Lilla's Feast (31 page)

Lilla’s letter is a reply to one from her daughter-in-law, Beryl. Beryl, who had muttered disparagingly behind Lilla’s back that she looked as if she had Chinese blood in her. Beryl, whose family had regarded Lilla’s family—the Howells as well as the Eckfords, and God knows what they would have made of the Jennings story had they heard it—as poor nobodies. Beryl, who might never have been in a kitchen before she married but who by now hadn’t seen her husband for two years, who was spending her nights firewatching and, like every other mother caught up in the war, was desperately worried about getting enough food for her children. Beryl was begging Lilla for money because, she said, her father wouldn’t help. The only reason the letter was brought to Lilla’s door was that Beryl hadn’t put enough stamps on it and the post-man could therefore ask Lilla to pay the overweight charge in cash.

“My darling Beryl,” it starts. Darling Beryl? How could Lilla be so forgiving? Is that what war does to you? Was she that pleased to receive a letter? Or did Lilla simply remember how tough being short of cash had once made life for her? “My darling Beryl,” Lilla wrote back. “Your father is a rich man from our point of view, and surely he must realise that you want help.” But she still tells Beryl to ask Ada for a check for Jane’s school fees; “she has a few pounds of mine left.” And she tells her about life in Chefoo.

“I cannot tell you all dear child but what we are going through.” The firms had been locked up. The offices, businesses—the Westerners’ very reason for spending their lives in China—were bolted up, chained, padlocked, and guarded “to see no-one comes in and no-one comes out” by those same Japanese soldiers who not long before had stopped the traffic for Lilla when she wanted to cross the road. All bank accounts were frozen, leaving everyone to exist off a complex system of probably unredeemable IOUs; “some people were clever & saw what was coming & got a few pennies in.” And, to Lilla’s intense frustration—“Alas. Alas. We are not allowed to receive letters or papers”—the post stopped coming, almost cutting them off from life beyond Chefoo. “The Post Office must be full up with letters, papers & parcels from floor to ceiling I should think.”

The one connection with the outside world was the radio, “what a comfort and blessing it is to one & all.” But, to Lilla, the hours between the radio news broadcasts—“7.45 am London, 1 pm Shanghai, 6 pm London, 9.30 pm San Francisco”—loomed like a vacuum threatening to devour her. And it was this gaping emptiness day after day that she found hardest to bear: “We must all occupy our minds, as being prisoners is no joke.” Casey was filling his time going around the town trying to cheer up “the sick and nervy ones” by reading to them. Lilla was telling them to “hang on. Perhaps after the war things may change for the better.” Then she went to cut the grass and weed the flower beds in the gardens of her empty houses on East Hill. When she could mow and dig no more, she went to the church and kneeled by the altar, trying to mend the embroidered altar cloth. But the satin was so rotten that “it can’t stand touching” and it fell apart in her hands.

It seems to have been Vivvy who gave Lilla the idea of writing a book. He himself was working on a history of Chefoo—“the start to the present day,” wrote Lilla, “with his own drawings, really quite good.” Maybe Lilla’s twinly competitiveness extended a little to her elder brothers. Maybe “labour lost” being “the end of all things,” as Lilla put it in her letter to her daughter-in-law, she leaped upon an activity that would produce something she could keep as well as fill the empty days. Or perhaps the reason was simply that given the futility of writing letters that would never arrive, especially those daily notes to Ada, she turned her urge to write toward something that didn’t need to be posted.

It had to be a recipe and housekeeping book. It must have been the only book Lilla felt she could write. In any case, just as Vivvy clearly regarded the history of Chefoo as his area of expertise, Lilla knew that hers was food. The buying of it, the preparing of it, and the serving of it—and making a home a place where you wanted to be. And good fresh food—the food that the treaty porters had taken for granted—was fast disappearing from Chefoo’s shops. Or, at least, the Chinese seemed too frightened of their new rulers to offer it to anyone with a Western face. Vivvy’s book about Chefoo was his way of keeping the old treaty-port life, the life that was vanishing, alive. Writing about food would be Lilla’s.

And there was something else, too, making Lilla want to write a cookery guide. An instinctive drive lurking deep in her subconscious. Although she reveals it herself in her letter to Beryl, I don’t think she was aware that this force was driving her.

But, even four eventful decades on, Lilla clearly still felt the scars of Ernie’s attempt to abandon her in England with their baby. As her world was turning upside down again, she found herself automatically talking about the misery of living with mothers-in-law, as a couple in Chefoo were doing: “The rows that go on, and now they have decided to part company—what a pity, as it will leave a bitter feeling for always now—why didn’t they have their own little houses from the first.” Lilla was desperate to convince her old Howell sisters-in-law of how optimistic and brave she was being. “I have written to Auntie Bob and Auntie Ada Henniker lovely long letters, worth printing,” she told Beryl, frantically adding at the top, “In case the Aunts Bob & Ada H haven’t received my letters—give them my news will you—I know many letters have been lost.”

And longing to show what a good wife she could be.

The book she started to write wasn’t just a recipe book. It was a guide for new housewives. With sections on economical dishes, economical menus, and how to make sweets to sell “when a little extra pocket money is needed.” Advice on how to shop wisely. And scattered throughout, tips to keep household costs down.

Although Lilla might not have managed to erase what had happened to her forty years earlier, it was through this weakness, this old ghost, that she would now find the strength to survive.

Then the anti-British demonstrations began. The Japanese hauled every single Chinese man, woman, and child out into the streets and marched them up and down the seafront, chanting and brandishing banners bearing anti-British slogans. The mood darkened. Lilla stopped wandering around the town unless it was strictly necessary. She and Casey huddled together inside their apartment, watching their former factory and office employees march past their windows.

She began to write.

Chapter 12

RICE-PAPER RECIPES

CHEFOO, LATE SUMMER 1941

Lilla found a typewriter in the apartment. One that had somehow made its way across from the locked and guarded office. It must have been a portable, as she later managed to carry it from camp to camp. I have an old typewriter on my desk. One made in the 1930s, as Lilla’s surely was. It is a portable, too. Although it weighs at least a stone. Another grandfather used it to type up his secret reports to Churchill on the information he had gathered on expeditions behind enemy lines in Greece during the Second World War. It is the only thing of his that I have. Unlike Lilla, he didn’t make it back from his last trip.

The typewriter I have is an Imperial. A Good Companion. It’s unlikely to be exactly the same model that Lilla used. But it can’t be very different.

It sits on a board about twelve inches square. Its black enamel gleams back at me, reflecting the light from the lamp hanging over my desk. The letter keys are small, round—about half an inch across—and seem to hover in the air. But underneath, each is connected to its corresponding printing arm by a slender, almost invisible, dark metal lever. The printing arms themselves spread out in a semicircle in between the keyboard and the ribbon that sits over the roller. Their ends thicken into the carved letter stamps—ink-stained gray metal wedges resembling a sinister mouthful of teeth.

Typing on this machine is as difficult as carrying it about. Nothing short of a finger-numbing, determined thump produces an imprint on the page. Far from the long-fingered elegance of electronic typists today, typists back then must have had knuckles of steel. And the shift key actually shifts the entire rear half of the machine back half an inch so that the capital—and not the lowercase—letters hit the inky ribbon.

Lilla was not an experienced typist. She had typed the occasional letter for Casey, filled in the odd rental form for her houses. She had never been able to close her eyes and let her fingers fly across the keys as though lost in some sonata. Although it’s hard to imagine who could on one of these machines.

The first line she typed was a row of capitals. I can see her sitting bolt upright at a table, her left forefinger pressed firmly down on the shift key to hold the carriage back and typing each letter in turn with her right: I-N-T-R-O-D-U-C-T-O-R-Y. Then she went back and underlined each letter, as if to make the task fill as much time as possible.

As she sat there listening to the jeering of the demonstrators fade into a heavy silence, broken only by the occasional asthmatic chug of a Japanese armored car, did Lilla have any idea how long she would have to write?

The war proper came to China in December 1941. It was early on Monday, December 8, in China—the difference in time zones making it a day ahead of Hawaii—when the news of Pearl Harbor rang through the radio. Japan had gone over the edge and there would be no turning back. That was it. War. In Shanghai, in Tientsin, the Japanese stormed into the concessions, and the foreigners poured down onto the streets among the Japanese signs and flags, tanks and megaphones. Trying to reach home. Trying to reach somewhere. Trying blindly to grasp the hand of a loved one who was being pulled away by the force of the crowd.

In Chefoo, Lilla and Casey spent the day in their apartment. They went from room to room, following the Japanese order to make an inventory of every item they possessed. Their grand piano. Their lacquered tea tables. Their gramophone. One big clock. One hat stand. A bronze Buddha. A chromium bathroom table. Their glasses—an astonishing four dozen tumblers, four dozen claret glasses, four dozen port glasses, four dozen champagne glasses, four dozen cocktail glasses, four dozen liqueur glasses—that showed just how much they entertained. And so it went on. I still have the list. It reads like a good-bye. As though they already knew that they were about to lose the lot.

A couple of days later, there was a knock at the door. A group of Japanese soldiers stood outside, their steel helmets and knee-high boots glinting in the sunlight. They’d come to take Casey away for questioning. I’m sure Casey told Lilla not to worry as they led him off. Not to worry? He was almost seventy years old. How could she not worry? I can see her fighting back the tears as he stumbled away.

The soldiers left Lilla clutching a red armband instead of a husband. It read
B
for “British.”
B,
then a number by which, she was told, she was known to the Japanese authorities. She was not to go outside without it on.

Casey didn’t come back that night. One by one, the Japanese were locking up every British or American businessman still in town in the Astor House Hotel on the seafront. Even the headmaster of the Chefoo school was taken. The rumor was that they were interrogating them long into the night, accusing them of anti-Japanese business activities, although nobody—not even the interrogators—can have been quite sure as to what these might be.

For the first time in her life, Lilla, usually fearfully proud of her tiny business empire, must have been grateful to be overlooked.

The next day, the soldiers came back. They came back to every house from which they had taken a businessman to see “if there was any incriminating evidence,” wrote Gladys McMullan Murray—whose husband and brother were both being interrogated. I can just see the soldiers in their helmets swarming through the dusty Casey & Co. factory, which had been locked up for months. I can hear their boots rattling down the empty aisles between the seamstresses’ benches. Hear the flutter of papers as they turned the office drawers inside out, looking for documents that didn’t exist. Hear glass splintering as they knocked Lilla’s photographs off the side tables in her apartment, off the Steinway, to check whether items were hidden inside. The crash of her bedroom drawers as they were turned upside down on the floor, strewing her silk underwear about the room in a melee of lace and bayonets. I can see Lilla standing there, yearning to rush around tidying everything up but finding her limbs frozen in fear. As she watched the soldiers pile up bundles of customer orders, details of fabric weaves and shipping bills, she must have wondered what they were asking Casey about. Would he remember each customer order, each fabric design? Give the right answers? If he didn’t, what would the Japanese do to him?

The soldiers came back and back, writes Murray in her autobiography, they “kept coming in. . . . They removed the telephone. All our private papers were burned and all valuables taken.” Murray hid a few things in her young daughter’s soft toys, hoping that they, at least, would not be bayoneted. I can see Lilla perched on a chair, her head bent over the dresses and coats in her lap, using the light of a reading lamp to stitch her jewelry into their hems.