Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  From the moment they met, Casey had adored her wholly, without reservation. “He doted on her.” Casey’s love was one of the few things in Lilla’s life that she hadn’t had to fight for. He made her feel like the most precious, valued, loved woman in the world. “Such love,” she wrote, “no man has given to a woman.” He needed her. When she was away—with her brother Reggie in Tsingtao, with friends in Shanghai, or when she dashed back to England on the Trans-Siberian Express to see her children and Ada—Casey took care of her little houses himself, cleaning them in between tenants. His attempts were not always successful, but the mere fact that he tried so hard on her behalf meant a lot to Lilla: “The poor lamb did his utmost . . . & felt very proud.” But when the tenants went in, they said it was dirty—“his disappointment!!! So it shows you,” she wrote to her son, as houseproud as ever, “that my presence is necessary—as no tenant that goes into my houses when I am there says it is dirty!!! I look into every corner . . . of course I will tell him, he did very well indeed.” And I think she found looking after him surprisingly fulfilling. On the evenings that they were in alone together, I can almost hear him reading aloud to her in a soft, lilting, unclipped voice and telling her how fabulous she was.

  And the love that grew out of this mutual caring, this holding-hands sort of love, would prove to be stronger and more constant than any Lilla had known before. It was a love that would survive all the terrifyingly high hurdles yet to come.

  Just as Lilla started to build her new life in Chefoo, the wheels that would ride it into the ground were already beginning to turn. For a couple of years, the area around Chefoo remained peaceful, but in the rest of China, civil war was raging and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, still nominally in power, was losing popular support. One of the reasons for this was that, rather than retaliate against the Japanese violence of the early 1930s, Chiang had ignored it and focused on trying to eliminate his rural Communist opposition instead. By the midthirties, support for the Nationalists was at such a low ebb that in December 1936, Chiang was taken prisoner by a local warlord in Sian. A few months later, he was released, but he was weakened by the humiliation—he had been captured wearing only his pajamas—and Japan saw the moment to invade.

  In July 1937, Japanese soldiers swarmed south from Manchuria along China’s prosperous eastern coast and took Peking and Tientsin, their bayonets stopping only at the gates of the foreign concessions in the latter. In August and September, they were locked in battles over Shanghai. And, although the Japanese again avoided entering the international settlement, several foreigners—and several thousand Chinese—were killed in their bombing raids on the main shopping streets. December of that year saw one of the worst atrocities in modern warfare with the Japanese “rape” of the city of Nanking, where Chiang Kai-shek’s fragile government was based. The Japanese army ran wild through the city with a mind-numbing, inhuman viciousness. Chinese women were gang-raped by soldiers and bayoneted like pincushions. Others were simply shot and sliced to pieces. Few survived. The lucky ones managed to take their own lives before the soldiers reached them.

  Again, the foreigners were carefully sidestepped. Yet, in the treaty ports, a chill began to set into expatriate bones. Until recently, the Westerners argued with themselves, the Japanese had been their colleagues. To an extent, they still were. The Japanese would never, they thought, they convinced themselves, dare do anything like this to Westerners. What they missed, or simply didn’t want to see, was that the important thing to the Japanese was not race; it was the strength of the governments of the people they were targeting. Two decades earlier, the Japanese had waited for the Germans to find themselves at loggerheads with the rest of the treaty-port nations in 1914 before slipping into their place and taking over their Chinese territories. And, as Lilla herself had seen, back in Europe, in those countries to which so many of the treaty-port residents were supposed to belong, trouble was already brewing.

  Having digested Peking, Tientsin, and Shanghai, the Japanese army reached Chefoo in the last days of 1937. At first, the Westerners were relieved to see the red-and-white-flagged vehicles rolling in. As news of the Japanese advance had swept through the country, the Nationalist Army had destroyed the infrastructure in Japan’s path and broken up the Japanese-owned factories and warehouses. It then fled toward its new headquarters in Chungking in the west of China, which the Japanese chose to ignore. The treaty ports were left with no semblance of law or order and at the mercy of rioters and looters encouraged by the damage that had already been done. The damage in Chefoo—where there were few industrial units; even Casey & Co. consisted of seamstresses rather than heavy machinery—was minimal. Still, Lilla must have felt very vulnerable. The Casey building was one of the largest in the center of the town. And anarchy is terrifying. The crowd was attacking the Japanese today. Tomorrow it could be the British.

  In industrial Tsingtao, just a couple of hours from Chefoo, the looting was so bad that, on New Year’s Eve, Lilla’s brother Reggie organized a force to try to keep control until the Japanese arrived. Not only had a large number of sites been destroyed, but the departing Nationalists had aggravated the situation by releasing a couple of thousand criminals back onto the streets. Ignoring the growing tensions among their governments back home, the British, Americans, White Russians, and Germans clubbed together to form the Tsingtao Special Police. The doctors were German, the drivers and intelligence officers Russian, and the British and Americans wielded the “sticks, pieces of board, anything available” that they could find. They charged the crowds of rioters that they found attacking waterworks, Chinese villages, and foreign property. The Tsingtao Special Police held the town for ten days. On January 10, Japanese marines began to land. In a formal ceremony, Reggie handed over Tsingtao to Japanese Rear Admiral Shisido. In return, Shisido handed Reggie a delicately engraved and painted china urn. “It was absolutely beautiful,” says Rugs—who had been fighting with the Tsingtao Special Police, too—as though the very beauty of it, the extent of the Japanese gratitude, should have alerted them as to what was to come.

  The Tsingtao Special Police was disbanded, each member clutching a picture of its extraordinary commemorative coat of arms—a shield quartered into the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, the Russian flag, and the German swastika. A sword rose up through the middle. On the shield was written TSINGTAO, 1938.

  There is something about this picture—the sight of the British and American symbols so closely intertwined with the jagged black Nazi cross and that date—that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

  As the Japanese took over the treaty ports, order returned. Lilla, her brothers and sisters, and Casey, all welcomed the peace. The factories were repaired. Business started up again. The cricket matches resumed. Inside the larger treaty ports, such as Shanghai and Tientsin, it was almost as though nothing had changed. Hardly a Japanese face was seen within the clearly demarcated foreign concessions. Even in Chefoo, where there were no concession gates for the Japanese to wait outside of and where the Japanese army had taken over every street and alleyway, stopping only at the foreigners’ front doors, cocktails reappeared on the terrace of the Chefoo Club and life seemed to slip back into the same easy rhythm as before.

  Alice Eckford, Tsingtao, 1938

  It was about this time, in 1938, that the indomitable Alice Eckford died. Over eighty years old, she was still pinning up her skirts to show off her knees. She could still pretend, just, that everything was almost as it had always been. Just.

  At first, the only noticeable change was that the Chinese policemen who had been directing the traffic had been replaced by exceptionally courteous Japanese soldiers. Then the Japanese began, ever so slightly, to clamp down. They closed the Yangtze River—supposedly a British domain—to all but Japanese ships. They made all foreigners in Tsingtao have cholera jabs every six months—you had to show your cholera pass at checkpoints throughout the town. Even in laid-back Chefoo, they began to run the trea
ty port with alarmingly proprietorial efficiency. Fortifications were built on Second Beach, beyond the school. All signs in Chinese were torn down and replaced with Japanese characters. Leaflets were distributed describing the New Order in Asia. The red suns of the Japanese flag seemed to rise over almost every corner of the town in an unearthly dawn.

  Even from inside the thick stone walls of the Casey compound, Lilla began to wonder what might be coming next.

  AMERICAN RED CROSS

  Sukiyaki

  This is a Japanese dish. Put into a frying pan, which contains plenty of fat, the following.

  Put all this, or some at a time if a large amount is required, into the frying pan. Add some worcester sauce and a little sugar. Mix well for the meat to cook properly. The fat must be piping hot for rapid cooking. Rice must be served with the Sukiyaki and placed into individual bowls. Then the desired quantity of Sukiyaki is placed on top.

  Chapter 11

  WAR

  1 9 3 9

  It takes a great deal of fear to make a person who loves the life she has to pack a bag and run away. People don’t give up their homes, their property, their friends—everything they have—unless they are extremely scared. Scared they might be humiliated, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. And, back in 1939, Lilla as yet feared none of these things. In any case, if she and Casey left China to run away from the Japanese, they would lose everything they had. And where would they go? They wouldn’t have enough money to retire comfortably in England—where all they would ever be was a couple of pieces of imperial flotsam and jetsam, washed up by the tide. Casey was already in his late sixties, was too old to move to Malaya or India or Burma and start up a new business, a new life, all over again.

  Besides, once the Japanese had raised their flags and laid down their regulations, nothing more seemed to happen. As 1938 rolled into 1939, little changed in the treaty ports. Business continued as before. The lunches, the parties, the picnics went on. If new trouble was brewing anywhere, it was back in Europe.

  Japan and Russia were not the only countries looking beyond their own horizons. The old European conflict was rearing its head. This time, it was fueled by fear on both sides. The agitators—the Fascist governments in both Germany and Italy—were driven not only by a desire to expand their own borders, but also by a long-standing fear of the Communism that had taken over the old Russia. The appeasers— France and Britain—were sufficiently paralyzed by fear of another war on the same scale as 1914–18 that they didn’t try to stop them until it was too late.

  In the autumn of 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier met Hitler in Munich. By then Hitler had rearmed Germany, taken Austria, and was threatening to invade Czechoslovakia. Still desperate to prevent another war in Europe, Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to split Czechoslovakia and hand the German-speaking Sudetenland to Hitler in exchange for his promise to leave the rest of the country alone. Chamberlain returned to Britain proudly waving the written agreement and claiming that he had secured “peace in our time.”

  Six months later, Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia.

  Britain now responded by promising to go to war with any power that invaded Poland—as it was feared Hitler might. The following month, in April 1939, Italy seized Albania, galvanizing Britain into reintroducing conscription and at last rearming. In May, Italy and Germany joined forces by signing the Pact of Steel.

  From then on, it was only a matter of when.

  But just as war seemed inevitable, the drumroll toward battle paused, swords hovering in the air just a few inches apart and Europe holding its breath. By the middle of July 1939, Lilla must have felt that the gap in warmongering was beckoning her back to England. If war did come to Europe, it could be her last chance to see her children, her grandchildren, Ada. She followed her usual route back to England on a north-bound boat from Chefoo to Dairen and then the Trans-Siberian Express back to Europe.

  The last leg of the trip, from Moscow to London, must have been extraordinary. The summer of 1939 in Europe was as oppressively hot as the region’s politics. The train would have been baking, claustrophobic. The passengers fidgety. The waiters jumping at the clink of china. And at each long station stop in eastern Europe, families—the parents white-faced, the children, as if sensing that something dramatic was happening, strangely calm—were heaving suitcases and brown paper parcels tied with string onto bulging trains.

  Arthur met Lilla at Victoria Station and drove her to the house he was renting in Haslemere, in the countryside outside London. Under pressure from Beryl to make more money than the army paid him, he had given up his commission in 1936 and become a stockbroker in the city. But, still a soldier at heart, he had been watching events in Europe and speaking frequently to his former army colleagues. He knew, he’d been telling Lilla for years, that war was coming. A couple of years earlier, he and Beryl had been on a driving tour of Europe: France, Italy, Austria, Germany. In Munich, they’d seen teenage soldiers beating up elderly Jews wearing stars on their chests. They were spotted watching the scene in horror and were arrested on suspicion of spying.

  I still find it hard to imagine Beryl, my grandmother, being arrested. There has never been a less likely spy. Beryl was not a practical woman. When she married Arthur, she had never been in a kitchen. Nor had she known that butter came from cows. She spent the last decade of her long life with her mind back in the 1920s, in a whirl of finishing schools, debutante dances, and society balls—the settings where she felt most at home.

  After a few hours in a police station cell they were released. Arthur, my grandfather, always said he knew then that war would come. Not if, but when. When they returned home, he put the family’s London house on the market and moved them out of the city.

  Lilla spent a few days at Arthur’s. My aunt Jane, Lilla’s granddaughter, remembers her there. They sat in the garden. A perfect English garden. On a hill, overlooking a deep valley and woodland beyond. In the garden, a rolling lawn, trimmed hedges, the last roses still out. Lilla watched the seven-year-old Jane teasing her three-year-old brother, David, my father, as he stumbled about on the grass. Each time that Jane trespassed what Lilla regarded as “a line,” she called out to her. My father, wearing only a bathing suit—it was too hot to wear anything else—rode his tricycle into a great patch of stinging nettles and turned it right over. The rash spread all the way up his back, his arms, his face. He screamed as Lilla ran him a cool bath and emptied “bluebag” into it—it made whites whiter and, curiously enough, also soothed burning skin.

  Then it was off to Ada and Toby in suburban splendor in Norwood. It must have felt just as hot in England as it had been in Central Europe. Everything, even the traffic around them, seemed to be waiting, suspended between a peace that had left them and a war that wasn’t quite here. Ada had a new car. She would inevitably have asked Lilla to admire it, goading Lilla into reminding her that her own car, in China, was at least as good, if not better. Casey had bought her a brand-new one just the year before—a green, 85-horsepower, 1938 Ford DeLuxe Fordor Sedan. She gave Ada a photograph of the car, herself, Casey, and their driver, as if to prove her point. In the heightened atmosphere, bickering was probably the only way to talk. And the question of who had the better car would have been left unresolved, perhaps deliberately, to crowd out other questions. Ones they didn’t want to think about. Like how long it might be until they saw each other again.

  From Ada’s, Lilla went on to see her daughter, Alice, her husband, Havilland, and their four children. All growing fast. Hard to keep up with who was doing what. Another week or so. Then back to Arthur. But now Russia had signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. That left Poland open for Hitler’s tanks to roll in. And Britain had committed itself to fight if it did.

  The war that they had been waiting for was about to arrive. But there was a chance, the papers said, that it wouldn’t come. That Chamberlain’s Anglo-Polish Alliance would deter Herr Hitler. Arthur dis
agreed.

  Lilla, Arthur, and Beryl spent the weekend in the garden again. I can see them doing their best to pretend that Lilla’s visit was just like any other visit, in any other year. Lilla makes a plate of raspberry-jam sandwiches. Wasps keep hovering over them. Lilla raises her arm to brush them away. The children are playing. Arthur gets up to go make a pot of tea. Lilla fills their cups. And a warm, muggy wind that peels back the blades of grass one by one seems to hover instead of disappearing over the next hill, waiting—like everything else in Europe—for what will happen next. This wind bears the faint scent of armies on the move, thousands of tons of thickly greased gunmetal turning freshly harvested European plains to mud. It seems to drift right over the children. Jane raises her head inquisitively to a passing gust, sensing the slightly forced scene around the table a few feet away, then resumes her teasing play. But the grown-ups—despite the warmth of the air—shiver. Their bare arms, Beryl’s white flesh and freckles, Arthur’s clenched forearm, Lilla’s skin that has known sharper, colder winds, prickle into goose bumps.

  It was the next morning that the call came. Monday. Arthur had gone up to his office in London. When he heard the news, he rang home immediately. Hitler had offered to “protect” the British Empire if Britain promised not to intervene if he attacked Poland. Britain had turned him down. Arthur was sure that Germany would now invade Poland. The war was, at most, a few days away. If Lilla was going to return to China, she had to leave immediately, he told her. And the Siberian way was already out of the question; she would have to take the long route round, by boat. She should leave today, if she could. If she waited until the German tanks rumbled over the Polish border, it would be too late to go anywhere. That is, if she really had to go.