Lilla's Feast (39 page)

Lilla, like everyone else, would have strung her and Casey’s food out through the rest of winter, each little nibble of sugar and protein becoming a great feast. Rolling it around inside your mouth, pushing it to every corner, could turn every bite into an entire ham, a whole cheese, a side of salmon, keeping you going for hours. By the time most of the parcels were finished, the corners of the tins licked clean, the snow had gone. It was spring 1945, and after over two years in camp, just as the trees were blossoming, a new hope—halfway between rumor and certainty—was arriving.

The cesspit wireless coolies had spat into the camp the news that, over in Europe, France had been invaded and the Nazis were on the retreat. And then, one night in May, the nocturnal calm was shattered by the clanging of the bell that hung in the tower over the single men’s dormitory block. The noise stopped, and the Japanese guards—convinced this was marking another escape—pounded through the camp, turfing the internees out of their beds for a roll call. And as the prisoners fumbled their way through the darkness, they saw to their horror that the guards surrounding them were carrying not clipboards, but machine guns.

They waited, shivering in the still bitingly cold night air. The dark silence was punctuated by infants’ cries, children’s whimpers, guard dogs barking, and soldiers shouting at any of the older internees who tried to sit down in the dirt. And a single machine-gun volley that had one lady screaming, “We’re all going to be killed! We’re going to die! We’re going to die!”

Lilla, unusually half dressed, her hair still down, must have been clinging on to Casey’s arm to keep him up off the ground.

After the prisoners had waited for “what seemed like hours” with little idea of what was about to happen to them, the camp commandant appeared and ordered them back to their cells. There would, he said, be no more food for them until the bell ringer confessed. But as the dazed prisoners dispersed, the rumor began to buzz from mouth to mouth that the bell had been marking the end of the war in Europe. And, with this, the prisoners’ spirits soared. For the next few days, the adults thrived off the rumor, “cinching our belts in tighter,” and any remaining food supplies and home rations were handed out to the children.

A week later, the perpetrator owned up and was put into solitary confinement by the Japnese in the hope that he would reveal the whereabouts of the shortwave radio over which he had learned the news. The rumor was confirmed. The prisoners’ attention now rapidly shifted to events in the Pacific. The pro-Japanese
Peking Chronicle
was now recounting “victories” in Japan itself, where American bombers were allegedly being shot out of the sky. As the crow flies, the Allies were now close. But how long would it take to beat Japan? One year, two more years? What would it take to make the Japanese give up China?

By now, Lilla must have been running out of recipes to type. She’d composed a chapter on almost every topic she could think of—starters, soups, fish courses, meat dishes, game, puddings, ice creams, and cakes from almost every country—many of which the average British person wouldn’t have dreamed of cooking back then. Before the war, and for several years afterward, only those British who could afford to hire chefs from Paris ate French food, and pasta could be bought only from specialty shops in London’s Soho.

But Lilla wasn’t an average British person. She had been born in China, surrounded by French, German, Italian, Russian, and even Japanese friends. And her recipe book is packed full of French fare and pasta recipes, Russian concoctions and Chinese chow. Recipes that, over in England, would make news when they were eventually published years later, turning their authors into household names. Even a Japanese recipe made it into Lilla’s book. Yes, Japanese. Sukiyaki. This is a Japanese dish she wrote as Japanese guards manned the gates and watchtowers around her.

After Lilla’s cakes come her sauces. Sauces to go with everything she could think of. “Let your sauces display an important factor in your menu.” Melted butter sauce, she typed. Brandy sauce. Mayonnaise. Hollandaise. Take this, add that, melt another, stir in . . . It’s as though Lilla was trying to weaken the Japanese with sauces. Coat them in sauce, simmer them in sauce, drown them in sauce. Anything that might soften them up. Lilla typed and typed. Broken eggs were tossed from shell to shell. Ingredients were chopped into the tiniest of pieces. Still liquids were whisked with a fork until they spun in a whirlpool of their own.

And if she was trying to cast a spell, it worked.

It was in June that the mood among the Japanese began to waver. Cliff, who had built up enough Japanese for a conversation, found the usually rigorously disciplined soldiers “now critical of their senior officers.” Some started behaving more aggressively toward the prisoners. Others seemed overly keen to make friends, “perhaps subconsciously wanting to save their necks.” Off-duty guards staggered back to their quarters drunk. One night, there was a rumpus when a guard escaping an infuriated colleague slipped into a family cell and hid under a bed. Lilla wrote a chapter on cocktails as if to encourage the guards on their way. A Gin Fizz with sugar and lemon. A Manhattan, a jumble of whisky and Italian vermouth. A Flash of Lightning. The brandy to knock them out. The Tabasco to burn the roofs of their mouths. Then a Monkey Gland. The gin and absinthe to finish them off. Make them drunk enough to surrender.

Soon, the Japanese guards appeared eager to earn what cash they could by buying what valuables the prisoners had left and reselling them to the Chinese outside at a profit. The internees were keen to comply. They desperately needed money to buy lavatory paper and soap at the White Elephant. And the scarcer these items grew, the higher their prices rocketed.

And then, fired up by a potent combination of alcohol and fear, the Japanese soldiers began the terrifying boast to their prisoners—in a combination of “Chinese, Japanese and sign language”—that if the war ended, rather than surrender, they would shoot every single one of them before falling on their own swords.

Change bore as many threats as promises for the prisoners. Would the Japanese really shoot them all? Or would they simply abandon them? If they did, then who would bring them food? Would they be able to leave the camp? Where would they go? The countryside that they could see around them was hot, dry, and empty—save for the sound of gunfire from the Chinese guerrillas fighting off anyone who came too close. Would they, too, shoot the fleeing prisoners before they stopped to work out who they were? If they knew who they were, would they care? Would the Chinese welcome them back or want to humiliate them? What if the Russians reached them before the Americans? Soon, what might happen when the war ended was all anyone in the camp could talk about.

Toward the end of Lilla’s recipe book is a section on sandwiches. Picnic food. Food that could be eaten while traveling. Cheese sandwiches, she typed, as if preparing for the journey she was about to make. Egg sandwiches. With beetroot, its juice finding its way through the yolks and whites, staining even the bread a dark purplish red. Sweet sandwiches. Crushed currants mixed with sugar. Melted cocoa oozing out of the sides of the bread in warm, sugary globules asking to be licked off.

Chapter 17

FREEDOM

WEIHSIEN INTERNMENT CAMP, AUGUST 1945. LILLA HAS BEEN A PRISONER FOR JUST UNDER THREE YEARS.

When the news came, it was like a bolt out of the blue. Spat into the camp by the bamboo wireless. The committees tried to keep it a secret, not let anyone know until it was confirmed. But this was a rumor that was fast on its feet. Within a few hours, everyone was murmuring its name: armistice. Peace. Nobody quite dared believe that it was true.

Still, just some hope of an end was enough. “The whole camp looked, felt and even smelled different,” Langdon Gilkey writes. The odor of the ubiquitous mud from the seasonal rains stopped grating against the back of the prisoners’ nostrils. Tired, shambling gaits quickened into lively steps. Eyes glazed over by years of malnutrition were glinting again. Smiles began to hover at the edge of long-cracked lips.

Two days later, on Wednesday, August 15, the news came again. “The rumour factory in camp was never busier,” says David Michell. There had been an offer of peace; the war was over. Again, no one could quite believe that it was true. Everyone was waiting for some convincing sign, some proof, some messianic apparition.

There was no call to gather that evening. No message was spun around the camp telling people to come. Every adult prisoner who could walk simply started to swarm around the commandant’s office like hungry bees. They literally buzzed with excitement as they hovered, waiting for an official bulletin that the war was over. When a door opened, the commandant didn’t appear. Another “well-hated but secondary official, small, arrogant and mean,” stepped out, barely looking where he was going until, suddenly, he saw the crowd around him. His face turned white with fear. And he ran for the cover of the Japanese quarters. “The sight of this hated tormentor transformed before our eyes into a fleeing rabbit caused a howl of delight and laughter to rise . . . as the most promising clue to the real state of things that we could have had.”

For the next day and a half, the camp held its breath.

Then, on Friday morning, they came. The plane passed overhead once, twice, its wheels skimming the tops of the trees. Every prisoner threw down what they were doing. Splashed their way along the muddy paths to the assembly field, the games pitch, whatever you called it, and stood mesmerized, their heads thrown back, chins in the air, mouths and eyes wide open as though they were witnessing the Second Coming. The engines stopped. For a moment, there was a deathly silence, the silence you expect before a bomb. Then they appeared. Seven billowing parachutes floating to the ground. Seven pairs of arms and legs dangling below them. And the bold American flag painted on the side of the aircraft glinting in the sunlight.

The prisoners charged. Charged in a single pounding mass, squealing and hugging and weeping on the way. Out of the gates. Past the guards, who half raised their rifles before lowering them again in astonishment. On across the fields to where the parachutes were landing. The crowd surrounded the men. Stared at them. Danced around them. Then, with a whoop of joy, picked them up, carried them on their shoulders, and marched back to the camp gates. As the prisoners strode back in triumphantly, the camp’s Salvation Army band struck up a victory march, and the national anthems of every prisoner echoed, one by one, around the camp. The notes reverberated around the cell-block walls. Swept into each room. Blasted the hopelessness away.

When the prisoners and the American paratroopers at last stood face-to-face, they looked like dwarves meeting giants. Even the healthiest adult internee was shrunken compared to the soldiers. Two and a half years of wartime rations followed by three years of imprisonment had ravaged their bodies. Their skin hung off their cheekbones in flaps, the whites of their eyes had reddened, the hair they had left was dry and brittle, and their clothes were now a size, maybe two sizes, too big.

Then the chief giant, a U.S. major, asked where the Japanese commander’s offices were. Once directed, he cocked the two pistols on his hips and, with a hand on each, strode in to meet him. The two men stared at each other across the room. Neither moved a muscle. Then the Japanese soldier reached into the drawer in front of him and drew out his samurai sword and his gun—and handed them over to the American. The American handed them back. “From now on,” he said, “you are under my command. We need you to protect the camp from outsiders.”

And once their enemy had become their friend, nothing else was quite as the prisoners had expected.

There was no swift departure. No rush to pack and catch a train back to Tsingtao and then a boat to Chefoo, Peking, or Tientsin. There wasn’t any train back to Tsingtao—Chinese guerrillas had broken the tracks. And, the Americans told the prisoners, they needed time to be reorientated—reeducated, even.

I don’t think that any of them realized quite how much there would be to learn.

The first thing that the internees had to learn anew was how to eat. The standard of food that they had become used to in the camp was so low that even when one kitchen’s team prepared the best meal they possibly could for two of their liberators, drawing out “specialities from our store . . . what to us seemed quite a treat,” writes Norman Cliff, “quietly and politely, the food was left uneaten . . . [t]o them [it] was unpalatable.” And the food that they had dreamed about, that Lilla had written about, that they all believed would save them had now become their poison. Cartloads of vegetables, grain, and meat—food that the Japanese had told them they were unable to obtain—were rolling in through the camp’s open gates. But after years of malnutrition and at least a couple of years of near starvation, their bodies couldn’t cope with it. “During that first week, we could not eat a full meal without vomiting,” Gilkey remembers.

Then there was everything else. The world of empires and great social divides, of grand houses staffed by dozens of servants, already rocked by the First World War, was fast being sunk by the Second. “Magazines [were] distributed and a library set up, all for the purpose of paving the way for our much-anticipated departure,” recalls Michell. And the prisoners had to learn history. “Realising how little of the events of the previous four years we knew,” writes Cliff, “the Americans organised classes to bring us up to date. An officer sketched the initial retreat of the American forces following Pearl Harbor,” then spelled out how the war had turned around in mid-1942, as they had begun to advance across the Pacific.