Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  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.

  Boxers on the streets of Tientsin, 1900

  The most curious Boxer target, however, was the railway system. Railways were not just “an obvious manifestation of foreign intrusion,” writes Frances Wood in her superb account of treaty-port life, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese, but—in as clear a sign as any that nations need to stop and think before imposing their own cultural values upon others— the railways also directly interfered with Chinese traditions. The rail tracks altered the feng shui of the land, thus bringing bad luck to all the areas in which they were laid. Passing trains potentially shook the tombs of ancestors, preventing their spirits from resting in peace. It was even alleged that the foreigners buried a dead Chinese under each railway sleeper—perhaps a metaphor for the jobs lost on the roads and canals. And in the second week of June 1900, the Boxers dug up as much of the Peking-Tientsin Railway as they could.

  One week later, Western troops stationed at Tientsin seized several forts that controlled access to the city, forcing the imperial court to back either the Boxers or the treaty porters. Fearing a popular rebellion if it sided with the West, the court took up the Boxer cause—in a dramatically unsuccessful attempt at self-preservation—and a full-scale war broke out. The Boxers took the endorsement as encouragement to do their worst, and they swept inland, murdering any Chinese Christians, missionaries, and their families that they could find. In one town, the Chinese governor made the grand, and apparently brave, gesture of offering all the local missionaries protection. And then, when they arrived, he slaughtered every man, woman, and child.

  For the foreigners, the most celebrated area of action was in Peking itself. There, everyone retreated into the American, British, Russian, German, and Japanese legations—diplomatic compounds—that nestled side by side in the city, barricading themselves in with sandbags, timber, and whatever furniture they could find. Between June 20 and August 14, an infamous fifty-five days, they were under siege, resorting to eating their ponies and horses, which had been performing in the May races shortly beforehand.


  However, as the Boxers had cut the Peking-to-Tientsin telegraph along with the railway, the news flow at the time was limited. And some confusion over events arose. On July 5, the New York Times splashed the headline ALL FOREIGNERS IN PEKING DEAD, then, eleven days later, printed the lurid details of the alleged massacre: FOREIGNERS ALL SLAIN AFTER A LAST HEROIC STAND—SHOT THEIR WOMEN FIRST. But when the rescue force—an early United Nations–like combination of twenty thousand Japanese, Russian, American, British, and French troops—arrived in August (to be followed later by a German contingent), they found just seventy of the several hundred foreigners dead and the rest alive.

  Foreign retribution was severe. “Russian and German troops in particular embarked on a campaign of rape and terror. Hearing that valuables were sometimes hidden in coffins along with dead family members awaiting an auspicious date for burial, they broke open any coffins they could find and even dug through the cemetery, flinging bodies away to be eaten by stray dogs.” The rest of the foreign soldiers set about sacking the palatial red-walled maze of the Forbidden City and beheading every Boxer they could find, grimly posing with their victims for photographs like big-game hunters who had tracked down their prey.

  And the effect on the Chinese imperial court of first siding with the Boxers and then losing to the foreigners yet again would turn out to be disastrous. Various financial and political penalties were imposed upon it by the occupying powers. But the most demeaning outcome was perhaps the breaking of the majestic isolation in which the imperial court had kept itself, as the empress dowager now found herself holding receptions—tea parties, I imagine—for the wives of foreign diplomats. And, in the longer term, with the Boxers and their antiforeignism defeated, the young Chinese started to examine their country’s own fallible imperial institutions in their search for a solution to China’s problems, so marking the first step on the road to a tumultuous and bloody upheaval.

  Chefoo, despite being an obvious Boxer target with both the Chefoo school for the children of missionaries and the bases of several missions in the town, seems to have been spared the worst. The clearest account is in a history of the school, which suggests that the town was threatened only for a week, and although the children “slept with a pillow-case containing a complete change of clothes ready by their beds,” they never needed it. Nonetheless, it must have been terrifying for those there. One former China resident writes that her missionary parents first ran to Chefoo from their station inland and from there fled China altogether, “travelling steerage” to Japan, her mother sitting up all night “to keep the rats off her babies”—including the author, who was just a few months old at the time.

  First Beach from Consulate Hill, Chefoo, 1900

  The Heavenly Twins: Ada and Lilla, Chefoo, 1901

  Although the foreign forces took Peking in August 1900, the military campaign throughout the rest of the country dragged on, leaving several thousand troops stationed in the treaty ports. The treaty-port residents took it upon themselves to entertain them. There were tea parties in the afternoon, regimental balls in the evening, and hunting at dawn the next morning in the countryside around the treaty ports. And when the cities turned into saunas the following summer, the soldiers decamped to seaside resorts like Chefoo whenever they were given leave. There, the entertainment went on. There were thinly sliced and peppered cucumber sandwich picnics at the temples in the hills; early-morning canters kicking the sand up along the beaches; energetic boat trips with well-muscled arms used to wielding swords turned to pulling oars through the water as far as the islands that circled the bay; race meetings at the track on the far side of the old town, with bets and adrenaline running high; and dancing whenever there was the slightest reason to do so. And with all too few young women around, Lilla’s and Ada’s days were bursting at the seams with invitations.

  It was a high time for the twins. They were nineteen years old and just back from finishing school in Europe. Those impish grins had blossomed into flirtatious flickers. The heart-shaped faces had softened. Their thick, dark hair was piled up on their heads, as the fashion dictated. But those two pairs of blue eyes still sparkled as if their owners were just twelve years old.

  Lilla and Ada were pretty and knew it. They knew how to hold themselves in a corset; move their arms gracefully in the lightly frilled, high-collared shirts of the moment; step, not stride, in slimmed-down skirts; and perch their boaters at just the right angle. And they knew how to flirt. “They were extraordinarily interested in pleasing men,” I’m told.

  Their mother, Alice, showed them her other ways of making a man happy, too. How to make a room look inviting, pulling back the furniture to open it up yet not placing the chairs so far apart that a secretive whisper couldn’t travel from one to another. How to bring a garden indoors without creating a greenhouse. How to display the latest tastes in fashion, art, and music so that your husband feels he is ahead of his peers. How to keep a house fresh, the air so gently scented that you long to breathe in yet more of it, without it growing too hot or too cold inside. How to turn your kitchen into an ever-simmering workshop of succulent roasts and irresistible sweet bakes and soft spices to tease the tongue—because, however many servants you might have cooking for you, they would only be as good as you yourself could teach them to be. These talents, Alice taught her daughters, were the tools for marriage, the tools for the only life that lay ahead of them. These were the unseen keys, I can almost hear her murmuring, to unlocking a husband’s heart. Spoil him rotten, she would have whispered, cater to his every need, and he will not be able to help himself but show you love in return. And as Lilla and Ada watched Andrew dote on their mother, his eyes following her every time she swept in or out of the room with a rustle of silk petticoats, they could only have agreed.

  Lilla also had charm. Her stammer gave her the air of an innocent about to surrender. And to keep up with Ada, she tried to please. Ada simply swanned around. Then that was Ada, everyone says—she never had to try. Unlike Lilla, whose need to work at whatever she turned her mind to meant that, even in her nineties, she would still have a young man eating out of the palm of her hand within minutes. At nineteen, however, the pair of them were dynamite, an ever-shifting double image tantalizing admirers who found it hard to tell which one they were addressing. They had endless, breathless energy with which to picnic, ride, play tennis, chatter, and dance until dawn. Their feet barely touched the ground. And the soldiers who came to Chefoo, Lilla said, called them “the H-H-Heavenly Twins”—a nickname stolen from a contemporary popular novel about a pair of wicked but irresistibly engaging children. One of Ada’s grandsons sent me a cartoon from New Zealand. It was drawn in China, that summer of 1901. It shows several officers weeping because they weren’t given leave to go to the races in Chefoo and see the leaping pair of parasoled figures in pink and blue, marked THE HEAVENLY TWINS.

  Then, just as Lilla thought they were having such a good time that she never wanted it to stop, Ada fell in love. And it wasn’t just a passing infatuation. Ada was head over heels in the going-to-get-married, unstoppable sort of love with a naval officer called Toby Elderton. Toby was tall, handsome, and a bit of a hero in Chefoo. He had been in charge of the ships that had ferried the rescue troops at breakneck speed to Peking, and he had already won one of the top British military medals, the Distinguished Service Order, twice over. He dazzled Ada with his self-assurance and charm. He was already thirty-six years old. So sweeping a nineteen-year-old girl off her feet must have been a walk in the park.

  Part of Lilla would have been thrilled for Ada. Marriage was what they had been brought up to do. A husband was their career. And Ada was doing just that—and basking in the romantic glow that had seeped out from the pages of the novels they had read.

  But Ada was mesmerized and could barely take her eyes off Toby. She dressed for him, wanted to spend time with him alone. She stopped speaking to Lilla quite so much in their private language—and started speaking to Toby about things she woul
dn’t repeat to her sister.

  The rest of Lilla must have been quite desperately jealous.

  Jealous not just of Ada, who for the first time since their birth had something Lilla didn’t have and couldn’t simply demand to have as well—but, as having an identical twin is like already having a husband, a wife, a lover, she must have been deeply jealous of Toby, too—his arrival making her ache in a place that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Ada’s glazed, flushed-cheeked look haunting her and her nights plagued by disturbing images of Ada disappearing up an endless church aisle, her rippling train slithering through Lilla’s outstretched fingers each time she tried to grasp it.

  The visceral umbilical cord that had, until then, still joined the two of them, was beginning to tear.

  Ada wasn’t just going to marry Toby. She was going to leave China with him, too.

  One year after the Boxer Uprising, the foreign occupation of China was coming to an end. Power was going to be handed back to the reinstated Chinese government, and the invading armies would disperse. Toby was a member of the British-run Indian navy. He had come to China from his base in India. When he went back, he would take Ada with him.

  Ada would write. But it would still take six weeks, at the very least, to send a letter and receive a reply. And Lilla would be left behind in Chefoo, the unmarried twin. The spinster sister. The one who wasn’t whisked off to India. The one letting the side down.