Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  But unlike Brighton, England, or even Brighton Beach, New York, Chefoo had barely two hundred Western residents. And it was perched precariously on the eastern edge of China on a rocky peninsula that, in an atlas, looks like a dog’s head barking at the country’s unfriendly neighbors, Korea and Japan. Inland, beyond the hills, lay thousands of miles of muddy and rutted plains planted with peanuts, beans, and mulberry trees crawling with silkworms. In sharp contrast to the port’s temperate seaside climate, the country inland from Chefoo was subject to near-Siberian winters, biblical floods, and searing droughts. The year before Charles and Alice arrived, two million Chinese had died of famine in the Shantung Province alone.

  As in Shanghai, most of the foreigners in Chefoo made every effort to shield themselves from the gritty reality of Chinese life beyond the cradling green hills that rose up behind the town. Sixteen grand consulates were built on the high promontory—rapidly renamed Consulate Hill—that overlooked the town and divided the pleasures of the main beach, known as First Beach, from the business of the port. Bavarian chalets jostled with French villas along the seashore, together with Western shops and services. In 1877, there was a British butcher splitting the bloody carcasses of skinny Chinese cattle into anglicized ribs of beef and cuts that looked like Sunday joints. There was a German bakery exhaling damp baking dough and crisp, sweet, chocolate pastries. And there were three storekeepers, three doctors, five holiday hotels, and an architect.

  Perhaps lulled into a false sense of security by the reef and the hills behind, the one thing that the foreigners in Chefoo didn’t feel the need to do was to mark out any fixed territory. Instead of a segregated British compound as in most of Britain’s colonies, or clearly defined foreign concessions as in the larger treaty ports, there was simply a vague area of international settlement where foreign houses of every nationality were freely interspersed with Chinese homes and buildings. Here, the smell of fat German sausage, steak and kidney pudding and garlic, and runny French cheese drifted out to meet the persistent wet vapor of Chinese cabbage and noodles.

  As the years passed, Western buildings sprang up in every corner of the seaside valley. The informality of the town’s layout, thought the residents, simply added to the easygoing holiday atmosphere of the place. The Chefooites must have felt so safe and secure in their pretty haven that they almost forgot they weren’t in their own country at all. The Westerners began to give their roofs a Chinese tilt so that the ridges curved back upward at the edges like a pagoda. They filled their houses with smooth, lacquered oriental furniture and cedarwood-scented painted screens. They began to cook food the Chinese way, lunching on the noodles of northern China, adding sweet-and-sour sauce to their evening meals. They wandered into the narrow alleys of the old Chinese quarter and gazed at the flutter and screech of hundreds of animals in cages and cautiously sniffed at the curious Chinese medicines for sale. The temple pagoda that stood at the top of the hill on the western edge of the town, towering far above the mansions on Consulate Hill, became a pleasant spot for a picnic. From it the Westerners could survey their little world tucked into the bay. And the caravans of chewing camels and mule trains that stank of dung and desert and had crossed Asia before making their way to the coast from the inland city of Sian—the far eastern end of the old Silk Road—were regarded as charming curiosities for the children to look at. Not a stark reminder that, despite its carefully manufactured homegrown atmosphere, Chefoo was in a very foreign country, on the far side of the world. A place where the native Chinese still carried out their own, as opposed to Westernized, forms of justice—casually beheading their equally casually convicted criminals behind the rocks at the far end of Second Beach, just outside the town. Leaving the sand there permanently stained a deep, dark red.

  For all the town’s pleasure-oriented activities—riding, racing, boating, picnicking, and so on—tourism was not the main business of Chefoo. That, as in all of China’s treaty ports, was trade. Trade, the making of far greater sums of money than could be earned back home, was the reason why most of these Westerners were risking their lives in these distant soap bubbles of unreality. In 1877, Chefoo’s exports came from the town’s agricultural hinterland of the Shantung Province. This produced vast quantities of peanuts, beans, straw braid—“consumed in the fabrication of fancy baskets and other articles of utility for the use of the fair sex,” according to the Chinese Customs trade report for that year—and the region’s glistening, double-threaded Shantung silk. Chefoo’s main imports, however, were much the same as those of the other treaty ports: practical cotton and wool and the dreadful, inevitable opium. But by 1877, opium imports were on the wane. After steadily losing ground to improved domestic poppy cultivation and opium production in China, they had halved in just three years. Nonetheless they made up “nearly one third of the entire revenue for the year.”

  Most of the six trading firms operating in Chefoo when Charles and Alice arrived bought and sold whatever they could turn a profit on, as well as acting as agents for the bevy of insurance companies that underwrote shipping in China. There were about thirty full-time traders in Chefoo, and it took another twenty—and that was just the Westerners—in Chinese Customs to back them up. At the top of Chinese Customs’ hierarchy stood four British Mandarin speakers known as the Indoor Staff. Below them came the less genteel Outdoor Staff, who were concerned more with the physical business of moving boats in and out of the port. As the harbormaster and head of the Outdoor Staff, Charles Jennings had to walk a political and social tightrope between the two camps.

  Chefoo was home to one other big foreign industry in China: religion. To the Chinese, the missionaries were at least as big a part of the foreign occupation as the traders. There were missionaries throughout China. Unlike the business communities, which tended to stay inside the treaty ports, the missionaries traveled as far inland as they could. They lived with the Chinese, in their huts and villages. To many of the millions of Chinese who didn’t live near a treaty port the common colloquial term foreign devil simply meant “missionary.” Missionaries were the only foreigners whom they had heard of or seen.

  Within the treaty ports, the missionary communities tended to keep to themselves. In a way, the preachers and the traders were trying to do the same thing: make the most of the new mass market that China offered. They had both been given access to inland China by the same agreement—the 1860 Convention of Peking—that had brought the Second Opium War to a close. Neither, however, saw it like that. The preachers disapproved of the opium trade. And the businessmen thought that the missionaries simply stirred up trouble. As a rule, the rift ran deep. Although, in 1908, domestic political pressure would bring Britain to agree with China that the opium trade should be brought to a halt, the missionaries and businessmen in China would continue to live quite separate, parallel lives.

  The missionary community in Chefoo, on the other hand, was a little different. Almost as soon as the treaty port had been opened, two missionaries decided to set up a boarding school in Chefoo, to which missionaries isolated in inland China could send their children. The school campus sprawled along several hundred yards of the beachfront, at the far end of First Beach from Consulate Hill and the town center. In order to start up the school, the missionaries agreed to accept children from the business community, immediately breaking down the boundary between the two groups. Just as the foreign nationalities in Chefoo were jumbled up with each other and with the Chinese, so the missionaries began to mix in too. There were football and cricket matches between the school and the town—usually under the banner of the Chefoo Club, hub of the trading community’s social life. The trading firms lent boats for school trips to the outlying islands. There were joint picnics to the temple pagoda. And so it went on.

  Charles and Alice reached Chefoo just as the summer season of 1877 was drawing to a close. They moved into the harbormaster’s new redbrick house on the edge of Consulate Hill, where first another boy, Reggie, and then Lilla and Ada w
ere born. They bought pet dogs. Alice decorated the small house, painting friezes of flowers on the edges of tabletops, on the backs of chairs, and around the walls in each room— as she did in every house she lived in. She and Charles made a few good friends in the small community that worked in Chefoo throughout the year. When they came round for dinner, Alice, who was never a person to do anything by halves, would have shown her Chinese cook how to produce great banquets of overflowing dishes. Some steaming with the same spices whose densely colored powders would have stained her fingers and tongue as a child. Others exuding the comfortingly familiar aromas of gravies, steak and kidney puddings and roasts, sweeping her guests through the icy night air back to their nurseries, their mothers’ laps, and rolling green hills several thousand miles away.

  Even at family meals, as far as Charles’s harbormaster’s salary allowed, Alice would have brought out soups and starters, teaching her children to ease crabmeat from its shell, flip the bones out of a fish, wolf watery noodles without spilling a drop, eat hot, spicy foods without letting their eyes water. Lilla’s earliest memories must have been a riot of different tastes and textures: mousses so light that you could scarcely feel them on your spoon, barely steamed vegetables that crunched between her milk teeth, vermicelli that slithered down her throat like the snakes she and Ada ran from in the grass, and great hunks of dense German rye bread that sank to the bottom of her stomach, weighing her down like the stones with which she filled her bucket on the beach.

  Most evenings Alice sang, and, Lilla later said, she became “well known in China” for her voice. Charles must have listened, mesmerized and bursting with pride, to every note. And, despite the possible convenience of their marriage, Lilla was told that her parents fell deeply in love and lived a more or less idyllic, though relatively modest, family life.

  And so it should have continued. The boys growing up and joining Chinese Customs or a local trading firm. Lilla and Ada marrying and staying close to home. Charles and Alice graying hand in hand as they watched the sun set each evening behind the town’s high hills, the last glints of sunlight separating into a rainbow of different colors on the sea.

  But on the bitter, icy morning of December 20, 1884, when Lilla and Ada were just three months short of their third birthday, Charles Jennings apparently scribbled a note to a friend of his in Chefoo called Andrew Eckford, asking him to look after his family. He then picked up his harbormaster’s pistol, loaded it and went outside. His boots crackled through the frost as he walked across the rough-grass lawn to the shed at the bottom of the garden. He stepped inside, shut the door, and blew his brains out.

  The sound of the pistol shot ricocheted around the garden walls. Alice came running to find the family’s house servant shivering outside the padlocked shed. Charles had told him to lock him in and not to open the door “until you are certain that I am dead.”

  Alice ordered the servant to unlock the door. Charles lay on the ground, his pistol a few inches from his motionless fingers.

  Lilla was later told that one of the family’s pet dogs had turned rabid and bitten her father. There was no cure. Faced with the prospect of a creeping, agonizing, even dangerous, death—during which he might well have gone mad and attacked his family—Charles had chosen to take his own life. And thus Lilla’s happy family idyll was brought to an abrupt end.

  Alice was devastated to lose Charles, she told her children. That she was stranded in China with hardly a penny didn’t matter. In fact, that was the easiest part of the situation to solve. The combination of a shortage of women and the sense of community spirit in British outposts around the world had led to an unwritten tradition that one of the bachelors in town would marry the wife of any man who died out there. And Andrew Eckford proposed to Alice. Andrew was a partner in one of Chefoo’s largest trading firms and therefore one of the wealthiest men in the port. He was as Chefoo establishment as a man could be. His firm even ran the local mail service. Andrew asked Alice to marry him and offered to take on all of her four children. Strangely, Alice turned him down and took her children home—as Victorian expatriates called England. Andrew escorted them all to Shanghai and bought the family tickets on the next steamer out. It would take two months to reach England. He installed them on board and waved good-bye.

  The return to England was not a success. Mrs. Simons had died, her savings exhausted by all those music lessons and boarding-school fees. The few relations who were still around simply didn’t have enough spare cash for Alice and her four children by an unknown and now dead husband. Alice found herself struggling to put food on the table.

  Andrew Eckford turned up on Alice’s doorstep in January 1886. The custom in the treaty ports, and in colonial life in general, was for expatriates to return to their home country on leave every few years— often for a year at a time, as traveling each way could easily take a couple of months. A businessman would leave his firm in his partner’s hands. And Andrew had handed over the reins of his firm, Cornabé Eckford, to Cornabé and taken some leave in order to return to England and pursue Alice.

  It was a year since he had seen her off in Shanghai. He proposed again. This time she accepted. They married in England, and Andrew prepared to return to China. Vivvy and Reggie, aged nine and seven, were sent to boarding school in England, along with thousands of other little boys whose parents worked in the far reaches of the British Empire. Lilla and Ada were still just too young for this, and, in any case, being girls, their education simply didn’t matter as much. They went back to China with their mother.

  As stepfathers go, Andrew Eckford was a good one. He threw himself wholeheartedly into his new family and treated Lilla and Ada—the boys, too—more or less as his own. “More or less” because, in just one respect—one that would turn out to be important for Lilla—he held back. However, then, none of them were old enough to notice or care. Lilla, Ada, Vivvy, and Reggie all called him Father. And within a terrifyingly short space of time, it was as if their real father had never existed. After her misery over losing Charles, Alice seems to have made a decision to start again with Andrew. There were no pictures or mementos of Charles Jennings—not even hidden away in some drawer. He simply ceased to exist. Alice even informally switched her children’s surname to Eckford, extinguishing the evidence of her former, poorer life. The children forgot Jennings, almost forgot that they had ever had another father. He disappeared into the farthest recesses of their memories, surviving only in the traces of his features on their faces.

  Alice continued to run her new family in the same way as before. She sang to her children, and made every effort to convince them of the pleasure of mealtimes—encouraging them to stand on stools in the kitchen, cut raw biscuit dough into animal shapes, lick their fingers for that sweet sugary tingle on their tongues, and vie for the last teaspoonful of butter, eggs, and sugar scraped from the mixing bowl. This time around, however, Alice’s budget was without constraint. Each morning when Andrew wandered into his study, a fresh bunch of flowers would be waiting on the desk. Every month or two, Alice—an avid shopper— would sail south to Shanghai and return with great cases of elegant Chinese and English reproduction furniture; delicate, whispered ink drawings by the Chinese artists everyone was talking about at the time; and voluminous silk dresses with corsets that crushed her ribs, created a wasp waist, and thrust her chest forward. And each time Andrew or even just the children sat down at the dining-room table, they were confronted with a panorama of mouthwatering smells—steaming northern Chinese dishes so hot that you could burn your hands as you spooned out a helping; dishes from western China deceptively cool to the touch, but whose spices threatened to lift the roof off your mouth; and the best cuts of meat from the British butcher followed by weighty puddings of suet and flour laced with sherry and jam.

  There were other ways in which Alice’s life was better. And as I write this, it forces me to consider the story I have already told—the story as Lilla knew it. Alice didn’t just love her life with An
drew Eckford; she loved him, too. In fact, I am assured by all who knew her that Andrew Eckford was the love of her life—Andrew Eckford, not Charles Jennings, not the unnamed music master. And maybe, just maybe, that was why Alice didn’t marry Andrew in China just after her husband had died: because they already loved each other. And heaven forbid that anyone should know.

  I wonder whether Lilla’s father was really bitten by a rabid dog. Whether he ever wrote that note to Andrew Eckford.

  Or whether he killed himself because he knew his wife was in love with another man.

  If Lilla ever suspected this, she didn’t mention it. All she recalled was how her new life as an Eckford was, in all material ways, considerably better than she had been told her life was before. She and Ada spent the next few years living in the grandest house in Chefoo, attending the mission school at the end of First Beach, making extravagant shopping excursions to Shanghai with their mother, and chattering away to each other in a language indecipherable to anyone else. Every summer, the town filled with more and more new families as the treaty ports flourished. There were parties, picnics, boat trips, and races—their new daddy owned one of China’s most famous racehorses, Recruit. They had every toy that they could want, and two of each—one for each twin. They wore the prettiest of dresses made out of the lightest of silks and the smoothest of cottons, with no limit as to the number of petticoats, bows, and ribbons. And, as Alice quickly gave Andrew two children of his own, they even had a new baby sister each—Edith and Dorothy—to play with.

  There was one other thing that Lilla didn’t mention. It was so terrifyingly normal back then that it would never have crossed her mind to bring it up later. That Andrew—dear, sweet, kind Andrew—whose firm shipped a little bit of everything in and out of China, was, more likely than not, making money out of opium, too. Money that was buying Lilla and Ada all those toys and dresses and ribbons and turning them into a pair of little princesses. Enabling them each to have one of everything—even an amah each—so Lilla stopped having to wait her turn. So much so that, at some point during this golden childhood, the idea that Ada had stolen Lilla’s share of good fortune was almost forgotten.