Miracles of Life by J. G. Ballard Page A

the camp radios,but the encouraging news about the war may have promptedthe first escape from the camp in 1944. A group of five or sixmen stepped through the wire and set off for the Chineselines 400 miles away, and they were followed by others. Onegroup made it to freedom, but others were betrayed byChinese villagers terrified of ferocious reprisals from theJapanese.
    An immediate result was the sacking of the camp commandant, Hyashi. Lunghua was placed under the directcommand of the Japanese military, and a harsher regimefollowed. The food ration was cut, and a second innerbarbed-wire fence was built around the central cluster ofbuildings that housed the unmarried internees. The gateswere shut at 7 o’clock, which meant that G Block was cut offfrom much of camp life in the evenings. Presumably theJapanese decided that married men with children were notlikely to escape. Roll-calls were stepped up, and took placetwice daily, when we stood wearily in the corridor outsideour rooms as the guards laboriously checked that we were allpresent. Whenever there was a major infraction of campregulations, or a significant defeat of their forces in thePacific, the new commandant would impose a curfew andclose the camp school, sometimes for two or three days, areal punishment for the parents forced to endure theirfractious children.
    The shower block was closed, and from then on we had tocarry buckets of warm water from the Bubbling Well andWaterloo heating stations, an exhausting daily chore that Iperformed for my mother (my father was working as astoker in the camp kitchens). The two dining halls were alsoclosed, and food arrived on metal-wheeled carts pulled bytwo of the G Block internees. As ravenous as ever, I wouldlisten out for the metal creaking of the cartwheels, and thenrush to be first in the queue as our ration of congee andsweet potato was doled out in the entrance hall. Later, while everyone recovered from their meal, I would help push thecart back to the kitchens and be allowed to scrape thebottom of the potato bin.
    Lunghua winters were fiercely cold. We were living inunheated buildings, and many people retired to bed for aslong as they could. My father learned from George Osbornethat many of the windows in the school classrooms hadlost their glass during the 1937 battles around Lunghua.Somehow my father persuaded parents to contributewhatever old pieces of cloth they had kept. He cut these intodozens of small squares, melted candles into a shallow trayand soaked the cotton in the molten wax. Tacked into placeby the teachers, they kept much of the icy wind from ourclassrooms.
    My mother liked to brew tea to keep warm, and one of mychess opponents, a garage owner named Richards, taught mehow to build a chatty, a primitive Chinese stove constructedfrom a five-gallon oilcan that we pilfered from the guards’refuse tip. We gouged reinforcing bars from the flakingconcrete of the ruined buildings, slotted them through thecan above a draught door and then moulded wet clay toform a venturi. The kitchen ovens burned a low-gradecoking coal, and in the tips outside the furnaces one couldfind small pieces of coke. I squatted on the still-warm ash-tips, poking with a bent piece of wire through the dust andclinkers, and thinking of the Chinese beggar boys whopicked over the Avenue Joffre ash-tips. I remember reflecting on this without comment, and I make no comment now.
    My father sometimes brought small portions of boiledrice for my mother, but as a principled man refused to bringany coal to fuel the chatty. In my roamings around the campI found a broken Chinese bayonet, a handle and three inchesof snapped blade. Over a few weeks I sharpened this to apoint, rubbing away at any hard stone I could find. Oneevening, in the darkness an hour before curfew, I led BobbyHenderson to the rear wall of the coal store behind thekitchens, and used the bayonet to scrape away the mortar.After removing two of the bricks, I drew out several handfulsof