Lilla's Feast (33 page)

They walked for a couple of miles. Up Temple Hill to the American Presbyterian mission compounds that lay between the hospital and the temple pagoda at the top. Temple Hill, where Lilla had been for so many picnics as a child, as a Heavenly Twin, as a grand hostess in Chefoo. Now she was going as something altogether different. The high stone walls of the compounds were surrounded by great rolls of barbed wire. Smaller pieces were strewn about the ground to catch anyone who approached. There were guards at the gates. Stepping carefully along the path, Lilla filed in.

Chapter 13

EATING BITTERNESS

CIVILIAN ASSEMBLY CENTRE, CHEFOO, LATE OCTOBER 1942, TEN MONTHS AFTER PEARL HARBOR

There is something particularly terrible about being forced to leave your home. Its familiar walls bulge with memories. Each room has its own atmosphere—a hidden smell that stirs your senses into the right mood to eat, talk, or sleep. It’s where your roots have pushed their way between the gaps in the floorboards and the cracks in the bricks.

And when you are torn away, the roots remain, ripped apart and weeping.

Lilla was to find the next three years of her life so horrific that she would hardly be able to talk about them. Not even to the BBC camera crew that would one day come to interview her about her experiences as a prisoner, about how she’d written her recipe book. It was her opportunity for fifteen minutes of fame, but she sat in a high-backed chair that stood by itself in her granddaughter’s drawing room, legs neatly crossed, unable to bring herself to say a word. To her family, she occasionally let slip odd snippets of information about her time in camp. Fragments that betrayed some of the pain and indignity she had tried to erase. And I have her recipe book—a book of the memories that she’d wished she had instead.

But life in this first camp and in the second, worse, camp that Lilla was sent to was so restricted, so unrelentingly focused around the basics of survival, that her fellow prisoners have been able to paint me a vivid picture of what happened to her. Each of them gives a different viewpoint of internment, a different camera angle, according to their age and gender and whether they came from the business or the missionary community—the latter looking at the world through a softer lens. Gladys McMullan Murray came from a business family and was in her early forties when she was interned with her husband and four of her children, ranging from four to nineteen years old. But nearly all the others who have spoken or written about these camps were far younger than Lilla when they were imprisoned.

And if they are young enough to still be alive today, then they were too young to notice a gray-haired lady writing a recipe book in the camp. Also, to the young, like J. G. Ballard’s semiautobiographical Jim in
Empire of the Sun,
rather than curtailing their freedom, war and internment offered a great adventure. In the words of David Michell, who was a nine-year-old pupil at the mission boarding school in Chefoo when he went into the camp on Temple Hill with his sister, Joyce, who was then ten, “What school child wouldn’t jump at the chance of a Tom Sawyer–like existence, where nothing was normal, particularly school work?”

But life for the older people in the camp was far, far harder. Norman Cliff, who, at seventeen, should have been graduating from the Chefoo mission boarding school that year but instead found himself being interned with his two younger sisters, Lelia, fourteen, and Estelle, twelve, describes how “the physical and mental strains of internment life” took their toll on the prisoners, “particularly those over forty. There were mental breakdowns, workers collapsing on shift with fainting and low blood pressure.” Joan Ward, née Croft, is the only internee I found who remembers Lilla. She holds an image in her head of Lilla “as a rather refined, elegant person walking down the street of the camp, her head up, bearing herself well.” She didn’t know Lilla well enough to remember her recipe book but still describes with feeling how “the hungrier we became, the more obsessed with food we were.” And, as Ward was interned with her parents, she was acutely aware of how different the experience was for young and old. One of the most painful things for the older people in the camp was that, right at the end of their working lives, when they had just saved up enough to retire, they suddenly found themselves penniless. Like Lilla and Casey. “Losing everything in your sixties, as my father did, was torment,” Ward told me. Particularly when you had no idea whether you would find work, or still be physically capable of doing it, when you were released.

The mission compounds on Temple Hill contained several spacious detached family houses—spacious, that is, if a single family were living in each—a church, a hospital, and a couple of schoolhouses. All were built, as the drawing I have shows, in a fusion style of Italianate arches and pagoda roofs. They spread over a broad swath of the Temple Hill slopes that led out toward the sea on what was, looking from the Chefoo Club on First Beach, the far side of the harbor. To convert the compounds into an internment camp, the Japanese had encircled three areas, each containing one or two family houses, with barbed wire. As Lilla arrived with the rest of the business community—all the Chefoo enemy nationals who were not part of the mission boarding schools that still stood at the far end of First Beach—they were directed toward the houses next to the church, on the seaward side of the hill.

The houses were wrecks. After being deserted by the missionaries, they had been camped in by the Japanese army and then left to fall down. “The rooms were dirty, and all the plumbing was out of order,” writes Gladys McMullan Murray. The stoves used for heating were broken. And there were only two houses for the hundred of them filing in. The hundred of them who weren’t German or Italian—and so on the same side as the Japanese. The hundred of them who had been foolish, hopeful, or desperate enough to stay in Chefoo.

That made fifty prisoners to each family-sized house.

It worked out as anywhere between six and seventeen to a room. Dining room, sitting room, nursery, or bedroom. Martha Philips, a missionary teaching at the Chefoo School who was moved into a business community house, remembers five of them being put in “a tiny upstairs room, which was not much bigger than a walk-in closet.” The rooms had bare floorboards, dusty corners, a broken-down, broken-up metal stove squatting along one wall, and wide windows that had once given a sweeping view of a busy Chefoo—and whose grimy panes now gaped curtainless across a dying town. Men, women, children, all ages, were jumbled up together. I imagine the arriving internees wobbling—nearly all of them, like Lilla, wearing as many layers as they could to take that tiny bit more with them—toward their spaces on the floor. Each dormitory must have looked like some grotesque boarding school or summer camp. Instead of fresh, glowing, teenage faces, the dried and battered features of a terrified and already malnourished aging population stared up from the floor.

The first night, there weren’t even mattresses to sleep on. Dodging one another’s knees and elbows, the prisoners eased open their bags and piled their clothes into bedding on the floor. And then, trying to stick to familiar routines, in a vain attempt to convince themselves that everything was still all right, they tried to change for bed.

It can’t have been easy. Especially sitting on the floor in a small room, with no discreet corner in which to hide from several new pairs of eyes. Each time that Lilla’s clothes caught on her underwear, baring the folds of skin that she would have struggled so hard to conceal, it must have felt like being forced to reveal a secret that stripped away her dignity.

One elderly lady couldn’t bring herself to change in front of everyone else, writes Gladys McMullan Murray. She sat on the floor, not moving. Simply unable to do it. Unable to get undressed in front of all the others. When the lights dimmed, she popped out into the corridor to be alone, unaware that the light on the stairs was illuminating her, like a stage spot, to everyone back inside.

By the time I started writing this book, Gladys was no longer around to talk to. But I’ve often wondered whether that was Lilla.

Several days later, the prisoners were allowed to return home to fetch mattresses and bedding. Those who could brought back curtains to divide their tiny spaces off into minicubicles. These gave the prisoners a gesture of privacy but made the rooms feel even more jam-packed, leaving little room to move. And they couldn’t stop the noises—or the smells.

It was hard to sleep. A single heavy snorer could keep a dozen of them awake all night. One lady “snored every night, so loudly that the shingles rattled.” And it wasn’t just the noise of the irregular, unfamiliar, heaving breathing that would have kept Lilla awake; it was its proximity. Right in the same room, stale breath puffing in her direction. I can imagine her lying there, fraying sheets draped around her and Casey’s area, the size of a small double bed, trying to sleep but surrounded by the smell exhaled from a dozen pairs of lungs that belonged to people whom she knew well—her brother Vivvy, his wife, Mabel, Mabel’s octogenarian mother—but had never wanted to be quite this close to. The sweating dampness of so many strange feet and armpits in such a small space adding to the aging mist that eased its way around the room.

But it was fear, rather than physical discomfort, that made the greatest contribution to the prisoners’ insomnia. “We often lay awake,” writes Murray, “thinking apprehensively of the future.”

Once they had been herded through the barbed wire, into the camp compounds, and the gates locked, the prisoners were more or less left to organize themselves, as “the Japanese officials did not want the responsibility.” They were allowed to hire outside workmen to repair the boilers and stoves used for heating and cooking. And then, “with no more servants around, we all had to pitch in . . . every one of us in camp had our regular chores, from sweeping floors to peeling potatoes.” In Philips’s house, “we selected two teams who worked on alternate days to plan, prepare and serve meals.” And in that of Wiley Glass—a Baptist missionary who was in the business camp with his wife and daughter— “some chopped kindling and brought in coal. . . . The younger men pumped water, two at a time. It was a strenuous job.”

The lack of running water in the camp meant few opportunities to wash. Whether it was for cooking or bathing, every drop was rationed. Once it had been pumped out of the ground, it was then carried into the house, where it was systematically heated saucepanful by saucepanful, “with hot water being taken one way and cold water brought from the other direction.” If you wanted the luxury of a bath—in a tin tub filled for the purpose in a barely lit cellar—then the water had to be shared. And even bathing in somebody else’s dirt was a treat, says Murray. So much so that one teenage girl, on finding the tub full, leaped in—only to discover the grease and leaves of a cabbage soup clinging to her skin. Nonetheless, “folks managed to keep fairly decent.”

But it wasn’t just their own bodies that the prisoners had to keep clean. Packed like sardines into spaces designed for far fewer, the internees’ elbows, knees, and ankles must have knocked against one another, their drying, flaking skins creating a snowstorm of dust and debris to battle with. Added to this was the “inconvenience,” Glass mentions, of the “lack of a dining room.” This meant that after the prisoners had “picked up their plates cafeteria style, we took our food to our bedrooms and ate on the small bit of floor space marked out as ours.” Inevitably, as the internees ate squatting on their beds, dropping crumbs, splashing drinks, and spilling food, bacteria bred like an infection. The prisoners did the best they could with the limited water supply, but, as the weeks passed, the conditions deteriorated—the outdoor latrines being a sight that was “by far the biggest shock of the Temple Hill compound,” as they were “a seething sea of maggots.”

The dirt and ripened stench of such communal living must have been very hard to bear. Especially for Lilla. Lilla who loved to clean, who loved to put things in order, for whom being well dressed and washed was almost a raison d’être. She faced a daily struggle just to make herself feel neat. I can see her, sitting on her mattress in the dormitory, trying to put her hair up in a way that would disguise the fact that she couldn’t wash it as often as she’d like. Dabbing a little powder, rouge even, on her cheeks. Checking that her diamond earrings were still in her ears—the safest place for them. Pulling herself up, standing tall, shoulders back, and facing up to the shrunken world around her.

As October passed into November and then December, the hours of daylight faded, and the internees’ spirits dimmed with them. “A bitterly cold winter descended upon us,” writes Cliff, and “clothes were wearing out.” Replacements were being stitched together from the curtains and drapes that the prisoners had brought with them. At least the body heat generated by so many souls living cheek by jowl meant that “it did not take much to keep the rooms warm.” But even then, the prisoners sifted all the ashes “to find any cinders that might burn again.” And, hands and legs chapped by the cold, they often found themselves down to their last bucket of coal, unsure of when another delivery might come.