Free Miracles of Life by J. G. Ballard

segments loosely strungtogether, they would encourage me to fence with them. Eachbout would last twenty seconds and involved me beingrepeatedly struck about the helmet and face mask, which Icould scarcely see through, every dizzying blow beinggreeted with friendly cheers from the watching Japanese.They too were bored, only a few years older than me, andhad little hope of seeing their families again soon, if ever. Iknew they could be viciously brutal, especially when actingunder the orders of their NCOs, but individually they wereeasy-going and likeable. Their military formality and never-surrender ethos were of course very impressive to a 13-year-oldlooking for heroes to worship.
    For me, the most important consequence of internmentwas that for the first time in my life I was extremely close tomy parents. I slept, ate, read, dressed and undressed within afew feet of them in the same small room, in many ways likethe poorer Chinese families for whom I had felt so sorry inShanghai. But I revelled in this closeness, which I assume hasbeen a central part of human behaviour throughout most ofits evolution. Lying in bed at night I could, if I wanted to,reach out and take my mother’s hand, though I never did. Inthe early days when there was still electric power my motherwould read late into the night, hidden inside her mosquitonet only a few feet away, as my father and sister slept in theirbeds behind us. One night a passing Japanese officer spottedthe light through the home-made blackout curtain. He burstinto the room, barely a foot from me, drew his sword andslashed away the mosquito net above my mother’s head, thenthrashed the light bulb into fragments and vanished withouta word. I remember the strange silence of people woken inthe nearby rooms, listening to his footsteps as he disappearedinto the night.
    Somehow my mother survived, but she and my fatherstruck up few close friendships with the other G Blockinternees. Though all had children, the families kept theirdistance from each other, presumably to maintain theirprivacy, a desperately short commodity when an evening curfew was introduced and we were confined to quarters forthe hours of darkness.
    But I flourished in all this intimacy, and I think the yearstogether in that very small room had a profound effect onme and the way I brought up my own children. Perhaps thereason why I have lived in the same Shepperton house fornearly fifty years, and to the despair of everyone have alwayspreferred make-do-and-mend to buying anew, even whenI could easily afford it, is that my small and untidy housereminds me of our family room in Lunghua.
    I realise now just how formal English life could be in the1930s, 40s and 50s for its professional families. The childrenof doctors, lawyers and company directors rarely saw theirfathers. They lived in large houses where no one shared abedroom, they never saw their parents dressing or undressing,never saw them brush their teeth or even take off awatch. In pre-war Shanghai I would occasionally wanderinto my parents’ bedroom and see my mother brushing herhair, a strange and almost mysterious event. I rarely saw myfather without a jacket and tie well into the 1950s. The vistasof polished furniture turned a family home into a desertedmuseum, with a few partly colonised rooms where peopleslept alone, read and bathed alone, and hung their clothes inprivate wardrobes, along with their emotions, hopes anddreams.
    Lunghua Camp may have been a prison of a kind, but itwas a prison where I found freedom. My parents were always at hand to answer any query that crossed my mind – adifficulty with my French prep, the existence or otherwise ofGod, or the meaning of ‘you play on my mistakes’, a phraseuttered sagely by my adult chess opponents when they wereon the point of losing. In no sense did I think of myself as amisfit (which was certainly true once I came to England in1946), and nor did anyone else, as far as I can remember. Inmany ways I was the