Miracles of Life Read Online Free Page B

shoes from our feet.
    In fact, the greatest danger we faced probably came fromthe Sunday afternoon trips we took with our parents andtheir friends to the recent battlegrounds to the south andwest of Shanghai. Convoys of chauffeur-driven Buicks andChryslers would move through the stricken land, wives intheir silky best. The battlefields must have reminded some ofthe older British of the Somme, with their endless networksof eroded trenches, crumbling earth blockhouses andabandoned villages. Around our feet when we stepped fromthe cars was the bright gold of spent cartridges, lengths ofmachine-gun ammunition, webbing and backpacks. Deadhorses lay by the roadside, enormous ribcages open to thesky, and in the canals were dead Chinese soldiers, legsstirring as the current flowed through the reeds. There was afeast of military souvenirs, but I was never allowed to keepeven a bayonet – many European sightseers had been killed,and a boy at school lost a hand when a grenade exploded.Then the convoy would roll on, carrying everyone back to the safety of the International Settlement and large gins atthe Country Club.
    Another treasure hunt to which I very keenly looked forwardtook place when we visited friends of my parents in thecountryside to the west of Shanghai. They held large lunchparties, after which the children were left to themselves whilethe nannies gossiped and the chauffeurs polished their cars.I would slip away, duck through a gap in the fence and runacross two dried-out rice paddies to an abandoned Chinesemilitary airfield. There was a single empty hangar, but on theedge of the airfield, forgotten in the long grass, was the shellof a Chinese fighter plane. I managed to climb into thecockpit, and would sit on the low metal seat, surroundedby the grimy controls. It was a magical experience, moreexciting than any funfair ride, not because I could imaginethe sounds of battle, machine-gun fire and rushing air, butbecause I was alone with this stricken but mysterious craft,an intact dream of flight. I visited it three or four times,whenever there was a lunch party, and if one of the adultssaw me slipping through the fence I would say that I waslooking for a lost kite, which in a sense I was. On my lastvisit, as I stepped out onto the airfield, several Japanesesoldiers were inspecting the hangar and ordered me away.Years later, this small airfield became the site of ShanghaiInternational Airport. In 1991, when I stepped down thegangway of the Airbus that had brought me to Shanghaifrom Hong Kong, I could almost sense the presence of a small boy still sitting in his Chinese fighter, unaware of theyears that had flown past him.
    My sister Margaret (now Margaret Richardson, untilrecently director of the Soane Museum) was born in 1937,but the seven-year gap between us meant that she neverbecame a childhood friend. When I was 10 she was still atoddler. I was busy with my exploration of the InternationalSettlement, and my prolonged but unsuccessful attempts tofraternise with the Japanese soldiers who manned the check-pointsinto the city. There was a strain of melancholy in theJapanese that I responded to, although I myself was neversad. I had a natural optimism that I only lost when I arrivedin England, and I was probably hyperactive, in today’sjargon. I was always on the go, whether playing my intenseprivate games with my model soldiers, leading the Kendall-Ward boys on an expedition to a ruined factory I had discovered,or exploring some unknown corner of the Shanghaisuburbs.
    The most visible features of the flat landscape beyondAmherst Avenue were the family burial mounds built ontothe retaining walls of the paddy fields. The water table wasonly three feet below the surface of the ground, and none ofthe villagers buried their dead beneath the soil (at one timeI went through a well-digging phase, sinking half a dozenwells into the flowerbeds in our garden until the gardenerprotested). The mounds could be six to ten feet high,