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 by Frances Osborne
PROLOGUE & FIRST CHAPTER
For Luke and Liberty,
Two of Lilla’s many great-great grandchildren
Prologue (click here to go straight to the first chapter)
IN THE Imperial War Museum in London there is a cookery book. It’s there because it was written in a Japanese internment camp in China during the Second World War. When the book was given to the Museum back in the 1970s, prime time television was still packed with dramas about Japanese prison camps and the war and the Museum put it on display in the front hall. Thirty years later, it has slipped further back in the building, into one of the galleries about battles we’re growing too young to remember.
There its old-fashioned Courier type pages lie open, each chapter a rusting paper-clipped bundle of different coloured leaves. Most sheets are scraps of what was once white paper, but which has now yellowed with age. Some are torn from old account books. Some have “American Red Cross” stamped on the back in red. There is even the odd sheet of Basildon Blue. And many of the pages are typed on blank rice paper receipts so thin that you can see right through them and marvel at how they survived the click and return of an old metal-bashing typewriter, let alone the war in which the recipes were written.
It’s when you actually read the book that the real surprise comes. For it’s not what you would expect from a wartime recipe book, all rations and digging for victory - or subsistence on rotting vegetables and donkey meat in a Japanese internment camp. It’s quite the opposite. It’s a book that’s written as if the war wasn’t there at all. As if it all wasn’t really happening. As if everyone was back in their warm safe homes with their families and friends, the larder full and the table heaving with fresh, just-cooked food. It gives advice on how to make good things last longer, how to live and eat to the full. The pages are jam-packed with recipes with old-fashioned names: cream puffs and popovers, butterscotch and blancmange, galantine of beef and anchovy toast, jugged hare and mulligatawny soup. There are dinner-party menus, children’s menus, cocktails, ice-creams, sweets. It’s a book for making the best of times in the worst of times, a book which makes you believe that if you could fill your mind with a cream cake or anything delicious then you could transform the bitterest times into something sweet and shut out the things that you needed to forget.
And that’s what my great-grandmother, who wrote this book, believed. |
My great-grandmother’s name was Lilla. She’d been christened Lilian, but her stutter stopped her reaching the third syllable. So Lilla it was. I remember her vividly. She didn’t just survive the camp, she lived for another forty years – until she was almost one hundred and one, and I was almost fourteen. Even at the end of her life, she was extraordinarily elegant, her long hair gently twisted up into a perfect chignon, her enviable legs always neatly crossed and only ever wearing fitted black lace and white diamonds that sparkled like those still burning bright blue eyes. Our visits would send my then thirty-something mother into a panic as to what she herself would wear. When we children scuttled through the door, this slim, birdlike, creature that sent our mother into a flurry would lean forward from where she perched on the edge of a sofa and whisper that it was “w-w-wonderful” to see us as she could never understand what the grown-ups had to say. In ten seconds flat, we had fallen under her spell. Jumping over the two bossy generations in between, our great-granny was our ally.
Lilla made the end of her life appear effortless. She trotted a mile to the shops and back each day. She had more descendants than she could count. Her bedroom was a through-the-looking-glass museum of furniture, pictures - even costumes - from the every corner of the world in which she had lived: China, where she had been born; India, where she had been a wife; even England, where she’d ended up when she had nowhere left to go. She behaved as if she had sailed through life like a breeze, and nothing could be better.
She rarely mentioned the camp.
Still, there were a few snippets that didn’t add up. A few phrases that slipped out in those grey hours after the funerals of each of her two children. There were her three “husbands” waiting in Heaven, and her worry as to which one she should live with “up there.” If any of them. There was an allusion to a “real father,” whom she said had shot himself when she was very young. There was her obsession with having something to leave her children and grandchildren. And there was the unheard of child that, in a whispered confession, she said she had made herself miscarry.
At the time, these were mysteries that simply added to Lilla’s exotic charm. It was only years later, when I started to unravel them that I began to realize that they were, in Lilla’s way, cries for help. Calls to understand that, beneath its polished surface, Lilla’s life had been far from effortless. Clues not just to the pain of internment, which at least she had shared with others, but to another story, one that she had endured alone. A trail of dozens of surviving friends and relations – there’s a tendency to longevity in our family – led me to the British Library. There I soon found myself staring at a long, thin box thickly packed with faded letters that had flown between Lilla, her first husband (my great-grandfather), his parents and his siblings, almost exactly one hundred years ago. As I pieced together the story that unfolded in them, I began to cry. Salty tears ran down my cheeks and dropped onto the thin paper letters, almost washing the words away. I wiped my face with a handful of tissues, smearing mascara around my eyes until I looked like I’d been in a fight. One of the librarians came over and asked if I was all right.
Emotional outbursts must be rare in those dimly-lit reading rooms on the Euston Road. It took me two years to return. When I walked back into the Oriental Reading Room, changed, a mother now, I hoped able to judge the story in a more objective light, the librarians recognised me instantly. And, before I could ask, they had gone to retrieve that old ballot box whose contents had made me cry.
The letters I read made me understand how Lilla had found the will to write those recipes. If it hadn’t been for what she had been through long before the camp, I’m not sure that she would have had the determination, the imagination, to shut out the bad things by writing down not just the odd recipe, but a complete cookery encyclopaedia that runs chapter by chapter, from a course of cooking, to soups, to fish, to game and right on to hints on homemaking. And get right to the end.
My father was always the one who was going to write Lilla’s – his grandmother’s – story. I remember him standing on the first floor landing of our house in London on the cold January morning after her funeral. He was examining a photograph of Lilla’s terrifying-looking first husband – his grandfather - that he had just hung on the wall. What a book it would make, he said. “It would be a sizzler. My God, she had a life.” He said that he must get around to it some time. But my father has written several books since then, and none of them have been about Lilla. Eventually, he handed me a pile of old photograph albums and a briefcase heavy with Lilla’s papers and documents and the mantle passed to me.
I went back to the Imperial War Museum for the first time since a child and read the recipe-book under the reading-room dome. I went to the British Library to see if I could find out a little more about who did what when and unearthed that long-since forgotten ballot box of letters, there because one of my great-great uncles had become Foreign Secretary for India and a poet. And as I started to turn over long-forgotten stones, more letters and newspaper clippings emerged from the bottom of dusty attic boxes, from the backs of once flower-scented drawers. And more photographs appeared. Some from the vaults of university libraries. Others from the albums once kept by Lilla’s identical twin sister Ada, spirited over to me from New Zealand. And a few from the collections of each person I went to see.
Then there are the family stories. I tracked down a web of long-lost relations by plucking names from newspaper reports written a century ago and persuading directory enquiries to do national searches. I’ve rediscovered dozens of cousins whom I never realized I had.
I flew to Vancouver and back, via a snow-bound Minneapolis, for the weekend to stay with one of Lilla’s nephews and met a lady who remembered Lilla in the Japanese prison camp they had both been in. I found others scattered around England’s coastline in Suffolk, Cornwall and Kent. All of them have their stories to tell about Lilla. The things that they overheard their parents discussing as children, and the secrets she confided to them during her long years in England at the end of her life.
There are non-family stories, too. The thousands of official documents recording the minutiae of the treaty ports of China – the extraordinary enclaves of Western life that used to be dotted up and down its shores. People from China families, people who were in Japanese camps. I’ve made friends with a missionary or two keen to reminisce about schooldays in Lilla’s home town – a Chinese treaty port and seaside resort called Chefoo - and life in the internment camps that she was in. They have provided me with endless photocopies of camp lists, lectures given at the Chefoo Club and other odds and ends. I advertised in the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society’s newsletter and received faxes from a bevy of old China hands.
Like a detective, I poured through my sources and linked the stories that I’d been told with the hard evidence that had come to light. I tracked Lilla, my great-grandmother - through years, through continents and through more episodes than could fit into a single book. I put on her shoes and walked through her life with her. I read her recipe book again and again, my mind tasting the food she loved to cook. I went to China and marvelled at the beauty of the bay in Chefoo. My sister and I ate cakes in the grand hotels of Shanghai, as Lilla and her sister once did. Where Lilla smiled, I smiled, where she cried, I cried, and where she made decisions that today seem strange, I began to understand what she had done. After all, I knew Lilla. The blood of her stories runs in my veins. And standing there with her, in other times, in other worlds, I closed my eyes and could almost see and hear what must have happened to her. And I could imagine what she would have thought and felt.
And by weaving back together the tapestry of bright strands and darker hues that is Lilla’s, my great-granny’s, story I have brought her back to life. Now she stands beside me - an eternal reminder never to give up hope.
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Part I
Love
CHAPTER 1
THE SWEET SMELL OF SPICE
Chefoo, North China, the second last day of March, 1882
Ada was born first, taking Lilla’s share of good luck with her. Or so everyone said. I’m not sure whether this was a Chinese myth to do with twins or just some family comparison of their two lives – for who can resist comparing the lives of twins? But when Lilla struggled into the world thirty minutes after her sister, she wailed, fists clenched, as if she already knew that she was going to have to fight to make up for being born without her fair share of fortune.
As far as the amah who looked after the two of them was concerned, Ada was Number One Daughter and Lilla, Number Two. When the amah always picked up Ada to be fed first, Lilla learnt to scream so that she was not forgotten. On the cold dark mornings of those freezing North China winters that numbed her fingers and nose, Lilla had to shout to show that she was cold too as Ada was the first to be swaddled in layers of warm clothes. And the moment that a thick slippery silk ribbon was carefully woven into Ada’s plaits, Lilla pushed through that stutter to demand one too. And if Ada’s ribbon was pink, Lilla made sure that she had a pink one as well - in spite of the amah’s best efforts to dress them so that you could tell which was which.
To look at, Lilla and Ada were identical. They both had exactly the same pale, heart-shaped faces with high cheekbones and delicately pointed chins and noses. They had the same long, dark dark brown – almost black – hair and bright blue eyes. They even had the same impish grin.
It was only when they began to move around and talk that any difference emerged. The moment Lilla opened her mouth, her stutter betrayed her, whilst Ada spoke in smooth clear tones. And when the pair of them started to totter around their red-brick two-storey end-of-terrace home in the Chinese port of Chefoo (pronounced Chee-foo) – a house designed to give its inhabitants the illusion of living in a safely British town but which instead peered out over a harbour full of junks and beyond them at a volcanic reef of green pointed islands like the spines on the back of a storybook dragon sitting down in the water - it was always Ada who went first. Lilla, a few paces behind, struggled to catch up. When they were out of the house in black boots and white frills, Lilla tried to overtake Ada as they clattered down the steep stone steps that led from the grand European villas and mock-castles on Chefoo’s Consulate Hill to its port. They watched the coastal steamer slide through the water from Shanghai, and a regatta of tall, swaying sailing ships and puffing, coal-driven barges nudge their way into moorings in from Russia, from Japan, from India, some even straight across the Pacific from San Francisco. They saw hundreds of barefooted coolies staggering up and down gangplanks loading silks and peanuts to go to every corner of the world - and unloading packages of narcotic brown powder from the hills of India, their conical straw hats shielding their dark-ringed eyes from the sun and hiding their sidelong glances in the direction of the sweet-smelling smoke seeping out from the doors of the opium dens.
When Lilla and Ada played at being grown-up, they strolled down the gentle slope on the far side of Consulate Hill that slid into the higgledy-piggledy beachfront. There they promenaded, tiny parasols in hand, alongside the rattle of rickshaws and pong of mule-carts that wafted into the sea air. They wandered past the whitewashed Western holiday hotels, past the clink of glasses on the suburban-style Chefoo Club terrace, and past the square squat tower of the austere St. Andrew’s Church and its triangular hat of a spire. Wherever they were, Lilla always made sure that she was abreast of Ada as if she needed to make sure that she was never left behind again.
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