Free Miracles of Life by J. G. Ballard Page B

estrangement, and realise howmuch I have missed. The experience of seeing adults understress is an education in itself, but bought, sadly, at too heavya price. When my mother, sister and I sailed for England atthe end of 1945 my father remained in Shanghai, returningfor a brief visit to England in 1947, when we toured Europein his large American car. I was 17, about to go toCambridge, unsure whether to be a doctor or a writer. Myfather was a friendly but already distant figure who playedno part in my decision. When he returned for good in 1950he had been away from England for more than twenty years,and the advice he gave me about English life was out of date.I went my own way, ignoring him when he strongly urgedme against becoming a writer. I had spent five years learningto decode the strange, introverted world of English life, whilehe was happiest dealing with his professional colleagues inSwitzerland and America. He telephoned to congratulate meon my first novel, The Drowned World , pointing out oneor two minor errors that I was careful not to correct. Mymother never showed the slightest interest in my career until Empire of the Sun , which she thought was about her.
    As an itinerant chess player and magazine hunter, I got toknow a huge number of Lunghua internees, but fewreappeared in my later life. One was the headmaster ofthe camp school, a Methodist missionary called George Osborne. Knowing of my father’s strongly agnostic and proscientific beliefs, he generously urged him to send me to hisold school, The Leys in Cambridge, founded by well-to-doMethodists from the north of England and very muchscience-oriented. Osborne was an unworldly figure, blinkingthrough his glasses and tireless in his efforts to keep thecamp together, and the best kind of practising Christian. Hiswife and three children were in England, but once the warended his first thoughts were for his Chinese flock at theirupcountry mission station, to which he returned rather thansail home. After a year there he paid a brief visit to England,taking me out to lunch whenever he was in Cambridge. Bychance, in the 1960s, I became close friends with a northLondon doctor, Martin Bax, who edited a poetry magazinewith his wife Judy. A decade later I learned that Judy Bax wasthe Reverend Osborne’s daughter. As she admitted, I knewher father far more closely than she did.
    Another Lunghua acquaintance was Cyril Goldbert, thefuture Peter Wyngarde. Separated from his parents, he livedwith another family in G Block, and amused everyone withhis fey and extravagant manner. Theatre was his entireworld, and he played adult roles in the camp Shakespeareproductions, completely dominating the bank managers andcompany directors who struggled to keep up with him. Hewas four years older than me, and very witty company, witha sophisticated patter I had rarely come across. He had neverbeen to England, but seemed to be on first-name terms with half of Shaftesbury Avenue, and was a mine of insider gossipabout the London theatre.
    Cyril was very popular with the ladies, distributing themost gallant flattery, and my mother always rememberedhim with affection. ‘Oh, Cyril…’ she would chortle whenshe saw him on television in the 1960s. Throughout herlife my mother had an active dislike of homosexuals,understandable perhaps at a time when a conviction forhomosexual acts brought not just the prison cell but socialdisgrace. Every married woman’s deep fear must have beenthat husband, breadwinner and father of her children mighthave a secret self in a carefully locked closet. When I was inmy late teens she saw me reading a collection of OscarWilde’s plays, and literally prised the volume from my hands,although I was already showing a keen interest in girls of myage.
    I once strolled with Cyril through some ruined buildingson the outskirts of the camp, listening to him set out hisplans for his conquest of the West End. He tore a piece ofcharcoal from a burnt roof beam, and with a