It seemed difficult to imagine such things emerging from the respectable streets of Shepperton. Some explanation was guessed at on the publication of Ballard’s wonderful 1984 novel, Empire of the Sun, about a boy’s wartime experiences in a prison camp in Shanghai. The origins of this extraordinary and wonderful writer are now set out in this pellucid, forgiving, tranquil autobiography.

Ballard’s boyhood was spent in a Shanghai already phantasmagorical — ‘the honour guard of 50 Chinese hunchbacks outside the film première of The Hunchback of Notre Dame stays in the mind’. Even in peace time, his upbringing in a mock-Tudor villa on Shanghai’s Amherst Avenue was far closer to the raw facts of life and death than any childhood spent in Weybridge at the same time would have been. The dead baby of a beggar left pressed against a heating grille and the torrential public defecations of rickshaw coolies suffering from cholera and dysentery are unforgettably present to Ballard even now.

When the Japanese took the city, Ballard and the rest of the British and Allied community were interned at Lunghua Camp. He calls it ‘my last real childhood home’ and even, amazingly, tells us that the years he spent there were largely happy. ‘The camp was, in effect, a huge slum, and in any slum it is the teenage boys who run wild.’ We’ve grown used to the prison-camp memoir, but Ballard’s stands out for its sheer oddity, and what is surely total authenticity. He was only 15 when the war ended, a fact occasionally brought home in a terrifying manner, as precious boyhood possessions attract the attention of torturers:

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP