Until I arrived in England I had been lucky to have a happy childhood, and any shocks that shaped my character came not from my family but from the outside world – the sudden scene-shifting I witnessed in 1937 and 1941. If anything, the years in Lunghua offered the first stability I had known since I had been a small child, a stability that the adult internees around me had done little or nothing to create. I felt fairly sceptical about the adult world and the notions of good sense and decisive thought promoted by my parents and teachers. War, I knew, was an irrational business, and the sensible predictions of architects, doctors and managing directors had a marked tendency to be wrong.
I have given a general picture of Lunghua Camp in my novel Empire of the Sun, which is partly autobiographical and partly fictional, though many incidents are described as they occurred. At the same time, I accept that the novel is based on the memories of a teenage boy, who responded more warmly to the good cheer of the American sailors than to the rather torpid Brits, many of whom had held modest jobs in Shanghai and probably regretted ever leaving England.
In my novel the most important break with real events is the absence from Lunghua of my parents. I thought hard about this, but I felt that it was closer to the psychological and emotional truth of events to make ‘Jim’ effectively a war orphan. There is no doubt that a gradual estrangement from my parents, which lasted to the end of their lives, began in Lunghua Camp. There was never any friction or antagonism, and they did their best to look after me and my sister. Despite the food shortages in the last year, the bitterly cold winters (we lived in unheated concrete buildlings) and the uncertainties of the future, I was happier in the camp than I was until my marriage and children.
At the same time I felt slightly apart from my parents by the time the war ended. One reason for our estrangement was that their parenting became passive rather than active – they had none of the usual levers to pull, no presents or treats, no say in what we ate, no power over how we lived or ability to shape events. Like all the adults, they were nervous of the highly unpredictable Japanese and Korean guards, they were often unwell, and always short of food and clothing. At one point, when my shoes had fallen to tatters, my father gave me a pair of heavy leather golfing shoes with metal studs, but the sound of me stamping down the stone corridors in G Block brought the internees swiftly to attention outside their doors, assuming that the Japanese had called a sudden inspection. I would find myself desperately trying to get to the Ballard room before anyone noticed who was actually inspecting them. Needless to say, I soon had to return the shoes to my father, and G Block was able to relax.
Thoughts of food filled every hour, as they did for the other teenage boys in Lunghua. I don’t remember my parents ever giving me their own food, and I’m sure that no other parents shared their rations with their children. All mothers, in prison camps or famine regions, know that their own health is vital to the survival of their children. A child who has lost its parent is in desperate danger, and the parents in Lunghua must have realised that they needed all the strength they had for the uncertain years ahead. But I scavenged what I could, stealing tomatoes and cucumbers from any unwatched vegetable plot. The camp was, in effect, a huge slum, and in any slum it is the teenage boys who run wild. I have never looked down on the helpless parents in sink housing estates unable to control their children. I remember my own parents in the camp, unable to warn, chide, praise or promise.
All the same I regret the estrangement, and realise how much I have missed. The experience of seeing adults under stress is an education in itself, but bought, sadly, at too heavy a price. When my mother, sister and I sailed for England at the end of 1945 my father remained in Shanghai, returning for a brief visit to England in 1947, when we toured Europe in his large American car. I was 17, about to go to Cambridge, unsure whether to be a doctor or a writer. My father was a friendly but already distant figure who played no part in my decision. When he returned for good in 1950 he had been away from England for more than twenty years, and the advice he gave me about English life was out of date. I went my own way, ignoring him when he strongly urged me against becoming a writer. I had spent five years learning to decode the strange, introverted world of English life, while he was happiest dealing with his professional colleagues in Switzerland and America. He telephoned to congratulate me on my first novel, The Drowned World, pointing out one or two minor errors that I was careful not to correct. My mother never showed the slightest interest in my career until Empire of the Sun, which she thought was about her.
As an itinerant chess player and magazine hunter, I got to know a huge number of Lunghua internees, but few reappeared in my later life. One was the headmaster of the camp school, a Methodist missionary called George Osborne. Knowing of my father’s strongly agnostic and proscientific beliefs, he generously urged him to send me to his old school, The Leys in Cambridge, founded by well-to-do Methodists from the north of England and very much science-oriented. Osborne was an unworldly figure, blinking through his glasses and tireless in his efforts to keep the camp together, and the best kind of practising Christian. His wife and three children were in England, but once the war ended his first thoughts were for his Chinese flock at their upcountry mission station, to which he returned rather than sail home. After a year there he paid a brief visit to England, taking me out to lunch whenever he was in Cambridge. By chance, in the 1960s, I became close friends with a north London doctor, Martin Bax, who edited a poetry magazine with his wife Judy. A decade later I learned that Judy Bax was the Reverend Osborne’s daughter. As she admitted, I knew her father far more closely than she did.
Another Lunghua acquaintance was Cyril Goldbert, the future Peter Wyngarde. Separated from his parents, he lived with another family in G Block, and amused everyone with his fey and extravagant manner. Theatre was his entire world, and he played adult roles in the camp Shakespeare productions, completely dominating the bank managers and company directors who struggled to keep up with him. He was four years older than me, and very witty company, with a sophisticated patter I had rarely come across. He had never been to England, but seemed to be on first-name terms with half of Shaftesbury Avenue, and was a mine of insider gossip about the London theatre.
Cyril was very popular with the ladies, distributing the most gallant flattery, and my mother always remembered him with affection. ‘Oh, Cyril…’ she would chortle when she saw him on television in the 1960s. Throughout her life my mother had an active dislike of homosexuals, understandable perhaps at a time when a conviction for homosexual acts brought not just the prison cell but social disgrace. Every married woman’s deep fear must have been that husband, breadwinner and father of her children might have a secret self in a carefully locked closet. When I was in my late teens she saw me reading a collection of Oscar Wilde’s plays, and literally prised the volume from my hands, although I was already showing a keen interest in girls of my age.
I once strolled with Cyril through some ruined buildings on the outskirts of the camp, listening to him set out his plans for his conquest of the West End. He tore a piece of charcoal from a burnt roof beam, and with a flourish drew on the wall what he said would be his stage name once he returned to England: Laurence Templeton. A name wonderfully of its time, and far grander than Peter Wyngarde. I met him in the early fifties in the Mitre pub in Holland Park Avenue in London, and he was in a poor way, with bad teeth and tired eyes. But ten years later he achieved huge success, not on stage but on television, as Jason King. I saw him in St James’s Park, camel-hair coat stylishly slung over an elegant suit, a tilted homburg and dazzling teeth. I started to speak to him but he cut me dead.