The real Empire of the Sun: JG Ballard on how his childhood inspired the gripping war film



It was an enthralling war film - based on the childhood adventures in a Japanese prison camp of author JG Ballard, who died this week. But, as his actual memoirs reveal, the full story was even more strange and disturbing.



Shanghai childhood: JG Ballard as a young boy before Japan invaded China

While I was lying in bed studying for a Scripture test, I heard tanks moving down Amherst Avenue.

My father, who ran cotton mills, burst into my bedroom and told me that Japan had declared war.

'But I have to go to school,' I protested. 'Exams start today.'

He then uttered the greatest words an 11-year-old schoolboy can ever hear.

'There'll be no more school, and no more exams.'

From that point, the old Shanghai - celebrated as the Paris of the Orient - ceased to exist.

I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930 and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs.

It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse and various patriotic gatherings at the British Embassy on the Bund, the city's glamorous waterfront area.

I remember, as an excited English boy, our trips in the family Buick to the Country Club swimming pool.

There was unlimited Coca-Cola and ice cream, and the chauffeur would stop on the way back to buy the latest American comics.

But everything changed with the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, the American naval base, on December 7, 1941.

The day after, Japanese troops occupied the international section of the city where we lived.

There were no more parties, and the Country Club became a Japanese officers' club - my mother told me in tones of great indignation that they had stabled their horses in the squash courts.



Classic: Christian Bale plays a character based on Ballard in Empire of the Sun



Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent.

But the cotton works were my father's responsibility and duty then counted for something.

In March 1943, my parents, four-year- old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at Lunghua camp, a former teacher training college outside Shanghai, where we remained until the end of August 1945.

Our assembly point was the city's American Club. There we found a huge press of people, mostly British, sitting with their suitcases around the swimming pool, many of the women in their fur coats.

Some of the men carried nothing apart from the clothes they were wearing, confident that the war would be over within days. Others had strapped tennis rackets, cricket bats and fishing rods to their luggage. Together we waited at the tables where Americans had once sipped their bourbons.

Then we were taken to Lunghua, my last real childhood home, where I would spend the next two-and-a-half largely happy years.

We were given a small room in G Block. My first impression was of how relaxed and casual the internees seemed. All this would change, but for the moment the people around me were enjoying a ramshackle, but rather pleasant, holiday.

I had known a Shanghai where the men wore suits and ties, but here they were dressed in cotton shorts and shirtsleeves. Many of the younger women were in beachwear.

The dining hall had the atmosphere of an unsupervised prison, children screaming, husbands flirting with each other's wives.

Outside, there were earth tracks named Oxford Street and Piccadilly, and the amateur dramatics group rehearsed The Pirates Of Penzance.

All in all, this was a relaxed and easy-going world and I enjoyed my time in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages, and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic.



Impressionable: In the film Bale idolises the Japanese despite being a prisoner



My parents were glad to let me stay out to all hours. Of the 2,000 inhabitants, 300 were children, and I roamed at the centre of a pack of boys my own age.

There were 1,000 sights to be investigated, 100 errands to run in return for an old copy of the photo magazine Life or an unwanted screwdriver.

The camp was ringed by a barbedwire fence, through which I often climbed to retrieve a ball or kite. A building was designated as the school.

Inside the crowded dormitories, there was desperate competition for space. Former classrooms were divided into a maze of cubicles by sheets hung from lines of string.

All the women in the camp were assigned jobs - running the kitchens or boiling our drinking water. Women with small children were excused duties and my mother rarely left our tiny room.

Families with one child were obliged to take in a child without parents. A boy named Bobby Henderson was so resented by the couple on whom he was billeted that he constructed a cubicle like a beggar's hovel, which he defended fiercely.

Bobby and I were close, though I never really liked him and found something threatening about his tough and self-reliant mind. Circumstances had forced him to fight too hard to survive and this had made him ruthless.

He regarded my endless curiosity and roaming around the camp as a waste of time, and my interest in chess, bridge and kites as frivolous.

His parents were interned in Peking, but he never spoke about them, which baffled me at the time. The truth is I suspect that he had forgotten what they were like.

On the whole, however, Lunghua seemed full of easy-going and agreeable characters. Striding around the assembly hall with my chessboard, I would be affably hailed as 'Shanghai Jim'.

I would settle down for a game with a man who might be an architect or a former jockey. Then I might be lent an old copy of The Saturday Evening Post, or Punch.

What all these adults shared, of which I took full advantage, was the crushing boredom of camp life. They were living in an eventless world. An hour's chess with a talkative 12-year-old was an hour less to endure.

Our food supply was a serious problem from the start. Our meals consisted of rice congee - rice boiled into a liquid pulp - vegetable soup that concealed a piece of gristly horse meat and hard, black bread.



Change of heart: When U.S. pilots bomb a nearby airfield, they become his heroes



For the rest of my life, I would find it difficult to leave food on my plate, even

if I disliked its taste. And in the last 18 months of the war, our rations fell further. As we sat at the card table in our room one day, pushing what my mother called 'the weevils' to the rim of our plates of congee, my father decided that we should eat them - we needed the protein.

They were small white slugs, and perhaps maggots, a word my mother preferred to avoid. I counted them before tucking in lustily - 100 or so was my usual score.

The camp commandant, Hyashi, was almost a caricature short-sighted Japanese with a toothbrush moustache and spectacles. He would smile at the noisy British children, a feral tribe if ever there was one.

I also became friends with several of the young Japanese guards. They were bored, too, and would let me wear their kendo martial arts armour.

I knew they could be viciously brutal. In the early days, when there was still electric power, my mother would read late into the night. And once, a passing Japanese officer spotted the light.

He burst into the room, drew his sword and slashed away the mosquito net above my mother's head. He then smashed the light bulb into fragments and vanished without a word.

For me, the most important consequence of internment was that for the first time in my life I was extremely close to my parents. I slept, ate, dressed and undressed within a few feet of them in the same small room, in many ways like the poorer Chinese families for whom I had felt so sorry in Shanghai.

But I revelled in this closeness. Lying in bed at night I could, if I wanted to, reach out and take my mother's hand. I flourished in this intimacy, such a contrast to formal English life.

In pre-war Shanghai, if I caught my mother brushing her hair, it seemed a strange and almost mysterious event.

The vistas of polished furniture turned a family home into a deserted museum.

Lunghua camp may have been a prison of a kind, but it was a prison where I found freedom.

My parents' memories of Lunghua were always much harsher than my own - perhaps because I knew nothing about our likely fate at the hands of the Japanese.

Missed: JG Ballard died at age 78



The adults must have been weak and demoralised, and had heard rumours that we would be marched up-country and disposed of.

By the summer of 1944, the conditions in the camp had changed markedly for the worse. The guards became more brutal as Japan faced defeat. They would lash out during roll-calls.

I can still see two of the guards beating to death an exhausted Chinese rickshaw coolie who had brought them from Shanghai.

The desperate man sobbed on his knees as they kicked him until he lay in a still and bloody pulp on the ground.

I watched from 30ft away, with a large crowd of British internees. I understood why no one tried to intervene. They all had wives and children. The reprisals would have been instant and fearsome. I remember feeling a deep deadness.

The first escape, of some men who set off for the Chinese lines 400 miles away, led to a harsher regime. The food ration was cut and the shower block closed. The winters were fiercely cold. Many people retired to bed for as long as they could.

American air raids then began. Once an anti-aircraft shell exploded above me and I stopped to pick up a gnarled piece of steel, like the peel of a silver apple. It was still hot to the touch.

The sight of American aircraft gave me a new focus of adolescent veneration. I watched the Mustangs streak overhead and spent every spare moment watching the sky.

By early 1945, destitute Chinese peasants tried to enter the camp. Starving families sat around the gates, the women wailing and holding up their skeletal children. The guards helped us keep them out.

And then, one day in early August, we woke to find that the Japanese guards had gone. We assembled for the morning roll-call, but they failed to appear.

We wandered away, listening to the empty sky. One or two reconnaissance planes drifted high overhead, but for the first time everything was silent. Had the war ended?

A few of the internees began to step through the barbed wire. They stood in

the deep grass, inhaling the air outside the camp, as if testing a different atmosphere.

I walked to a nearby burial mound. I climbed onto the lowest tier of rotting coffins, turned and looked back at the camp, a view I had never seen before.

Everything about it seemed strange and unreal, though it had been my home for two-and-a-half years. I ran back and climbed through the wire, relieved to be back in the camp and the only security I knew.

I assume that at this time the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, but the Japanese had not yet decided to surrender.

A few days later we heard of Hirohito's broadcast, calling on Japanese forces everywhere to lay down their arms. But we were all unsure whether they would obey him.

It was several weeks before American forces arrived to take control of Shanghai. And so August 1945 was a strange interregnum when we were never wholly certain that the war had ended.

All sense of community spirit had left Lunghua, and nothing seemed to matter any more. The school had closed, and mothers abandoned the family washing on the lines behind G Block.

Then, in the last days of August, a B-29 flew towards the camp. A line of canisters' parachutes flared and the first American relief supplies floated towards us.

Each was a cargo of treasure. There were tins of Spam, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, jars of jam and huge bars of chocolate. I remember vividly our first meal on our little card table and the extraordinary taste of animal fat, sugar, jam and chocolate. The vast, lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world.

The camp came alive again, as the internees found a new purpose in their lives, hoarding their new supplies, quick to point out the smallest unfairness.

Tired of all this, and revived by the Spam and chocolate, I decided to walk to Shanghai five miles away. Without telling my parents, I stepped through the wire fence.

I passed through a silent terrain of abandoned paddy fields, burntout trucks, burial mounds and ghost villages.

After an hour, I reached a railway station. A group of fully-armed Japanese soldiers waited on the platform, picking their teeth while one of them tormented a young Chinese man.

The Japanese soldier had tied the Chinese to a telegraph pole and was now slowly strangling him.

I was about to walk past when the soldier beckoned me to him. He had seen the transparent celluloid belt that held up my frayed cotton shorts.

It was a prized novelty. I handed it to him, then waited as he flexed the colourless plastic and stared at me through it, laughing admiringly.

Behind him the young Chinese was slowly suffocating to death, his urine spreading across the platform.

I waited in the sun, listening as his strangled voice grew weaker. I was old enough to know that this lost Japanese platoon was beyond the point where life and death meant anything at all.

Ten minutes later, the Chinese was silent and I was able to walk away. The Japanese soldier looped my plastic belt around his neck, stepped over the trussed body, and rejoined his companions, waiting for a train that would never come.

I was no different from millions of other teenage boys in enemyoccupied Europe and the Far East. A vast cruelty lay over the world and was all we knew. I had changed and I knew that childhood had passed for good.

I walked down Amherst Avenue to our house at 31. A young Chinese soldier not much older than I was, opened the door and tried to bar my way with his rifle. I pushed past him, saying: 'This is my house.'

A general had occupied the house, but had fled after the Japanese surrender. The house was untouched, every piece of furniture and kitchen equipment in place.

I walked around the airless rooms, watching the sunlight play on the swirls of dust that followed me. I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, and lay on the bed, counting the screw-hooks from which I had hung my model aircraft.

The house seemed strange and I felt that it should have changed like everything else in Shanghai.It was almost as if the war had never happened.