Lilla's Feast (29 page)

The Tsingtao Special Police was disbanded, each member clutching a picture of its extraordinary commemorative coat of arms—a shield quartered into the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, the Russian flag, and the German swastika. A sword rose up through the middle. On the shield was written TSINGTAO, 1938.

There is something about this picture—the sight of the British and American symbols so closely intertwined with the jagged black Nazi cross and that date—that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

As the Japanese took over the treaty ports, order returned. Lilla, her brothers and sisters, and Casey, all welcomed the peace. The factories were repaired. Business started up again. The cricket matches resumed. Inside the larger treaty ports, such as Shanghai and Tientsin, it was almost as though nothing had changed. Hardly a Japanese face was seen within the clearly demarcated foreign concessions. Even in Chefoo, where there were no concession gates for the Japanese to wait outside of and where the Japanese army had taken over every street and alleyway, stopping only at the foreigners’ front doors, cocktails reappeared on the terrace of the Chefoo Club and life seemed to slip back into the same easy rhythm as before.

Alice Eckford, Tsingtao, 1938

It was about this time, in 1938, that the indomitable Alice Eckford died. Over eighty years old, she was still pinning up her skirts to show off her knees. She could still pretend, just, that everything was almost as it had always been. Just.

At first, the only noticeable change was that the Chinese policemen who had been directing the traffic had been replaced by exceptionally courteous Japanese soldiers. Then the Japanese began, ever so slightly, to clamp down. They closed the Yangtze River—supposedly a British domain—to all but Japanese ships. They made all foreigners in Tsingtao have cholera jabs every six months—you had to show your cholera pass at checkpoints throughout the town. Even in laid-back Chefoo, they began to run the treaty port with alarmingly proprietorial efficiency. Fortifications were built on Second Beach, beyond the school. All signs in Chinese were torn down and replaced with Japanese characters. Leaflets were distributed describing the New Order in Asia. The red suns of the Japanese flag seemed to rise over almost every corner of the town in an unearthly dawn.

Even from inside the thick stone walls of the Casey compound, Lilla began to wonder what might be coming next.

AMERICAN RED CROSS

Sukiyaki

This is a Japanese dish. Put into a frying pan, which contains plenty of fat, the following.

Put all this, or some at a time if a large amount is required, into the frying pan. Add some worcester sauce and a little sugar. Mix well for the meat to cook properly. The fat must be piping hot for rapid cooking. Rice must be served with the Sukiyaki and placed into individual bowls. Then the desired quantity of Sukiyaki is placed on top.

Chapter 11

WAR

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It takes a great deal of fear to make a person who loves the life she has to pack a bag and run away. People don’t give up their homes, their property, their friends—everything they have—unless they are extremely scared. Scared they might be humiliated, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. And, back in 1939, Lilla as yet feared none of these things. In any case, if she and Casey left China to run away from the Japanese, they would lose everything they had. And where would they go? They wouldn’t have enough money to retire comfortably in England—where all they would ever be was a couple of pieces of imperial flotsam and jetsam, washed up by the tide. Casey was already in his late sixties, was too old to move to Malaya or India or Burma and start up a new business, a new life, all over again.

Besides, once the Japanese had raised their flags and laid down their regulations, nothing more seemed to happen. As 1938 rolled into 1939, little changed in the treaty ports. Business continued as before. The lunches, the parties, the picnics went on. If new trouble was brewing anywhere, it was back in Europe.

Japan and Russia were not the only countries looking beyond their own horizons. The old European conflict was rearing its head. This time, it was fueled by fear on both sides. The agitators—the Fascist governments in both Germany and Italy—were driven not only by a desire to expand their own borders, but also by a long-standing fear of the Communism that had taken over the old Russia. The appeasers— France and Britain—were sufficiently paralyzed by fear of another war on the same scale as 1914–18 that they didn’t try to stop them until it was too late.

In the autumn of 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier met Hitler in Munich. By then Hitler had rearmed Germany, taken Austria, and was threatening to invade Czechoslovakia. Still desperate to prevent another war in Europe, Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to split Czechoslovakia and hand the German-speaking Sudetenland to Hitler in exchange for his promise to leave the rest of the country alone. Chamberlain returned to Britain proudly waving the written agreement and claiming that he had secured “peace in our time.”

Six months later, Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia.

Britain now responded by promising to go to war with any power that invaded Poland—as it was feared Hitler might. The following month, in April 1939, Italy seized Albania, galvanizing Britain into reintroducing conscription and at last rearming. In May, Italy and Germany joined forces by signing the Pact of Steel.

From then on, it was only a matter of when.

But just as war seemed inevitable, the drumroll toward battle paused, swords hovering in the air just a few inches apart and Europe holding its breath. By the middle of July 1939, Lilla must have felt that the gap in warmongering was beckoning her back to England. If war did come to Europe, it could be her last chance to see her children, her grandchildren, Ada. She followed her usual route back to England on a north-bound boat from Chefoo to Dairen and then the Trans-Siberian Express back to Europe.

The last leg of the trip, from Moscow to London, must have been extraordinary. The summer of 1939 in Europe was as oppressively hot as the region’s politics. The train would have been baking, claustrophobic. The passengers fidgety. The waiters jumping at the clink of china. And at each long station stop in eastern Europe, families—the parents white-faced, the children, as if sensing that something dramatic was happening, strangely calm—were heaving suitcases and brown paper parcels tied with string onto bulging trains.

Arthur met Lilla at Victoria Station and drove her to the house he was renting in Haslemere, in the countryside outside London. Under pressure from Beryl to make more money than the army paid him, he had given up his commission in 1936 and become a stockbroker in the city. But, still a soldier at heart, he had been watching events in Europe and speaking frequently to his former army colleagues. He knew, he’d been telling Lilla for years, that war was coming. A couple of years earlier, he and Beryl had been on a driving tour of Europe: France, Italy, Austria, Germany. In Munich, they’d seen teenage soldiers beating up elderly Jews wearing stars on their chests. They were spotted watching the scene in horror and were arrested on suspicion of spying.

I still find it hard to imagine Beryl, my grandmother, being arrested. There has never been a less likely spy. Beryl was not a practical woman. When she married Arthur, she had never been in a kitchen. Nor had she known that butter came from cows. She spent the last decade of her long life with her mind back in the 1920s, in a whirl of finishing schools, debutante dances, and society balls—the settings where she felt most at home.

After a few hours in a police station cell they were released. Arthur, my grandfather, always said he knew then that war would come. Not if, but when. When they returned home, he put the family’s London house on the market and moved them out of the city.

Lilla spent a few days at Arthur’s. My aunt Jane, Lilla’s granddaughter, remembers her there. They sat in the garden. A perfect English garden. On a hill, overlooking a deep valley and woodland beyond. In the garden, a rolling lawn, trimmed hedges, the last roses still out. Lilla watched the seven-year-old Jane teasing her three-year-old brother, David, my father, as he stumbled about on the grass. Each time that Jane trespassed what Lilla regarded as “a line,” she called out to her. My father, wearing only a bathing suit—it was too hot to wear anything else—rode his tricycle into a great patch of stinging nettles and turned it right over. The rash spread all the way up his back, his arms, his face. He screamed as Lilla ran him a cool bath and emptied “bluebag” into it—it made whites whiter and, curiously enough, also soothed burning skin.

Then it was off to Ada and Toby in suburban splendor in Norwood. It must have felt just as hot in England as it had been in Central Europe. Everything, even the traffic around them, seemed to be waiting, suspended between a peace that had left them and a war that wasn’t quite here. Ada had a new car. She would inevitably have asked Lilla to admire it, goading Lilla into reminding her that her own car, in China, was at least as good, if not better. Casey had bought her a brand-new one just the year before—a green, 85-horsepower, 1938 Ford DeLuxe Fordor Sedan. She gave Ada a photograph of the car, herself, Casey, and their driver, as if to prove her point. In the heightened atmosphere, bickering was probably the only way to talk. And the question of who had the better car would have been left unresolved, perhaps deliberately, to crowd out other questions. Ones they didn’t want to think about. Like how long it might be until they saw each other again.