Ten minutes later, the Chinese was silent and I was able to walk away. The Japanese soldier never told me to go, but I knew when he had lost interest in me. Whistling to himself, the plastic belt around his neck, he stepped over the trussed body of the Chinese and rejoined his companions, waiting for the train that would never come.
I was badly shaken, but managed to steady myself by the time I reached the western suburbs of Shanghai. Perhaps the war had not really ended, or we had entered an in-between world where on one level it would continue for months or even years, merging into the next war and the war beyond that. I like to think that my teenage self kept his nerve, but I realise now that I was probably aware of nothing other than the brute fact that I was alive and this unknown Chinese was dead. In most respects, sadly, my experiences of the war were no different from those of millions of other teenage boys in enemy-occupied Europe and the Far East. A vast cruelty lay over the world, and was all we knew.
At last I reached the western suburbs of Shanghai, and set off for the Kendall-Ward house. I needed to see them again, after a lapse of nearly three years. I knew the boys would have grown, and the Airedales would be older, but Mrs Kendall-Ward would be the same, a little thinner but as welcoming as ever. I could already hear her chatting in Chinese to her tribe of amahs, as the dogs bounded around her.
The gates were ajar, and I walked up the drive past the untended garden, listening for any sounds of the family. I reached for the doorbell, and looked through the open door at the sky. It took me several moments to realise what had happened. The house was a shell. Everything had been looted and stripped away, every door frame, joist and floorboard, every roof beam and tile, every electric cable and water pipe. Nothing remained except the raw brickwork. The unguarded house had become, in effect, a free carpentry store and hardware shop, where local Chinese had helped themselves to whatever electrical switch or faucet they needed. I remember feeling a profound sense of loss, as if a large part of the happiness I had known in pre-war Shanghai had been erased for ever. It was a grave mistake to rely on one’s memories, which were as much a stage set as the gutted house whose doorbell I was trying to ring.
After resting on the doorstep, I walked down Amherst Avenue to the Ballard house at 31, expecting to find it similarly stripped. I climbed the steps, and heard the doorbell ring. A young puppet soldier, a Chinese youth not much older than I was, opened the door and tried to bar my way with his rifle. I pushed past him, saying: ‘This is my house.’
A Chinese puppet general had occupied the house, but had fled the scene, no doubt in a complete panic after the Japanese surrender. The house was untouched, every piece of furniture and kitchen equipment in place. I walked around the airless rooms, watching the sunlight play on the swirls of dust that followed me. I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, and lay on the bed, counting the screw-hooks from which I had hung my model aircraft. The house seemed strange, and I felt that it should have changed, like everything else in Shanghai. It was almost as if the war had never happened.
10
War’s End (1945)
Shanghai soon opened all its doors and turned on all its lights, greeting its new American visitors in its time-honoured way, with thousands of bars, prostitutes and gambling dens. An American cruiser moored off the Bund, and American aircraft landed at Lunghua airfield, but the transfer of power took several weeks to become effective. Disbanded puppet troops and aimless militia units still roamed the outskirts of the city, and most of the Lunghua internees remained for the next month within the comparative safety of the camp.
I went back to Shanghai several times, walking or cadging lifts from Red Cross drivers, or riding on top of the tanker that brought fresh water to the camp. One afternoon in Shanghai I set off on the five-mile walk back to Lunghua, following the road that led to the airfield. An hour later a Japanese army truck passed me. I ran after the wheezing vehicle and then clambered uninvited over the tailboard. Half a dozen armed Japanese soldiers watched me as I sat down next to them, and one took the water bottle from my hand. He tasted the water with a grimace, perhaps hoping for something stronger, and passed it back to me. When I jumped down at the next crossroads and set off across the paddy fields for Lunghua one of them might easily have shot me, for they must have had only the faintest idea of Hirohito’s surrender broadcast. But they may have realised that in some way I was on their side.
The Ballard family left Lunghua at the beginning of September, and returned to their house in Amherst Avenue. A staff of servants signed on, though I’m not sure if they included any of those dismissed when we went to Lunghua. Our former chauffeur returned, driving a Chrysler that my father had bought from one of his Chinese business contacts. Huge quantities of gifts arrived daily at our house, straw panniers filled with fresh peaches and mangoes, canned goods and bottles of pre-war Scotch whisky. I remember live chickens strutting and squawking around the hall until they were seized by the cook and taken off to the kitchen.
I at last made contact with the Kendall-Wards, who had survived the war and were now living in a rented house to the north-west of the city. I was glad to see the boys again, and Mrs Kendall-Ward greeted me warmly. But I felt slightly uneasy with them all. Miraculously, they seemed unchanged by the war, as charming and amiable as ever. But I had changed, and I knew that childhood had passed for good.
Yet within a surprisingly short time something very close to our previous life resumed. Dozens of American warships were moored in the Whangpoo, and armed shore parties of American sailors and marines were moving around Shanghai. The German family who lived in the house across the drive were ejected, and two very likeable American intelligence officers took their place. They soon moved in their stylish Chinese girlfriends, educated and sophisticated women who brought my mother up to date with the latest fashion news. The Americans were part of the military administration of Shanghai, and would take me with them on trips around the city, visiting the stockades where Japanese soldiers and Chinese collaborators were imprisoned, in the grimmest conditions. In the evenings they would hold film shows and invite the Ballards over. We watched the Andrews Sisters singing ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, and joined in heartily, following the bouncing ball. The Americans had unlimited supplies of magazines and comics, but I was more interested in the wartime pocket editions of Hemingway and Steinbeck, which I devoured. The shortage of paper in Lunghua meant that I had done little writing, but Hemingway’s accounts of the Great War tallied with my own memories of war and the unwelcome truths it could expose.
My father arranged for me to be given a bicycle by a Chinese business friend, and I began to pedal around Shanghai again. I often went out to Lunghua airfield, and was invited aboard the huge American transport planes lined up beside the runway. The sense of American power was overwhelming. I also made regular visits to Lunghua Camp. At least half the internees still lived there two months after the war’s end, sustained by the American airdrops. These were Britons with no homes to return to, no jobs, and no source of income, waiting to be repatriated to England.