Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  But the moans about Lilla rumbled on, and Barbie could no longer remain silent. She wrote to her elder sister, Laura Harmer. Laura was another Cambridge graduate, who had walked away with a glittering double First—the highest grade achievable in natural science. Not that, being a woman, she had been allowed to collect her degree. She had married another scientist and still lived in the university town, so she was close enough to events in London to be able to influence what was happening, yet far enough from Lilla to make writing safe. Laura was also, quite rightly, regarded by the rest of her family as terrifyingly bright. Among the Howells it was thought sad but inevitable that she had given up her scientific career when she married and had children— her husband was the eminent scientist Sidney Harmer, later knighted for his discovery of protozoa, tiny single-cell organisms. Laura herself found it hard: “I find that domestic chores—when they take the form of curtains and turning out drawers—all day simply reduce one’s brain to a pulp and make it impossible to think intelligently on any subject.” Laura, like most of her family, was clearly not designed for domestic chores. My father tells me how her husband, Sidney, “a scientist second only to Alexander Fleming,” was so perpetually half starved by the household’s meager meals that every lunchtime he disappeared into the bushes to eat cheese sandwiches with the gardeners.

  Barbie wrote to Laura:

  And now as this is a “strictly private” epistle and only written to be burned at once (—promise—) after you’ve read it, I will say what I have frequently thought but have never ventured to hint at to Mama as I know how her letters get bandied about through the family—why is everyone so hard on poor Lily—including Ernie! Poor Lily, she may not be a prodigy of wisdom, but she is such a baby still—I do think Mama and everyone seem hard on her. What do you think about her and Ernie? Are they a happy couple? I do hope so. But he writes of her so funnily one doesn’t know what to think.

  Laura’s reply has been lost. However, the complaints about Lilla continued to reach Shillong. A month later, Barbie wrote to Laura again:

  It makes me awfully angry to hear the groans over poor Lily—I do call it so horribly unfair and it makes me very cross with Ernie, who was certainly no susceptible infant when he married her but a man with his eyes very wide open indeed—or ought to have been. Well, well of course you understand all this is not for publication in the family but I am sure you agree with me. No-one can be more awake to the horrors and folly—esp out here—of “reckless and improvident marriages.”

  It was about this time that Ernie must have first told Lilla that, when he returned to India, he intended to leave her behind with his family. To those used to “Indian life,” this was not so unusual. The country’s raging heat and outbreaks of disease often led husbands to leave their wives and young children in England for long periods at a time. Ernie, though, was talking about repeatedly going out alone for three years at a stretch and piling together his one month’s annual leave in order to squeeze in a quick trip home, then leaving her behind again and again. As it took a month to travel each way, that left just a month with Lilla in England—once every three years. At a time when divorce was unheard of, Ernie was suggesting a very thinly veiled long-term separation. And all because, as he must have made clear, keeping her and the baby with him in India would be, in his book, too expensive.

  To be told by your husband, when you are nineteen years old, pregnant, and far from home, that your company is not worth the cost of living together must be just about as emotionally devastating as it gets. It must also have been terrifying for Lilla. If Ernie left her and their baby alone with his family, what would become of her?

  Lilla clearly realized that this was a problem she could no longer hide.

  And when, on the other side of the world, Alice Eckford read a cry for help that must have brought tears of frustration to her eyes, she didn’t hesitate to act. She packed up the house, and, six weeks after sailing out of Shanghai, she arrived in England in a glittering caravan of silk and lace. With her came Andrew—who must have decided to take another year’s leave, now that Vivvy and Reggie were old enough to help run the firm in his absence—and their two teenage daughters, Edith and Dorothy, trailing behind.

  As if trying to make her family as appealing as possible to Ernie’s, Alice rented a house in Bedford, a market town bursting with retired empire builders, civil servants, and army officers—and within visiting distance of both Papa and Mama in London and Laura in Cambridge. Then she filled it to overflowing with fine oriental furniture, spices, and endless gratuitous cakes, setting up an extravagant family camp that shouted out that money was not an issue.

  And she made it clear that she intended to stay.

  Chapter 5

  “ POOR LITTLE LILY ”

  BEDFORD, EARLY SUMMER 1902

  I have been scrabbling through boxes and drawers, through albums and battered cardboard folders, looking for a photograph of the Eckfords’ drawing room in Bedford. I am sure that I have seen one somewhere. An almost wide-angled-lens view across a square room, taken from the corner opposite the door. Perhaps it is in one of the many dusty photograph albums that were lent by relations or that surfaced from the deep vaults of all those libraries and universities. As I turned the pages a little too eagerly, I may have glimpsed the picture almost subconsciously, and the image has imprinted itself on my mind.

  It is a large, lightly decorated room. Instead of being draped with the dark velvets and brocades of a century ago—every curtain pelmet, stuffed cushion edge, and sofa skirt weighed down with heavy fringes and tassels—the Eckfords’ drawing room is light, fresh, modern. But then, that was Alice’s, and Lilla’s, style. The sofas and big armchairs are upholstered in pale fabrics. There are three or four dark wooden armchairs with cream, almost white, seats and backs. Great ferns, or palms, reach into the room from its corners, their long, thin, pointed leaves dangling down like fingers aching to stroke the shining objects that glitter around the room. Or the cheek of a passerby. And, in between the sofas and armchairs, there are maybe a dozen dark, thickly lacquered side tables. Standing against the calm palette of the walls are three-quarter-height painted Chinese cupboards with moonlike circles drawn around their strange brass locks. A couple of Japanese screens covered in figures telling epic tales of love and heartbreak, half concertinaed, frame the set. Their resined scent fills the room, seeping out from deep inside the wood, bringing years of memories with it.

  In sharp contrast to the minimalism of the color scheme, every surface is crammed with photographs in thick silver frames, carved wooden figures and demigods. There are embroidered laces and linens—some so bright that they appear snatched from the seamstress’s hands, others so faded and thin that they look as though they would fall apart if taken out of their frames. Curving porcelain vases and bowls too fragile—the china almost transparent—to pick up but whose ridges rise and fall under your fingertips, so that their painted surfaces seem to leap out at you. And hanging on the walls are more framed embroidery samplers, pen-and-ink drawings by Chinese artists and watercolor landscapes by Western hands, but again of Chinese scenes.

  This was a room in which you could hear the breathy whisper of opulence. Even the thick, silk curtains—the material shipped over on great rolls from Shanghai—were as pale as the walls, their richness one that you felt as your arm brushed past a surface firm from the sheer weight of the fabric. This was a room in which Alice intended to make it quite clear to Ernie and his family that the Eckfords were not just colonial traders whose daughters could be picked up and dumped at will, but a force to be reckoned with. Little did she realize just how impervious to her efforts her daughter’s in-laws would be.

  Socially, the Howells were as deeply conventional as they believed they were not. They may have mingled with scientists on the cutting edge of change. They may have foreseen the cataclysmic political changes of the twentieth century, pointing out in their letters that “things cannot continue as they are” and discu
ssing the likely collapse of “that wonderful house of cards which we call our Indian Empire”—even when that meant the end of the very traditions, the old order, that had nurtured them. They may have held strikingly liberal views on women’s education—it was quite extraordinary that in the 1880s and 1890s, when few women were educated at all, the family had not just allowed, but encouraged, Laura and Barbie to go to Cambridge. And, of course, each of them may have felt that their experiences in India had given them a worldly-wise perspective from which to judge. Nonetheless, on social issues, they were the puritanical sort of small “c” conservatives whose sympathies and aversions had long sustained the British class system: When it came to family pedigree, the longer the better. And on this point, they chose conveniently to ignore the fact that until Papa’s grandfather had ventured up to London and made a fortune shipping stores out to the British army in its various wars, the Howells had simply been the local butchers in Oswestry, a market town on the Welsh border. Instead, they focused on the achievements of Papa’s father, Sir Thomas Howell, who had been knighted for sorting out the shambolic logistics—or lack of them—that had left the British army without enough boots during the first bitter winter of the Crimean War.

  A couple of exceptionally procreative generations—Papa was one of thirteen and appears restrained in having only six children himself—had now subdivided the family money to a pittance. This left the short-of-cash Howells deeply suspicious of other people’s fortunes, particularly those that were newly made, as the Eckfords’ money was in China. It was an unspoken but fundamentally held belief among Lilla’s in-laws that the pursuit of riches resulted in a neglect of more high-minded endeavors. “They must be fairly well endowed with this world’s goods,” wrote Papa Howell after meeting Andrew and Alice Eckford for the first time, implying that they lacked the nonmaterial, intellectual assets that were worth more.

  There was certainly an element of jealousy in the Howells’ snobbery. Like Ernie, the rest of the men in the Howell family were perpetually moaning about a “shortage of funds.” When translated into English pounds and prices, Indian Civil Service and Indian army salaries were not generous. The mess bills, the uniforms, the cost of employing a valet could easily make an army officer’s career an expensive luxury rather than a gainful occupation. Ernie and his siblings, even their parents, were incessantly calculating how to live the lifestyle that they had been brought up to expect on the combination of salary and the tiny private income that each of them had. And while they whinged about the differences between extravagances and necessities, they were all aware that the Eckfords didn’t have to make such distinctions.

  This must have made it all the harder for Ernie to ask Andrew Eckford for help. When Andrew wrote out checks to Lilla, Ernie must certainly have been grateful. But admitting to a successful businessman like Andrew Eckford that he couldn’t cope financially would have knocked a huge dent in his soldierly pride. The straightforward option—especially now that Lilla had her family in England—was to stick to his plan to go to India alone.

  Money wasn’t the only gulf between the two families. Lilla was already well acquainted with the sharp contrast between the Eckfords’ love of luxury and the Howells’ almost spartan lifestyle. For Alice, this would have come as a shock. She may have intended the display in the house in Bedford to bring the two families closer together, but instead, it seemed to accentuate their differences.

  The Eckfords’ house in Bedford was everything that the house in Kensington Gardens Square was not. Number 5 Kensington Gardens Square was an externally elegant, white-stucco terraced house containing a smattering of functional furniture. Number 14 Lansdowne Road, Bedford, was, wrote Ernie’s sister Laura after she had driven over from Cambridge to see the Eckfords, “not much to look at on the outside, but most comfortable inside.” To some extent, Laura was impressed. “[The house is] beautifully furnished. The drawing room is a perfect museum of Chinese and Japanese china, embroidery, carved work, etc.”

  But this attention to visual detail heralded—as Laura might have expected—a lack of the intellectual interests that the Howells cared so much about. The Eckfords’ conversation, she nonetheless wrote, was “not particularly cultivated.” Alice Eckford in particular she found “suburban” and “full of a fussy sort of kindness which is rather distracting.” “She simply fazes me out,” continued Laura. “She has discovered the secret of perpetual motion and has in addition an unending flow of small talk. I think there is nothing as tiring as having to talk for a whole day, especially the make up kind of talk one has to keep up with a person with whom one has not really much in common.”

  Poor Alice. She was trying so hard to make life easier for Lilla by being friendly and showing that her family was too rich to be ignored. Really, she would have done better if she had suggested that the Eckfords were impoverished artists with grand connections. If she had toned down the decoration, focused on her love of singing, and chatted less, maybe the Howells would have warmed to her.

  Lilla’s baby was due at the end of August. By the beginning of July, she would already have felt the size of a house and been torn between a longing to be rid of the huge weight she was carrying and a growing fear of the pain that lay ahead in what was euphemistically referred to by the Howells as her “event.” The question arose as to where she should give birth and stay for her confinement afterward. The convention then was that, after giving birth, a woman should “lie in”—either stay in bed or take it very easy indeed—for six weeks.

  Deeply relieved that some of her family was with her in England— even if it made her twin’s absence all the more marked—Lilla assumed that she would go to her mother in Bedford for the birth and started organizing herself to do so. But when the Howells caught wind of this, they were aghast. Lilla was now a Howell, they pointed out, as the baby she was having would be, too. She should therefore be with her husband’s family for her “troubles.” Perhaps Ernie’s family did not quite trust Lilla’s “suburban” mother to do things in the proper way or held some suspicion that she might have picked up unorthodox childbearing practices in China. In any case, they professed amazement that Lilla could have been foolish enough to think that she should give birth anywhere but in a Howell household. London was regarded as unhealthy for a newborn, particularly in the summer, so it was decided that Lilla would go to some cousins of Ernie’s near Cromer, on the Norfolk coast.

  Cromer may have been a fashionable seaside resort like Chefoo, but Norfolk is nothing like Shantung. Instead of a town sheltered by hills and beaches nestling between rocky coves, the Norfolk coastline is bare and flat. The only undulations along the East Anglian shore and inland are a few dunes whose sand has been whipped up into great piles by the wind and the dips that mark the great watery channels that crisscross the countryside—the marshlands known as the Norfolk Broads. Barring a few tufts of tough, shrubby grass, there is little to stop the great North Sea winds sweeping down from icy Scandinavia and leveling the landscape. Even in August, the hottest month of the year, Norfolk requires a thick fisherman’s sweater. It is not a cozy place to give birth to a first child.

  Not that Lilla can have cared. Ernie was still intending to go back to India without her. And although her mother was now there to encourage Lilla to hold back a little, not serve herself up to Ernie on a plate, telling her that he would come round once he held his child in his arms, Lilla must have been desperate to do anything to make herself seem less of a burden and easier to take with him. She agreed to go to Cromer.

  Ernie didn’t go with her. In late July, he dispatched Lilla to his relatives and took the sleeper to Scotland. There, he joined his father, who had already taken up residence at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews. While Lilla was left among strangers in an unfamiliar place to grow larger, more exhausted, and increasingly anxious about what lay ahead of her in childbirth, Ernie and Papa settled down for a month or so of father-and-son golf.

  Alice followed her daughter f
rom Bedford to Cromer, taking Andrew and their two girls with them. She booked rooms for the family in one of the hotels and hovered as close as she could without interfering with the Howells’ arrangements and upsetting matters more.

  Again, it was Barbie’s lone voice, from miles away in India, that spoke up for Lilla. “For this event of hers she seems to have been the last person to have been consulted, though one would have thought on this one occasion at least she was the first person to consider.”

  Perhaps, if they had arrived in time, Barbie’s words would have roused a flicker of conscience among her family back in England. But, of course, it was yet another month before they were read.

  The baby was late. Luckily perhaps, for it was only toward the end of August that Ernie decided to return south. Papa was reluctant to see him go: “I wish Ernie could have stayed longer with me.” Ernie reached Norfolk in the last days of the month. Papa planned to follow him shortly.

  The first week of September passed. There was no sign of the baby. The second week dragged on with Lilla cumbersome, barely able to move, simply waiting on tenterhooks for the pain to begin. By the time September reached its third week, Alice decided to intervene. In her opinion—and she had borne six children herself—a bit of movement was what was needed. She took Lilla out for a carriage drive. The “carriage” was a fairly rudimentary pony and cart. Nonetheless, as my grandfather, Lilla’s son, told me again and again, Alice set off at a rapid pace.