The dining hall had the atmosphere of an unsupervised prison, children screaming, husbands flirting with each other's wives. Many of the younger women were in beachwear. I had known a Shanghai where the men wore suits and ties, but here they were dressed in cotton shorts and shirtsleeves. All this would change, but for the moment the people around me were enjoying a ramshackle, but rather pleasant, holiday. My first impression was of how relaxed and casual the internees seemed. Then we were taken to Lunghua, my last real childhood home, where I would spend the next two-and-a-half largely happy years. Together we waited at the tables where Americans had once sipped their bourbons. Others had strapped tennis rackets, cricket bats and fishing rods to their luggage. Some of the men carried nothing apart from the clothes they were wearing, confident that the war would be over within days. There we found a huge press of people, mostly British, sitting with their suitcases around the swimming pool, many of the women in their fur coats.
Our assembly point was the city's American Club. In March 1943, my parents, four-year- old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at Lunghua camp, a former teacher training college outside Shanghai, where we remained until the end of August 1945. Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent.īut the cotton works were my father's responsibility and duty then counted for something. Classic: Christian Bale plays a character based on Ballard in Empire of the Sun
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