Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  Beef Roast

  fillet, ribs, sirloin, or topside

  Put the joint in a baking tin large enough to take it comfortably. If it is not a very fat piece of meat, lay one or two pieces of dripping on top of the joint. Put in a very hot oven for the first 10 minutes, then reduce to a moderate oven. Allow ¼ hour to each pound of meat and 20 minutes extra. Baste frequently and serve with horseradish, gravy, and Yorkshire pudding.

  Chapter 18

  STEALING CHINA

  ENGLAND, 1947

  It took almost two years for Lilla to fill out to look like her twin again. Her cheeks gradually fattened. The thin layer of muscle that had been stretched over her frame thickened. Her shoulders expanded to fit her clothes. Her eyes lost that rheumy look of hunger. Her hair, now completely gray, began to shine, and the clumps that, for years, she had found in her hairbrush each night faded away. Slowly, either from relief at being out of the camp or from sheer determination to catch up with Ada, her old energy returned.

  It can’t have been just the food. Food in England was still tightly rationed. There was even less to go round than there had been during the war. The only way to obtain a decent amount of meat each week was to have been friendly with the local butcher throughout. Lilla and Casey, as good as foreigners pitching up from China at the end of things, wouldn’t have made it into this category. In the summer of 1946, even bread had started to be rationed—something that had never happened before. Nine ounces a week each, of a loaf made from flour so fully extracted from wheat husks that it was a dark gray and barely digestible. Nor was there enough fuel. In the cold of early 1947, an already shivering British population was working in their offices by candlelight and forbidden to cook on an electric stove between nine in the morning and noon and two and four in the afternoon. Traffic lights and lifts stopped working altogether. Even the national newspapers were cut to just four pages each. All this took an inevitable toll on the business environment—over two million people lost their jobs. In 1947, England was a far from comfortable place to be.

  As Lilla and Casey sat in their room in a small hotel in Richmond, on the outskirts of London, the news that they were receiving from China made it sound a golden land again. In January 1947, America had withdrawn its support from Chiang Kai-shek in the face of his continuing use of violence against the Communists attacking him. But Chiang’s Nationalists were nonetheless advancing, and his prewar government had appeared well disposed to foreign residents. Vivvy’s son Rae was living in Shanghai. And half of Lilla’s family was already back in Tsingtao. Mabel and Vivvy had never even left the town. Reggie had been sent straight back out in 1946 to act as British consul in Shantung. His children had followed. Jean, his youngest, sailed out with her mother and started working as a decoder in the consulate. Gerry, his eldest daughter, and her husband, Murray Zimmerman, returned from Washington, D.C., where Murray had been in charge of foreign funds control during the war. Rugs and Audrey, whom he had just married, moved back, too.

  Lilla and Casey heard from them all how the tennis and golf clubs had reopened. Lilla would have remembered, even from her short stay in Tsingtao after her release from the camp, that there had been no shortage of food. The news from Reggie confirmed this. Fresh fruit and vegetables were being delivered daily to everyone’s door. And some sort of business life seemed to be starting up again.

  Back in gray-as-ever London, Lilla must have felt that she and Casey really were the flotsam and jetsam that—even before the war—she had feared they might become. They were refugees, drifting along on the far from welcoming waters of British life, with no apparent purpose or use. Not even to Lilla’s own family. Her daughter-in-law, Beryl, my father tells me, regarded Lilla as “irrelevant.” Lilla would have felt that she and Casey were only a burden on her daughter, Alice, and her husband, Havilland. Even Ada had apparently recovered from Toby’s death and was sailing along. She may not have had a husband anymore, but she did have something else that Lilla didn’t: money.

  Lilla and Casey had a little money in England and about £2,000 worth of stocks and shares (worth about £60,000 in 2003). It was far from enough for a long, comfortable retirement in Britain, even a Britain that Clement Attlee, having wound up the war, was reforming to provide a free health service and welfare state for all. Nor was it enough to leave Lilla with anything much to pass on to her children and growing grandchildren. In China, she and Casey had had £20,000 (half a million pounds today) of property, possessions, and Casey & Co. embroidered linens. The possessions were no longer there, but, as far as she knew, the houses were. And back with them in China was the possibility of starting up the business again. Lilla’s family in England “thought she was mad to go back.” But to Lilla, it clearly made perfect sense. In September 1947, obviously aware of some danger in what they were about to do, she and Casey handed power of attorney over all their affairs to Lilla’s son, “should anything happen to us,” and, at the ages of sixty-five and seventy-six, set sail for a still war-torn China.

  Lilla must have hidden her recipe book at the bottom of a suitcase she left with Ada. She’d had a pair of loose bindings made from black leather embossed in gold leaf with one of Vivvy’s sketches and tied her manuscript up between these covers before hiding it away. Ada didn’t even know it was there. Didn’t even know it existed. Never would.

  I’ve often wondered whether this was because Lilla didn’t want implicitly to challenge Ada to write a recipe book, too, or whether, back then in 1947, surrounded by the particularly horrific stories that unfolded in the aftermath of the Second World War, her recipe book didn’t feel like much of an achievement.

  The ship was packed. Just as disillusioned as Lilla and Casey by the state of affairs in England, many Old China Hands, as the treaty porters called themselves, were flooding back. For the six-week journey eastward, men and women were segregated into cabins stacked with bunk beds. They must have reached Shanghai in the late autumn, Rae bounding up to meet them as they came off the ship. He found them an apartment to rent, and Lilla and Casey decided to spend the winter there, looking up friends and trying to pull the threads of their life back together. Trying to make it just as it had been before. Trying to ignore, I’m sure, what the British colonel, the McMullan boy, had told them back in the camp. That life in China would never be the same again. Shutting their eyes and ears to the chaos raging around them in the continuing civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and the Communists. Perhaps forgetting that foreigners were no longer immune to Chinese law, and they would be at the mercy of whatever happened next.

  That first winter, Lilla and Casey’s hope of restarting their old China life didn’t seem too far-fetched. There were fuel shortages and an erratic power supply. But that was nothing new. Many of their old contacts had vanished, and inflation was out of control. Between December 1946 and July 1947, the amount of money that the Westerners paid their house servants had rocketed from a bundle of banknotes two inches thick to one almost a foot long. By the time Lilla and Casey arrived in Shanghai, even a daily trip to the shops meant carrying a suitcase in order to have enough cash with which to buy food. But an expatriate life was struggling on. The old hotels had reopened. The bands were playing again. There was an air of hope around, an aspiration to return to the old life, that had been missing in Britain—where the horror of the war in Europe had made most feel that life could never be the same again. And for a great many so-called British who had spent their entire lives in China, it was the only home they knew.

  However, although, superficially, expatriate life in Shanghai seemed to be working, by the time Lilla had boarded that packed ship to return to China, Chiang Kai-shek’s government had already begun to look fragile. The country was still in ruins. The transport infrastructure—especially the railways—had been ripped up and destroyed at random. Most of the buildings in China’s towns had been severely damaged. Those still standing were likely to have had the plumbing torn out by the Japanese army, who had intend
ed to turn the metal into guns. In many places, piles of old radiators and lead piping were found sitting on the edge of towns. Even though agricultural areas like Shantung, around Tsingtao, were providing ample fruit and vegetables for the local inhabitants, elsewhere in China, there was a growing risk of famine. And while Chiang Kai-shek struggled with this wreckage, the Communists were waiting to step into any breach that appeared.

  In May 1948, about six months after Lilla arrived in Shanghai and as the summer heat began to rise in the city, she took Casey to join the rest of her family in Tsingtao. They arrived, as Audrey wrote in her diary, “ostensibly to visit Chefoo.” They must have hoped, fingers tightly crossed, that they might be able to return. But as soon as Lilla and Casey left Shanghai, they would have begun to realize just how much China had already changed. The railway between Shanghai and Tsingtao was in shreds. Flights were hazardous and involved abandoning your baggage to its fate by sea. Neither Lilla nor Casey wanted to be parted from their possessions again. They therefore chose to stick with their luggage and sail up the coast, arriving by boat. Tsingtao’s harbor, however, was now closed to any non-Chinese vessel. So, instead of spending a couple of days on a Western liner that could offer its passengers some luxury—even if they still had to be locked belowdecks some of the way for fear of pirate attacks—Lilla and Casey traveled on a Chinese steamer.

  Conditions on board were grim. The passengers were crowded into bunk beds in mixed-sex cabins, wrote Audrey. Every inch of space on the ship was packed. At mealtimes, squatting passengers were cleared from on top of and underneath the dining-room tables so that those entitled to could eat. The distinctly unappetizing—and unidentifiable—food on board was hardly helped by the failure to change the tablecloths even once throughout the journey, allowing them to gather an increasing number of equally unidentifiable stains from both the meals served upon them and the passengers camping around them. By the time they reached Tsingtao, the smells on board these ships were “well-nigh unbearable.” No doubt reminding Lilla of the latrines back in the camp.

  But after two days at sea, Lilla and Casey stepped off into a balmy late spring in Tsingtao. The acacia trees that still lined the town’s rolling hills were in full blossom, their waxy white flowers giving off a sweet scent that the sea air would have swept into their lungs. There were ball boys at the tennis club and “caddies by the dozen” on the golf course. Lilla and Casey rented a seaside cottage near Mabel and Vivvy— Mabel’s mother had died in Tsingtao at Christmas 1946, at ninety-one years old, but still in China—just along the coast from the main port in Tsingtao’s resort area, a place known as Iltis Huk. And a couple of weeks after Lilla arrived, her brother Reggie threw a party to celebrate his daughter Jean’s wedding to Jack Polkinghorn, the son of a treaty-port war hero.

  Jack’s father had been a boat pilot on the strip of river that ran from the coast at Taku to the treaty port of Tientsin and an unofficial “eyes and ears” for the British government. In 1941, he had been the first person to fire on the Japanese in China. Swiftly realizing that he was outnumbered, he had then sunk his vessel rather than allow the codebooks with which he telegraphed London to fall into the hands of the Japanese. He remained on board. The admiring Japanese had fished him, minus a finger, out of the water and swept him off to Japan. There, they had treated their prisoner as well as one of their own heroes, for he had been prepared, like them, to die for his country.

  As Lilla stood on the consulate lawn at the wedding party, surrounded by her family, breathing in that sweet Shantung sea air, she must have felt that she was almost home. Almost back looking over that perfectly curving bay, with those storybook dragon spines arching their way through the water.

  The Communists were still in Chefoo. And not just in Chefoo, but in nearly all of Shantung except a narrow strip of land between Tsingtao and the inland city of Tsinan—one of just four strategic corridors in north China that the Nationalists were fighting to keep open. And which, within weeks of Lilla arriving in Tsingtao, the Communists would manage to close. Nonetheless, shortly before Lilla reached Tsingtao, her nephew Rugs had managed to make a brief trip back to Chefoo. He had sailed around the coast on a U.S. Navy transport ship with the U.S. vice-consul and six representatives of other countries. The only foreigners left in the town were the German civilians who had not been inprisoned but were now stranded there—their “home” country being in no state to pick them up. The American vessel stayed out at sea, and the group went into land on a launch, carrying signal lights to flash to the ship in case they found themselves in trouble. Once ashore, Rugs took them all to stay “at the house of a German friend from the old days.”

  They stayed just under a week. Each of them visited as many of their nationals’ former houses and offices as they could. Rugs went to where Vivvy’s house, called Avalon, had once stood and took a couple of photographs of the few bricks scattered there. The Casey & Co. building still towered over the seafront but was very much occupied. And its new occupiers, whoever they were, had no intention of letting Rugs in. Once he had given up trying to gain access, he walked to the far end of First Beach and climbed East Hill to the remains of the Woodlands Estate. As in the rest of the town, the furniture and plumbing had been torn out of every house. But Lilla’s houses were still standing. Two of them still had glass in some of the windows. Rugs wandered through the buildings and made a few notes.

  Avalon, Vivvy and Mabel’s home in Chefoo, before the Second World War

  On his return to Tsingtao, he wrote up a lengthy report for the Consulate General in Shanghai. Lilla pored over its contents, and I think she took the description of every stone standing as hope that the town she remembered could come alive again. She couldn’t go back to Chefoo until Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists regained control. But surely they would. After all, a couple of months earlier, in March, a new Chinese National Assembly had been set up in Nanking. And Chiang Kai-shek had been elected president of it.

  So Lilla decided to wait. Unaware that she, like the rest of her family in Tsingtao, was standing right in the enemy’s path.

  While they waited, Lilla and Casey kept on trying to carry out some sort of linen trade from Tsingtao. But business was far from easy. Lilla’s niece Gerry and her husband, Murray, were finding it hard to restart his business of shipping frozen eggs to the United States. Vivvy and Mabel seemed to be having no luck at all and were “so pauperish” that they were living off chili con carne and little else. Still, they can’t have been completely penniless as—even though fruit and vegetables were abundant—any sort of meat at all was hard to come by. It was mainly available on the black market, and even with cash, it was hard to buy. “Rugs came back one lunchtime jubilant,” remembers Audrey, “to have found a ham.” The one form of protein that seemed to be in endless supply was caviar, sent in to the British consulate from passing Russian ships. At times, Reggie and his wife, Jessie, resorted to feeding it to their dog.

  As the summer passed, Lilla’s hope that the Communists would be defeated began to look increasingly unlikely. Chiang Kai-shek’s first term as president of the new assembly was not proving a success. The country was still in chaos, and the assembly had decided to issue a new national currency. This was to be based on the price of gold and—perhaps ill-advisedly—required the surrender of all gold, silver, and foreign currency held by individuals. At this proposal, public opinion swung firmly against Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party. And at almost the same time, the military tide began to turn against them, too. In the bitter northern province of Manchuria—where the Nationalists had long been fighting off the Communists forces—the Communists were now gaining the upper hand. By the end of 1948, they had taken the town of Mukden and control of Manchuria with it. In January 1949, just as the Japanese had done a dozen years beforehand, the Red Army swooped down out of the windswept province.

  It was two more months before the Red Army marched into Tsingtao. But long before the army’s arrival, the town was already fee
ling the effects of its advance. As the Japanese had removed the radiators from every house, the only form of heating was a coal stove in the kitchen. And the coal mines were now in Communist territory, so no coal was reaching the Nationalist-controlled areas such as Tsingtao. Once more, Lilla and Casey found themselves grubbing around in the dirt to make coal balls to keep warm. “Even the Chinese coolies found squatting in the mud to do this too degrading at any price.” At least there was still some electricity. Kettle by kettle, Lilla would have been able to heat herself a bath. Unless it rained—when the electricity shut down altogether. As the Red Army drew closer in the early months of 1949, even this capricious power supply grew more and more erratic. And a new hazard reared its head as “Nationalist bullets began to fly around the town indiscriminately.” Not even the supposedly inviolable British consulate was safe. One evening, bullets flew through its bathroom walls, narrowly missing Jean, who, then heavily pregnant, was maneuvering herself into the bath. Even the official consular car was fired at as it was trying to speed Gerry to the hospital before her new baby arrived. Already in the throes of labor, Gerry had to fling herself “to the floor of the car to dodge the bullets.”

  When the Communist army eventually entered Tsingtao in March 1949, the Nationalist soldiers showed little resistance. They had been so poorly paid—if at all—that some took the opportunity of making a fast buck by selling their rifles to the advancing enemy before disappearing. Lilla’s hopes for a Nationalist victory in China must have disappeared with them. But as the red flags rolled into the town, I think she found herself nurturing the same optimism that had kept her going under the Japanese. Maybe, just maybe, once the Communists had settled down, sorted the country out, life in China could continue as before. Lilla wasn’t going to give everything up now. Not now that she was this close to home.