Read Online Miracles of Life by J. G. Ballard - Free Book Online Page A

American merchantseamen, captured on board an American freighter. Ascivilians, they were not sent to a POW camp, and must haverealised their good luck. They passed their time loafing ontheir beds in E Block, though now and then they wouldrouse themselves and amble out to the assembly ground fora game of softball. I liked them immensely, for their goodhumour, verbal inventiveness and enormously laid-backstyle. Life in their company was always interesting, and theyremained cheerful to the end, unlike many of the Britishinternees. They always seemed glad to see me, throwing backthe curtains of their miniature cubicles, and would go toelaborate lengths to make me the butt of friendly practicaljokes, which I took in good part. Among their other virtues, the Americans had a substantial stock of magazines – Life, Time, Popular Mechanics, Collier’s – which I devoured, desperatefor the kind of hard information on which myimagination fed.
    What was happening, without my realising it at the time,was that I was meeting a range of adults from whom my lifein Shanghai had screened me. This was nothing to do withclass in the English sense, but with the fact that pre-warShanghai attracted to its bars and hotel lobbies a number ofdevious and unscrupulous characters who were very goodcompany, and often far more generous with a sweet potatothan the tight-fisted Church of England missionaries. Manyof these ‘rogues’, as my mother termed them, had well-stocked minds (perhaps based on their extensive prison-cellreading in England) and could come up with arresting ideasabout everything under the sun. Years of property andfinancial scams, of rigged bets at jai alai games and theShanghai racecourse, had added salt to their easy wit. I hungon every word, and even tried to model myself on them,without success. When I first tried ‘the university of life’on my mother she stared at me without speaking for a fullminute.
    But I loved hearing adults talk together. I would sidle upunnoticed to a group of G Block adults discussing the servantproblem in Shanghai, their last leaves in Hong Kong orSingapore, the refusal by some fellow internee to do his shareof the lavatory-cleaning fatigue, pre-war gossip about Mrs So-and-so, until they noticed my keen ears and gleamingeyes and ordered me to hop it.
    What all these adults shared, of which I took full advantage,was the crushing boredom of camp life. The war was faraway and the news we received, percolating through deliverydrivers and Red Cross visits, was months late. The Lunghuainternees were living in an eventless world, with little todistract them other than the sound of a few Japanese planestaking off from the nearby airfield. An hour’s chess with atalkative 12-year-old was an hour less to endure, and even adiscussion about the relative merits of the Packard and theRolls-Royce could help the afternoon along.
    The adults in the camp were also coming to terms withthe most significant change in their lives, almost on a parwith the war itself, and one which histories of internmentoften overlook – the absence of alcohol. After years andsometimes decades of heavy drinking (the core of social andprofessional life in the 1930s), Lunghua Camp must havefunctioned for its first months as a highly efficient healthspa. One serious hazard still remained: malaria. TheLunghua area, with its stagnant paddy fields and canals, wasnotorious for its malaria, though luckily the Ballard familywas immune. My mother later claimed that 50 per cent ofthe internees caught malaria. This sounds high to me, but Ihave seen official post-war estimates of 30 per cent.
    Our food supply was a serious problem from the start.Hungry children will eat anything, but my parents must have shuddered at the thought of another day’s meals. At no timeduring the years of internment did we see milk, butter,margarine, eggs or sugar. Our meals consisted of rice congee(rice boiled into a liquid pulp), vegetable soup that concealedone or two