Demoralised by the unending air offensive and the sinking of most of their shipping by American submarines near the Yangtze estuary, and by the loss of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Japanese military responsible for Lunghua Camp had finally abandoned this malaria-ridden group of foreign internees. The food supply had been intermittent for months, and I spent hours on the observation roof of F Block, hoping for any sign of the Red Cross truck that would bring the next day’s rations.
The perimeter fence ran within a dozen yards of G Block, and a few of the internees began to step through the barbed wire. They stood in the deep grass, inhaling the air outside the camp, as if testing a different atmosphere. I followed them and, rather than stay near the fence, I decided to walk to a burial mound some two hundred yards away. I climbed onto the lowest tier of rotting coffins, turned and looked back at the camp, a view I had never seen before. It seemed almost uncanny to be no longer part of the camp but staring at it from a distance. Everything about its perspectives seemed strange and unreal, though it had been my home for two and a half years. I jumped down from the burial mound, then ran back through the deep grass to the fence and climbed through the wire, relieved to be back in the camp and the only security I knew.
Emboldened by the absence of the Japanese guards, a number of British internees decided to walk to Shanghai. I was tempted to join them, but fortunately decided not to. Within hours they were brought back to the camp, lying badly beaten on the floor of a Japanese truck, part of a motorised unit of military police that immediately re-established control over Lunghua. I assume that at this time the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, but the Japanese had not yet decided to surrender. The Japanese generals in China were still prepared to fight on to the end, aware that most of Japan’s principal cities and industrial areas had been reduced to ash by the American bombing campaign.
The Japanese soldiers stepped down from their trucks, and seized a number of internees and held them for interrogation in the first-floor offices of the commandant and his staff in F Block. Realising what might happen to their husbands, a group of wives attacked the Japanese as they crossed the assembly ground outside D Block, then formed up below the balcony of the commandant’s offices, jeering and screaming at the Japanese officers as they stared down impassively at the raging women. The spit from their mouths formed necklaces on their breasts as they swore and shook their fists at the Japanese.
Eventually the men were released, but still no one knew if the war had ended. A few days later we heard of Hirohito’s broadcast, calling on Japanese forces everywhere to lay down their arms, but we were all unsure whether they would obey him, even when the Japanese guards finally drove away from Lunghua and left us to ourselves. The bombing raids had ceased, but Japanese military units still occupied Shanghai and the surrounding countryside.
It was several weeks before American forces arrived in strength to take control of Shanghai. August 1945 formed a strange interregnum when we were never wholly certain that the war had ended, a sensation that stayed with me for months and even years. To this day as I doze in an armchair I feel the same brief moment of uncertainty.
* * *
I stayed in the camp, waiting until I was sure that the Japanese had surrendered. All sense of community spirit had left Lunghua, and nothing seemed to matter any more. The school had closed, and children played their skipping games while their mothers abandoned the family washing on the lines behind G Block. But the water from the Bubbling Well station was cold, and the Red Cross sent a daily tanker filled with drinking water to the camp, along with enough rations to keep us going. Clearly, though, the camp’s reason for existence had passed. I wandered around the ruined buildings with Cyril Goldbert, listening to him describe the Shakespeare roles he would soon be playing, ‘his’ Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, aware that none of us in Lunghua had any role at all.
Then, in the last days of August, I was on the roof of F Block when a B-29 flew towards the camp at a height of about 800 feet. Its bomb doors were open, and for a few seconds I assumed that we were about to be attacked. A line of canisters fell from the bomb bays, parachutes flared and the first American relief supplies floated towards us. A stampede followed, as everyone helped to drag the canisters back to their blocks. Each one was a cargo of treasure, but a sensible rationing system saw that every family received its fair share. There were tins of Spam and Klim, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, cans of jam and huge bars of chocolate. I remember vividly our first meal on our little card table, and the extraordinary taste of animal fat, sugar, jam and chocolate. The vast lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world. The camp came alive again, as the internees found a new purpose in their lives. Everyone hoarded and guarded their new supplies, listening out for the sound of American engines, quick to point out the smallest unfairness.
Tired of all this, and revived by the Spam and chocolate, I decided to walk to Shanghai. I had spent years staring at the apartment houses of the French Concession, and I was eager to see Amherst Avenue again. Without telling my parents, I set off for the fence behind the old shower blocks. Confident that I could walk the five miles to the western suburbs of Shanghai, I stepped through the wire.
The camp fell behind me more quickly than I expected. Around me was a silent terrain of abandoned paddy fields and burial mounds, derelict canals and bridges, ghost villages that had been deserted for years. I skirted the perimeter of the airfield, where I could see Japanese soldiers patrolling the burnt-out planes and hangars, and decided not to test whether they agreed that the war was over. I passed the wrecks of canal boats and trucks caught in the air attacks, and the bodies of Chinese puppet soldiers.
After an hour I reached the Hangchow–Shanghai railway line, which circled the western perimeter of Shanghai. No trains were running, and I decided to walk along the embankment. Half a mile in front of me was a small wayside station, no more than a concrete platform and a pair of telegraph poles. As I approached I could hear an odd singsong sound, and saw that a group of Japanese soldiers was waiting on the platform. They were fully armed, and sat on their ammunition boxes, picking their teeth while one of them tormented a young Chinese man in black trousers and a white shirt. The Japanese soldier had cut down lengths of telephone wire and had tied the Chinese to a telegraph pole, and was now slowly strangling him as the Chinese sang out in a sing-song voice. I thought of leaving the embankment and walking across the nearby field, but then decided it would be best to walk straight up to the soldiers and treat the grim event taking place as if it were a private matter that did not involve me.
I drew level with the platform and was about to walk past it when the soldier with the telephone wire raised a hand and beckoned me towards him. He had seen the transparent celluloid belt that held up my frayed cotton shorts. It had been given to me by one of the American sailors, and was a prized novelty that no Japanese was likely to have seen. I unbuckled the belt and handed it to him, then waited as he flexed the colourless plastic and stared at me through it, laughing admiringly. Behind him the young Chinese was slowly suffocating to death, his urine spreading across the platform.
I waited in the sun, listening to the sing-song voice as it grew weaker. The Chinese was not the first person I had seen the Japanese kill. But a state of war had existed since 1937, and now peace was supposed to have come to the mouth of the Yangtze. At the same time I was old enough to know that this lost Japanese platoon was beyond the point where life and death meant anything at all. They were aware that their own lives would shortly end, and that they were free to do anything they wanted, and inflict any pain. Peace, I realised, was more threatening because the rules that sustained war, however evil, were suspended. The empty paddy fields and derelict villages confirmed that nothing mattered.