My father said nothing when I showed him the coal, though he must have known that I had stolen it from the kitchen storeroom. I soon had it glowing brightly in the chatty outside the rear entrance to G Block, and my father carried a warming cup of black tea to my bedridden mother. Both of us knew that he had compromised his principles, but at the same time I felt that I had gained no merit in his eyes. I take it for granted that if the war had continued for much longer the sense of community and the social constraints that held the internees together would have broken down. Moral principles, along with kindness and generosity, are worth less than they might seem. At the time, as the glowing coals warmed my hands, I wondered what Henderson would do with his share of the coal. Later I saw him in the darkness, hurling the pieces into the deep pond beyond the perimeter fence.
In late 1944 conditions in Lunghua continued to worsen, not through deliberate neglect by the Japanese authorities, but because they had lost all interest in us. The food supply fell, and the internees’ health was eroded by malaria, exhaustion and a general resignation to further years of war. The Americans had advanced island by island across the Pacific, but they were still hundreds of miles away. The huge Japanese armies in China were ready to defend the Emperor and the home islands to the last man.
Nowhere had Japanese soldiers surrendered in large numbers. Fatalism, fierce discipline and a profound patriotism shaped their warrior spirit. In some way, I think, the Japanese soldier assumed unconsciously that he had already died in battle, and the apparent life left to him was on a very short lease. This explained their vicious cruelty. I can still see two of the guards beating to death an exhausted Chinese rickshaw coolie who had brought them from Shanghai. As the desperate man sobbed on his knees the Japanese first kicked his rickshaw to pieces, probably his only possession in the world and sole source of income, and then began to beat and kick the Chinese until he lay in a still and bloody pulp on the ground.
All this took place some thirty feet from me by the rear entrance of G Block, and was watched by a large crowd of internees. None of the men spoke, as if their silent stares would force the two Japanese to end their torment. I knew that this was a naive hope, but I also understood why none of the British, all of whom had wives and children, had tried to intervene. The reprisals would have been instant and fearsome. I remember feeling a deep deadness, which may have been noticed by one of my father’s friends, who steered me away.
I think that by this time, early 1945, I was already (aged 14!) starting to worry about the future of Lunghua. I realised that the state of Japanese morale was more important than that of the internees, and I was glad to see the Japanese guards helping the internee working parties to repair the main gates of the camp and keep out the destitute Chinese peasants who had crossed the stricken countryside and were hoping to find sanctuary in Lunghua. Starving families sat around the gates, the women wailing and holding up their skeletal children, like the beggars who had clustered outside the office buildings of downtown Shanghai. If the Japanese abandoned Lunghua we would be exposed to roaming groups of militia soldiers, little more than bandits, and to units of the former puppet armies left to fend for themselves, all armed and eager to ransack the camp.
I kept careful watch on the barbed-wire fence, and turned my back on the younger children still playing the traditional games that I forgot when I came to England and sadly never passed on to my own children – marbles and hopscotch, and complicated skipping and ball games. I had read the camp’s entire stock of magazines several times over, but I still visited the American seamen. Cheerful as ever, they were obsessed with their pheasant traps, which I helped them lay in the open ground between E Block and the perimeter fence. I suspect now that they were really marking out an escape route beyond the eyes of the Japanese, in the event of a major emergency like the sudden closure of the camp.
The first American air raids over Shanghai had begun in the summer of 1944, and steadily intensified over the following months. High-flying reconnaissance planes appeared in the sky, strangely motionless as they hung between the clouds. Soon after, squadrons of fighters, Mustangs and twin-engined Lightnings, flew in from the south to attack Lunghua airfield. As they approached, barely twenty feet above the abandoned paddy fields, they hid behind the three-storey buildings of Lunghua Camp, then swerved away to strafe the parked Japanese planes and nearby hangars. Lunghua pagoda had been turned into a flak tower by the Japanese, and as I watched the attacks from the first-floor balcony of the men’s washroom the pagoda was lit up like a Christmas tree, gunfire flickering from its upper decks.
Whenever an air attack was imminent a warning siren sent us to our quarters. Running back to G Block with other internees, I was once caught out in the open. Anti-aircraft shells were exploding above us, and I stopped to pick up a gnarled piece of steel, like the peel of a silver apple, that gleamed on the pathway. I remember that it was still hot to the touch. Often the Mustangs would shed their drop tanks before making their attack, and these tail-less, bomb-shaped structures were treated with immense respect by the guards, who roped them off and waited for army engineers to inspect them.
The air attacks on Shanghai took place almost daily, and once Lunghua airfield had been neutralised the first waves of B-29 bombers appeared in the sky, immense four-engined aircraft that bombed the airfield, Shanghai dockyards and railway junctions. They passed overhead and then seemed to vanish into the clouds, and a moment later a thunderous curtain of smoke rose from the ground as sticks of bombs struck the hangars and parked planes. I can still see one Mustang trailing smoke that turned and headed east towards the sea, the pilot hoping perhaps to ditch his crippled plane near a US warship. As the Mustang crossed the Whangpoo he seemed to give up, and we saw his parachute open and a truck filled with Japanese soldiers driving past the camp to capture him.
The sight of these advanced American aircraft gave me a new focus of adolescent veneration. As the Mustangs streaked overhead, less than a hundred feet from the ground, it was clear that they belonged to a different technological order. The power of their engines (the British-designed Rolls-Royce Merlin, I later learned), their speed and silver fuselages, and the high style in which they were flown, clearly placed them in a more advanced realm than the Japanese Zeros and the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the British Embassy newsreels. The American aircraft had sprung from the advertisement pages of Life and Collier’s, they embodied the same consumer ethos as the streamlined Cadillacs and Lincoln Zephyrs, the refrigerators and radios. In a way the Mustangs and Lightnings were themselves advertisements, 400-mile-an-hour commercials that advertised the American dream and American power.
I noticed that the American seamen in E Block took for granted the superiority of the advanced aircraft flying over their heads. Despite the catastrophe that befell the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales, the British internees still spoke with a certain dogged pride of their country’s military equipment. But the American seamen I visited said nothing and never made a boastful claim.
All this led me to switch my boyhood admiration to a new set of heroes. However brave the Japanese soldiers and pilots, they belonged to the past. America, I knew, was a future that had already arrived. I spent every spare moment watching the sky.
9
The Railway Station (1945)
One day in early August we woke to find that the Japanese guards had gone. We assembled for the morning roll-call, standing in the corridor outside our rooms, but the guards failed to appear. We wandered away, listening to the empty sky. One or two reconnaissance planes drifted high overhead, but for the first time everything was silent. Had the war ended? Rumours and counter-rumours swept the camp, but Lunghua was sealed off from the world, surrounded by the deserted villages and drained paddy fields.