Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  Lilla was so jealous, I’m told, that she could hardly bring herself to talk about Ada’s new home. And, no longer to be outdone if she could possibly help it, she wrote to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office—which allocated the apartments—arguing that Ernie’s limited successes entitled her to one, too. She was turned down. But, perhaps out of loneliness, perhaps out of sympathy, perhaps because as much as she vied with her twin, she now couldn’t really live without her, Ada invited her to move in.

  There was more than enough space for the two of them. Ada’s apartment consisted of the nurseries used by Henry VIII’s short-lived son, Edward VI. It was a rambling succession of rooms that were reputedly haunted by several ghosts. Lilla’s daughter, Alice, a firm believer in the supernatural, was convinced that she’d seen a Tudor nursemaid outside her bedroom when staying overnight. After that, few of Lilla’s and Ada’s family were willing to stay.

  Ada was completely unperturbed by these stories. She slept in the room in which Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, had died shortly after giving birth to Edward VI. If Lilla was even the slightest bit scared, she wasn’t going to show it. Not even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would have driven her from that apartment once she was in. She did, however, claim to have seen one ghost when walking in the palace grounds after dark. She said she’d spotted a lady looking lost and had approached her to help. When the woman turned to her, Lilla said she had recognized her as Henry VIII’s faithless and beheaded second wife, Anne Boleyn.

  I strongly suspect that she made this up. Not just to tease the more gullible members of her family, but to bait Ada. Ada might have been sleeping in a Tudor queen’s bedroom, but Lilla had met one. Once they were living together, the old twinly rivalry took on a new, even more energetic lease on life. At times they’d bicker like mad. Then sit down together for a cup of tea or a stiff drink. Whatever one did, the other had to do, too. Now, however, toward the end of their lives, at least it wasn’t always Ada who went first.

  Within the apartment, each twin had her own sitting room. Lilla moved in her dark dragon-covered furniture and bought more, again from the Sheen Road, to fill the room. Walking into her apartment was like stepping into China. Ada copied her. She bought identical furniture and created her own Chinese chamber across the hallway. And although by then she could cook only curries, Ada copied Lilla in eating with chopsticks only—even making her daughter and grandchildren eat turkey with them on Christmas Day.

  It was here, in the kitchen, that Lilla could have really outstripped Ada if she’d shown her the recipe book. But for some reason, she didn’t. She cooked Chinese, Indian, English, French, and Italian food, winding Ada up from day to day. But she never showed her twin her cookery book. Maybe she was so successful in chasing her memories of the camp away that she had forgotten about it. But I find this hard to believe. Surely, every time she went through a recipe, went into a kitchen, felt the resistance of fresh food in her hand, she remembered the hunger she had felt and the effort of typing those pages letter by letter in the baking heat and searing cold.

  I think that Lilla kept her book hidden because from day to day there was still a chance that Ada could learn to cook a few more dishes and catch up, moving their game on. But Ada could never have written a recipe book like hers. Could never have bridged that crevasse. And she would have tried, certainly.

  Lilla knew all too well what it was like to feel that far behind. I don’t think she wanted Ada to have to feel it, too.

  Still, however hard the twins tried to keep up with each other, there remained one glaring difference between the two of them. Even though she never appeared to put on a single pound—and she had done so from time to time when younger—Lilla “ate like a horse,” without a trace of self-discipline. Whenever she went to a restaurant, she collected up the leftovers and took them home as if she was still worried that there might not be any more food the next day. She did this at parties, too— as one of her grandchildren burst out, “Even at my wedding.” And Lilla had a need, a desperate need, to eat on time. Lunch had to be by twelve and supper early. Some days, she couldn’t even wait until noon. Her daughter would go to meet her for lunch in a department store—the combination of eating and shopping together was Lilla’s idea of a perfect day out—only to find that Lilla hadn’t been able to stop herself from eating before Alice arrived, gorging herself on cakes and cream buns as though they might vanish at any moment.

  But, of course, after those years in the camps, she would have still felt that they could.

  The twins busied themselves through their eighties. Vivvy and Reggie and their wives passed away. Even their younger half sisters, Edith and Dorothy, who—safely back in England with their families—had avoided the camps, grew old and died. But Lilla and Ada were still going at their lives hammer and tongs. Each was up at six o’clock to clean out her fireplaces, tidy her sitting room, make it sparkle just a little more than the other’s. Then they dressed. Each twin’s hair swept up at the back of her head into a perfect chignon and, wearing immaculate suits, diamonds in their ears, the two of them went out shopping. Not that they bought much. They thrived on the process, rather than in the act, of shopping. Occasionally, they went together, but usually each went off on her own, hunting out some piece of oriental paraphernalia that the other had found. Or something that the other hadn’t yet found. Shopkeepers throughout the area must have thought they were seeing double as, a day or so after one twin had bought something from them, the other appeared to buy it again. They made the most of looking identical. Whenever one bumped into somebody she didn’t like, she unhesitatingly pretended to be the other.

  Back in the apartment, the Heavenly Twins were as gregarious as they had been all those years ago in Chefoo. They were endlessly throwing parties, inviting family, friends, anyone who had been in China. Anyone they knew. One relative out of a job even found herself recruited to the filing department of MI6 (Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service)—at the height of the Cold War—in Lilla’s kitchen. And whenever the two of them wanted to retreat into their private twinly world in front of other people, they lapsed into their private language. “It sounded by then,” says one of Lilla’s grandsons, “like a form of kitchen Hindustani.”

  Lilla and Ada stayed together in Hampton Court until 1970. When Ada grew so frail that she had to move into a nursing home, Lilla took her to one in the Chefoo-like seaside town of Hove on England’s south coast. She rented an apartment nearby and sat at her elder sister’s bedside, holding her hand until Ada—eighty-nine years old and still vowing to outlive Lilla—eventually let go of life.

  After Ada died, Lilla moved in with her daughter, Alice. Alice and her husband, Havilland, lived in the lower ground floor of a rambling house in the commuter town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. They gave Lilla a bedroom next door to the sitting room. The room that she turned into that through-the-looking-glass museum of furniture and clothes from every corner of the world. The room that I remember being invited into to be shown how to brush my hair. Lilla unpinned her hair and, even in her nineties, it fell to below her waist. She showed me how to comb through my tomboy locks with her silver-backed hairbrush. “I b-b-brush my hair one h-hundred times a night,” she whispered. I remember my arm aching as I tried to do the same that evening back home.

  Six years after Ada died, Lilla brought out her recipe book. She showed it to Alice. Alice showed it to her daughter, Liz. Liz showed it to her husband, Donald, who took it to the Imperial War Museum in London. The museum asked to keep it. Lilla agreed. The museum wrote to her expressing their “warmest appreciation”: “We are delighted to be able to add this most unusual item to our collections and are certain it will be of great interest to visitors and researchers alike.”

  Lilla had the letter framed.

  That summer, Lilla’s son, Arthur, my grandfather, led a family expedition to see her recipe book in the museum. I was eight years old and wanted to climb on top of the great gun that still stands in front of
the main door, but Grandpa, still a soldier at heart, ordered us on. The recipe book stood in its own glass case, in the center of an open hall near the entrance. My father lifted me up so that I could peer at the pages that lay open. I remember seeing the yellowed paper, the lists of ingredients, and Vivvy’s pen-and-ink drawings. At the time, I didn’t understand why Great-Granny’s book was so important when there were far more exciting things like guns and tanks in the museum. Then, while the grown-ups stood around the recipe book talking and talking, Grandpa took my sister and me down into the basement and showed us the guns he’d commanded in the North African desert.

  Lilla didn’t come to the museum with us. She was as proud as punch that her “b-b-book” was in the museum, and she regarded it as a great honor. “Both my book & my name are placed there for ever!!” she wrote. But—unlike so many people who used to boast of their experiences in the War—it wasn’t a time that Lilla wanted to dwell on.

  After all those years of feeling a foreigner, at the age of ninety-five, Lilla found herself suddenly welcomed in by the British establishment. And she felt it was parading her at least as high as it had ever paraded Ada. Lilla was made an honorary vice president of her local branch of the National Council of Women of Great Britain. The tiniest of honors, but Lilla boasted of it as though she had been given a medal. It was then that the BBC sent a television crew down to interview her about her time in the Japanese camps. The crew unpacked their bags in Liz’s drawing room, set up their cameras, arranged the lights. Lilla sat there in silence, watching them. This would have been her great moment, but by the time the crew was ready to start, Lilla couldn’t speak. She just sat there in a black beaded outfit, her elegant legs crossed, her hair up, diamonds in her ears. And unable to utter a word about what she’d been through.

  Lilla was now in her late nineties. Yet the years hardly seemed to touch her. Having had a far tougher life than her identical twin, there was something a little uncanny about the way in which she seemed to be sailing on after Ada had gone. She was still as bright as a button and quick on her feet. Still walking a mile each day to do her shopping. She even had her teeth capped at the age of ninety-seven. It was as though Ada really had taken Lilla’s share of good luck at birth, and now that Ada had died, Lilla had taken it back. But it was when Lilla had outlived both Arthur and Alice, and an emptiness had begun to creep into the back of her eyes, that her family began to wonder whether it wasn’t good luck, but something quite different, that was keeping her alive.

  Arthur was the first to die. Of cancer. In 1980. Lilla was ninety-eight. A few months later, Alice had a heart attack on her way into the operating room.

  It was only then that Lilla told her granddaughter Liz about her other child. The one whom she thought she had bounced out of her in order to keep Ernie. The child whose death I fear she thought she was being made to pay for again and again. It was only then, eighty years later, that there was somebody to tell her that she couldn’t have possibly killed that child.

  After Arthur and Alice died, something in Lilla weakened, and she had to go into a nursing home in Tunbridge Wells. I can remember her deep red room, crammed with her Chinese furniture. And Lilla sitting at a small, dark wood table under the window, throwing her arms up, fingers and hands extended as if she were about to throw herself forward onto her knees in prayer as she welcomed us in. “D-d-d-darlings,” she smiled at us. She still dressed immaculately in those beaded black cardigans and diamonds. Still wore that brooch that Ernie had given her. Her fingers still just nimble enough to fix her hair. She wasn’t like other old people, my mother used to say. Not at all. And Lilla could still twist a man around her little finger. When one of her other great-granddaughters popped in to see her on the way to the cinema with her boyfriend, Lilla greeted the strange young man with a “D-d-darling,” and he was spellbound, rooted to the spot. Unable to tear himself away until long after the movie had begun.

  In the hours she was alone, Lilla leafed through her scrapbooks of China photographs. Photographs of Chefoo, the bay, her little houses. Photographs of Peking and the Forbidden City. Photographs of the places to which she longed to return—but knew she never would.

  And then, out of the blue, came a glimmer of hope. A glimmer of something that Lilla thought she had given up on. Perhaps all those years in the camps might have been worthwhile. Perhaps she might have something to give, if not to her children, then to her grandchildren.

  In the early 1980s, China decided to talk to the West. It decided to open its doors enough to let a slither of light through. It wanted to borrow money and lure investors back. It had to show that it could honor its debts. It was prepared to settle all outstanding claims.

  My father filled out all the forms for Lilla. Attached copies of the lists she had made on the day after Pearl Harbor. Copies of the lists she had made when she returned to China after the war. Copies of her title deeds to the land upon which she had built her houses. He sent them off from his office as Secretary of State for Energy—Lilla was always brimming with pride over her grandson’s success—along with the British passport that she had been given back in 1939.

  The reply from the British government department dealing with the claims was stark. Lilla’s passport was no longer enough to make her British. In order to stem the flow of immigrants from its former empire, the British government had introduced new laws making it difficult to claim British nationality unless you could show that you had been born in Britain or were married to a British citizen. And to claim under the arrangements with China, Lilla had to provide birth and marriage certificates to prove her nationality and changes of name.

  Pieces of paper like that don’t always survive wars. Lilla had clung on tightly to her lists and title deeds. But the documents that she needed now—that she could never have imagined she would need—had gone.

  My father didn’t know what to say to Lilla. She had been so excited, so thrilled to hear that China was about to acknowledge her life there and give her back something for her grandchildren. He couldn’t bring himself to tell his dear, sweet granny that now, even after the Imperial War Museum had taken her recipe book, she was still regarded as a foreign refugee. That she couldn’t give her grandchildren the money she felt should be hers to give.

  Lilla was not alone in believing herself British but being classed as a stateless foreigner. The new laws had caught hundreds, if not thousands, of returning empire builders in its nets. Including most of Lilla’s family. Nearly everyone I spoke to had had problems with their nationality. Lilla’s niece Gerry, returning to Britain from the United States with her young children after her husband, Murray, had died of cancer in 1950, very young, found herself shuffled from windowless room to windowless room deep in the bowels of the Home Office until she let fly, “Of course I’m bloody British. My father was the British consul in Shantung.” Rugs, who won a Military Cross for single-handedly leading an infantry charge up a hill in the Second World War, hasn’t held a British passport since.

  And when Ernie’s youngest brother, Evelyn—who had been Foreign Secretary to the Government of India and received a knighthood—had gone to renew his passport, he had been told he was no longer British. He had been planning his first trip abroad in years, as a lifetime serving his country had left him with a great deal of pride but very little money on which to retire. Now even that pride had been stolen from him.

  Luckily, he had made it back to Britain first. There are some people whose families set off for the empire’s outposts a couple of generations ago who, turfed out of the former colonies they have been living in, are still trying to return.

  The British Empire, and colonial life generally, offered a deal. It encouraged people who were prepared to work hard to take risks abroad in exchange for a better life than was open to them at Home. But once imperialism fell out of favor, troops were withdrawn, and some of the former colonies became set on expelling all trace of colonialism, the families of those who had first taken up the challen
ge began to discover that they no longer belonged to the country they regarded as Home.

  My father wrote back to the Foreign Office. He told them about the camps. He told them about the Communists. He pointed out that it was almost a century since his grandmother had been born. And then he waited.

  And, ignorant as to why her claim was taking so long, Lilla waited, too.

  Lilla turned one hundred while she was waiting to hear from the Foreign Office. My father decided to take no chances and wrote in advance to Buckingham Palace to confirm that Lilla would be receiving the traditional telegram of congratulations from the Queen for reaching one hundred years old. It arrived during her party. A large room in her nursing home packed with relatives and plastered with cards that Lilla had received from all over the world. Thirteen years old, gawkily dressed in a drop-waisted, tartan minidress that I now cringe to think about (it was 1982), I watched Lilla, elegant as ever in diamonds and black, sitting resplendent in the bay window. All she’d lost was her long hair. When her fingers could no longer twist it up at the back of her head, she agreed to have it cut and curled. She still, I thought, looked better than me. But in the moments between conversations, I saw a faraway look in her eyes as she fingered her telegram from the Queen.

  I wonder whether she was remembering another telegram from the Queen. Another King, another Queen. One written in a pencil scrawl on yellowing paper pinned into that little black album that she still kept in a drawer. The telegram that she’d received almost seven decades beforehand, confirming that Ernie was dead. Ernie, whose reddish hair was still floating around the room in front of her on the top of several heads. Including mine.