Miracles of Life

11 Take it on the Chin (1946)

Winter numbed, England froze.

The Arrawa docked at Southampton, under a cold sky so grey and low that I could hardly believe this was the England I had read and heard about. Small, putty-faced people moved around, shabbily dressed and with a haunted air. Looking down from the rail, I noticed that the streets near the docks were lined with what seemed to be black perambulators, some kind of mobile coal scuttle, I assumed, used for bunkering ships. Later I learned that these were British cars (all made pre-war), a species I had never seen before.

We travelled to London, and then went on to West Bromwich, where I met my grandparents. Our mutual suspicion was probably instant. After a month or so I entered The Leys School in Cambridge as a boarder, and my mother rented a house at Newton Ferrers, about ten miles from Plymouth, near Shanghai friends. I joined her during the holidays, but in 1947 she and my sister returned to Shanghai with my father, and for the next year or so I spent the holidays with my grandparents in West Bromwich, the lowest point in my life that I had by then explored, several miles at least below the sea level of mental health. I hope that I survived, though I have never been completely sure. My mother returned to England with my sister in 1949, and rented a house in the Aldwick Bay estate, to the west of Bognor. After my father’s escape from China, when I was at King’s College, Cambridge, they moved to Manchester. When he left the Calico Printers Association they bought a house in Claygate, near Esher, and in the early 1960s retired to the New Forest.

My first impressions of England remained vividly in my mind for years. They may seem unnecessarily hostile, but they were no different from the impressions that England made on countless American GIs and the Canadian and American students I met at Cambridge. Even allowing for a long and exhausting war, England seemed derelict, dark and half-ruined. The Southampton that greeted me as I carried my suitcase down the gangway had been heavily bombed during the war, and consisted largely of rubble, with few signs of human settlement. Large sections of London and the Midlands were vast bomb sites, and most of the buildings still standing were ruined and desolate. London and greater Birmingham, like the other main cities, had been built in the 19th century, and everything seemed to be crumbling and shabby, unpainted for years, and in many ways resembled a huge demolition site. Few buildings dated from the 1930s, though I never visited the vast London suburbs that largely survived the war intact. A steady drizzle fell for most of the time, and the sky was slate-grey with soot lifting over the streets from tens of thousands of chimneys. Everything was dirty, and the interiors of railway carriages and buses were black with grime.

Looking at the English people around me, it was impossible to believe that they had won the war. They behaved like a defeated population. I wrote in The Kindness of Women that the English talked as if they had won the war, but acted as if they had lost it. They were clearly exhausted by the war, and expected little of the future. Everything was rationed – food, clothing, petrol – or simply unobtainable. People moved in a herd-like way, queueing for everything. Ration books and clothing coupons were all-important, endlessly counted and fussed over, even though there was almost nothing in the shops to buy. Tracking down a few light bulbs could take all day. Everything was poorly designed – my grandparents’ three-storey house was heated by one or two single-bar electric fires and an open coal fire. Most of the house was icy, and we slept under huge eiderdowns like marooned Arctic travellers in their survival gear, a frozen air numbing our faces, the plumes of our breath visible in the darkness.

More importantly, hope itself was rationed, and people’s spirits were bent low. The only hope came from Hollywood films, and long queues, often four abreast, formed outside the immense Odeons and Gaumonts that had survived the bombing. The people waiting in the rain for their hour or two of American glamour were docile and resigned. The impression given by the newsreels we had seen in Shanghai, of confident crowds celebrating VE and VJ Days, wasn’t remotely borne out by the people huddling in the drizzle outside their local cinema, the only recreation apart from the BBC radio programmes, which were dominated by maniacal English comedians (ITMA, totally incomprehensible) or Workers’ Playtime (forced cheerfulness relayed from factories).

It took a long while for this mood to lift, and food rationing went on into the 1950s. But there was always the indirect rationing of simple unavailability, and the far more dangerous rationing of any kind of belief in a better life. The whole nation seemed to be deeply depressed. Audiences sat in their damp raincoats in smoke-filled cinemas as they watched newsreels that showed the immense pomp of the royal family, the aggressively cheerful crowds at a new holiday camp, and the triumph of some new air-speed or land-speed record, as if Britain led the world in technology. It is hard to imagine how conditions could have been worse if we had lost the war.

It came home to me very quickly that the England I had been brought up to believe in – A.A. Milne, Just William, Chums annuals – was a complete fantasy. The English middle class had lost its confidence. Even the relatively well-off friends of my parents – doctors, lawyers, senior managers – had a very modest standard of living, large but poorly heated homes, and a dull and very meagre diet. Few of them went abroad, and most of their pre-war privileges, such as domestic servants and a comfortable lifestyle awarded to them by right, were now under threat.

For the first time, I was meeting large numbers of working-class people, with a range of regional accents that took a trained ear to decode. Travelling around the Birmingham area, I was amazed at how bleakly they lived, how poorly paid they were, poorly educated, housed and fed. To me they were a vast exploited workforce, not much better off than the industrial workers in Shanghai. I think it was clear to me from the start that the English class system, which I was meeting for the first time, was an instrument of political control, and not a picturesque social relic. Middle-class people in the late 1940s and 1950s saw the working class as almost another species, and fenced themselves off behind a complex system of social codes.

Most of these I had to learn now for the first time – show respect to one’s elders, never be too keen, take it on the chin, be decent to the junior ranks, defer to tradition, stand up for the national anthem, offer leadership, be modest and so on, all calculated to create a sense of overpowering deference, and certainly not qualities that had made Shanghai great or, for that matter, won the Battle of Britain. Everything about English middle-class life revolved around codes of behaviour that unconsciously cultivated second-rateness and low expectations.

With its ancestor worship and standing to attention for ‘God Save the King’, England needed to be freed from itself and from the delusions that people in all walks of life clung to about Britain’s place in the world. Most of the British adults I met genuinely thought that we had won the war singlehandedly, with a little help, often more of a hindrance, from the Americans and Russians. In fact we had suffered enormous losses, exhausted and impoverished ourselves, and had little more to look forward to than our nostalgia.

Should we have gone to war in 1939, given how ill-prepared we were, and how little we did to help Poland, to whose aid Neville Chamberlain had committed us when he declared war on Germany? Despite all our efforts, the loss of a great many brave lives and the destruction of our cities, Poland was rapidly overrun by the Germans and became the greatest slaughterhouse in history. Should Britain and France have waited a few years, until the Russians had broken the back of German military power? And, most important from my point of view, would the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor if they had known that they faced not only the Americans but the French, British and Dutch armies, navies and air forces? The sight of the three colonial powers defeated or neutralised by the Germans must have tipped the balance in Japanese calculations.

In short, did the English pay a fearful price for the system of self-delusions that underpinned almost everything in their lives? The question seemed to leap from the shabby streets and bomb sites when I first came to England, and played a large role in the difficulty I had settling down here. It fed into my troubled sense of who I was, and encouraged me to think of myself as a lifelong outsider and maverick. It probably steered me towards becoming a writer devoted to predicting and, if possible, provoking change. Change, I felt, was what England desperately needed, and I still feel it.

The Leys School, 1946–49

Life at an English boarding school was part of the continuum of strangeness that made up my adolescence. I once said that The Leys reminded me of Lunghua Camp, though the food was worse. In fact, by the standards prevalent among English public schools, The Leys was liberal and progressive. It had been founded in 1875 by rich Nonconformists from the north of England, who wanted the ethos and discipline of a public school without the mummery and flummery of the Church of England. Most of the founders were industrialists, and were strong supporters of science. The large science block at The Leys was remarkably well-equipped, with superb physics, chemistry and biology labs, so much so that I rather looked down on the tired and broken equipment I later found in the University science laboratories. The school had a large swimming pool, the only indoor pool in Cambridge when I was there, regularly used for University events. There was no fagging, and though there was chapel twice a day, many of the Sunday sermons were given by lay preachers, often well-known scientists. The Methodist message was never blatant.

Another advantage was that the school was in Cambridge. Most public schools existed in an isolated world of their own, but The Leys was within walking distance of the centre of Cambridge. This was important to me, and meant that I was able to visit friends from the classes above mine who had entered the University a year ahead of me. It gave me an early taste of college life, and access to excellent bookshops, specialist journals and student magazines I would never have seen otherwise.

Above all, there was the Arts Cinema, where I saw virtually the entire repertory of French, Italian, Swedish and German films screened in England after the war. I remember Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, a wonderful romp of wartime collaborators led by Arletty; Clouzot’s Le Corbeau and Manon (with the divine child-woman Cécile Aubry, apparently no older than I was and impossible to get out of my 17-year-old head); Cocteau’s Orphée, with another ‘divine’, María Casares, incarnating Death: I was more than ready to die as I recuperated in the Copper Kettle, a coffee shop on King’s Parade, before going back to cottage pie and treacle pudding in the school dining hall; Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers are Among Us, the first revisionist German film, powerful but hollow.

I also liked American films, especially the B-movies that formed the lower part of a double bill. This was the heyday of film noir, and I must have sneaked away on our free afternoons to see everything that the Hollywood studios could produce. I devoured Double Indemnity (Barbara Stanwyck reminded me in some ways of my mother and her bridge-playing friends, desperate women trying to break out of their housewifely roles) and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, but my favourite films of all were the ultra-low-budget crime and gangster movies. These were often far more interesting than the star vehicle topping the bill. Out of the simplest materials – two cars, a cheap motel, a gun and a tired brunette – they conjured up a hard and unsentimental image of the primeval city, a psychological space that existed first and foremost in the characters’ minds.

Writing my short stories in idle moments during evening prep, I knew that the post-war film offered a serious challenge to any aspirant writer. The novel thrived on static societies, which the novelist could examine like an entomologist labelling a tray of butterflies. But too much had happened to me, and to the boys sitting at the desks around me, in the wartime years. Continuous upheavals had unsettled family life: fathers were away in the Middle East or in the Pacific, mothers had taken on jobs and responsibilities that had redefined who they felt they were. People had memories of bombing raids and beachheads, endless hours of queueing and waiting in provincial railway stations that were impossible to convey to anyone not actually there. I never talked about my life in Shanghai or internment in Lunghua even to my closest friends. Too much had happened for even a race of novelists to digest. But I persisted with my short sketches, gnawing away at the inner bone.

Despite its modern ways, The Leys was the model for the very old-fashioned public school shown in the film Goodbye, Mr Chips, based on a novel by an Old Leysian, the bestselling writer James Hilton (author also of the Shangri-La novel, Lost Horizon). Mr Chips was modelled on a master named Balgarnie, a familiar figure around the school during my years there. When Hollywood made its version of the novel, with Robert Donat, they chose a deeply self-enclosed, ivy-clad Victorian institution far removed in spirit from The Leys, all Gothic spires and hallowed cloisters.

In fact, the masters at The Leys were remarkably open-minded. They lived in Cambridge, many had served in the war, and none of them would have wanted to bring a sentimental tear to the eyes of the boys they taught. The English master, who had the closest access to the turmoil inside my head, never chided me for the strange notions I set out in my essays, which were virtually short stories, and encouraged me to read as widely as I could.

As I entered the Science VIth at 16 I was spending more and more of my time in the school library. The careers master assumed that I would go on to Cambridge University, but I was still not sure what subject I would study. My parents were in Shanghai, and I was thrown onto myself. My grandparents were in many ways as remote from me as the Chinese servants at 31 Amherst Avenue. Any kind of discussion was impossible. They were obsessed with the iniquity of the post-war Labour government, which they genuinely believed to have carried out a military putsch to seize control of the country, using the postal votes of millions of overseas servicemen. If I made the mildest comment in praise of the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, my grandfather would stare silently at me, his face turning bright pink and then purple. Yet all around him was the desperate poverty of the Black Country, with some of the most ill-housed and poorly educated people in western Europe, still giving their lives after the war to maintain an empire that had never been of the least benefit to them. My grandfather’s attitude was common, and based less on feelings of social class than on a visceral resistance to change. Change was the enemy of everything he believed in.

I spent the long months of school holiday with them reading relentlessly, sketching out ‘experimental’ short stories, which usually proved the experiment had failed, and going to the cinemas in Birmingham. I liked to go in the afternoons, when the vast auditoriums were almost empty, and sit in the front row of the circle, the closest possible communion with the world of the Hollywood screen. I avoided English films, apart from a select few – A Matter of Life and Death, a posthumous fantasy in which a ‘dead’ pilot walks ashore into an England he barely recognises, a predicament with which I totally identified; The Third Man, a masterpiece that might just as well have been set in England (the bomb sites and black market, the air of compromise and defeat, the sports jackets and shabby drinking clubs straight out of Earls Court); and the wonderful Ealing comedies, which sent up the English class system that everyone secretly accepted, for reasons I have never understood.

The more I learned about English life, the stranger it seemed, and I was unsure how I could shape my life to avoid it. The contemporary novelists I read offered little help. I enjoyed Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, but most English novelists were far too ‘English’. To save myself from the suffocations of English life, I seized on American and European writers, the whole canon of classic modernism – Hemingway, Dos Passos, Kafka, Camus, Joyce and Dostoevsky. It was probably a complete waste of time. I read far too much, far too early, long before I had any experience of adult life: the worlds of work, marriage and parenthood. I was focusing on the strong mood of alienation that dominated these writers, and on little else. In many ways I was rather lost, trying to find my way through a dark and very grim funfair where none of the lights would come on.

Then, at the age of 16, I discovered Freud and the surrealists, a stick of bombs that fell in front of me and destroyed all the bridges that I was hesitating to cross.

Freud’s works, like Jung’s, were easy to come across in the late 1940s, but reproductions of surrealist paintings were extremely difficult to find. Many of the first paintings I saw by Chirico, Ernst and Dalí were in books about abnormal psychology, or in guides to modern philosophy, both very popular in the years after Belsen and Hiroshima. Freud was still something of an academic joke; the admissions tutor at King’s assumed that I was being ironic when I mentioned my admiration of Freud. The surrealists were still decades away from achieving any kind of critical respectability, and even serious newspapers treated them as a rather tired joke.

Needless to say, this rejection only recommended Freud and the surrealists to me. I felt strongly, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality, and also a key to myself. My head was filled with half-digested fragments of Kafka and Joyce, the Paris existentialists and Italian neorealist films such as Rome, Open City, the high tide of heroic modernism, played out against the background of the Nazi death camps and the growing threat of nuclear war.

All this pressed around me, but I was stuck in a deeply provincial outpost, England in the late 1940s. Few of the painters, philosophers, writers and film-makers I admired were English, but at the same time I could see that I myself was becoming more and more English, if only to get along more comfortably with everyone I met. By 1948 I knew that the Communists under Mao Tse-tung would soon take over the whole of China and that I would never go back to Shanghai. Lunghua Camp and the International Settlement would be swept away. England was my home for the indefinite future, and the locks had been changed.

But surrealism and psychoanalysis offered an escape route, a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world, where shifting psychological roles are more important than the ‘character’ so admired by English schoolmasters and literary critics, and where the deep revolutions of the psyche matter more than the social dramas of everyday life, as trivial as a tempest in a tea cosy.

Freud’s serene and masterful tone, his calm assumption that psychoanalysis could reveal the complete truth about modern man and his discontents, appealed to me powerfully, especially in the absence of my own father. At the same time, the surrealists’ rejection of reason and rationality, their faith in the power of the imagination to remake the world, resonated strongly with my efforts as a novice writer. I wrote short stories and fragments of incomprehensible novels which made complete sense if deemed to be surrealist. Ever since childhood I had a flair for drawing, and in the art department at The Leys I made plaster casts of the faces of friends (I called them ‘death’ masks after those of Shelley, Blake, Napoleon and other heroes). I nearly suffocated one classmate when the plaster failed to set and I physically restrained him from clawing away the oozing carapace. To my lifelong regret, however, I lacked the skill and facility to become a painter, whereas my head was filled with short stories and I had the beginnings of a knack for expressing them.

Despite my efforts to fit in, I think I was a bit of a misfit at school, an over-aggressive tennis player who would throw a game so that I could slip away to see the latest French film at the Arts Cinema. I was introverted but physically strong, and knew from my wartime experience that most people will back away if faced with a determined threat. One of my classmates called me an ‘intellectual thug’, not entirely a compliment, and my years in Lunghua had probably given me a tendency to watch other boys’ plates in the dining hall. I was also prone to backing up an argument about existentialism with a raised fist.

I had a few close friends, an Anglo-Indian boy who went up to Trinity a year ahead of me to study medicine, and an American exchange student. There was also a boy called Frank who was an Auschwitz survivor and had his number prominently tattooed on his arm. He was adopted after the war by an émigré Cambridge physicist and his wife, and attended The Leys as a day boy. To begin with he spoke no English, but he was well-liked. I was drawn to all of them because they were foreigners, but when my parents returned from Shanghai on a visit, my mother stepping from their new Buick, dressed in the latest New York fashions, I thought rather critically of how un-English they seemed. I knew, as I thought this, that it marked how English I was becoming, despite all my efforts. The camouflage always imitates the target.

In the Upper VIth I passed the King’s College entrance examination and met the admissions tutor. I had applied to read psychology, but at the time psychology was not an independent faculty at Cambridge, and he told me that I would have to read philosophy, which contained a small element of psychology within it. ‘What do you want to do when you graduate?’ he asked me. When I said that I was really interested in psychiatry, he told me that I would need a medical degree. I was interested in medicine, which seemed to abut abnormal psychology and surrealism, so I agreed there and then, perhaps not the wisest decision in the long term. My parents, naturally, were delighted. In October 1949 I moved half a mile down Trumpington Street to King’s, and began my study of anatomy, physiology and pathology.

As I left The Leys for the last time, entering the world as an adult, I felt more confident about the future than I had at any time since arriving in England. In the last two years at school I had read a great deal, endlessly experimented with my short stories, which were becoming steadily more unreadable, and through my study of biology had even found a strain of scientific mysticism in my imagination. I was happy with the prospect of becoming a psychiatrist, and knew that I already had my first patient – myself. I was well aware that my reasons for studying medicine were strongly influenced by my memories of wartime Shanghai, and by the horrors of the European war exposed at the Nuremberg trials. The dead Chinese I had seen as a boy still lay in their ditches within my mind, an ugly mystery that needed to be solved.

The faith in reason and rationality that dominated postwar thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous, and the business of psychiatry was as much with the sane as the insane.

My last act at The Leys, in the week before I left, took place in the basement kitchen in North B house, when I skinned and then boiled a rabbit. I was determined to expose the skeleton, wire it together and use it as a combined mascot and table ornament. I filled the entire building with steam and a disagreeably potent stench. The housemaster came down to stop me, but backed off when he saw that I was on an intense mission of my own. Why the rabbit skeleton was so important I can’t remember.

* * *

Shanghai was still very close to me, and the American airbases that surrounded Cambridge were a constant reminder, as were the American airmen who visited the pubs and cinemas with their English girlfriends. I was strongly drawn to flight, and could still see the B-29s sailing slowly over Lunghua, releasing their coloured parachutes like toys thrown to desperate children. I once climbed through the fence around a British airfield and crept into one of the parking bays protected by an earth embankment. Security was lax, and none of the service crews was around. There was a four-engined bomber with a tricycle landing gear – probably a Liberator – and I swung myself through the open ventral hatchway, and sat surrounded by the clutter of equipment inside the cockpit.

Today I would have been arrested, held in a child remand centre, examined by psychologists, sent to a juvenile court, and generally made to feel like a dysfunctional and even dangerous member of society. In fact, I had touched nothing and damaged nothing, and merely gazed through a small window into a dream. I might think that England was deeply repressed and ready to be laid on the analyst’s couch, but I was well aware of my own flaws. I liked to think I was rootless, but I was probably as English as anyone could be, and being rootless was anyway a huge handicap. I was drawing a curtain over my past life, accepting that I would never go back to Shanghai and would have to make a new life in England, with all that this entailed.

12 Cambridge Blues (1949)

Unlike most undergraduates – never ‘students’, one of countless minor anachronisms – I knew Cambridge well when I first went up to King’s. I knew the coffee shops and bookshops, I had punted on the Cam, I knew several of the colleges well, especially Trinity, I had been to the tea dances at the Dorothy, the Arts Cinema and the film society, where I had seen all the pre-war classics such as The Seashell and the Clergyman, and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or.

This had advantages and drawbacks. There was never any chance that I would be ‘smitten’ by the visual impact of the colleges, the Gothic presence of King’s chapel, the beauty of the Backs. I went on having my hair cut at the same barbers, I bought my shoes at the same shoe shops. Had I seen Cambridge for the first time in 1949, I might have taken more from it. In a sense I was ready to leave as soon as I arrived, not the best arrangement.

On the other hand, I could concentrate on the important aspects of Cambridge – the medical and science faculties – and ignore anything connected with ‘heritage’ Cambridge, which has mesmerised generations of parents, who have sacrificed so much energy and ambition into getting their children between those sacred Gothic walls. This has long been one of the most wasteful forms of English snobbery. I firmly believe that Oxford and Cambridge should be graduate universities only, at one stroke killing off this absurd status race, and at the same time benefiting all other universities.

In reality there are two Cambridges, the faculties on the one hand – history, physics, archaeology and so on – where research, lectures and laboratory work take place, and the colleges, which are residential clubs that provide poor food, a small amount of often poor teaching and the bulk of the myths about the Cambridge lifestyle. I was very happy with the first, and bored stiff by the latter.

I spent my two years studying anatomy, physiology and pathology. The tuition I received was superb, the lectures lucid and intelligent, and the anatomy demonstrators who regularly tested us were all qualified physicians specialising in surgery. Anatomy involved the extended dissection of the five parts into which the human body was divided. Physiology and pathology largely consisted of examining slides through the microscope, but anatomy was a process entirely initiated by the student, and demanded hours of patient application. The dissecting room was the gravitational centre of all medical study. If nothing else was going on we would go to the DR, put on our white coats, take our particular body part – the leg, arm or head-and-neck we were dissecting, and start work alongside our Cunningham dissection manuals (never Gray’s), whose pages would soon be stained with human fat.

Before our first visit to the DR we were welcomed by Professor Harris, the head of the anatomy school. He was an inspirational lecturer, the child of a modest Welsh family too poor to send their children to university. Harris and his brother were both determined to become doctors, so the younger brother worked for six years to support the older and pay his medical school fees until he qualified. He in turn supported his younger brother for a further six years until both had gained their degrees. In his wide-ranging lectures Harris made clear his belief in the noble calling of medicine, with anatomy at its heart, and I never for a moment doubted him.

At the end of his opening lecture Harris warned that a small number of us would be unable to cope with the sight of the cadavers waiting for dissection on the glass-topped tables. Walking into that strange, low-ceilinged chamber, halfway between a nightclub and an abattoir, was an unnerving experience. The cadavers, greenish-yellow with formaldehyde, lay naked on their backs, their skins covered with scars and contusions, and seemed barely human, as if they had just been taken down from a Grünewald Crucifixion. Several students in my group dropped out, unable to cope with the sight of their first dead bodies, but in many ways the experience of dissection was just as overwhelming for me.

Nearly sixty years later, I still think that my two years of anatomy were among the most important of my life, and helped to frame a large part of my imagination. Both before and during the war in Shanghai I had seen a great many corpses, some at very close quarters, and like everyone else I had neutralised my emotional response by telling myself: ‘This is grim, but sadly part of life.’ I assume that police, firemen, paramedics, doctors and nurses react in the same way. But they, at least, are absolved from any sense of guilt or responsibility. Even as a child in Shanghai I knew that something was wrong. Most of the corpses I saw, even (indirectly) the famine and disease victims, had been killed by someone else, and childishly I felt that I was partly responsible.

Now, in 1949, only a few years later, I was dissecting dead human beings, paring back the layers of skin and fat to reach the muscles below, then separating these to reveal the nerves and blood vessels. In a way I was conducting my own autopsy on all those dead Chinese I had seen lying by the roadside as I set off for school. I was carrying out a kind of emotional and even moral investigation into my own past while discovering the vast and mysterious world of the human body.

Each term we would begin work on a new cadaver, five teams of two students dissecting a body part. A team would separate its part from the cadaver, and continue the term’s dissection on its own. When the DR was closed we would leave our parts in one of the large wooden cabinets – one cabinet filled with heads, another with legs, and so on. Looking at the heaped faces with their exposed teeth, it was difficult not to think of the newsreels of Belsen and Dachau that were still being shown in cinemas when fresh accounts of Nazi atrocities came to light.

In 1949 most of the cadavers in the DR were those of doctors who had willed their bodies for dissection to the next generation of medical students. This selfless act was a remarkable tribute to the spirit of these dead doctors, who knew that they would be reduced at the end of the term to a clutch of bones and gristle tagged for the incinerator. Once, searching for the senior laboratory assistant, I strayed into the preparation room beyond the DR on the last day of term, and found a large table set with a dozen metal platters, each bearing its tagged remains of the doctors who had bequeathed their bodies, a mysterious banquet in which I had taken part. I felt, and still feel, that in a sense they had transcended death, if only briefly, living on as the last breath of their identities emerged between the fingers of the students dissecting them.

Although they were identified only by number, each of the cadavers seemed to have a distinct personality – the girth and general physique, the profile bones of the face coming through the skin and reasserting themselves, the scars and blemishes, odd anomalies such as extra nipples and toes, residues of operations, tattoos, inexplicable blemishes, the story of a lifetime written into the skin, especially of the hands and face. Dissecting the face, revealing the layers of muscles and nerves that generated expressions and emotions, was a way of entering the private lives of these dead physicians and almost of bringing them back to life.

There was one female cadaver, a strong-jawed woman of late middle age, whose bald head shone brightly under the lights. Most of the male medical students gave her a wide berth. None of us had seen a naked woman of our mothers’ age, alive or dead, and there was a certain authority in her face, perhaps that of a senior gynaecologist or GP. I was drawn to her, though not for the obvious sexual reasons; her breasts had subsided into the fatty tissue on her chest, and many of the students assumed she was male. But I was intrigued by the small scars on her arms, the calluses on her hands she had probably carried from childhood, and tried to reconstruct the life she had led, the long years as a medical student, her first affairs, marriage and children. One day I found her dissected head in the locker among the other heads. The exposed layers of muscles in her face were like the pages of an ancient book, or a pack of cards waiting to be reshuffled into another life.

And all the while, in a wooden box under my bed at King’s, slept the bones of a small Asian farmer who had once planted rice, smoked his pipe in the evenings and watched his grandchildren grow. After his death his body had been boiled down to the white sticks that were sold on to an English medical student who had once boiled a rabbit to its bones. His skeleton, in the same pine box, has probably guided generations of Cambridge students, who have sat at their desks and explored his ribs and pelvis, feeling the bony points of his skull as if assembling the armature of a soul. Patiently, he has lived on.

My years in the dissection room were important because they taught me that though death was the end, the human imagination and the human spirit could triumph over our own dissolution. In many ways my entire fiction is the dissection of a deep pathology that I had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the post-war world, from the threat of nuclear war to the assassination of President Kennedy, from the death of my wife to the violence that underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the century. Or it may be that my two years in the dissecting room were an unconscious way of keeping Shanghai alive by other means.

At all events, by the time I completed the anatomy course I had really completed my time at Cambridge. It had supplied me with a huge stock of memories, of mysterious feelings for the dead doctors who in a sense had come to my aid, and with a vast fund of anatomical metaphors that would thread through all my fiction. The hours in the dissecting room were backed up by the anatomy lectures and the time I spent reading in the anatomy library, where I became friends with an émigré Pole who was an assistant librarian, had served in the Polish Army and escaped to the West through Iraq.

By comparison, college life seemed like a quaint and overly folkloric pageant. Where the Cambridge science faculties (Rutherford and the Cavendish, Crick/Watson and DNA, Sanger and so on) were powerfully oriented towards the future, the Cambridge colleges looked back to the past. King’s was dominated by its chapel and the musical events that surrounded it. The provost was a classicist, a pantomime parody of the eccentric don. In the dining hall we listened to a long Latin grace that I still know by heart, and sat on benches to eat execrable meals, wearing gowns after dusk and being overseen in the streets of Cambridge by a proctor and his bulldogs (his bowler-hatted aides). We had to be back in college by ten, or perhaps earlier. The colleges may have begun as religious foundations, but they had evolved into bizarre public schools with the boys played by adults and the masters by overgrown boys. The French and American students I knew were mystified by it all. I found it rather sad and all too typical of England at the time.

A drawback of the collegiate system is that it is difficult to make close friends in other colleges. There were no more than nine or ten medical students at King’s across all three years, and I was forced to find friends who were reading other subjects. One Kingsman I knew was Simon Raven, whom I would meet in the Copper Kettle after dinner. He told me many years later that he thoroughly enjoyed his time at King’s. But he was actively homosexual, and King’s was an openly homosexual college, famously home to Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster, with close connections to the painter Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group. A few years earlier a number of its dons had come very near to being prosecuted for offences against the little troupe of choirboys (in miniature top hats and bum-freezer jackets) who arrived in a crocodile every day from the King’s choir school. The complaining parents who threatened to go to the police were said to have been paid for their silence from the deep King’s coffers.

The ethos of the college was homosexual, and a heterosexual like myself who brought in his girlfriends (mostly Addenbrooke’s Hospital nurses and free-livers all) was viewed as letting the side down, as well as having made a curious choice in the first place. This was an era when most public schoolboys met no women for the first twenty years of their lives other than the school matron and their mothers, with the result that women in general remained forever in a dead perceptual zone (like vertical stripes to kittens only allowed to see horizontal stripes). I have known women married to unresponsive men they suspected of being repressed homosexuals, but most were probably victims of a special kind of English deprivation.

Otherwise, I enjoyed myself like other students, punting on the river, playing tennis, writing short stories, getting drunk with the Addenbrooke’s nurses, who generously provided me with an education not even the dissecting room could match. They were interesting young women, some with remarkably rackety lives (the syringes in the bedside table drawer?) and I liked them all.

I also, with everyone else, went to a great many films. I relished hard-edged American thrillers with their expressive black and white photography and brooding atmosphere, their tales of alienation and emotional betrayal. Already I sensed that a new kind of popular culture was emerging that played on the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact needed to elicit that strain of psychopathy if it was to work. The modern movement had demonstrated this from its start, in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the willing engagement of the audience’s own psychopathy is almost a definition of modernism as a whole. But this was strongly denied by F. R. Leavis and his notion of the novel as a moral criticism of life. I went to one of Leavis’s lectures and thought how limited his world was, and remember saying to the English literature student who had taken me: ‘It’s more important to go to T-Men (a classic noir film) than to Leavis’s lectures.’ It sounded preposterous at the time, but less so now.

I briefly met E.M. Forster at a King’s sherry party, already an old man or convincingly posing as one, and often drove in a friend’s car around the US airbases. No one seemed aware that the nostalgic pageant called ‘Cambridge’ was made possible by the fleets of American bombers waiting in the quiet fields around the city.

At the end of my second year I knew that I had absorbed all I needed from the medical course. My interest in psychiatry had been a clear case of ‘physician, heal thyself’. I never wanted to walk the wards as a trainee doctor, and friends ahead of me at their London teaching hospitals warned that years of exhausting work would postpone for at least a decade any plans to become a writer. Varsity, the student weekly newspaper, staged an annual short story competition, and my entry, a Hemingwayesque effort called ‘The Violent Noon’, won joint first prize in 1951. The judge was a senior partner at a leading London agents, A.P. Watt, who commended my story and invited me to call on him.

This was another green light, and I told my father that I wanted to give up medicine and become a writer. He was dismayed, especially as I had no idea of how to bring this about. He decided that I should study English literature, the worst possible preparation for a writer’s career, which he may well have suspected. I managed to get a place at London University, at Queen Mary College, and started the degree course in October 1951.

I had written a number of short stories at Cambridge, heavily under the influence of James Joyce, and had sent a few unsuccessfully to Horizon and other literary magazines. The surrealist painters were deeply inspiring, but there was no easy way to translate the visually surreal into prose, or prose that was readable. At heart I was an old-fashioned storyteller with a lively imagination, but English fantasy was too close to whimsy. This created problems that would take me a good many years to solve.

13 Screaming Popes (1951)

I enjoyed my year at Queen Mary College, glad to become a student rather than an undergraduate. I travelled on the London tube system with people who were going to work, and I could almost imagine that I was doing a job. I was one of those millions of European students who had helped to launch revolutions and had battled with police on the streets of eastern Europe, a political power bloc in their own right, something one could never imagine in the case of Oxford or Cambridge undergraduates. A student, Gavrilo Princip, had assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and launched a world war. At Cambridge, an academic theme park where I was a reluctant extra, the only splash I could have made was by falling off a punt.

I liked London, and particularly the Chelsea area, with its lesbian pubs and rich friends of friends who took me to expensive nightclubs like the Milroy and Embassy in Mayfair. People lived in the present, and no one cared about property values or redecorating their flats. Everything was still very shabby and much of South Kensington, where I had a room in Onslow Gardens, was semi-derelict. People lived in dilapidated flats but bought their clothes in Bond Street. One of the English lecturers, a woman in her forties who lived nearby, owned an open-topped Allard, an impressively stylish car, which she drove all the way to the Mile End Road, a journey unthinkable today. Sometimes she gave me a lift. As we roared through the City of London she would take both hands off the wheel to hold forth about Gammer Gurton’s Needle. I had the sense that my life could veer away in any direction, figuratively as well as literally.

I also liked the social mix of students. At Cambridge everyone was middle-class, trying to be middle-class or trying not to be. At London University the students came from all possible backgrounds, with very different approaches to everything. In my group was a surprisingly free-thinking nun, who wore a wimple and a full nun’s rig. There were several ex-servicemen who had become interested in taking a degree while in the wartime forces. They had travelled all over the world. One or two were married. Another had spent his entire childhood in foster homes, was pleasantly good-humoured but quietly anti-semitic. They were all intelligent, which wasn’t true of Cambridge undergraduates, and already had original ideas about the world. When I mentioned that I had been born in China and interned during the war they noted this in the way they would have reacted had I told them I was born in a North Sea trawler or a lighthouse.

The English course was interesting, but modern fiction played no part in it, and at the end of my first year I decided to leave Queen Mary College. My attempts to write a new experimental novel were a complete flop. I needed to get away from academic institutions, and I needed to be free of all financial dependence on my parents, a sentiment I am sure they shared. They were strongly opposed to my hopes of becoming a professional writer, and I found their hostility wearing. Through a Cambridge friend who was working for Benson’s advertising agency in Kingsway, where Dorothy Sayers had worked and which housed the spiral staircase that appeared in one of her novels, I found a job as a novice copywriter with a small London agency.

Like most people living in London for the first time, I spent many of my free hours visiting art galleries and museums, especially the National Gallery and the Tate, as well as the commercial galleries off Bond Street. Now and then there would be a small exhibition of new surrealist paintings – I remember Dalí at, I think, the Lefevre Gallery, and a show of new Magrittes. These sold for remarkably low prices, even the Dalís, but the surrealists had lost most of their prestige and appeal after the war. Their wayward imaginations seemed tame by comparison with the horrors of the Nazi death camps, and no one gave them credit for anticipating the pathological strains in the European mind that had propelled Hitler into power. There were very few surrealists in the Tate collection, and while I was interested in modern art as a whole, my imagination wasn’t touched by cubism or abstract art, which seemed to be formal exercises confined to the artist’s studio.

Today it seems to me that the works by modernist pioneers displayed in the Tate have begun to lose their lustre. Those landmark paintings by Picasso and Braque, Utrillo and Léger, Mondrian and Kandinsky appear smaller than they did fifty years ago. Their colour has faded, and they lack the imaginative bite that I felt when I first looked at them. At the same time I have to accept that my entire visual response to the world was kindled in those Millbank galleries I visited in my early twenties. Then, whenever I visited the Tate, I would always turn right into the modern rooms, and never left to the British art of the past four centuries. I admired Turner because he seemed to anticipate the Impressionists, but the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and Burne-Jones in particular, presented an airless and over-imagined realm as suffocating as the children’s books I read uneasily as a boy. Today, my sense of direction has changed: whenever I enter the Tate I first turn left, and never right.

Surprisingly, given my passion for the new, I spent a huge amount of time in the National Gallery, and would often go every day. By a touching coincidence, my future partner Claire Walsh, then a hyper-bright 12-year-old Claire Churchill, would also visit the National Gallery, as part of her intellectual roaming around London. I wish I had seen her. Gallery tours are now part of every school curriculum, but in the early 1950s even the National Gallery would often seem deserted, and a visitor could be alone in a room filled with Rembrandts, a powerful charge to the imagination.

I am sure that a large part of the enduring mystery of the Renaissance masterpieces in the National Gallery was due to the absence of the explanatory matter that now drains away much of the strangeness and poetry of the Old Masters. I would stare at Crivelli’s Annunciation, charmed by the peacocks, loaves of bread and other incongruous items, the passer-by reading a book on the bridge and the Virgin in her jewel box of a house. I was forced to use my own imagination to stitch these elements into a master narrative that made some kind of sense, rather than read an extended wall caption and be solemnly told that the peacock was a symbol of eternal life. Perish the thought, and let the exquisite bird be itself, and nothing more or less than itself. What could be more natural, and more mysterious, than a peacock and a loaf of bread appearing on the scene to celebrate the forthcoming birth of the Saviour?

Years later, standing in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in front of another Annunciation, by Leonardo, I found my view blocked by a huge party of Japanese tourists. I wondered what they made of the religious paintings in the gallery, with their winged men kneeling in front of rather self-conscious young women. A few Japanese take the Latin mass, but most know nothing about the Christian myths, and the paintings must have seemed completely surrealist.

Then I realised what had drawn me to the National Gallery. There were very few surrealist paintings on display in London in the early 1950s. Colour printing was in its infancy, and there were few illustrated books at affordable prices. I had unconsciously done the only thing I could – I had turned the National Gallery into a virtual museum of surrealist art, and co-opted Leonardo, Raphael and Mantegna to become surrealist painters for me.

In 1955 there was a modest retrospective of Francis Bacon’s paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, followed in 1962 by a far larger retrospective at the Tate Gallery, which was a revelation to me. I still think of Bacon as the greatest painter of the post-war world. Sadly, when I met him in the 1980s I found, like many others before me, that he was not interested in receiving compliments or in talking about his own work. I suspect that he was still sensitive to charges of gratuitous violence and sensationalism that were levelled at him in the 1950s and 1960s. He chose as his official interviewer the art critic David Sylvester, who was careful to steer clear of the questions everyone was eager to hear answered, and only asked Bacon about his handling of space and other academic topics. In his replies Bacon adopted the same elliptical and evasive language, with the result that we know less about the motives of this extraordinary painter than we do of almost any other 20th-century artist. At least Crivelli’s Annunciation in the 1950s was not screened behind endless lectures on Renaissance perspective and the fluctuating price of lapis lazuli.

Bacon’s paintings were screams from the abattoir, cries from the execution pits of World War II. His deranged executives and his princes of death in their pontiffs’ robes lacked all pity and remorse. His popes screamed because they knew there was no God. Bacon went even further than the surrealists, assuming our complicity in the mid-century’s horrors. It was we who sat in those claustrophobic rooms, like TV hospitality suites in need of a coat of paint, under a naked light bulb that might signal the arrival of the dead, the only witnesses at our last interview.

Yet Bacon kept hope alive at a dark time, and looking at his paintings gave me a surge of confidence. I knew there was a link of some kind with the surrealists, with the dead doctors lying in their wooden chests in the dissecting room, with film noir and with the peacock and the loaf of bread in Crivelli’s Annunciation. There were links to Hemingway and Camus and Nathanael West. A jigsaw inside my head was trying to assemble itself, but the picture when it finally emerged would appear in an unexpected place.

14 Vital Discoveries (1953)

Working as a copywriter at an advertising agency was not as glamorous or interesting as novels and films suggested. Most of it was a slog, a dull chore of writing booklets and copy for manuals. I needed the daylight to write my own fiction, so I took a job as a Covent Garden porter, working in the chrysanthemum department of a large wholesaler. We started early, at something like 6 o’clock, and were through by noon. When too many sleep-starved nights finally got to me, I sold encyclopaedias door to door, a job at which I was surprisingly successful, partly because the Waverley Encyclopaedia was the one I had read as a child in Shanghai

– I knew it backwards and genuinely believed in it. It was a fascinating time, roaming the Midland towns with my samples, living in shabby hotels among garment workers. A modest street of Victorian terraced houses would hold a universe of differences – cheerful teenage girls bringing up a brood of small children while the mother slumped in the kitchen watching TV among the clutter; religious fanatics with barely a stick of furniture and wary daughters who couldn’t wait to grow up; a man so excited that I worked for a publisher that he propelled me into his living room and proudly showed me a piano whose keys were coloured and numbered, his ‘revolutionary’ system for teaching music that he wanted me to market for him – by way of proof, he whistled up the stairs and his amiable 13-year-old daughter came down and sat at the upright with her sheet music annotated like a candy bar, then solemnly played the Moonlight Sonata. I still see coloured stripes when I hear the melody, and taste sweetness on my lips.

Prosperity of a sort had reached the Midlands, and the early 1950s was on the cusp of social change. The poorer that people were, the keener they seemed to be to buy the encyclopaedia, and I often waived my commission (there was no salary) to secure for them the hours of intelligent pleasure I had known as a child. But the better-off residents, especially those working in the Coventry car plants, had moved beyond the hallowed notion of education as a gateway to success. Information came through advertising and the television set. They would show off their huge new screens, their wall-to-wall carpeting and their modern kitchens and bathrooms, taking it for granted that I was genuinely interested in these features, then politely decline the eight-volume Waverley. Consumerism provided all the bearings they needed in their lives.

Meanwhile, my writing was still stuck. I had sensibly abandoned my efforts to go one better than Finnegans Wake, and knew that I wasn’t muscular and morbid enough to emulate Hemingway. My problem was that I hadn’t found a form that suited me. Popular fiction was too popular, and literary fiction too earnest. A spate of World War II memoirs and novels was being published, but surprisingly it never occurred to me to write a novel based on my own wartime experiences. Even the grim events I had witnessed as a child in Shanghai could never match the genocidal horrors of the Nazi death camps.

By now, seven or eight years after the war, I had begun to switch off my memories of Shanghai. Very few people had shared my experiences, and the European war was still everywhere around us in a hundred bomb sites. I had always detested nostalgia, and the attempt by British politicians of all parties to assert Britain’s importance in the world, when in reality we were nearly bankrupt, by harping on our wartime role and our pre-war empire, reminded me of the danger of dwelling too much in the past. The Shanghai years would never return, and it unsettled me whenever I met friends of my parents and former Lunghua internees who were detached from the present and living entirely within a cocoon of China memories.

Flying still interested me, and I began to notice advertisements for short-service commissions in the RAF. The flight training was in Canada, an added attraction. My years in Lunghua had exempted me from National Service, and as an officer I would be able to leave the service if I was reassigned to ground duties, as happened to so many pilots and navigators. A change of scene, from grey and overcrowded London to the vast spaces of central Canada, would give me time to think and with any luck be a new spur to my imagination. I was still only 23, but my career as a novelist showed no signs of ever beginning.

I signed on at the RAF recruitment offices in Kingsway, passed the assessment tests at RAF Hornchurch, near Dagenham, and started my three-month basic training at Kirton in Lindsey, in Lincolnshire. I enjoyed my time there, a mix of army-style drill and square-bashing, basic navigation and meteorology, weapons training with the Lee-Enfield rifle, Smith & Wesson revolver and Sten machine gun (I turned out to be a fairly good shot), lessons in officers’ mess etiquette (we would be Britain’s ambassadors around the world as well as becoming nuclear bomber pilots), and experts at self-diagnosing the first symptoms of VD, thanks to hours of instructional films that gave a rather odd impression of our future role as serving officers of the Queen.

In the autumn of 1954 we sailed for Canada on one of the Empress liners, and then spent a month at an RCAF base near London, Ontario, not far from Detroit and Niagara Falls. The intention was to ‘culturally relocate’ us within the North American way of life, and wean us off the enticements of cricket, warm beer and toad-in-the-hole. Needless to say, we were all eager to embrace the North American way of life from the second we stepped off the Empress boat. Canadians were generous and hospitable, without any of the rough edges that can make America jar. The country was vast and sparsely populated, and virtually under a blanket of snow for six months of the year. The Canadians had the natural warmth towards strangers of a desert people.

We arrived at our training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as the first snow was falling, and I think it was still falling when I left the following spring. NATO pilot training took place in Canada as part of the country’s contribution to the alliance, but a wilderness of ice and snow was not the best location for a flying school. The fierce isolation of the Canadian winter, and the white world that surrounded the airbase ten miles from Moose Jaw, meant that for long periods we had nothing to do but sit in the flight rooms, reading magazines and watching the snow fall on the buried runways. Now and then a moose would leap the perimeter fence and gallop off into the mist. In the very comfortable mess, virtually a four-star hotel, I would sit by the picture windows and watch the snow carried horizontally by the icy wind. Walking to the mess from our barracks, I would sometimes find small contact lenses on my cheeks – ice dislodged from my eyeballs when I blinked. We lived on turkey, waffles and ice cream, and drank the bar out of its bourbon and gin. There was no taboo about flying and drinking – one of my Canadian instructors always boarded our plane with a cigar and two bottles of beer.

Then the weather would clear, brilliant blue skies above the silent snow, and we would get in a few days of pilot training. I enjoyed flying the heavy Harvard T-6, with its huge radial engine, retractable undercarriage and variable-pitch propeller, but the training was continually hampered by the weather. Ice crystals in the air produced extraordinary atmospheric effects, such as the triple suns that would blaze through the frozen haze. The British trainees were happy to loaf around, but the French and Turkish trainees demanded to be sent home. They were older and senior in rank to many of the RCAF instructors. At one point the French staged a mutiny, refusing to eat the food served in the mess, which they claimed was fit only for children. The Turks, all experienced army officers, declined to accept orders from any RCAF instructor junior to them. A senior French liaison officer had to be flown in from Ottawa, and was told to climb up the nearest flagpole.

With a great deal of time on my hands, I wrote a few short stories and tried to find enough reading matter to keep me going. The regional newspapers carried no international news and consisted of nothing except reports of curling and ice hockey matches. Magazines such as Time were regarded as intensely highbrow and were difficult to get hold of in Moose Jaw, which was then a dead-end town with two filling stations and a bus depot. Its main function was to supply tractor parts to the huge wheat farms that covered the whole of Saskatchewan. Most of the paperbacks in the bus depot were popular thrillers and detective stories, but there was one type of fiction that occupied a lot of space on the book racks. This was science fiction, then enjoying its great postwar boom.

Up to that point I had read very little science fiction, apart from the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic strips of my Shanghai childhood. I would later realise that most professional s-f writers, British and American, were keen fans from their early teens, and many began their careers writing for the fanzines (amateur magazines produced by enthusiasts) and attending conventions. I was one of the very few who came to science fiction at a relatively late age. By the mid 1950s there were some twenty commercial s-f magazines on monthly sale in America and Canada, and the best of these were in the Moose Jaw magazine racks.

Some, like Astounding Science Fiction, the front runner in both sales and prestige within the field, were heavily committed to space travel and tales of a hard-edged technological future. Almost all the stories were set in spaceships or on alien planets in the very far future. These planet yarns, in which most of the characters wore military uniform, soon bored me. The forerunners of Star Trek, they described an American imperium colonising the entire universe, which they turned into a cheerful, optimistic hell, a 1950s American suburb paved with good intentions and populated by Avon ladies in spacesuits. Eerily, this may prove to be an accurate prophecy.

Luckily, there were other magazines like Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction, where the short stories were set in the present or very near future, extrapolating social and political trends already evident in the years after the war. The dangers to a docile public of television, advertising and the American media landscape were their terrain. They looked searchingly at the abuses of psychiatry and at politics conducted as a branch of advertising. Many of the stories were droll and pessimistic, with a surface of dry wit that hid a quite downbeat message.

These I seized on and began to devour. Here was a form of fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka. It recognised a world dominated by consumer advertising, of democratic government mutating into public relations. This was a world of cars, offices, highways, airlines and supermarkets that we actually lived in, but which was completely missing from almost all serious fiction. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. No one in Hemingway’s post-war novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war. The very notion was ludicrous, as absurd then as it seems now. Writers of so-called serious fiction shared one dominant characteristic – their fiction was first and foremost about themselves. The ‘self ’ lay at the heart of modernism, but now had a powerful rival, the everyday world, which was just as much a psychological construct, and just as prone to mysterious and often psychopathic impulses. It was this rather sinister realm, a consumer society that might decide to go on a day trip to another Auschwitz and another Hiroshima, that science fiction was exploring.

Above all, the s-f genre had a huge vitality. Without thinking up a plan of action, I decided that this was a field I should enter. I could see that here was a literary form that placed a premium on originality, and gave a great deal of latitude to its writers, many of whom had their own trademark styles and approaches. I felt too that for all its vitality, magazine science fiction was limited by its ‘what if?’ approach, and that the genre was ripe for change, if not outright takeover. I was more interested in a ‘what now?’ approach. After weekend trips across the border I could see that both Canada and the USA were changing rapidly, and that change would in time reach even Britain. I would interiorise science fiction, looking for the pathology that underlay the consumer society, the TV landscape and the nuclear arms race, a vast untouched continent of fictional possibility. Or so I thought, staring at the silent airfield, with its empty runways that stretched into a snow-blanched infinity.

In early spring, when the last of the snow was falling, we were told that our flight training would be transferred back to England (within a year RCAF Moose Jaw ceased to be a NATO training centre). By this time I was confident that my career as a writer was about to begin. I had written several s-f stories, which had flowed quickly from my pen, and there was a queue of others waiting in my mind. I enjoyed flying, but months in an isolated training base in Scotland or the north of England would postpone everything I planned.

Accordingly, I resigned my commission, and was soon installed in my tiny couchette on the Canadian Pacific Railway train to Toronto, a long journey of endless lakes and pine forests that I spent with pad and pencil. In a real sense I wrote my way across Canada, and then across the Atlantic to England. On arrival I was sent to RAF High Wycombe, where RAF personnel were demobilised.

It was a cold spring, and we sat in an unheated barrack room on the edge of a disused airfield, waiting to be called by the two flight lieutenants who processed our papers. As the days passed I would strike up the acquaintance of a V-bomber navigator cashiered for some mess irregularity, or a pilot who had damaged the undercarriage of his jet fighter by hitting one too many landing lights. Then ‘Robertson’ or ‘Groundwater’ would be called out, a half-finished Times crossword would be pressed into my hands, and my new companions would vanish for ever.

Since my papers had to come from Canada, I spent several weeks at RAF High Wycombe, a gloomy place that managed a convincing impersonation of the end of the world. But I have fond memories of it; firstly, because it was there that I wrote my first s-f story to be published, and secondly because I was looking forward to seeing Mary Matthews, whom I had met in a Notting Hill hotel a month before I joined the RAF. We had exchanged a few letters while I was in Canada, but I had no idea if she would still be there.

15 Miracles of Life (1955)

As soon as I left RAF High Wycombe I travelled straight to London, and booked myself into the hotel near Ladbroke Grove where Mary and I had first met. Friends had brought us together at a party held in the large communal garden behind Stanley Crescent, an untended wilderness that I remember as a cross between Arcadia and a jungle-warfare training range. Today this entire area is dominated by bankers, hedge-fund managers and television executives, but in the 1950s it was a warren of shabby boarding houses and one-room flats occupied by jobless ex-servicemen, part-time prostitutes, divorcees with small children living on handouts from their relatives; in short the flotsam of down-at-heel post-war England who could not even afford to be poor.

Yet respectability kept breaking through, and young professionals were already beginning to infiltrate the area. Mary Matthews was one of them. Arriving in London to take up her job as a secretary at the Daily Express, she moved into the Stanley Crescent Hotel because it advertised a handbasin with hot and cold running water in every room, a remarkable feature at the time, and as much a sign of middle-class success as a second bathroom in a suburban house today.

Yet this was Christie country, and Rillington Place (later renamed), where the ghastly John Christie committed his murders, was only a few hundred yards away. Back in 1953, soon after my meeting with Peter Wyngarde at the Mitre in Holland Park Avenue, I was walking up Ladbroke Grove when I found a huge crowd outside the police station. They filled the side street, watching the entrance to the car park behind the station. A police car approached, siren ringing, followed by a police van. The crowd drew back, leaving a woman in a red coat standing in the middle of the side street. The constables guarding the car park entrance made no attempt to move her, and she stood her ground, watched admiringly by the crowd as the police car and van swerved at speed through the gates.

The woman in the red coat was the sister of Timothy Evans, a mentally retarded friend of Christie who had been charged with the murder of his son and hanged in 1950. In fact, Christie had murdered the infant, and was himself hanged in 1953. Evans, too late, received a posthumous pardon in 1966. I can still remember the woman in the red coat, and her implacable gaze as she stared at the police van. Inside was John Christie, a now-deranged figure who had just been arrested for the murders he had committed at Rillington Place.

My wife, Mary Ballard, in 1956.

I had originally moved to the Stanley Crescent Hotel after being driven out of South Kensington, when the weekly rent for my room in Onslow Gardens rose from 36 shillings a week to two guineas. South Kensington was beginning to stir, as old money that had retreated to the countryside for the duration of the war began to return to its stucco villas. I preferred Notting Hill, for its general raffishness and unexpected delights, chief among them Mary Matthews.

When I first met Mary, shortly before joining the RAF, she was working as a secretary for Charles Wintour (father of Anna, the ‘tyrant’ of Vogue; he later became editor of the Evening Standard, but was then a senior editor at the Daily Express). Born in 1930, Mary was the daughter of Dorothy Vernon and her husband Arthur Matthews, who were well-to-do landowners in Stone, Staffordshire. Mary’s father served in the Honourable Artillery Company during the Great War and was invalided out. At the time I met them in 1955 they were living in a modest cottage in Dyserth, a village near Prestatyn in north Wales. They grew their own vegetables and had a simple and pleasantly provincial life together. Like Mary and her two sisters, Peggy and Betty, they were extremely generous people with strong moral principles.

I think Mary was the most adventurous of the sisters, the youngest but the most ambitious, and the only one who wanted to live and work in London. She was enormously optimistic, and confident that anything was possible if enough willpower was brought to bear. She was tall, with a striking figure and great presence, a woman whom men immediately noticed. In many ways she remained a girl from the Potteries, and at times appeared to be a dizzy brunette, something of an act, as she was quick-witted. All my men-friends liked her enormously, and she was generally popular at the Express. She had enjoyed a very active social life in Stone, a world of big houses, prosperous farmers driving Armstrong Siddeleys, lavish private dances and several very dashing suitors.

What she saw in me I still find it difficult to work out. I was probably rather ‘lost’ in her eyes, but she knew that I was ambitious. I lived on the floor below her in a wing of the hotel, and I worked hard at making myself useful. We began to spend increasing amounts of time in the pubs along the Portobello Road, getting pleasantly tight together. For some reason I delayed telling her about my Shanghai background, which I was afraid might appear a little like a criminal record. In some half-conscious sense it was. Mary was not impressed to hear that I was joining the RAF, but her eyes widened a little when I said that I was writing a novel, a rare phenomenon among the point-to-points and hunt balls. ‘Have you nearly finished?’ she asked me, to which I replied, truthfully: ‘No, I’ve nearly begun.’ She saw the joke, but also the serious point lurking somewhere behind it.

What rather raised me in Mary’s eyes was the modest part I played in the Mrs Shanahan incident. This on-and-off prostitute lived in a room above Mary with her 7-year-old daughter. When times were low she would bring back customers from the Portobello pubs, for some reason always large and tired men who would climb the stairs past Mary’s door as if on the way to the gallows. What disturbed us was the presence of the daughter, who would be dressed in a grey silk Marie Antoinette dress and hat, carrying a little baroque umbrella. Blank-faced and unsmiling, she would remain in the Shanahan room while business was transacted.

I still prided myself on the thought that I had seen everything in Shanghai, but this completely shook me. What on earth did the daughter do in her Petit Trianon outfit while her mother and the customer had sex? Did she take part? I prayed not, and I guessed that all she did was watch, or sit behind a curtain, twiddling her umbrella. Mary didn’t care what she did, but wanted the whole horror stopped. She bought little presents for the child, which made Mrs Shanahan effusively grateful, and she was overly keen to be our friends, forever offering to cook meals for us; she told Mary that I was far too thin. I suspect that a wall divided her mind, separating her affectionate, everyday life with her daughter from the spectral moments imposed by necessity. Pressed by Mary, I spoke to the manager, a tired Pole exhausted by climbing the stairs to badger his tenants for the rent. I threatened to call the police, something I probably would never have done, I regret to say. The next day Mrs Shanahan and her daughter had gone, and Mary assumed, with her good nature and high principles, that this was a happy ending. I hope it was.

When I left High Wycombe, the RAF now behind me, and booked into the Stanley Crescent Hotel I found that nothing had changed. The same tired tenants were still there, one of the lost tribes of Britain’s post-war world, among them a retired RAF squadron leader and his very posh wife, Peta, who was always boasting in a loud voice that she had ‘checked out on twin-engines’ (was authorised to fly twin-engined aircraft) before her husband. To her annoyance, he was never able to pay the rent, and I think she knew that her husband had given up hope. The Polish manager would linger in the breakfast room (breakfast was never served, except to cash-on-the-nail tenants), waiting until Peta was in full twin-engined flight with another guest, and then step up to her, saying in a loud voice: ‘You are three weeks behind with your rent, Mrs…’ Peta would flounce away, angry that I had witnessed this little humiliation. Only a few years earlier they had been stationed in Cyprus, with a large house and servants. She was lost in post-war England, but a perfect symbol of it.

There was a wartime Navy lieutenant who had captained a motor torpedo boat. He lived in one room with his amiable wife and baby daughter, and spent his time building model seacraft. Some years earlier, he had damaged his brain by diving into the wrong end of a swimming pool. I became good friends with him, and would help carry the picnic equipment to Kensington Gardens and watch him sail his models in the Round Pond. All these people, like myself, would have been classed as misfits, casualties of war who had lost their way in the peace, but at least we all accepted each other and there was never any rivalry. Today that one-star hotel would be full of financial hustlers, celebrity hunters, people with huge expectations and aware that a lack of any real talent was no handicap to success. Any novice writer would flee in horror. I remember the old Stanley Crescent Hotel with affection.

Above all, of course, because Mary was still there. I left my suitcase in my old room, luckily vacant, and knocked on the door of Mary’s room. It was opened by a middle-aged woman in a nursing sister’s uniform. For a few seconds my heart died, and I realised why I had left the Air Force and travelled all the way from Moose Jaw. Then I learned that Mary had moved to a larger room on the first floor.

I think we were surprised, a little wary but almost relieved to see each other again.

Mary lent me her typewriter, and over the next few weeks I typed out all the stories I had written on the way back to England. She read them very carefully, was clearly impressed by them, and not in the least put off by the fact that they were science fiction, which she had never read. She strongly urged me to press on, though most of her friends regarded science fiction as beyond the pale. But she sensed that there was something original and fresh about this apparently modest genre, that it was optimistic and positive, and drew on qualities within my mind that had been repressed since my arrival in England. The wilder side of my imagination was its strength, and I needed to tap that, at least for the time being. From the very beginning she was convinced that I would be a success as a writer.

Here she differed completely from my parents, who were convinced that I would be a failure. Looking back, I am puzzled by their lack of support, but they may have believed that the wilder side of my imagination needed to be repressed, not released. Mary tried to be charitable, but she disliked my parents. As it happened, we saw little of them in the coming years, and I now had all the emotional support I needed.

Mary listened for hours as I described the kind of fiction I wanted to write, urging me to keep up a steady flow of short stories and to ignore the strong hostility they provoked from the s-f fans within the field. I submitted my stories to the American s-f magazines that I had read in Moose Jaw, but all came back to me, usually with very dismissive rejection notes, which revealed the narrowness of mind that lurks behind American exuberance. A fierce orthodoxy ruled, and any attempt to enlarge the scope of traditional science fiction was regarded as conspiratorial and underhand.

In due course Mary became pregnant, and we were married in September 1955. Mary’s family, my parents and sister, and a few friends attended the church service, which moved me deeply. Three of us, in a sense, were being married – Mary, I and our unborn child. I took the ceremony very seriously, though not for religious reasons. My life had been witness to wars and destruction, to erosion and entropy, capped by two years in the dissecting room at Cambridge, paring down the cadavers as if death itself was not final enough, and the remains of these human beings needed to be further diminished. Now, for the first time, I had helped to create something, almost out of nothing, an intact and growing creature that would emerge as a living being. Mary was three months pregnant when we married, and I would lie beside her, touching the swelling of her womb, willing on this little visitor from beyond time and space. Creation on the grandest scale was taking place under the warmth of my hand.

I remember the wedding ceremony as a slightly disjointed affair. The respective in-laws had not met each other, and the old tribal defensiveness showed itself. Waiting for the clergyman to arrive, I turned to my father in the pew behind me and asked if I should leave a donation ‘for the poor of the parish’. He replied, jovially: ‘You are the poor of the parish.’ He and my mother enjoyed the joke.

Strictly speaking, this was true. I made a small income writing freelance advertising copy and direct-mail letters for an agency I knew, but I needed a full-time job to support us now that Mary had given up her post at the Express. Luckily I had begun to sell my short stories to the two English science fiction magazines, Science Fantasy and New Worlds, and the first was published in 1956, a signal moment in any writer’s career, especially that of a late starter like myself.

The editor, E.J. Carnell, was a thoughtful and likeable man who worked in a pleasant basement office near the Strand. The walls were hung with posters of s-f films and magazine covers that together conveyed a rather conventional view of the nature of science fiction. In private, though, once he was away from the old-guard fans, Carnell told me that science fiction needed to change if it was to remain at the cutting edge of the future. He urged me not to imitate the American writers, and to concentrate on what I termed ‘inner space’, psychological tales close in spirit to the surrealists. All this was anathema to the American editors, who continued to reject my fiction.

But we listened in 1957 to the radio call sign of Sputnik 1, an urgent wake-up call from the next world and the dawn of the Space Age. For the s-f traditionalists, Sputnik 1 confirmed all their most precious dreams, but I was sceptical. To hold its readers’ imaginations, I believed, science fiction needed to be the harbinger of the new, not a reminder of the old. Soon after, sure enough, science fiction went into a steep decline in the United States, from which it didn’t recover until the advent of Star Wars decades later.

Aware that I needed a job, with a wife and baby son to support, Carnell arranged for me to get an editorial post on one of the trade journals published by his parent company. There were always vacancies because the firm paid so little to its employees, from the editors down. Colleagues would go out for a packet of cigarettes and never return. After six months I too moved on to a better-paid post as deputy editor of the weekly journal Chemistry & Industry, published by the Society of Chemical Industry in Belgrave Square.

After our wedding, Mary and I lived, first, in a flat in Barrowgate Road, Chiswick, and then for several years in a larger flat in Heathcote Road, St Margarets, near Twickenham. Our son, James, was born in the Chiswick Maternity Hospital, part of the NHS, but a strangely penal institution that enshrined then-fashionable views about the post-natal care of mothers and their babies. There was no question of fathers being present at the delivery; we were told to stay at home until called. When I arrived soon after the birth I found Mary in a ward with five other mothers, all weeping as they listened to their babies desperately crying in a separate ward across the corridor. Mother and child were only united during feeding times, set out in an inflexible rota. When I protested I was told that it would be better if I left the hospital.

Our daughters, Fay and Beatrice, were born in 1957 and 1959. Both were home deliveries, from the heart of a warm domestic nest, and in which I actively participated, almost shouldering the midwives aside. In the untidy but blissful bed where our two daughters were conceived they were in due course born, surrounded by Mary’s sisters and close friends. I was profoundly moved as Fay’s head emerged into the midwife’s waiting hands, just as I was two years later when Bea arrived in the same bed. Far from being young, as young as a human being can be, they seemed immensely old, their foreheads and features streamlined by time, as archaic and smooth as the heads of pharaohs in Egyptian sculpture, as if they had travelled an immense distance to find their parents. Then, in a second, they became young and were carried off by the midwife and Mary’s sister. Only a few minutes earlier I had been kneeling beside the bed, pressing back Mary’s large and bursting piles, and now I lay beside her as she smiled, embraced me and fell asleep. I wept steadily through both these deliveries, the greatest mystery that life can offer, and I regret that so few babies, if any, are born today in their own homes.

Once the children arrived our domestic world became chaotic. Mary was never much of a housekeeper, but became a kind of earth mother, sitting up in bed and breastfeeding a baby while sipping a glass of wine and arguing in a strong voice about some topic of the day with two of my men-friends. One of the Twickenham GPs who looked after her became quite besotted, and was happy to be called at any hour of the day or night to sit on the bed beside her, a romantic infatuation that she thought hilarious, even as she was leading the poor man towards disciplinary proceedings at the General Medical Council.

Despite the pressures of her new job as homemaker, wife and mother of three, Mary tried to read everything I wrote. For the first time I had someone who believed in me, and was prepared to back that belief by putting up with a rather modest life. She was always confident that one day I would be a success, which seemed unlikely in the late 1950s, when science fiction was generally regarded as not much better than the comic strips.

In 1960, as our toddlers found their legs, we decided we needed a home with a garden, and bought a small house in Shepperton, where I live to this day. I think I chose Shepperton because of its film studios, which gave it a slightly raffish air. Mary assumed that we would stay there for no more than six months, but three years later, after the success of The Drowned World, there still seemed little hope of moving, which I think depressed her, as did the literary world as a whole.

We began to meet other writers, both in and out of the s-f world, and she realised that even successful writers in England had rather humdrum lives. Publishers’ parties and writers’ boozy blow-outs in Clapham flats did not compare with the life of hunt balls and fast cars she had left behind in Stone. I am sure that we would have eventually moved to a detached house with a big garden in Barnes or Wimbledon, but even that would have been very tame compared with the world of well-to-do farmers and landowners, Lagondas and lavish dances.

All the same, I hope that her years here were happy. I tried to share the load, and enjoyed every minute I spent with the children, watching them create their own universes out of a few toys, treats and games. I knew that I was enjoying a family life I had never really known, even in pre-war Shanghai. I had rarely seen my parents in a relaxed, domestic mood. Their lives were too busy, and everything took place in the silent presence of Chinese servants and the bored White Russian nannies. Our home in Shepperton, by contrast, was a chaotic, friendly brawl, as a naked parent dripping from the bath broke up a squabble between the girls over a favourite crayon, while their brother triumphantly strutted in his mother’s damp footprints. Mayhem ruled.

To give Mary a break, I often heaped the three toddlers into their huge pram, a stretch limousine of the perambulator world, and would push them down to the splash meadow a few hundred yards from our house. The river Ash, little more than a stream, emerged from a culvert and crossed the road, flanked by a pedestrian bridge where an appreciative crowd would lean on the rail and watch unsuspecting motorists strand their stalled cars in the stream. The scene in Genevieve, where the antique car is stranded in the village pond, was filmed here. My children loved to watch the whole hilarious spectacle, chortling and stamping as a nonplussed driver finally lowered his feet into the water, under the gaze of a sinister yokel and his offspring.

We spent hours with little fish nets, hunting for shrimps, which were always taken home in jam jars and watched as they refused to cooperate and gave up the ghost. Fay and Bea were fascinated by the daisies that seemed to grow underwater when the stream rose to flood the meadow. Shepperton Studios were easy to enter in those wonderful summers nearly fifty years ago, and I would take the children past the sound stages to the field where unwanted props were left to the elements: figureheads of sailing ships, giant chess-pieces, half an American car, stairways that led up to the sky and amazed my three infants. And their father: days of wonder that I wish had lasted for ever.

I thought of my children then, and still think of them, as miracles of life, and I dedicate this autobiography to them.

16 This is Tomorrow (1956)

In 1956, the year that I published my first short story, I visited a remarkable exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, This is Tomorrow. Recently I told Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and a former director of the Whitechapel, that I thought This is Tomorrow was the most important event in the visual arts in Britain until the opening of Tate Modern, and he did not disagree.

Among its many achievements, This is Tomorrow is generally thought of as the birthplace of pop art. A dozen teams, involving an architect, a painter and sculptor, each designed and built an installation that would embody their vision of the future. The participants included the artist Richard Hamilton, who displayed his collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, in my judgement the greatest ever work of pop art. Another of the teams brought together the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who constructed a basic unit of human habitation in what would be left of the world after nuclear war. Their terminal hut, as I thought of it, stood on a patch of sand, on which were laid out the basic implements that modern man would need to survive: a power tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol.

The overall effect of This is Tomorrow was a revelation to me, and a vote of confidence, in effect, in my choice of science fiction. The Whitechapel exhibition, and especially the Hamilton and Paolozzi exhibits, created a huge stir in the British art world. At the time the artists most in favour with the Arts Council, the British Council and the academic critics of the day were Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, who together formed a closed fine art world largely preoccupied with formalist experiment. The light of everyday reality never shone into the aseptic whiteness of their studio-bound imaginations.

This is Tomorrow opened all the doors and windows onto the street. The show leaned a little on Hollywood and American science fiction; Hamilton had got hold of Robby the Robot from the film Forbidden Planet. But for the first time the visitor to the Whitechapel saw the response of imaginations tuned to the visual culture of the street, to advertising, road signs, films and popular magazines, to the design of packaging and consumer goods, an entire universe that we moved through in our everyday lives but which rarely appeared in the approved fine art of the day.

Hamilton’s Just what is it…? depicted a world entirely constructed from popular advertising, and was a convincing vision of the future that lay ahead – the muscleman husband and his stripper wife in their suburban home, the consumer goods, such as the tin of ham, regarded as ornaments in their own right, the notion of the home as a prime selling point and sales aid for the consumer society. We are what we sell and buy.

In Paolozzi’s display, the power tool laid on the post-nuclear sand was not just a portable device for drilling holes but a symbolic object with almost magical properties. If the future was to be built of anything, it would be from a set of building blocks provided by consumerism. An advertisement for a new cake mix contained the codes that defined a mother’s relationship to her children, imitated all over our planet.

This is Tomorrow convinced me that science fiction was far closer to reality than the conventional realist novel of the day, whether the angry young men with their grudges and grouses, or novelists such as Anthony Powell and C.P. Snow. Above all, science fiction had a huge vitality that had bled away from the modernist novel. It was a visionary engine that created a new future with every revolution, a hot rod accelerating away from the reader, propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealists.

If pop art and surrealism were a huge encouragement, my work at Chemistry & Industry kept me up to the mark about the latest scientific discoveries. An established science magazine receives a steady flow of press releases, conference reports, annual bulletins from leading research laboratories around the world and publications put out by UN scientific bodies and organisations such as Atoms for Peace. I feasted on all this material, the accounts of new psychoactive drugs, nuclear weapons research, the applications of the latest-generation computers.

For several years I commuted to Belgrave Square, first from Twickenham and then from Shepperton, a long journey that left me too tired to write, except at weekends. After being cooped up all day with the children, Mary needed to breathe. I remember her saying when I reached home at 7.30 and was pouring a stiff gin and tonic: ‘Are we going out? I can call the babysitter.’ I thought: Out? I’ve been out. But we would go down to one of the pubs on the riverbank, and she would come alive when I bought a sandwich and threw bread to the swans.

In 1960, sadly for himself and his family, the editor of Chemistry & Industry, Bill Dick, killed himself with a gas poker and a plastic bag. He had been the once celebrated editor of the science magazine Discovery, but had become an argumentative alcoholic. After his death I was left alone to produce the magazine, and adjusted my time so that I could write in the office. My one piece of out-and-out commercial fiction, The Wind from Nowhere, was written straight onto the typewriter during a fortnight’s holiday in 1961, and was published by an American paperback firm, Berkley Books. I received an advance of $1000, which seemed a fortune. I celebrated by moving from the 3/6 (three shillings and sixpence) lunch menu at the Swan pub in Knightsbridge to the 4/6 menu, an extravagance that alarmed the waitresses, to whom I had proudly shown a photograph of my three children. It is easy to forget how thin was the line between poverty and bare survival.

In 1963 The Drowned World was successfully published, and with Mary’s encouragement I gave up my job at Chemistry & Industry and became a full-time writer. Despite the many editions of The Drowned World, this was a huge gamble, and I’m grateful and impressed that Mary urged me to take it. The novel was published all over the world, but the amounts of money forthcoming were modest.

Victor Gollancz, the patriarch of English publishing, paid me an advance of £100, barely enough to keep a family afloat for a month. When Gollancz took me out to lunch at The Ivy and I saw the prices on the menu I was tempted to say: I’ll have nothing to eat, and just take the cash. But I knew that being lunched by Gollancz was a significant honour. He had dominated London publishing throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and had a huge influence on literary editors and readers. As we sat down in The Ivy he boomed in his loud voice: ‘Interesting novel, The Drowned World. Of course, you stole it all from Conrad.’ The Ivy was a haunt of senior journalists, and I saw heads turning. I thought: My God, this grand old man is going to sink my career before it’s launched. As it happens, I had not read anything by Conrad at the time, though I soon made up for this.

My first decade as a writer coincided with a period of sustained change in England, as well as in the USA and Europe. The mood of post-war depression had begun to lift, and the death of Stalin eased international tensions, despite the Soviet development of the H-bomb. Cheap jet travel arrived with the Boeing 707, and the consumer society, already well established in America, began to appear in Britain. Change was in the air, affecting the nation’s psychology for good or bad. Change was what I wrote about, especially the hidden agendas for change that people were already exposing. Invisible persuaders were manipulating politics and the consumer market, affecting habits and assumptions in ways that few people fully realised.

It seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed ‘inner space’, was where science fiction should be heading. But I met tremendous opposition. The editors of the American s-f magazines were nervous of their readers, and would refuse to accept a story if it was set in the present day, a sure sign that something subversive was going on. It was a curious paradox that science fiction, devoted to change and the new, was emotionally tied to the status quo and the old.

While I was at Chemistry & Industry I would regularly meet my fellow writer Michael Moorcock, who later took over Carnell’s magazines when he retired. We had spirited arguments at the Swan in Knightsbridge over the direction science fiction should take. Moorcock was a highly intelligent and warm-hearted man, who embraced change and became a vocal spokesman for the New Wave, as the avant-garde wing of science fiction was known. What I admired most about Moorcock was that he was a complete professional, and had been since the age of 16, writing whatever he needed to write in order to make a living but always imposing his own vision. Daniel Defoe would have approved of him, and Dr Johnson. Moorcock was extremely well read – in fact, I sometimes think that he has read everything – but has kept his popular touch. He is writing for his readers, not for himself. I once said to him that I wanted to write for the sort of s-f magazine that was sold on news-stands, and bought by passers-by along with a copy of Vogue and the New Statesman, all hot from the street. Moorcock completely agreed.

Moving on the fringes of literary London for four decades, I have been constantly struck by how few of our literary writers are aware that their poor sales might be the result of their modest concern for their readers. B.S. Johnson, a thoroughly unpleasant figure who treated his sweet wife abominably, was forever telephoning and buttonholing me at literary parties, trying to enlist me in his campaign to persuade publishers to pay a higher royalty to their authors. At one point, when he was far gone in bitterness over his minuscule sales, he suggested we should demand a starting royalty of 50 per cent. Sadly, he was one of those literary writers who receive a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement, believe every word of praise and imagine that it will ensure them a prosperous career, when in fact such a review is no more than the literary world’s equivalent of ‘Darling, you were wonderful…’

I had many reservations about science fiction as a whole, but the early 1960s were an exciting time. It was possible to have a short story in every issue of a magazine, each one exploring a new idea, a superb training ground. Too many writers today have to start their careers by writing novels, long before they are ready. I thought then, and still think, that in many ways science fiction was the true literature of the 20th century, with a vast influence on film, television, advertising and consumer design. Science fiction is now the only place where the future survives, just as television costume dramas are the only place where the past survives.

Apart from my friendship with Moorcock and his wife Hilary, I had few contacts with other writers. I went to the world s-f convention held in London in 1957, but the Americans were hard to take, and most of the British fans were worse. In Paris science fiction was popular among leading writers and film-makers like Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, and I assumed that I would find their counterparts in London, a huge error. Today’s s-f enthusiasts are an entirely different breed, however. Many have university degrees, have read Joyce and Nabokov and seen Alphaville, and can place science fiction within a larger literary context. Yet curiously, science fiction itself is now in steep decline, and there may well be a moral there.

The first English novelist I met and got to know closely was Kingsley Amis. He had reviewed The Drowned World in extremely generous terms in the Observer, and was the first to introduce me to an audience beyond science fiction. He was then at the peak of his Lucky Jim fame, a highly intelligent, witty and glamorous figure who was pleasantly affable to anyone whose writing he liked. He reviewed science fiction in an open-minded way, maintaining that the best of the genre deserved to be taken seriously in the same way as jazz at its best.

After Victor Gollancz’s death Amis joined Jonathan Cape, then the most fashionable publishing house in London, and effectively took me with him. Cape published me for the next twenty years, in some ways a mixed blessing. I knew Amis closely from 1962 to 1966, and often had lunch with him in Soho. He was a great drinking companion – the food served at Manzi’s or Bertorelli’s was little more than an appetiser for the real sustenance in the form of numerous bottles of claret. He was a great raconteur and brilliant mimic with a number of set-piece performances, such as President Roosevelt’s wartime short-wave broadcasts, with isolated phrases like ‘arsenal of democracy’ and ‘tanks, guns, planes’ emerging from a blare of static.

Amis had just freed himself from his teaching post at Cambridge, and was in very good humour, but sadly this darkened over the next ten years as he grew dissatisfied with everything. I think he knew that his first book had been his best, and this led to heavier and heavier drinking, coupled with a certain social stiffness. Where once he was happy to drink beer in pubs, he now insisted on going to hotels, where he would order pink gins in an over-elaborate way.

By the last years of his life his hates were in full flow – Americans, Jews, the French and their entire culture, hippies and, for some unfathomable reason, Brigid Brophy. In the 1970s we once looked down during lunch from a window of the Café Royal at a protest march going along Regent Street. Amis began to tremble and shake. ‘Jim, what are they? What are they?’ He was almost speechless as he surveyed the column of cheerful young people with their anti-nuclear banners. To be fair to Amis, he had been through the war, and served in the army in northern Europe. While he had never taken part in combat, he told me, he had seen plenty of bodies by the roadside as the British forces advanced, and felt that he knew far more about the realities of war and peace than the soft-cheeked protesters in the street below us.

Amis disliked literary pretension (as he saw it) of any kind and was a remarkably astute judge of fiction, which I can say even though he later disliked a good part of my own writing. He believed in the 19th-century virtues of well-drawn characters, credible dialogue and a strong story. No novel should ever comment on itself, but sustain the illusion that it is enacting real events.

I met his son Martin when he was 14 – like many of us, at heart, unchanged by the decades – and in later years Kingsley always seemed proud of Martin’s success. ‘Great stuff,’ he would say about Martin’s latest novel, and I saw none of the meanness or grudging praise now credited to him.

Undoubtedly, Amis did have his mean streak, and was one of those people who feel a need to break with all their friends. His treatment of women could be crude. One of his former lovers, a student during his Swansea teaching days, told me that he would regularly order his wife into the nearby park when it was time for his ‘tutorial’ with her. There the novelist’s wife would push the pram with the children until he drew the bedroom curtains and signalled that she could return.

17 Wise Women (1964)

Family life has always been very important to me, far more important, I suspect, than to people of my parents’ generation. I often wonder why many of them bothered to have children at all, and assume that it must have been for social reasons, some ancient need to enlarge the tribe and defend the homestead, just as some people keep a dog without ever showing it affection, but feel secure when it barks at the postman.

Perhaps I belong to the first generation for whom the health and happiness of their families is a significant indicator of their own mental well-being. The family and all the emotions within it are a way of testing one’s better qualities, a trampoline on which one can leap ever higher, holding one’s wife and children by their hands.

I enjoyed being married, the first real security I had ever known, and easily coped with the strains and early struggles of a writer’s life. I enjoyed being a father who was closely involved with his children, pushing them in their pram through the streets of Richmond and Shepperton, and later driving with them across Europe to Greece and Spain. Children change so rapidly, learning to grasp the world and learning to be happy, learning to understand themselves and shape their own minds. I was fascinated by my children and still am, and feel much the same way about my four grandchildren. I have always been very proud of my children, and every moment I spend with them makes the whole of existence seem warm and meaningful.

In 1963 Mary was in good health, but needed her appendix removed. She recovered slowly from the operation at Ashford Hospital, and perhaps her resistance was affected, or some infection lingered. She was keen to go on holiday, and the following summer we drove to a rented flat at San Juan, near Alicante. For a month all went well, and we enjoyed ourselves in the bars and beach restaurants. It was the kind of holiday where the high point is the day Daddy fell off the pedalo. But Mary suddenly became ill with an infection, and this rapidly turned into severe pneumonia. Despite the local doctor, a male nurse (the practicante) who was with her constantly, and a consultant from Alicante, she died three days later. Towards the end, when she could barely breathe, she held my hand and asked: ‘Am I dying?’ I’m not sure if she could hear me, but I shouted that I loved her until the end. In the final seconds, when her eyes were fixed, the doctor massaged her chest, forcing the blood into her brain. Her eyes swivelled and stared at me, as if seeing me for the first time.

We buried her in the small Protestant cemetery in Alicante, a walled stone yard with a few graves of British holidaymakers killed in yachting accidents. A Protestant priest came to see me the previous day, a decent and kindly Spaniard who did not seem upset when I declined to pray with him. I can still hear the sound of the iron-wheeled cart carrying the coffin across the stony ground. The priest conducted a short service, watched by myself and the children, and a few English residents from our apartment building. Then the priest rolled up his sleeves, took a spade and began to shovel the soil onto the coffin.

In late September, when San Juan beach was deserted and the cold air was beginning to come down from the mountains, we left the now-empty apartment building and set off on the long drive back to England.

From the start I was determined to keep my family together. Mary’s sisters and mother, who were an enormous help over the coming years, offered to share bringing them up. But I felt that I owed it to Mary to look after her children, and I probably needed them more than they needed me.

I did my best to be both mother and father to them, though it was extremely rare in the 1960s to find single fathers caring for their children. Many people (who should

Fay, Jim and Beatrice at home with me in 1965.

have known better) openly told me that a mother’s loss was irreplaceable and the children would be affected for ever, as maintained by the child psychiatrist John Bowlby. But I seriously doubt this claim, which seems unlikely given the hazards of childbirth – the evolutionary disadvantages if the claim were true would have been selected against and a less dangerous parental bond would have taken its place. I believe that the chief threat posed by a mother’s death is, rather, an uncaring or absentee father. As long as the surviving parent is loving and remains close to the children, they will thrive.

I loved my children deeply, as they knew, and we were lucky that I had a job as a writer that allowed me to be with them all the time. I made them breakfast and drove them to school, then wrote until it was time to collect them. Since day-time babysitters were difficult to come by, we did everything together – shopping, seeing friends, visiting museums, going on holiday, doing homework, watching television. In 1965 we drove to Greece for nearly two months, a wonderful holiday when we were always together. I remember a hold-up on a mountain road in the Peloponnese when an American woman looked into our car and said: ‘You mean you’re alone with these three?’ and I replied: ‘With these three you’re never alone.’ Thankfully, I had long forgotten what it was like to be alone.

I hope the children realised early on that they could always rely on me. My son Jim, who was the oldest, grieved deeply for his mother, but we helped each other through, and eventually he regained his confidence and became a cheerful teenager with a charming and witty sense of humour. My daughters Fay and Bea soon took command of the situation, and became strong-willed young women before they were in their teens, deciding on our diet, which holiday hotels we should stay at, what clothes they should buy. In many ways my three children brought me up.

Alcohol was a close friend and confidant in the early days; I usually had a strong Scotch and soda when I had driven the children to school and sat down to write soon after nine. In those days I finished drinking at about the time today that I start. A friendly microclimate unfurled itself from the bottle of Johnnie Walker and encouraged my imagination to emerge from its burrow and test the air. Kingsley Amis made a point of inviting me out to lunch, and in the evening I would often visit Keats Grove, where he and Elizabeth Jane Howard had rented a flat. Jane was unfailingly kind, though my presence was probably a nuisance. She cooked supper, which we ate on our knees, while Kingsley kept a beady eye on a television quiz show, answering all the questions before they were out of the compère’s mouth. I am grateful to Kingsley, and glad that I saw his generous and kindly side before he became a professional curmudgeon.

Other friends were a great help, especially Michael Moorcock and his wife Hilary. But, as every bereaved person learns, one soon reaches the point where friends can do little more than keep one’s glass filled. I missed Mary in a thousand and one domestic ways – the traces she had left of herself in the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom together formed the outlines of a huge void. Her absence was a space in our lives that I could almost embrace. Long months of celibacy followed, during which I resented the sight of happily married couples strolling down Shepperton High Street. I once saw a couple laughing together in the car ahead of me and sounded my horn in anger. After celibacy came a kind of desperate promiscuity, a form of shock treatment in which I was trying to will myself to come alive. I remember embracing my first lover – the estranged wife of a friend – like a survivor at sea clinging to a rescuer. I’m grateful to those friends of Mary’s who rallied round and knew that it was time to bring me back into the light. In their way they were thinking of Mary rather than me, wise and kindly women who were concerned that Mary’s children should be happy.

A year or so after Mary’s death I saw her in a dream. She was walking past our house, skirt floating on the air, smiling cheerfully to herself. She saw me watching her from the doorstep of our house and walked on, smiling at me over her shoulder. When I woke I tried to keep these moments alive in my mind, but I knew that in her way she was saying goodbye, and that at last I was beginning to recover.

I am sure that I changed greatly during these years. On the one hand I was glad to be so close to my children. As long as they were happy nothing else mattered, and success or failure as a writer was a minor concern. At the same time I felt that nature had committed a dreadful crime against Mary and her children. Why? There was no answer to the question, which obsessed me for decades to come.

18 The Atrocity Exhibition (1966)

But perhaps there was an answer, using a kind of extreme logic. My direction as a writer changed after Mary’s death, and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to prove that black was white, that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s. I was trying to construct an imaginative logic that made sense of Mary’s death and would prove that the assassination of President Kennedy and the countless deaths of the Second World War had been worthwhile or even meaningful in some as yet undiscovered way. Then, perhaps, the ghosts inside my head, the old beggar under his quilt of snow, the strangled Chinese at the railway station, Kennedy and my young wife, could be laid to rest.

All this can be seen in the pieces I began to write in the mid 1960s, which later became The Atrocity Exhibition. Kennedy’s assassination presided over everything, an event that was sensationalised by the new medium of television. The endless photographs of the Dealey Plaza shooting, the Zapruder film of the president dying in his wife’s arms in his open-topped limousine, created a kind of gruesome overload where real sympathy began to leak away and only sensation was left, as Andy Warhol quickly realised. For me the Kennedy assassination was the catalyst that ignited the 1960s. Perhaps his death, like the sacrifice of a tribal king, would re-energise us all and bring life again to the barren meadows?

The 1960s were a far more revolutionary time than younger people now realise, and most assume that English life has always been much as it is today, except for mobile phones, emails and computers. But a social revolution took place, as significant in many ways as that of the post-war Labour government. Pop music and the space age, drugs and Vietnam, fashion and consumerism merged together into an exhilarating and volatile mix.

Emotion, and emotional sympathy, drained out of everything, and the fake had its own special authenticity. I was in many ways an onlooker, bringing up my children in a quiet suburb, taking them to children’s parties and chatting to the mothers outside the school gates. But I also went to a great many parties, and smoked a little pot, though I remained a whisky and soda man. In many ways the 1960s were a fulfilment of all that I hoped would happen in England. Waves of change were overtaking each other, and at times it seemed that change would become a new kind of boredom, disguising the truth that everything beneath the gaudy surface remained the same.

In 1965 I met Dr Martin Bax, a north London paediatrician who published a quarterly poetry magazine called Ambit. We became firm friends, and years later I learned that his wife, Judy, was the daughter of the Lunghua headmaster, the Reverend George Osborne. She and her mother had returned to England in the 1930s and spent the war years there. I began to write my more experimental stories for Ambit, partly in an attempt to gain publicity for the magazine. Randolph Churchill, son of Winston and a friend of the Kennedys, objected publicly to my story ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’. Churchill made a song and dance in the newspapers, demanding that Ambit’s modest Arts Council grant be withdrawn and describing my piece as an irresponsible slander, all this at a time when the ordeal of Mrs Kennedy and her courtship by Aristotle Onassis were ruthlessly exploited by the tabloid newspapers, the real target of my satire.

A prime engine of change in the 1960s was the entirely casual use of drugs, a generational culture in its own right. Many of the drugs, led by cannabis and amphetamines, were recreational, but others, heroin chief among them, were intended for use in the intensive care unit and the terminal cancer ward, and were highly dangerous. Moral outrage had a field day, while preposterous claims were made for the transformation of the imagination that could be brought about by LSD. The parents’ generation fought from behind a barricade of gin and tonics, while the young proclaimed alcohol to be the real enemy of promise.

Tired of all this, and feeling that the entire wrangle about drugs was ripe for a small send-up, I suggested to Martin Bax that Ambit should run a competition for the best poem or short story written under the influence of drugs – a reasonable suggestion, given the huge claims made for drugs by rival gurus of the underground. This time Lord Goodman, legal fixer for the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, denounced Ambit for committing a public mischief (a criminal offence) and in effect threatened us with prosecution. The competition was conducted seriously, and the drugs involved ranged from amphetamines to baby aspirin. It was won by the novelist Ann Quin, for a story written under the influence of the contraceptive pill.

Another of my suggestions was staged at the ICA, when we hired a stripper, Euphoria Bliss, to perform a striptease to the reading of a scientific paper. This strange event, almost impossible to take in at the time, has stayed in my mind ever since. It still seems in the true spirit of Dada, and an example of the fusion of science and pornography that The Atrocity Exhibition expected to take place in the near future. Many of the imaginary ‘experiments’ described in the book, where panels of volunteer housewives are exposed to hours of pornographic films and then tested for their responses (!), have since been staged in American research institutes.

I must say that I admire Martin Bax for never flinching whenever I suggested my latest madcap notion. He was, after all, a practising physician, and Lord Goodman may well have had friends on the General Medical Council. Martin responded positively to my wish to bring more science into the pages of Ambit. Most poets were products of English Literature schools, and showed it; poetry readings were a special form of social deprivation. In some rather dingy hall a sad little cult would listen to their cut-price shaman speaking in voices, feel their emotions vaguely stirred and drift away to a darkened tube station.

I wanted more science in Ambit, since science was reshaping the world, and less poetry. Asked what my policy was as so-called prose editor of Ambit, I would reply: to get rid of the poetry. After meeting Dr Christopher Evans, a psychologist who worked at the National Physical Laboratory, not far from Shepperton, I asked him to contribute to Ambit. We published a remarkable series of computer-generated poems, which Martin said were as good as the real thing. I went further: they were the real thing.

Chris Evans drove into my life at the wheel of a Ford Galaxy, a huge American convertible that he soon swapped for a Mini-Cooper, a high-performance car not much bigger than a bullet that travelled at about the same speed. Chris was the first ‘hoodlum scientist’ I had met, and he became the closest friend I have made in my life. In appearance he resembled Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel Crash, though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure. Most scientists in the 1960s, especially at a government laboratory, wore white lab coats over a collar and tie, squinted at the world over the rims of their glasses and were rather stooped and conventional. Glamour played no part in their job description.

Chris, by contrast, raced around his laboratory in American sneakers, jeans and a denim shirt open to reveal an Iron Cross on a gold chain, his long black hair and craggy profile giving him a handsomely Byronic air. I never met a woman who wasn’t immediately under his spell. A natural actor, he was at his best on the lecture platform, and played to his audience’s emotions like a matinee idol, a young Olivier with a degree in computer science. He was hugely popular on television, and presented a number of successful series, including The Mighty Micro. Although running a research department of his own, Chris became an ex officio publicity manager for the NPL as a whole, and probably the only scientist in that important institution known to the public at large.

In private, surprisingly, Chris was a very different man: quiet, thoughtful and even rather shy, a good listener and an excellent drinking companion. Some of the happiest hours in my life have been spent with him in the riverside pubs between Teddington and Shepperton. In many ways his extrovert persona was a costume that he put on to hide a strain of diffidence, but I think this inner modesty was what appealed to the American astronauts and senior scientists he met during the making of his television programmes. He was a great lover of America, and especially the Midwest states, and liked nothing better than flying into Phoenix or Houston, hiring a convertible and setting off on the long drive to LA or San Francisco. He liked the easy formulas of American life. He thoroughly approved of my wish to see England Americanise itself, and hung California licence plates over his desk as a first step.

After taking his PhD in psychology at Reading University, Chris specialised in computers, and spent a year at Duke University, home to Professor Rhine and the ESP experiments that involved closed rooms and volunteers guessing each other’s card sequences. Chris’s American wife, Nancy, a beautiful and rather remote woman, was Rhine’s secretary when he met her. ESP experiments were largely discredited in the 1960s, but I think Chris still had a sneaking hope that telepathic phenomena existed on some undiscovered level of the mind. Now and then, as we hoisted our pints and threw pieces of our cheese rolls to the Shepperton swans, he would slip some reference to ESP into the conversation, waiting for my response. He was also surprisingly interested in Scientology, while claiming to be a complete sceptic. I sometimes wonder if his entire interest in psychology was unconsciously a quest for a paranormal dimension to mental life.

I often visited Chris’s lab, and admired the American licence plates and the photographs of him with Aldrin and Armstrong (this was before the lunar flights in 1969). I was fascinated by the work his team was doing on visual and language perception. In the 1970s he was exploring the possibilities of computerised medical diagnosis, after the discovery that patients would be far more frank about their symptoms when talking to a computerised image of a doctor rather than the doctor himself. Women patients from ethnic minorities would never discuss gynaecological matters with a male doctor, but spoke freely to a computerised female image.

I was sitting in his office in the early 1970s when something in the waste basket beside his desk caught my eye, a handout from a pharmaceutical company about a new antidepressant. Seeing my eyes light up, Chris offered to send me the contents of his waste basket from then on. Every week a huge envelope arrived, packed with handouts, brochures, research papers and annual reports from university labs and psychiatric institutions, a cornucopia of fascinating material that fired my imagination. Eventually I stored them in an old coal bunker outside the kitchen door. Twenty years later, when I dismantled the bunker, I started reading these ancient handouts as I rested between axe blows. They were as fascinating and stimulating as they had been when I first read them.

Chris’s death from cancer in 1979 was a tragic loss to his family and friends, all of whom have vivid memories of him.

In 1964 Michael Moorcock took over the editorship of the leading British science fiction magazine, New Worlds, determined to change it in every way he could. For years we had carried on noisy but friendly arguments about the right direction for science fiction to take. American and Russian astronauts were carrying out regular orbital flights in their spacecraft, and everyone assumed that NASA would land an American on the moon in 1969 and fulfil President Kennedy’s vow on coming to office. Communications satellites had transformed the media landscape of the planet, bringing the Vietnam War live into every living room.

Surprisingly, though, science fiction had failed to prosper. Most of the American magazines had closed, and the sales of New Worlds were a fraction of what they had been in the 1950s. I believed that science fiction had run its course, and would soon either die or mutate into outright fantasy. I flew the flag for what I termed ‘inner space’, in effect the psychological space apparent in surrealist painting, the short stories of Kafka, noir films at their most intense, and the strange, almost mentalised world of science labs and research institutes where Chris Evans had thrived, and which formed the setting for part of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Moorcock approved of my general aims, but wanted to go further. He knew that I responded strongly to 1960s London, its psychedelia, bizarre publishing ventures, the breaking-down of barriers by a new generation of artists and photographers, the use of fashion as a political weapon, the youth cults and drug culture. But I was 35 and bringing up three children in the suburbs. He knew that however much I enjoyed his parties, I had to drive home and pay the baby-sitter. He was ten years younger than me, the resident guru of Ladbroke Grove and an important figure and inspiration on the music scene. It was all this counter-cultural energy that he wanted to channel into New Worlds. He knew that an unrestricted diet of psychedelic illustrations and typography would soon become tiring, and responded to my suggestion that he dim the LSD strobe lights a little and think in terms of British artists such as Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi.

I still remembered the 1956 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, This is Tomorrow, and I regularly visited the ICA in Dover Street. Many of its shows were put on by a small group of architects and artists, among them Hamilton and Paolozzi, who formed a kind of ideas laboratory, teasing out the visual connections between Egyptian architecture and modern refrigerator design, between Tintoretto ‘crane-shots’ and the swooping camera angles of Hollywood blockbusters.

In Eduardo Paolozzi’s Chelsea studio, 1968.

All this was closer to science fiction, in my eyes, than the tired images of spacecraft and planetary landscapes in s-f magazines.

I remembered that in the 1950s Paolozzi had remarked in an interview that the s-f magazines published in the suburbs of Los Angeles contained more genuine imagination than anything hung on the walls of the Royal Academy (still in its Munnings phase). With Moorcock’s approval, I contacted Paolozzi, whose studio was in Chelsea, and he invited us to visit him.

We got on famously from the start. In many ways Paolozzi was an intimidating figure, a thuggish man with a sculptor’s huge arms and hands, a strong voice and assertive manner. But his mind was light and flexible, he was a good listener and adept conversationalist with a keen and well-stocked mind. Original ideas tripped off his tongue, whatever the subject, and he was always pushing at the edges of some notion that intrigued him, exploring its possibilities before filing it away. A woman-friend I introduced to him exclaimed: ‘He’s a minotaur!’ but he was a minotaur who was a judo expert and light on his feet.

He and I became firm friends for the next thirty years, and I regularly visited his studio in Dovehouse Street. I think we felt at ease with each other because we were both, in our different ways, recent immigrants to England. Paolozzi’s Italian parents had settled in Edinburgh before the war, where they ran an ice cream business. After art school he left Scotland and attended the Slade in London, quickly established himself with his first one-man show, and then left for Paris for two years, meeting Giacometti, Tristan Tzara and the surrealists. He always insisted that he was a European and not a British artist. My impression is that as an art student he had felt deeply frustrated by the limitations of the London art establishment, though by the time I knew him he was well on the way to becoming one of the tallest pillars in that establishment.

Everyone who knew him will agree that Eduardo was a warm and generous personality, but at the same time remarkably quick to pick a quarrel. Perhaps this touchiness drew on the deep personal slights he suffered as an Italian boy in wartime Edinburgh, but he fell out with almost all his close friends, a trait he shared with Kingsley Amis. One of his disconcerting habits was to give his friends valuable presents of pieces of sculpture or sets of screen-prints and then, after some largely imagined slight, demand the presents back. He fell out spectacularly with the Smithsons, his close friends and collaborators on This is Tomorrow. After giving them one of his great Frog sculptures, he later informed them that he wanted it returned; when they refused, he went round to their house at night and tried to dig it out of their garden. Their friendship, needless to say, never recovered.

I have often wondered why Eduardo and I never fell out, though my partner Claire Walsh, who was present at the time, claims that we had our ‘break-up’ row on the second day we met. I think Eduardo realised that I was a genuine admirer of his work, and that apart from his lively imagination and powerful mind I wanted nothing from him. He was a generous and sociable man, and tended to attract an entourage of graduate students, museum curators, art school administrators eager for him to judge their diploma shows, well-to-do art lovers and ladies who lunch – in short, what used to be called sycophants. This became a real problem for him in the 1980s once he accepted his knighthood.

To what extent did Eduardo’s very busy social life influence his work, possibly for the worse? I greatly admire his early sculpture, those gaunt and eroded figures cast from machine parts who resemble the survivors of a nuclear war. It’s difficult to imagine the Paolozzi of the 1980s, who dined most evenings at the Caprice, a few steps from the Ritz, producing those haunted and traumatised images of mankind at its most desperate. By the end of the 1960s his sculpture had become smooth and streamlined, and resembled modules from some high-tech design office working on a new airport terminal.

I think he was aware of this, and sometimes he would say: ‘Right, Jim … let’s go out.’ And we would prowl the side streets off the King’s Road, where he would search the builders’ skips, his huge hands feeling some piece of discarded wood or metalwork, as if looking for a lost toy. Then it would be back to the Caprice, with its showbiz and film-star clientele, its dreadful acoustics and cries of ‘Eduardo…!’ and ‘Francis…!’ Why Bacon spent any time there is another mystery. Eventually, by the late 1980s, I had to retreat gently from this competitive circus.

But for the most part Eduardo enjoyed an idyllic life, and I watched him with real envy as he worked in his studio, listening to music while he cut up images for his screen-prints, chatting to an attractive graduate student, recounting another traveller’s tale about his latest trip to Japan, a country that fascinated him even more than the US. His early obsession with all things American rather faded after his teaching trip to Berkeley in the late 1960s. He told me how he had taken a party of his students on a field trip to a Douglas aircraft plant, but they had been bored by the whole venture. Advanced technology might spur the imagination of a European, but Americans took it for granted, and were no more inspired by the assembly of a four-engine jet plane than by the process of sealing beans into a can.

Japan, I think, became for Eduardo the continuation of America by other means, and the excitement of an endlessly self-renewing technology lay at the centre of the Japanese dream. He would return from Japan loaded with high-tech toys, bizarre robots equipped with electronic sensors that could lumberingly make their way around his studio. He once rang me from Tokyo, and I could barely hear him above a background babble of Japanese voices. He explained that he was near a bank of cigarette automats with voice-actuated brand selectors. He shouted above the din: ‘It’s midnight, there’s no one here. The machines break down and start each other talking…’ I wish Eduardo had pursued all this in his sculpture, and can still hear the robots jabbering in the darkness, with their ‘Please come again’ and ‘Thank you for your custom’ going on through the night.

Germany was another great magnet for him, and the country where his sculpture was most admired. I remember telling him that Chris Evans had found some wartime film cans stored in a basement at the National Physical Laboratory, among them a Waffen SS instructional film on how to build a pontoon bridge. Eduardo was deeply impressed. ‘That says it all,’ he murmured, his imagination stirred by the fusion of these almost emblematic elite troops with the down-to-earth realities of military engineering. I suspect his obsession with Wittgenstein, the Austrian-born philosopher and Cambridge friend of Bertrand Russell, had far less to do with The Tractatus than with Wittgenstein’s trips to the cinema to see Betty Grable.

Eduardo knew few novelists, if any, though the same could be said of myself. I felt far more at ease with a physician like Martin Bax, or with Chris Evans and Eduardo, than I did with my fellow novelists in the late 1960s. Most of them were still locked into a literary sensibility that would have been out of date in the 1920s. I’m glad to say that the novel has changed very much for the better in recent years, and a new generation of writers has emerged, among them Will Self, Martin Amis and Iain Sinclair, with powerful imaginations and a wide, roving intelligence.

The last literary party I attended, at my publishers Jonathan Cape in the early 1970s, at least brought me a little closer to the threatening Lord Goodman. I arrived with my agent, John Wolfers, a highly cultivated man who had served in the Welsh Guards and been wounded in the battle for Monte Cassino. He was also a compulsive drinker, locked into an intensely competitive relationship with the head of Cape, Tom Maschler, with whom he had been to school. The evening of the party John was deeply drunk, and barely able to stand upright. I tried to support him, but he pushed me away, talked incoherently for ten seconds and suddenly crashed to the floor, like a giant tree falling in a forest, taking two or three smaller guests with him. This happened several times, and was soon clearing the room.

Eventually I managed to steer him down the stairs. There were no taxis cruising Bedford Square, but a uniformed chauffeur stood by a double-parked limousine. Taking out a £5 note (then probably worth £50) I offered it to the chauffeur if he would take John home. ‘Regent Square, five minutes away.’ He accepted the fiver, and we laid John out in the rear seat. As the chauffeur started the engine I asked: ‘By the way, whose car is this?’ He replied: ‘Lord Goodman’s.’

I’m surprised I didn’t find myself in the Tower.

19 Healing Times (1967)

I still think that my children brought me up, perhaps as an incidental activity to rearing themselves. We emerged from their childhood together, they as happy and confident teenagers, and I into a kind of second adulthood enriched by the experience of watching them grow from infancy into fully formed human beings with minds and ambitions of their own. Few fathers observe this extraordinary process, the most significant in all nature, and sadly a great many mothers are so distracted by the effort of running a home and family that they are scarcely aware of the countless miracles of life that take place around them every day. I think of myself as extremely lucky. The years I spent as the parent of my young children were the richest and happiest I have ever known, and I am sure that my parents’ lives were arid by contrast. For them, domestic life was little more than a social annexe to the serious business of playing bridge and flirting at the Country Club.

My friendships with Eduardo Paolozzi, Dr Martin Bax, Chris Evans and Michael Moorcock were important to me but lay on the perimeter of my life, and anyway depended on reliable babysitters and the parking regulations of the day. My children were at the centre of my life, circled at a distance by my writing. I kept up a steady output of novels and short-story collections, largely because I spent most of my time at home. A short story, or a chapter of a novel, would be written in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up the sausage and mash, and watching Blue Peter. I am certain that my fiction is all the better for that. My greatest ally was the pram in the hall.

The 1960s were an exciting decade that I watched on television. Driving the children to and from school, to parties and friends, I had to be very careful how much I drank, regardless of the breathalyser. I was a passive smoker of a good deal of cannabis, and once took LSD, completely unaware of the strength of a single dose. This was a disastrous blunder that opened a vent of hell, and confirmed me as a long-standing whisky drinker.

Fay and Bea had taken charge of family life, and Jim and I were happy to follow orders. This was excellent training for all of us, especially the girls. They made the most of school and university, and have enjoyed successful careers in the arts and the BBC. They married happily and have families of their own. From the start I drummed into them that they were as entitled to opportunity and success as any man, and should never allow themselves to be patronised or exploited.

My daughter Fay Ballard.

As it happened, I could have saved my breath; they knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives, and were determined to do it.

Some fathers make good mothers, and I hope I was one of them, though most of the women who know me would say that I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other – in short, the kind of mother, no doubt loving and easy-going, of whom the social services deeply disapprove. The women journalists who have interviewed me over the years always refer to the dust that their gimlet eyes detect in unfrequented corners of my house. I suspect that the sight of a man bringing up apparently happy children (to which they never refer) alerts a reflex of rather old-fashioned alarm. If women aren’t needed to do the dusting, what hope is there left? Perhaps, too, the compulsive cleaning of a family home is an attempt to erase those repressed emotions that threaten to break through into the daylight. The nuclear family, dominated by an overworked mother, is in many ways deeply unnatural, as is marriage itself, part of the huge price we pay to control the male sex.

The absence of a mother was a deep loss for my children, but at least my girls were spared the stress that I noticed between many mothers and their daughters as puberty approached. As a father who collected his children from school, I spent a great deal of time by the school gates, and soon recognised the fierce maternal tension that made adolescence a hell for many of my daughters’ friends. Some mothers simply could not cope with the growing evidence that their daughters were younger, more womanly and more sexually attractive than they were. Sex, I’m glad to say, never worried me; I was far more concerned about what might happen to my daughters in a car rather than in a bed. A few words of friendly advice and the address of the nearest family planning clinic were enough; nature and their innate good sense would do the rest.

Sadly, many mothers refused to accept that their daugh

My daughter Beatrice Ballard.

ters had reached puberty at all. I once collected my daughters from a schoolfriend’s party, the first any of them had attended where boys would be present. Mothers were chatting near their cars, waiting for the party to end, and one of them laughingly described the pitch-black living room, thudding with music, where slumped forms of their precious daughters and the boy guests sprawled on sofas. Then one of the mothers emerged from the house and gestured helplessly at her friends. She was clearly distraught, barely able to walk or speak, and tottered down the garden path towards us. ‘Helen…’ someone called, taking her quivering shoulders. ‘Is Sally with a boy?’

Helen stared at us, as if she had seen the horror of all horrors. At last she spoke: ‘She’s holding his penis…’

The most important person I met in the late 1960s was Claire Walsh, who has been my partner, inspiration and life-companion for forty years. We met at a Michael Moorcock party, when Claire was in her early twenties, and I was struck immediately by her beauty and high intelligence. I often think that I have been extremely lucky during my life to have known closely four beautiful and interesting women – Mary, my daughters, and Claire. Claire is passionate, principled, argumentative and highly loyal, both to me and to her many friends. She has a wide-ranging mind, utterly free of cant, and has been very generous to my children and grandchildren.

Life with Claire has always been interesting – we have often driven together across half of Europe and never once stopped talking. We share a huge number of interests, in painting and architecture, wine, foreign travel, politics (she is keenly left-wing and impatient with my middle-of-theroadism), the cinema and, most important of all, good food. For many years we have eaten out twice a week, and Claire is an expert judge of restaurants, frequently finding a superb new place long before the critics discover it. She is a great reader of newspapers and magazines, has completely mastered the internet and is always supplying me with news stories that she knows will appeal to me. She is a great cook, and over the years has educated my palate. She has very gamely put up with my lack of interest in music and the theatre. Above all, she has been a staunch supporter of my writing, and the best friend that I have had.

When I first met Claire I was dazzled by her great beauty, naturally blonde hair and elegant profile. Sadly, she has suffered more than her share of ill health. Soon after we met, she underwent a major kidney operation at a London hospital, and I remember walking with her down the Charing Cross Road on the day she was discharged, on the way to Foyle’s to buy the ‘book’ of her operation, a medical text of the exact surgical procedure. It is typical of Claire that she took the trouble to write a letter of thanks to the surgeon who invented the procedure, then retired to New Zealand, and received a long and interesting reply from him. Ten years ago she faced the challenge of breast cancer, but fought back bravely, an ordeal that lasted many years. That she triumphed is a tribute to her courage.

Together we have travelled all over Europe and America, to film festivals and premieres, where she has looked after me and kept up my spirits. At the time we met, Claire was working as the publicity manager for a publisher of art books, and she went onto be publicity manager of Gollancz, Michael Joseph and Allen Lane. Her knowledge of publishing, and many of the devious and likeable personalities involved, has been invaluable.

Looking back, I realise that there is scarcely a city, museum or beach in Europe that I don’t associate with Claire. We have spent thousands of the happiest hours with our children (she has a daughter Jennifer) on beaches and under poolside umbrellas, in hotels and restaurants, walking around cathedrals from Chartres to Rome and Seville. Claire is a speed-reader of guidebooks, and always finds some interesting side chapel, or points out the special symbolism of this or that saint in a Van Eyck. She had a Catholic upbringing, and lived in a flat not far from Westminster Cathedral, whose nave was virtually her childhood playground. Whenever we find ourselves in Victoria she casually points out a stone lion or Peabody building where she and her friends played hide-and-seek.

I was so impressed by Claire’s beauty that I made her the centrepiece of two of my ‘advertisements’, which were published in Ambit, Ark and elsewhere in the late 1960s. I was advertising abstract notions largely taken from The Atrocity Exhibition, such as ‘Does the Angle Between Two Walls Have a Happy Ending?’ – a curious question that for some reason preoccupied me at the time. In each of the full-page ads the text was superimposed on a glossy, high-quality photograph, and the intention was to take paid advertisement pages in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. I reasoned that most novels could dispense with almost all their text and reduce themselves to a single evocative slogan. I outlined my proposal in an application to the Arts Council, but they rather solemnly

Claire Walsh in 1968.

refused to award me a grant, on the surprising grounds that my application was frivolous. This disappointed me, as I was completely serious, and the Arts Council awarded tens of thousands of pounds to fund activities that, unconsciously or not, were clearly jokes – Ambit itself could fall into that category, along with the London Magazine, the New Review and countless poetry magazines and little presses.

The funds disbursed by the Arts Council over the decades have created a dependent client class of poets, novelists and weekend publishers whose chief mission in life is to get their grants renewed, as anyone attending a poetry magazine’s parties will quickly learn from the nearby conversations. Why the taxes of people on modest incomes (the source of most taxes today) should pay for the agreeable hobby of a north London children’s doctor, or a self-important Soho idler like the late editor of the New Review, is something I have never understood. I assume that the patronage of the arts by the state serves a political role by performing a castration ceremony, neutering any revolutionary impulse and reducing the ‘arts community’ to a docile herd. They are allowed to bleat, but are too enfeebled to ever paw the ground.

Still, what the Arts Council saw as a prank at least put Claire’s beautiful face into the Evening Standard.

And, last but not least, she introduced me to the magic of cats.

20 New Sculpture (1969)

If The Atrocity Ehibition was a firework display in a charnel house, Crash was a thousand-bomber raid on reality, though English critics at the time thought that I had lost my bearings and made myself into the most vulnerable target. The Atrocity Exhibition was published in 1970, and was my attempt to make sense of the sixties, a decade when so much seemed to change for the better. Hope, youth and freedom were more than slogans; for the first time since 1939 people were no longer fearful of the future. The print-dominated past had given way to an electronic present, a realm where instantaneity ruled.

At the same time, darker currents were flowing a little too close to the surface. The viciousness of the Vietnam War, lingering public guilt over the Kennedy assassination, the casualties of the hard drug scene, the determined effort by the entertainment culture to infantilise us – all these had begun to get between us and the new dawn. Youth began to seem rather old hat and, anyway, what could we do with all that hope and freedom? Instantaneity allowed too many things to happen at once. Sexual fantasies fused with science, politics and celebrity while truth and reason were shouldered towards the door. We watched the Mondo Cane ‘documentaries’ where it was impossible to tell the fake newsreel footage of atrocities and executions from the real.

And we rather liked it that way. Our willing complicity in this blurring of truth and reality in the Mondo Cane films alone made them possible, and was taken up by the entire media landscape, by politicians and churchmen. Celebrity was all that counted. If denying God made a bishop famous, what choice was there? We liked mood music, promises that were never kept, slogans that were meaningless. Our darkest fantasies were pushing at a half-open bathroom door as Marilyn Monroe lay drugged among the fading bubbles.

All this I tried to grapple with in The Atrocity Exhibition. What if the everyday environment was itself a huge mental breakdown: how could we know if we were sane or psychotic? Were there any rituals we could perform, deranged sacraments assembled from a kit of desperate fears and phobias, that would conjure up a more meaningful world?

Writing The Atrocity Exhibition, I adopted an approach as fragmented as the world it described. Most readers found it difficult to grasp, expecting a conventional A+B+C narrative, and were put off by the isolated paragraphs and the rather obsessive sexual fantasies about the prominent figures of the day. But the book has remained in print in Britain, Europe and the USA, and has been reissued many times.

In New York it was published by Doubleday, but the editor, an enthusiastic supporter, made the mistake of adding an advance copy to the trolley filled with new titles that was sent up to the president’s office. There Nelson Doubleday broke the cardinal rule of all American publishers: never read one of your own books. He leafed idly through The Atrocity Exhibition and his eye lit upon a piece entitled ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. The then governor of California was a close friend, and within minutes the order had gone out to pulp the entire edition. The book was later published by Grove Press, home to William Burroughs and other prominent avant-garde writers, and since the 1990s by the very lively and adventurous Re/Search firm in San Francisco, one of the most remarkable publishing houses I have come across, specialists in urban anthropology of the most bizarre kind.

In the last few years The Atrocity Exhibition seems to be emerging from the dark, and I wonder if the widespread use of the internet has made my experimental novel a great deal more accessible. The short paragraphs and discontinuities of the morning’s emails, the overlapping texts and the need to switch one’s focus between unrelated topics, together create a fragmentary world very like the text of The Atrocity Exhibition.

* * *

By the time that The Atrocity Exhibition was published in 1970 I was already looking ahead to what would be my first ‘conventional’ novel for five years. I thought hard about the cluster of ideas that later made up Crash, many of them explored in The Atrocity Exhibition, where to some extent they were disguised within the fragmentary narrative. Crash would be a head-on charge into the arena, an open attack on all the conventional assumptions about our dislike of violence in general and sexual violence in particular. Human beings, I was sure, had far darker imaginations than we liked to believe. We were ruled by reason and self-interest, but only when it suited us to be rational, and much of the time we chose to be entertained by films, novels and comic strips that deployed horrific levels of cruelty and violence.

In Crash I would openly propose a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity. It seemed obvious that the deaths of famous people in car crashes resonated far more deeply than their deaths in plane crashes or hotel fires, as one could see from Kennedy’s death in his Dallas motorcade (a special kind of car crash), to the grim and ghastly death of Princess Diana in the Paris underpass.

Crash would clearly be a challenge, and I was still not completely convinced by my deviant thesis. Then in 1970 someone at the New Arts Laboratory in London contacted me and asked if there was anything I would like to do there. The large building, a disused pharmaceutical warehouse, contained a theatre, a cinema and an art gallery (there were also a number of flues, intended to draw off any dangerous chemical fumes and useful, so I was told, for venting away any cannabis smoke in the event of a police raid.

It occurred to me that I could test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars. The Arts Lab were keen to help, and offered me the gallery for a month. I drove around various wrecked-car sites in north London, and paid for three cars, including a crashed Pontiac, to be delivered to the gallery.

The cars went on show without any supporting graphic material, as if they were large pieces of sculpture. A TV enthusiast at the Arts Lab offered to set up a camera and closed-circuit monitors on which the guests could watch themselves as they strolled around the crashed cars. I agreed, and suggested that we hire a young woman to interview the guests about their reactions. Contacted by telephone, she agreed to appear naked, but when she walked into the gallery and saw the crashed cars she told me that she would only perform topless, a significant response in its own right, I felt at the time.

I ordered a fair quantity of alcohol, and treated the first night like any gallery opening, having invited a cross section of writers and journalists. I have never seen the guests at an art gallery get drunk so quickly. There was a huge tension in the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring. No one would have noticed the cars if they had been parked in the street outside, but under the unvarying gallery lights these damaged vehicles seemed to provoke and disturb. Wine was splashed over the cars, windows were broken, and the topless girl was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac (or so she claimed: she later wrote a damning review headed ‘Ballard Crashes’ in the underground paper Friendz). A woman journalist from New Society began to interview me among the mayhem, but became so overwrought with indignation, of which the journal had an unlimited supply, that she had to be restrained from attacking me.

During the month they were on show the cars were ceaselessly attacked, daubed with white paint by a Hare Krishna group, overturned and stripped of wing mirrors and licence plates. By the time the show closed and the cars were towed away, unmourned the moment they were dragged through the gallery doors, I had long since made up my mind. All my suspicions had been confirmed about the unconscious links that my novel would explore. My exhibition had in fact been a psychological test disguised as an art show, which is probably true of Hirst’s shark and Emin’s bed. I suspect that it’s no longer possible to stir or outrage spectators by aesthetic means alone, as did the Impressionists and cubists. A psychological challenge is needed that threatens one of our dearer delusions, whether a stained sheet or a bisected cow forced to endure a second death in order to remind us of the illusions to which we cling about the first.

In 1970, encouraged by my crashed cars exhibition, I began to write Crash. This was more than a literary challenge, not least because I had three young children crossing the streets of Shepperton every day, and nature might have played another of its nasty tricks. I have described the novel as a kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense effort of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an attempt to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the narrator my own name, accepting all that this entailed.

Two weeks after finishing the novel I was involved in a car crash of my own, when my tank-like Ford Zephyr had a front-wheel blowout at the foot of Chiswick Bridge. The car swerved out of control, crossed the central reservation and rolled onto its back. Luckily I was wearing my seat belt. Hanging upside down, I found that the doors had been jammed by the partly collapsed roof. People were shouting: ‘Petrol! Petrol!’ The car lay in the centre of the oncoming carriageway, and I was fortunate not to be struck by the approaching traffic. Eventually I wound down the window and clambered out. An ambulance took me to a nearby hospital at Roehampton, where my head was X-rayed. I had mild concussion for a fortnight, a constant headache that suddenly cleared, and was otherwise unhurt.

Looking back, I suspect that if I had died the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level, a surrender to the dark powers that propelled the novel. I have never had an accident since, and in half a century of driving have never made an insurance claim. But I believe that Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to appease death, to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby, like Bacon’s headless figure in his herringbone jacket who sits patiently at a table with a machine gun beside him. Crash is set at a point where sex and death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read and is constantly recalibrating itself. The same is true, I suppose, of Tracey Emin’s bed, which reminds us that this young woman’s beautiful body has stepped from a dishevelled grave.

Crash has been published in many countries, and was widely reissued after the 1996 David Cronenberg film. It was a moderate success in Britain, but Jonathan Cape showed none of the flair of their French counterparts, Calman-Levy in Paris. The French edition was a huge success, and remains my best-known book in France. The French critics accepted without qualms the novel’s yoking together of sex, death and the motor car. Anyone who drives in France is steering into the pages of Crash.

An important factor in the French success of Crash was the long tradition of subversive works in France, going back at least as far as the pornographic novels of de Sade and extending more recently from the symbolist poets to the anti-clerical fantasies of the surrealists and the novels of Céline and Genet. No such tradition has ever existed in England, and it is impossible to imagine Story of O being published here in the 1950s. The United States, now fast becoming a theocratic state run by right-wing political fanatics and religious moralisers, has posed similar problems to its more challenging writers. Nabokov’s Lolita, Henry Miller’s Tropic novels, and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch were all first published in Paris by the Olympia Press, a small publishing house that specialised in literary porn.

Crash created little stir when it first appeared in Britain, but twenty-five years later, after a period when the country was supposed to have liberalised itself, a preposterous storm in the largest teacup that Fleet Street could find showed just how repressed and silly as a nation we could be.

David Cronenberg’s film of Crash was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996. It was the most controversial film of the festival, and the controversy continued for years afterwards, especially in England. Desperate Conservative politicians, facing defeat at the imminent general election, attacked the film in an attempt to gain moral credit as the guardians of public decency. One cabinet minister, Virginia Bottomley, called for the film (which she had not seen) to be banned.

The Cannes festival is an extraordinary media event, in many ways deeply intimidating to a mere novelist. Books may still be read in vast numbers, but films are dreamed. Claire and I were stunned by the screaming crowds, the lavish parties and stretch limos. I took part in all the publicity interviews, and was deeply impressed to see how committed the stars of the film were to Cronenberg’s elegant adaptation of my novel.

I was sitting next to Holly Hunter when we were joined by a leading American film critic. His first question was: ‘Holly, what are you doing in this shit?’ Holly sprang into life, and delivered a passionate defence of the film, castigating him for his small-mindedness and provincialism. It was the greatest performance of the festival, which I cheered vigorously.

The film opened in France within a few weeks, and was very successful, and then went on to open across Europe and the rest of the world. In America there were problems when Ted Turner, who controlled the distribution company, decided that Crash might offend public decency. At the time, interestingly, he was married to Jane Fonda, who had enlivened her career by playing prostitutes (as in Klute) or cavorting naked in a fur-lined spaceship (in Barbarella).

In England the film was delayed for a year when Westminster Council banned it from the West End of London, and a number of other councils up and down the country followed suit. When the film finally opened there were no copycat car crashes, and the controversy at last died down. Cronenberg, a highly intelligent and thoughtful man, was completely baffled by the English reaction. ‘Why?’ he kept asking me. ‘What’s going on here?’

After fifty years, I was nowhere nearer an answer.

21 Lunches and Films (1987)

By 1980 my three children were adults and away at their universities. Within a year or two they would leave home and begin their careers apart from me, and the richest and most fulfilling period in my life would abruptly come to an end. I had already had a foretaste of this. As every parent knows, infancy and childhood seem to last for ever. Then adolescence arrives and promptly leaves on the next bus, and one is sharing the family home with likeable young adults who are more intelligent, better company and in many ways wiser than oneself. But childhood has gone, and in the silence one stares at the empty whisky bottles in the pantry and wonders if any number of drinks will fill the void.

We had enjoyed the 1970s together, the dull Heath years and the twilight world of the last Old Labour government, largely by going abroad whenever we could. Claire and I and our four children would climb into my large family saloon and head for Dover, watch the white cliffs recede without a pang (I never saw a tear shed by a single fellow passenger on countless cross-channel ferries) and begin to breathe freely as we emerged through the bow doors and rolled the wheels across the Boulogne cobbles. Soon there was the intoxicating reek of Gauloises, scent, merde and higher octane French petrol – now sadly all gone, including the cobbles. For reasons I have never understood, we took few photographs, and had left it too late when the children decided to holiday on their own. But memory is the greatest gallery in the world, and I can play an endless archive of images of the happy time.

Waving goodbye to the children as Claire and I set off on our first holiday alone, I found myself thinking of Shanghai again. I had almost forgotten the war, and never referred to Shanghai in conversation with friends, and rarely even to Claire and the children. But I had always wanted to write about the war years and internment, partly because so few people in England were aware of the Pacific war against the Japanese.

It was then nearly forty years since I entered Lunghua Camp, and soon my memories would fade. Few novelists have waited so long to write about the most formative experiences of their lives, and I am still puzzled why I allowed so many decades to slip by. Perhaps, as I have often reflected, it took me twenty years to forget Shanghai and twenty years to remember. During my early years in England after the war Shanghai had become an unattainable city, an El Dorado buried beneath a past to which I could never return. Another reason was that I was waiting for my children to grow up. Until they were young adults I was too protective of them to expose them in my mind to the dangers I had known at their age.

One question that readers still ask is: why did you leave your parents out of the novel? When I first began to think about the overall story I assumed that the central characters would be adults, and that children of any age would play no part in the novel. But I realised that I had no adult memories of Lunghua Camp, or of Shanghai. My only memories of life in both the camp and the city were those of an early teenager. I had, and still have, vivid memories of cycling around Shanghai, exploring empty apartment buildings, and trying unsuccessfully to fraternise with Japanese soldiers. But I had no memories of going to nightclubs and dinner parties. Although I spent my time roaming around Lunghua Camp, I had little idea of large areas of adult life. To this day I know nothing about the sexual lives of the internees. Did they have affairs, in the warrens of curtained cubicles that must have been ideal trysting cells? Almost certainly, I assume, especially during the first year when the internees’ health was still robust. Were there pregnancies? Yes, and the few families involved were moved by the Japanese to camps in Shanghai that were close to hospitals. Were there fierce rivalries and gnawing tensions between the internees? Yes, and I observed rows and arguments between both men and women that sometimes came to blows. But I knew nothing about the festering resentments that must have lasted for months if not years. My father was a gregarious man and got on well with most people, but my mother made few friends in G Block and seemed to spend most of her time reading in our little room. Curiously, though we ate, slept, dressed and undressed within a few feet of each other, I have very few memories of her in the camp. And none of my sister.

So, I accepted what I had probably assumed from the start, that Empire of the Sun would be seen through the eyes of a child who became a teenager during war and internment. And there seemed no point in inventing a fictitious child when I had one ready-made to hand: my younger self. Once I decided that the novel would be autobiographical, everything fell naturally into place. In much of the novel I was describing events I could still see in my mind’s eye. There were a huge number of memories that I needed to knit together, and some of the events described are imaginary, but although Empire of the Sun is a novel it is firmly based on true experiences, either my own or those told to me by other internees.

Writing the novel was surprisingly painless. A rush of memories rose from my typescript, the filth and cruelty of Shanghai, the faded smell of deserted villages, even the stench of Lunghua Camp, the reek of overcrowded barrack huts and dormitories, the desperate seediness of what in effect was a large slum. I was frisking myself of memories that popped out of every pocket. By the time I finished, at the end of 1983, Shanghai had advanced out of its own mirage and become a real city again

Empire of the Sun was a huge success, the only one I have known on that scale, and outsold all my previous books put together. It revived my backlist, in Britain and abroad, and drew many new readers to my earlier books. Some were deeply disappointed, writing letters along the lines of ‘Mr Ballard, could you explain what you really mean by your novel Crash?’ A question with no possible answer.

Other, more sympathetic readers of my earlier novels and short stories were quick to spot echoes of Empire of the Sun. The trademark images that I had set out over the previous thirty years – the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers – could all be traced back to wartime Shanghai. For a long time I resisted this, but I accept now that it is almost certainly true. The memories of Shanghai that I had tried to repress had been knocking at the floorboards under my feet, and had slipped quietly into my fiction. At the same time, though, I have always been fascinated by deserts, and even wrote an entire book, Vermilion Sands, set at a desert resort something like Palm Springs. And yet there are no deserts within a thousand miles of Shanghai, and the only sand I ever saw was in the snake house at Shanghai Zoo.

* * *

Most writers dream of having films made of their novels, but for every thousand films visualised and enthused over during the world’s longest lunches only one is ever actually made. The film world is a gaudy balloon kept aloft by enthusiasm, preposterous overconfidence, and all the dreams that money can buy. Film people – producers, directors and actors – are enormously good company, far livelier and more interesting than the majority of writers, and without their enthusiasm and their heroic lunches few films would ever reach the screen.

I was lucky enough to have options taken out on my earlier novels, but unlucky that my career as a writer coincided with the decades which marked the decline of the British film industry. Films based on my novels were lunched, but never launched.

The first time I saw my name (even if mispelled) in the credits of a film came in 1970, with the British release of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. This was a Hammer film, a sequel to the Raquel Welch vehicle One Million Years BC, itself a remake of the 1940 Hollywood original starring Victor Mature and Carole Landis. Hammer specialised in Dracula and Frankenstein films, then much despised by the critics. But their films had tremendous panache and visual attack, without a single wasted frame, and the directors were surprisingly free to push their obsessions to the limit.

I was contacted by a Hammer producer, Aida Young, who was a great admirer of The Drowned World. She was keen that I write the screenplay for their next production, a sequel to One Million Years BC. Curious to see how the British film world worked, I turned up at the Wardour Street offices of Hammer, to be greeted in the foyer by a huge Tyrannosaurus rex about to deflower a blonde-haired actress in a leopard-skin bikini. The credits screamed ‘Curse of the Dinosaurs!’

Had the film already been made? I knew that outfits like Hammer worked fast. But Aida assured me that this was just window dressing, and they had settled on the title When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Raquel Welch would not be available. They were thinking of using a Czech actress who spoke no English, but this didn’t matter since there would be no dialogue in the film. My job was to come up with a strong story.

She steered me into the office of Tony Hinds, then the head of Hammer. He was affable but gloomy, and listened without comment as Aida launched into a chapter-by-chapter account of The Drowned World, with its picture of a steaming, half-submerged London and its vistas of dream-inducing water.

She finished and we waited for Hinds to speak. ‘Water?’ he repeated. ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with water.’

It turned out that they planned to shoot the film in the Canary Islands. I remembered that the surrealists had made field trips to the Canaries, fascinated by the black volcanic beaches and the extraordinary fauna and flora. All Hammer had seen was the tax incentives.

Hinds asked me what ideas I had come up with. Bearing in mind that the promised contract had yet to arrive, I had given little thought to the project, but on the drive from Shepperton to Soho I had produced several promising ideas. I outlined them as vividly as I could.

‘Too original,’ Hinds commented. Aida agreed. ‘Jim, we want that Drowned World atmosphere.’ She spoke as if this could be sprayed on, presumably in a fetching shade of jungle green.

Hinds then told me what the central idea would be. His secretary had suggested it that morning. This was nothing less than the story of the birth of the Moon – in fact, one of the oldest and corniest ideas in the whole of science fiction, which I would never have dared to lay on his desk. Hines stared hard at me. ‘We want you to tell us what happens next.’

I thought desperately, realising that the film industry was not for me. ‘A tidal wave?’

‘Too many tidal waves. If you’ve seen one tidal wave you’ve seen them all.’

A small light came on in the total darkness of my brain. ‘But you always see the tidal waves coming in,’ I said in a stronger voice. ‘We should show the tidal wave going out! All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology.

There was a silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other. I assumed I was about to be shown the door.

‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’

We went out to a glamorous lunch in a restaurant with Roman decor. Hinds and Aida were excited and cheerful, already moving on to the next stage of production, casting the leading characters. I failed to realise it at the time, but I had already reached the high point of my usefulness to them. I should have heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the ebbing tidal wave, but it was exciting to have an idea taken up so quickly and be plied with enthusiasm, friendship and fine wine. Already they were discussing the complex relationships between the principal characters, difficult to envisage in a film with no dialogue, where emotions were expressed solely in terms of bare-chested men hitting each other with clubs or dragging a handsome blonde into a nearby cave by her hair. In due course I prepared a treatment, some of which survived into the finished film, along with my ebbing wave.

As Hammer films go, it was a success, but I am glad that they misspelled my name in the credits.

In 1986, two years after the publication of Empire of the Sun, a very different kind of film company appeared on the scene. Warner Brothers bought the rights to the novel, and asked Steven Spielberg, the world’s most successful film-maker, to direct the production. Spielberg at first proposed that he would produce the film, and asked David Lean to direct. But Lean declined, saying that he couldn’t handle the boy. Perhaps Jim was too aggressive and too conflicted for Lean, who liked his boy actors to be lisping and slightly effeminate. In any event Spielberg, who had a unique gift for drawing superb performances from child actors, decided to direct it himself.

Most of the film was shot in Shanghai and near Jerez, in Spain, where Lunghua Camp was recreated, but a few scenes were shot in and near London. The Ballard house in Amherst Avenue was divided between three houses in Sunningdale, to the west of London, and Spielberg invited me to play a walk-on part at the fancy-dress party that opens the film. I appeared as John Bull in scarlet coat and top hat. It was on set that I met Spielberg for the first time, and was immediately impressed by his thoughtfulness and his commitment to the novel. Difficult scenes that could easily have been dropped were tackled head-on, like Jim’s ‘resuscitation’ of the young kamikaze pilot who briefly merges into his younger, blazer-wearing self, a powerful image that expresses the essence of the whole novel.

A Spielberg production is a huge event, with hundreds of people involved – technicians, actors, bodyguards, bus drivers and catering staff, publicists and make-up artists. Given the costs involved, the sheer scale of Hollywood films demands the highest degree of professionalism. This is the central paradox of film-making, as far I can see. For hours on the set nothing is happening, but not a second is being wasted. The lighting is in many ways more important than the actors’ performances, which can be strengthened by astute cutting and editing. Spielberg, of course, is a master of film narrative, and his films far transcend the performances of individual actors. He told me that he ‘saw’ the film of Empire of the Sun in the scene where the Mustangs are attacking the airfield next to Lunghua Camp, and the fighter aircraft move in slow motion in the eyes of the watching Jim. It’s an unsettling moment, one of many in what I think of as Spielberg’s best, and most imagined, film.

It was fascinating for me to take part in the Sunningdale scenes, and strange to be involved in a painstakingly accurate recreation of my childhood home. The white telephones and original copies of Time magazine, the art deco lamps and rugs, carried me straight back to the Shanghai of the 1930s. The large Sunningdale houses were uncannily similar in their fittings, their door handles and window frames. In fact, the English architects in Shanghai had modelled their Tudor-style houses on the Sunningdale mansions rather than the reverse.

When the fancy-dress party ended, the ‘guests’ were filmed leaving the house, and I stepped out into the drive to find a line of 1930s American Packards and Buicks, each with a uniformed Chinese chauffeur. The scene was so like the real Shanghai of my childhood that for a moment I fainted.

Other curious reversals occurred during the making of the film. Several of my neighbours in Shepperton worked as extras, drawn by the nearby film studios, and took part in the scenes shot in England. I vividly remember the mother of a girl at the same school as my daughters calling out to me: ‘We’re going back to Shanghai, Mr Ballard. We’re in the film…’ I had the uncanny sense that I had chosen to live in Shepperton in 1960 because I knew unconsciously that I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that extras among my neighbours would one day appear in a film based on the novel.

Another eerie moment occurred when I was on the set at Sunningdale, and a 12-year-old boy in fancy dress came up to me and said: ‘Hello, Mr Ballard, I’m you.’ This was Christian Bale, who played Jim so brilliantly, virtually carrying the whole film on his shoulders. Behind him were two actors in their late thirties, Emily Richard and Rupert Frazer, also in fancy dress, who smiled and said: ‘And we’re your mother and father.’ They were twenty years younger than me at the time, and I had the strange feeling that the intervening years had vanished and I was back in wartime Shanghai.

The Los Angeles premiere of the film in December 1987 was a Hollywood epic in its own right. Claire and I stayed at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, just within sight of the Hollywood sign, where we met Tom Stoppard, the writer of the script, a pleasant but intensely nervous man. Dozens of stars attended the charity screening, some in mink coats, like Dolly Parton, and others in T-shirts, like Sean Connery. Later the nearby streets were closed to traffic and we walked in procession along red carpets laid in the centre of the road to a vast marquee where a themed banquet was held with Chinese food and Chinese dancers bopping to jive numbers.

In early 1988 my American publisher Farrar Straus arranged a six-city, two-week-long book tour to promote my latest novel. The schedule was exhausting, a non-stop round of interviews, book signings, radio and television appearances. At its best, radio is a thoughtful medium in America, while television is regarded as nothing but a continuous stream of advertising, the programmes included. Publicity and promotion are the air that Americans breathe, and they take it for granted that in every minute of the day someone is trying to sell them something.

Many of my bookshop readings and signings were packed, but others were completely empty, for reasons no one could explain. Americans were unfailingly friendly and helpful, though I noticed an almost universal hostility to Steven Spielberg. One journalist asked me: ‘Why did you allow Spielberg to make a film of your novel?’ When I replied that he was the greatest film director in America, he promptly corrected me: ‘Not the greatest, the most successful.’ This was the only time that I’ve heard success downplayed in America. Usually it marks the end of any argument about the merits or otherwise of a film or book. Perhaps American journalists, who see themselves as the consciences of their nation, resent Spielberg for revealing the sentimental and childlike strains that lie just below the surface of American life. There is certainly a missing dimension that European visitors become aware of within a few days of arrival, a trust in the idea of America that no Frenchman or Briton ever feels about his own country. Or it may be that we in Europe are by nature more depressed.

In London in the spring of 1988 there was a royal command performance of Empire of the Sun, attended by Spielberg and Steve Ross, the head of Time Warner and a hugely influential man. I am a lifelong republican and would like to see the monarchy and all hereditary titles abolished, but I was impressed by how hard the Queen worked, making friendly comments to each of us. She was poorly briefed by her English guide, and had to ask Ross what he did, an example of British parochialism (though no fault of the Queen’s) at its worst. Cher, among the Hollywood stars in the line-up, suggested to the Queen that she might like to see her own film, Moonstruck, then playing on the other side of Leicester Square. Her tone implied that now would be a good time for the Queen to cut and run, if she wanted to see a real movie. It was another extraordinary evening, and one of the strangest sights was the band of the Coldstream Guards marching into the auditorium and the Queen standing to listen to her own anthem. I felt that she was the one person entitled to sit down.

* * *

In 1991 I was invited to serve on the jury at MystFest, an Italian film festival of crime and mystery films, which was then held at Viareggio, near the beach where the drowned Shelley was cremated by his friends. The chairman of the jury was Jules Dassin, one of the Hollywood exiles and husband of Melina Mercouri, and the director of Rififi, The Naked City and other classic noir thrillers. Another of the jurors was Suzanne Cloutier, a former wife of Peter Ustinov who had played Desdemona in Orson Welles’s Othello. Nick Roeg and Theresa Russell were the guests of honour, and we had a great time in the hotel bar. Claire got on especially well with a young American film-maker of whom none of us had heard; he was screening his first film in a small off-the-beach cinema out of competition. Dassin, a kindly but ailing old man still recovering from open-heart surgery, found him particularly tiring. ‘Who is this young man?’ he asked me. ‘He makes so much noise…’ I put out a few feelers and reported back that the young man was called Quentin Tarantino and the film was Reservoir Dogs. A year later he was one of the most famous directors in the world.

MystFest was interesting to me because it demonstrated the peculiar psychology of the jury system. The six jurors, with Claire as supernumerary, enjoyed our meals together in Viareggio’s best restaurants, including Puccini’s favourite. It seemed to me that we were in agreement about everything, sharing the same taste in films, whether European, Japanese or American. I was sure we would come to a speedy conclusion when we sat down to decide on the winner.

Halfway through the festival, when we had seen five films, Jules Dassin called a meeting. ‘The films are rubbish,’ he told us. ‘We’ll give the prize to Roeg.’ We had not yet seen Roeg’s film, Cold Heaven, and I pointed out that there were six films waiting to be screened for us. ‘They’ll be rubbish too,’ Dassin said. I suspect that he was under pressure from the festival management to steer the best film award to Roeg. Bob Swaim, the American director of Half Moon Street and La Balance (‘I always sleep with my leading ladies.’ This left me agog. ‘You’ve had sex with Sigourney Weaver? Tell me more.’ ‘No, not Sigourney.’) and I insisted that we see all the films, though the other jurors were ready to follow Dassin.

In the event, sadly, Roeg’s film was not one of his better efforts, and at our final meeting Dassin gave up his attempt to award the prix d’or to him. But our problems had only just begun. As we discussed the eleven films it soon became clear that we would never agree. Each member of the jury had his or her favourite, which the other jurors dismissed with contempt. We stared at each speaker as if he had announced that he was Napoleon Bonaparte and was about to be taken away by the men in the white coats. Every choice other than my own seemed preposterous. I assume that sitting collectively in judgement runs counter to some deep and innate belief that justice should be dispensed by a single, all-powerful magistrate. How jurors at murder trials ever come to a unanimous verdict is beyond me.

Aware that we were becoming tired and fractious, Dassin wisely called a halt to the discussion. He passed around pieces of paper and asked us each to write down our top three films, in descending order. This we did, and it is remarkable that the eventual winner did not feature in the list of any member of the jury.

Utter deadlock loomed, and tempers rose. No one was prepared to yield an inch. We were saved by one thing alone – our desperate need for lunch. We were tired, angry and starving. At last we seized gratefully on a compromise candidate, a German thriller about a Turkish detective in Berlin. This had been shown without subtitles, and had been barely comprehensible. But it would have to do.

The German woman director was flown in for the prize-giving but the festival organisers were most displeased. Roeg’s honour was satisfied, though not in the way we had expected. At the gala evening, in front of massed TV cameras and journalists, we found that our deliberations had been demoted to the status of a ‘jury’ prize. The festival grand prix, newly created for the occasion, went to Nick Roeg. As the jury retreated from the rear of the stage, well aware of its humiliation, I wished that we had heeded the wise old Jules Dassin and awarded Roeg the prize in the first place.

22 Return to Shanghai (1991)

My novel The Kindness of Women, a sequel to Empire of the Sun, was published in 1991, and the BBC TV series Bookmark decided to make a programme about my life and work. Most of it was filmed in and around Shepperton, but I spent a week in Shanghai with the film crew and its director, James Runcie. He was the son of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, which may have had some bearing on the help that the Chinese gave us. Two English-speaking executives from the Shanghai television service were with us throughout the week. I have no doubt that part of their job was to keep an eye on us, but they went out of their way to lay on an air-conditioned bus and car and smooth our path around any obstacles.

Without their navigation skills we might never have discovered Lunghua Camp, now completely swallowed by the urbanisation of the surrounding countryside. In the 1930s our house in Amherst Avenue had stood on the edge of the western suburbs of Shanghai. Standing on the roof as a boy, I would look out over the cultivated farmland that began literally on the far side of our garden fence. Now all this had gone, vanishing under the concrete and asphalt of greater Metropolitan Shanghai.

The return to Shanghai, for the only time in forty-five years, was a strange experience for me, which began in the Cathay Pacific lounge at Heathrow. There I saw my first dragon ladies, rich Chinese women with a hard, fear-inducing gaze, similar to those who had known my parents and terrified me as a child. Most of them got off at Hong Kong, but others went on with me to Shanghai. We landed at the International Airport, on one of the huge runways laid across the grass airfield at Hungjao where I had once sat in the cockpit of a derelict Chinese fighter. As the dragon ladies left the first-class compartment their immaculate nostrils twitched disapprovingly at the familiar odour that stained the evening air – night soil, still the chief engine of Chinese agriculture.

We drove into Shanghai down a broad new highway. Lights glimmered through the perspiring trees, and above the microwave air I could see vast skyscrapers built in the 1980s with expat Chinese money. Under Deng’s rule, Shanghai was returning rapidly to its great capitalist past. Inside every open doorway a small business was flourishing. A miasma of frying fat floated into the night, radio announcers gabbled, gongs sounded the start or end of a work shift, sparks flew from the lathes of a machine shop, mothers breastfed their babies as they sat patiently by pyramids of melons, traffic horns blared, sweating young men in singlets smoked in doorways … the ceaseless activity of a planetary hive. There are only two words in the Chinese bible: Make Money.

The Bund was intact, the same vista of banks and trading houses still faced the Whangpoo river, crowded with ships and sampans. The Nanking Road seemed unchanged, Sincere’s and the great Sun and Sun Sun department stores crammed with Western goods. The racecourse was now an immense parade ground, the only visible trace of the authoritarian regime. I had hoped that we might stay at the former Cathay Hotel (now the Peace Hotel) on the Bund, a crumbling art deco palace. We later filmed a scene in the karaoke bar, where drunken Japanese tourists bellowed their way through Neil Diamond hits. But the Cathay, where Noël Coward had written Private Lives, lacked fax links to the outside world, and we moved to the Shanghai Hilton, a tall tower not far from the former Cathedral Girls’ School.

Memories were waiting for me everywhere, like old friends at an arrivals gate, each carrying a piece of cardboard bearing my name. The next morning I looked down at Shanghai from my room on the seventeenth floor of the Hilton. I could see at a glance that there were two Shanghais – the skyscraper city newer than yesterday, and at street level the old Shanghai that I had cycled around as a boy. The Park Hotel, overlooking the former racecourse and a vast brothel for American servicemen after the war, had been one of the tallest buildings in Shanghai, but was now dwarfed by gigantic TV towers and office buildings that stamped ‘money’ across the sky. The Hilton stood on the edge of the old French Concession, still today one of the largest collections of domestic art deco architecture in the world. The paint-work was shabby, but there were the porthole windows and marina balconies, fluted pilasters borrowed from some car factory in Detroit in the 1930s. Curiously, the TV towers, broadcasting the new to the people of Shanghai, seemed rather old-fashoned and even traditional, as seen everywhere from Toronto and Tokyo to Seattle. At the same time, the dusty and faded art deco suburbs were bracingly new.

I was due to rendezvous with Runcie and his crew at 9 a.m. in the Hilton lobby, but an hour earlier I slipped out of the hotel and began to walk the streets, heading in the general direction of the Bubbling Well Road. The pavements were already crowded with food vendors, porters steering new photocopiers into office entrances, smartly dressed young secretaries shaking their heads at a plump and sweating 60-year-old European out on some dishevelled errand.

And I was on an errand, though I had yet to grasp the true nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self, the boy in a Cathedral School cap and blazer who had played hide-and-seek with his friends half a century earlier. I soon found him, hurrying with me along the Bubbling Well Road, smiling at the puzzled typists and trying to hide the sweat that drenched my shirt. On the last leg of our journey from England, as we took off from Hong Kong, I worried that I had waited too long to return to Shanghai, and that the actual city would never match my memories. But those memories had been remarkably resilient, and I felt surprisingly at home, as if I was about to resume the life cut off when the Arrawa set sail from its pier.

But something was missing, and that explained the real nature of my breakfastless errand.

Shanghai had always been a European city, created by British and French entrepreneurs, followed by the Dutch, Swiss and Germans. Now, though, they had gone, and Shanghai was a Chinese city. All the advertising, all the street signs and neon displays, were in Chinese characters. Nowhere, during our week in Shanghai, did I see a single sign in the English language, except for a huge hoarding advertising Kent cigarettes. There were no American cars and buses, no Studebakers and Buicks, no film posters in twenty-foot-high letters announcing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Robin Hood or Gone With the Wind.

Shanghai had forgotten us, as it had forgotten me, and the shabby art deco houses in the French Concession were part of a discarded stage set that was slowly being dismantled. The Chinese are uninterested in the past. The present, and a modest down payment on a first instalment of the future, are all that concern them. Perhaps we in the West are too preoccupied with the past, too involved with our memories, almost as if we are nervous of the present and want to keep one foot safely rooted in the past. Later, when I left Shanghai and returned to England with Runcie and the film crew, I felt a great sense of release. I had visited those shrines to my younger self, stood in silence for a few moments with my head bowed, and driven straight to the airport.

At 9 on that first morning we gathered in the Hilton lobby and then set off for the Ballard home in the former Amherst Avenue. The house was still standing, though in a state of extreme dilapidation, its gutters propped up by a scaffolding of bamboo poles that was in turn about to collapse. At the time of our visit the house served as the library of a state electronics institute, and metal book-racks filled with international journals and magazines had replaced the furniture on all three floors, a change that might have pleased my father. Nothing, otherwise, had changed, and I noticed that the same lavatory seat was in my bathroom. But the house was a ghost, and had spent almost half a century eroding its memories of an English family that had occupied it but left without a trace.

The next day we set off in our air-conditioned bus for Lunghua, and spent most of the morning trying to track it

The former Ballard house in Amherst Avenue, Shanghai, in 2005. The fountain, garden sculpture and wall decoration are recent additions.

down. A vast urbanised plain stretched south from the Shanghai that I had known, a haze-filled terrain of flats, factories and police and army barracks, linked together by motorway overpasses. Now and then we stopped, and climbed to the roof deck of a workers’ apartment block, where I scanned the countryside for any sight of the water tower. Eventually, one of our translators hailed an old man dozing outside a bicycle shop. ‘Europeans, imprisoned by the Japanese…?’ He thought about this. ‘There was a camp – I don’t remember which war…’

Ten minutes later we arrived at the gates of the former Lunghua Camp, now the Shanghai High School. Almost

Standing outside the former G Block in 1991.

The Ballard family room in the former G block.

nothing remained of the original camp. The Japanese guardhouse, the dozen or more ruined buildings and the wooden huts had all been cleared away. New buildings had been built, and the old ones refurbished.

I wandered around the site for an hour, ignoring my camera but taking a thousand snapshots inside my eye. Everywhere trees had been planted shoulder to shoulder, as a result of some Maoist diktat in the 1960s. The children were away on holiday, and we were able to enter G Block. The Shanghai High School is solely for boarders, and all the rooms were locked except for the former Ballard room, which was now a kind of rubbish store. A clutter of refuse, like discarded memories, lay in sacks between the wooden bed frames, where my mother had read Pride and Prejudice for the tenth time, and I had slept and dreamed.

Lunghua Camp was there, but it was not there.

I arrived back at Heathrow feeling mentally bruised but refreshed, as if I had completed the psychological equivalent of an adventure holiday. I had walked up to a mirage, accepted that in its way it was real, and then walked straight through it to the other side. The next ten years were among the most contented of my life.

My daughters Fay and Beatrice had made very happy marriages, and each soon had two children, over whom I doted from the day of their birth. There is no doubt that grandchildren take away the fear of death. I had done my biological duty, and completed the most important task on the genetic job list. My son remains a confirmed bachelor, happy with his computers, his weekend walks and pints of ale.

I was lucky to meet two fellow writers and their lively wives, with whom Claire and I frequently share a meal. Both Iain Sinclair and Will Self are much younger than me, but we fill the gap with shared enthusiasms, and an interest in the world beyond the London literary scene. Sinclair is a poet and mesmerist, tracing out the ley lines of the imagination in his heroic walks around London, making the connections between Templar churches and the archaic ghosts of east London and the Thames Gateway. He is also the Odysseus of the M25, and has walked the 120-mile circuit, threading 19th-century fever hospitals and the graveyards of mysterious parish churches onto his bow. Will Self is another remarkable writer, almost seven feet in height and with a tall man’s constant surprise at the mundane world far below him. He is richly generous in thought and speech, forever taking new ideas from the top shelves of his mind and laying them out in front of you with a flourish. Both Sinclair and Self have a wholly original take on the world, and I have never heard them utter a single cliché or commonplace in all the brilliant books by them that I have read, or in all the meals we have shared together.

I still think about Shanghai, but I know that the city is

Claire Walsh in 1990.

undergoing another of its unending changes. One image that stays in my mind was the glimpse I had of an old man squatting behind a small stool outside the entrance to the Cathay Hotel. He seemed to have nothing for sale, and I couldn’t help thinking about another old man under his eiderdown of snow in Amherst Avenue. But this old man seemed confident, and was eating his lunch from a small china bowl, using his chopsticks to fork in a modest portion of rice and a single cabbage leaf.

He was very old, and I wondered if this would be his last meal. Then I looked down at the stool and realised why he was so confident. Lying face up to the passing tourists and office workers, the titles in the Chinese characters of their Hong Kong distributor, were three Arnold Schwarzenegger videos.

23 Homeward Bound (2007)

In June 2006, after a year of pain and discomfort that I put down to arthritis, a specialist confirmed that I was suffering from advanced prostate cancer that had spread to my spine and ribs. Curiously, the only part of my anatomy that did not seem to be affected was my prostate, a common feature of the disease. But an MRI scan, a disagreeable affair that involves lying in a coffin wired for sound, left no doubt. Originating in my prostate, the cancer had invaded my bones.

I moved into the care of Professor Jonathan Waxman, in the Cancer Centre at Hammersmith Hospital in west London. Professor Waxman is one of the leading prostate cancer specialists in this country, and he rescued me at a time when I was exhausted by the intermittent pain and the fears of death that blotted everything else from my mind. It was Jonathan who convinced me that within a few weeks of the initial treatment the pain would leave me and I would begin to feel something closer to my everyday self. This proved true, and for the past year, except for one or two minor relapses, I have felt remarkably well, have been able to work and enjoyed my restaurant visits and the company of friends and family.

Jonathan has always been completely frank, leaving me with no illusions about the eventual end. But he has urged me to lead as normal a life as I can, and he supported me when I said, early in 2007, that I would like to write my autobiography. It is thanks to Jonathan Waxman that I found the will to write this book.

Jonathan is highly intelligent, thoughtful and always gentle, and has that rare ability to see the ongoing course of medical treatment from the point of view of the patient. I am very grateful that my last days will be spent under the care of this strong-minded, wise and kindly physician.

Shepperton, September 2007