Miracles of Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

apyramid of coffins covered with soil that the heavy rains would wash away. Unless regularly maintained, the coffinswould emerge into the daylight.
    There was a burial mound on the edge of an abandonedpaddy field three hundred yards from our house. One day,on my way back from school, I made a small detour to themound, climbed up the rotting pyramid and peered into oneof the lidless coffins. The skeleton of a forgotten rice farmerlay on what seemed like a mattress of silk – the soil aroundhim had been endlessly washed and rinsed by the rains. Yearslater, as a Cambridge medical student, I would sleep in mycollege room with my anatomy skeleton in a coffin-like pinebox under my bed. I was told that the skeleton’s modestheight did not mean it was that of a child – most anatomyskeletons were those of south-east Asian peasants.
    Despite my heroic cycle trips, my insulation from Chineselife was almost complete. I lived in Shanghai for fifteen yearsand never learned a word of Chinese. Although my fatherhad a large Chinese workforce, and at one point tookChinese lessons, he never uttered a syllable of Chinese to anyof our servants. I never had a Chinese meal, either at homeor during the many hotel and restaurant visits with myparents and their friends. We ate roast beef and roast lamb,American waffles and syrup, ice cream sundaes. My firstChinese meal was in England after the war. Today, Britishand European émigrés to the third world have been educated by television to take an interest in the local history andculture – its cuisine, architecture, folklore and customs. Thiswas not the case in 1930s Shanghai, in part because there wasso little of that history and culture available in Shanghai, andpartly because of the standoffishness of the Chinese.
    And perhaps, after all, too little was hidden in Shanghai.Even as a 10-year-old who had known nothing else, theextreme poverty of the Chinese, the deaths and disease andorphans left to starve in doorways, unsettled me as it musthave unsettled my parents. I assume that both had emotionallydistanced themselves from what they saw in theShanghai streets. There were many foreign-run charitieswhich they actively supported, but they probably knew therewas very little that even the most sympathetic Westernerscould do for the millions of destitute Chinese. My mothertravelled everywhere in her chauffeur-driven car, and maywell have seen less of poverty than her forever-cycling son.There were also huge numbers of destitute Europeanrefugees – White Russians, German and eastern EuropeanJews fleeing from the Nazi threat, English expats down ontheir luck, political refugees from all over the world whoneeded no visas to enter Shanghai. As the thousands of barsand nightclubs toasted the even better years to come, andthe dancers continued to dance, I cycled up and down theAvenue Foch and the Bubbling Well Road, always on thelookout for something new and rarely disappointed.
    In Shanghai the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me, and I think now thatmy main effort as a boy was to find the real in all this make-believe. In some ways I went on doing this when I came toEngland after the war, a world that was almost too real. As awriter I’ve treated England as if it were a strange fiction, andmy task has been to elicit the truth, just as my childhood selfdid when faced with honour guards of hunchbacks andtemples without doors.
    Meanwhile, there was a host of treats to look forward to:children’s parties with their conjurors and tumblers; thegymkhana at the riding school where I would pretend tosteer my docile nag around a figure-of-eight course, all thebeast could remember; the premiere of The Wizard of Oz ,attended by the whole school; Saturday ice cream sundaes atthe Chocolate Shop, a happy bedlam of small boys, amahsand exhausted nannies; the American Hell-Drivers at theracecourse, crashing their cars through burning walls; a visitto the Chinese theatre in the