Lilla's Feast (32 page)

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 sheep’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.

It was only October when the knock at the door came, but it had already snowed. A deep, early snow that heralded an exceptionally bitter winter. Lilla opened the door to find a group of Japanese soldiers blocking her in. She and Casey were to be taken to what the soldiers euphemistically referred to as a “civilian assembly centre.” They had one hour to prepare and could take a single suitcase each. They were told that they would be able to return in a few days’ time to collect anything else they needed. In a few days’ time, after the looters had had their run of the place. Lilla knew that anything she left behind now she would never see again. She fixed her hair and makeup, changed into her jewelry-laden dress, and threw on an extra overcoat too bulky to pack. She bundled Casey up in his coat, too.

Lilla must have made a final frantic dash around the apartment, her home. Was there anything else she should take? Anything else she could take? The apartment was still overflowing with dozens of precious objects that she had collected over the years. Each piece of furniture arranged just so. Every lampshade, every curtain, carefully chosen. And as she walked out the door, Lilla, like everyone else, was forced to leave her home open “to anyone who cared to enter,” writes Murray. “Looters were encouraged by our captors.”

Lilla and Casey’s bags would have been very heavy. Maybe, like many of the other Western faces staggering along the streets that morning, they found a wheelbarrow to struggle with. If they were lucky, they would have been allowed to pay for a rickshaw to take their cases.

In a straggling column, the “enemy nationals” walked past the harbor and through the crowded narrow lanes of the old Chinese city. The Chinese stopped and stared at their former princes turned into paupers, whispering in Chinese, says Murray, “Oh, they will eat much bitterness now. They have nothing but bits and pieces.”