Lilla's Feast (5 page)

The return to England was not a success. Mrs. Simons had died, her savings exhausted by all those music lessons and boarding-school fees. The few relations who were still around simply didn’t have enough spare cash for Alice and her four children by an unknown and now dead husband. Alice found herself struggling to put food on the table.

Andrew Eckford turned up on Alice’s doorstep in January 1886. The custom in the treaty ports, and in colonial life in general, was for expatriates to return to their home country on leave every few years— often for a year at a time, as traveling each way could easily take a couple of months. A businessman would leave his firm in his partner’s hands. And Andrew had handed over the reins of his firm, Cornabé Eckford, to Cornabé and taken some leave in order to return to England and pursue Alice.

It was a year since he had seen her off in Shanghai. He proposed again. This time she accepted. They married in England, and Andrew prepared to return to China. Vivvy and Reggie, aged nine and seven, were sent to boarding school in England, along with thousands of other little boys whose parents worked in the far reaches of the British Empire. Lilla and Ada were still just too young for this, and, in any case, being girls, their education simply didn’t matter as much. They went back to China with their mother.

As stepfathers go, Andrew Eckford was a good one. He threw himself wholeheartedly into his new family and treated Lilla and Ada—the boys, too—more or less as his own. “More or less” because, in just one respect—one that would turn out to be important for Lilla—he held back. However, then, none of them were old enough to notice or care. Lilla, Ada, Vivvy, and Reggie all called him Father. And within a terrifyingly short space of time, it was as if their real father had never existed. After her misery over losing Charles, Alice seems to have made a decision to start again with Andrew. There were no pictures or mementos of Charles Jennings—not even hidden away in some drawer. He simply ceased to exist. Alice even informally switched her children’s surname to Eckford, extinguishing the evidence of her former, poorer life. The children forgot Jennings, almost forgot that they had ever had another father. He disappeared into the farthest recesses of their memories, surviving only in the traces of his features on their faces.

Alice continued to run her new family in the same way as before. She sang to her children, and made every effort to convince them of the pleasure of mealtimes—encouraging them to stand on stools in the kitchen, cut raw biscuit dough into animal shapes, lick their fingers for that sweet sugary tingle on their tongues, and vie for the last teaspoonful of butter, eggs, and sugar scraped from the mixing bowl. This time around, however, Alice’s budget was without constraint. Each morning when Andrew wandered into his study, a fresh bunch of flowers would be waiting on the desk. Every month or two, Alice—an avid shopper— would sail south to Shanghai and return with great cases of elegant Chinese and English reproduction furniture; delicate, whispered ink drawings by the Chinese artists everyone was talking about at the time; and voluminous silk dresses with corsets that crushed her ribs, created a wasp waist, and thrust her chest forward. And each time Andrew or even just the children sat down at the dining-room table, they were confronted with a panorama of mouthwatering smells—steaming northern Chinese dishes so hot that you could burn your hands as you spooned out a helping; dishes from western China deceptively cool to the touch, but whose spices threatened to lift the roof off your mouth; and the best cuts of meat from the British butcher followed by weighty puddings of suet and flour laced with sherry and jam.

There were other ways in which Alice’s life was better. And as I write this, it forces me to consider the story I have already told—the story as Lilla knew it. Alice didn’t just love her life with Andrew Eckford; she loved him, too. In fact, I am assured by all who knew her that Andrew Eckford was the love of her life—Andrew Eckford, not Charles Jennings, not the unnamed music master. And maybe, just maybe, that was why Alice didn’t marry Andrew in China just after her husband had died: because they already loved each other. And heaven forbid that anyone should know.

I wonder whether Lilla’s father was really bitten by a rabid dog. Whether he ever wrote that note to Andrew Eckford.

Or whether he killed himself because he knew his wife was in love with another man.

If Lilla ever suspected this, she didn’t mention it. All she recalled was how her new life as an Eckford was, in all material ways, considerably better than she had been told her life was before. She and Ada spent the next few years living in the grandest house in Chefoo, attending the mission school at the end of First Beach, making extravagant shopping excursions to Shanghai with their mother, and chattering away to each other in a language indecipherable to anyone else. Every summer, the town filled with more and more new families as the treaty ports flourished. There were parties, picnics, boat trips, and races—their new daddy owned one of China’s most famous racehorses, Recruit. They had every toy that they could want, and two of each—one for each twin. They wore the prettiest of dresses made out of the lightest of silks and the smoothest of cottons, with no limit as to the number of petticoats, bows, and ribbons. And, as Alice quickly gave Andrew two children of his own, they even had a new baby sister each—Edith and Dorothy—to play with.

There was one other thing that Lilla didn’t mention. It was so terrifyingly normal back then that it would never have crossed her mind to bring it up later. That Andrew—dear, sweet, kind Andrew—whose firm shipped a little bit of everything in and out of China, was, more likely than not, making money out of opium, too. Money that was buying Lilla and Ada all those toys and dresses and ribbons and turning them into a pair of little princesses. Enabling them each to have one of everything—even an amah each—so Lilla stopped having to wait her turn. So much so that, at some point during this golden childhood, the idea that Ada had stolen Lilla’s share of good fortune was almost forgotten.

Chapter 2

HEAVENLY TWINS

The recipe book is unbound. Its flyaway leaves are cradled between a pair of black leather-topped covers, the bindings decorated on the front with a sketch of a young couple holding hands and wearing uniforms. If you run your fingers over its lines, you can feel that they have been embossed deep into the board beneath. Above this sketch, the title reads:
A House Wife’s Dictionary and Suggestions.
The drawing is by Lilla’s eldest brother, Vivvy—a gentle giant in whose large hands a pen could create an entire world on paper and whom one cousin remembers giving her art lessons back in the London suburb of Blackheath in the early 1950s. “Poor as a church mouse by then,” she gushed, “but still the handsomest man in the world.”

It was Vivvy who gave Lilla the idea of writing the book when they were both in Chefoo waiting for the full blast of war to hit them with little to do and too much time to think. So it’s hardly surprising that he offered to fill it with illustrations. Beautiful, tiny, pen-and-ink drawings of pots and pans and cakes and puddings and barefoot men pulling wheelbarrows and wearing pointed hats are scattered throughout its pages.

Whatever else you might say about Vivvy, he could certainly draw.

Lilla’s book starts with a course on how to cook: “Cooking stands today amongst the most important arts,” she writes. “A few suggestions in boiling, simmering and roasting will be found useful.” Useful—that’s what she wanted the book to be. Then comes a basic guide on how to turn every foodstuff from raw to cooked. At first, the suggestions are general. How to roast meat, what you do with fish. And then there are a few gems, such as: “If fish is boiled too long and breaks, it is best to add white sauce and chopped up hard boiled eggs mixed with it, and serve it as Fish fricassée,” and see that the fruit is dry before it is added to the cake. Steamed puddings are lighter than boiled ones. There are rules for cooking vegetables, time limits for each one, and for poultry and game, tips about the right fat for frying, and how to cook casseroles. Then a table of measures “and their equivalents.” The chapter ends with “Suggestions for a list of kitchen utensils required,” and almost-forgotten words like
double boiler, pastry board, enamel saucepan, tin plates, salamander, jelly moulds
(you needed two of these). And some items that sound surprisingly modern: a coffee percolator, a mincing machine.

There’s an introduction, too: “This book has been compiled to help the House wife to select her menus. There are many little items in everyday life that a House wife would like to know, not only in her kitchen, but in sickness, and household hints. ‘House Wife’s Dictionary and Suggestions’ will give enough information to help and advise the House wife.” Help and advise—that’s what Lilla wanted to do. Help and advise the housewife, whom Lilla puts right up on a pedestal—the star of the social and domestic show.

At the bottom of the introduction is a drawing of wedding guests leaving a church. Below that is a quote from
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Wonderland. Even as she started to write it with the war closing in around her, Lilla knew her recipe book would be a fantasy. The quote reads: “A book without pictures, is not interesting, says ‘Alice.’ ” And the frontispiece shows a bride and groom leaving the church. Around it are written the words: “The Bride of to day The Housewife of tomorrow.”

The groom is in uniform, looks like he has a mustache, and has exceptionally broad shoulders, but he stands little taller than the bride. The couple looks just like Lilla and her first husband, my great-grandfather Ernie Howell, in the old wedding photograph hanging in my parents’ house. I wonder whether Lilla asked Vivvy to draw it that way or whether that’s just how it came out.

CHEFOO, NORTH CHINA, SUMMER 1901

The summer of 1901, Chefoo was heaving with soldiers on leave from their stations in China. Uniforms from almost every Western country, every service, every brigade, jostled side by side. Red twill, white cotton, blue wool, and plain green serge waltzed around one another on the packed beach promenade. Glints of gold braid, shiny silver epaulets, and well-burnished leather caught the sunlight as their wearers edged slowly along the seafront, weaving in and out of the crowds. China was under foreign occupation following an infamous episode, immortalized both in print and on celluloid and known as the Boxer Uprising.

There are a host of theories about the mystical and mysterious origins of the Boxers. They are generally believed to have sprung from a religious group based in Shantung Province. The group held that its followers would become invulnerable in battle, and its members were called Boxers because they preached through boxing demonstrations in town marketplaces. The Boxers drew their support both from peasants who feared a regional famine after a serious flood in 1898 followed by two years of searing drought and from China’s widespread anti-Westernism.

The initial targets for Boxer anger were Chinese Christians, who vied with the Boxers for recruits in Shantung’s towns. The Boxers blamed the Christians for the flood and the drought and started to attack both them and the foreign missionaries who had converted them, killing a few Chinese in the process. This alarmed the foreigners in China enough for them to ask the imperial court to suppress the Boxers. The Boxers’ response was to develop a series of popular jingles, posted on street corners. According to Jonathan Spence in
The Search for Modern China,
one translated as: “Their men are all immoral; their women truly vile. For the [foreign] Devils, it’s mother-son sex that serves as the breeding style.”

By the beginning of June 1900, Boxers were roaming the streets of Peking and Tientsin wearing red leggings, white bracelets, and turbans in red, black, or yellow. Anyone in possession of foreign objects such as clocks, matches, or kerosene lamps was subjected to a witch-hunt-style trial by means of holding up burning paper. If the holder was innocent, the ashes rose. If they fell, he was guilty. And even though the Boxers had a women’s brigade, known as the Red Lanterns Shining, women were regarded as unclean and had to stay indoors after nightfall.