Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  She began to write.

  Chapter 12

  RICE-PAPER RECIPES

  CHEFOO, LATE SUMMER 1941

  Lilla found a typewriter in the apartment. One that had somehow made its way across from the locked and guarded office. It must have been a portable, as she later managed to carry it from camp to camp. I have an old typewriter on my desk. One made in the 1930s, as Lilla’s surely was. It is a portable, too. Although it weighs at least a stone. Another grandfather used it to type up his secret reports to Churchill on the information he had gathered on expeditions behind enemy lines in Greece during the Second World War. It is the only thing of his that I have. Unlike Lilla, he didn’t make it back from his last trip.

  The typewriter I have is an Imperial. A Good Companion. It’s unlikely to be exactly the same model that Lilla used. But it can’t be very different.

  It sits on a board about twelve inches square. Its black enamel gleams back at me, reflecting the light from the lamp hanging over my desk. The letter keys are small, round—about half an inch across—and seem to hover in the air. But underneath, each is connected to its corresponding printing arm by a slender, almost invisible, dark metal lever. The printing arms themselves spread out in a semicircle in between the keyboard and the ribbon that sits over the roller. Their ends thicken into the carved letter stamps—ink-stained gray metal wedges resembling a sinister mouthful of teeth.

  Typing on this machine is as difficult as carrying it about. Nothing short of a finger-numbing, determined thump produces an imprint on the page. Far from the long-fingered elegance of electronic typists today, typists back then must have had knuckles of steel. And the shift key actually shifts the entire rear half of the machine back half an inch so that the capital—and not the lowercase—letters hit the inky ribbon.

  Lilla was not an experienced typist. She had typed the occasional letter for Casey, filled in the odd rental form for her houses. She had never been able to close her eyes and let her fingers fly across the keys as though lost in some sonata. Although it’s hard to imagine who could on one of these machines.

  The first line she typed was a row of capitals. I can see her sitting bolt upright at a table, her left forefinger pressed firmly down on the shift key to hold the carriage back and typing each letter in turn with her right: I-N-T-R-O-D-U-C-T-O-R-Y. Then she went back and underlined each letter, as if to make the task fill as much time as possible.

  As she sat there listening to the jeering of the demonstrators fade into a heavy silence, broken only by the occasional asthmatic chug of a Japanese armored car, did Lilla have any idea how long she would have to write?

  The war proper came to China in December 1941. It was early on Monday, December 8, in China—the difference in time zones making it a day ahead of Hawaii—when the news of Pearl Harbor rang through the radio. Japan had gone over the edge and there would be no turning back. That was it. War. In Shanghai, in Tientsin, the Japanese stormed into the concessions, and the foreigners poured down onto the streets among the Japanese signs and flags, tanks and megaphones. Trying to reach home. Trying to reach somewhere. Trying blindly to grasp the hand of a loved one who was being pulled away by the force of the crowd.

  In Chefoo, Lilla and Casey spent the day in their apartment. They went from room to room, following the Japanese order to make an inventory of every item they possessed. Their grand piano. Their lacquered tea tables. Their gramophone. One big clock. One hat stand. A bronze Buddha. A chromium bathroom table. Their glasses—an astonishing four dozen tumblers, four dozen claret glasses, four dozen port glasses, four dozen champagne glasses, four dozen cocktail glasses, four dozen liqueur glasses—that showed just how much they entertained. And so it went on. I still have the list. It reads like a good-bye. As though they already knew that they were about to lose the lot.

  A couple of days later, there was a knock at the door. A group of Japanese soldiers stood outside, their steel helmets and knee-high boots glinting in the sunlight. They’d come to take Casey away for questioning. I’m sure Casey told Lilla not to worry as they led him off. Not to worry? He was almost seventy years old. How could she not worry? I can see her fighting back the tears as he stumbled away.

  The soldiers left Lilla clutching a red armband instead of a husband. It read B for “British.” B, then a number by which, she was told, she was known to the Japanese authorities. She was not to go outside without it on.

  Casey didn’t come back that night. One by one, the Japanese were locking up every British or American businessman still in town in the Astor House Hotel on the seafront. Even the headmaster of the Chefoo school was taken. The rumor was that they were interrogating them long into the night, accusing them of anti-Japanese business activities, although nobody—not even the interrogators—can have been quite sure as to what these might be.

  For the first time in her life, Lilla, usually fearfully proud of her tiny business empire, must have been grateful to be overlooked.

  The next day, the soldiers came back. They came back to every house from which they had taken a businessman to see “if there was any incriminating evidence,” wrote Gladys McMullan Murray—whose husband and brother were both being interrogated. I can just see the soldiers in their helmets swarming through the dusty Casey & Co. factory, which had been locked up for months. I can hear their boots rattling down the empty aisles between the seamstresses’ benches. Hear the flutter of papers as they turned the office drawers inside out, looking for documents that didn’t exist. Hear glass splintering as they knocked Lilla’s photographs off the side tables in her apartment, off the Steinway, to check whether items were hidden inside. The crash of her bedroom drawers as they were turned upside down on the floor, strewing her silk underwear about the room in a melee of lace and bayonets. I can see Lilla standing there, yearning to rush around tidying everything up but finding her limbs frozen in fear. As she watched the soldiers pile up bundles of customer orders, details of fabric weaves and shipping bills, she must have wondered what they were asking Casey about. Would he remember each customer order, each fabric design? Give the right answers? If he didn’t, what would the Japanese do to him?

  The soldiers came back and back, writes Murray in her autobiography, they “kept coming in. . . . They removed the telephone. All our private papers were burned and all valuables taken.” Murray hid a few things in her young daughter’s soft toys, hoping that they, at least, would not be bayoneted. I can see Lilla perched on a chair, her head bent over the dresses and coats in her lap, using the light of a reading lamp to stitch her jewelry into their hems.

  Each morning, the businessmen’s wives and families, all wearing their armbands, would walk past the Astor House Hotel to show the prisoners that they were still alive and well. We “dared not stand still,” writes Murray, “but only walked slowly past.” The prisoners stood at the windows, staring out to sea, unable to speak.

  I can picture Lilla and her sister-in-law Mabel meeting on the beachfront, near the hotel. Mabel, Vivvy’s wife, who was looking after her eighty-year-old mother, Josephine Lavers, nonetheless with her gloves neatly ironed and her hat pushed back into shape. Lilla’s hair arranged, her diamond earrings in her ears, looking as good as she can to show Casey she is all right. They walk past the hotel as slowly as the cold and the Japanese guards allow, hoping to glimpse their husbands through a window. And when she had done this, Lilla must have returned home, sat down at her typewriter, and started to type.

  It can’t have taken Lilla long to finish her “Course of Cooking,” that first dozen pages of tips and hints. Then she was on to stocks and soups. A great long list of soups.

  Recipes she had in her head. Recipes she found in books, had cut out of magazines and newspapers. Recipes given to her by friends. Something, at least, they could still chatter about. Some sound familiar: asparagus soup, leek soup, mushroom soup. Others bring a sigh of relief that I wasn’t born fifty years earlier: bone soup, giblet soup, kidney soup, liver soup, ox-foot soup, and sh
eep’s head soup. A few take me back in time, to that comforting, fuzzy glow of television costume dramas: beef tea, mutton broth, Scotch broth, mulligatawny soup. The names evoke nursery teas and old-fashioned kitchens. Warm, cozy images a galaxy away from Lilla alone in her apartment, trying not to think about what would happen next. Trying to keep herself immersed in a world where there were still the leftovers of great joints of lamb, pork, and beef to make stock from. A world in which these had not long since vanished from the market stalls. When the men hadn’t vanished from their homes. And where she could keep on hoping that everything would be all right again.

  The sheer flimsiness of the paper Lilla was typing on seems to emphasize how tenuous these hopes were. After the first couple of pages of blank paper, Lilla ran out and turned to typing on rice-paper receipts, torn from a blank book left behind by the soldiers. The rice paper is so thin that I can see right through it. It is hard to believe that it has survived the shifts and stamps of an old-fashioned typewriter.

  But Lilla was gentle and neat. I imagine her edging the paper in, typing slowly, easing the machine forward and back, from side to side, and winding it out without a single crease.

  On Christmas Day 1941, as a gesture, as if clinging to the idea that this was an honorable war, the Japanese let the businessmen come home briefly. Just long enough for a church service and a Christmas lunch. Lilla, Casey, Mabel, Vivvy, Mabel’s mother—Lilla’s family in Chefoo— would have eaten together. Vivvy and Casey would not have uttered a single word about what they were going through in the hotel, not wanting to worry their wives any more than necessary. But, looking at their husbands’ pale, wasted faces, Lilla and Mabel would have known without asking that something awful was happening to them.

  I am trying to imagine their meal. Lilla must have been living off peas, beans, lentils, and peanuts, as everyone else in Chefoo was doing at the time. “Just as nourishing as meat,” she later wrote, “especially if suet dumplings, bacon or fried bread are served with them.” But on Christmas Day, Lilla must have somehow managed to lay her hands on at least a chicken, its flesh probably lean and taut from age. Her chef long since gone, she would have basted it again and again in its own thin juice, kept it well covered, not allowed a drop of moisture to escape. Still, it can’t have been the same as turkey or goose. They would have chewed through their mouthfuls, pushing a smile onto their faces between each bite. Trying to have a normal Christmas conversation, talking about anything they could think of except the war. If they could think of anything else at all. Then they would have exchanged presents. Something small, a token. A favorite piece of embroidery. A drawing. A card. It was hard, almost impossible, to find anything new, so, like everyone else in Chefoo, they must have just circulated their own treasures. Then tried to sing, Lilla at the piano, striking chords. Casey and Vivvy mustering all the enthusiasm they could.

  When the soldiers came back to take the men away again that afternoon, they took Lilla’s car with them. The car she’d boasted about to Ada. The car in which she and Casey had gone on so many picnics and dashes across the peninsula to see Reggie in Tsingtao. Or even just out at night, when it was too cold or wet or far to walk. By Christmas 1941, there hadn’t been any petrol for over a year. Still, the car had been sitting in the garage as if one day soon she’d take it out again. But as the Japanese soldiers drove it off, they took that hope away, too.

  A few days later, after going to wave at Casey, Lilla picked her way around the ice on the road over Consulate Hill and walked up to the Japanese consulate, a large concrete block overlooking the harbor. Everyone else, she’d heard, had been given a receipt for their cars, as though they’d be able to claim them back in a couple of months’ time. Another gesture. A hopeful one. But any straw was worth clinging to. “Honoured Sir,” she wrote. “Would you kindly allow me . . . I should be so grateful . . . With many thanks . . . Yours faithfully.” She took the letter right to the door, addressed it to the commanding officer, Colonel Shingo.

  After two attempts, one of her letters came back with a reply. I have it in front of me. Lilla’s letter is written on thin, semitransparent, almost shiny paper. As if to emphasize her straitened circumstances, she has used both sides rather than run to a separate sheet. The Japanese reply is on imperiously thicker paper. I can almost feel the roughness of the weave. It is just four lines long, and the sheet is folded, leaving three grandly empty pages that shout out to the recipient that Japan is very much in power. This is followed by a part-printed, part-written Japanese rice-paper receipt. Lilla must have wondered how this could be all that was left of the great metal hulk of her car.

  At the end of January, Casey came home. As the UN War Crimes Commission charge number UK-J/C.24 spells out, he and the other businessmen imprisoned had by then spent several weeks being “subjected to protracted interrogations on the suspicion of espionage, conducted by Sergeant Keichi Ohga of the gendarmerie.” No details of the methods of questioning used are given. But as though they were trying to break the spirit remaining in those who could still walk after being interrogated, the Japanese then paraded several of their shattered prisoners—most of whom were as elderly as Casey and Vivvy, for everyone else had gone off to fight—through the streets of Chefoo. And every few hundred yards, they brought their miserable captives to a halt and made “derogatory speeches” intended to humiliate them.

  Casey came back to Lilla a shadow of the man who had stumbled out of the apartment in December.

  Vivvy, relatively impervious to his surroundings or at least good enough at pretending, came home, too. The one man who didn’t come back was Vivvy’s boss, Bob McMullan, who’d taken on the busted rump of Cornabé Eckford and given everyone in Lilla’s family a job a decade beforehand. Now the biggest taipan in town and grand master of the local order of Masons, as Vivvy had been, McMullan had been sent to a jail in Tsingtao. “These things,” writes Gladys McMullan Murray, Bob’s sister, “seemed to make him more suspect.” Three long months later, in April, his wife was at last told he was being released. But on the day he was supposed to return, as she was putting up the balloons, the ribbons, and the welcome-home signs, a passing Japanese soldier casually called out to her that her husband had died in jail. It was later said that he had been locked in a cell too small to stand up in and slowly poisoned to death.

  After that, the anti-British demonstrations returned with vehemence. The marches up and down the seafront continued. From time to time, the Japanese authorities set up vast outdoor cinema screens and herded hundreds of Chinese in front of them to watch films proclaiming the “New Order in East Asia.” Reel after reel showed villages and towns being occupied by lorry-loads of immaculate Japanese troops, skies full of gleaming airplanes and Japanese flags flying from every post. The Chinese were left in no doubt as to in whose hands their fate lay. And as the Chinese fear of their Japanese occupiers grew, so the pitch of their anti-Western shouts heightened. Rumors flew around of former servants selling “information” to the Japanese. Japanese official after official—naval, consular, military—turned up at British and American “enemy national” doors. They measured up the premises and gave the inhabitants form after form to fill in before departing with a different warning of evacuation or eviction each time. And at night, Lilla and Casey had to bolt and shutter their doors and windows against the starving Chinese who viewed the new status quo as an invitation to take what they could.

  But Lilla still didn’t want to leave China. Her possessions, her houses, her businesses, the legacy that she had built up for her children—everything was in Chefoo. She knew that if she and Casey left now, they would never see any of it again; they might as well throw all their hard work away. So when they were offered places on one of the diplomats’ boats that left Shanghai for England in August 1942, they turned them down. Lilla must have somehow still been telling herself and everyone around her to “hang on . . . things may change for the better.” In any case, poverty in an England that, at this stage of the war,
might still be invaded can’t have seemed a much better proposition than staying in China. And, as I have to keep reminding myself, back then, Lilla had no idea how long the war would last. Or what was about to happen.

  It must have been just after the diplomats’ boats had left that the rumor first surfaced that all “enemy nationals” were going to be taken into a camp. Locked up together like cattle so that the Japanese could swarm into their homes. Panicking, some of the Westerners started standing in front of their houses like the street hawkers they had once ignored, trying to turn baskets full of possessions—books, binoculars, photograph frames, candlesticks, furniture, anything—into hard cash that they could stuff into their clothes and take with them when they went. Others gave their belongings to their German and Italian friends, who would not be going with them. Lilla gave some of hers to her houseboy. He’d kept on coming to help her even when she hadn’t had anything other than a meaningless IOU to pay him with. He promised to take good care of everything. Especially her fur coat. She would need it, he said, for the winter, when she came out of the camp in a few weeks’ time.

  Nobody knew when or where they would be going, but the moment Lilla knew she might be leaving, she would have begun to prepare. I imagine her packing just as neatly as she did everything else, layering crinkling tissue between each item. Not as optimistic as her houseboy, she opens a suitcase and folds in warm clothes, furs, cashmere, hats, gloves, stockings. Pairs and pairs of thick stockings. Long underpants for Casey. And shoes. If they ran out of shoes in camp—she would have thought this through—they’d be barefoot. Bed linen, towels, tea towels. In between the layers of clothes, she slides photographs. She sews her jewelry into the lining of the dress she will wear when they depart and works out how to tie bundles of cash around her and Casey’s waists. Then come Casey’s books, her recipe book, and the typewriter—her hope-creator in the graying world around her. She wedges spare ribbon into the corners of a suitcase and searches the apartment for every last scrap of paper to take with her. And food. The greatest picnic she would ever pack. A picnic that might have to go on for longer than she cared to think. A picnic of everything she could squeeze in or carry and that would last. Tinned meats, fish, fruit, vegetables, rice pudding. And cooking implements. A mixing bowl. A wooden spoon. A saucepan. Sugar. Salt. Pepper. Spices that might turn whatever they were given into something they could swallow. Then, a few pretty things. Small pleasures that could still make her smile. A couple of prints. Some of Casey’s embroidery. Makeup. Hairpins. A sewing kit. Lace. Soap.