Lilla's Feast (22 page)

A professional soldier, Ernie must have been aching to return to battle before it was all over. His old Indian boss, Lord Kitchener, had become Secretary of State for war, and his face was looming down from posters throughout the land. YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU, the drawing bellowed, his outstretched arm appearing to point straight between the eyes of anyone who stopped to look.

By the end of 1915, more than one million volunteers had signed up—for war was still regarded as a glorious opportunity for adventure. Those who hadn’t were receiving anonymous white feathers of cowardice in the post. When, in December, Ernie was pronounced fit to return to action, he must have raced to book a passage back east. He might not have been heading for the still-glamorous and sought-after center of the action in the trenches on the western front—the full horror of this war had yet to reach its climax, let alone the eyes and ears of those still at home—but he was going to play his part.

Shortly before Christmas 1915, he boarded the SS
Persia,
a passenger liner, to return to the East. As Lilla bid him farewell, I don’t think it occurred to her that she might never see him again. The journey had its risks. Just seven months earlier, the Lusitania had been sunk by a U-boat, killing 1,200 passengers. But this had caused an outrage. As a rule, a U-boat was supposed to surface in a gentlemanly fashion and give a warning to an enemy civilian ship, allowing those on board time to clamber into lifeboats and, if necessary, taking them on board the U-boat itself for their own safety. Only then would the vessel be sunk with a gun mounted on the U-boat’s deck. In any case, U-boats could carry only half a dozen underwater missiles at a time, and they kept them for when the gun wouldn’t do.

Lilla and Ernie’s parting was probably not so different from any of their other separations. A firm enveloping hug, broken off brusquely enough for Ernie to maintain his dignity in front of his fellow passengers. A final peck on the cheek. A promise to meet up again as soon as possible when the war was over, surely in no more than a few months’ time. And Lilla, now thirty-three and with thirteen-year-old Arthur and eleven-year-old Alice standing on either side, would have waved him off.

Ernie’s trip promised to be comfortable. The passenger list shows only 185 passengers on board, and there was a full crew of almost 300 to look after them. His fellow passengers included a few couples, several families both British and Indian, an infant or two unnamed on the register, and a smattering of military men, like himself. Among them was a colonel whom Ernie befriended, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. Montagu was a motoring fanatic and, in the late 1890s, had been one of the first people in Britain to own a motorcar. On the
Persia,
he was, amid some scandal, traveling with his mistress, the actress Eleanor Thornton, whose curvaceous figure was the model for the Spirit of Ecstasy, the six-inch silver figurehead that still adorns the bonnet of Rolls-Royce cars today. Montagu had been appointed inspector of all mechanical vehicles in India. Ernie, a logistics lieutenant colonel trained in mechanical transportation, must have had a great deal to talk to him about.

By the time the
Persia
reached Marseilles, the passengers reckoned that they had passed the most dangerous part of their journey. The ship’s captain was less convinced. He had been given detailed instructions as to the exact course he should take through the Mediterranean and how he should destroy the ship’s documents were the worst to happen. With this in mind, he held the ship at Malta until precisely 10:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 28, so that its journey through the U-boat-infested corridor between Crete and North Africa would be made under the cover of night. The following day, before the ship reached Crete, there was a lifeboat drill. Comfortingly, with the memory of the
Titanic
still fresh in every sea traveler’s mind, the boats were only half full. That night, as the
Persia
crept past Crete, the crew was tense, jumping at every sound or flicker on the horizon. But as dawn broke on December 30, a wave of relief swept through the ship. The worst was over. They were now within twenty-four hours of the safety of Port Said in Egypt.

Even in midwinter, the sun off the North African coast can be strong and the weather distinctly, almost claustrophobically, warm. By midmorning, the ship’s main saloon was becoming stuffy. The passengers began to clamor for the portholes to be opened. Given the calm weather, this would not have been a problem in peacetime. In wartime, however, it was strictly forbidden, as open portholes could rapidly sink a listing ship. As the temperature rose, the passengers’ protests grew. Eventually, permission was given for the portholes to be opened.

What no one on the ship realized was that the
Persia
was being tracked by U-boat 38 of the Imperial German Navy, in the hands of the U-boat ace Max Valentiner. In just five days in August 1915, he had sunk thirty ships. Valentiner had two attributes that distinguished him from other U-boat captains. One was the ability to sneak right up to a ship unseen. The other was enough ruthlessness to open fire on civilians, which he had recently done when the passengers on an Italian vessel had failed to follow his orders to disembark—the scandal of this event filling the newspapers as the
Persia
set sail.

According to his diary, Valentiner was not convinced that the
Persia
was a civilian ship. He wrote that he believed it was a troop transport— maybe he saw Ernie wandering the decks in his uniform. But I’m not sure that this mattered. A few weeks previously, he had searched a British civilian ship and discovered sealed orders for all British ships to attack U-boats. In his view, this made all British ships fair game. And as the
Persia
had a gun on its deck, it would have been impossible for Valentiner to surface without imperiling his U-boat and crew.

Shortly before one o’clock, the luncheon gong on the
Persia
was rung and the passengers poured into the saloon. But as they lifted their knives and forks to their first course, Valentiner’s U-boat, hovering under the waves just a few hundred yards from the
Persia,
let fire a precious torpedo.

At ten minutes past one, Valentiner’s torpedo exploded in the
Persia
’s hull. As the ship began to list, its engines continued to steam away, propelling it through the water at some speed and taking in more and more water as it went. Within three minutes, the main saloon was underwater and the sea began to pound in through the open portholes. The ship’s decks started to fracture, and the stench of explosives began to rise up through the cracks. By now, the tilt was making it impossible to lower the lifeboats on the starboard side, and the passengers and crew who had managed to reach the deck flocked to the other side of the boat. The situation even there was not much better. The few boats that were making it into the water were being smashed by the ongoing speed of the ship. As the water gushed in, the
Persia
turned on its side. Those who could clambered back across the ship’s near-vertical deck and leaped from the rail as the ship went under. At 1:15 p.m., just five minutes after it had been hit, the
Persia
’s funnels disappeared beneath the waves.

Ernie made it off the ship into the water. He was lucky to do this. Most of the three-hundred-odd people lost, including seventeen of the nineteen children on board, were trapped belowdecks—many on their way back to their cabins to retrieve their life jackets after the drill the day before. The cheaper your cabin, the farther you had to walk from the saloon. As the ship went down, it pulled many of those in the water into a whirlpool of wreckage that knocked them about. Ernie went under and then, pulled up by his life jacket, rose to the surface as the sea cleared. Montagu told Lilla that he had last seen him in the water after the ship sank, “looking dazed and confused as we all were but otherwise all right.” At that stage, Ernie still had a life jacket on. Montagu managed to reach one of the five lifeboats that picked up more than 150 survivors. Ernie, somehow, did not, despite the broad sweep for survivors made by the lifeboats. Nor, as it happens, did Eleanor Thornton. “You will easily understand how much I sympathise,” wrote Montagu to Lilla.

Years later, my aunt Jane, Ernie’s granddaughter, was accosted at a party by a lady who swore that Ernie had saved her mother’s life by handing her his life jacket. He had claimed to be a strong enough swimmer to cope.

Poor Ernie. It must have been very cold in that water. And he hated the sea.

Lilla was doing her hair, her always perfect hair, when she heard that the
Persia
had gone down. The announcement made on New Year’s Day by P&O, whose ship it was, simply stated: “Most of the passengers and crew lost. Four boats got clear.”

I imagine her, motionless with shock, gazing into her dressing-table mirror, its wings showing her cheeks whitening almost to the color of the tiny diamonds in her ears as she thought of Ernie floating cold and lifeless beneath the sea.

It was two days before the first list of survivors emerged. The story was splashed over the front of the
Times
on the morning of Monday, January 3, 1916. It named those who had already been hauled off the lifeboats. Lilla must have read and reread the list several times. Ernie’s name wasn’t on it.

Lilla didn’t know whether her husband was dead or whether he was still paddling some lifeboat to shore. Another boat carrying survivors did make it to shore a few days later. But Ernie wasn’t on board that one either. As the weeks passed and no more boats appeared, Lilla must have felt suspended between marriage and widowhood. Between Ernie and an empty space. Between a life in India and another future. Wondering what life would hold for her now.

The telegram came on January 24. The postmaster’s penciled scrawl covered two pages:

The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the army have sustained by the death of your husband in the service of his country their Majesties truly sympathise with you in your sorrow Keeper of the Privy Purse.

Ernie’s family was, naturally, extremely sad to lose him. Some time afterward, his sister Laura wrote, in a family history, of the “very bitter irony of fate that he should be drowned” after having given up being a sailor years earlier. Papa had died in 1911, but Mama—who survived until she failed to recover from a gallstone operation in 1919—posted a movingly simple tribute in the Memorials column of the papers: “In loving memory of my darling son, Lieut. Col. Ernest Russell Howell, I.A., lost in the S.S. ‘Persia,’ off Crete, Dec. 30th, 1915.”

But Lilla’s feelings were not so clear-cut. And as the words on the telegram sank in, she must have felt a strange combination of relief and despair. It had been decided. Officialdom, the powers that be, had drawn a line through her husband’s name. She should think him gone.

Yet it must have been hard to feel certain. There was no eyewitness account of his head sinking beneath the waves, no body to bury, no guarantee that, somewhere, somehow, Ernie hadn’t clambered ashore and was living, breathing, still. All Lilla had was a note telling her that somebody thought, to the best of their knowledge, that Ernie was sleeping somewhere beneath the cold waves of the sea.

Nor would she have felt certain that she wanted to cry.

Useful Ice Cream Hints

If the ice cream is required quickly, a small amount of gelatine helps the mixture to freeze more smoothly. The cream should be beaten until quite stiff before being added.

The mixtures that ices are made of vary greatly in richness. They may be made of cornflour or custard powder, sweetened and flavored to taste, or egg custard and fruit puree. To make the foundation ice cream, beat the eggs and sugar together and pour on the warm milk. When cold, add the cream. Ice cream can be served in glasses with a sauce or fruit. It can also be served with sponge cake, the middle taken out and replaced with ice cream. A handle made of sponge can be placed on top, thus forming a basket.