Lilla's Feast (26 page)

The Japanese entertain the Westerners, Chefoo, mid-1930s. Vivvy is in the front, second from the left.

However, after that, everything seemed to have calmed down between the Chinese and Japanese. For a while, the Chinese boycotted Japanese goods, but that came to an end and trade picked up—without any resumption of talks over extraterritoriality.

Cornabé Eckford was only one-tenth the size of a vast house like Jardine’s, which, together with Swire’s, dominated the China trade. Even so, as shipping agent for Jardine’s, Asiatic Petroleum (now known as Shell), and P&O, it was a substantial concern. Cornabé Eckford itself shipped frozen eggs to America in brand-new refrigerated ships and exported every type of straw braid under the sun. The braid was woven by peasant families in the Chinese countryside and sent to the nearest Cornabé Eckford office. Vivvy and Reggie used special measuring devices to determine its grade—ladies’ hats, straw boaters, or rope—and had neat rolls of it packed into wooden crates to be sent off to milliners, gentlemen’s outfitters, and shipyards around the world.

Cornabé Eckford made hairnets, too. The local Chinese grew their long plaits to cut off and sell. And one hundred more of them sat in a factory in Chefoo sterilizing the hair and weaving it into hairnets to ship to New York.

The most glamorous trade was silk. Rolls of unbleached silk already woven into a soft fabric known as pongee were hurried across the Pacific to Vancouver on three-funneled Empress boats that could shave a couple of days off any other crossing—vital to keeping down the high insurance on silk shipments. The silk rolls were then bundled onto long, slinking freight trains. These sped across North America with such urgency that passenger services were held up to let them pass in order to meet the tight price deadlines set by the futures markets in New York and Montreal.

The least glamorous trade for the Eckfords, as it would turn out, was peanuts.

What happened certainly wasn’t Reggie’s fault. Reggie had spent the past thirty years moving around China expanding the firm. By the 1930s, he had settled in Tsingtao, a German treaty port a couple of hours’ drive across the Shantung Peninsula from Chefoo and still famous today for its beer. Over the years, Tsingtao had been slowly expanding to overtake Chefoo in both size and trade. Reggie ran what was by then the largest Cornabé Eckford office and had become British vice-consul in the port.

It was Vivvy, as the older brother, who ran the original head office in Chefoo. Or, rather, he didn’t. He spent most of his time painting and drawing, constructing backdrops for the regular amateur theatricals at the Chefoo Club. He was a keen golfer and built Chefoo’s first and only golf course—playable only at low tide. He was head of the local Freemasons. Larger than life in both character and physique, he was a
bon viveur
and a sportsman. He was everything that didn’t require him to while away the hours behind a desk in the Cornabé Eckford offices.

Nonetheless, the business seemed to be running itself quite happily. Whenever there was a particularly large shipment that required the firm to borrow the money to buy the cargo, somebody went down to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and brought Vivvy the chit to sign. The money would be handed over to the firm’s comprador, the Chinese buyer who went inland to find the goods. He then sent them to the Cornabé Eckford warehouses in the new port of Weihaiwei, an hour down the road from Chefoo. On an appointed day, a ship came and picked up the cargo. In due course, Cornabé Eckford was paid, and the firm pocketed the profit over and above the bank’s advance.

When a large order for peanuts came through, Vivvy thought nothing of it. He signed the chit, gave the money to the comprador, and went back to the golf course. But when the ship arrived at the warehouse to pick up the cargo, the loaders pulled back the tarpaulin— imaginatively strewn with a few peanuts—to find nothing underneath. And the comprador had vanished.

The scandal rocked the treaty ports. The Eckfords’ betrayal by their comprador cut right to the heart of the Westerners’ existence in China, exposing just how precarious it was. If the traders couldn’t rely on their compradors, their key employees, the most trusted of the Chinese whom they dealt with, on whom could they rely? Who would turn on them next? The news must have sent shivers down the spines of the Western hongs whose businesses depended on their compradors—the high walls around the foreign concessions in the treaty ports beginning to feel paper thin.

For the Eckfords, however, the consequences weren’t simply unnerving, they were disastrous.

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank called in the loan. The firm couldn’t meet it. Vivvy couldn’t meet it. Nor could Reggie. Nor could anyone. The firm’s, and the Eckfords’ own, assets were frozen. Reggie’s attempts to wire his children’s school fees to England were stopped midway. His children were shipped back to China with their grandmother, whose house in Crystal Palace was sold to meet part of the debt. “In any case,” says one of Reggie’s daughters philosophically, “we were all called Chinks at school.” Reggie and Vivvy were turfed out of their grand houses in Tsingtao and Chefoo and their possessions auctioned. For years afterward, the family would go out to dinner to find their old ornaments on other people’s mantelpieces.

The bank’s decision was regarded as financially harsh but justifiable, given the way in which Vivvy had been failing to run the Chefoo office. It was unforgivable, I’m told, that nobody—neither Vivvy nor either of his two sons who worked for him, Erroll and Rae—had been to the warehouse to check on the cargo. Still, Vivvy went to the British consulate to beg for help. The consul did what he could. Another Chefoo trading firm, McMullan & Co., agreed to take on the bankrupt rump of Cornabé Eckford “on very generous terms.” There were jobs for Vivvy, Reggie, and as many of their sons as wanted them. But there wasn’t any more money for Lilla.

Ernie had left her barely enough to live on. Both Arthur and Alice were struggling with young families. Alice’s husband had hardly a bean. Sir Frank Bowater was pleading poverty and Lilla could see that Beryl and Arthur needed more help than he was providing. Lilla knew what she had to do. Ernest Casey’s offer of marriage—kept fresh by Lilla’s I’m sure gently teasing correspondence—was still on the table. He even promised to leave everything to Arthur and Alice. Right now, that seemed very important to Lilla.

Lilla followed her family back to China.

Chapter 10

GOING HOME

VICTORIA STATION, LONDON, AUTUMN 1934

Lilla went back to China “via Siberia,” as she put it, in October 1934. The Trans-Siberian Express was a tough way to travel but far quicker than the boat. Lilla still hated to waste time, and it meant she could be in Chefoo in thirteen days instead of seven weeks. Concertinaing the distance between China and her children and grandchildren in England in this way made it feel less of a wrench to leave them behind.

At Victoria Station, she met up with her nephew Rugs, one of Reggie’s sons. At just seventeen Rugs was being prematurely parachuted out of the protection of an English boarding school and into a job in China with McMullan & Co. Lilla had offered to escort him out. On this trip in particular, she must have welcomed the company. She scooped him up and bundled him on board the heaving, steaming train to Europe. He still remembers the journey well, and this is what he told me.

It took two days to reach Berlin, hauling on and off a cross-Channel ferry, the rails clattering through the night. Hitler had become chancellor of Germany the year before. A few months later, he had managed to seize absolute power in a Germany hungry for self-respect. Germany had been politically and militarily humiliated by the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which fear of starvation by the victorious Allies’ continuing blockade had forced it to sign. The treaty had required Germany to give up its navy, its air force, almost all of its army, and its precious territories in Silesia, West Prussia, and Alsace-Lorraine. The country had further been devastated first by runaway inflation in the early 1920s and then, barely a decade later, by the worldwide economic depression that followed the Wall Street crash. This had left Germany’s population hungry and unemployed. And, amid a general fear of the revolutionary Communist movements growing in Europe, Hitler’s Nazism had swiftly gained huge appeal.

By the autumn of 1934, when Lilla and Rugs reached Berlin, Hitler’s Brownshirts were already marching the streets and the swastika flag was beginning to fly from every building. Lilla must have found the combination of fear and efficiency with which even the station porters were hauling cases from platform to platform slightly eerie. She’d grown up surrounded by Germans—Chefoo’s Shantung Province was the main German area in China. She spoke the language. She and Ada had even been sent to finishing school in Darmstadt, a small town near Frankfurt—an episode marked by page after page of postcards of the place, pasted into one of Lilla’s scrapbooks. But here, now, in Berlin, the people she thought she knew must have seemed suddenly quite foreign, both disturbing and comforting her. It wasn’t just her life that was changing—everyone else’s was as well.

Lilla and Rugs spent a brief night in a hotel. In the morning, they boarded the train for Stalin’s cold, gray Communist Moscow. The Moscow that had frightened Italy into Mussolini’s Fascist hands before scaring Germany into Hitler’s. That had murdered its way to domination of the dozens of old Russian Empire states that spread from the Pacific to the Baltic. And that was now looking to edge its borders farther west into Central Europe. Here, the swastikas were replaced by a blood-colored field of red flags, yellow hammers and sickles glinting in their corners. Here, it was easier for Lilla to lay a finger on what was wrong. The treaty ports in China were packed with White Russians who had fled the revolution and Communist takeover of their own country. Governesses who spoke the perfect French they had learned in their families’ grand apartments in St. Petersburg now found themselves conjugating verbs in schoolrooms instead of hosting literary salons. Doormen whose upright shoulders were used to the heavy braid of a cavalry officer’s armor. Cleaning ladies whose earlobes still hung low from the weight of the diamonds they had once worn. The stories that these Russians had brought with them to China had made the treaty porters’ blood run cold. A few hours in Moscow was enough. Then Lilla and Rugs steamed east out of town on the Trans-Siberian Express.

The journey through the ice took seven long days. The train stopped and started dozens of times each day. Sometimes in wooden-chaleted towns that reminded European travelers of the Alps. Sometimes at snowbound villages, where it was hard to imagine anyone could survive the winter. Sometimes at just a collection of broken-down shacks, where Lilla and Rugs heard orders being barked, the click of rifles being primed, as unwilling passengers were hauled off the other end of the train. At these stops, they found themselves sitting in silence until the train had pulled away.

For hundreds of miles, the track was enclosed on either side by an interminable beech forest. Lilla must have felt that she was being swallowed up by a long tunnel that would spit her out on the other side of the world, into a new existence. The train rattled on, the heat from its wheels melting the ice on the rails. Even inside the train, it was so cold that they had to wear gloves to stop the skin on their hands from sticking to the brass rails as they clutched their way to the dining car. Vast piles of black caviar served as casually as butter overflowed from bowls in the middle of the table. Other than that, the fare was barely edible. They wandered out of the first-class section of the train to find the other carriages packed with passengers crammed upright on wooden benches, their heads bouncing off their neighbors’ shoulders as they tried to sleep.

Then they staggered back along the swaying train to their berths, where Lilla opened a suitcase that she had packed with food, just in case. I can just see her sitting there in the rocking carriage, an open bag on her black-skirted lap heaving with flour-dusted salami and wurst picked up in Berlin. With hard cheddars and soft smoked cheeses kept fresh by the refrigerating temperature on the train. With freshly ground coffee and loose China tea. Tins of pâté, peaches in syrup, and chilled chocolate bars that took a great effort to break in two. Lilla and Rugs pressed their noses against the steamed-up windowpanes, straining to catch a glimpse of the snow-ridden forest and magnificent lakes outside. And they nibbled their way to the Manchurian city of Harbin.

Harbin is one of the most northern cities in China. Even in summer, it can be a desolate place. But when Lilla and Rugs arrived, there was, as in Berlin, a deeper chill in the air. Ever since it had invaded Manchuria three years earlier, Japan had been piling a vast army into the northeastern province—a force far too large for Manchuria alone. But the soldiers had kept on arriving, the rumble of their feet shaking the windswept wasteland. Harbin’s streets must have felt ready to overflow with neat, sharp uniformed faces waiting to have somewhere else to go.