes, melons and runner beans, though the results of all this labour seemed strangely puny and stunted.
For all the open spaces that surrounded the buildings in the camp, including the assembly ground where football matches were played, inside the crowded dormitories there was a desperate competition for space. In E and F Blocks, the former classrooms that housed married couples were divided into a maze of cubicles by sheets hung from lines of string and rope. Pieces of cardboard, sections of wooden packing cases and anything else to hand helped to provide a minimum of privacy. Within the small family rooms of D and G Blocks the parents had no defence against the children who shared their tiny spaces, and no doubt this explains why my mother and father were happy to let me roam around the camp for as long as I wanted. In many ways the camp became my new Shanghai, with a thousand sights to be investigated and savoured, a hundred errands to be run in return for an old copy of Life or an unwanted screwdriver.
All men in the camp were assigned jobs – running the kitchens, unloading the supplies of food and coal trucked into Lunghua from Shanghai, boiling our drinking water, maintaining the electricity supply, teaching the children and conducting religious services. Single women helped wherever they could, nursing and caring for malaria victims. Married women with small children were excused duties of any kind, and my mother rarely left G Block and the tiny room that became our home. During the day my father raised his mattress against the wall, and in the small space we set up a card table at which we ate our meals. Much of the time my mother remained in our room, reading by the window as she kept an eye on my sister playing in the yard outside with the other toddlers.
Families with only a single child were obliged to take in one of the children separated from their parents and interned alone. In G Block a boy named Bobby Henderson was so resented by the couple on whom he was billeted that he constructed a cubicle like a beggar’s hovel around his narrow bed. This was his private world that he defended fiercely. He was dressed in cast-offs, and saved his shoes for the winter months. In the summers he wore a pair of wooden clogs with the heels completely worn away, leaving two slivers of wood that ended in his insteps.