For the next day and a half, the camp held its breath.
Then, on Friday morning, they came. The plane passed overhead once, twice, its wheels skimming the tops of the trees. Every prisoner threw down what they were doing. Splashed their way along the muddy paths to the assembly field, the games pitch, whatever you called it, and stood mesmerized, their heads thrown back, chins in the air, mouths and eyes wide open as though they were witnessing the Second Coming. The engines stopped. For a moment, there was a deathly silence, the silence you expect before a bomb. Then they appeared. Seven billowing parachutes floating to the ground. Seven pairs of arms and legs dangling below them. And the bold American flag painted on the side of the aircraft glinting in the sunlight.
The prisoners charged. Charged in a single pounding mass, squealing and hugging and weeping on the way. Out of the gates. Past the guards, who half raised their rifles before lowering them again in astonishment. On across the fields to where the parachutes were landing. The crowd surrounded the men. Stared at them. Danced around them. Then, with a whoop of joy, picked them up, carried them on their shoulders, and marched back to the camp gates. As the prisoners strode back in triumphantly, the camp’s Salvation Army band struck up a victory march, and the national anthems of every prisoner echoed, one by one, around the camp. The notes reverberated around the cell-block walls. Swept into each room. Blasted the hopelessness away.
When the prisoners and the American paratroopers at last stood face-to-face, they looked like dwarves meeting giants. Even the healthiest adult internee was shrunken compared to the soldiers. Two and a half years of wartime rations followed by three years of imprisonment had ravaged their bodies. Their skin hung off their cheekbones in flaps, the whites of their eyes had reddened, the hair they had left was dry and brittle, and their clothes were now a size, maybe two sizes, too big.
Then the chief giant, a U.S. major, asked where the Japanese commander’s offices were. Once directed, he cocked the two pistols on his hips and, with a hand on each, strode in to meet him. The two men stared at each other across the room. Neither moved a muscle. Then the Japanese soldier reached into the drawer in front of him and drew out his samurai sword and his gun—and handed them over to the American. The American handed them back. “From now on,” he said, “you are under my command. We need you to protect the camp from outsiders.”
And once their enemy had become their friend, nothing else was quite as the prisoners had expected.
There was no swift departure. No rush to pack and catch a train back to Tsingtao and then a boat to Chefoo, Peking, or Tientsin. There wasn’t any train back to Tsingtao—Chinese guerrillas had broken the tracks. And, the Americans told the prisoners, they needed time to be reorientated—reeducated, even.
I don’t think that any of them realized quite how much there would be to learn.
The first thing that the internees had to learn anew was how to eat. The standard of food that they had become used to in the camp was so low that even when one kitchen’s team prepared the best meal they possibly could for two of their liberators, drawing out “specialities from our store . . . what to us seemed quite a treat,” writes Norman Cliff, “quietly and politely, the food was left uneaten . . . [t]o them [it] was unpalatable.” And the food that they had dreamed about, that Lilla had written about, that they all believed would save them had now become their poison. Cartloads of vegetables, grain, and meat—food that the Japanese had told them they were unable to obtain—were rolling in through the camp’s open gates. But after years of malnutrition and at least a couple of years of near starvation, their bodies couldn’t cope with it. “During that first week, we could not eat a full meal without vomiting,” Gilkey remembers.
Then there was everything else. The world of empires and great social divides, of grand houses staffed by dozens of servants, already rocked by the First World War, was fast being sunk by the Second. “Magazines [were] distributed and a library set up, all for the purpose of paving the way for our much-anticipated departure,” recalls Michell. And the prisoners had to learn history. “Realising how little of the events of the previous four years we knew,” writes Cliff, “the Americans organised classes to bring us up to date. An officer sketched the initial retreat of the American forces following Pearl Harbor,” then spelled out how the war had turned around in mid-1942, as they had begun to advance across the Pacific.
How deeply ironic this must have been for the internees. The Allies had already been winning the war by the time they were imprisoned. But then, maybe, it was the fact that the Japanese had found themselves on the defensive that had made them decide to round up all their enemy nationals.
And then, finally, the lessons came to the two atomic bombs that had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The grim reasons why the Americans were at the camp now and not a year or two later. There was a long list of vocabulary to learn, too. Words that had been rolling off the tongues of people in almost every corner of the world but that the inmates of Weihsien had never heard: GI, jeep, kamikaze.
Lilla must have wondered whether she’d ever use them back home in Chefoo. The Chefoo that she longed to return to. She would only have had to close her eyes and remember the sweeping bay, the smell of the salty air, the sound of the gulls, to feel a great rush of energy through her body. In a week or two now, she and Casey must have whispered to each other at night, we’ll be home. We’ll be home.
The hardest lesson was to come.
On a cold, gray day a month after the Americans had arrived, a British colonel turned up at the camp. He had come to speak to the British subjects, he said. Lilla, Casey, Vivvy, Mabel, Mabel’s mother, Reggie, and the eight hundred-odd other British in Weihsien gathered in front of him. The moment Lilla and her siblings recognized him, their spirits must have soared. The colonel was the younger brother of Bob McMullan from Chefoo. Bob who had died at the hands of the Japanese and Bob who had rescued Lilla’s family from bankruptcy a decade earlier. This was another McMullan—he had to be rescuing them again. I can see their chests puffed up with excitement, their eyes gleaming—ready to catch every gesture, every word.
Then the colonel began. He began by warning them that they would not like what he had to say. But the situation was this: Their businesses had been destroyed. The Chinese had now occupied their homes and buildings. The British army would not be turning the Chinese out. Nor would there be any money to help them start again. While they had all been locked up in the camp, it had been agreed with Chiang Kai-shek’s Chungking government that the days of the treaty ports—and the foreigners’ immunity to Chinese law that came with them—were over. They should all leave China. Those who had relatives in England should go there. Those who had no other roots apart from China, who had no connection with England at all, should try Australia, New Zealand, Canada. And start again.
The crowd was silent, every face around Lilla as white as a sheet. Some were shaking their heads. Some had tears running down their cheeks. “Others merely clung together mute, emptied of life,” writes Gilkey. Many were murmuring that they didn’t know anyone anywhere else apart from China. That they’d never been anywhere else but China. “When that is taken from us,” one internee told him, “we have no place on earth that is ours.” For many of them, every single thing they had taken for certain had been swept away.
Eventually, the railroad was repaired, and Lilla and Casey were taken by train to Tsingtao. Tsingtao was one of four key ports in China that the American forces had agreed with Chiang Kai-shek, whose Nationalist government they were now backing, they should occupy as soon as possible after the Japanese surrender—taking them out of Chinese Communist hands if necessary. Now it had British and American ships moored in the harbor. And its hotels, along with a few other recently deserted buildings, were put at the disposal of the Weihsien internees.
The Chinese and Allied troops set up a great welcome for the prisoners. As their train pulled into the port, “every roof was covered with Chinese waving Bri
tish and American flags,” Joan Ward told me. “It was a very emotional moment.” And as the internees came out of the station into that Bavarian town square so strangely untouched by the war, the band of the British naval ship the HMS Bermuda began to play. A vast crowd of Chinese schoolchildren cheered, waving a sea of victory banners, remembers Cliff, “with slogans in Chinese and English, such as ‘Victory of the Allied Nations is the base of World Peace.’ ”
Some of the prisoners cheered and waved back. Some of them cried. But I don’t think Lilla did either. It couldn’t have felt like much of a victory to her. She and Casey—her brothers, too—were beginning to realize that they had probably lost almost everything they owned. Many of the treaty porters were ignoring the advice they had been given in the camp and going back to their old homes in China to see what was left and what sort of life they could pick up again. But Lilla couldn’t even do that. Unlike Tsingtao, Chefoo had fallen into the hands of the Communists, who, in their search for a new China, were deeply opposed to all elements of the treaty ports and imperialist rule—their viewpoint no doubt hardened by America’s decision to lend its support to their enemy, Chiang Kai-shek. They made it clear that they would not welcome any of the internees back to Chefoo. It wasn’t even safe enough for Lilla to go back and look.
Lilla stayed in Tsingtao, waiting to see if the situation in Chefoo would improve. For the first time in three years, she and Casey were living not just in comfort, but in luxury, as they had been given a room in the former German consulate—one of the grandest houses in Tsingtao— where they were being waited on hand and foot by Japanese prisoners.
But I think all Lilla wanted was to go back to her home in Chefoo.
A few days after they had arrived in Tsingtao, as the family legend goes, Lilla’s old houseboy turned up on a bicycle. He had cycled the whole way across the Shantung Peninsula from Chefoo with Lilla’s fur coat tied to the back. It was the only thing he had managed to save, he said. Everything else had been stolen or vandalized. Not a single one of her possessions remained.
Lilla was devastated. She had worked hard, so very hard, to build her life in Chefoo. At long last, she’d had everything she wanted: a beautiful home, a business of her own, and money to leave her children. And now the Japanese had taken everything she had worked for from her. And although Casey was still there with her, the weeks of interrogation, those years in the camp, had taken most of him away, too.
She must have wondered what she had done to deserve this.
But she wasn’t giving up yet.
If she was going back to England, she was taking something for her children with her.
The German consulate in which she was staying was still full of pictures and furniture and silver and china and every type of possession under the sun. The Japanese had taken everything from her, she reasoned. And the Germans were the allies of the Japanese. Lilla reckoned she was entitled to something for her family. She spotted a couple of pretty china pots. A pair of graceful, slender, blue and white vases with lids, about a foot high, I think.
And there are two vases just like this still sitting quietly on a bedroom windowsill in my parents’ house in Hampshire, thousands of miles and several decades away from war-torn China.
Lilla’s son, Arthur, left them to my mother in his will.
Back in Tsingtao, Lilla stuffed the china in her suitcase and headed south to Shanghai. There, the city itself appeared relatively untouched. “Shanghai bore few physical marks of war . . . apart from the street fortifications and air-raid shelters,” writes Bernard Wasserstein in a rare account of treaty-port Shanghai that goes on to describe life there after the war. As in Weihsien, the 100,000 Japanese troops in the city remained on duty, under Allied orders, and then disappeared into the Japanese civilian population, which, in an eye-for-an-eye gesture, was compelled to wear armbands.
Despite this, “the Shanghai party hardly missed a beat,” continues Wasserstein. American sailors thronged through the shopping streets, and “like manna from heaven, goods of every description suddenly descended on the Shanghai markets; electric kettles and toasters, typewriters, cameras, radios.” The bars and brothels found themselves taking off, notwithstanding the “spectacularly unenforceable orders given to the victorious soldiery” to avoid them. On a tamer front, in November 1945, Shanghai’s Amateur Dramatics Society revived its production of Richard III, banned by the Japanese three and a half years earlier.
But this wasn’t a party that everyone could join in. Like Lilla, many of the internees found their homes and possessions gone. Another “bitter pill for the former internees to swallow,” as Wasserstein quotes from a U.S. intelligence report, was the sight of “scores of former collaborators” flashing their money around the town in sharp contrast to “the gaunt looks and threadbare clothes of the camp residents.”
Either poverty in a bustling Shanghai that was nonetheless short of food and fuel or a need to see her children and Ada, or both, drove Lilla back to England. Anne Eckford, who was married to Reggie’s son Donald, remembers Lilla and Casey still living in Shanghai in January 1946. But shortly afterward, clutching a suitcase containing Lilla’s recipe book and fur coat, the few pieces of clothing that hadn’t disintegrated in the camp, and their stolen china, they sailed back to England.
At least Lilla had someone to go to there. Although Reggie had gone straight to Britain to see his wife and children, Vivvy was still in Tsingtao, trying in vain to start a business in a postwar economic environment that still didn’t know what was going to happen when the Allied troops left. His son Erroll had disappeared in Burma. But Rae had survived the war in a camp near Shanghai and was staying in China. I don’t think Vivvy—a huge, handsome, and desperately kind man but somewhat hopeless when it came to finance and trade—had it in him to move to a new country and start all over again. After all, he was now sixty-eight and had lost everything he had not once, but twice—the first time being when Cornabé Eckford had gone bankrupt. He, his wife Mabel, and her mother must have stayed in Tsingtao with little to look forward to and a great deal of apprehension as to what might happen next.
Lilla was met at Southampton by her son, Arthur. She must have known by now, and I wish I could have seen her when she heard, that he had more or less fulfilled her ambition for him. He had been promoted to brigadier, the first and lowliest rank of general but a general all the same, and had even held the post of acting major general for a while. He wasn’t Sir Arthur, and as he had rejoined the army just for the war, he could call himself only colonel now. But I imagine Lilla’s smile, when she at last saw her son, almost cleaving her shrunken frame in two.
Maybe it was a good thing that Arthur couldn’t tell her then, had to keep from her for years, what else he had been up to. For, while Lilla had been freezing and starving in the camp, he had been in the eye of the storm, working on the tiny team in the Cabinet War Rooms hidden beneath the London streets. His job had been to collate all the information coming in from the forces on land around the world—a naval officer and an air force officer covered the sea and air. He then briefed first Churchill and later, after the British public had voted their wartime leader out of office in July 1945, Ernest Bevin. Bevin was Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government that followed Churchill’s, and Attlee delegated the War Rooms to him.
Bevin—a Churchill-shaped man (short but heavily built) whose thick, round spectacles made him look like a frog—needed some guiding through the system when he came on board. Hidden at the back of a former broom cupboard in the War Rooms was a highly secret transatlantic telephone booth that had provided a direct link between Churchill and first President Roosevelt, then President Truman. Arthur found himself repeatedly being called down the corridor to help his new chief make the telephone work during his calls to Truman and James Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, during the last days of the war. For the immensely powerful Bevin, a self-educated man who had taken control of the entire trade union movement in Britain, this transatlanti
c telephone was probably the first thing in his life to defeat him. “He used to shout at it [in his thick cockney accent], as though shouting at it would make it work,” Arthur told my father years later, in 1970, when he became a very junior minister in the Civil Service Department in the same building. After hearing this story, my father took the lift down two floors below the usual ground-floor entrance and emerged into the underground labyrinth of the War Rooms. They had been sealed up when the war had ended twenty-five years earlier and barely touched since. “It was very dusty,” he tells me. “There were handwritten lists still pinned to walls and sugar cubes, which everyone had hoarded in the war, still in the desk drawers.” And, at the back of the broom cupboard, the transatlantic telephone booth was still there.
If Lilla had heard about all that then, she would have burst with pride.
And then she went to see Ada. Even though they had been apart, unable even to write for almost five years, the twins’ lives had been so similar that while Lilla had been resurrecting moldy vegetables in the camp kitchens, Ada had been filling her days serving in the Australian Troops’ Canteen in London. And just about the time that Lilla had first been herded into a prison camp, Toby had died. While Lilla had been locked up in China, Ada had been in an internal prison of her own. For months and months after Toby’s death, she had sat down every afternoon all afternoon and cried her heart out on the shoulder of her postcard-collecting cousin Lulu. Lulu, whose womanizing husband had left her to pursue his interests in Paris and died too.
When Lilla and Ada met, they didn’t look like twins at all. Not even sisters. Ada was healthier, taller, fleshy, full. Compared to Lilla, she even looked fat. Lilla could hardly fill her own clothes. However far she pushed her shoulders back, they no longer met the seams where the sleeves began. She didn’t just appear thinner, older, ill-fed. As one of her grandsons, my cousin, tells me, “She seemed half the size of Ada.”
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