Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  Not so with Ernie and Lilla. In England, Ernie had decided to give his marriage another chance. In Kashmir, he had fallen in love again. And even though he and Lilla were now being hurled out of their mountain paradise and down onto the hot, dusty, Indian plain, Ernie found himself increasingly dependent on the wife he had once tried to abandon.

  As Ernie’s spirits sank, Lilla swept him up under her wing, soothing his injured pride at losing Kashmir with comfort food. She could conjure up the smoky atmosphere of an English gentlemen’s club by smearing anchovies onto hot toast dripping with melted butter. She knew how to keep cheddar on a high shelf in their larder until it was stale enough to darken and crack, then melt it into browned onions to make cheese on toast with a rich, earthy tang. Surrounded by mountains of Indian rice, she could curry sardines and rice together, spooning the fishy, mushy, oily mixture onto a bed of fried apples. She chopped ham, hard-boiled eggs, and parsley into tender cooked rice, tossing the sizzling ingredients into a creamy kedgeree. She simmered long-grain Patna rice and tomatoes until softened into an Italian risotto. I think she must have lulled Ernie’s anger with himself, with his eyes, with the system that had sent another man to take his coveted place in Kashmir, in a smooth, rich, buttery haze of food.

  Lucknow made as stark a contrast with Bandipur as India could provide. Instead of nestling among the cool, clear pinnacles of Kashmir, Lucknow sits surrounded by the flat horizons of the vast Ganges Plain. Even in winter, the temperatures are as hot as a northern European summer; and between April and June, the heat can soar to a stifling 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And unlike remote, peaceful Bandipur, Lucknow was a former Muslim capital of India. Its buildings were a riot of golden domes, turquoise arched ramparts, and ivory inlaid mosaic. As Rudyard Kipling puts it in his novel Kim, “No city—except Bombay, the queen of all—was more beautiful in her garish style than Lucknow.” Embroidered silks were piled up inside the doorways of its shopping streets whose air was thick with a rich, intoxicating perfume, a perfume that carried with it deep memories of unrest.

  For all the order that the heavy British garrison imposed upon the town’s surface, underneath it quietly seethed with rebellion against its imperial invaders. Half a century before Lilla and Ernie arrived, Lucknow had cut the deepest wound that the British had suffered in India. In the midst of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the mutineers of Lucknow had besieged the British residency, which was crammed with no fewer than three thousand British and loyal Indians. The siege lasted for eighty-seven days, and the squalor, disease, and starvation far outstripped what the Boxers later achieved in Peking. When British troops eventually came to the rescue, just one thousand—one-third—of those besieged had survived. The building still stands almost as it was found by the British troops in the autumn of 1857, a charred ruin, its walls peppered with cannonball holes.

  When Ernie and Lilla arrived in the autumn of 1904, the same mutinous spirit still bubbled through the city. Not that Lilla would have been expected to come into much contact with it. For unlike in Bandipur, where they had lived more or less by themselves—their closest neighbors the local Kashmiri villagers, who were happy, as Ernie had boasted, “to do anything” for Lilla—in Lucknow they found themselves part of the rigidly ordered life of the British cantonment.

  Cantonments in India were a little like foreign concessions in China. They were dwelling, shopping, schooling, worshipping, and socializing areas for the British fenced off from the gritty reality of Indian life. They were designed to be self-sufficient worlds, their green lawns and wide tree-lined avenues creating a utopia to comfort even the most homesick souls. But there the similarities ended. For while foreign concessions in China were a base from which to explore—if not the countryside, then at least a flavor of the real China and other foreign concessions—the cantonments in India made themselves as inward looking as they could possibly be. And as the Indian heat stifled the British residents’ bodies, dampening their skin under their tight-fitting clothes, the cantonment way of life carefully starved their minds of the reality of the India outside. There were parks for the children to play in, polo fields for husbands to play on, and social clubs that still managed to convey an air of condescending exclusivity even though they were basically open to any bearer of a white-skinned face.

  Lilla can have hardly noticed the sterility of her environment when she arrived. Ignoring her own exhaustion so shortly after having a baby, she had carted two children and a grumpy husband down from the Himalayas and hundreds of miles across the Indian plain. By the time they reached Lucknow, the children were not at all well. Whereas back in Kashmir, Arthur was so rosy-cheeked that one lady who saw him said, Lilla wrote, “he was the healthiest & most English-looking chap she had seen in India. It pleased me very much to hear that,” now things were quite different. “Arthur’s little face is half the size,” she wrote, and baby Alice was far from thriving. Lilla and Mrs. Desmond had tried to feed her “every food under the sun,” eventually having a go with “milk & barley water with mellius [a honey mixture].” Lilla was desperately worried to see her two-month-old daughter so sick. Every cell in a new mother’s body is programmed to obsess over how much her newborn is eating and how much weight he or she is gaining. Even today, mothers with robustly healthy babies can feel helpless if their child skips a meal. Back then, in India, as Lilla knew all too well—from the deaths of little Jack Henniker and her twin’s child—the stakes were high. “It makes me so unhappy to see them, with little white faces,” wrote Lilla, all her maternal instincts painfully sharpened and wondering, perhaps, whether she didn’t deserve to lose a child, too.

  No sooner had Lilla started to settle her ailing family into their new home than she was told that they had to move. “To make matters worse we have to turn out of our house—to think of packing once again, it makes me sick—I am so weary of it all.” At least this time it was only to another house in the cantonment. For several exhausting days, Lilla scuttled from one house to the other, repacking the boxes that she had just carefully emptied in the first and organizing the cleaning and preparing of the second. Then, at last, at the end of October, they moved into an imposing house that could not have been less like the beloved fishing hut she had had to leave behind. Her new home was a grand villa with a semicircular veranda that bulged out from its stone facade, supported by half a dozen fat classical columns.

  Lilla, like Ernie, would much rather have stayed in Kashmir—but for very different reasons. Ernie missed the great outdoors, the expeditions, the shooting and fishing. He also missed the independence and autonomy of being posted outside of the chain of command. In the army lists for Ernie’s Supply and Transport Corps, Kashmir is entered in whispery italics, hinting at the subterfuge and derring-do of the Central Asian spying wars between Russia and Britain. In Lucknow, Ernie was an accounts clerk, jammed behind a desk all day with a host of superior officers to bark orders at him. One in particular seems to have given Ernie such a rough time that, as he left India, he wrote to apologize for being such a “hard task master.”

  What Lilla missed about Kashmir was the coziness of their cottage and the roaring fires. The evenings spent at the piano while Ernie tried to accompany her on the violin. The snugness, the togetherness, of their life high up in the hills. Not having to worry about anyone else. For Ernie, Kashmir had been a physical adventure. For Lilla, it had been a romantic one. Looking around her new surroundings, the carefully manicured lawns and gardens, the rows of pasty expatriates trying to live for the greater good of the empire, she must have realized that she was going to have to create a brand-new type of adventure for Ernie and herself. And within the corniced walls of her grand stone villa, she started to construct a grand Raj life for her family.

  Three years on from Calcutta, Lilla was a master of conversation with other expatriate wives. She had two children to discuss—who, thankfully, recovered fully—and the kudos of having spent a year in Kashmir. She also had her own house, which doubtless she arranged with
considerably more style than most of her neighbors—the limitless heavy Chinese silks and miniature-stitched embroidery sent over by her mother, who had returned to Chefoo, raising a few envious hackles around the cantonment. She dressed Alice in frills and Arthur in immaculate short frocks with starched sailor collars and sometimes, as if to make his connection to the Scottish Andrew Eckford real, a kilt. Even Mrs. Desmond joined in the show. There were surprisingly few English nannies in India—most people made do with Indian ayahs. Mrs. Desmond, whom Lilla called Nurse, paraded her status in great constructions of hats that looked as if they were better suited to a medieval play than the Asian sunshine.

  And Lilla could certainly entertain. She loved entertaining. She’d grown up weaving her way among the guests at the Eckfords’ endless parties. In Kashmir, she had managed to produce great feasts by sleight of hand. But here in Lucknow, she had time to think and plan properly. She and Ernie were, as ever, fighting to live within the budget of his wages. Still, she would have made sure that the food she served was among the best. When the meat wasn’t good enough for an English roast, she had a dozen curry recipes up her sleeve. At the back of her recipe book is a section on housewives’ tricks. One of these is a recipe for “mock” pâté de foie gras conjured up by mashing cooked chicken livers or “liver sausage” with stock, lemon juice, seasoning, and—if possible—truffles. Lilla completed the disguise with hard-boiled eggs, pastry, and aspic jelly.

  Next to this section are pages and pages of menus for dinner parties. Fruit, soup, sole, chicken, then rum omelette for those who still had room. Roast duck followed by strawberry ice cream, my favorite. A traditional mushroom soup, stuffed veal, and apple meringue. Lobster salad (mmm), sheep’s tongue “boiled with brain sauce” (thank God for the change in modern tastes), and rhubarb charlotte, an indulgent mixture of cake, stewed fruit, and cream. The ubiquitous prawn cocktail, followed by beef with fried bananas and pineapple mousse, which sounds like an early form of fusion cuisine. After dinner, Lilla played the piano, encouraged her guests to sing. And, hopefully, spared Ernie on his novice violin.

  By flinging her family into a full-blown cantonment life, Lilla was disguising the air of unease emanating from her husband—“I do wish Ernie would cheer up,” she wrote to her sister-in-law Ada Henniker. But Ernie’s career was flagging. Staying healthy was crucial to success in India. Hordes of diseases lay in wait for the weak. Medical problems didn’t just keep a man in bed for a couple of weeks, they bestowed a stigma of not being up to the job. Ernie’s problems with his eyes— which had flared up within months of returning from his prolonged sick leave in England—were enough for the powers that be to shove him on the back burner in Lucknow and let him simmer gently while his juniors were promoted beyond him. As his self-esteem drooped, so his temper flared. This time, Lilla could rise above her husband’s bad moods. She could stand firm in the face of his explosions and busy herself with the house, the children, and a thousand other things she found to do. Of the two of them, she was the one making a success of their respective roles in life. And, inch by inch, she must have felt the gap between them growing.

  It is at this point—in the late fall of 1904—that the collection of Howell letters comes to an end. Maybe Laura had come to agree with Barbie that keeping all their correspondence would require “an elastic-sided bungalow”: “I always feel compunction in tearing up letters but really I don’t know what else one could do with them—even one’s descendants could not enjoy such vast piles as would accumulate.” Even just between the Howells themselves—ignoring their various husbands and wives— there were six children and two parents, all writing to one another once a week, which makes around fifty letters a week and well over two thousand letters a year.

  So, for the next ten years, I tracked Lilla through a handful of letters that emerged from a range of albums and drawers. Some were from Ernie’s superior officers, kept, I guess, for the praise they bestowed. Others fell out of the bottom of files lurking in attics that nobody had bothered to throw away. I uncovered a mass of photographs that put Lilla in various places on certain dates—photographs that popped out of Lilla’s own albums or other dusty family tomes hidden at the back of cupboards, photographs archived away in the bowels of libraries or, like Toby and Ada’s albums, flown to me from across the world. I pored through the old Indian army lists in the British Library and worked out where Ernie was posted when and as what.

  And then there were the stories I grew up with. Above all, the one about Lilla falling out of love.

  Lilla and Ernie stayed in Lucknow for a couple of years, punctuated by summers in the hill station of Naini Tāl, to where the Lucknow cantonment decamped to escape the hot weather. It is a mountainous region scattered with so many lakes that it has earned the nickname the Switzerland of Asia. But it wasn’t Kashmir. The steep tree-covered hill-sides leading down to the water had been carved into the manicured lawns of the cantonments down on the plain. And, transplanted several hundred miles north and a couple of thousand meters up, cantonment life continued as before—Ernie’s frustration at his crawling career manifesting itself in increasingly frequent outbursts of temper.

  When eventually they moved on, it was to a drier and duller posting in Meerut, a town that the clipped British voices called “Merit.” Even a long-overdue promotion to major left Ernie still spending his days burrowing through mounds of paper behind a desk, bringing only a brief respite from his dark moods. And here, Lilla’s enthusiasm began to fade. The family photograph albums whose pages she had so meticulously filled with pictures of their life in Kashmir—and even Lucknow—simply petered out. It was as though, barely twenty-four years old and just five years into her marriage, she knew that it was no longer something she would wish to remember. As Ernie’s sister Laura had so neatly written to their youngest sibling, Evelyn, living in India “is an awfully hard life for a woman . . . you need an awfully good husband to make it worthwhile.”

  When she needed to, whenever she found reason to, Lilla visited Ada in Bombay. Once there, she wouldn’t have complained about her life with Ernie. Not even hinted that anything was wrong. The pressure for any siblings, let alone identical twins, to keep up with each other can make it hard for them to admit something may not be right. But then, twins don’t always have to use words for a message to be read loud and clear. Despite Lilla’s eulogies of cantonment life, of what a wonderful husband Ernie was and how well he was doing, Ada would have known—maybe even guessed from Lilla’s letters, without seeing her face-to-face—that all was not as it might have been.

  Ada’s troubles were different. In sharp contrast to Ernie, Toby was going from strength to strength in the navy. He was rapidly establishing himself as one of the great and the good. Successful and confident, he was easy to love and found it easy to love in return. Ada worshipped him, and he adored her. But even this love couldn’t keep their babies alive. Their second baby girl—the one for whose birth Ada had gone to England—had started having fits, and Ada had had to watch this child die, too. She had returned to India to be with Toby and, like Lilla, would have been pretending that nothing was wrong. Given Toby’s position as principal officer of the Bombay Dockyard, she had plenty to do socially. She probably claimed that she hardly had the time for children in any case. But, again, without a single word being uttered, Lilla would have known that this wasn’t quite true.

  On more earthy matters, Ada was frank. The confidence that had been ingrained in her as the elder twin, and by having Toby, made her open when it came to the practicalities of life. She claimed she always read the Times while Toby was “in the act,” as if attempting to make light of her childlessness and so lessen the pain. But, within the family, she was widely assumed to be frigid. It may well have been the case. There can hardly be a greater disincentive to making love than the fear of having another child and watching it die. Understanding as Toby was, he at times found Ada’s physical coldness hard to bear. As the years passed, his after-dinner stories w
ould begin to include increasingly sexual innuendos—with more than a hint of desperation at their heart.

  Enjoying their time together, however, Ada and Lilla would have pottered around Bombay going for dress fittings, shopping for Ada’s house, the two of them giggling at tea parties, and at home bustling around the kitchen, organizing Ada’s bemused Indian cook into making spring rolls and chow mein. At times it must have seemed that they had wandered back half a dozen years, were just nineteen again, buffeted only by the sea breezes in Chefoo. As though, as long as they were together, nothing bad could happen to them.

  And when they parted, it was Ada’s turn to feel a wrench. That postcard of Ada’s from Bombay says it all: “Lilla and children left today for China. Sorry cannot write.”

  In China, Lilla’s photographs pick up again. At the end of 1907, a long-awaited great hand reached down from the sky and plucked Ernie from his dusty desk in Meerut, posting him back not just to China, but to his old military station in Tientsin, which was about as close to Chefoo as a British soldier could be. And, instead of languishing behind a desk in the middle of an unhappy chain of command, he was now Chief Supply and Transport Officer for the Forces in China. Snow-covered panoramas of Peking, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, fill up entire pages of Lilla’s album. I can remember my grandfather, Arthur, showing me one of him, Lilla, and Ernie standing in the snow outside the Forbidden City in Peking. But Arthur, dear Grandpa, died when I was ten—years before his mother—and I can’t find it now.

  As Lilla moved back to China, she must have felt the blood pump faster through her veins. Like Calcutta and Bombay, the center of Tientsin was packed with towering colonial edifices. But the streets that ran between them could hardly have felt more different. Tientsin was smaller than Shanghai but just as cosmopolitan. Instead of the colorless monopoly of British fashion, British food, British drink, British parties that reigned in the cantonments and the cities of the Raj, Lilla was once again surrounded by the styles, tastes, and smells from every corner of the world that made her blossom. Ernie probably thought, a little blindly, that it was he who was pleasing her, and puffed his chest out to match, reckoning this was a long-overdue chance for their relationship to take off again. But Lilla can hardly have noticed. Her smiles, the lightness of her step, would have come, not from her husband, but simply from being in China. Whether it was the tiny stitching on the country’s embroidered coats; the reservation of its tea ceremonies; the miniature hedges, ponds, and waterfalls of its formal gardens; the delicacy of the detail in its carved roofs and painted murals; the perfection of each pinched parcel of dim sum—it was all small, perfect, neat. And it was the world she knew. It was home.