Paul French - Bloody Saturday: Shanghai’s Darkest Day: Penguin Specials

15 February, 1941 Farrens Nightclub, Great Western Road, The Shanghai Badlands

S hanghai is not the city it once was... She heard it over and over again, repeated so often it had become received wisdom. At the still-swank cocktail parties just off the Bund; at dinner parties in the still-elegant apartments and villa houses of the French Concession... Since August 37, Bloody Saturday, Shanghai was not what it once was.

She disagreed.

Not that war, the bombings, the Japanese hadnt changed things, but that change wasnt all bad. Shanghai clouds had silver linings. Her father, a bullion dealer, was making more money than ever inflationary and uncertain times meant demand for gold had soared. The Japanese encirclement of the foreign concessions was an inconvenience; few ships came and went; the airplane services were erratic to non-existent. Life in the protected Solitary Island could be tiresome as it meant many of lifes goodies didnt make it to Shanghai anymore, but nothing was insurmountable.

For Alice Daisy Simmons, just turned twenty-eight, a Shanghailander by birth, unmarried and a partner in her fathers firm, Solitary Island life was exciting. From her Frenchtown penthouse, the wardrobe stuffed with tailormade gowns and Siberian furs, Alice looked out on a city that twinkled at night like a jewel box. They all knew war raged in the hinterlands, that the wartime capital at Chungking was bombed nightly, that little seemed to stand in the way of the Japanese and their desire to subjugate all China. But here, in Shanghais foreign concessions, the neon still shone brightly, taxicabs still hustled for fares, and the nightclubs swung just like before.

While other Shanghailander girls had been shipped out down to Hong Kong, away to far off Australia she had stayed. Her father believed in Shanghai, believed the Japanese would want it to remain a special place that generated profits for them. Therefore they would leave it alone, ring-fence it, and let Shanghai do what it had always done: make profit. She believed that too.

And so she had remained in the Solitary Island, and found it a surrounded citadel where those who could afford it continued to dedicate themselves to pleasure as the rest of the world burned around them. This was Shanghai in 1941, and she was part of it.

A chill Shanghai February, close to midnight. Alice arrives at Farrens on the Great Western Road, her favourite nightspot, supposedly the largest in the Far East. The place enthrals her. After the Japanese invaded the western districts of the city and allowed the cabarets, casinos, dope dens and brothels of the Badlands to spring up cheek-by-jowl alongside the streets and boulevards of the Settlement and Frenchtown, she had begun making excuses to avoid the stuffy drawing room soires; the boring tittle-tattle of lunchtime tiffins and Frenchtown cafs. What she discovered, under the neon lights, beyond the velvet rope, was Farrens and its three floors of roulette, chemin-de-fer and craps.

She is known here, treated with respect, among people who feel the same thrill. The young Austrian refugees who man the doors swing them wide open and usher her in with exaggerated bows and cheeky winks. The head doorman, Walter, a great bear of a Viennese but always charming, helps Alice out of her fur as a coatcheck girl has a hanger ready. He motions her towards the bar where Joe Farren, the patron of the club and master impresario of Shanghais wartime nightlife, pours her a glass of champagne from an iced bucket that stands on the corner, always full, ready for Dapper Joe to toast his most favoured clientele. He kisses her cheeks and raises his own glass. They clink flutes. He whispers in her ear over the sound of the band whipping up a storm on the dancefloor. She doesnt quite hear what he says but nods and smiles. With Gentleman Joe its always compliments.