Miracles of Life (2 page)

This rather impressed me, and I thought long and hard as
we sailed back across the river, the China Printing ferry
avoiding the dozens of corpses of Chinese whose impoverished
relatives were unable to afford a coffin and instead launched them onto the sewage streams from the Nantao
outfall. Decked with paper flowers, they drifted to and fro as
the busy river traffic of motorised sampans cut through their
bobbing regatta.

Shanghai was extravagant but cruel. Even before the
Japanese invasion in 1937 there were hundreds of thousands
of uprooted Chinese peasants drawn to the city. Few found
work, and none found charity. In this era before antibiotics,
there were waves of cholera, typhoid and smallpox epidemics,
but somehow we survived, partly because the ten
servants lived on the premises (in servants’ quarters twice
the size of my house in Shepperton). The huge consumption
of alcohol may have played a prophylactic role; in later years
my mother told me that several of my father’s English
employees drank quietly and steadily through the office day,
and then on into the evening. Even so, I caught amoebic
dysentery and spent long weeks in Shanghai General
Hospital.

On the whole, I was well protected, given the fears of kidnapping.
My father was involved in labour disputes with the
Communist trade union leaders, and my mother believed
that they had threatened to kill him. I assume that he
reached some kind of compromise with them, but he kept an
automatic pistol between his shirts in a bedroom cupboard,
which in due course I found. I often sat on my mother’s bed
with this small but loaded weapon, practising gunfighter
draws and pointing it at my reflection in the full-length mirror. I was lucky enough not to shoot myself, and sensible
enough not to boast to my friends at the Cathedral School.

Summers were spent in the northern beach resort of
Tsingtao, away from the ferocious heat and stench of Shanghai.
Husbands were left behind, and the young wives had a
great time with the Royal Navy officers on shore leave from
their ships. There is a photograph of a dozen dressed-up
wives each sitting in a wicker chair with a suntanned, handsomely
smiling officer behind her. Who were the hunters,
and who the trophies?

Amherst Avenue was a road of large Western-style houses
that ran for a mile or so beyond the perimeter of the International
Settlement. From the roof of our house we looked
across the open countryside, an endless terrain of paddy
fields, small villages, canals and cultivated land that ran in
the direction of what later became Lunghua internment
camp, some five miles to the south. The house was a three-
storey, half-timbered structure in the Surrey stockbroker
style. Each foreign nationality in Shanghai built its houses in
its own idiom – the French built Provençal villas and art
deco mansions, the Germans Bauhaus white boxes, the
English their half-timbered fantasies of golf-club elegance,
exercises in a partly bogus nostalgia that I recognised
decades later when I visited Beverly Hills. But all the houses,
like 31 Amherst Avenue, tended to have American interiors – overly spacious kitchens, room-sized pantries with giant
refrigerators, central heating and double glazing, and a bathroom
for every bedroom. This meant a complete physical
privacy. I never saw my parents naked or in bed together, and
always used the bath and lavatory next to my own bedroom.
By contrast, my own children shared almost every intimacy
with my wife and me, the same taps, soap and towels, and I
hope the same frankness about the body and its all too
human functions.

But physical privacy may have been more difficult for my
parents to achieve in our Shanghai home than I could have
imagined as a boy. There were ten Chinese servants – No. 1
Boy (in his thirties and the only fluent English speaker), his
assistant No. 2 Boy, No. 1 Coolie, for the heavy housework,
his assistant No. 2 Coolie, a cook, two amahs (hard-fisted
women with tiny bound feet, who never smiled or showed
the least signs of affability), a gardener, a chauffeur and a
nightwatchman who patrolled the drive and garden while we
slept. Lastly there was a European nanny, generally a White
Russian young woman who lived in the main house with us.

The cook’s son was a boy of my age, whose name my
mother remembered until her nineties. I tried desperately to
make friends with him, but never succeeded. He was not
allowed into the main garden, and refused to follow me
when I invited him to climb the trees with me. He spent his
time in the alley between the main house and the servants’
quarters and his only toy was an empty Klim tin that had once held powdered milk. There were three holes in its lid,
through which he would drop small stones, then remove the
lid and peer inside. He would do this for hours, mystifying
me completely and challenging my infinitely short attention
span. Aware that I had a bedroom filled with expensive
British and German toys (ordered every September from
Hamleys in London), I made a selection of cars, aeroplanes,
lead soldiers and model battleships and carried them down
to him. He seemed bemused by these strange objects, so I left
him to explore them. Two hours later I crept back and found
him surrounded by the untouched toys, dropping stones
into his tin. I realise now that this was probably a gambling
game. The toys had been a genuine gift, but when I went to
bed that night I found that they had all been returned. I hope
that this shy and likeable Chinese boy survived the war, and
often think of him with his tin and little pebbles, far away in
a universe of his own.

This large number of servants, entirely typical among the
better-off Western families, was made possible by the
extremely low wages paid. No. 1 Boy received about £30 a
year (perhaps £1000 at today’s values) and the coolies and
amahs about £10 a year. They lived rent-free but had to buy
their own food. Periodically a delegation led by No. 1 Boy
would approach my mother and father as they sipped their
whisky sodas on the veranda and explain that the price of
rice had risen again, and presumably my father increased
their pay accordingly. Even after the Japanese seizure of the International Settlement in December 1941 my father
employed the full complement of servants, though business
activity had fallen sharply. After the war he explained to me
that the servants had nowhere to go and would probably
have perished if he had dismissed them.

Curiously, this human concern ran hand in hand with
social conventions that seem unthinkable today. We
addressed the servants as ‘No. 1 Boy’ or ‘No. 2 Coolie’ and
never by their real names. My mother might say, ‘Boy, tell
No. 2 Coolie to sweep the drive…’ or ‘No. 2 Boy, switch on
the hall lights…’ I did the same from a very early age. No. 1
Boy, answering my father, would say ‘Master, I tell No. 2 Boy
buy fillet steak from compradore’ – the lavishly stocked
food emporium in the Avenue Joffre which supplied our
kitchen.

Given the harsh facts of existence on the streets of
Shanghai, and the famine, floods and endless civil war that
had ravaged their villages, the servants may have been
reasonably content, aware that thousands of destitute
Chinese roamed the streets of Shanghai, ready to do
anything to find work. Every morning when I was driven to
school I would notice fresh coffins left by the roadside,
sometimes miniature coffins decked with paper flowers
containing children of my own age. Bodies lay in the streets
of downtown Shanghai, wept over by Chinese peasant
women, ignored in the rush of passers-by. Once, when my
father took me to his office in the Szechuan Road, near the Bund, a Chinese family had spent the night huddling against
the steel grille at the top of the entrance steps. They had been
driven away by the security guards, leaving a dead baby
against the grille, its life ended by disease or the fierce cold.
In the Bubbling Well Road our car had to halt when the
rickshaw coolie in front of us suddenly stopped, lowered his
cotton trousers and leant forward over his shafts, defecating
a torrent of yellow liquid at the roadside, to be stepped in by
the passing crowds and carried all over Shanghai, bearing
dysentery or cholera into every factory, shop and office.

As a small boy aged 5 or 6 I must have accepted all this
without a thought, along with the backbreaking labour of
the coolies unloading the ships along the Bund, middle-aged
men with bursting calf veins, swaying and sighing under
enormous loads slung from their shoulder-yokes, moving a
slow step at a time towards the nearby godowns, the large
warehouses of the Chinese merchants. Afterwards they
would squat with a bowl of rice and a cabbage leaf that
somehow gave them the energy to bear these monstrous
loads. In the Nanking Road the Chinese begging boys ran
after our car and tapped the windows, crying ‘No mama, no
papa, no whisky soda…’ Had they picked up the cry thrown
back at them ironically by Europeans who didn’t care?

When I was 6, before the Japanese invasion in 1937, an old
beggar sat down with his back to the wall at the foot of our
drive, at the point where our car paused before turning into
Amherst Avenue. I looked at him from the rear seat of our Buick, a thin, ancient man dressed in rags, undernourished
all his life and now taking his last breaths. He rattled a
Craven A tin at passers-by, but no one gave him anything.
After a few days he was visibly weaker, and I asked my
mother if No. 2 Coolie would take the old man a little food.
Tired of my pestering, she eventually gave in, and said that
Coolie would take the old man a bowl of soup. The next day
it snowed, and the old man was covered with a white quilt. I
remember telling myself that he would feel warmer under
this soft eiderdown. He stayed there, under his quilt, for
several days, and then he was gone.

Forty years later I asked my mother why we had not fed
this old man at the bottom of our drive, and she replied: ‘If
we had fed him, within two hours there would have been
fifty beggars there.’ In her way, she was right. Enterprising
Europeans had brought immense prosperity to Shanghai,
but even Shanghai’s wealth could never feed the millions of
destitute Chinese driven towards the city by war and famine.
I still think of that old man, of a human being reduced to
such a desperate end a few yards from where I slept in a
warm bedroom surrounded by my expensive German toys.
But as a boy I was easily satisfied by a small act of kindness,
a notional bowl of soup that I probably knew at the time was
no more than a phrase on my mother’s lips. By the time I was
14 I had become as fatalistic about death, poverty and hunger
as the Chinese. I knew that kindness alone would feed
few mouths and save no lives.

Myself aged 5 at my riding school in Shanghai
.

I remember very little before the age of 5 or 6, when I joined
the junior form of the Cathedral School for boys. The school
was run on English lines with a syllabus aimed at the School
Certificate examinations or their pre-war equivalent, heavily
dominated by Latin and scripture classes. The masters were
English, and we were made to work surprisingly hard, given
the nightclub and dinner-party ethos that ruled the parents’
lives. There were two hours of Latin every other day and a
great deal of homework. The headmaster was a Church of
England clergyman called the Reverend Matthews, a sadist who was free not only with his cane but with his fists,
brutally slapping quite small boys. I’m certain that today
he would be prosecuted for child abuse and assault.
Miraculously I escaped his wrath, though I soon guessed
why. My father was the chairman of a prominent English
company, and later vice-chairman of the British Residents
Association. I noticed that the Reverend Matthews only
caned and slapped the boys from more modest backgrounds.
One or two were beaten and humiliated almost
daily, and I’m still surprised that the parents never complained.
Bizarrely, this was all part of the British stiff-upper-lip
tradition, no match as it would turn out for another
violent tradition, bushido, and the ferocious violence meted
out by Japanese NCOs to the soldiers under their command.

When the Reverend Matthews was interned he underwent
a remarkable sea change: he abandoned his clerical collar
and spent hours sunbathing in a deckchair, and even became
something of a ladies’ man, as if at last able to throw off the
disguise imposed on him by a certain kind of English self-
delusion.

Outside school I remember a great many children’s parties,
every child escorted by its refugee nanny, a chance for
White Russian and German Jewish girls to exchange gossip.
During school holidays we would drive every morning to the
Country Club, where I spent hours in the swimming pool
with my friends. I was a strong swimmer, and won a small
silver spoon for coming first in a diving competition, though I wonder if the prize was awarded to me or to my parents.