Even though none of Lilla’s family had any Chinese ancestry, and they had come to China as “colonials,” many of her family felt that China was their real home, the only place to which they belonged. What was it about China that made it home to Lilla? What does this tell us about the meaning of home? What made Lilla turn down the chance to escape after Pearl Harbor? Does this help to explain why, even today, people living in war zones appear to fail to flee until it is too late?
She’ll Go Far . . . East
BY MELINDA STEVENS
Frances Osborne sits across the table from me on a bright, sunshiny day in Notting Hill. From time to time she casts a furtive glance at the thick book between us. It is a burgundy color with a picture of a small Chinese bowl below the title Lilla’s Feast: One Woman’s True Story of Love and War in the Orient. It is Frances’s book, her first, a story that was initially going to be told by somebody else and might never have been written at all.
Frances always wanted to be a writer—she had her epiphany at the age of three reading a gory story about monsters—but a lack of confidence and an inability to make the commitment stopped her. Instead, she went to Oxford, trained as a barrister, knocked about in the City, and dabbled in financial journalism. Then she met her husband, George, scion of the Osborne & Little family, member of Parliament for Tatton, widely reported as a future leader of the Conservative party, and well known as the politician whom William Hague cast to play Tony Blair in mock debates. “George is as good at Blair as Rory Bremmer,” says one witness of the debates.
“I realized that George really loves what he does,” says Frances. “That life was too short. That all I’d ever wanted to do was write books. And here I was, the daughter of an MP, married to an MP. I had no job, I was pregnant, about to disappear behind diapers and washing machines. I was desperate. It was now or never.”
But it wasn’t that simple. She sent her synopsis to agent after agent, and all of them turned her down. Determined, she wrote three sample chapters and sent them to one last agent, a friend. Within a few weeks there were auctions on both sides of the Atlantic. The bidding went on for three days. When the flurry had died down Frances found herself with an incredibly rare six-figure sum for a one-book deal. “It was surreal,” she says, widening her eyes, shaking her head.
Frances is charming, bright, self-deprecating. It was partly growing up as Lord Howell’s daughter, “surrounded by clever and urbane people,” that made her shy away from the path she so wanted to pursue. “Women seem to start their lives with such doubt. And men are absolutely the other way round,” she says.
It was her father who was always going to write the book, the story of his grandmother. “What a book it would make,” he said to Frances at Lilla’s funeral. “It would be a sizzler. My God, she had a life.” He has written several books since then, but none of them was about her. “Eventually,” Frances writes in her prologue, “he handed me a pile of old photograph albums . . . and the mantle passed to me.”
The book, according to Frances, “wrote itself ” in roughly four months. It is the story of a lady who lived for more than one hundred years, married three times, and saw both of her children die before her. She grew up in China, traveled all over India, was occasionally parceled off to England, and spent three years in a Japanese concentration camp, where she wrote a cookery book on tiny scraps of paper to keep herself sane. As Frances says, wincing: “She was an ordinary woman who had a shit time.” It is a wonderfully evocative, vivid, distilled book. It contains sentences such as: “She dreams of peeling apples with insides like half-frozen snow.” Above all it is a story of a wife and subject, one who was not often treated well by either husband or Empire. “It is the very ordinariness of it which is the key,” says Frances.
“I really hope that if the book can do anything it is to show that you can turn your life around,” she says, pushing back the same red hair that has traveled down three generations from Lilla’s first husband. “And that is sort of what happened to me. She inspired me, as well as giving me the means to do it myself. I could have missed my chance. Instead, it’s given me a whole new life.” Frances now lives in Notting Hill and Cheshire. A few days after we meet, she is off to Africa in pursuit of the subject of her second book.
I ask her the question she has been fearing. She looks bashful. “I cook a little,” she says, turning her fork. “I like to hang about the Aga in Cheshire, although my husband does wonder when this angel of domesticity is coming his way. But a friend of mine said that if I could write about cooking as I do in the book, then I must at least be a cook at heart, if not at the stove.”
Lilla, who loved her food like no other, would not have minded a bit. Her cookery book, full of chapters on soups, fish, and game, now sits in the Imperial War Museum. That was her great achievement. Her great-granddaughter Frances’s book is now on bookshelves all over this town and thousands of others, and that is hers.
Lilla’s War with China
BY FRANCES OSBORNE
Little old ladies with bottles of ink, mounds of writing paper, and firm hands have long been the bane of government officials. There’s even a name for them: “Angry of Tunbridge Wells.” My great-grandmother Lilla, whom I remember living in that venerable Kentish town, was Super-Angry. She was so angry that at the age of one hundred, after an extraordinary exchange of correspondence lasting thirty years and consuming many sheets of Basildon Bond, she succeeded in extracting a check from none other than the Communist government of China. And when I was writing Lilla’s Feast, the story of her remarkable life, I discovered how she did it.
Lilla had long been tough. In the 1930s she ran two businesses in a colonial trading port in China called Chefoo. When the Japanese half starved her in a concentration camp during the Second World War, she defiantly spent her three years of imprisonment writing a cookery book. When, in 1949, Mao’s Red Army separated her again from not just her home but her embroidery factory and five little rental houses—worth £20,000 then (the equivalent of half a million pounds today)—she returned to Britain and vowed not to let go of life until either Japan or China had given her something back.
She started with the Foreign Office, which appeared to be helping everyone else with war reparations. She typed out long lists of the personal possessions she had lost, including her Steinway, her gramophone, and three hundred crystal glasses. She copied the Japanese army rice-paper receipt she had been given for her 1938 Ford Sudan, confiscated a few days after Pearl Harbor, and its accompanying letter from Colonel Shingo, promising to return it after the war. She itemized the crates of embroidered bed linen, tablecloths, napkins, and handkerchiefs that had vanished from their Chinese warehouses. She detailed the hat stands, newspaper racks, bridge tables, jelly molds, and even trays for visitors’ cards with which she had meticulously furnished the five houses she had built and rented out to the families of visiting U.S. servicemen. Then she attached a one-by-two-inch black-and-white photograph of each house and sent them to the Foreign Office with a series of letters asking whether she was entitled to compensation from Japan or from China.
The Foreign Office’s replies to this onslaught would have made Sir Humphrey proud. It was still too early (in 1953) to think about making a claim against Japan. “The peace treaty with Japan has not yet been ratified.” However, the Foreign Office could give Lilla advice about her real estate in China. It was extremely simple. All she needed to do was to register it with the Chinese authorities either in person or through a representative—oh, and this registration had to happen in China itself.
As both the Foreign Office and Lilla knew, this sounded simple but was utterly impossible. Lilla had experienced not a little difficulty in escaping the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Her two nephews who had been with her had been interrogated for three months before being finally granted exit permits. A German national had been casually shot while being questioned. Lilla, fast approaching her seventieth birthday, could not return to China. Nor w
ould any Chinese person have dared make contact with a Westerner. But Lilla, still leafing through photograph albums of Chefoo and her houses there, was not going to let civil war, revolution, or even unsigned peace treaties impede her.
The next stop was the Chinese embassy in London. Lilla sent them another copy of her lists, receipts, and photographs. Not without reason did the term “mandarin” originate in China. The embassy’s commissioners fired off a response that would have thrown most people. It would be more appropriate, they replied, if Lilla were to write them in Chinese. But, like all good great-grannies, Lilla was far from ordinary. She had been born and brought up in China, chiefly in the hands of Chinese-speaking amahs. A Chinese version of her missive was shortly winging its way back.
Without the slightest hint of embarrassment, the commissars replied in the Queen’s English. A thousand years of bureaucratic experience made it clear where they believed responsibility lay. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Mrs. Casey’s [Lilla’s] property was confiscated by the Japanese authorities occupying the city, and some of it was destroyed by them. After the end of the war, the property was occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers, who completely destroyed it. Therefore the Casey property had long ceased to exist during the Liberation of Chefoo.
Now, Lilla knew that this was not quite true. One of her nephews had sneaked around Chefoo after the Communists had arrived and had seen that all her houses were standing, although anything removable, including the plumbing, had been ripped out. She wasn’t prepared to give up. As she rounded the corner into her eighties, she followed up every reported nuance of Far Eastern foreign policy, sending letters off to the Chinese embassy, Japanese embassy, and the Foreign Office. When she hit ninety, Lilla’s distinctly healthier identical twin, who hadn’t spent several years being half starved in a concentration camp, died of old age. Then Lilla’s own children, both in their seventies, also went. But Lilla, keeping to her vow to win something back before she died, stormed on, pen in hand.
Eventually, in the early 1980s, the tide turned. After thirty years of isolationism, China needed to borrow money from the West. Before it could do this, it had to show that it could honor its debts. It turned to face its most determined foe, the ninety-nine-year-old Lilla.
Her writing a little shaky by now, Lilla asked her grandson to fill in all the forms. He attached yet more copies of all her lists, receipts, and photographs and sent them off from his ministerial office (he was secretary of state for energy). Lilla began to plan her funeral.
Then the British government department dealing with these claims against China wrote back to Lilla’s grandson. It said that of course it would be happy to process Lilla’s claim, but there was one small administrative problem. This was that Lilla’s British passport, issued in 1939, no longer made her British. Along with tens of thousands of other British people whose families had furthered the British Empire’s interests abroad, Lilla was discovering now that there was no more empire. Britain didn’t really want its colonies back.
In order to claim under the arrangements with China, Lilla had to provide her birth and both of her marriage certificates to prove her nationality and changes of name. Though she had survived the Boxer Rebellion, two world wars, two concentration camps, and the Red Army’s “Liberation” of China, these documents—funnily enough—weren’t on hand.
Lilla’s grandson, who had inherited some of her letter-writing skills, wrote back to point out that these were documents that couldn’t possibly be available. Six months later, in May 1982, Lilla heard that her claim had been approved. “Now I can go to Heaven,” she wrote, and went. Luckily her departure was prompter than the arrival of the check. For when it came, instead of returning the half-million pounds she was expecting, it was for £1,400. She had been paid just one-fifth of the 1935 value of her houses alone. If Lilla had been around to discover that, she would have been so angry that I think she would still be alive today.
Ada and Lilla, or Lilla and Ada? Chefoo, 1890.
The family Lilla left behind. The Eckfords in Chefoo, shortly before Ada’s wedding to Toby Elderton in December 1901. From left: Dorothy, Alice, Andrew (sitting), Vivvy, Reggie, Edith, and Ada (both sitting).
The spire of St. Andrew’s Church with Consulate Hill rising behind, Chefoo.
Lilla and Ada on the left. On the right, Toby Elderton, the artist who painted this, and Ernie Howell—all weeping because they are unable to obtain leave for Chefoo’s September race meeting, 1901.
The navy on leave.
The Howell family, England, ca. 1910.
Wyndham Somerset (Barbie’s husband), Lilla, Auberon Howell, Ernie Howell, Evelyn Howell, Jane (a nurse), and Fred Henniker (Ada’s husband).
Bob Howell (Auberon’s wife) with their daughter Barbara on her lap, Russell Harmer (child, standing), Laura Harmer with Freddie Harmer on her lap, Mama Howell, Mark Henniker (child, standing), Papa Howell, Ada Henniker with her daughter Alison on her lap, and Barbie Somerset.
A friend, Arthur Howell, Jeanne Howell (Auberon’s daughter), Alice Howell, and Roy Somerset.
Ernie with Arthur in his goat cart, Kashmir, 1904.
The raging torrent at the bottom of Lilla and Ernie’s garden in Kashmir, 1904.
A friend and Ernie. Front row: a friend, friend’s child, Arthur (in kilt), Lilla, and Nurse Desmond holding Alice.
The emblem of the Tsingtao Special Police, showing the flags (clockwise, from top left) of Germany, White Russia, the United States, and Britain, whose nationals joined forces to keep the peace and hand the town over to the advancing Japanese. Designed by N. A. Piculevitch, 1938. A photograph of a cell block in Weihsien internment camp. The woman bending over is attempting to grow vegetables to supplement camp rations. Published in the pro-Japanese German-run Peking Chronicle, May 20, 1943. A painting of one of the kitchen blocks and outside yards, Weihsien internment camp. By Father Frans Verhoeven, an internee. Freedom at last! Weihsien internment camp shortly after the arrival of the American liberators, August 1945.
First Beach waterfront from Consulate Hill, Chefoo (now Yantai), in May 2000. The Casey & Co. building is just to the right of the wide waterfront skyscraper in the center. To the left, all along the seafront, are old European-style buildings.
Lilla at her hundredth birthday party, Tunbridge Wells, 1982.
Embroidered handkerchief from Casey & Co.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been a long journey, and there are a great number of people who deserve my thanks for helping me to complete it. Very sadly, not all of them are still alive to see this book’s publication, but I have included their names, as they are certainly far from forgotten.
Much of the research in the latter half of the book I owe to Lilla’s fellow internee Norman Cliff, without whose generosity in both thought and time this book would not have been written. Others who have been equally unstinting in their help include Ron Bridge, Peggy Caldwell, Martin Cornish, Joan Croft, Colonel Patric Emerson, Alison Holmes, Rosie Llewellyn Jones, Bob McMullah, George McWatters, Colonel Patrick Mercer, MP, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Jimmy Murray, Patricia and Brian Ogden, Leopold Pander, Algernon Percy, Mary Taylor Previte, and James H. Taylor III; Dan Waters and Sarah Parnell of the Royal Asiatic Society in Hong Kong, Christopher Hunt of the Imperial War Museum, Sarah Parker of Historic Royal Palaces, Sarah Dodgson of the Athenaeum, Frances Wood and the staff of the Oriental and India Office Reading Room at the British Library. And, of course, Elizabeth Filby, my researcher, who managed to unearth long-forgotten documents and details from the recesses of London’s archives with a flourish.
My research in China could not have been completed without the help of Susan Liu, Liu Xingbang, Mark O’Neill, Sun Liping, and Zhang Tao, all of whom extended me generous hospitality during my visit. The other great set of people who threw open their doors to me are my many rediscovered relations, whom it was a joy to meet. Rugs and Audrey Eckford in particular showed me the sights of Vancouver while producing a
treasure trove of memories, photographs, and diaries that form the backbone for several chapters in this book. Carol Bartlett, Anne and Shelagh Eckford, John and Nan Elderton, Nicholas Gibbs, George Howell, Phyllis Morley, Liz Murton, Dilys Philps, Jean and Jack Polkinghorn, Gerry Simmons, and John, Maureen, Nicky, Tom, Mike, and Belinda de Sausmarez each gave me several pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of Lilla’s life and have discussed and rediscussed their reminiscences with me at length.
Several of my friends, too, have provided me with both their advice and encouragement at crucial points along the way. Chief among these is Amanda Foreman, who has nudged me in the right direction both professionally and as a friend. I can safely say that, were it not for her enthusiasm at several critical stages, Lilla’s Feast would still be one of those many books that were never quite written. And Corisande Albert, Matthew d’Ancona, Catherine Fall, Simone Finn, Henrietta Green, Edward Heathcoat-Amory, Santa Montefiore, Catherine Ostler, Kate Pope, Albert Read, Andrew Roberts, Sarah Schaefer, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Victor Sebastian, and Alice Thomson have each passed me a few pieces of information worth their weight in gold.
I can boast a handful of new friends that I have made along the road—namely, Claire Paterson, my agent, and Jane Lawson and Elisabeth Dyssegaard, my editors. They are the ones who ultimately teased Lilla’s Feast out of my mind and onto its many pages, guiding me up the vertiginous slope of writing my first book, cajoling me back to work after the arrival of Liberty midway through with their eagerness to read it. And, with the exceptional skill of haute couturiers, Jane and Elisabeth used their great expertise on all things editorial to help me tuck and pin this book into its final shape. Thank you, too, to Sheila Lee, who seemed to enjoy looking at my family photographs and has done a fantastic job in finding more.
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