Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography

”There were ten Chinese servants – No. 1 Boy (in his 30s 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 sign of affability), a gardner, a chauffeur and a nightwatchman. Lastly there was a European nanny, generally a White Russian young woman.

This large number of servants, entirely typical among the better-off Western families, was made possible by the extremely low wages paid….

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.

My first impression was of how relaxed and casual the internees seemed. All this would change, but the people around me were enjoying a ramshackle and rather pleasant holiday…There seemed to be humour…earth and cinder road tracks named Oxford Street and Piccadilly…On the observation roof of F block a group of music lovers listened to a classical symphony on a wind-up gramophone. On the steps of the assembly hall the Lunghua Players rehearsed a scene from The Pirates of Penzance

All in all this was a relaxed and easy-going world that I had never known, except during our holidays in Tsingtao, and this favourable first impression stayed with me to the end, when conditions in the camp took a marked turn for the worse. I enjoyed my years in Lunghyua, made a large number of friends…and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition and prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart….In many ways I was the opposite of a misfit and adapted too well to the camp.

”Even allowing for a long and exhausting war, England seemed derelict, dark and half ruined. Southampton consisted largely of rubble. Large sections of London and the Midlands were vast bomb sites and most of the buildings still standing were ruined and desolate….everything seemed to be crumbling and shabby, unpainted for years, and in many ways resembling a huge demolition site….A steady drizzle fell for most of the time, and the sky was slate-grey with soot lifting over the streets from tens of thousands of chimneys. Everything was dirty, and the interiors of railway carriages and buses were black with grime.

Looking at the English people around me, it was impossible to believe that they had won the war. They behaved like a defeated population…They were clearly exhausted by the war, and expected little of the future. Everything was rationed – food, clothing, petrol – or simply unobtainable… Ration books and clothing coupons were all-important, endlessly counted and fussed over, even thought there was virtually nothing in the shops to buy….

Hope itself was rationed, and people’s spirits were bent low. The only hope came from Hollywood films, and long queues formed outside the immense Odeons and Gaumonts that had survived the bombing….

It came home to me very quickly that the England I had been brought up to believe in – AA Milne, Just William , Chums annuals – was a complete fantasy.

For the first time I was meeting large numbers of working class people….Travelling around the Birmingham area I was amazed at how bleakly they lived, how poorly paid they were, poorly educated, poorly housed and fed. To me they were a vast exploited workforce, not much better off than the industrial workers in Shanghai.”