Lilla's Feast (45 page)

Authors: Frances Osborne

BOOK: Lilla's Feast

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I wonder whether she was remembering another telegram from the Queen. Another King, another Queen. One written in a pencil scrawl on yellowing paper pinned into that little black album that she still kept in a drawer. The telegram that she’d received almost seven decades beforehand, confirming that Ernie was dead. Ernie, whose reddish hair was still floating around the room in front of her on the top of several heads. Including mine.

Two months later, the news came through that Lilla’s claim to her property in China had been accepted. And, suddenly, whatever had been pinning her to this life began to loosen its claws. Old age came pounding down upon her. “It’s so m-m-maddening, d-d-d-darling,” she whispered to my mother. “First your legs go, then your hearing goes, then your eyes go.” But at last she was free. “Now I can go to Heaven,” she wrote to my father, her writing so shaky that I still want to applaud each word. She longed, she said, to join her children and Ada. And though far from devout, she claimed to hear heavenly music and choirs in her head. It was as though she was listening to what she thought Ada could already hear. As though she was slipping back to be one with her twin again. And the following January, on the sixth, Epiphany, the day after Twelfth Night, the last of the twelve days of Christmas—the day the decorations are taken down and the revelers go home to rest—Lilla died.

Lilla’s funeral was the first funeral that I had been to. The church was packed. The overflowing pews were buzzing with excitement. As I found my way to my seat, I saw the same faces I had seen swarming around the room at her birthday party a few months earlier. The only person missing was Lilla.

Her grandson John, a clergyman, led the proceedings. Lilla had lived so long that even her daughter’s son had gray hair. Each time John referred to Lilla, instead of saying “the deceased” or giving her name, he called her dear Granny. That was what made me want to cry.

I sat staring at the coffin throughout the service. The stretched wooden hexagon in front of the altar didn’t seem to bear any relation to Lilla, to all that life, at all. And if she was there, hiding inside, I was amazed that she was keeping so still. I kept my eyes on the box, waiting for the flowers to tremble, the lid to slide away, and Lilla to pop out stuttering,
D-d-d-darlings, how w-w-wonderful you could all come.

But she didn’t. She had at last gone.

EPILOGUE

LONDON, NOVEMBER 2003

Lilla never made it back to Chefoo, but I did. In May 2000, I went to China with my younger sister, Kate. We landed in Beijing—the city Lilla called Pékin—marveled at the Forbidden City as she had done, and then flew south to Chefoo. Only the town isn’t called Chefoo anymore. Now it’s known only by its Chinese name of Yantai. For the Chinese, Chefoo had never really been the town’s name. Chefoo, or Zhifu, was the name of a fishing village just along the coast, and the foreigners had misappropriated it for their port next to the city of Yantai.

I didn’t expect to find many traces of our family’s life in Yantai. For the past half century, China had been such an isolationist country that it felt like another planet. It seemed, frankly, weird to think that, just over fifty years ago, its coastline and rivers had been scattered with American and European enclaves. Places full of Western buildings, Western businesses, Western people, Western lives. Places that had been—and were still—home towns for the Americans and Europeans born there. Including Lilla and the host of other relations I had dug out of Vancouver, New Zealand, and a variety of British seaside resorts. All of whom still felt displaced in the non-Chinese countries in which they had ended up. But, of course, the treaty ports themselves—with their foreign domination of Chinese trade and their importation of opium— are one of the unspoken reasons why China cut itself off from the rest of the world.

As Kate and I were driven in from the Chefoo airport by a friend of Norman Cliff’s called Liu Xingbang, we were hoping at best to grasp the geography of the place. The perfectly curving bay, the dragon spines in the water, Consulate Hill dividing the port from the harbor, the hills rising up behind.

We were surprised.

In the gaps between the modern towers that now make up the Yantai waterfront stood the remains of the treaty port that the town had once been. European buildings poked up between the concrete blocks like the lost ruins of an ancient civilization. Germanic alpine chalets gathered in groups of three or four along First Beach. There was the mission boarding school, now a heavily guarded military training ground. The Casey & Co. building still loomed up on the seafront just as in the photographs I had seen, though now a wide Tarmac road had been paved between it and the beach. The church had gone, but I squealed as I saw the Chefoo Club straight ahead of me, instantly recognizable from the photocopies of the family albums that I was clutching. There were even Westerners sipping cocktails at the front. They were, we were told, the new wave of foreign investors in China, lured over from Canada’s west coast.

The owners of the club—by then known as the Hundred Years Golden Club—showed Kate and me around. They took us downstairs to the nineteenth-century wooden bowling alley, whose far end was decorated with a vista of what looks like London’s Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Then they took us into the new basement bar. Western style, they proudly said. Next door to the club, the old white-gabled hotel that used to stand there had been replaced by an unpainted concrete block containing a hotel and sushi restaurant designed to appeal to the Japanese who still frequented the Shantung—now written as Shandong—coast.

Behind this lay the path up to Consulate Hill.

Consulate Hill had become a park. The gardens of its old mansions had overflowed, opening out into public lawns. The long-empty consulate buildings and grand dwellings served as a form of entertainment for the passersby to stare at, as they were being steadily knocked down to make way for new property developments.

Kate and I meandered through and over the top of the hill to the Chinese Customs officers’ redbrick houses. The row was still there but boarded up and ready to go next. We tried to peer over the high wall in front of them, hoping to catch a proper look at the place where Lilla, our great-grandmother, had been born. Where her real father, our great-great-grandfather, Charles Jennings, had blown his brains out in the garden shed.

It felt very strange to walk around this town perched on the Chinese coast and think that, in a way, this is where I am from. As we followed the steps down to the port, I glanced inside the terraced houses on our left and saw eerily familiar tiled Victorian hallways, wooden banisters rising up beside the stairs as in a hundred London houses I have seen. The same view that a toddling Lilla must have glimpsed as she trotted by.

The next day, we walked along the beachfront and up East Hill, clutching Lilla’s photographs of her houses. Not a brick remained. The rich brown earth had been recently plowed and then flattened to make way for the new China rising up around us. I looked at the photos and then back at the bare hill and thought that this was what it must have looked like when Lilla had started to build her houses almost seventy years earlier. She’d loved those houses, spent hours leafing through the photographs I was holding in my hand. To Lilla, those five houses had meant independence and a guarantee that no child, grandchild, or great-grandchild of hers would ever be abandoned because they weren’t rich enough. They were, she believed, worth a fortune. A fortune that made all those years in the camps, her whole life, as she put it, “worthwhile.”

When Lilla put in her claim, she was hoping to receive this “fortune”—somewhere between a quarter and a half million pounds in today’s money. As I stood on East Hill, looking along First Beach to Consulate Hill and the dragon spines curving through the water beyond, I wondered what would have upset her more: the destruction of her houses or living long enough to learn how small her fortune would turn out to be. A few months after Lilla’s funeral, the check arrived— the check that Lilla had died believing would make her beloved six grandchildren rich, that left her free to join her own children and Ada. But the sum written on it was £1,400 (£3,000 today). She was paid one-fifth of the 1935 value of her houses—the only property she was deemed to have lost in the Communist takeover in 1949 and not during the war with Japan beforehand. If Lilla had been alive to discover that, I think she would have been so angry that she would still be alive now, battling with the latest Chinese regime.

Before we went home, Kate and I took the train across the Shandong Peninsula to Tsingtao, now Qingdao. As we stepped out of the railway station into that untouched Bavarian town square that looks like a Second World War film set with an extensive Chinese crew, our jaws dropped. Qingdao still has mile after mile of avenues lined with European stone mansions. It was mind-boggling to see such a perfectly preserved European town standing in China. Clutching an old photograph, Kate and I found Reggie’s old house at 5 Liang Road—the mansion he had to sell when Cornabé Eckford went bust. We broke in through the garbage bins at the back and sneaked around the front. The stone balustrades and trees outside were intact. But instead of the clutch of English children peering over the balcony in my photograph, we saw lines of laundry and signs that at least one family, if not two, lived on each floor.

Our final stop was Shanghai. Here, block after block of mock-Tudor suburbia fanned out from the grand waterfront buildings. The palaces knocked up in the twenties and thirties by the port’s magnates sprawled alongside new freeways. Kate and I roamed the streets, shopping for silk, popping into restaurants, meeting up with friends of friends, as Lilla and Ada must have done on their visits. Just as in Chefoo, although on a far grander scale, Shanghai is welcoming foreigners again. And a new generation of Westerners is flocking back. They are opening jazz bars, printing English-language newspapers, and talking in reverent tones about Old China Hands. The city buzzes with an explosive energy that can make Manhattan feel provincial. Its former treaty-port mansions are once more changing hands for millions of pounds. Its old five-star hotels have become new five-star hotels. The bellboys have returned, as have the dancing girls. Shanghai, the neon signs seem to flicker, is starting all over again.