Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  By the end of 1944, food supplies were so low that children’s teeth were growing in without enamel. Girls were not reaching puberty—some would never be able to have children. The queues for what little food there was brought out the very worst in the internees. Everyone was desperate to see his or her own bowl filled. As they neared the serving hatch, starving prisoners would literally pounce on the servers, accusing them of handing out too much to those ahead of them. Gordon Martin, a teacher at the Chefoo School, remembers feeling “filled with black poison” when he saw the food run out before his family’s bowls were filled, leaving his young children to go hungry.

  I don’t think that I could have even rasped out “roast beef” at this stage, let alone write a recipe for it. I would have cracked at the mere prospect of doing so. I think most people would.

  Lilla, however, didn’t.

  Maybe it was because she was so used to picking herself up off the floor that she knew how to take a deep breath and make the great mental leap required. Maybe it was because she had learned she had to fight to survive. And then, surviving this far might have weakened the prisoners’ bodies, but it had given them a lean, inner strength. Enough to keep almost all of them alive.

  It is still dumbfounding to read what Lilla was writing then.

  By this stage, Lilla must have reached her recipes for pastries and puddings, desserts and cakes. She had a sweet tooth and wrote chapter after chapter full of sugary, gooey treats. They take up a good part of her book. Recipe after recipe of indulgent dishes. List after list of cakes. Large cakes, tea cakes, scones, icing, she typed. Dripping raisin cake. Chocolate layer cake. Honey gingerbread. Raspberry sandwich cake. Swiss roll. Cream puffs. Treacle scones. Waffles. A warm, sweet orgy of cakes and puddings. Steamed sponge puddings, hot enough to burn your tongue, coated in a thick, sugary syrup that stuck to your spoon until you had licked every last sticky drop away. Trays of freshly baked apples just out of the oven that you could slide your spoon into as smoothly as butter, their cooked insides melting into a white sugary soup. Or bread-and-butter pudding. Thick, yeasty bread layered with eggs and milk and butter and sugar and raisins and baked until the crusts were still crisp but the center had melted into a single hot, sweet, soggy mass.

  This was Lilla’s feast.

  Chapter 16

  SURVIVAL

  WEIHSIEN INTERNMENT CAMP, JANUARY 1945. LILLA HAS BEEN IN A PRISON CAMP FOR TWO YEARS AND THREE MONTHS, OR A LITTLE OVER EIGHT HUNDRED DAYS.

  Hope comes in many guises. It can float in on the wind as a familiar scent, a changing season, just a rumor, or even a definite piece of news. Or it can take a concrete form. A gift, a home, an item of clothing. Or food.

  Hope came to the Weihsien camp in the form of American Red Cross parcels. They appeared out of the thick white snow one morning, rolling into the camp on the back of donkey carts. Donkey cart after donkey cart. Piled high, overflowing, almost tipping with huge parcels three feet long and half as wide again and full to bursting, the prisoners knew, with food. The entire camp downed tools, dreams, or whatever was keeping them busy and stumbled through the snow to watch this epiphanic caravan arrive.

  The Americans were the first to weep. These parcels usually came to them. The rest of the camp had to use their cash to bargain for what they could. Only nothing had arrived for over six months. Food had become priceless. “In utter amazement, tears streaming down our faces,” remembers Langdon Gilkey, “we counted fourteen of those carts, each one carrying well over a hundred parcels!” As more and more parcels came in through the gate, quick calculations were made, and a rumor ran through the Britons and the Belgians, the Canadians, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Greeks, everyone else: There’s enough for us, too!

  Tears ran down the prisoners’ cheeks, cutting paths through the frost that was settling on their skin the moment they stood still. Each of them was imagining opening their own parcel. Imagining sinking their teeth through the firm flesh of tinned meat, the kick of caffeine in their veins, the fizz of sugar on their tongues. Tastes that had haunted their dreams. Tastes that—if supplies ground to a halt, and they well might—could keep all of them alive. A Red Cross parcel each!

  But that wasn’t how everyone saw it. Just as the prisoners’ dreams seemed to be turning into reality, they were snatched away. The camp commandant was “mobbed by a contingent of angry Americans” arguing that the parcels should go to Americans only. And “afraid of an uprising,” he took the parcels and locked every single one up in the camp’s assembly hall until he could work out what to do. A “heavy guard,” adds Gilkey, “was posted to watch over them.”

  The prisoners waited two days for a decision from the Japanese. For two long, cold days, the assembly hall seemed to bulge with promise. Finally, a notice was posted on the hall door. Every internee would receive one parcel. The two hundred Americans would receive one and a half. The parcels would be distributed at ten o’clock the following morning.

  The line for the parcels began at dawn.

  The queue was a jolly affair. The prisoners’ lips were buzzing with pleasure as they looked forward to what was to come. A late Christmas present for their children. A late Christmas present for themselves. Something to ease the pain in their bellies. Something to keep the cold at bay, the cold that—even though it was January and so bitter that they had stopped counting the degrees below zero—none of them felt as they waited for their packages. “What blessed security was promised to every father and mother with three, possibly four, parcels for their family, enough surely to last through to the spring, whatever might happen to our camp supplies,” explains Gilkey. As they stood in line, every British, Canadian, French, Russian, Dutch, Belgian, and Italian prisoner loved the Americans for their generosity.

  A few minutes later, the Americans were more reviled than the Japanese.

  Shortly before ten, as the queue began to shuffle forward to the doors that at any moment would open, letting them into an Aladdin’s cave of food, a new notice was posted. Seven American prisoners had again protested against handing out the parcels to any non-Americans. The commandant had referred the matter to Tokyo. There would be no parcels today.

  It was as though the internees had jumped off a cliff only for the sea beneath them to vanish. Gilkey overheard an Englishman explain to his crestfallen children that the Americans had taken away Santa. “For the first time,” he says, “I felt fundamentally humiliated at being an American.”

  For ten long days, the entire camp was on edge. However hard the non-Americans tried not to point their fingers, however well everybody knew that it was just seven out of the two hundred who had made a fuss, an ugly tribal instinct reared its head, threatening to cleave the camp in two. Lean and mean on their empty stomachs, the prisoners began to remember where each of them had once come from. Fistfights broke out over the parcels. Over old grievances. Over new grievances. Over nothing at all—if you can call a year of near starvation and the worry of whether you would have enough food to keep your family alive “nothing at all.” Every prisoner’s stomach ached for the treasures that were just out of their reach. And then the decision arrived from Tokyo. One parcel each for everybody, including the Americans. The remainder would be sent to other camps.

  Lilla and Casey must have staggered back to their cell with their parcels—each weighed about fifty pounds—and unwrapped their newfound wealth on their beds. An endless picnic of powdered milk and tinned butter, spam and cheese, salmon and raisins, concentrated chocolate and sugar, jam, and several packs of cigarettes spread before them.

  Nobody had to taste the food to feel its effect. Simply having it, possessing it, knowing it was there was enough to keep them going. It was as though “our small community had been whisked overnight from the living standard of a thirteenth-century village to that of a modern affluent industrial society. Now we had food to keep us all from hunger,” says Gilkey. And whereas, before the war, the food-loving Lilla would have turned up her nose in disgust at al
l these powders and tins, now she must have been close to tears at the sight of it. I can see her, in her freezing cell, prizing open the pages of her recipe book again and rereading the recipes that she had already typed. The scent of fresh basil and garlic, the rustle of brown paper bags squelching with fruit, the feeling of dough between her fingertips, the warmth of the oven all flooding back. She pulls the leaden typewriter out of its trunk with ease. Winds a new piece of paper—a new piece of American Red Cross paper that had arrived in the package—into it, throws a couple of extra coal balls on the fire, and starts to type. Drifting as she does so back into the comforts of that old, familiar world without feeling her stomach, her guts, her entire body, trying to claw her back to a bitter reality.

  Lilla, like everyone else, would have strung her and Casey’s food out through the rest of winter, each little nibble of sugar and protein becoming a great feast. Rolling it around inside your mouth, pushing it to every corner, could turn every bite into an entire ham, a whole cheese, a side of salmon, keeping you going for hours. By the time most of the parcels were finished, the corners of the tins licked clean, the snow had gone. It was spring 1945, and after over two years in camp, just as the trees were blossoming, a new hope—halfway between rumor and certainty—was arriving.

  The cesspit wireless coolies had spat into the camp the news that, over in Europe, France had been invaded and the Nazis were on the retreat. And then, one night in May, the nocturnal calm was shattered by the clanging of the bell that hung in the tower over the single men’s dormitory block. The noise stopped, and the Japanese guards—convinced this was marking another escape—pounded through the camp, turfing the internees out of their beds for a roll call. And as the prisoners fumbled their way through the darkness, they saw to their horror that the guards surrounding them were carrying not clipboards, but machine guns.

  They waited, shivering in the still bitingly cold night air. The dark silence was punctuated by infants’ cries, children’s whimpers, guard dogs barking, and soldiers shouting at any of the older internees who tried to sit down in the dirt. And a single machine-gun volley that had one lady screaming, “We’re all going to be killed! We’re going to die! We’re going to die!”

  Lilla, unusually half dressed, her hair still down, must have been clinging on to Casey’s arm to keep him up off the ground.

  After the prisoners had waited for “what seemed like hours” with little idea of what was about to happen to them, the camp commandant appeared and ordered them back to their cells. There would, he said, be no more food for them until the bell ringer confessed. But as the dazed prisoners dispersed, the rumor began to buzz from mouth to mouth that the bell had been marking the end of the war in Europe. And, with this, the prisoners’ spirits soared. For the next few days, the adults thrived off the rumor, “cinching our belts in tighter,” and any remaining food supplies and home rations were handed out to the children.

  A week later, the perpetrator owned up and was put into solitary confinement by the Japnese in the hope that he would reveal the whereabouts of the shortwave radio over which he had learned the news. The rumor was confirmed. The prisoners’ attention now rapidly shifted to events in the Pacific. The pro-Japanese Peking Chronicle was now recounting “victories” in Japan itself, where American bombers were allegedly being shot out of the sky. As the crow flies, the Allies were now close. But how long would it take to beat Japan? One year, two more years? What would it take to make the Japanese give up China?

  By now, Lilla must have been running out of recipes to type. She’d composed a chapter on almost every topic she could think of—starters, soups, fish courses, meat dishes, game, puddings, ice creams, and cakes from almost every country—many of which the average British person wouldn’t have dreamed of cooking back then. Before the war, and for several years afterward, only those British who could afford to hire chefs from Paris ate French food, and pasta could be bought only from specialty shops in London’s Soho.

  But Lilla wasn’t an average British person. She had been born in China, surrounded by French, German, Italian, Russian, and even Japanese friends. And her recipe book is packed full of French fare and pasta recipes, Russian concoctions and Chinese chow. Recipes that, over in England, would make news when they were eventually published years later, turning their authors into household names. Even a Japanese recipe made it into Lilla’s book. Yes, Japanese. Sukiyaki. This is a Japanese dish she wrote as Japanese guards manned the gates and watchtowers around her.

  After Lilla’s cakes come her sauces. Sauces to go with everything she could think of. “Let your sauces display an important factor in your menu.” Melted butter sauce, she typed. Brandy sauce. Mayonnaise. Hollandaise. Take this, add that, melt another, stir in . . . It’s as though Lilla was trying to weaken the Japanese with sauces. Coat them in sauce, simmer them in sauce, drown them in sauce. Anything that might soften them up. Lilla typed and typed. Broken eggs were tossed from shell to shell. Ingredients were chopped into the tiniest of pieces. Still liquids were whisked with a fork until they spun in a whirlpool of their own.

  And if she was trying to cast a spell, it worked.

  It was in June that the mood among the Japanese began to waver. Cliff, who had built up enough Japanese for a conversation, found the usually rigorously disciplined soldiers “now critical of their senior officers.” Some started behaving more aggressively toward the prisoners. Others seemed overly keen to make friends, “perhaps subconsciously wanting to save their necks.” Off-duty guards staggered back to their quarters drunk. One night, there was a rumpus when a guard escaping an infuriated colleague slipped into a family cell and hid under a bed. Lilla wrote a chapter on cocktails as if to encourage the guards on their way. A Gin Fizz with sugar and lemon. A Manhattan, a jumble of whisky and Italian vermouth. A Flash of Lightning. The brandy to knock them out. The Tabasco to burn the roofs of their mouths. Then a Monkey Gland. The gin and absinthe to finish them off. Make them drunk enough to surrender.

  Soon, the Japanese guards appeared eager to earn what cash they could by buying what valuables the prisoners had left and reselling them to the Chinese outside at a profit. The internees were keen to comply. They desperately needed money to buy lavatory paper and soap at the White Elephant. And the scarcer these items grew, the higher their prices rocketed.

  And then, fired up by a potent combination of alcohol and fear, the Japanese soldiers began the terrifying boast to their prisoners—in a combination of “Chinese, Japanese and sign language”—that if the war ended, rather than surrender, they would shoot every single one of them before falling on their own swords.

  Change bore as many threats as promises for the prisoners. Would the Japanese really shoot them all? Or would they simply abandon them? If they did, then who would bring them food? Would they be able to leave the camp? Where would they go? The countryside that they could see around them was hot, dry, and empty—save for the sound of gunfire from the Chinese guerrillas fighting off anyone who came too close. Would they, too, shoot the fleeing prisoners before they stopped to work out who they were? If they knew who they were, would they care? Would the Chinese welcome them back or want to humiliate them? What if the Russians reached them before the Americans? Soon, what might happen when the war ended was all anyone in the camp could talk about.

  Toward the end of Lilla’s recipe book is a section on sandwiches. Picnic food. Food that could be eaten while traveling. Cheese sandwiches, she typed, as if preparing for the journey she was about to make. Egg sandwiches. With beetroot, its juice finding its way through the yolks and whites, staining even the bread a dark purplish red. Sweet sandwiches. Crushed currants mixed with sugar. Melted cocoa oozing out of the sides of the bread in warm, sugary globules asking to be licked off.

  Chapter 17

  FREEDOM

  WEIHSIEN INTERNMENT CAMP, AUGUST 1945. LILLA HAS BEEN A PRISONER FOR JUST UNDER THREE YEARS.

  When the news came, it was like a bolt out of the blue. Spat into t
he camp by the bamboo wireless. The committees tried to keep it a secret, not let anyone know until it was confirmed. But this was a rumor that was fast on its feet. Within a few hours, everyone was murmuring its name: armistice. Peace. Nobody quite dared believe that it was true.

  Still, just some hope of an end was enough. “The whole camp looked, felt and even smelled different,” Langdon Gilkey writes. The odor of the ubiquitous mud from the seasonal rains stopped grating against the back of the prisoners’ nostrils. Tired, shambling gaits quickened into lively steps. Eyes glazed over by years of malnutrition were glinting again. Smiles began to hover at the edge of long-cracked lips.

  Two days later, on Wednesday, August 15, the news came again. “The rumour factory in camp was never busier,” says David Michell. There had been an offer of peace; the war was over. Again, no one could quite believe that it was true. Everyone was waiting for some convincing sign, some proof, some messianic apparition.

  There was no call to gather that evening. No message was spun around the camp telling people to come. Every adult prisoner who could walk simply started to swarm around the commandant’s office like hungry bees. They literally buzzed with excitement as they hovered, waiting for an official bulletin that the war was over. When a door opened, the commandant didn’t appear. Another “well-hated but secondary official, small, arrogant and mean,” stepped out, barely looking where he was going until, suddenly, he saw the crowd around him. His face turned white with fear. And he ran for the cover of the Japanese quarters. “The sight of this hated tormentor transformed before our eyes into a fleeing rabbit caused a howl of delight and laughter to rise . . . as the most promising clue to the real state of things that we could have had.”