Shanghai had forgotten us, as it had forgotten me, and the shabby art deco houses in the French Concession were part of a discarded stage set that was slowly being dismantled. The Chinese are uninterested in the past. The present, and a modest down payment on a first instalment of the future, are all that concern them. Perhaps we in the West are too preoccupied with the past, too involved with our memories, almost as if we are nervous of the present and want to keep one foot safely rooted in the past. Later, when I left Shanghai and returned to England with Runcie and the film crew, I felt a great sense of release. I had visited those shrines to my younger self, stood in silence for a few moments with my head bowed, and driven straight to the airport.
At 9 on that first morning we gathered in the Hilton lobby and then set off for the Ballard home in the former Amherst Avenue. The house was still standing, though in a state of extreme dilapidation, its gutters propped up by a scaffolding of bamboo poles that was in turn about to collapse. At the time of our visit the house served as the library of a state electronics institute, and metal book-racks filled with international journals and magazines had replaced the furniture on all three floors, a change that might have pleased my father. Nothing, otherwise, had changed, and I noticed that the same lavatory seat was in my bathroom. But the house was a ghost, and had spent almost half a century eroding its memories of an English family that had occupied it but left without a trace.
The next day we set off in our air-conditioned bus for Lunghua, and spent most of the morning trying to track it
The former Ballard house in Amherst Avenue, Shanghai, in 2005. The fountain, garden sculpture and wall decoration are recent additions.
down. A vast urbanised plain stretched south from the Shanghai that I had known, a haze-filled terrain of flats, factories and police and army barracks, linked together by motorway overpasses. Now and then we stopped, and climbed to the roof deck of a workers’ apartment block, where I scanned the countryside for any sight of the water tower. Eventually, one of our translators hailed an old man dozing outside a bicycle shop. ‘Europeans, imprisoned by the Japanese…?’ He thought about this. ‘There was a camp – I don’t remember which war…’
Ten minutes later we arrived at the gates of the former Lunghua Camp, now the Shanghai High School. Almost
Standing outside the former G Block in 1991.
The Ballard family room in the former G block.
nothing remained of the original camp. The Japanese guardhouse, the dozen or more ruined buildings and the wooden huts had all been cleared away. New buildings had been built, and the old ones refurbished.
I wandered around the site for an hour, ignoring my camera but taking a thousand snapshots inside my eye. Everywhere trees had been planted shoulder to shoulder, as a result of some Maoist diktat in the 1960s. The children were away on holiday, and we were able to enter G Block. The Shanghai High School is solely for boarders, and all the rooms were locked except for the former Ballard room, which was now a kind of rubbish store. A clutter of refuse, like discarded memories, lay in sacks between the wooden bed frames, where my mother had read Pride and Prejudice for the tenth time, and I had slept and dreamed.
Lunghua Camp was there, but it was not there.
I arrived back at Heathrow feeling mentally bruised but refreshed, as if I had completed the psychological equivalent of an adventure holiday. I had walked up to a mirage, accepted that in its way it was real, and then walked straight through it to the other side. The next ten years were among the most contented of my life.
My daughters Fay and Beatrice had made very happy marriages, and each soon had two children, over whom I doted from the day of their birth. There is no doubt that grandchildren take away the fear of death. I had done my biological duty, and completed the most important task on the genetic job list. My son remains a confirmed bachelor, happy with his computers, his weekend walks and pints of ale.
I was lucky to meet two fellow writers and their lively wives, with whom Claire and I frequently share a meal. Both Iain Sinclair and Will Self are much younger than me, but we fill the gap with shared enthusiasms, and an interest in the world beyond the London literary scene. Sinclair is a poet and mesmerist, tracing out the ley lines of the imagination in his heroic walks around London, making the connections between Templar churches and the archaic ghosts of east London and the Thames Gateway. He is also the Odysseus of the M25, and has walked the 120-mile circuit, threading 19th-century fever hospitals and the graveyards of mysterious parish churches onto his bow. Will Self is another remarkable writer, almost seven feet in height and with a tall man’s constant surprise at the mundane world far below him. He is richly generous in thought and speech, forever taking new ideas from the top shelves of his mind and laying them out in front of you with a flourish. Both Sinclair and Self have a wholly original take on the world, and I have never heard them utter a single cliché or commonplace in all the brilliant books by them that I have read, or in all the meals we have shared together.
I still think about Shanghai, but I know that the city is
Claire Walsh in 1990.
undergoing another of its unending changes. One image that stays in my mind was the glimpse I had of an old man squatting behind a small stool outside the entrance to the Cathay Hotel. He seemed to have nothing for sale, and I couldn’t help thinking about another old man under his eiderdown of snow in Amherst Avenue. But this old man seemed confident, and was eating his lunch from a small china bowl, using his chopsticks to fork in a modest portion of rice and a single cabbage leaf.
He was very old, and I wondered if this would be his last meal. Then I looked down at the stool and realised why he was so confident. Lying face up to the passing tourists and office workers, the titles in the Chinese characters of their Hong Kong distributor, were three Arnold Schwarzenegger videos.
23
Homeward Bound (2007)
In June 2006, after a year of pain and discomfort that I put down to arthritis, a specialist confirmed that I was suffering from advanced prostate cancer that had spread to my spine and ribs. Curiously, the only part of my anatomy that did not seem to be affected was my prostate, a common feature of the disease. But an MRI scan, a disagreeable affair that involves lying in a coffin wired for sound, left no doubt. Originating in my prostate, the cancer had invaded my bones.
I moved into the care of Professor Jonathan Waxman, in the Cancer Centre at Hammersmith Hospital in west London. Professor Waxman is one of the leading prostate cancer specialists in this country, and he rescued me at a time when I was exhausted by the intermittent pain and the fears of death that blotted everything else from my mind. It was Jonathan who convinced me that within a few weeks of the initial treatment the pain would leave me and I would begin to feel something closer to my everyday self. This proved true, and for the past year, except for one or two minor relapses, I have felt remarkably well, have been able to work and enjoyed my restaurant visits and the company of friends and family.