Miracles of Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

match for theRoyal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Japanese pilots flewinferior planes and had notoriously bad eyesight, accordingto cocktail-party wisdom. But the blinkered vision lay in theeyes of the British, a strange self-delusion bearing in mindthat my parents and their friends had seen the ruthlesscourage of the Japanese soldiers and the skill of their pilotsat first hand since 1937.
    In many ways life in Shanghai instilled a kind ofunconscious optimism in the European residents. Living ina centre of unlimited entrepreneurial capitalism, everyonebelieved that anything was possible. In the last resort, moneywould buy off any danger. The vast metropolis where I wasborn had been raised within not much more than thirtyyears from a collection of low-lying swamps (selected by theManchu rulers as a sign of their contempt), and attractedbemused visitors from all over the world, from GeorgeBernard Shaw to Auden and Isherwood.
    There was also a pleasantly tolerant climate of what nowseems unbelievably heavy drinking. When I mentioned the ‘two-martini lunch’ to my mother at the time I was writing Empire of the Sun , she retorted: ‘Five martinis…’ As a smallboy I took it for granted that drinks were served at any hour,and the pantry cupboards resembled a medium-sized off-licence, with shelves of gin and whisky bottles. Many of thepeople my parents knew remained slightly drunk all day, andI remember the family dentist whose breath always reeked ofsomething stronger than mouth-rinse. But this was commonin the Far East, partly a social convention, an extension ofwine with one’s meals to every other human activity, andpartly a response to living in a city without a museum orgallery, and where the houses in the nearby streets werethirty years younger than the residents. I asked my motherabout drugs, and she insisted that no one in her circle tookthem, though she knew people who were morphine addicts.But bridge, alcohol and adultery are the royal cement thatholds societies together, and too many sedative drugs wouldhave shut down a large part of Shanghai. In England in the1960s my parents were abstemious drinkers, having a whiskysoda before dinner and a single glass of wine, at a time whenI was drinking half a bottle of Scotch a day. My mother wasrarely ill and lived to the age of 93.
    My earliest childhood writings began in the late 1930s,perhaps as a response to the greater tension I sensed amongthe adults around me. The outbreak of war in Europe and, later, the fall of France left my parents distracted and lessinterested in what I was doing. My sister, aged three, irritatedme immensely, and I tried to devise entire days when I neverset eyes on her. Breakfast was always a problem, with schooldeciding when I sat down to my mango and scrambled egg,and having to endure my sister’s babbling across the table.With a small boy’s logic, I took advantage of Mr Kendall-Ward’scarpentry room to construct a large plywood screenwhich I placed in the centre of the dining table. I equipped itwith a spyhole through which I could ferociously keep watchon my astonished sister, and a miniature hatch cover thatI would flick into place when she noticed my staring eye.Amazingly, my parents took all this with good humour, butthey drew the line when I joined them for lunch with friendsand arrived dragging my huge screen, which I urged No. 2Boy to set up on the table.
    But clearly I needed to be alone. I was always a keen storyteller,and enjoyed school essays when there was a free choiceand I could describe some important event, real or imaginary.At the Cathedral School the standard penalty for smallinfringements was ‘lines’, which involved copying out a setnumber of pages from a worthy book we were studying. Soit would be ‘Maxted, five pages; Ballard, eight pages,’ a considerablechore on top of one’s regular homework. Thechoice of text would usually be one of the Victorian writersin the school library – G.A. Henty, Dickens (we read