Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  In general, apart from roll call, where the prisoners had to call out their number in the line in Japanese—which they had to learn to count in—the guards’ interference was limited to insisting that anyone with money help support his fellow prisoners. “In polite English, but with a bayonet at his throat, they told a Greek import-export man, ‘Yes, you put in money, please. Thank you.’ ” For the first few months, the internees bought their own food through former Chinese house servants who had been assigned the task of coming to the camp each day to take orders. Even fresh bread was delivered daily from the baker still operating in the town—who also seized the opportunity to pass discreet messages among the three separated camps of the business community and the boys’ and girls’ mission schools. And a few piglets were smuggled into the children’s compounds, where they were hidden under the verandas and fattened up. “We fed them aspirin to keep them quiet,” remembers Mary Taylor Previte, who was nine at the time.

  Before the winter was over, however, the money had run out and the prisoners had to fall back on limited Japanese rations. “We ran short of meat, butter and sugar,” and “stocks of flour . . . often ran dangerously low only to be renewed in the nick of time.”

  Little more is said about the food here in the Temple Hill camp. The reason for this, I think, is that it was barely any different from the miserable fare of peanuts, bean curd, cabbage, and bread that the prisoners had already been scraping by on for almost a year before they had gone into the camp.

  But later, there would be hardly any food at all.

  In Chefoo, spring had always meant the beginning of summer, glorious summer, visitors and parties, new faces and dancing until dawn. And as the snow melted around them, the prisoners must have held their breath in anticipation of something better to come. Surely this war had to end soon.

  It didn’t. Instead, five months after Lilla had walked into the Temple Hill compound, spring disappeared into a summer that brought a blistering heat to the bursting houses. Whereas sleeping—and living—a dozen to a room had been tolerable in the cooler months, it became unbearable in summer. With temperatures rising to 120 degrees Fahrenheit inside, some of the younger people moved their mattresses outdoors. But Casey is unlikely to have been up to this. And Lilla didn’t leave his side. They must have stayed in their dormitory, being cooked alive like two flailing lobsters in a pan until the heat drove them to try to drag their mattresses and belongings out of the oven that the house had become. And then, bent over the weight of their bedding, heaved away, tears in their eyes.

  It must have been hard for Lilla and Casey to feel married in the camp. Imprisonment warps relationships, and everything that people expect marriage to be—a couple’s own living space, moments alone together, shared dreams—had gone. At least Lilla and Casey could still share a hope to go on, to return to their old lives together. But the war ate into even this. Casey grew feebler. Both his determination to survive and his physical strength began to ebb. Lilla nursed him as well as she could. And as she helped him move around, she had to persuade him that everything would, she was sure, be all right.

  But she couldn’t have been sure. The very worst part of being imprisoned was that, as each empty day stretched into the next, with the prisoners struggling to fill their time, nobody had any idea how long they would be there. The internees may have called their prison a camp, but camp is a deceptively temporary word. Maybe deliberately so. Everything it suggests—packing up and moving on, starlit nights and open air, fresh game roasted over a wood fire—is everything a prison is not.

  As the weeks passed into months, the expectation that the war would end soon must have begun to recede—replaced by a growing, stomach-emptying fear that it might never end.

  It must have made every gut rumble, stench, pile of dirt, and breath of someone else’s exhaled air all the more painful.

  In the middle of all this hunger, this discomfort, this uncertainty, whenever the daily grind of cooking, washing, cleaning receded, Lilla was writing her recipe book. Her recipe book of cozy homes and full bellies. Of newly wed lives and grand hopes for the future.

  It can’t have been easy to think about all of that there. But, like her fellow prisoners, Lilla must have been desperate to find activities to fill her days. On arriving in the camp, Norman Cliff and his friends had “walked round and round the house, six times to a mile, to pass the time.” But after this initial enthusiasm, “the months at Temple Hill dragged on monotonously.” As the weeks and months passed, the monotony worsened. And, sheltered behind her makeshift cubicle curtains, as if hiding from the oppressive tedium of the camp, Lilla must have perched the typewriter on her knees as she squatted at the end of her mattress and slowly and deliberately punched each letter in turn: M-e-l-t t-h-e b-u-t-t-e-r . . .

  As I read through Lilla’s book now, my mind stuck in the crowded, smelly house on Temple Hill, it seems hard to believe that the world of her recipes had existed so recently, so close by. A world of freshly pressed clothes, the scent of clean laundry tinged with a hint of hot-ironed starch. Of silver gleaming on long white tablecloths, the sunlight reflecting off it into little spots of light dancing on the wood-paneled walls. Of jazz playing on a gramophone in a room nearby. Of bottles of wine being poured into decanters. Of kitchens full of cooks and steaming pots. Of piles of thinly sliced beef and vegetables waiting on thick wooden chopping boards. Of great white meringues cooling under gauze. Of buckets full of raspberries and mixing bowls stiff with peaks of freshly whipped cream. Of the feeling that guests are about to arrive.

  The recipes seem to cast a kind of magic as I read them. Somehow they bring this other, old, world to life, take me right there, and make me want to reach for a cocktail, hum along with the music. Sneeze because the smell of spice is tickling the back of my nose. As she typed, Lilla must have escaped there, too. Escaped back home for the moments her fingers were knocking the keys. The moments her mind was absorbed in what to write next. Perhaps when Vivvy sat with her, whisking his strokes of pen and ink onto the pages she had finished, all this was easier to believe. Perhaps she read the recipes out to Casey—I can almost hear her doing so—her stutter tripping her up every line or so, yet still trying to persuade him to believe in it, too.

  Four decades later, when she pulled the manuscript out of the bottom of the suitcase in which it had been hiding for so long, Lilla said that she had written the book “for my fellow prisoners.” Perhaps, once she was in a prison camp, it was their desire to go on reading page after page that helped her find the strength to keep churning them out.

  But each time Lilla stopped typing or reading, the aroma of rich gravy giving way to the damp smell of cabbage leaves, the jazz notes and dinner-party chatter being drowned out by the indeterminate groans and clatter of fifty people and a house bulging to overcapacity, the starched tablecloth dissolving into the crumpled sheets on her bed, the dining room disappearing into the chipped bowl she had to balance on her lap, the searing contrast must have burned her like the fat from one of her dreamed-of pans.

  The order to move came in August, ten months after Lilla had been taken from her home and put into the camp. The initial instructions from the Japanese were almost cryptically brief: “Make immediate preparations to be transferred to the Weihsien Civil Assembly Centre” was barked at the internees by a “top-ranking” Japanese officer who had appeared from headquarters. The Weihsien Civil Assembly Centre, the prisoners soon learned, was a much larger camp and already contained all the enemy nationals from Peking, Tientsin, and Tsingtao, who had been there since March. The Temple Hill commandant, Major Kosaka, went to look at it. “Take everything you have,” he warned the Chefoo internees ominously on his return. “The conditions there will be far worse.”

  By the time they left the camp, it was September 1943. Lilla and Casey had already been imprisoned for almost a year. They packed up their belongings, their mattresses, whatever tins, if any, Lilla had managed to keep, and they walked back down the hill to
the port.

  Even the Chefoo outside the camp was a different town from the one of Lilla’s recipe book. The old picnic panorama of town and bay, junks and steamers jostling in the harbor, Consulate Hill just beyond, that she had so often climbed Temple Hill to feast on had long since vanished. The streets were emptier. The harbor was subdued. The mass of Japanese gunmetal hulks that had come right onto the shore—the U.S. and British navies had always moored a little way out—had suffocated the usual bustle of tiny boats. If Lilla had been able to see far enough, she might have spotted the strangers who had taken over her home—most of the vacated buildings in Chefoo were occupied by Japanese soldiers—bumping into the furniture, moving it around. If any had been left by the looters. Or even her little houses, where, by now, the blue silk curtains she had designed would have been torn, if not ripped away completely by their temporary inhabitants. The furniture gone. Every strip of woodwork smeared with black boot polish.

  I hope she never saw that far.

  The same crowd of Chinese faces that had watched the prisoners walk into the camp swarmed out to watch them pass again in their nowdisheveled clothes and worn shoes. Lilla and Casey, the rest of the business community, and the couple of hundred Chefoo schoolchildren were, remembers Gladys McMullan Murray, “literally packed into a small steamer.” Although the old walled city of Weihsien was only about one hundred miles inland from Chefoo, there was no railroad between the two towns, and the prisoners first had to make the sea journey around the Shantung Peninsula to Tsingtao and take a train from there.

  The steamer pulled out of the harbor, past the row of redbrick houses Lilla had been born in, rounded Consulate Hill, and headed out to the open sea, leaving behind the club, the beach, the hotels, the school, the Casey & Co. building that stood on the waterfront. I wonder whether Lilla was one of those on deck watching the only real home they knew disappear from sight.

  The journey was tough. “It was a miserable voyage,” writes Murray, “the hold and every available space packed with people . . . our youngest slept in my arms . . . it was unbearably stuffy in the hold . . . and the smells on the ship were nauseating as the plumbing had gone wrong.” The “floor was hard, the ship was rocking, our stomachs were hungry and rats were running over us,” remembers the usually upbeat Cliff.

  And it was dangerous. The portholes were “covered by thick sacking lest American submarines should spot us,” and “there was also the danger of the mines left by the American navy.” Equally chilling was the fact that “it was the season of the annual breaking-up storm for which Chefoo is famous”—a season marked in Chefoo’s long consular records as an annual September toll of shipwreck deaths.

  After two days and nights of merciful calm, the ship docked at Tsingtao early in the morning of the third day. Lilla must have wanted to leap for joy. The town’s gingerbread churches and wooden chalet houses were untouched. Just as they had been on so many trips to see her brother Reggie, for those picnic lunches, those Empire Day sporting events that he’d organized on the beach each year. But this time, Reggie wasn’t there waiting to meet them. Of course he wasn’t. Lilla didn’t know whether he had escaped, died, or would be waiting for her at the next camp.

  The first they saw of the camp was the watchtowers. The photographs show squat medieval stone turrets with pointed wooden hats, the tips of machine guns pointing out like black teeth. Then they saw that the high walls “were electrified,” writes Murray, and “our hearts sank . . . we didn’t know what was in store for us.” But it was when they drew through the gates that the real shock came. The streets were lined with hundreds of prisoners staring at the new arrivals. The men were barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only shorts—their skinny backs tanned to leather from working in the sun “like creatures from another world.”

  Lilla must have seen Reggie there. Standing in the crowd. Waving at her, calling out to her and Vivvy furiously. Reggie, half his usual size, missing that crisp, pressed, open-necked shirt and the whistle around his neck with which he always seemed to be starting some race or umpiring some match. Reggie standing alone because his wife had made it back to England and his children had all gone off to nurse or fight in the war. Reggie smiling to see her, his eyes shining with relief that she was still alive.

  Chapter 14

  THE BIG CAMP

  WEIHSIEN INTERNMENT CAMP, NORTH CHINA, SEPTEMBER 1943, ELEVEN MONTHS INTO LILLA’S IMPRISONMENT

  The new camp spread out in front of Lilla in row after row of long, thin, gray huts as far as she could see. Here and there, the single-story skyline of this former missionary compound was punctuated by a taller building hovering over the tips of the low trees dotted along the alleyways and open spaces between the buildings. The pictures drawn by inmates show that each block was peppered with a row of door- and window-shaped holes, like a long line of animal stalls. A series of beams protruded out of the front of each row, like the side of a cage that had been temporarily lifted to let the creatures out. Clothes flapped from the wooden poles. A few graying sheets and towels seemed to skip just clear of the quagmire that must have been oozing like a lava flow through every gap the buildings allowed. “The monsoon rains were late that year,” writes Pamela Masters, a teenager who had gone straight into Weihsien from Tientsin with her parents and two elder sisters. The rains usually came in August, but when Lilla arrived in September, the camp pathways were still inundated, the compound a sticky sea of mud.

  The mud stank. The stench must have hit the back of Lilla’s nostrils and the top of her throat as her bus rolled in through the camp gates. It was a reek “of rotting human excrement,” writes Masters. Of refuse and sewage. Of the discarded items that life leaves behind—which, in a way, was what the two-thousand-odd inmates of Weihsien, the remnants of the northern treaty porters, were. The elderly and schoolchildren. Taipans and civil servants. Prostitutes and thieves. An entire jazz band from Tientsin. Britons, Americans, Canadians, South Africans, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians, Greeks, Cubans, Filipinos, Jewish Palestinians, Iranians, Uruguayans, Panamanians, a lone Indian, and even one German—a wife who had decided to follow her American husband and daughter into the camp. The people whose national governments had simply abandoned them to their fate. They had all been swept up in the great river of mud that was this war. Bundled together, rained on, and left to rot at the far end of the world, now distinguished only by the identification badges that they “had to wear at all times,” writes Murray, who, in an attempt to render this vast new camp less frightening to her youngest daughter, stitched a badge on her doll, too.

  Weihsien internment camp: the perimeter fence, walls, and watchtower by the hospital block

  Lilla and Casey were in either block 20 or block 8. The only record of who was where in Weihsien is a column of numbers jotted alongside a camp census typed up at the end of June 1944. The smudged room numbers were inserted after this, but nobody now knows when, or whether the internees were in those rooms for a night, a week, or a year.

  Plan of Weihsien camp, drawn by internee Langdon Gilkey

  And what those numbers tell me is that, at some stage during their imprisonment, Lilla and Casey spent at least one night apart. Lilla in block 20, room 3, and Casey in block 8, room 5. As a couple of pages of prisoners’ names are missing, I don’t know whether they were alone in these rooms or temporarily sharing with the husband and wife of another couple. The elderly men in block 8, perhaps because it was near to the men’s showers and latrines, and the women in block 20. Or, I have been told, Casey may have been ill enough to need nursing care for a while. As there was only one ward in the hospital and many nurses—nursing being one of the few professions open to women back then—an interned nurse would move in with a patient, the rest of the patient’s family moving out to make room for her for as long as necessary. I don’t think it can have been that long. Casey may have been weakened by interrogation and imprisonment, but he would still make several journeys across the world in the years to come. In any case,
although on first sight the number of buildings in the camp made it appear large—there were sixty-odd buildings in total, at just a couple of hundred yards square— it was all too compact a space for two thousand people to eat, wash, work, and sleep in. And blocks 8 and 20 were both off a black cinder pathway in the northwestern corner of the camp, known as Tin Pan Alley or Rocky Road, only a few yards away from each other.

  The compound had a few large buildings containing old classrooms that were now being used as dormitories for the single men and women in the camp. The former missionaries’ houses—the most comfortable places there—had been taken over by the Japanese. The remainder, and the majority, of the camp’s accommodations consisted of those long, thin, gray huts that had originally been built as rows of single cells to house individual Chinese missionary students. Even before they had been abandoned, looted, and occupied first by Chinese soldiers and then by the Japanese, they had been spartan. Now they were miserable, and each had to house at best just a married couple, but often a family of four. The cells measured just nine by twelve feet—barely enough room to cram three mattresses onto the floor. The door and one window stood at the east-facing front, and there was a tiny opening for ventilation at the back. “The rooms had all been badly neglected,” writes Masters. “The white plastered walls were peeling and in need of repair, and the only electrical fixture was a ceiling lamp, hanging from a frayed cord.” And “there was no furniture,” points out Murray, “just a shelf on the wall.”

  It was Lilla’s greatest domestic challenge yet. Less hospitable—and potentially hotter—than the Indian postings in which she had sweltered. Damper than the “rat-palace” in Kashmir. Less personal than Mrs. Bridges’s lodgings in Calcutta—and certainly smaller. And most galling of all, a stay that each day she must have hoped to see the end of. She had already been locked up for a year. Who was to say that she wouldn’t be locked up for another or more—two, three, four, or ten years, twenty even? If she survived that long. Perhaps, like murderers or other penitentiary lifers, she and Casey would die in prison.