Two months later, the news came through that Lilla’s claim to her property in China had been accepted. And, suddenly, whatever had been pinning her to this life began to loosen its claws. Old age came pounding down upon her. “It’s so m-m-maddening, d-d-d-darling,” she whispered to my mother. “First your legs go, then your hearing goes, then your eyes go.” But at last she was free. “Now I can go to Heaven,” she wrote to my father, her writing so shaky that I still want to applaud each word. She longed, she said, to join her children and Ada. And though far from devout, she claimed to hear heavenly music and choirs in her head. It was as though she was listening to what she thought Ada could already hear. As though she was slipping back to be one with her twin again. And the following January, on the sixth, Epiphany, the day after Twelfth Night, the last of the twelve days of Christmas—the day the decorations are taken down and the revelers go home to rest—Lilla died.
Lilla’s funeral was the first funeral that I had been to. The church was packed. The overflowing pews were buzzing with excitement. As I found my way to my seat, I saw the same faces I had seen swarming around the room at her birthday party a few months earlier. The only person missing was Lilla.
Her grandson John, a clergyman, led the proceedings. Lilla had lived so long that even her daughter’s son had gray hair. Each time John referred to Lilla, instead of saying “the deceased” or giving her name, he called her dear Granny. That was what made me want to cry.
I sat staring at the coffin throughout the service. The stretched wooden hexagon in front of the altar didn’t seem to bear any relation to Lilla, to all that life, at all. And if she was there, hiding inside, I was amazed that she was keeping so still. I kept my eyes on the box, waiting for the flowers to tremble, the lid to slide away, and Lilla to pop out stuttering, D-d-d-darlings, how w-w-wonderful you could all come.
But she didn’t. She had at last gone.
EPILOGUE
LONDON, NOVEMBER 2003
Lilla never made it back to Chefoo, but I did. In May 2000, I went to China with my younger sister, Kate. We landed in Beijing—the city Lilla called Pékin—marveled at the Forbidden City as she had done, and then flew south to Chefoo. Only the town isn’t called Chefoo anymore. Now it’s known only by its Chinese name of Yantai. For the Chinese, Chefoo had never really been the town’s name. Chefoo, or Zhifu, was the name of a fishing village just along the coast, and the foreigners had misappropriated it for their port next to the city of Yantai.
I didn’t expect to find many traces of our family’s life in Yantai. For the past half century, China had been such an isolationist country that it felt like another planet. It seemed, frankly, weird to think that, just over fifty years ago, its coastline and rivers had been scattered with American and European enclaves. Places full of Western buildings, Western businesses, Western people, Western lives. Places that had been—and were still—home towns for the Americans and Europeans born there. Including Lilla and the host of other relations I had dug out of Vancouver, New Zealand, and a variety of British seaside resorts. All of whom still felt displaced in the non-Chinese countries in which they had ended up. But, of course, the treaty ports themselves—with their foreign domination of Chinese trade and their importation of opium— are one of the unspoken reasons why China cut itself off from the rest of the world.
As Kate and I were driven in from the Chefoo airport by a friend of Norman Cliff’s called Liu Xingbang, we were hoping at best to grasp the geography of the place. The perfectly curving bay, the dragon spines in the water, Consulate Hill dividing the port from the harbor, the hills rising up behind.
We were surprised.
In the gaps between the modern towers that now make up the Yantai waterfront stood the remains of the treaty port that the town had once been. European buildings poked up between the concrete blocks like the lost ruins of an ancient civilization. Germanic alpine chalets gathered in groups of three or four along First Beach. There was the mission boarding school, now a heavily guarded military training ground. The Casey & Co. building still loomed up on the seafront just as in the photographs I had seen, though now a wide Tarmac road had been paved between it and the beach. The church had gone, but I squealed as I saw the Chefoo Club straight ahead of me, instantly recognizable from the photocopies of the family albums that I was clutching. There were even Westerners sipping cocktails at the front. They were, we were told, the new wave of foreign investors in China, lured over from Canada’s west coast.
The owners of the club—by then known as the Hundred Years Golden Club—showed Kate and me around. They took us downstairs to the nineteenth-century wooden bowling alley, whose far end was decorated with a vista of what looks like London’s Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Then they took us into the new basement bar. Western style, they proudly said. Next door to the club, the old white-gabled hotel that used to stand there had been replaced by an unpainted concrete block containing a hotel and sushi restaurant designed to appeal to the Japanese who still frequented the Shantung—now written as Shandong—coast.
Behind this lay the path up to Consulate Hill.
Consulate Hill had become a park. The gardens of its old mansions had overflowed, opening out into public lawns. The long-empty consulate buildings and grand dwellings served as a form of entertainment for the passersby to stare at, as they were being steadily knocked down to make way for new property developments.
Kate and I meandered through and over the top of the hill to the Chinese Customs officers’ redbrick houses. The row was still there but boarded up and ready to go next. We tried to peer over the high wall in front of them, hoping to catch a proper look at the place where Lilla, our great-grandmother, had been born. Where her real father, our great-great-grandfather, Charles Jennings, had blown his brains out in the garden shed.
It felt very strange to walk around this town perched on the Chinese coast and think that, in a way, this is where I am from. As we followed the steps down to the port, I glanced inside the terraced houses on our left and saw eerily familiar tiled Victorian hallways, wooden banisters rising up beside the stairs as in a hundred London houses I have seen. The same view that a toddling Lilla must have glimpsed as she trotted by.
The next day, we walked along the beachfront and up East Hill, clutching Lilla’s photographs of her houses. Not a brick remained. The rich brown earth had been recently plowed and then flattened to make way for the new China rising up around us. I looked at the photos and then back at the bare hill and thought that this was what it must have looked like when Lilla had started to build her houses almost seventy years earlier. She’d loved those houses, spent hours leafing through the photographs I was holding in my hand. To Lilla, those five houses had meant independence and a guarantee that no child, grandchild, or great-grandchild of hers would ever be abandoned because they weren’t rich enough. They were, she believed, worth a fortune. A fortune that made all those years in the camps, her whole life, as she put it, “worthwhile.”
When Lilla put in her claim, she was hoping to receive this “fortune”—somewhere between a quarter and a half million pounds in today’s money. As I stood on East Hill, looking along First Beach to Consulate Hill and the dragon spines curving through the water beyond, I wondered what would have upset her more: the destruction of her houses or living long enough to learn how small her fortune would turn out to be. A few months after Lilla’s funeral, the check arrived— the check that Lilla had died believing would make her beloved six grandchildren rich, that left her free to join her own children and Ada. But the sum written on it was £1,400 (£3,000 today). She was paid one-fifth of the 1935 value of her houses—the only property she was deemed to have lost in the Communist takeover in 1949 and not during the war with Japan beforehand. If Lilla had been alive to discover that, I think she would have been so angry that she would still be alive now, battling with the latest Chinese regime.
Before we went home, Kate and I took the train across the Shandong Peninsula to Tsin
gtao, now Qingdao. As we stepped out of the railway station into that untouched Bavarian town square that looks like a Second World War film set with an extensive Chinese crew, our jaws dropped. Qingdao still has mile after mile of avenues lined with European stone mansions. It was mind-boggling to see such a perfectly preserved European town standing in China. Clutching an old photograph, Kate and I found Reggie’s old house at 5 Liang Road—the mansion he had to sell when Cornabé Eckford went bust. We broke in through the garbage bins at the back and sneaked around the front. The stone balustrades and trees outside were intact. But instead of the clutch of English children peering over the balcony in my photograph, we saw lines of laundry and signs that at least one family, if not two, lived on each floor.
Our final stop was Shanghai. Here, block after block of mock-Tudor suburbia fanned out from the grand waterfront buildings. The palaces knocked up in the twenties and thirties by the port’s magnates sprawled alongside new freeways. Kate and I roamed the streets, shopping for silk, popping into restaurants, meeting up with friends of friends, as Lilla and Ada must have done on their visits. Just as in Chefoo, although on a far grander scale, Shanghai is welcoming foreigners again. And a new generation of Westerners is flocking back. They are opening jazz bars, printing English-language newspapers, and talking in reverent tones about Old China Hands. The city buzzes with an explosive energy that can make Manhattan feel provincial. Its former treaty-port mansions are once more changing hands for millions of pounds. Its old five-star hotels have become new five-star hotels. The bellboys have returned, as have the dancing girls. Shanghai, the neon signs seem to flicker, is starting all over again.
SOURCES
Booth, Martin, Opium (Great Britain: Pocket Books, 1997).
Cauthan, Eloise Glass, Higher Ground: Biography of Wiley B. Glass, Missionary to China (Nashville, TN: Boardman Press, 1978).
Cliff, Norman, Courtyard of the Happy Way (Great Britain: Courtyard Publishers, 1977).
Dennys, N. B., A Guide to China’s Treaty Ports (London: Trubner & Co., 1867).
Gilkey, Langdon, Shantung Compound (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
Hennessy, Peter, Never Again: Britain, 1945–51 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1971).
Holyroyd, Michael, Works on Paper (New York: Little Brown, 2002).
Hopkirk, Peter, The Great Game (Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1990).
“The Liner and the Lost Gold,” Timewatch, broadcast on BBC Two, January 16, 2004.
Lintilhac, Claire Malcolm, China: A Personal World (privately published, 1977).
Martin, Gordon, Chefoo School, 1881–1951 (Great Britain: Merlin Books, 1990).
Masters, Pamela, The Mushroom Years (Camino, CA: Henderson House Publishing, 1998).
McMullan Murray, Gladys, China Born (privately published).
Michell, David, A Boy’s War (Singapore: Overseas Missionary Fellowship Books, 1988).
Morris, Jan, Pax Britannica (London: Faber & Faber, 1968).
Philips, Martha, and Mary Haddon, Behind Stone Walls and Barbed Wire (U.S.A.: Bible Memory Association, 1991).
Previte, Mary Taylor, “A Song of Salvation,” Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, August 25, 1985.
Roberts, J. A. G., The Complete History of China (Great Britain: Sutton Publishing, 2003).
Schmidt, C. W., “Glimpses of the History of Chefoo,” lecture given at the Unity Club, Chefoo, China, October 1932.
Spence, Jonathan D., The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1999).
Taylor, Mary, The Women’s Century (Great Britain: National Archives, 2003).
Tritton, Paul, John Montagu of Beaulieu: Motoring Pioneer and Prophet (Great Britain: Golden Eagle/George Hart, 1985).
Wasserstein, Bernard, The Secret War in Shanghai (London: Profile Books, 1999).
Wood, Clive, and Beryl Suitters, The Fight for Acceptance: A History of Contraception (Aylesbury, England: Medical and Technical Publishing, 1970).
Wood, Frances, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese (Great Britain: John Murray, 1998).
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
The line drawings used on the part openings and the chapter headings come from Lilla’s cookery book, which is now kept in the Imperial War Museum.
All other photos and illustrations in the book have been supplied by the author and her family, except for the following: 24: Hulton Archive; 77: from Living London: its work and its play, its humour and its pathos, its sights and its scenes, edited by G. R. Sims, 1906; 147: courtesy Patricia Ogden; 156: hairnet girls sketch by Claire Malcolm Lintilhac from her privately published memoirs; 205: view of Weihsien hospital from the collection of Ida Jones Talbot, courtesy of her daughter Christine (Talbot) Sancton; 206: plan of the camp courtesy Langdon Gilkey; 213: drawing by Father Louis Schmid by courtesy of Leopold Pander and Father Wiel Bellemakers.
Photo insert: 1: Ada and Lilla as children: MS 201813 Box 20, Bowra Collection, School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London; 2/3: marines taking a ride in a rickshaw: © Lake County Museum/CORBIS; 6/7: drawing of emblem by N. Piculevitch; woman cultivating the ground outside the kitchen hut and the liberation of Weihsien: courtesy Ron Bridge; Father Frans Verhoeven’s view of Kitchen no. 1 by courtesy of Leopold Pander and Father Wiel Bellemakers.
LILLA’S FEAST
FRANCES OSBORNE
A Reader’s Guide
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Lilla spends her childhood as a “little princess,” but she ends up a strong, independent woman. How much of this change do you attribute to the characteristics she was born with, and how much to the circumstances that she found herself in? To what extent do you think our personalities can be shaped by our experiences rather than what we inherit? Can you identify which traits of your own personality you have inherited, and which have been formed by your experiences?
“It is not often that lovers swap roles,” writes Osborne. How do Ernie and Lilla change roles in their marriage? Does the love between them change? Lilla has three significant sexual relationships in her life. How do her feelings for each lover—and each for her—differ? Do her relationships improve or worsen? Do you think she was ever really in love?
Lilla’s Feast is a family memoir. How does the fact that the author both knew and is related to Lilla affect the narrative? And what can the biography of an ordinary woman caught up in world events—rather than a biography of a famous person orchestrating those events—teach us? How different is history when seen from an eye-level point of view, rather than the political point of view?
“Down by the waterfront,” writes Osborne of nineteenth-century Shanghai, “the smells of steaming rice and charring meat mingled with traces of opium smoke.” Lilla’s Feast is marked by its descriptive passages, taking the reader to, inter alia, the mountains of India, Edwardian England, and a Japanese concentration camp. Where do you find Osborne’s descriptive style most evocative? How does Osborne primarily create this effect in your chosen passage—through the context of physical surroundings, or calling on the senses? Which ones?
Food, to Lilla, is more than nutrition. She “dreams of peeling apples with insides like half-frozen snow.” What role, or roles, does food play in the story? How do the attitudes of Alice Eckford, Ernie, and Papa Howell to food reflect their attitudes to life? In the prison camp, how do the inmates’ changing circumstances affect their relationship with food? Has your own relationship with food ever been altered by events in your life?
Lilla was brought up “to be a wife and nothing else.” How do the choices open to Lilla as a woman change during her lifetime? Do you think she takes full advantage of them? What do these changes reveal about the choices available to women today?
There is an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Lilla’s life took her through world wars and across the world in a time of great political upheaval, leading her to have to turn her life around and start over again and again. Which of her turnarounds do you find the most inspiration
al? Why?
“At the end of 1907, a long-awaited great hand reached down from the sky and plucked Ernie from his dusty desk,” writes Osborne, making the point that people’s lives can be turned this way or that by events over which they have little control. How much do external circumstances and chance—as opposed to the characters’ own choices— change the lives of Lilla and her family members? How might Lilla’s life have turned out if her husband’s troopship had not been sunk by a U-boat in the Second World War? If she had married Malcolm Rattray, or another man, before the Great Depression of the early thirties? Or if the family firm had not gone bankrupt? At what other points could Lilla’s life have gone in another direction—and how? Can you identify any similar turning points for yourself where an external event, or your own choice, has fundamentally changed the course of your life?
To what extent do the forceful characters of Lilla’s and Ernie’s mothers affect their lives? What does the interaction between the Howells and the Eckfords reveal about social and intellectual snobbery between older, educated families and new money at the turn of the twentieth century? Does the same pattern hold true in any way today?
What prompted Lilla to start writing her cookbook? What added symbolism did it take on once she had been marched out of her home and imprisoned? How did her relationship to her cookbook change during her years in the camp? Why do you think she hid the book when she was released?
“Every aspect of the inmates’ lives in Weihsien [prison camp] was ordered by layer upon layer of ruthlessly efficient committees,” writes Osborne. What does the formation of these committees reveal about humans’ innate desire to organize themselves into hierarchies? Why do you think this is? Have you ever been a founding member of any club or organization? How did its hierarchy evolve?
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