Small acts illustrated this. D. P. Thomson heard about two instances.13
Flies were a menace in China because of the illnesses these insects were capable of spreading. Liddell had been invited to the home of some friends for coffee and biscuits. When a fly settled on the topmost biscuit, Liddell was told not to touch it. He ignored the advice. ‘His action was not intended as a rebuke – that would never occur to him,’ Thomson was told. Liddell was instead making certain ‘that no one else should suffer discomfort’ as a consequence of eating the one biscuit the fly had ‘defiled’.
The second example of Liddell’s concern for others was even more touching. In the visitors’ book of a church where he’d been preaching, Liddell wrote in Chinese: ‘Keep Smiling’. After the local minister read it, he approached Liddell about a member of his congregation who had been injured in an industrial accident. Her scalp and one eye had been torn out. The primitive grafts to restore the skin had taken two years of surgery. She was deaf and suffered intense headaches. The eyelashes on her remaining eye had to be pulled every month to stop them from growing on to the eyeball. She nonetheless scribbled ‘Keep Smiling’ on the bottom of every letter she wrote. She would feel, the minister said, that Liddell’s own message had been ‘left especially for her’. Liddell offered to meet the woman. ‘Busy though he was,’ explained the minister, Liddell spent ‘an hour with her in her little room’. Afterwards she wrote a long letter of thanks to him.
The sequel to that vignette seemed to everyone who heard it – and to Liddell himself – to be providential rather than coincidental. Her letter arrived shortly before Liddell set off to catch a train. In an otherwise empty carriage he sat facing a much younger man who looked lonely and troubled. Gradually, a distressing account of adversity, failure and personal defeat bled out of him. The man explained he’d ‘lost all belief and hope’. He was ‘seriously contemplating suicide’. Liddell admitted that for a minute or two he ‘did not know what to say or do’. So he produced the letter from the woman from his pocket and said, ‘Read that.’ Liddell then spoke movingly of the woman’s ‘grinding hardship, her accident and her faith’. As the minister put it: ‘Before that journey ended, a new journey had begun for that young man.’
Two strangers on a train had been connected through a letter from a third stranger.
This was the Liddell that Florence loved.
One of the most curious and ridiculously anachronistic of the London Missionary Society’s strictures was the clause in its contract relating to matrimony.14 Managing to sound manipulating and morally superior, the LMS declared that its directors must approve of a couple’s choice of each other before ‘completing any engagement with the view to marriage’. It implied the LMS would veto those it regarded as unsuitable. These self-appointed judges and juries of the heart didn’t bother Eric Liddell. The only thing concerning him was the reaction of his own parents – his father was still alive then – and Florence’s. Hugh MacKenzie, describing his future son-in-law as ‘very unassuming and so gentle’, placed only one barrier between Liddell and his daughter. Florence had to finish her training before the banns could be read.
Cream is the colour for both Eric Liddell and Florence during his furlough in Toronto.
The flame of most other relationships would have flickered out, all passion long spent, in the three years and four months separating Liddell’s proposal and the recital of the wedding vows. From mid-June in 1930 until early 1934, Liddell and Florence saw each other only twice for a total of eight weeks. He bookended his furlough to Scotland with sea voyages to Canada. Otherwise ink took the place of speech and sight.15 Liddell wrote to her about the Bible classes he organized and the ‘memory cards’ he had designed, each containing a daily scripture reading that could be slipped into a pocket and be absorbed wherever the recipient wanted to read it ‘for meditation’. She wrote to him about making hospital corners with the bedsheets, emptying chamber pots and her aching feet after ward-patrol in several departments as diverse as children’s care and psychiatry. When Florence finally arrived back in China, Liddell was waiting for her on the dockside at Taku.16 Watching him, pacing with his hands behind his back and staring out to sea for the first sight of her ship, one of Florence’s brothers realized how dearly her fiancé loved her. ‘I’d never seen Eric so animated. He couldn’t wait to see her. He was bouncing around like a rubber ball. When the ship finally appeared, he was beside himself. If he could have swum out to meet her, he would have done.’
Eric Liddell and Florence MacKenzie were married on 27 March 1934 in Tientsin’s Union Church, where the two of them had originally met eight years earlier.
In the official, typically stuffy wedding album shots, snapped outside the church, Mr Liddell is impeccably smart in the sort of matrimonial uniform his ancestors would have worn: top hat with a silk sheen, starched wing collar and frock coat. A pink carnation blooms in his left button hole. The new Mrs Liddell carries a cascade of pink carnations and a heap of greenery so enormous that the florist’s shop in Tientsin must surely have seemed very bare after the bouquet was collected for her. The comet trail of that bouquet looks as long as the train of her lace and satin dress.
The two best photographs of man and wife were taken informally. There are couples who even on their wedding day seem still to be getting used to the idea of being together. The Liddells were different. These pictures tell you everything you need to know about the marriage. It is frequently said that a man can win over a woman simply by making her laugh. This was true of Liddell. Florence said her husband was an ‘incurable romantic’17 with a ‘fantastic and very unconventional’ sense of humour. The evidence is in these pictures. Preserved in them is much more than his character and spirit and also the joie de vivre of a morning about to break into a long celebratory afternoon. What the photographs transmit is the ease between the Liddells and the absolute contentment each feels in the other’s company. In the first, Liddell is wearing his wife’s wide hat, made from light, wispy material, which she wore for a friend’s wedding. The pleasure on his face is like the pleasure on a child’s; a child, moreover, who has suddenly been given what it most wanted. Florence’s smile at her husband’s larking about is instinctive, unforced. The second picture is even better. What it captures is unscripted – the very second when Liddell tries to tickle his wife and she pretends to resist being tickled. Her semi-turn, in a mock escape, obscures her expression; but his is exultant.
Here comes the couple. Eric and Florence leave the Union Church in Tientsin after attending the wedding of a friend . . .
. . . before their own wedding day there in March 1934.
The Liddells spent a ten-day honeymoon at an LMS cottage in the Western Hills, close to Peking, before returning to Tientsin. Their newly decorated three-room flat was filled with furniture bought for a pittance from departing missionaries. Like all newly-weds the Liddells were wrapped up in themselves and thankful at last to have an address that belonged to them alone. Nothing mattered more than being together. But around the bliss of it all hung the black menace of everyday life in China.
Sometimes the landmarks of history, disputed or otherwise, are less telling in retrospect than its footnotes or the newspaper reports at the bottom of a column. The perfect example is three short paragraphs from The Times in mid-June 1934. The piece appeared beneath such a familiar headline – ‘Missionary Killed in China’ – that it looked like recycled news. The sub-heading – ‘Struggle with Bandits’ – reinforced that idea. The slain missionary was seventy-five years old. A veteran of the Boxer siege in Peking, he had spent almost half a century in China tending to its huddled poor. He’d pioneered work in medicine and surgery for native doctors, writing textbooks for them in Chinese. He’d been called one of the country’s ‘best foreign friends’. He’d also put together manuals for non-Chinese speakers who wished to learn the language. His robbers neither knew this nor would have cared. He was shot twice in the head at midnight. He’d been attem
pting to protect his wife and two grandchildren. The salient – and most sobering – detail of the dispatch was the location of the shooting: the missionary was staying in the holiday cottages in the Western Hills, where the Liddells honeymooned only ten weeks earlier. Here was another sign that the size of the country offered no protection to anyone.
Eric Liddell reveals the carefree element of his nature by pulling on Florence’s hat, which she wore at a friend’s wedding.
A sign of love: Eric playfully attempts to tickle Florence . . . and she pretends to try to run away from him.
China hardly seemed to be a place to build a home and start a family. A home was built nonetheless; and a family was soon begun too.18 Liddell was in his early thirties. His friends had been fathers long before him, and so had his brother, Rob, whose son was born in 1930.
Barely sixteen months after the wedding, Florence gave birth to a girl, christened Patricia. A second daughter was born in the first week of January 1937. The Liddells couldn’t agree on a name. The baby was originally due in late December, and Florence wanted to call her Carol to chime with the season. Liddell preferred Heather, reminding him of Scotland. Eventually, a compromise was agreed. A draw would be made to resolve the impasse, and Liddell volunteered to organize it. He placed two folded squares of paper inside one of Florence’s cloche hats and invited her to pick out one of them. She did so, reading aloud her blind choice to him: Heather. She accepted defeat until Liddell, unable to tell even the whitest of lies, made a confession. The contest had been a fix. He’d written Heather on both pieces of paper. ‘I picked up a cushion and threw it at him,’19 said Florence. ‘Then I reckoned that if he’d wanted the name Heather that much, I wasn’t going to stand in his way.’
With two children, one just two years old and the other in the cradle, most parents would have settled into the quietest of family routines. But another path beckoned Liddell like a hooked finger; and where it led promised nothing quiet or cosy.
A bicycle made for a family. Eric, dapper in his straw hat, prepares to pedal through Tientsin. Florence, Patricia (left) and Heather see him off.
Eric Liddell planned to be a country missionary like his father; only the timing of the move remained in doubt. The London Missionary Society nagged him into it much sooner than he had expected.
As early as 1935, less than fourteen months after his marriage to Florence, the LMS became concerned about what it called ‘the smallness’ of its ranks in North China and the ‘consequent inadequacy to meet the needs of the country fields’.20 The solution was to transfer evangelists such as Liddell to fill up the numbers. The LMS wanted him to go to Siaochang, his boyhood home and his father’s former district. His brother Rob was still doctoring there. His friend Annie Buchan was still the hospital’s matron. The LMS turned the screw on Liddell in an un-Christian manner. Its executive committee traded on both his conscience and his obligations to God. It asked him to ‘consider’ whether the ‘serious emergency’ over staffing did not ‘constitute a Call to him to give temporary help’. The enquiry, though polite, was as loaded as a gambler’s dice. The capitalization of the word ‘Call’ – and what it implied – piled on the pressure. He initially resisted it, thinking the LMS’s timing wrong for him and Florence. The Anglo-Chinese College needed his teaching, he said, and to go to Siaochang would be a ‘big waste’ of his educational work at that stage. His Chinese wasn’t fluent enough to cope in the remotest of the rural areas either. Noticeably he didn’t summon the excuse about bringing up a young family and not wanting to leave them; after all, missionaries complaining about the agony of separation sounded like sea captains complaining about the sea. Above all, Liddell stressed that he then didn’t ‘feel a definite enough call’ to abandon the college just yet.
The LMS was peeved. The executive committee did what autocratic organizations always tend to do when someone or something doesn’t bend to their will. It first moved the goalposts and then gerrymandered the outcome it wanted. In a pincer movement, it decided to review ‘the whole policy and work’ of the college and pledged to reduce staffing there as soon as ‘circumstances’ allowed. The meaning of these announcements didn’t require translation. Liddell would be steered towards Siaochang eventually. Within another twelve months the LMS made its second attempt to engineer the move, proposing that Liddell go there ‘on loan’ either in the autumn of 1937 or the spring of 1938. The earlier date was preferable to the impatient LMS.
Liddell continued to waver, mulling over the move at enormous length. The future prosperity of the college, which he had served for more than a decade, bothered him. Liddell also thought he was still ‘more equipped for educational work, both by training and temperament’ – at least for another year or two. With the LMS adamant, however, Liddell went into a period that Florence described as ‘much prayerful consideration’ because ‘all his decisions were made in light of what he felt was God’s will for him’. After those prayers, Liddell’s opinion changed. ‘It took him a long time to be sure he was doing the right thing,’ said Florence.21 ‘But eventually he felt God was calling him to the country.’
That call could not have come at a more dangerous time.22
Long before he began chronicling the making of American presidencies, and winning the Pulitzer Prize for it, Theodore H. White reported on China for Time. Casting his eye across the churned battlefields of its history, White reflected that successive dynasties were ‘born of upheaval and fermented in the brew of revolution’. Those, such as Liddell, who were there during the 1920s and 1930s lived through one of them, each a witness to civil war during a decade of mass death and madness. Liddell saw the Nationalists and the Communists fight over ideology and he picked his way gingerly through the wreckage both of them scattered.
The Nationalists, under Sun Yat-sen, and the Communists, under the intellectual Li Dazhao and his party co-founder Chen Duxiu, had become allies in 1922, a coming-together of convenience designed to rid China of its warlords, who ruled and duelled as arbitrarily as those maverick king-commanders in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. When Sun died of liver cancer in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek, then thirty-eight, eventually replaced him, turning himself into the organizing brain of the Kuomintang. Within eighteen months Chiang had shrewdly married the Christian Soong Mei-ling. Her sister was Sun’s widow. Chiang read Mei-ling’s Bible daily, and prayed with her after becoming a practising Methodist. Of him, White said: ‘He cloaked himself in the sanctity of a deacon . . . his utterances rang with the sincerity of a Puritan . . . [he] frowned on sin with the intensity of one who has sampled it and found it less rewarding than piety.’ White then smashed apart the picture of Chiang as the saintly Christian soldier with the mallet-swing of this line: ‘His ferocity was that of an Old Testament Joshua . . . as a politician Chiang dealt in force rather than ideas . . . any concept that differed from his own was treated with as much hostility as an enemy division.’
The warlords were said to have a total of 1.5 million followers when Chiang’s ‘Northern Expedition’ began against them in 1926, an action dismissed as ‘hopeless folly’ by the correspondent of the New York Times. As Jonathan Fenby points out in The Penguin History of Modern China, Chiang was more wily than his critics at home and abroad ever believed. ‘He grasped the importance of finance and resources, of political control and coalitions which, however temporary, isolated opponents.’ With the support of the Communists, he substantially weakened some warlords and toppled others, reunifying the bulk of China under the National Government, based in Nanking.
But even victors are by victories undone; and so it proved now. Political and military fault-lines as big as chasms remained, and China was an ungovernable Gordian knot of intrigue and corruption, pride and ego, feuds and resentments in which the self-serving and the power-crazed were unimaginably entangled. Things fell apart. Without a common enemy to unite them, the ‘understanding’ that had existed between the Nationalists and the Communists rapidly disintegrated. In April 1927,
what became known as Chiang’s ‘White Terror’ began. Communists and dissidents alike were purged; five thousand were slaughtered in Shanghai alone as Chiang – aided and abetted there by the criminal organization the Green Gang – strove to establish an unbendable capitalist state beneath the tent of his dictatorship. As White observed, there were ‘riots, bloodshed and butchery’. Chiang even placed a bounty on the heads of Communist leaders: $50,000 alive and $20,000 dead. Li Dazhao was hanged after being captured in Peking. Dazhao’s political partner, Chen Duxiu, lost his influence and was subsequently expelled from the party.
That summer, out of the chaos, the Communists created the Red Army and made Mao Tse-tung its commander-in-chief. In one photograph he is thin and distinctly oval-faced, his thick black hair centrally parted and cut almost flush against the tops of his ears. Mao looks as if he is wearing a clown’s skullcap and wig.
Just as the Boxer Rebellion had done, the civil war became convenient cover for hate-crimes against foreigners. Missionaries were wedged between rival armies and rival warlords and also the bedraggled but belligerent assortment of bandits who took advantage of the anarchy.
For the Glory Page 19