Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  The dust must have spread over Lilla’s hands, up her arms, into every hollow of her clothing, every crevice of her barely exposed skin that it could find. And even when she had mixed that first heap of coal and earth with water, pulled the mixture apart into tiny lumps, rolled them into balls, and pounded them into bricks, she would still have had no fire. “We still couldn’t burn them, as they were wet through.” It took another week for the coal balls to dry out.

  Eventually, Lilla, like everyone else, learned the science of coal balls. How much dust you needed for coal balls that could light a fire. How much soil you should use for coal to burn slowly through the night. Pamela Masters and her sisters worked out that “there were different types of soil in different parts of the camp that bound better, and burned longer.” The biggest question, however, was when to use the coal dust. There was all too little of it, and Lilla would never have known when, or if, the next delivery would come.

  In December 1943, the Italians arrived. On the other side of the world, in Europe, Italy had surrendered to the Allies. The Japanese had then rounded up all the Italians still living in the treaty ports and herded them into the internment camps. As their country had surrendered, the Japanese regarded the Italians as dishonorable prisoners. And when they arrived at Weihsien, they were locked away in the quarantine compound—so as not to contaminate the other, honorable, Allied nationals. After a few weeks, the rules were relaxed, and they were allowed to wander around the camp. But by then, the cold had reached them, too.

  The winter in north China is arctic. In the treaty ports, on the coasts, at least there is a chance of a sea breeze drifting up from warmer climes to take the edge off the cold. But inland, at Weihsien, the winds sweep down from the north, from the Arctic Circle itself. As they cross the great plains, the freezing Mongolian desert, they harden with the toughness of the terrain over which they are traveling. The nights are already growing cold by the end of September. By November, they are freezing. On New Year’s Eve you think it is so cold that it cannot grow any colder. And then, in January, the real winter comes.

  As Lilla scratched deeper and deeper into the earth to make coal balls, sharing the black dust out among them as thinly as she could, the winter would have dug into her like a ghoul finding a fresh vein and sucking her energy away. It must have been harder and harder to type out those recipes. Even if she kept her gloves on, taking her hands out of her pockets would have exposed her fingers to such cold that they no longer felt attached to the rest of her.

  Instead of bending each finger from key to key, Lilla would have had to raise her hand each time and position it above the letter she wanted, then let it fall painfully onto the keypad, waiting for the thin silver arm to slice through the air and hoping that it was swinging fast enough to leave a mark on the paper. But for the moments she had a rhythm going, she could leave her cell, the camp, the cold, behind for a world of hot soups, steaming buckets of rice, crispy pastry (“to make it brown nicely, brush it over with milk just before putting it in the oven”), stewed fruit disintegrating into its warm juices (“do not put hot cooked fruit into a tart, the steam given off will sodden the pastry”), and the baking heat of an oven whose temperature she could just turn up and down. Sitting there in her cell on those bitter, dark, winter afternoons, did she close her eyes and imagine turning it up, up, up and opening the door, letting the heat blast out over her?

  The moments when Lilla’s stove was on, when she could warm her fingers enough to move them against the typewriter keys without wincing in pain, she would have had to use her hands for other, more pressing, tasks. Stitching up their clothes that were falling apart. Sewing layer upon layer of clothing together to make a coat thick enough to keep warm. How she must have wished she’d brought that fur! At least the kitchen was warm. At least on the one day in three that she must have been there she wouldn’t have frozen. But what about Casey? Lilla must have wanted to bundle up the warmth of the kitchen and take it back for him, rushing back to their cell before the cold could steal the warmth away from her. And burrowing deep under the blankets with her husband, glowing like their stove that seemed so rarely lit.

  At low points, Lilla’s mind must have drifted to what-ifs. What if she hadn’t come back to China that late summer of ’39? Well, she couldn’t have left Casey, but what if he’d come with her on the trip to England? What if they’d sold up when times were still good and gone to Europe? What if they’d just left everything and fled for their lives when the Americans had gone home? Or taken those passages on the diplomats’ boats? Would they have been caught in the Blitz—or be living in some English seaside town waiting for a German invasion? What if they had just managed to take a little more money out of China before this war? What if they didn’t have to start all over again, start saving to retire, when Casey was seventy something and Lilla had a grandson of almost eighteen?

  She must have wondered what was happening to everyone else. Everyone except Reggie, Vivvy, Mabel, and Mabel’s mother, who were all still with her. Freezing but alive. It was hard to receive news in the camp. The only letters to arrive had nearly always been posted in China. The steadily shrinking, English-language, pro-Japanese newspaper, the Peking Chronicle, edited by the Germans and notoriously inaccurate—over the years, Masters says, it claimed that “the total US fleet had been sunk at least three times!”—could be deciphered to reveal just how fast the Americans were moving across the Pacific. Even if it was claimed they were Japanese victories, the names of the islands being fought over—the Tarawa and Makin atolls in the Gilbert Islands, Kwajalein, Maloelap, and Wotje in the Marshalls—gave the Americans’ progress away. The only other source of news, the only hints as to just how long they might have to wait, was the “bamboo” or “cesspit” wireless—tiny linen pellets that were spat out by the Chinese coolies who came to clear the latrines and that unfolded into treasured news sheets.

  But none of these would have given Lilla any idea of what was happening to her family in Europe. Had England been invaded? Were her children, their children, well—alive, even?

  And there was Ada. Lilla had never gone so long—almost three years—without exchanging words with her sister.

  I find it hard to believe she simply accepted the silence between them. Didn’t manage to conjure up some twinly telepathy just to know that Ada was still alive.

  The cold ate away at everyone and everything. It “dampened our mood and stunted conversation.” Fewer people scurried along the camp paths. And when they did, instead of finding themselves stuck in the mud, they slipped and skidded on the ice. Even the Red Cross visits slowed. Home rations, comfort money, contact with the outside world all dwindled. Sporting matches were unplayable. Musical and theatrical performances were abandoned. “Every effort was spent acquiring fuel, food and clothing.”

  And then, after six months in Weihsien, eighteen months in captivity, just as winter eased—when Lilla must have thought that they’d made it, they were alive, and now that the cold was abating, their bodies would have a chance to build themselves back up a little—the rations began to be cut.

  Years of war and occupation, followed by a hard winter, had left food in China thin on the ground, the Japanese told the prison committees. What they didn’t mention was that, as U.S. forces made their way steadily across the Pacific, Japanese resources were being diverted to try to hold their positions rather than run their new empire. The prisoners’ days of filling up on noodles and dough, of longing for home supplies of sweet spreads to smear on abundant bread, were over. Even at the start, the Japanese authorities had calculated food supplies on the basis of “quantities for two meals per day,” which the kitchens had stretched to three. Now this would be almost impossible.

  Cereal was the first to go. That glutinous mass of stodgy millet porridge that had sat heavy in the prisoners’ stomachs from breakfast onward, choking their insides into believing that they were full. Then it was tea. No tea. In China. The last beaten and rebeaten tea bags ha
d disintegrated, the leaves washed pale. Hot water that you had to wish the flavor into. By the end of the morning, Lilla and Casey must have been struggling to find the energy to stand in the long queue for lunch.

  Spring didn’t come to the camp in 1944. There was no warm Chinese sunshine and blossom. No gentle awakening and flowering of a new year. Instead, “the climate in the camp switched from arctic cold to tropic heat with clock-like precision.” With the heat came a sun that dried out every inch of the ground. Left the alleyways punctured with ankle-twisting crevasses. Sent clouds of dust swirling through the air, into the cells, under the sheets, into the prisoners’ lungs. The prisoners must have felt their skin, still cracked by the winter, begin to shrivel further as the heat stole the last drops of moisture from them. “The heat was unbearable. Although we wore only khaki shorts (without shoes [which wore out easily and so were saved for the winter months] or shirts), the perspiration just poured off us,” says Norman Cliff, who was so desperate for water that he often drank straight from the camp pumps—in direct contravention of the health committee’s orders to drink only boiled water. Obviously, others had too, as “throughout the night there was the pitter-patter of feet down the corridor to the toilet of those suffering from dysentery.”

  And as the heat rose, the camp’s other inhabitants flourished, especially at night. “Mosquitoes buzzed around us persistently. . . . Rats ran over us and became such a menace that the Japanese authorities organised a competition to stamp them out.” Bedbugs swarmed up through any gaps in the floors and walls they could find and surfaced from the depths of the mattresses. The prisoners tried to slow them down by pouring boiling water into the cracks, but still “by the light of our two-and four-wick candles we could see clusters of little black-red bodies scurrying across the sheets.”

  The heat besieged the prisoners in a different way from the cold. Cold chills you from the inside. Heat punches you in the face and chest as you step in it, awake in it. You feel as if a great fist will knock you over, evaporate you the moment you step into its glare. I can imagine Lilla trying to keep to the shade of the trees as she made her way around the camp, each step producing a trickle of sweat that defied gravity as it worked its way into every fold of her skin. Sticking her together with a persistent dampness that inevitably turned into the itchy red rash of prickly heat.

  One afternoon in June 1944, a rumor ran around the camp that two prisoners had escaped to join a band of Chinese rebels. Avoiding the electrical fence, they had climbed through a watchtower during the guard’s evening cigarette break. The inmates’ initial reaction was elation. For a few precious hours, excitement buzzed from cell to cell. The knowledge that somebody, anybody, had made it to the outside world gave even the oldest and weakest prisoner a glimmer of hope. “The effect was electrifying.”

  But by nightfall, elation had been replaced by fear. How would the Japanese react?

  Until this point, as in the Chefoo camp, the rule of the Japanese Consular Guard had been relaxed. The soldiers had been on reasonably friendly terms with many of the prisoners, giving some of the boys jujitsu lessons, helping others to dig their toy gardens in the dirt, and even fielding a baseball team. And, perhaps because they were preoccupied with the bands of Chinese guerrillas fighting in the region around the camp, the Japanese had stated that their only responsibilities in respect to the internees “were to see that none escaped and to supply coal and wood for cooking and heating and ‘adequate’ food.”

  This escape therefore meant a great loss of face for the Japanese guards. Yet worse was the fact that the Japanese had not picked up on the escapees’ absence in the morning’s roll call—and had had to be informed of the escapes by the prisoners themselves. The captain in charge was “livid with rage.” He ranted and raved at the camp’s committee leaders. He doubled the daily roll calls to morning and evening and made the prisoners stand outside in the burning sun for hours on end as the guards counted and re-counted, barking at any internee who fell out of line. He imprisoned every other man in the escapees’ dormitory for several days, questioning them again and again as to what they knew.

  And then he cut the rations. For two weeks, there was no meat. Not even horse meat or the “tablespoonful of donkey” that the prisoners were becoming used to. Yet, however hungry they felt, every single one was grateful that his anger had stopped at that.

  After a couple of weeks of punishment, the meat ration was restored. Shortly afterward, the summer rains came. Water poured out of the heavens and seemed to turn to steam as it hit the baking ground. The hot, damp air hovered above the ground, as if trapped by the thick cloud above. With every inch of water, the earth softened and gave way, dissolving back into the rivers of stinking mud that had greeted Lilla a year beforehand. When the rains moved on, they took all the warmth with them. As quickly as winter had turned into a baking summer, so the summer flipped back into winter.

  It was then, in September 1944, at the beginning of Lilla’s third year in a prison camp, as—unknown to the prisoners—the U.S. military was pushing its way into the Japanese-held Philippines, that the more systematic cuts in rations began. I don’t know whether this was a calculated cruelty or whether the camp authorities were running out of the money or men needed to obtain the food. They admitted to neither and simply told the prisoners over and over again that there was no more food to give them. The clearly ragged state of the Japanese soldiers that winter must have made these assertions all the more believable. “We looked at our bedraggled clothes and barely-shod feet and saw our reflections in the young, forgotten guards. They had put newsprint in their boots to keep their feet warm, and wrapped their legs in whatever rags they could find, as they, like us, had no socks to wear. Their uniforms were in shreds, and their bare hands, as they checked off the roll, were cracked and bleeding from the cold,” writes Masters.

  First to go was meat again. Not cut entirely, just halved. But halved from very little to almost nothing. I can imagine Lilla studying the stew that was ladled into her bowl at lunchtime. Sweeping her spoon through it, catching each lump and bringing it to the surface to see whether it was meat or just another piece of eggplant. S.O.S., the prisoners called it—Same Old Stew—as each day’s ingredients were indistinguishable from any other’s.

  Flour went next—just as the autumn weather was growing colder again. At the next monthly meeting between the supplies committee and the commandant’s men, the Japanese imparted the news with deadpan faces. The flour ration would be cut by half. From now on, Lilla would be lucky to see two slices of bread at each meal to go with her stew, thinned down to a cup of soup at supper.

  The following month it was oil. Peanut oil. The prisoners used it for frying, baking, and, most important of all, to supplement their diet. Peanuts are full of goodness, Lilla had written in her recipe book. Peanuts can be used as a substitute for meat when it is scarce. In a few weeks, their fingernails would crack more readily than usual, a little more of their hair would fall out on their brush each night, their skin would feel even drier and, as the increasing cold bore down on them, would split into crevasses at every joint.

  They came to dread these monthly meetings, wondering what would be taken away from them next. Whether they would be left with anything at all.

  Not a hungry soul could open his mouth without talking about food. “Our stomachs, like implacable slave masters, completely supervised our powers of thought. A conversation might begin with religion, politics, or sex, but it was sure to end with culinary fantasies.” Adults talked about meals they’d had, evenings out, New Year’s feasts, in “intricate detail and tasting in our excited imaginations long forgotten dishes in restaurants visited in some dim past.” I can almost hear Lilla’s voice joining in, chatting away about h-h-how to bake this, h-h-how to cook that as she scribbled down notes of new recipes, before rushing back to her cell to type them up.

  In conversation, the images were there for a few tantalizing seconds—and then they were gone. Vanish
ed. Not waiting to be turned over and rediscovered as they were in Lilla’s recipe book. She could flick back through the pages, though carefully, as most of the rice paper was too fragile to stand heavy handling, and gaze at food words she’d typed days earlier. Eggs. Mix. Stir. Sift. Until steam rises. Chop the pork finely. Add garlic. Add cream. Add wine.

  It was as though, by writing down the recipes, or even just the words— chocolate, sugar, tomatoes, lamb—Lilla gave them a life of their own inside the camp. And as the book progressed through category after category, from meat to game to Chinese dishes to savories to ice creams, Lilla re-created in her tiny gray cell an entire universe of the good old days. The good old days back in her grand apartment in Chefoo. The smell of course after course being carried into the dining room. The tastes changing from dish to dish so that you could eat more than you really had room for. That slightly bloated feeling of having overeaten. Or the good old days in a crisp white-tableclothed restaurant in Shanghai, the long low-ceilinged room sending the noise and clatter of plates and the latest news echoing back around her ears. Waiters charging past. Steaming platters held high. Even the good old days in Kashmir. Roasting the goose that Ernie had stormed in with so triumphantly, still wearing her nightdress over his coat. The good old days that would now always exist on the paper pages of her recipe book, ready to be picked up again the moment she was free.

  As the chasm grew between the food that Lilla was eating and the food that she craved, or knew that she needed in order to survive, even bringing herself to type out these recipes must have begun to feel like self-torture. Chop the onions. Onions. Just onions. Raw, cooked, even sprouting with age. As she typed out the word—o-n-i-o-n—Lilla must have yearned to feel its weight in her hand, brush off the dirt, peel away its papery skin. Wanted to bite into it. Even a raw onion. Crunch through the layers with her teeth. Feel its juices squirt into her eyes, making them sting.