Lilla's Feast Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  Part One - LOVE

  Chapter 1 - THE SWEET SMELL OF SPICE

  Chapter 2 - HEAVENLY TWINS

  Chapter 3 - A “NOT QUITE PRUDENT” MARRIAGE

  Chapter 4 - BURN THIS

  Chapter 5 - “POOR LITTLE LILY”

  Chapter 6 - MELTING BITTER LEMONS

  Chapter 7 - IN THE LAP OF THE GODS

  Chapter 8 - THE TABLES TURN

  Part Two - PEACE

  Chapter 9 - AN ALMOST HUSBAND

  Chapter 10 - GOING HOME

  Part Three - WAR

  Chapter 11 - WAR

  Chapter 12 - RICE-PAPER RECIPES

  Chapter 13 - EATING BITTERNESS

  Chapter 14 - THE BIG CAMP

  Chapter 15 - HUNGER

  Chapter 16 - SURVIVAL

  Chapter 17 - FREEDOM

  Part Four - REFUGE

  Chapter 18 - STEALING CHINA

  Chapter 19 - HEAVENLY TWINS TOGETHER AGAIN

  EPILOGUE

  SOURCES

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  She’ll Go Far . . . East

  Lilla’s War with China

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Luke and Liberty,

  two of Lilla’s many

  great-great-grand children

  CHOSEN AS A KIRIYAMA PRIZE NOTABLE BOOK

  PRAISE FOR Lilla’s Feast

  “Lilla’s Feast . . . tells the remarkable tale of an ordinary woman and her extraordinary life.”

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “A new and absorbing book . . . Lilla’s Feast is a stunning example of a woman who triumphed over adversity.”

  —El Paso Times

  “A must-read.”

  —The Daily Oklahoman

  “A feast for the reader . . . For those of you who like adventure, history and love stories with food thrown in, don’t miss Lilla’s Feast . . . . It’s fascinating reading.”

  —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “I loved Lilla’s Feast—absolutely absorbing, both for its historical content and its personal details. I felt for Lilla, every step of the way. A real feeling for place fills this book. . . . Lovely.”

  —MARGARET FORSTER,

  author of Lady’s Maid

  “A captivating narrative of one resilient woman’s one-hundred-year journey through the cultural changes and political turmoil of the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth.”

  —JOANNE LAMB HAYES,

  author of Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen

  Author’s Note

  In 1976, English-language newspapers changed from the old Wade-Giles system of romanizing Chinese names to the modern Pinyin. As Lilla’s story is set in the past, nearly all of it prior to 1976, I have used the Wade-Giles system. The Chinese names in this book are all therefore written differently today. This may give the impression that the places Lilla inhabited no longer exist. And, as you will discover, they don’t—at least not as she knew them.

  PROLOGUE

  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 farther 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-colored leaves. Most sheets are scraps of what was once white paper but 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 blue sheet of Basildon Bond writing paper. 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 during 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 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 fullest. 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 that makes you believe that if you could fill your mind with a cream cake or anything delicious, then you could transform the bitterest experience into something sweet and shut out the things that you need to forget.

  And that’s what my great-grandmother, who wrote the book, believed.

  My great-grandmother’s name was Lilla. She’d been christened Lilian, but her stutter stopped her from 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 one and I was almost fourteen. Even at the end of her life, she was extraordinarily elegant, her long hair gently twisted up at the back of her head, 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. When we children scuttled through the door, this slim, birdlike creature 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 each country of the world in which she had lived: China, where she had been born; India, where she had been a wife; England, where she’d ended up when she had nowhere left to go. She behaved as if she had sailed through life and nothing could have been 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 gray 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,” who had shot himself, she said, 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 whom, 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 and India Office Reading Room, changed, a mother now, and hoping to be able to judge the story in a more objective light, the librarians recognized me instantly. And almost 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 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 encyclopedia that runs chapter by chapter, from a “course of cooking” to soups to fish to game and 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.” 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 I was 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 I unearthed that ballot box of letters—there because one of my great-great-uncles had become Foreign Secretary to the Government of 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 of weddings written a century ago and persuading inquiry directories to do national searches. I’ve discovered dozens of cousins I never realized I had. I flew from London to Vancouver and back, via a snowbound Minneapolis, to stay with one of Lilla’s nephews for the weekend and met a lady who remembered Lilla in the Japanese prison camp they had both been in. I found others scattered around the coast of England in Suffolk, Cornwall, and Kent. All of them have their stories to tell about Lilla. The things 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. Thousands of documents record the minutiae of Lilla’s home, the treaty ports of China—extraordinary enclaves of Western life that used to be dotted up and down its shores.

  And the way in which each record has been kept tells me almost as much as its contents. Like the sepia portraits of British families and children, dressed as for a London street a century ago but taken, as the fraying cardboard around them reveals, in Shanghai. And it is not just how memories have been preserved, but why, that has been revealing, too. There are those British Library letters, self-consciously gathered by Lilla’s in-laws, the Howells, a family thoroughly sure of both its intellectual ability and literary skills (“they will very likely be interesting reading a hundred years hence if the world moves on as fast as it has done”). Several other key letters and files I have seem to have escaped the fire or wastepaper basket only because they make some reference to money and were therefore kept by people who had lost a lot of it and hoped that one day some might come back. And there are the letters and notes that have not survived—destroyed because the reader wanted to keep the correspondence tantalizingly private or because the writer assumed that nobody would be interested. As one of my many great-great-aunts in this story writes of her diary, “as I am not very likely to become famous and have a biographer, I have burnt it.” Oh, how I wish she had not.

  Even the stories I have been told face-to-face vary in nature according to the teller and to what they have found interesting enough for their memories to retain: detailed accounts of great journeys, moments of battle, business deals, and mouthwatering meals from my male relations; the intricacies of who said what to whom when, loves, heart-breaks, homes, clothes, possessions, and eating habits from the women. Some old and lonely by the time I found them, their minds still fixed on a glorious past.

  However, it is far from new to declare that all “facts” are inextricable from the person and medium used to record them. As Queen Victoria wrote, “I had long learnt that history was not an account of what actually happened, but what people thought had happened.” I haven’t attributed every single fact given to me to the particular source that provided it. To do so would make the text unreadable. In many cases, I have been given so many accounts of a single episode—each providing a different camera angle on Lilla’s life—that the only intelligible way of reproducing them has been to edit them into a single movie. Nevertheless, where it adds to the understanding of the story and is not self-evident, I explain how details came to light.

  But by far the hardest question surrounds the gaps in the story. Where, sleuthing again, I have had to deduce how it must have felt to Lilla to be in a certain place, at a certain time. I read her recipe book again and again, my mind tasting the food she loved to cook. I went to China and marveled at the beauty of the bay in Chefoo where she was born. My sister and I ate cakes in the grand hotels of Shanghai, as Lilla and her sister once did. I put on her shoes and walked through her life with her. 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. 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. Could imagine what she might have thought and felt.

  Lilla’s story is not large-scale history. She was not a grand or famous person orchestrating world politics. She was in many ways very ordinary, a typical woman of her time—and this is a story of what large-scale history does to the small-scale people caught up in its events. There were a lot of events—two world wars, a couple of civil wars, and a complete change in the choices open to women in the Western world. When Lilla was born, she was brought up to be a wife and nothing else. But she ended up working and starting her own business. And I hope that my two children, who never had a chance to meet Lilla and to whom this book is dedicated, will take its most enduring lesson to heart. That is, however bad things may be, somewhere inside all of us is the strength of spirit to overcome them. Never give up hope.

  London, January 2004

  Shrimp Pork

  To serve say five people: 3/4 lb vermicelli (boiled until soft), 3 large onions, ½ lb pork cut into dice when fried in the margarine until tender. Chop the onions and fry until golden brown, shell the shrimps about 4 ozs, prepare the vegetables then cut into small pieces. If garli
c is liked, chop a very small piece. Boil the vegetables.

  When all is ready, add onions, drained vermicelli, pinch of salt, chopped pork, vegetables (about 2½ lb), shelled shrimps. Put into a saucepan and heat until very hot.

  Sometimes an omelet is made and placed on top, also dry rice is served in small bowls, with drops of soya sauce over.

  Chapter 1

  THE SWEET SMELL OF SPICE

  CHEFOO, NORTH CHINA, THE SECOND-TO-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 picked up Ada to be fed first, Lilla learned to scream so that she was not forgotten. On the cold, dark mornings of those freezing north China winters that numbed the babies’ fingers and noses, Ada was the first to be swaddled in layers of warm clothes and Lilla had to shout to show that she was cold, too. The moment that a thick, slippery, silk ribbon was carefully woven into Ada’s plaits, Lilla pushed through her stutter to demand one for herself. And if Ada’s ribbon was pink, Lilla made sure that she had a pink one as well. “Right from the start,” I was told, “they had the most terrible fights—their shoes had to be put on each foot at the same time.”

  To look at, Lilla and Ada were identical. Rummaging through the archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, I found a photograph of the pair of them, taken by a visitor to Chefoo when they were about eight years old. In it, they both have exactly the same pale, heart-shaped faces with high cheekbones and delicately pointed chins and noses. And the same long, dark brown—almost black—hair and bright blue eyes.