Lilla's Feast (46 page)

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ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

The line drawings used on the part openings and the chapter headings come from Lilla’s cookery book, which is now kept in the Imperial War Museum.

All other photos and illustrations in the book have been supplied by the author and her family, except for the following: 24: Hulton Archive; 77: from
Living London: its work and its play, its humour and its pathos, its sights and its scenes,
edited by G. R. Sims, 1906; 147: courtesy Patricia Ogden; 156: hairnet girls sketch by Claire Malcolm Lintilhac from her privately published memoirs; 205: view of Weihsien hospital from the collection of Ida Jones Talbot, courtesy of her daughter Christine (Talbot) Sancton; 206: plan of the camp courtesy Langdon Gilkey; 213: drawing by Father Louis Schmid by courtesy of Leopold Pander and Father Wiel Bellemakers.

Photo insert: 1: Ada and Lilla as children: MS 201813 Box 20, Bowra Collection, School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London; 2/3: marines taking a ride in a rickshaw: © Lake County Museum/CORBIS; 6/7: drawing of emblem by N. Piculevitch; woman cultivating the ground outside the kitchen hut and the liberation of Weihsien: courtesy Ron Bridge; Father Frans Verhoeven’s view of Kitchen no. 1 by courtesy of Leopold Pander and Father Wiel Bellemakers.

LILLA’S FEAST

FRANCES OSBORNE

A Reader’s Guide

Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

Lilla spends her childhood as a “little princess,” but she ends up a strong, independent woman. How much of this change do you attribute to the characteristics she was born with, and how much to the circumstances that she found herself in? To what extent do you think our personalities can be shaped by our experiences rather than what we inherit? Can you identify which traits of your own personality you have inherited, and which have been formed by your experiences?

“It is not often that lovers swap roles,” writes Osborne. How do Ernie and Lilla change roles in their marriage? Does the love between them change? Lilla has three significant sexual relationships in her life. How do her feelings for each lover—and each for her—differ? Do her relationships improve or worsen? Do you think she was ever really in love?

Lilla’s Feast
is a family memoir. How does the fact that the author both knew and is related to Lilla affect the narrative? And what can the biography of an ordinary woman caught up in world events—rather than a biography of a famous person orchestrating those events—teach us? How different is history when seen from an eye-level point of view, rather than the political point of view?

“Down by the waterfront,” writes Osborne of nineteenth-century Shanghai, “the smells of steaming rice and charring meat mingled with traces of opium smoke.”
Lilla’s Feast
is marked by its descriptive passages, taking the reader to, inter alia, the mountains of India, Edwardian England, and a Japanese concentration camp. Where do you find Osborne’s descriptive style most evocative? How does Osborne primarily create this effect in your chosen passage—through the context of physical surroundings, or calling on the senses? Which ones?

Food, to Lilla, is more than nutrition. She “dreams of peeling apples with insides like half-frozen snow.” What role, or roles, does food play in the story? How do the attitudes of Alice Eckford, Ernie, and Papa Howell to food reflect their attitudes to life? In the prison camp, how do the inmates’ changing circumstances affect their relationship with food? Has your own relationship with food ever been altered by events in your life?

Lilla was brought up “to be a wife and nothing else.” How do the choices open to Lilla as a woman change during her lifetime? Do you think she takes full advantage of them? What do these changes reveal about the choices available to women today?

There is an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Lilla’s life took her through world wars and across the world in a time of great political upheaval, leading her to have to turn her life around and start over again and again. Which of her turnarounds do you find the most inspirational? Why?

“At the end of 1907, a long-awaited great hand reached down from the sky and plucked Ernie from his dusty desk,” writes Osborne, making the point that people’s lives can be turned this way or that by events over which they have little control. How much do external circumstances and chance—as opposed to the characters’ own choices— change the lives of Lilla and her family members? How might Lilla’s life have turned out if her husband’s troopship had not been sunk by a U-boat in the Second World War? If she had married Malcolm Rattray, or another man, before the Great Depression of the early thirties? Or if the family firm had not gone bankrupt? At what other points could Lilla’s life have gone in another direction—and how? Can you identify any similar turning points for yourself where an external event, or your own choice, has fundamentally changed the course of your life?

To what extent do the forceful characters of Lilla’s and Ernie’s mothers affect their lives? What does the interaction between the Howells and the Eckfords reveal about social and intellectual snobbery between older, educated families and new money at the turn of the twentieth century? Does the same pattern hold true in any way today?

What prompted Lilla to start writing her cookbook? What added symbolism did it take on once she had been marched out of her home and imprisoned? How did her relationship to her cookbook change during her years in the camp? Why do you think she hid the book when she was released?

“Every aspect of the inmates’ lives in Weihsien [prison camp] was ordered by layer upon layer of ruthlessly efficient committees,” writes Osborne. What does the formation of these committees reveal about humans’ innate desire to organize themselves into hierarchies? Why do you think this is? Have you ever been a founding member of any club or organization? How did its hierarchy evolve?

Even though none of Lilla’s family had any Chinese ancestry, and they had come to China as “colonials,” many of her family felt that China was their real home, the only place to which they belonged. What was it about China that made it home to Lilla? What does this tell us about the meaning of home? What made Lilla turn down the chance to escape after Pearl Harbor? Does this help to explain why, even today, people living in war zones appear to fail to flee until it is too late?

She’ll Go Far . . . East

BY MELINDA STEVENS

Frances Osborne sits across the table from me on a bright, sunshiny day in Notting Hill. From time to time she casts a furtive glance at the thick book between us. It is a burgundy color with a picture of a small Chinese bowl below the title
Lilla’s Feast: One Woman’s True Story of Love and War in the Orient.
It is Frances’s book, her first, a story that was initially going to be told by somebody else and might never have been written at all.

Frances always wanted to be a writer—she had her epiphany at the age of three reading a gory story about monsters—but a lack of confidence and an inability to make the commitment stopped her. Instead, she went to Oxford, trained as a barrister, knocked about in the City, and dabbled in financial journalism. Then she met her husband, George, scion of the Osborne & Little family, member of Parliament for Tatton, widely reported as a future leader of the Conservative party, and well known as the politician whom William Hague cast to play Tony Blair in mock debates. “George is as good at Blair as Rory Bremmer,” says one witness of the debates.

“I realized that George really loves what he does,” says Frances. “That life was too short. That all I’d ever wanted to do was write books. And here I was, the daughter of an MP, married to an MP. I had no job, I was pregnant, about to disappear behind diapers and washing machines. I was desperate. It was now or never.”

But it wasn’t that simple. She sent her synopsis to agent after agent, and all of them turned her down. Determined, she wrote three sample chapters and sent them to one last agent, a friend. Within a few weeks there were auctions on both sides of the Atlantic. The bidding went on for three days. When the flurry had died down Frances found herself with an incredibly rare six-figure sum for a one-book deal. “It was surreal,” she says, widening her eyes, shaking her head.

Frances is charming, bright, self-deprecating. It was partly growing up as Lord Howell’s daughter, “surrounded by clever and urbane people,” that made her shy away from the path she so wanted to pursue. “Women seem to start their lives with such doubt. And men are absolutely the other way round,” she says.

It was her father who was always going to write the book, the story of his grandmother. “What a book it would make,” he said to Frances at Lilla’s funeral. “It would be a sizzler. My God, she had a life.” He has written several books since then, but none of them was about her. “Eventually,” Frances writes in her prologue, “he handed me a pile of old photograph albums . . . and the mantle passed to me.”

The book, according to Frances, “wrote itself ” in roughly four months. It is the story of a lady who lived for more than one hundred years, married three times, and saw both of her children die before her. She grew up in China, traveled all over India, was occasionally parceled off to England, and spent three years in a Japanese concentration camp, where she wrote a cookery book on tiny scraps of paper to keep herself sane. As Frances says, wincing: “She was an ordinary woman who had a shit time.” It is a wonderfully evocative, vivid, distilled book. It contains sentences such as: “She dreams of peeling apples with insides like half-frozen snow.” Above all it is a story of a wife and subject, one who was not often treated well by either husband or Empire. “It is the very ordinariness of it which is the key,” says Frances.