Lilla's Feast (21 page)

After four long years of dragging his heels, Ernie was once again bursting with energy and confidence. He proudly forwarded his letters from FitzGerald to Lilla in China.

How ironic that would turn out to be. Kitchener was the man who invented one of the great scourges of the twentieth century: the concentration camp. He first used such camps to imprison Boer women and children after burning their farms in the British war against the Boers of 1899–1902. I wonder how fondly Lilla remembered those letters when, thirty years later, she found herself locked up in just such a camp by the Japanese.

But by the time the letters reached Lilla back in 1908, it would already have been too late. In an almost childish way, she seems to have loved Ernie most when he wasn’t interested in her. Once she had not only won him over, but found she was the one keeping his head above water, I think she discovered that there was not much lasting love there. Or maybe she simply outgrew him. In any case, although hurting each other from time to time can be part and parcel of a loving relationship, I don’t think you can ever really forgive someone for trying to leave you in the way Ernie had tried to leave Lilla. For the rest of her life, Lilla would feel scarred by Ernie’s behavior back in England—the wound manifesting itself primarily as an obsession with having some money to leave to her children and grandchildren so that their husbands and wives wouldn’t want to leave them, too. And, later, it surfaced to spur her to write her recipe book. As if, when her life was again turned upside down four decades on, she still automatically felt a need to show what a good wife she could be.

But now, the little remaining love between them must have been eaten away by half a decade of Lilla covering up Ernie’s failures and putting up with his near-constant grumpiness at home. She was still proud of her husband, still pleased at his success—she always was, even when she spoke about him to me seventy years later. And she was still prepared to play the role of a loyal army wife, even if it was duty, rather than desire, that made her do so. But it was clear to everyone back then that she wasn’t in love with him anymore. Clear enough for the story to have reached my young ears generations later, forming an early impression that what you should do and what you might want to do are not always the same thing.

Lilla sailing for England, August 1908

Nonetheless, in August 1908, Lilla didn’t follow Ernie to Burma. She followed Ada to England.

Ada and Toby had had another child, a boy named Alan. He was alive but ill, and Ada and Toby had taken him to England, where the doctors had advised them to stay. Toby had decided to resign from the Indian navy and transfer to the Royal Navy, based in Britain, in order to be able to do so.

Lilla booked Arthur, Alice, and herself on a boat to England. Her excuse was easy. Arthur was almost six. It was time for him to begin the long separation from his parents and go to boarding school in England. Ernie approved and didn’t blink. Lilla would settle Arthur into school, leave Alice in the care of Ada, and return to India the following year. And she did.

I am surprised that Lilla went back to Ernie. I know that, back then, duty played a larger role in people’s lives than it does now. I understand that she may have been trying to make the marriage work—or simply hoping to hide the fact that it wasn’t. But Lilla could easily have stayed with the children for a few years without raising any eyebrows at all. Maybe she felt that she had to go back because being in the same place was the only relationship she and Ernie had left. Still, I struggle to imagine how she could have left her children behind in England and why she chose to play the role of wife to a husband she was no longer in love with rather than be a mother to them, whom I know she loved very much. But, of course, being stuck in England with the children was precisely what she had once fought so hard to escape.

I have to keep reminding myself that this was another time, almost another place. “The past is another country,” wrote author L. P. Hartley in
The Go-Between;
“people do things differently there.” And they did. Lilla wasn’t being a neglectful parent by leaving her children in England. She was simply doing what, back then, everyone thought was best. Once children reached school age out in the British Empire, they were sent Home. Not just to escape disease, not just for an education, but, in a slightly sinister way, to ensure that they grew up “British.” Unless their parents chose to separate, their mothers remaining in Britain while their fathers pursued some greater good or ambition abroad, the children of the British Empire barely saw their parents between the age of about five and adulthood. Their upbringing was handed over to a combination of relatives—often maiden aunts—and the English public school system that turned them into the same empire-building stock as their parents. Arthur used to tell me time and time again how he remembered sailing away from India as a small boy and barely seeing his parents for years at a stretch.

For the next five years, as Lilla rounded the corner from her twenties to her thirties, she seems to have scurried between Ernie in India and her children and twin in England as much as she could, continuing her Indian adventure by playing an officer’s wife to the hilt. I can picture her bounding with exaggerated enthusiasm for his mule corps. Admiring the polished belts and boots of the soldiers’ uniforms—“w-w-w-wonderful, d-d-darling”—the long line of beasts with gently rounded bellies, and the punctiliousness with which they arrived at each port of call and left again. In the evenings, she would have welcomed her husband with open arms, the simmering of a feast to come prickling her soft, freshly washed skin. And then, as soon as was decent, she was off again back to England, back to close whatever painful gap had opened up since she’d last seen Ada or her children. Still, these gaps could be long. In a letter I found at the bottom of a tin box in my father’s study, Arthur’s childhood scrawl reads, “Mummy is coming home next year.”

A rare picture of the family together: from left, Arthur, Ernie, Lilla, and Alice

But Lilla and the hundreds of other empire wives like her were not the only people rushing from pillar to post at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a strange way, Lilla’s busy handling of her own domestic politics—struggling to keep both her husband and her children happy—mirrored the political and diplomatic maneuverings of the great military powers of the day. Almost ever since Russia, Japan, Great Britain, France, Austria, Italy, and Germany had joined forces to quell the Boxer Uprising—ever since Lilla had met Ernie—their ambassadors had been scuttling from court to government to court in a merry dance as they frantically tried to keep war between them at bay. The imperialist expansion of the nineteenth century had already painted almost the entire globe the color of one empire or another. Nonetheless, the first decade and a half of the twentieth century saw a great surge of rearmament. Germany vied with Britain to have the largest navy. France decided to increase the size of its army. And every effort was made by each power to introduce the latest technology into its fighting forces. Even Ernie found himself ordered back from India to England in 1913 for a course in the “mechanical transport” that would one day put his mule corps out of business. Upon his return to India, he was promptly promoted to lieutenant colonel.

All this left the armies all dressed up with no place to go.

By the summer of 1914, a vast bonfire had been laid in Europe. A great pile of tinder packed with kindling. A fire that could burn for a long time.

All it needed was a match.

On June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in the Serbian city of Sarajevo. And, within a few weeks, the world was at war. At its start, the war was expected to last three or four months and to be over by Christmas. But, of course, it lasted for over four years and saw a loss of human life on a scale never before envisaged. France and Germany each lost about two million men. Australia and Canada, even India, suffered huge losses. Britain lost half a million men under the age of thirty. Russian losses remain uncounted but ran into millions. By the end, even the United States, which entered the war only in 1917, had lost over a hundred thousand men.

Life in the battered world that eventually emerged from the war in 1918 had changed irrevocably. War had become something to be avoided at almost any cost. The old European empires would never recover, and, from now on, the world would increasingly dance to America’s tune. The hitherto mainly patriarchal societies evolved into democracies as— after having been asked to fight in such a terrible war—every man, regardless of wealth or social status, was given the vote.

One of the most dramatic developments that the First World War set in motion was the changing role of women in society. During the war, women famously stepped into the jobs of the men who were away fighting. Women worked in munitions factories, on farms, ferrying food around the country, running the railways, and even on active service in the auxiliary forces. The years that followed the war saw them shed their corsets, win the right to vote, and make the most of the advances in technology that war always seems to bring. As increasing numbers of labor-saving modern appliances—ovens that you could turn on and off instead of stoking all day, vacuum cleaners, fridges, and even washing machines for the lucky few—made their way into homes, women gained both time and freedom.

But Lilla’s freedom was to come in another way.

Ernie was in Quetta, right up on the North-West Frontier, when war broke out in Europe in August 1914. In April 1915, an Indian Expeditionary Force was raised to venture up through Mesopotamia—modern-day Iraq. Trained up to the eyeballs in “mechanical transport,” Ernie was dispatched with it.

Britain had already taken the chief city in southern Mesopotamia, Basra, from its Turkish occupiers in the first months of the war. This had been a vital strategic move, as Turkey had entered the war on the German side and the port of Basra lay next door to the island of Abadan, where the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had its refinery. This refinery supplied oil to Britain’s newest and fastest “Dreadnought” ships, and if Turkey had cut off the oil supply, a substantial proportion of the Royal Navy would have been brought to a standstill. But Britain now had its eyes on a greater Turkish-held prize: the city of Baghdad, as well as Mesopotamia itself.

The Expeditionary Force’s plan was to travel by boat. First north, up through the flooded southern Mesopotamian plain, and then up the river Tigris to Baghdad. A veritable floating army of machine guns and field guns was assembled, spreading over hundreds of local river craft— rafts, tugs, and barges. For a logistics and transport officer like Ernie, the Persian Gulf Expedition, as it was called, must have been dream and nightmare rolled into one. At first, the going was good. The army vessels cruised northward from Basra, the Turkish enemy scattering before their prows. Within a month, the British boats claimed a heroic victory over their first target of Amara, one hundred miles upriver and about one-third of the way to Baghdad, when their field commander, Major General Townshend, charged ahead and captured the city with a corporal and twelve men.

The price of such heroics was organizational disaster. To the frustration of Ernie’s logistics corps, Townshend’s river dash had left an army running out of supplies trailing behind in his wake. Southern Mesopotamia was an unromantic, forlorn mudflat. In May and June, when the British were rowing their way north, the temperature and mosquitoes were at their height. And the flooded plain that they were sailing on was a vast sewer pullulating with disease. Any food left was rotting, and there were scant medical supplies with which to tackle the raging dysentery and paratyphoid. Townshend himself was shipped back to India on sick leave. When Ernie fell sick, he was sent to England.

Lilla was waiting for him there. A couple of years beforehand, Andrew Eckford had retired to England, leaving the firm in the hands of Lilla’s brothers, Vivvy and Reggie. Shortly afterward, he had died. But Lilla’s mother, Alice, was still living in a sprawling semidetached villa on the outskirts of London—number 4 Crystal Palace Park Road—which must have realized all the Howells’ fears of suburbia. Lilla nursed Ernie there for five frustrating months.