Will ask you to identify yourself
But this will lead to hell, the route
The pilgrims take – down the valleys
Of concealed renewal to the pier-theatre,
The crinkle-crankle wall, the graveyard up for sale.
J. G. Ballard
[1930-]
James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai, China, where he spent the first sixteen years of his life. During the Second World War he was interned in a civilian prisoner-of-war camp. In 1946 he was repatriated to Britain, but the vision of a ravaged and desolate post-war Shanghai left a powerful impression on him and was to influence his writing in the years to come. His urban landscapes appear as places of numbing destruction (London as ‘a city of hell’), or lose their identities completely in the face of chaos.
After attending King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied medicine but left without taking his degree, Ballard worked at odd jobs and, in the early 1950s, served in the Royal Air Force. In 1954 he married Helen Matthews and the two settled near London. His first short stories, written in the early 1960s and later published as Terminal Beach (1964), appeared in the British science-fiction magazines Science Fantasy and New Worlds. Ballard gradually gained a reputation for science-fiction writing that transcended the traditions of the genre and his explorations of psychological ‘inner space’ earned him respect among purveyors of science fiction’s ‘New Wave’ movement.
It is widely acknowledged that Ballard’s canon can be divided into ‘serious’, more demanding work and lighter ‘entertainments’. His first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), would most likely fall into this second category. It was followed by The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965; previously issued as The Burning World in 1964) and The Crystal World (1966), a trilogy which explored the disintegration of civilization in the face of environmental catastrophe.
In 1964 Helen Matthews died. The loss of his wife, with whom he had three children, had a profound effect on Ballard’s writing. His production of short stories decreased and his fiction became increasingly sombre. Crash (1973), which was seen as a cult triumph by some but as unnecessarily provocative by others, explored themes of violence, sexual perversion and moral and emotional sterility. Two stories of Robinson Crusoe-type castaways, Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975) followed Crash. In the former, the protagonist is trapped on a traffic island; in the latter, a luxury apartment building becomes the isolated setting for social savagery.
In 1984 Ballard received the Guardian Prize for Empire of the Sun (1984), a largely autobiographical novel set in Shanghai during the Second World War. Empire of the Sun, which decries the senselessness and brutality of war, also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1985. His subsequent works include Running Wild (1988) and The Kindness of Women (1991).
In 1966 many of Ballard’s essays and reviews were collected in A User’s Guide to the Millennium.
In stark contrast to Lawrence Durrell, Ballard sees London as not decadent enough. His ‘First Impressions of London’ (1993) is a commentary upon Britain, which to his eyes never recovered from the ravages of the Second World War.
First Impressions of London
My image of London was formed during my Shanghai childhood in the 1930s as I listened to my parents’ generation talk nostalgically of West End shows, the bright lights of Piccadilly, Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence, reinforced by a Peter Pan and Christopher Robin image of a London that consisted entirely of Knightsbridge and Kensington, where I per cent of the population was working class and everyone else was a barrister or stockbroker. When I actually arrived in 1946 I found a London that looked like Bucharest with a hangover – heaps of rubble, an exhausted ferret-like people defeated by war and still deluded by Churchillian rhetoric, hobbling around a wasteland of poverty, ration books and grotesque social division.
To understand London now one has to grasp the fact that in this city, as nowhere else in the world, World War II is still going on. The spivs are running delis and restaurants, and an occupying arm of international bankers and platinum-card tourists has taken the place of the American servicemen. The people are stoical and underpaid, with a lower standard of living and tackier services than in any comparable Western capital. The weary camaraderie of the Blitz holds everything together. Bombs should fall tonight but probably won’t, but one senses that people would welcome them.
How to improve London? Launch a crash programme to fill the city with pirate TV stations, nightclubs, brothels and porn parlours. London needs to become as decadent as Weimar Berlin. Instead, it is merely a decadent Bournemouth.
Eva Figes
[1932-]
Eva Figes was born Eva Unger in Berlin, Germany, into an affluent Jewish family. Her father was imprisoned in Dachau following Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938). Eventually, he managed to procure visas for himself and his family, and in 1939 Eva, her parents and her brother fled to England. Figes later received a scholarship to Queen Mary College, University of London, where she received a BA in English.
In 1952 Figes began working as an editor at a London publishing house. In 1954 she married John George Figes, with whom she had two children. It was after the breakdown of their marriage that she wrote her first novel, Equinox (1966), which tells of one critical year in a woman’s life. She then left publishing and began writing and translating full-time. In 1967 she won the Guardian Fiction Prize for her second novel, Winter Journey, which chronicles a day in the life of a confused, elderly man. Figes wrote several more novels before publishing a personal memoir, Little Eden: A Child at War (1978), in which she recounts her experiences during the 1940–41 Blitz of Britain. In this book the sense of personal alienation and ‘statelessness’ that she shares with many of her fictional characters is evident.
Figes has often been termed a ‘modernist’, for her novels digress from traditional forms. In keeping with her desire to reshape conventions, she questions accepted sexual stereotypes and in her writing she often addresses the issue of female estrangement from the mainstream of power. Her later works include Ghosts (1988) and The Tree of Knowledge (1990). Her latest novel, The Knot, was published in 1996.
The following extract from Figes’s personal memoir Little Eden: A Child at War, reveals the pain and anxiety of being both Jewish and German in the England of the 1930s and 1940s.
From Little Eden: A Child at War
In London, for the past year, apart from a few weeks in Scotland waiting for a German invasion which never came, I had been trying very hard to get myself accepted in the childhood network of streets, school and playground whose laws were strange to me. I was foreign, used to large households with servants. All my life I had been sheltered, not only from the realities of poverty, but from the much harsher realities of life in Germany. As a small child I did not look particularly Jewish, and I could not have told you what the word meant. The adult world was wrapped in mysteries, sensed tension not understood, but always I was cushioned from the impact of harsh reality. My father had been arrested while on a business trip to Dusseldorf, so his continued absence was easily explained. He was simply ‘away’ on business. My nursemaid, who later died of cholera in a concentration camp, organized a singsong in a back room away from the street while the smashing and looting, the beating and killing, went on four floors below at street level. All the servants had instructions to lie, and they must have been quite good at it. My nursemaid only got caught out once: when I stopped outside a shop displaying brown uniforms and leather belts and boots, and asked what they were for. She did not answer, she had no answer ready, which is why I remember that shop so vividly. But the smashed shop windows did not make much impression, because my question was promptly answered by prearrangement: they are being repaired. My brother and I could see that the shops were being repaired, so the aftermath of the Kristallnacht faded into everyday reality.
But our sheltered and comfortable existence ended the day my father came back from concentration camp. From that moment on I felt caught up in a drama, which started with the housemaid Edith waiting for us on the pavement in her black and white uniform. We got off the tram with the nursemaid and I saw her standing outside the main house door, without even a coat slung over her shoulders. The nurse was told not to bring us indoors, but to take us straight on to our grandparents. Herr Unger had scarlet fever.
We spent some time with my grandparents, where I slept on a sofa and we had English lessons in the afternoons from a young German woman and learned a few words and phrases which later proved quite useless. After a while my grandparents, who only had a small flat and one servant, were given a rest, and we were moved to my other, widowed grandmother, who lived in gloomy and palatial splendour in a vast apartment on the Kurfürstendamm. Here I caught only a brief glimpse of my mother, who turned up to settle a row which had flared up between my grandmother and the nurse, whose nerves appeared to have reached breaking point.
The day we were finally brought back home was also memorable. My father stood in the living room, looking pale and thin. But we knew he had been ill. What I had not been led to expect was the state of the apartment: the living room was almost bare of furniture, and the carpets had disappeared. My father grinned at my puzzled astonishment on seeing familiar surroundings so changed.
‘We’re going to England,’ he said, and our excitement changed to terror when we made too much noise at the passport office and a man in military uniform with a swastika armband frightened us into round-eyed silence when he shouted at us to keep quiet and glared down at us from his desk while he examined the passports. And when we went to the British Embassy my father only had to warn us once: we waited in the old-fashioned hallway in subdued awe, quiet as mice. By now, aged six, I had learned that officialdom was to be feared, understood that bureaucrats exercised powers of life and death over people and, judging by the Nazi at the passport office, they could exercise it arbitrarily, depending on their mood and how you behaved.
Crowded into two cars, accompanied by two grandmothers, my grandfather, and an aunt, we drove in a rather sombre mood, like a funeral cortège, to the airport at Tempelhof. It was a bleak, overcast day. During the customs formalities it began to hail and I saw my grandfather outside the plate-glass windows peering in to try and catch a final glimpse of us. He looked very forlorn outside, with the hailstones coming down on him, though he did not seem to notice them. He had not seen me: I pulled at the bottom of my father’s coat to draw his attention but he was much too busy to take any notice. Afterwards, settled in the aeroplane, they were only a remote group of tiny figures standing outside the building, waiting for the plane to take off. We were told to wave, but I do not suppose they even saw us.
My brother, aged four, caused a last-minute diversion by announcing in a loud voice that, contrary to instructions, he had not spent his pocket money. He had it on him. He knew that from now on we would be poor, so if father ran short of cash he could rely on him to help out. The whole plane smiled at the pudgy small boy with ash-blond hair who thought himself a responsible man with just over one mark in his pocket, but my mother’s smile was strained and anxious. I had been taken into a small shop a few days earlier and instructed to spend my money on anything, whether I wanted it or not, but my brother’s childhood instinct for hoarding money had more than a touch of high drama on this occasion. He felt self-important and spoke in a very loud voice. By now I knew enough to be anxious in case we were all taken off the plane at the last minute.
But we took off, leaving everything behind. For years I was to take off, in a recurring dream, leaving them all behind, under that dark menacing sky.
My father had depicted England as the promised land with its own mythology: policemen with funny helmets, a city of buildings streaked black and white, regularly enveloped in dense fogs of legendary oddness, old railway stations where the taxis came right inside the station. Reality became, first a sordid boarding-house off the Finchley Road where I was scared to go to sleep at nights, then a small surburban flat where the furniture which we had brought from Berlin would not fit. Large Persian carpets lay rolled up against the wall as they were far too long for the small floors, sideboards and wardrobes and beds took up so much space that there was no room left to move. We rapidly acquired a new mythology of England: small rooms, draughty windows without double glazing, no central heating, outside plumbing which froze and started an indoor flood at the first sign of winter, and open coal fires which scorched your face whilst your back remained icy.
I started school, and my difficulties began. They did not really resolve themselves until I passed the eleven-plus and moved on to the local grammar school, but the period of fifteen months I spent in Cirencester was a welcome respite from the private war in which I found myself involved for so many years, no doubt one reason why it turned out to be such a special time.
When I came to Cirencester in 1940 I was raw with the effort of a year in which I had tried, oh so hard, to acclimatize not just to a foreign country in language and geography. If I had moved to Mayfair or Kensington I doubt whether I would have noticed any change. The foreign country was made up of a network of small, jerry-built semi-detached houses where children ran loose in the quiet residential streets, uncontrolled by adults. Nursemaids were unheard of, mothers did their own housework and allowed their children out of doors until dark: to fight, climb trees, invent dangerous games, sneak into back gardens for missing balls, roam from street to street and house to house until dusk or hunger drove us home. To my amazement my mother, who now did her own housework, allowed me to run wild and asked no questions. It was as though that other world of supervised walks, decorum and curtsies, separate meals in the day nursery, had been totally negated, by more than mere absence of money.
I liked being poor. I saw much more of my mother, and playing with gangs of children in the streets was exciting, an endless adventure. But I suffered from a handicap: from the day I was introduced into a classroom of forty staring children in my odd foreign clothes, only able to speak a few words, writing a peculiar script which my teacher dismissed as scribble, I was branded. I was allowed to join in girls’ games on sufferance, and made to feel excluded from more secret rites. Even though I quickly learned the language and the tribal customs of alley and playground, the fact that I had arrived as a foreign child was never forgotten or forgiven, and with the rise of anti-German feeling after the outbreak of war my nationality was always good for abuse. The girls were the worst: they mostly played in groups, and my acceptance seemed to depend entirely on the mood of the acknowledged leader, whose hostility immediately infected the others. My troubles were offset but perhaps also exacerbated by the fact that as a shy, withdrawn little foreigner I quickly became the object of chivalrous attention from several small boys in the class, who invited me to tea, brought me flowers from their back garden, and came to call for me on their way to school. My popularity with boys only made the girls more standoffish and hostile, since they were openly jealous.
I learned to hate that school anyhow, for its crass teaching methods, but I was never to live down my German origin there, long after my English was perfect and I could conform to the patterns of the playground with the rest. I never knew when I would be accused next of being one of the hated enemy, except that I knew I would be. I was conscious of injustice, since my father was a soldier in the British army, which was more than most of their fathers were. But somehow these things were never open to discussion. I was too hurt and confused, my accusers too confident in their self-righteous prejudice.
Perhaps I suffered no more than any intelligent and sensitive child in such a group, but this particular group always had a stick to beat me with, and I never knew when they would take it into their heads to turn on me. At the dinner table ‘shiny’ spoons were much sought after as a status symbol. As a mark of friendship girls would go and get one for their friends from the cutlery tray. Nobody ever offered to find one for me. Conscious of a slight, I acquired one of the rare shiny spoons and took to keeping it in my purse, ready for the next day’s meal. A few days later I found a gang of girls waiting for me as I came out of school. As usual there was a leader. They accused me of stealing cutlery and made me open my purse. I was marched off to one of the ‘dinner ladies’, who not only would not listen to my explanation, but dismissed me with the words: ‘No English child would ever do a thing like that.’ I tried to keep my head high, the tears back, as I walked home, followed by the jeers and catcalls of my classmates.
By next morning those girls were friendly once more, treated me as though nothing had happened. It was just one of those things, part of the fun and games of everyday life, and perhaps they had already forgotten the incident. But I never forgot it. Unfortunately I was proud as well as an enemy alien, and in later years I took to spending a lot of my free time in the home for parentless German-Jewish children next door to the school, where I could feel accepted as part of a strongly bonded group. Although I knew I was lucky in comparison to these children, I sometimes envied them for being all together under one large roof. It was fun there, like a permanent holiday camp, and the youth leaders always accepted me and made me welcome, when I came to join in their games. They lived openly and proudly, whilst my family was trying to hide, become English, or at least merge into the background and avoid giving any possible offence to English neighbours. Rule one: never speak German.
