J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk

This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

Previously published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2006,

Flamingo 2001 and (as a Modern Classic) 1993

First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz in 1984

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1984

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Introduction © John Lanchester 2014

Interview © Travis Elborough 2006

‘The End of My War’ © J. G. Ballard 1995

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Cover by Stanley Donwood

Photograph of atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy © Corbis. Background colours from strontium and caesium/methanol combustion carried out by Dr Roy Lowry at Plymouth University, and photographed by Anna Walker.

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007283132

Version: 2014-08-15

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Epigraph

Part I

1: The Eve of Pearl Harbor

2: Beggars and Acrobats

3: The Abandoned Aerodrome

4: The Attack on the Petrel

5: Escape from the Hospital

6: The Youth with the Knife

7: The Drained Swimming-Pool

8: Picnic Time

9: An End to Kindness

10: The Stranded Freighter

11: Frank and Basie

12: Dance Music

13: The Open-Air Cinema

14: American Aircraft

15: On their Way to the Camps

16: The Water Ration

17: A Landscape of Airfields

18: Vagrants

19: The Runway

Part II

20: Lunghua Camp

21: The Cubicle

22: The University of Life

23: The Air Raid

24: The Hospital

25: The Cemetery Garden

26: The Lunghua Sophomores

27: The Execution

28: An Escape

29: The March to Nantao

30: The Olympic Stadium

31: The Empire of the Sun

Part III

32: The Eurasian

33: The Kamikaze Pilot

34: The Refrigerator in the Sky

35: Lieutenant Price

36: The Flies

37: A Reserved Room

38: The Road to Shanghai

39: The Bandits

40: The Fallen Airmen

41: Rescue Mission

Part IV

42: The Terrible City

An Investigative Spirit

The End of My War

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Introduction

BY John Lanchester

When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, it had a huge and double impact. The first part of this consisted of the effect on its author’s reputation. J. G. Ballard turned fifty-four that year, and had published nine novels and more than a dozen short-story collections. He was regarded as a known quantity: an admired writer, and also the kind of writer who has fans. That implies a passionate, but perhaps rather narrow readership. He was seen as a writer of science fiction – an unhelpfully broad term, and one which perhaps puts off more people than it puts on. When I interviewed Ballard at his home in Shepperton in 1987, en route to writing about his novel The Day of Creation, he specifically asked me not to describe it as a work of science fiction, because that was a limiting and compartmentalizing description. Even those of us who loved his work could see why it didn’t have mass-market appeal. The sentences were clear, the images vivid, but the strangeness of the worlds he described was all the more pronounced for that. The normals out there would never be able to handle Ballard. We fans loved him all the more because of that.

And then came Empire of the Sun. In place of the mysterious dreamscapes we had come to expect, it was a largely realist, autobiographically inspired novel about growing up in wartime Shanghai. The new book seemed to explain and contextualize the earlier work. It had an immediate success, not just for its own merits, but also because the wider public suddenly had a key to Ballard’s oeuvre. Ballard’s worlds, for instance, shared a particular strain of imagery to do with abandonment: empty swimming-pools, crashed planes, deserted or ruined buildings, objects made by and for humans now given over to unimagined purposes, or reclaimed by nature. The source and locus of all these imaginings suddenly became clear: Shanghai.

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and lived there until 1946. In the pre-war years, Shanghai had a claim to be the most interesting and also the strangest city in the world. The greater part of China had fallen under control of the Japanese following their invasion in 1937. The subjugation of China was brutal, and saw some of the twentieth century’s worst atrocities, most famously in what became known as the Rape of Nanking. Shanghai, however, was partially exempt from the mayhem. Inside the city was the International Settlement, an area forcibly seceded from Chinese control by the treaties which brought an end to the nineteenth-century opium wars. The International Settlement, which was free from Chinese laws and Chinese rule, had a population of more than 1 million Chinese. When the Japanese invaded, the army stopped short of overrunning the settlement, no doubt on the basis that it would have constituted a declaration of war against the Allies. Instead the Japanese army waited until Pearl Harbor before launching their attack. The story of what happened next is told in Empire of the Sun, which balances a highly personal and partly fictionalized account of the narrator’s experiences with a careful and accurate use of the real historical framework.

A number of themes that run through Ballard’s work are crystallised in Empire of the Sun. All his novels give a powerful sense that the reality in front of our eyes is never much more than a stage set, a temporary scene that can be instantly and irrevocably swept away. This isn’t a benign, Humean or Buddhist sense that reality is an illusion. It’s much more pressing than that. In Ballard’s novels, any apparently settled reality is prone to be dissolved and reconfigured. In Empire of the Sun, the process is prefigured on the very first page. ‘At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theatre.’ The real images and the mediated images blur into each other. ‘The whole of Shanghai was turning into a newsreel leaking from inside his head.’ And then, when the war does finally break out, the slide from the old reality into the new one is figured memorably: a Gone with the Wind poster of Atlanta on fire blends into the real, burning Shanghai. ‘Chinese carpenters were cutting down the panels of painted smoke that rose high into the Shanghai sky, barely distinguishable from the fires still lifting above the tenements of the Old City, where Kuomintang irregulars had resisted the Japanese invasion.’ The image of a city in flames has become reality. For the next 300 pages, reality is never stable, and Jim is never safe, not for a moment.

This world, like all of Ballard’s worlds, is full of images which hover on the edge of being symbols. The young Jim is fascinated by everything to do with aviation, especially military aviation. He has detailed real-world knowledge of all the different types of Allied and Japanese aircraft. He has good reason to be interested, as is painfully clear to the reader, but at the same time the planes and their pilots are also symbols of escape and freedom, worlds beyond the horrors of Shanghai. All Ballard’s books have something like that, a piece of reality which is also a piece of dreamscape: the underwater city of The Drowned World, the tower block of High-Rise, the river of The Day of Creation. There had always been a strong sense of psychic pressure in Ballard’s work, a powerful force of feeling behind these insistent images. Now we readers felt we knew where those feelings were coming from.

The tone of Ballard’s fiction also seemed more explicable. His work had always featured images of extraordinary power recounted with a consciously flat affect. His narrators – heroes is definitely not quite the right word – see extraordinary, unprecedented things, but never let on. It’s a rule of actors playing in a farce never to signal that they know what’s happening is funny. Ballard’s characters follow an inversion of that rule: especially when confronted by horrors, they never admit to horror. This deadpan manner is one of the things which makes his work so forceful and so disturbing. Its origin – this distinctive, mesmerizing emotional flatness – is to be found in Shanghai. It seems to come from a childhood exposure to many things that a child should never see. Consider the flotilla of coffins floated on the Yangtze River every night. The coffins are surrounded by paper flowers. ‘Jim disliked this regatta of corpses. In the rising sunlight the paper petals resembled the coils of viscera strewn around the terrorist bomb victims in the Nanking Road.’ No eleven-year-old should have that in his head: not the coffins, not the terrorism, and not the viscera. The novel is full of such sights. ‘Looking at the glove, Jim realized that it was the complete skin from one of the petty officer’s hands, boiled off the flesh in an engine-room fire.’

Linked to the sense of horror is a sense of abandonment. Jim is living in a world without safety and authority and love; a world without parents. In reality, Ballard had his parents with him in the internment camp. As it happens, my godfather, Bill Stewart, was interned in the same camp, and made this point forcefully. ‘I knew James Ballard,’ he said, referring to the writer’s father. ‘It wasn’t a bit like that.’ But that misses the point: the point is what it felt like. In the camps, there was nothing parents could do to help their children. Survival was at the whim of the Japanese. Children knew that. In Empire of the Sun, the parents are absent because in real life, they felt completely absent. The sense of abandonment is total. ‘He felt a strange lightness in his head, not because his parents had rejected him, but because he expected them to do so, and no longer cared.’

All of these things came together in Empire of the Sun: the sense of reality as a stage set, potent imagery pressing on the edge of symbolism, the horrors and the flat affect. Almost overnight, Ballard’s reputation changed. His admirers had always felt that his work had a strong sense of imaginative truth; now we had a greater sense of why.

The transformative impact of Empire of the Sun on Ballard’s reputation is only part of the reason why it is such an important book. It also has a claim to be the best English novel about the Second World War. The book dramatizes the sheer geographical and world-historical sweep of the war. The immense casualness with which Jim regards death is very powerful, but also – a greater horror – thoroughly representative. He is a child of the war and his terrible familiarity with death is, in this context, normal. The typical combatant in the twentieth century’s wars, for the first time in human history, was not a combatant at all, but a civilian. Jim’s story captures that truth.

It captures other things too, among the most vivid the sense of total chaos around the war. The history of war is usually told in terms of battles, of more or less clearcut conflicts, of front lines and rearguard actions, of advances and retreats. For the people living through it though, especially for civilians, war is much more chaotic and formless and fluid and unpredictable. Jim could lose his life at almost any moment: he knows it so well he has accepted the fact. The ungoverned landscape around Shanghai, lawless and lethal, is a typical twentieth-century place. My grandparents were in Hong Kong when it fell to the Japanese (my father having been evacuated to Australia), and my grandmother would sometimes talk about the time just afterwards, and also the time immediately after the end of the war. The overwhelming impression given by her stories was one of anarchy and chaos, and the only text I’ve ever read that catches that flavour is Empire of the Sun.

There is a broader truthfulness to the novel too. As well as being the story of Jim and Lunghua internment camp and Shanghai, and the undertold reality of civilian war, it’s also a story about the future. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the book comes when Jim interprets the chaotic ending of the Second World War as being the outbreak of the third. ‘He was sure now that the Second World War had ended, but had World War III begun?’ To make it more painful, Jim isn’t necessarily wrong. The second half of the century didn’t see a world war, but it did see a world that was almost constantly at war somewhere or other. In Empire of the Sun everything is swept away, everything is going to change: Jim knows it, and the reader knows it too. The novel figures the end of the British Empire, and the first glimmerings of the Asian century, the Chinese century, through which we are just now beginning to live. ‘The war had changed the Chinese people – the villagers, the wandering coolies and lost puppet soldiers looked at Europeans in a way Jim had never seen before the war, as if they no longer existed.’ It’s a novel about a profound historical pivot, a fundamental change of global orientation, and it’s told through the eyes of a child in an internment camp.

London, 2014

Empire of the Sun draws on my experiences in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C. (Civilian Assembly Centre) where I was interned from 1942–45. For the most part this novel is based on events I observed during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and within the camp at Lunghua.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, but as a result of time differences across the Pacific Date Line it was then already the morning of Monday, 8 December in Shanghai.

J. G. Ballard

Part I

1

The Eve of Pearl Harbor

Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.

Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theatre. During the winter of 1941 everyone in Shanghai was showing war films. Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city; in the foyers of department stores and hotels the images of Dunkirk and Tobruk, Barbarossa and the Rape of Nanking sprang loose from his crowded head.

To Jim’s dismay, even the Dean of Shanghai Cathedral had equipped himself with an antique projector. After morning service on Sunday, 7 December, the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the choirboys were stopped before they could leave for home and were marched down to the crypt. Still wearing their cassocks, they sat in a row of deck-chairs requisitioned from the Shanghai Yacht Club and watched a year-old March of Time.

Thinking of his unsettled dreams, and puzzled by their missing sound-track, Jim tugged at his ruffed collar. The organ voluntary drummed like a headache through the cement roof and the screen trembled with the familiar images of tank battles and aerial dogfights. Jim was eager to prepare for the fancy-dress Christmas party being held that afternoon by Dr Lockwood, the vice-chairman of the British Residents’ Association. There would be the drive through the Japanese lines to Hungjao, and then Chinese conjurors, fireworks and yet more newsreels, but Jim had his own reasons for wanting to go to Dr Lockwood’s party.

Outside the vestry doors the Chinese chauffeurs waited by their Packards and Buicks, arguing in a fretful way with each other. Bored by the film, which he had seen a dozen times, Jim listened as Yang, his father’s driver, badgered the Australian verger. However, watching the newsreels had become every expatriate Briton’s patriotic duty, like the fund-raising raffles at the country club. The dances and garden parties, the countless bottles of Scotch consumed in aid of the war effort (like all children, Jim was intrigued by alcohol but vaguely disapproved of it) had soon produced enough money to buy a Spitfire – probably one of those, Jim speculated, that had been shot down on its first flight, the pilot fainting in the reek of Johnnie Walker.

Usually Jim devoured the newsreels, part of the propaganda effort mounted by the British Embassy to counter the German and Italian war films being screened in the public theatres and Axis clubs of Shanghai. Sometimes the Pathé newsreels from England gave him the impression that, despite their unbroken series of defeats, the British people were thoroughly enjoying the war. The March of Time films were more sombre, in a way that appealed to Jim. Suffocating in his tight cassock, he watched a burning Hurricane fall from a sky of Dornier bombers towards a children’s book landscape of English meadows that he had never known. The Graf Spee lay scuttled in the River Plate, a river as melancholy as the Yangtze, and smoke clouds rose from a shabby city in eastern Europe, that black planet from which Vera Frankel, his seventeen-year-old governess, had escaped on a refugee ship six months earlier.

Jim was glad when the newsreel was over. He and his fellow choristers tottered into the strange daylight towards their chauffeurs. His closest friend, Patrick Maxted, had sailed with his mother from Shanghai for the safety of the British fortress at Singapore, and Jim felt that he had to watch the films for Patrick, and even for the White Russian women selling their jewellery on the cathedral steps and the Chinese beggars resting among the gravestones.

The commentator’s voice still boomed inside his head as he rode home through the crowded Shanghai streets in his parents’ Packard. Yang, the fast-talking chauffeur, had once worked as an extra in a locally made film starring Chiang Ching, the actress who had abandoned her career to join the communist leader Mao Tse-Tung. Yang enjoyed impressing his eleven-year-old passenger with tall tales of film stunts and trick effects. But today Yang ignored Jim, banishing him to the back seat. He punched the Packard’s powerful horn, carrying on his duel with the aggressive rickshaw coolies who tried to crowd the foreign cars off the Bubbling Well Road. Lowering the window, Yang lashed with his leather riding crop at the thoughtless pedestrians, the sauntering bar-girls with American handbags, the old amahs bent double under bamboo yokes strung with headless chickens.

An open truck packed with professional executioners swerved in front of them, on its way to the public stranglings in the Old City. Seizing his chance, a barefoot beggar-boy ran beside the Packard. He drummed his fists on the doors and held out his palm to Jim, shouting the street cry of all Shanghai:

‘No mama! No papa! No whisky soda!’

Yang lashed at him, and the boy fell to the ground, picked himself up between the front wheels of an oncoming Chrysler and ran beside it.

‘No mama, no papa …’

Jim hated the riding crop, but he was glad of the Packard’s horn. At least it drowned the roar of the eight-gun fighters, the wail of air-raid sirens in London and Warsaw. He had had more than enough of the European war. Jim stared at the garish façade of the Sincere Company’s department store, which was dominated by an immense portrait of Chiang Kai-Shek exhorting the Chinese people to ever greater sacrifices in their struggle against the Japanese. A faint light, reflected from a faulty neon tube, trembled over the Generalissimo’s soft mouth, the same flicker that Jim had seen in his dreams. The whole of Shanghai was turning into a newsreel leaking from inside his head.

Had his brain been damaged by too many war films? Jim had tried to tell his mother about his dreams, but like all the adults in Shanghai that winter she was too preoccupied to listen to him. Perhaps she had bad dreams of her own. In an eerie way, these shuffled images of tanks and dive-bombers were completely silent, as if his sleeping mind was trying to separate the real war from the make-believe conflicts invented by Pathé and British Movietone.

Jim had no doubt which was real. The real war was everything he had seen for himself since the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the old battlegrounds at Hungjao and Lunghua where the bones of the unburied dead rose to the surface of the paddy fields each spring. Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.

By contrast, the coming conflict between Britain and Japan, which everyone in Shanghai expected to break out in the summer of 1942, belonged to a realm of rumour. The supply ship attached to the German raider in the China Sea now openly visited Shanghai and moored in the river, where it took on fuel from a dozen lighters – many of them, Jim’s father noted wryly, owned by American oil companies. Almost all the American women and children had been evacuated from Shanghai. In his class at the Cathedral School, Jim was surrounded by empty desks. Most of his friends and their mothers had left for the safety of Hong Kong and Singapore, while the fathers closed their houses and moved into the hotels along the Bund.

At the beginning of December, when school ended for the day, Jim joined his father on the roof of his office block in Szechwan Road and helped him to set fire to the crates of records which the Chinese clerks brought up in the elevator. The trail of charred paper lifted across the Bund and mingled with the smoke from the impatient funnels of the last steamers to leave Shanghai. Passengers crowded the gangways, Eurasians, Chinese and Europeans fighting to get aboard with their bundles and suitcases, ready to risk the German submarines waiting in the Yangtze estuary. Fires rose from the roofs of the office buildings in the financial district, watched through field-glasses by the Japanese officers standing on their concrete blockhouses across the river at Pootung. It was not the anger of the Japanese that most disturbed Jim, but their patience.

As soon as they reached the house in Amherst Avenue he ran upstairs to change. Jim liked the Persian slippers, embroidered silk shirt and blue velvet trousers in which he resembled a film extra from The Thief of Bagdad, and he was eager to leave for Dr Lockwood’s party. He would endure the conjurors and newsreels, and then set off for the secret rendezvous which the rumours of war had prevented him from keeping for so many months.

By way of a happy bonus, Sunday was Vera’s free afternoon, when she visited her parents in the ghetto at Hongkew. This bored young woman, little more than a child herself, usually followed Jim everywhere like a guard dog. Once Yang had driven him home – his parents were to stay on for dinner at the Lockwoods’ – he would be free to roam alone through the empty house, his keenest pleasure. The nine Chinese servants would be there, but in Jim’s mind, and in those of the other British children, they remained as passive and unseeing as the furniture. He would finish doping his balsa-wood aircraft, and complete another chapter of the manual entitled How to Play Contract Bridge that he was writing in a school exercise book. After years spent listening to his mother’s bridge parties, trying to extract any kind of logic from the calls of ‘One diamond’, ‘Pass’, ‘Three Hearts’, ‘Three No Trumps’, ‘Double’, ‘Redouble’, he had prevailed on her to teach him the rules and had even mastered the conventions, a code within a code of a type that always intrigued Jim. With the help of an Ely Culberston guide, he was about to embark on the most difficult chapter of all, on psychic bidding – all this and he had yet to play a single hand.

However, if the task proved too exhausting he would set off on a bicycle tour of the French Concession, taking his airgun in case he ran into the group of French twelve-year-olds who formed the Avenue Foch gang. When he returned home it would be time for the Flash Gordon radio serial on station XMHA, followed by the record programme when he and his friends telephoned requests under their latest pseudonyms – ‘Batman’, ‘Buck Rogers’, and (Jim’s) ‘Ace’, which he liked to hear read out by the announcer though it always made him cringe with embarrassment.

As he flung his cassock to the amah and changed into his party costume he found that all this was threatened. Her head muddled by the rumours of war, Vera had decided not to visit her parents.

‘You will go to the party, James,’ Vera informed him as she buttoned his silk shirt. ‘And I will telephone my parents and tell them all about you.’

‘But, Vera – they want to see you. I know they do. You’ve got to think of them, Vera …’ Baffled, Jim hesitated to complain. His mother had told him to be kind to Vera, and not to tease her as he had done the previous governess. This moody White Russian had terrified him as he recovered from measles by telling him that she could hear the voice of God in Amherst Avenue, warning them from their ways. Soon afterwards Jim had impressed his school friends by announcing that he was an atheist. By contrast, Vera Frankel was a calm girl who never smiled and found everything strange about Jim and his parents, as strange as Shanghai itself, this violent and hostile city a world away from Cracow. She and her parents had escaped on one of the last boats from Hitler’s Europe and now lived with thousands of Jewish refugees in Hongkew, a gloomy district of tenements and faded apartment blocks behind the port area of Shanghai. To Jim’s amazement, Herr Frankel and Vera’s mother existed in one room.

‘Vera, where do your parents live?’ Jim knew the answer, but decided to risk the ruse. ‘Do they live in a house?’

‘They live in one room, James.’

‘One room!’ To Jim this was inconceivable, far more bizarre than anything in the Superman and Batman comics. ‘How big is the room? As big as my bedroom? As big as this house?’

‘As big as your dressing-room. James, some people are not so lucky as you.’

Awed by this, Jim closed the door of the dressing-room and changed into his velvet trousers. His eyes measured the little chamber. How two people could survive in so small a space was as difficult to grasp as the conventions in contract bridge. Perhaps there was some simple key which would solve the problem, and he would have the subject of another book.

Fortunately, Vera’s pride made her rise to the bait. When she had left for her parents’, setting off on the long walk to the tram terminus in the Avenue Joffre, Jim found himself still pondering the mystery of this extraordinary room. He decided to raise the matter with his mother and father, but as always they were too distracted by news of the war even to notice him. Dressed for the party, they were in his father’s study, listening to the short-wave radio bulletins from England. His father knelt by the radiogram in his pirate costume, leather patch pushed on to his forehead and spectacles over his tired eyes, like some scholarly buccaneer. He stared at the yellow dial embedded like a gold tooth in the mahogany face of the radiogram. On a map of Russia spread across the carpet he marked the new defensive line to which the Red Army had retreated. He stared at it hopelessly, as mystified by the vastness of Russia as Jim had been by the Frankels’ minute room.

‘Hitler will be in Moscow by Christmas. The Germans are still moving forward.’

His mother stood in her pierrot suit by the window, staring at the steely December sky. The long train of a Chinese funeral kite undulated along the street, head nodding as it bestowed its ferocious smile on the European houses. ‘It must be snowing in Moscow. Perhaps the weather will stop them …’

‘Once every century? Even that might be too much to ask. Churchill must bring the Americans into the war.’

‘Daddy, who is General Mud?’

His father looked up as Jim waited in the doorway, the amah carrying his airgun like a bearer, this member of a volunteer infantry in velvet blue ready to aid the Russian war effort.

‘Not the BB gun, Jamie. Not today. Take your aeroplane instead.’

‘Amah, don’t touch it! I’ll kill you!’

‘Jamie!’

His father turned from the radiogram, ready to strike him. Jim stood quietly by his mother, waiting to see what happened. Although he liked to roam Shanghai on his bicycle, at home Jim always remained close to his mother, a gentle and clever woman whose main purposes in life, he had decided, were to go to parties and help him with his Latin homework. When she was away he spent many peaceful hours in her bedroom, mixing her perfumes together and idling through the photograph albums of herself before her marriage, stills from an enchanted film in which she played the part of his older sister.

‘Jamie! Never say that … You aren’t going to kill Amah or anyone else.’ His father unclenched his hands, and Jim realized how exhausted he was. Often it seemed to Jim that his father was trying to remain too calm, burdened by the threats to his firm from the communist labour unions, by his work for the British Residents’ Association, and by his fears for Jim and his mother. As he listened to the war news he became almost light-headed. A fierce affection had sprung up between his parents, which he had never seen before. His father could be angry with him, while taking a keen interest in the smallest doings of Jim’s life, as if he believed that helping his son to build his model aircraft was more important than the war. For the first time he was totally uninterested in school-work. He pressed all kinds of odd information on Jim – about the chemistry of modern dyestuffs, his company’s welfare scheme for the Chinese mill-hands, the school and university in England to which Jim would go after the war, and how, if he wished, he could become a doctor. All these were elements of an adolescence which his father seemed to assume would never take place.

Sensibly, Jim decided not to provoke his father, nor to mention the Frankels’ mysterious room in the Hongkew ghetto, the problems of psychic bidding and the missing soundtrack inside his head. He would never threaten Amah again. They were going to a party, and he would try to cheer his father and think of some way of stopping the Germans at the gates of Moscow.

Remembering the artificial snow that Yang had described in the Shanghai film studios, Jim took his seat in the Packard. He was glad to see that Amherst Avenue was filled with the cars of Europeans leaving for their Christmas parties. All over the western suburbs people were wearing fancy dress, as if Shanghai had become a city of clowns.

2

Beggars and Acrobats

Pierrot and pirate, his parents sat silently as they set off for Hungjao, a country district five miles to the west of Shanghai. Usually his mother would caution Yang to avoid the old beggar who lay at the end of the drive. But as Yang swung the heavy car through the gates, barely pausing before he accelerated along Amherst Avenue, Jim saw that the front wheel had crushed the man’s foot. This beggar had arrived two months earlier, a bundle of living rags whose only possessions were a frayed paper mat and an empty Craven A tin which he shook at passers-by. He never moved from the mat, but ferociously defended his plot outside the taipan’s gates. Even Boy and Number One Coolie, the houseboy and the chief scullion, had been unable to shift him.

However, the position had brought the old man little benefit. There were hard times in Shanghai that winter, and after a week-long cold spell he was too tired to raise his tin. Jim worried about the beggar, and his mother told him that Coolie had taken a bowl of rice to him. After a heavy snowfall one night in early December the snow formed a thick quilt from which the old man’s face emerged like a sleeping child’s above an eiderdown. Jim told himself that he never moved because he was warm under the snow.

There were so many beggars in Shanghai. Along Amherst Avenue they sat outside the gates of the houses, shaking their Craven A tins like reformed smokers. Many displayed lurid wounds and deformities, but no one noticed them that afternoon. Refugees from the towns and villages around Shanghai were pouring into the city. Wooden carts and rickshaws crowded Amherst Avenue, each loaded with a peasant family’s entire possessions. Adults and children bent under the bales strapped to their backs, forcing the wheels with their hands. Rickshaw coolies hauled at their shafts, chanting and spitting, veins as thick as fingers clenched into the meat of their swollen calves. Petty clerks pushed bicycles loaded with mattresses, charcoal stoves and sacks of rice. A legless beggar, his thorax strapped into a huge leather shoe, swung himself along the road through the maze of wheels, a wooden dumb-bell in each hand. He spat and swiped at the Packard when Yang tried to force him out of the car’s way, and then vanished among the wheels of the pedicabs and rickshaws, confident in his kingdom of saliva and dust.

When they reached the Great Western Road exit from the International Settlement they found a queue of cars on both sides of the checkpoint. The Shanghai police had given up any attempt to control the crowds. The British officer stood on the turret of his armoured car, smoking a cigarette as he gazed over the thousands of Chinese pressing past him. Now and then, as if to keep up appearances, the Sikh NCO in a khaki turban reached down and lashed the backs of the Chinese with his bamboo rod.

Jim gazed up at the police. He was fascinated by the gleaming Sam Brownes of these sweating and overweight men, by their alarming genitalia that they freely exposed whenever they wanted to urinate, and by the polished holsters that held all their manliness. Jim wanted to wear a holster himself one day, feel the enormous Webley revolver press against his thigh. Among the shirts in his father’s wardrobe Jim had found a Browning automatic pistol, a jewel-like object resembling the interior of his parents’ cine-camera which he had once accidentally opened, exposing hundreds of feet of film. It was hard to imagine those miniature bullets killing anyone, let alone the tough communist labour organizers.

By contrast, the Mausers worn by the senior Japanese NCOs were even more impressive than the Webleys. The wooden holsters hung to their knees, almost like rifle-scabbards. Jim watched the Japanese sergeant at the checkpoint, a small but burly man who used his fists to drive back the Chinese. He was almost overwhelmed by the peasants struggling with their carts and rickshaws. Jim sat beside Yang in the front of the Packard, holding tight to his balsa aircraft as he waited for the sergeant to draw his Mauser and fire a shot into the air. But the Japanese were careful with their ammunition. Two soldiers cleared a space around a peasant woman whose cart they had overturned. Bayonet in hand, the sergeant slashed open a sack of rice which he scattered around the woman’s feet. She stood shaking and crying in a sing-song voice, surrounded by the lines of polished Packards and Chryslers with their European passengers in fancy dress.

Perhaps she had tried to smuggle a weapon through the checkpoint? There were Kuomintang and communist spies everywhere among the Chinese. Jim felt sorry for the peasant woman, whose sack of rice was probably her only possession, but at the same time he admired the Japanese. He liked their bravery and stoicism, and their sadness which struck a curious chord with Jim, who was never sad. The Chinese, whom Jim knew well, were a cold and often cruel people, but in their superior way they stayed together, whereas every Japanese was alone. All of them carried photographs of their identical families, little formal prints, as if the entire Japanese Army had been recruited only from the patrons of arcade photographers.

On his cycle journeys around Shanghai – trips of which his parents were unaware – Jim spent hours at the Japanese checkpoints, now and then managing to ingratiate himself with a bored private. None of them would ever show him their weapons, unlike the British Tommies in the sandbagged blockhouses along the Bund. As the Tommies lay in their hammocks, oblivious of the waterfront life around them, they would let Jim work the bolts of their Lee-Enfields and ream out the barrels with the pull-throughs. Jim liked them, and their weird voices full of talk about a strange, inconceivable England.

But if war came, could they beat the Japanese? Jim doubted it, and he knew that his father doubted it too. In 1937, at the start of the war against China, two hundred Japanese marines had come up the river and dug themselves into the beaches of black mud below his father’s cotton mill at Pootung. In full view of his parents’ suite in the Palace Hotel, they had been attacked by a division of Chinese troops commanded by a nephew of Madame Chiang. For five days the Japanese fought from trenches that filled waist-deep with water at high tide, then advanced with fixed bayonets and routed the Chinese.

The queue of cars moved through the checkpoint, carrying groups of Americans and Europeans already late for their Christmas parties. Yang edged the Packard to the barrier, whistling with fear. In front of them was a Mercedes tourer emblazoned with swastika pennants, filled with impatient young Germans. But the Japanese searched the interior with the same thoroughness.

Jim’s mother held his shoulder. ‘Not now, dear. It might frighten the Japanese.’

‘That wouldn’t frighten them.’

‘Jamie, not now,’ his father repeated, adding with rare humour: ‘You might even start the war.’

‘Could I?’ The thought intrigued Jim. He lowered his aircraft from the window. A Japanese soldier was running the bayonet of his rifle across the windshield, as if cutting an invisible web. Jim knew that he would next lean through the passenger window, venting into the Packard’s interior his tired breath and that threatening scent given off by all Japanese soldiers. Everyone then sat still, as the slightest move would produce a short pause followed by violent retribution. The previous year, when he was ten, Jim had nearly given Yang a heart attack by pointing his metal Spitfire into the face of a Japanese corporal and chanting ‘Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta …’ For almost a minute the corporal had stared at Jim’s father without expression, nodding slowly to himself. His father was physically a strong man, but Jim knew that it was the kind of strength that came from playing tennis.

This time Jim merely wanted the Japanese to see his balsa aircraft; not to admire it, but to acknowledge its existence. He was older now, and liked to think of himself as the co-pilot of the Packard. Aircraft had always interested Jim, and especially the Japanese bombers that had devastated the Nantao and Hongkew districts of Shanghai in 1937. Street after street of Chinese tenements had been levelled to the dust, and in the Avenue Edward VII a single bomb had killed a thousand people, more than any other bomb in the history of warfare.

The chief attraction of Dr Lockwood’s parties, in fact, was the disused airfield at Hungjao. Although the Japanese controlled the open countryside around the city, their forces were kept busy patrolling the perimeter of the International Settlement. They tolerated the few Americans and Europeans who lived in the rural districts, and in practice there was rarely a Japanese soldier to be seen.

When they arrived at Dr Lockwood’s isolated house Jim was relieved to find that the party was not going to be a success. There were only a dozen cars in the drive, and their chauffeurs were hard at work polishing the dust from the fenders, eager for a quick getaway. The swimming-pool had been drained, and the Chinese gardener was quietly removing a dead oriole from the deep end. The younger children and their amahs sat on the terrace, watching a troupe of Cantonese acrobats climb their comical ladders and pretend to disappear into the sky. They turned into birds, unfurled crushed paper wings and danced in and out of the squealing children, then leapt on to each other’s backs and transformed themselves into a large red cockerel.

Jim steered his balsa plane through the verandah doors. As the adults’ world continued above his head he made a circuit of the party. Many of the guests had decided not to appear in costume, as if too nervous of their real roles to cast themselves in disguise. The gathering reminded Jim of the all-night parties at Amherst Avenue which lasted to the next afternoon, when distracted mothers in crumpled evening gowns wandered by the swimming-pool, pretending to look for their husbands.

The conversation fell away when Dr Lockwood switched on the short-wave radio. Glad to see everyone occupied, Jim stepped through a side door on to the rear terrace of the house. He watched the line of weeding women move across the lawn. There were twenty Chinese women, dressed in black tunics and trousers, each on a miniature stool. They sat shoulder to shoulder, weeding knives flashing at the grass, while keeping up an unstoppable chatter. Behind them Dr Lockwood’s lawn lay like green shantung.

‘Hello, Jamie. Cogitating again?’ Mr Maxted, father of his best friend, emerged from the verandah. A solitary but amiable figure in a sharkskin suit, who faced reality across the buffer of a large whisky and soda, he stared down his cigar at the weeding women. ‘If all the people in China sat in a line they would stretch from the North to the South Pole. Have you thought of that, Jamie?’

‘They could weed the whole world?’

‘If you want to put it like that. I hear you’ve resigned from the cubs.’

‘Well …’ Jim doubted if there was any point in explaining to Mr Maxted why he had left the wolf-cubs, an act of rebellion he had decided upon simply to test its result. To his disappointment, Jim’s parents had been surprisingly unmoved. He thought of telling Mr Maxted that not only had he left the cubs and become an atheist, but he might become a communist as well. The communists had an intriguing ability to unsettle everyone, a talent Jim greatly respected.

However, he knew that Mr Maxted would not be shocked by this. Jim admired Mr Maxted, an architect turned entrepreneur who had designed the Metropole Theatre and numerous Shanghai nightclubs. Jim often tried to imitate his raffish manner, but soon found that being so relaxed was exhausting work. Jim had little idea of his own future – life in Shanghai was lived wholly within an intense present – but he imagined himself growing up to be like Mr Maxted. Forever accompanied by the same glass of whisky and soda, or so Jim believed, Mr Maxted was the perfect type of the Englishman who had adapted himself to Shanghai, something that Jim’s father, with his seriousness of mind, had never really done. Jim always enjoyed the drives with Mr Maxted, when he and Patrick sat in the front seat of the Studebaker and embarked on unpredictable journeys through an afternoon world of empty nightclubs and casinos. Mr Maxted drove the Studebaker himself, a trick of behaviour that seemed exciting and even faintly disreputable to Jim. He and Patrick would play the untended roulette wheels with Mr Maxted’s money, under the tolerant smiles of the White Russian bar-girls darning their silk stockings, while Mr Maxted sat in the office with the owner, moving around other piles of banknotes.

Perhaps, in return, he should take Mr Maxted on his secret expedition to Hungjao Airfield?

‘Don’t miss the film show, Jamie. I rely on you to keep me up to date with the latest news in military aviation …’

Jim watched Mr Maxted sway along the tiled verge of the empty swimming-pool, curious to see if he would fall in. If Mr Maxted was always accidentally falling into swimming-pools, as indeed he always was, why did he only fall into them when they were filled with water?

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