From Shanghai to Shepperton

Abstract

Shanghai was an American zone of influence. All the foreign nationals there lived an American style of life. They had American-style houses, air-conditioning and refrigerators, and American cars. I never saw an English car until I came to Britain in 1946. We had Coca-Cola — and American-style commercial radio stations. We used to listen to the radio a lot. Shanghai itself had about ten English-language radio stations, and they were blaring out American programmes and radio serials. (I think there were sf serials.) And of course there were American films on show in the cinemas which I went to from a very early age. I started going to the movies when I was six or seven, something my own children didn’t do (they had television). One had a peculiar cultural diet, in a way. I spent a great deal of time reading as a child — all the childhood classics, like Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, as well as American comics and the American mass magazines of the day, Collier’s, Life and so on. I don’t think I read any Jules Verne, though I certainly read H.G. Wells. There were popularized versions of Wells’s novels in the American comic books, and those things called Big Little Books. I must have read a bit of science fiction in book form, but I certainly didn’t buy the sf magazines until much later, when I went to Canada.