Bobby was a close friend, though I never really liked him, and found something threatening about his tough and self-reliant mind. I sensed that circumstances had forced him to fight too hard to survive, and that this had made him ruthless not only with others, but with himself. He allowed me to tag along with him, but regarded my endless curiosity and roaming around the camp as a waste of time and energy, and my interest in chess, bridge and kite building, and in the complex skipping games that some of the girls brought into camp with them, as frivolous and distracting. His parents were interned in Peking, but he never spoke about them, which baffled me at the time, and I suspect that he had forgotten what they were like. Thinking of him now, I realise that part of him had died, and I hope that he never went on to have children of his own.
On the whole, however, Lunghua seemed full of easygoing and agreeable characters. What I liked most was that everyone, of almost any age, could talk to anyone else. Striding around E Block or the assembly hall with my chessboard, I would be affably hailed as ‘Shanghai Jim’ (for constantly telling anyone who would listen about some strange Hardoon temple I had found on my cycle rides). I would then settle down to a game of chess with a man of my father’s age who might be an architect or cinema manager, Cathay Hotel bartender or a former jockey. At the end of the game, which generally involved the transfer from my opponent of a goodly amount of internment camp wisdom, I might be lent an old copy of the Saturday Evening Post, which I understood, or Punch, with its incomprehensible humour that my tired mother would have to explain.
During the first year a host of camp activities took place – amateur dramatics, with full-scale performances in the dining hall of Noël Coward and Shakespeare plays, lighthearted revues (‘We’re the Lunghua sophomores, we’re the girls every boy adores, CAC don’t mean a thing to me, for every Tuesday evening we go on a spree…’). I forget what happened on Tuesday evenings, and there may have been dances from which all children were excluded. CAC stood for ‘Civilian Assembly Centre’, an exalted term for our collection of run-down and half-ruined buildings.
Generally I would be somewhere in the audience, fascinated by a lecture on Roman roads or airship design. My father once delivered a lecture on ‘Science and the Idea of God’, a tactful dismissal of the Almighty from human affairs, which drew many of the English missionaries in the camp. Until the day we left Lunghua I was frequently stopped by one or other of the up-country parsons and told what an excellent lecture it was, so interesting, and I wonder if any of them or their high-minded wives had seen the point.
Since there were so many professionally trained men in the camp – engineers, architects, bankers, industrial chemists, dentists and doctors – there was no shortage of lecturers. And, alas, no shortage of teachers for the camp school that soon opened. A full-scale syllabus was set out, which met the requirements of the then School Certificate, and we were taught maths, French, English and Latin, history and general science. Since there were few books our tuition was largely blackboard-driven, but I don’t think that any of us fell behind our counterparts at school in wartime England, and in some cases we were well ahead. I find it difficult to explain this, but my guess is that there were far fewer distractions in Lunghua than I imagined at the time, for either teachers or pupils, and that we progressed rapidly in the way that long-term convicted prisoners pass one university degree after another.
Lunghua Camp held some 2000 internees, of whom 300 were children. Most of them were British, Dutch and Belgian, but there was a group of thirty American merchant seamen, captured on board an American freighter. As civilians, they were not sent to a POW camp, and must have realised their good luck. They passed their time loafing on their beds in E Block, though now and then they would rouse themselves and amble out to the assembly ground for a game of softball. I liked them immensely, for their good humour, verbal inventiveness and enormously laid-back style. Life in their company was always interesting, and they remained cheerful to the end, unlike many of the British internees. They always seemed glad to see me, throwing back the curtains of their miniature cubicles, and would go to elaborate lengths to make me the butt of friendly practical jokes, which I took in good part. Among their other virtues, the Americans had a substantial stock of magazines – Life, Time, Popular Mechanics, Collier’s – which I devoured, desperate for the kind of hard information on which my imagination fed.
What was happening, without my realising it at the time, was that I was meeting a range of adults from whom my life in Shanghai had screened me. This was nothing to do with class in the English sense, but with the fact that pre-war Shanghai attracted to its bars and hotel lobbies a number of devious and unscrupulous characters who were very good company, and often far more generous with a sweet potato than the tight-fisted Church of England missionaries. Many of these ‘rogues’, as my mother termed them, had well-stocked minds (perhaps based on their extensive prison-cell reading in England) and could come up with arresting ideas about everything under the sun. Years of property and financial scams, of rigged bets at jai alai games and the Shanghai racecourse, had added salt to their easy wit. I hung on every word, and even tried to model myself on them, without success. When I first tried ‘the university of life’ on my mother she stared at me without speaking for a full minute.
But I loved hearing adults talk together. I would sidle up unnoticed to a group of G Block adults discussing the servant problem in Shanghai, their last leaves in Hong Kong or Singapore, the refusal by some fellow internee to do his share of the lavatory-cleaning fatigue, pre-war gossip about Mrs So-and-so, until they noticed my keen ears and gleaming eyes and ordered me to hop it.
What all these adults shared, of which I took full advantage, was the crushing boredom of camp life. The war was far away and the news we received, percolating through delivery drivers and Red Cross visits, was months late. The Lunghua internees were living in an eventless world, with little to distract them other than the sound of a few Japanese planes taking off from the nearby airfield. An hour’s chess with a talkative 12-year-old was an hour less to endure, and even a discussion about the relative merits of the Packard and the Rolls-Royce could help the afternoon along.
The adults in the camp were also coming to terms with the most significant change in their lives, almost on a par with the war itself, and one which histories of internment often overlook – the absence of alcohol. After years and sometimes decades of heavy drinking (the core of social and professional life in the 1930s), Lunghua Camp must have functioned for its first months as a highly efficient health spa. One serious hazard still remained: malaria. The Lunghua area, with its stagnant paddy fields and canals, was notorious for its malaria, though luckily the Ballard family was immune. My mother later claimed that 50 per cent of the internees caught malaria. This sounds high to me, but I have seen official post-war estimates of 30 per cent.
Our food supply was a serious problem from the start. Hungry children will eat anything, but my parents must have shuddered at the thought of another day’s meals. At no time during the years of internment did we see milk, butter, margarine, eggs or sugar. Our meals consisted of rice congee (rice boiled into a liquid pulp), vegetable soup that concealed one or two dice-sized pieces of gristly horse meat, a hard black bread baked from what must have been godown sweepings and filled with bits of rusty wire and stony grit, and grey sweet potatoes, a cattle feed that I adored. Later there was a cereal called cracked wheat, another cattle feed that I took a great liking to. Somehow my parents and the other adults forced this down, but I always had a strong appetite, and to this day I find it difficult to leave food on my plate, even if I dislike its taste.