Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  And then the tide turned just a little in Lilla’s favor. Perhaps as a result of his well-connected father pulling some strings for his son, Ernie’s posting was moved from Calcutta to Kashmir, India’s mesmerizingly scenic mountain kingdom in the foothills of the Himalayas and both a holiday destination for British expatriates and home to some of the best hunting, shooting, and fishing in the British Empire. He was delighted. “A prime billet for a man of my rank,” he wrote to Evelyn, in anticipation of the hours of recreation that lay ahead. “I cannot tell you how pleased I am & so will poor little Lily be when she hears the news.” She must have been. Kashmir was a long way from the charms of her twin in Calcutta. And there was a fighting chance that she might be allowed out to India a little sooner.

  The climate in mountainous Kashmir was the reverse of that in the rest of India. Whereas by April Calcutta had grown unbearably hot—a breeding ground for disease entirely unsuitable for a young baby—in Kashmir a cool gentle spring was just beginning. So, although there was no question of Lilla going out to meet Ernie in Calcutta the following March when her baby would be only a couple of months old, there could be no objection to her going out to Kashmir then.

  But March was still the best part of a year away. To the twenty-year-old Lilla, it seemed like eternity. She may have professed to Barbie to be “quite consoled” to “having another infant,” but it was far from truth. In order to keep herself busy, she immersed herself in the practicalities of Ernie’s move, trying to look after him from afar and writing to him “all my spare time.” She suggested that he look for a house outside Kashmir’s capital: “It would be most unwise to live in Srinagar this winter as the house could not possibly be dry.” She asked him to buy “only camp furniture” until she arrived and could take charge of their new home, their first proper home. “I am sure I will be able to make the house quite nice and pretty, without any expense.” Ernie’s enthusiastic replies urging her not to “be discouraged, sweetheart” by their prolonged separation made Lilla feel closer to him than she had ever been. “Oh if I had my Ernie,” she wrote, “how happy I should be.” She longed to feel him hug her again, as he had done in those last few days in England. Even just touch her. But whenever his letters launched into a lengthy description of his new life in his new home or of his job organizing the visits of both Lords Curzon and Kitchener, India’s viceroy and military commander in chief, respectively, to Kashmir that year, she felt him slipping out of reach.

  For a while, Lilla persevered. But as she packed his “winter garments” to send out to Kashmir—“he did not take any thick things with him, thinking he was to remain in Calcutta”—I think something in her began to crack. Perhaps folding his heavy tweed coats while the July sunshine beat in through the windows made the distance between them seem irrecoverably large and she could hardly bear to close the trunk lid. As Ernie’s possessions disappeared from her sight behind a row of heavy brass locks, it was as though she were packing their relationship away. KASHMIR, the label on the trunk read. The other side of the world.

  I can see Lilla standing there, the fuzzy sunshine coming through the window onto the back of her neck, looking at Ernie’s locked trunk, her spirits sinking. The old sadness creeping up on her again. A dark shadow beginning to cloud her field of vision, shutting out the light.

  It may have been an old wives’ tale that she had picked up or just parlor gossip. I don’t think she cared. The thought of it made her feel quite sick. It was a horrible, horrible solution. But right then, it seemed to be her only hope.

  Lilla must have feigned tiredness and excused herself from the day’s visiting planned by her mother, then gone up to her room as if to take a nap and waited for the house to empty. When the last squeak on the stair had died away, she stood up on her bed and, as she told her granddaughter years later, began to jump. Up and down, bending her knees and heaving her five months’ pregnant frame into the air. Raising her arms and trying to reach for the ceiling. Bouncing on the springs as they creaked and caved and sprang back. The head of the bed rattling against the wall. The bedposts grinding against the floor. She jumped and bounced and bent and reached until she could heave no more. Then she collapsed onto the bed in a ball of exhaustion and wept.

  Shortly afterward, she miscarried the child.

  INDIA, AUTUMN 1903

  Lilla sailed from Liverpool for India at the end of September with the now one-year-old Arthur and a nanny, Mrs. Desmond. Her boat trip back to England with Ernie had been miserable. But this time, she was bubbling with excitement—professing to Ernie “in raptures,” as he later wrote—to find the ship comfortable, the service attentive, and even the food good. Not only was she going to see Ernie, she was also going to see Ada, who, with Toby, had been transferred to Bombay, on the west coast of India. The very port that Lilla was heading for.

  Like Calcutta, Bombay was a grand imperial city. Perhaps even grander than Calcutta, for, as Jan Morris wrote in her great guide to the British Empire, the Pax Britannica trilogy, Bombay was home to “probably the most daunting group of buildings in the Empire.” I have in front of me a postcard. One of the three I know of written by Lilla’s own family. It was sent by Ada from Bombay. Dense, corridor-infested buildings that seem to shout administration from every Victorian Gothic arch and medieval portal squat in a row as far as the eye can see. In front of them is what, on the postcard, looks like a racetrack but must be Morris’s “brownish turf” and “riding-track called Rotten Row”—after the track in London’s Hyde Park. Beyond this lay the beaches. Perhaps the location of these grand buildings had been chosen so that the British and Indians burrowing through mounds of paper in Bombay’s infinite offices could glance up and see the waves ruled by Britannia stretching out before them back toward London.

  Behind this gleaming show of imperialism was hidden the chaos of the Indian city. Rickshaws, feathered squawkings, and a rich variety of stenches spread into the distance. This contrary combination of all-British grandeur and impoverished street life must have reminded Lilla of Calcutta. But her time there was now far away. It was almost two years since she had left that city, and now she was going to meet an Ernie who loved her. And, for the first time, they would have a proper home of their own.

  It was also two long years since Lilla had last seen Ada. Ada, who had always been a step ahead of her. Ada had grown yet further in stature, almost rising to meet the imperial edifices that the two of them would have trotted past in tongas—the horse-drawn, two-wheeled carriages used as taxis in India. Toby was an important man in Bombay, and Ada, even though she was only twenty-one years old, had become a grand lady. Lilla must have felt almost childish, girlish, in comparison. Ada and Toby’s comfortable house and servants must have made a stark contrast to Lilla’s old lodgings in Calcutta. And as much as Lilla talked about the importance of Ernie’s new position, it was clear that she and Ernie were on a very different path in life from Ada and Toby’s.

  Even so, I don’t think Lilla envied Ada one bit. Despite Ada’s trappings of success, in reality her life had been far from perfect. Over the past two years, Lilla may almost have been abandoned by her husband, but she had succeeded in winning him back and putting her life back on track. Ada, on the other hand, had given birth to a daughter, adored her on sight—and then had to watch her tiny child die from a series of inexplicable fits.

  Bouncing her own bonny baby on her knee, Lilla must have felt for the first time that life was being less fair to Ada than it was to her. Perhaps, also for the first time, she was emotionally the stronger of the two. Managing to pull her marriage back from the edge of the abyss had given her a new confidence. If she could do that, then she could do anything. But Ada had found her own experiences so painful that she said she could not face having another child.

  What Lilla couldn’t have told Ada then was what she had had to do in order to come out to India so soon after Ernie. And if she didn’t tell Ada, she didn’t tell anyone else. For the next eighty years, she must ha
ve kept the secret buried deep inside her. Hidden under her ebullient exterior it must have gnawed away, a constant reminder that she had done something terribly, terribly wrong—something for which she might, one day, have to pay. And during the dark times to come, I fear she would feel that she was paying again and again.

  In mid-November, before the snow cut off Kashmir from the rest of the world, Lilla headed north into the Himalayan winter. She and Ada would not be living in the same city, but at least they would be in the same country—barely a week’s travel and post apart. Lilla left the vast arches of muggy Bombay’s gargoyle- and stained-glass-ridden Victoria Terminal on the gleaming and sleek Punjab mail train that steamed up through the hot, dry plain to the large cantonment at Pindi, or Rawalpindi, the general headquarters for the Indian army in the north of the country. Here, Lilla, nurse, and child clambered off onto a dusty station platform.

  Ernie was waiting for them. He and Lilla hadn’t seen each other for eight months. Eight months of tear-filled letters and frantic, parsimoniously brief cables. They must have held each other on the station platform, Ernie’s broad shoulders encircling Lilla’s frame. Lilla leaning in against him, the polished brass buttons on his uniform imprinting themselves into her cheek. Lilla didn’t burst into overemotional tears—Ernie described her as “plucky”—but held her ground as if to say, Right, I’m ready to go, we still have a long way to travel. Ernie may have given her a couple of mustachy, slightly longer than pecks on the cheek, but a great long smooch on a public platform was not the done thing.

  In any case, it is always strange to meet a lover after a long time apart. Is he or she the same person you said good-bye to? And if you can’t spot any obvious differences, you wonder what alterations lie invisibly stitched beneath the surface. It can take a bit of time for the awkwardness to dissolve into easy repartee. And then Ernie and Lilla would have been wondering how things would turn out for them in this new place they were heading to. Everything had been fine, and only just, when he had left her back in London. But in Kashmir? Would it still be fine? Or would their marriage start to crumble again?

  For the following year of Lilla and Ernie’s life, an unprecedented number of their letters were regarded good enough to make it into his siblings’ collection. This had by no means always been the case. “Ernie, you must admit, does not rise to a very high standard,” his sister Laura had written the previous March, as she had tried to talk him out of leaving Lilla behind. But the details of his life in Kashmir were deemed interesting enough to include. And up until this point, only two of Lilla’s letters had been kept. Now, however, as Barbie told her, “your letter of the 25th was a welcome surprise. It was a quite delightful letter & the family will not let you off, when they find out how you can write when you choose!” And from then until the following autumn, when the letters stored in that long ballot box come to an end, several of Lilla’s and Ernie’s scribbles are included, giving an extraordinarily detailed account of their life—and, for almost the first time, giving Lilla a voice.

  Lilla and Ernie spent their first two days in the Pindi cantonment, staying with a Colonel Hawkins and his wife. Lilla charmed their hosts, and Ernie felt himself beginning to relax. “She is a good little soul,” he wrote to Papa, and—fulfilling all the Howell criteria—“so economical.” Then, taking a phaeton, they set off on the long journey up into the hills. The idea was to travel quickly during the day but stop every night. Ernie, a logistics officer to the core, had planned every detail of the trip, booking them into lodgings at each stage along the way.

  The first day on the road went smoothly. But on the second afternoon, Ernie wrote, his carefully laid plans began to disintegrate when one of their two horses died. With just one horse to pull them along, their pace was reduced to a painfully slow crawl. By the time that they eventually arrived at that night’s lodgings, their rooms had been taken—by one of Ernie’s senior officers. Lilla must have sensed that, frustrated by his inability to turn the situation around, Ernie’s short fuse was priming itself to blow. Abandoning their beleaguered phaeton and exhausted single horse, she darted back into the street and flagged down a tonga. She piled Ernie, nurse, and child in and ordered it back along the road that they had just driven down. Three miles back they found a government rest house—one of a chain of bungalows to be found every ten to fifteen miles—with free rooms.

  The next morning, Ernie set about getting another horse sent down from Pindi. He was grumbling at the prospect of a three-day wait—a day and a half for the messenger to reach Pindi and another day and a half for the horse to arrive—stuck in the middle of nowhere, when Lilla started to produce “food of all sorts out of a surprisingly small basket.” I imagine her, Mary Poppins–like, magicking up meal after meal of cold meats and cheeses, laced with quince and red-currant jelly, out of a bottomless picnic basket. It was more than enough to last them three days. A sated Ernie settled down and began to enjoy the wait. “We were perfectly happy and most comfortable.”

  Two days farther up the road, Ernie had to leave Lilla. He had found a wire waiting for him and, within half an hour, was on the back of the overnight mail cart where he froze for “twelve long hours” before spending a day resolving whatever logistical problems had called for his attention. At nine-thirty in the evening, he set off with some trepidation toward Baramullah, a day’s journey on from where he had left Lilla. He had arranged to meet her on a houseboat he kept there. The maharajah of Kashmir, fearing, as Jan Morris puts it, “an influx of retired British officials into his arcadian State,” had banned Europeans from owning land there. The British, however, had simply resorted to building houseboats that could float on Kashmir’s abundant waterways and lakes whenever extra accommodation was needed. Kashmiri houseboats were peculiar craft. They looked, says Morris, like “little Thames-side chalets mounted on hulls, with dormer windows and shingle roofs.”

  It was two in the morning by the time Ernie arrived at the houseboat, and he crept aboard the silent vessel, “fearing it empty.” To his surprise, he found Lilla, Mrs. Desmond, the nanny, and Arthur “comfortably asleep and quite snug.” They all spent two more days on board while Ernie finished up some administrative work at Baramullah. Finally, they set off for the home he had prepared for his family twenty miles up the Kashmir valley from Srinagar, in an area called Bandipur, known to the British for its excellent trout fishing.

  Ernie’s house in Bandipur was far from grand. It was essentially a summer fishing hut and not an obvious place to spend the winter. Still, it was far better than his flooded lodgings in Srinagar. The descriptions of visitors and even Ernie and Lilla themselves range from “hut” and “match-box” to “rat-palace” and even “queer little hutch beside a raging torrent.” Photographs show a ramshackle single-story cottage, its walls a jigsaw of whitewash, redwash, and unpainted board, its roof a medley of carved wood and slate, punctured by square brick chimneys that look as though they have been designed to weather far greater storms than the house could ever withstand. On the other side of the whitewater river that charges along the edge of its lawns, a similarly sized shack teeters on the shore in ruins, a stern reminder of what the vagaries of the Kashmiri weather can do to a home.

  Lilla and Ernie’s cottage in Bandipur, Kashmir, 1904

  Lilla and Ernie’s cottage in Bandipur, Kashmir, 1904

  Kashmir is an imposingly beautiful and heartlessly cruel country. Its Himalayan summits rise up through the landscape like Olympian gods looking to the sky. In between their ridges and peaks, the ground falls away precipitously, its cliffs eventually softening into rocky tundra that in turn flattens out into grassy slopes, tree-filled pastures, and roundbottomed glacial valleys. Down here, meadows amble beside a water garden of rivers, streams, and lakes. Dotted alongside, Kashmiri shacks, cottages, and houseboats sit as if in the lap of the gods. In the summer, these pastures fill with flowers, larger, brighter, and more abundant than seems possible in real life. But when winter comes, the temperature falls
far below freezing, and snow buckets out of the sky, its blizzards wrapping themselves around each building, each tree, like a great winter coat, and in the lap of the gods is exactly where the Kashmiris are.

  Lilla brushed aside Ernie’s concerns about the house, declaring it “quite snug and cosy” in her letters. When they arrived there in late November, it probably was. The vast mountain walls that surrounded the valley were already iced white, but the heavy snow wouldn’t spread across the low ground until January. However, when the winter proper came, it would be tough. In summer, Bandipur may have been a welcome retreat from Srinagar; but, apart from the local Kashmiri village, in winter, Lilla and Ernie risked being cut off from the outside world.

  Lilla, though, viewed this impending onslaught of the elements as a challenge. Making a home against the odds like this was exactly what she knew how to do, longed to do. And in so doing, she must have thought, she could win Ernie round irrevocably.

  She had a month before the snow arrived.

  The house at Bandipur had just four rooms, and Lilla, Ernie, Arthur, and Mrs. Desmond were likely to be confined to this space for the best part of the winter months. The snow would be too deep, the temperature too low, to wander outside much. In any case, there wasn’t anyone to go and visit. Lilla’s first priority was to create a civilized living area for Ernie and herself. “I have made the front room my drawing-room,” she wrote to her sister-in-law Ada Henniker, so thrilled to have a home of her own at last that she gave her every detail of the house. “At last I am able to write and tell you how comfy we are in our little hut.” Next door was a room leading onto an L-shaped veranda, which she made their bedroom. On the far side of the house she put Arthur and Mrs. Desmond in a bedroom and nursery—“the latter is so nice, that I am sure many a nurse and child at home would envy.” It was hardly a separate wing, but it would at least give her and Ernie some space of their own. In order to keep out some of the cold, she had the veranda outside Arthur’s bedroom boarded up; “it makes a splendid hall.”