Lilla's Feast (43 page)

Chapter 19

HEAVENLY TWINS TOGETHER AGAIN

THE LONDON SUBURBS, 1949

Back in London, Lilla was an exile. She floated on the surface of the city, one of the thousands of pieces of human debris that the disintegrating British Empire was throwing up on British shores. People whose families had left Britain two, three, or even four generations earlier to fly the flag in far-off lands. People who had barely known Britain. Some may have been educated “at Home” for a couple of years. Others not even that. Yet, even though they felt they belonged in the tropics, in dusty desert cities or, in Lilla’s case, junk-filled harbors, they had still felt that Home would be there for them when they needed it. An often unfamiliar, deific power, waiting to reclaim them in an afterlife. But now that, finally, their Time Had Come, this afterlife was proving a far from celestial affair.

Many of these families had worked tirelessly as civil servants, soldiers, or diplomats for the great machinery of the British Empire. Even those who had been running their own businesses like Lilla and her family had still been throwing coins into Britain’s gleaming coffers. But instead of returning to a glorious fanfare of trumpets, they now found themselves unwelcome and superfluous in a war-battered, still rationed, and overstretched land. Those still young enough took straight off for the former British dominions—Australia, New Zealand, Canada—that offered them the chance to start again. Many had no choice but to try to make a resting place in Britain, surrounded by mementos of their past adventures.

One of the most dignified and heartrending stories I have heard comes from Gladys McMullan Murray. She ended up in “a camp for displaced persons in Bridge-of-Weir” near Glasgow, in Scotland. Eventually, after spending some time in a factory job “within walking distance” while her husband remained unemployed—he “tried everywhere to find a job but was told that he was too old—he was barely fifty”—they both found posts as a warden and cook in an old folks’ home. It must have been a crushingly different life from the one they had in Chefoo, where she was the wife of a successful businessman and the sister of the biggest taipan in town.

Others—the lucky ones, perhaps, who could—chose to return to the former colonies that had become home and eke out their days chasing the ever-fading shadow of empire life. This was what Lilla had tried to do. But her far-off land, the China she knew, had now ceased to exist. Thankfully, all Lilla’s family, my family, eventually escaped alive. But few of them went to Britain. Gerry and Murray had left for America just before the Communists marched into Tsingtao. A few anxious months after Lilla and Casey had sailed from Tsingtao, Rugs and Audrey sailed straight for a new life in Vancouver. Jean and Jack, their car heart-stoppingly halted and searched on the way to their ship out, eventually slipped south to Hong Kong in the summer of 1950 with a “very important letter” from Reggie to the British Foreign Office sealed at the bottom of their baby’s crib. Lilla’s brother Reggie was the last to leave, staying on alone for a year after his wife had sailed to England. He manned the consulate until 1951, when it was finally closed. By then, he was over seventy and, like Lilla, too old to start again, and went to England. And Vivvy’s son Rae never really left China. He moved to Hong Kong and ended up alone in a home for impoverished and slightly confused former treaty porters. Somebody sent me a photocopy of an interview with Rae, published in the
Hong Kong Standard
in July 1990. He could no longer remember when he had arrived in Hong Kong, but recalled being treated “as the taipan’s son” in Chefoo. “Perhaps I should go back to England and settle down,” he said, although he can have had neither the money to travel nor anywhere to go there. The only living relative he knew of was his eldest brother’s widow, who lived in South Africa. And when, a couple of years later, Rae died, Vivvy’s book on the history of Chefoo vanished with him.

Sitting in the Public Record Office in Kew fifty years after Lilla left China, I leafed through the British consular registers for Chefoo and Tsingtao. There were the births of Lilla and Ada and their siblings. The death of Jennings. The most poignant entries, however, were in Tsingtao. The first entry in the British birth register is that of Reggie’s daughter Gerry in 1911. The very last is in Reggie’s own handwriting. It is for his granddaughter, bearing the same name, Geraldine, born in May 1950 as her parents, Jean and Jack, were desperately trying to escape the country. Lilla’s family’s roots were plunged so deeply into China’s treaty-port earth that when they were finally torn out of the ground, the patch where they had once been concreted over by the Chinese, part of them shriveled and died. All the family, like Lilla, found themselves floating on the surface of wherever they went next, yearning for the China that had been their home. In Vancouver, I celebrated Chinese New Year with Rugs and Audrey in a huge, bustling restaurant where ours were the only non-Chinese faces, Rugs automatically ordering in still fluent Mandarin. And when Gerry took me to a Chinese restaurant in Kent—half a century after she had last left China—she bantered a little with the waiter before turning back and whispering to me, “You know, his Chinese isn’t really very good. I am certainly more Chinese than him.”

For China, the treaty ports had been a brief wrinkle in a long history. For Lilla and her family, the treaty ports had been their life.

Back in 1949, almost as soon as her feet touched British soil, Lilla started trying to re-create something of her old life back in China. She packed her and Casey’s rented flat in the London suburb of East Sheen full of dragon-covered furniture that she found on the Sheen Road. She stood in their kitchen, using Worcestershire sauce for soy, trying to reproduce the sticky, spicy, sweet foods that reminded them both of Chefoo—shreds of pork and beef coated in sauce, tiny deep-fried parcels of whatever she could scrape together, noodle dishes floating in clear soup made from dried pasta that she hunted out from Italian shops. At home, she ate only with chopsticks. In the evenings, she flung on a traditional woven silk Chinese coat that she had brought back to England before the war. And, snug inside her oriental refuge, she must have felt a little less of a refugee.

Her recipe book, however, stayed hidden at the bottom of a suitcase.

But this tiny China haven wasn’t enough for Lilla. After almost seventy years of fighting her way through life, she couldn’t just shut up and put up with what she had left. And justified or not, she didn’t only feel that she had a birthright to be in China, she felt that she had a blood right— and sweat-and-tears right—to be there, too. And if the Chinese government was going to prevent her from living in the country in which she had been born, then it could at least give her something in return. In return for her business, her property, and the life it had taken away. Something to make all those years in the camps worthwhile. And, as she watched Casey die in 1951, exhausted by the to-and-fro, exhausted by losing everything not once, but twice over, Lilla—as if entering into some otherworldly pact—seems to have vowed not to let go of life herself until China had given her something back.

Whoever she struck a bargain with—and maybe it was just with her own sheer determination—held her to it.

Shortly after Casey’s funeral, Lilla started with the Foreign Office. She fired off a series of letters asking whether she was entitled to compensation from Japan or China. The replies were clear: “The peace treaty with Japan has not yet been ratified”; property in China now needed to be registered with the Chinese authorities either in person or through an agent, and “at present, unfortunately, it is proving most difficult to find persons willing to act as agents in China.” The country was in the middle of a series of purges of anybody who did not adhere to strict Chinese Communist Party lines. There was a Three Antis Campaign against “corruption, waste and obstructionist bureaucracy” aimed at administrators and managers, even party members themselves; a concurrent Five Antis Campaign to dig out any remaining industrialists and businessmen, and a campaign to uncover hidden counterrevolutionaries. Many of those found guilty were sent to labor camps. Nobody dared hold any links with the West.

Lilla moved on to the Chinese embassy in London. The embassy’s first rejection letter pointed out that “it would be more appropriate” if Lilla were to write her letter in Chinese. She did. The second— nonetheless written in English—quoted a report from Chefoo that made it clear where the Chinese government believed responsibility lay—with everyone else but itself:

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Mrs. Casey’s property was confiscated by the Japanese authorities occupying the city. Part was destroyed by them. After the end of the Second World War, the property was occupied by Chiang Kai-Shek’s soldiers, who completely destroyed it. Therefore the Casey property was long out of existence during the liberation of Chefoo.

However incorrect this was, even though Lilla’s houses had still been standing when the Communists occupied—or, in their view, “liberated ”—Chefoo after the Second World War, there was little she could do about it. Like millions of other refugees around the world, Lilla’s life in China had been swept up and tossed from pitchfork to pitchfork in the chaos of war. So many different boots had trampled it underfoot that the Chinese government felt no need to shoulder the blame for her loss.

By the late 1950s, Lilla had tried every avenue she could think of and had received rejection after rejection in return. Far from staking a claim to her old life, making her feel that she really had belonged somewhere once, she must have felt her life in China slipping farther and farther away. She took a deep breath, put down her pen, and gave up.

Perhaps forgetting the pact she had made.

Living alone after Casey’s death, Lilla began to spend more and more time with Ada. They took carefully counted turns to make the long bus ride across the London suburbs to meet each day. Now that they were both in the same city, both without husbands, and with a son and daughter and grandchildren each, their relationship settled into a wobbly equilibrium. It was almost as if keeping up with each other was the motor driving them through their days. If they couldn’t meet that day, they’d write instead. And when they argued, an iron curtain fell across southwest London as each sent her children, her nieces, her cousins to spy on the other while feigning a total lack of interest herself.

And then in 1958, when Lilla and Ada were seventy-six years old and still going strong, something happened to Ada that—just as her falling in love with Toby had done over half a century earlier—turned Lilla’s world on its head.

Ada was offered a “grace and favour” apartment in the sixteenth-century Royal Palace of Hampton Court on the outskirts of London. The last British monarch to live at Hampton Court was George II. He moved out in 1727, leaving his courtiers to move in. When Queen Victoria took over a hundred years later, she decided that the widows of high-ranking servants of the state—soldiers, clerics, and civil servants— might make more deserving tenants.

Toby had been distinguished enough for Ada to qualify as just such a widow, and her move into Hampton Court Palace elevated her onto a grand social plane. Nearly all the other widows there bore household names, many of them prefixed by a title. Ada’s new neighbors were Lady This and Lady That. When she talked about them, it must have sounded as though she was reading out of a history book.

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.