Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  Even in midwinter, the sun off the North African coast can be strong and the weather distinctly, almost claustrophobically, warm. By midmorning, the ship’s main saloon was becoming stuffy. The passengers began to clamor for the portholes to be opened. Given the calm weather, this would not have been a problem in peacetime. In wartime, however, it was strictly forbidden, as open portholes could rapidly sink a listing ship. As the temperature rose, the passengers’ protests grew. Eventually, permission was given for the portholes to be opened.

  What no one on the ship realized was that the Persia was being tracked by U-boat 38 of the Imperial German Navy, in the hands of the U-boat ace Max Valentiner. In just five days in August 1915, he had sunk thirty ships. Valentiner had two attributes that distinguished him from other U-boat captains. One was the ability to sneak right up to a ship unseen. The other was enough ruthlessness to open fire on civilians, which he had recently done when the passengers on an Italian vessel had failed to follow his orders to disembark—the scandal of this event filling the newspapers as the Persia set sail.

  According to his diary, Valentiner was not convinced that the Persia was a civilian ship. He wrote that he believed it was a troop transport— maybe he saw Ernie wandering the decks in his uniform. But I’m not sure that this mattered. A few weeks previously, he had searched a British civilian ship and discovered sealed orders for all British ships to attack U-boats. In his view, this made all British ships fair game. And as the Persia had a gun on its deck, it would have been impossible for Valentiner to surface without imperiling his U-boat and crew.

  Shortly before one o’clock, the luncheon gong on the Persia was rung and the passengers poured into the saloon. But as they lifted their knives and forks to their first course, Valentiner’s U-boat, hovering under the waves just a few hundred yards from the Persia, let fire a precious torpedo.

  At ten minutes past one, Valentiner’s torpedo exploded in the Persia’s hull. As the ship began to list, its engines continued to steam away, propelling it through the water at some speed and taking in more and more water as it went. Within three minutes, the main saloon was underwater and the sea began to pound in through the open portholes. The ship’s decks started to fracture, and the stench of explosives began to rise up through the cracks. By now, the tilt was making it impossible to lower the lifeboats on the starboard side, and the passengers and crew who had managed to reach the deck flocked to the other side of the boat. The situation even there was not much better. The few boats that were making it into the water were being smashed by the ongoing speed of the ship. As the water gushed in, the Persia turned on its side. Those who could clambered back across the ship’s near-vertical deck and leaped from the rail as the ship went under. At 1:15 p.m., just five minutes after it had been hit, the Persia’s funnels disappeared beneath the waves.

  Ernie made it off the ship into the water. He was lucky to do this. Most of the three-hundred-odd people lost, including seventeen of the nineteen children on board, were trapped belowdecks—many on their way back to their cabins to retrieve their life jackets after the drill the day before. The cheaper your cabin, the farther you had to walk from the saloon. As the ship went down, it pulled many of those in the water into a whirlpool of wreckage that knocked them about. Ernie went under and then, pulled up by his life jacket, rose to the surface as the sea cleared. Montagu told Lilla that he had last seen him in the water after the ship sank, “looking dazed and confused as we all were but otherwise all right.” At that stage, Ernie still had a life jacket on. Montagu managed to reach one of the five lifeboats that picked up more than 150 survivors. Ernie, somehow, did not, despite the broad sweep for survivors made by the lifeboats. Nor, as it happens, did Eleanor Thornton. “You will easily understand how much I sympathise,” wrote Montagu to Lilla.

  Years later, my aunt Jane, Ernie’s granddaughter, was accosted at a party by a lady who swore that Ernie had saved her mother’s life by handing her his life jacket. He had claimed to be a strong enough swimmer to cope.

  Poor Ernie. It must have been very cold in that water. And he hated the sea.

  Lilla was doing her hair, her always perfect hair, when she heard that the Persia had gone down. The announcement made on New Year’s Day by P&O, whose ship it was, simply stated: “Most of the passengers and crew lost. Four boats got clear.”

  I imagine her, motionless with shock, gazing into her dressing-table mirror, its wings showing her cheeks whitening almost to the color of the tiny diamonds in her ears as she thought of Ernie floating cold and lifeless beneath the sea.

  It was two days before the first list of survivors emerged. The story was splashed over the front of the Times on the morning of Monday, January 3, 1916. It named those who had already been hauled off the lifeboats. Lilla must have read and reread the list several times. Ernie’s name wasn’t on it.

  Lilla didn’t know whether her husband was dead or whether he was still paddling some lifeboat to shore. Another boat carrying survivors did make it to shore a few days later. But Ernie wasn’t on board that one either. As the weeks passed and no more boats appeared, Lilla must have felt suspended between marriage and widowhood. Between Ernie and an empty space. Between a life in India and another future. Wondering what life would hold for her now.

  The telegram came on January 24. The postmaster’s penciled scrawl covered two pages:

  The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the army have sustained by the death of your husband in the service of his country their Majesties truly sympathise with you in your sorrow Keeper of the Privy Purse.

  Ernie’s family was, naturally, extremely sad to lose him. Some time afterward, his sister Laura wrote, in a family history, of the “very bitter irony of fate that he should be drowned” after having given up being a sailor years earlier. Papa had died in 1911, but Mama—who survived until she failed to recover from a gallstone operation in 1919—posted a movingly simple tribute in the Memorials column of the papers: “In loving memory of my darling son, Lieut. Col. Ernest Russell Howell, I.A., lost in the S.S. ‘Persia,’ off Crete, Dec. 30th, 1915.”

  But Lilla’s feelings were not so clear-cut. And as the words on the telegram sank in, she must have felt a strange combination of relief and despair. It had been decided. Officialdom, the powers that be, had drawn a line through her husband’s name. She should think him gone.

  Yet it must have been hard to feel certain. There was no eyewitness account of his head sinking beneath the waves, no body to bury, no guarantee that, somewhere, somehow, Ernie hadn’t clambered ashore and was living, breathing, still. All Lilla had was a note telling her that somebody thought, to the best of their knowledge, that Ernie was sleeping somewhere beneath the cold waves of the sea.

  Nor would she have felt certain that she wanted to cry.

  Useful Ice Cream Hints

  If the ice cream is required quickly, a small amount of gelatine helps the mixture to freeze more smoothly. The cream should be beaten until quite stiff before being added.

  The mixtures that ices are made of vary greatly in richness. They may be made of cornflour or custard powder, sweetened and flavored to taste, or egg custard and fruit puree. To make the foundation ice cream, beat the eggs and sugar together and pour on the warm milk. When cold, add the cream. Ice cream can be served in glasses with a sauce or fruit. It can also be served with sponge cake, the middle taken out and replaced with ice cream. A handle made of sponge can be placed on top, thus forming a basket.

  Chapter 9

  AN ALMOST HUSBAND

  ENGLAND, 1916

  Lilla played at being Ernie’s widow just as she had played at being his wife. As the war ground its way through 1916 and 1917, guzzling tens, hundreds of thousands of fresh young lives in a great sausage machine of battles with names like the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele, mourning became a way of life in Britain. Turning the dead into heroes helped to dignify the slaughter.

  Lilla flung herself into the national mood. “She went aro
und weeping” and set about gathering mementos of Ernie’s triumphs. Letters of praise from his superiors. Photographs of him looking stern in his new lieutenant colonel’s uniform. Photographs of the grander houses they had lived in. Newspaper clippings of his obituary and descriptions of him as a “well-known passenger” on the ill-fated Persia. Even his mechanical transport training certificate. She bought a small black album and, on page after page, pasted them all in.

  Her son, Arthur, copied her. In between endless photographs of the old stone buildings and playing fields of his boarding school—in his own black album—are dozens of copies of a stern portrait of his father in uniform. It was as though he didn’t know how else to mark or feel his death. Didn’t have anything else to remember him by. He’d barely seen him since he was six.

  And, until I started to write this book, those formal photographs were almost all I knew of Ernie, too. There was one hanging in the drawing room in one of the houses Lilla lived in when I was young. I think it must have been the same photograph I later found my father hanging on the wall in our house the day after Lilla’s funeral. The gruff-looking mustached head and shoulders staring out from the wall that made the stories of his filthy temper feel very real. Lilla used to point to the picture and say, “That was my h-h-husband. He died in the First World War.” I remember gazing at it and struggling to reconcile this terrifying image from a time that seemed as far back as the Pyramids with the vibrant and delicate creature shimmering in black beside me.

  She had worn black ever since, she said. After Ernie’s death, she had even taken an emerald and diamond brooch that he had given her to a jeweler, who ripped out the colored stones. I can remember her still wearing it sixty years later. Its empty settings gaped as though something very precious had been lost. Now I realize that these extravagant gestures were designed to hide her lack of real grief.

  And here, Lilla’s story parts company from the Howells’. She strikes out on her own, still quite young—she was just thirty-three when she was widowed—and now free and single. She kept in touch with Ernie’s siblings—after all, they were her children’s family, too. She even stayed with one or two of them from time to time. However, from now on, Laura, Barbie, Evelyn, Ada Henniker, and the less loquacious Auberon fade into the background. An old family tree I was sent shows me that they all had children who married—even Ada, who, ignoring her doctor’s orders, went on to have two more children after Jack died. And they must have gone on to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, too, creating a vast web of Howell cousins.

  But I can think of only one or two whom I have ever met.

  Lilla’s official grief lasted three years. She had, after all, been only just younger than I am as I write this when Ernie died. And I think that I’m just starting out on life. So I suppose it would be strange to expect Lilla to shut up shop romantically and decide, well, that was it, she’d had a husband, a few adventures, and a couple of children—now it was time to sit back and watch them grow up. Still, that was exactly what many young women did in those years after the First World War. Some hadn’t even married. Lost their boyfriends, their fiancés, at the bottom of some sodden trench. Their true love had gone, and there was not much hope of finding a replacement. A whole generation of British women found themselves growing up with no prospect of marriage—the only career that they had been brought up to follow. But, having worked during the war, many had acquired a taste for independence. And they would gradually metamorphose into the first great wave of women teachers and doctors, who married a career instead of a man.

  Arthur in his scholar’s gown and his desk at Winchester

  Not so with Lilla. As the war ended and a victorious but exhausted Britain began to pick itself up again, Lilla found that being a widow was rapidly losing its glamour. Ernie had left her very little money, and the war had brought the family business in China more or less to a halt. That left Lilla, as is still recounted, having to lean her bosom over Arthur’s headmaster’s desk and whisper that, now she was a poor widow, she had to find a scholarship for her son. And thus Arthur, never destined for a university career, found himself a long-gowned scholar at Winchester College, a famously academic British boarding school. I think Ada must have paid Alice’s school fees, leaving Lilla resentful of dependence upon her sister.

  The imbalance between the twins that, for the first time, had shifted in Lilla’s favor in India seemed to be swinging back into the old pattern. Ada now had a son—Alan had survived and flourished—and a daughter, Betty, too. And an adoring husband. Whom she was still in love with. And plenty of money. Even more grating, I’m sure, was Toby’s continued success. The year after Ernie died, Toby was awarded a CMG—Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George—for distinguished public service. Ada had gone with him to Buckingham Palace to receive it. Ada had met King George and Queen Mary. Lilla would have been pleased for Ada but so jealous that she could barely speak about it. It was becoming clear that she needed a husband, too. Preferably a successful one. However, in an almost bachelorless country, the odds were not good. But Lilla was now not a woman to be deterred by odds.

  Hidden at the back of Lilla’s black memorial album to Ernie are photographs of another man. Another lieutenant colonel. His name was Malcolm Rattray. From his picture, he looks a taller, thinner version of Ernie. Upright, uniformed, terribly, Britishly proper, with a neatly divided mustache, its ends waxed into upturned points, giving him a slightly surprised expression. Malcolm was a surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps. And a highly decorated officer—a bearer of the Distinguished Service Order.

  Ugly gossip claims that Lilla chased Malcolm all over the place. Well, maybe she had to do the running. Malcolm was hardly a ladies’ man. He’d reached fifty without a wife in sight. What a challenge for the feisty Lilla. I can imagine her fussing around him as she’d fussed around Ernie. Tempting him with rich gravies that disguised the stringiness of postwar meat. Making up for the lack of butter and cream with liberal splashes of brandy, rum, and claret that warmed his stomach. Concocting sweet puddings from spoonfuls of jam and cupfuls of flour. Plying him with more and more food magicked out of a larder gaping empty, like the rest of Britain’s kitchens. His stomach shrunk by the wartime shortage of food, Malcolm must have eaten until he was ready to explode and had little choice but to sink into one of the high-armed chairs dotted around Lilla’s drawing room and drift off into a deep, hypnotic sleep.

  Toby, Ada, and Alan outside Buckingham Palace

  Still, it was not easy to prize him out of his bachelordom. Malcolm did not appear to be driven by the same impetuousness that had rushed Ernie to propose. And they were older. Lilla was a widow, which meant that they could spend time together, walking through London’s parks, without too many eyebrows being raised. Lilla cooked and cosseted, walked and waited. Eventually, in the autumn of 1919, Malcolm was posted out to Basra, Mesopotamia, which was still held by the British to protect their oil interests and where they were trying out a new military tactic of using aircraft to bomb the local tribes into submission. This enabled them to reach targets far inland without having to send in the army. But by then, Malcolm was hooked. Clearly unable to tear himself away from the comforts of Lilla, he proposed.

  However, Lilla no longer needed a husband quite so badly. As the months had passed, business in China had begun to pick up, and Lilla’s brothers, Vivvy and Reggie, were again in a position to send her an allowance. She could now afford to rent her own home, pay her daughter’s school fees, and live, not extravagantly, but reasonably well. Nevertheless, she had set out to marry Malcolm, and marry him she would.

  And she was more than a little hooked, too. “It was a love match,” Lilla’s daughter Alice told her own children. And it probably was. Malcolm looks like the sort of man who had eyes that sparkled with surprised gratitude each time Lilla did even the tiniest thing for him— cooked for him, accompanied him on some trip, straightened the buckle on his army belt. Nobody, he must have blurted
out in clipped tones, had ever looked after him like that before. His profuse thanks would have sent a warm glow pumping around Lilla’s veins. Ernie had eventually told her she was wonderful, but he had still somehow taken her help for granted. Malcolm, on the other hand, must have made her feel like a luxury, gazing at her like a large faithful dog, utterly dependent, and leaving Lilla firmly in charge.

  She accepted his proposal, packed up her house, and, leaving Arthur and Alice at their boarding schools in England, followed Malcolm out to Basra to marry there. I can see her skipping up the gangplank of her boat like a teenager, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen.

  It would be hard to describe Basra in 1919 as a romantic place. It sits at the top of the Persian Gulf, in the same fetid marshlands in which Ernie’s war expedition had floundered. The photographs in the back of Lilla’s little black album show a port fringed with palms, giving the scene a deceptively escapist air. Behind them, however, a city of mud appeared to have oozed up from the hot, wet flatlands, ready to sink back into oblivion at a moment’s notice. Even the British jetty had a hopelessly ramshackle, temporary look to it, a mess of crisscrossed timbers bound together under a crumbling roof. In every direction the horizon was depressingly flat, the uncannily straight line of the sky pressing down on the mud, as if squeezing the life out of anything trying to breathe.