https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/14/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview10
“I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn’t in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of their car.” The proximity of Shepperton film studios was important. “They were why I picked this place. The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.”
Ballard claims that he has “always treated England as a strange fiction”. The real world, in which he was formed, was Shanghai, where he was born in 1930 and brought up as a typical privileged expatriate boy in the city’s International Settlement, without learning Chinese or tasting a morsel of native cuisine. “I didn’t have a Chinese meal until I returned to England.” In 1943, his world flipped upside down when he was incarcerated with his parents in the Lunghua detention camp. In his collection of memoirs, Miracles of Life, published earlier this year, Ballard writes that he was “largely happy” in Lunghua, finding there “a relaxed and easygoing world” that he had not known in everyday life. He claims that he thrived during his two and a half years in detention, “even when food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, “
How my heart sings 