Lilla's Feast (36 page)

But in doing so, they set up a structure that would enable the Japanese to keep them there for a very long time indeed. And despite the committees’ sophisticated arrangements for education and entertainment, the basic facilities the Japanese provided for the prisoners at Weihsien were appalling. Each day began with a long wait at the latrines. As there were only about a couple of dozen lavatories in a camp with a population of over fifteen hundred, “the queues for this unavoidable aspect of life were endless.” And so many were continually out of order that there was, on average, only one lavatory for every hundred prisoners. To flush them, each prisoner had to take in their own tin can of slop water from the earthenware jars that stood outside the door. Nor was there any paper. “The stench that assailed our Western nostrils almost drove us back.” And every able-bodied woman in the camp—Lilla doubtless included—took her turn at cleaning out the ladies’ latrines for a week at a time.

Showering was an even more open affair than dormitory living in the Chefoo camp. “There were no cubicles, just open stalls,” writes Masters—who “couldn’t get used to the complete lack of privacy.” Water was pumped through the showerheads by a male prisoner sweating and grunting away on the other side of the wall.

Joan Ward explained to me that, early on, it became clear that there were two sorts of people in the camp. Those who let themselves go and “certain people who made an effort to continue to look nice.” Lilla she remembers as being one of the latter. Just as she would have battled through the loss of dignity as she cleaned the latrines, Lilla must have closed her eyes, taken a deep breath to prepare herself for the freezing water, and shut her ears to the grunts.

For the first few months at Weihsien, Lilla didn’t go too hungry. The cartloads of supplies that rolled into the camp still contained green vegetables, potatoes, and meat. But the meat was so packed with sinew and gristle that only a small proportion of it could be eaten.

Like the committees, the three camp kitchens were fanatically well run by the camp oligarchy. Any meat that arrived was pulled off the carts and sent to the two camp butchers, who brushed off any larvae— it had traveled unrefrigerated from a slaughterhouse thirty miles away—and, in summer, boiled it overnight as the only way of stopping it from deteriorating further. The vegetables were sent directly to each kitchen, where a team of fifteen to twenty women spent the day peeling and chopping. At five o’clock each morning, two cooks and five kitchen helpers turned up to start breakfast. After they had prepared the cereal and tea, they set to work on lunch. The great challenge was to try to serve a meal other than stew, or serve it “dry”—that is, “put on a plate rather than in a bowl.”

When the mealtime arrived, there was a team of women servers to ladle out the food to the queues of prisoners. A couple of elderly gentlemen monitored the rate at which food was distributed, making sure that there would be some for everyone. And they checked that no one came in twice. Finally, a team of washer-uppers cleaned up after each meal. Throughout the entire cooking process, a pair of storekeepers kept vigil over the quantities delivered and the quantities used—to try to make sure that as little as possible slipped into inmates’ pockets instead of the communal pot.

Kitchen jobs were sought after—“jobs kept you sane.” I have seen some drawings showing groups of women standing elbow to elbow around tubs and chopping boards, scrubbing and peeling vegetables. The drawings are simple, almost sketches, but you can still sense the camaraderie leaping out from the paper. Almost hear the banter. Stories of horse races and hunting around the treaty ports. Of dinner parties. Of sizzling meals of spicy Chinese food followed by English puddings. Of how they would cook the carrots if they were back there. Carrots coated in melted butter, thickened with flour, and drowned in parsley. Or carrots so fresh that they could be shredded into thread-thin curls and doused in mustard, oil, and vinaigrette.

Lilla would have undoubtedly wangled her way onto a kitchen shift. I imagine her picking up a moldy carrot, turning it around in her fingers, taking up the challenge of transforming it into something edible while saving as much of it as she could. Slicing it into whichever shape the carrots were being sliced that day—a constant rotation of sticks, circles, and cubes to give an impression of variety. At the end of the day, after hours standing, arms constantly moving as if she were swimming a marathon, keeping up her end of the conversation, Lilla must have felt exhausted. Looking forward to the next day’s rest yet longing to return to the hubbub. Wishing her shift came around more often than the standard one day in three. And dreading the gaps in between.

On the days they weren’t working, the prisoners stretched out the daily chores of living for as long as they could. After queuing at the showers and latrines, the internees took their water buckets to the communal pump, heaving the full ones back to their rooms. Then they’d head off to wait in line for breakfast, at which tea, while it was still available, was such a precious commodity that one person’s sole job was to dry out used tea bags and bang them back into shape. After breakfast, Lilla set about cleaning their tiny room, sending Casey out—for a walk, a chat, or simply out—and trying to scrub the black dirt and traces of insects out of every crevice she could find. As though, if she scrubbed hard enough, the walls of her cell might dissolve back into the wood paneling of her home in Chefoo.

Midmorning, the bell rang for roll call. For the first few months that Lilla was at Weihsien, roll call was a relaxed affair. The prisoners chatted, the guards made a show of counting. The arrival of Lilla and the other internees from Chefoo had pushed the number in the already packed camp to over two thousand. But within a couple of weeks, around four hundred Catholic clergy were moved to an institution in Peking, and a couple of hundred Americans—including Martha Philips and Dr. Glass’s family—were repatriated in a prisoner exchange, taking the camp number back down to around fifteen hundred. Norman Cliff “noted that the figures chalked up on the blackboard in the guardroom had one day totalled 1,492 and the next day 1,518, and so on, with little effort to account for the discrepancies”—as if any Western faces could go far in the Chinese countryside and, in any case, where would they go to? And after everyone had been more or less counted—occasionally, a child’s doll was mistaken for a baby and counted, too—the camp transformed itself into a giant marketplace.

Private supplies of food, or “home rations” as they were called, were the be-all and end-all of camp life. There were a few prisoners—mainly missionaries whose Chinese-manned stations in China were still operating well enough to send them food and knew where to send it—who were receiving a steady supply. Steady enough for them to throw out tins that the mice or the rats or the cockroaches had found their way into. Cliff remembers finding one such tin with a rat in it: “The rat was duly removed, the syrup was boiled for several hours over the stove, and then three of us spread it sumptuously on our bread for some weeks afterwards.”

And steady enough for them to have more than they wanted for themselves. Or things that they didn’t want. Like cigarettes instead of jam or jam instead of cigarettes. So they were prepared to barter. Bartering “for life’s daily needs” was a serious business inside the camp. Gladys McMullan Murray remembers exchanging her “best dress” for “a tin of sweet condensed milk.”

At the beginning, cash was still worth something, too. People clung on to some savings in the belief that they might need them again soon when they went home. Or they’d sell things for money, knowing that they could turn it back into something they wanted and needed more— soap, mosquito nets—things that were still coming into the camp. Or they used it to buy goods on the black market. “We sold all our belongings, bit by bit,” Gladys’s son Jimmy told me.

Black marketeers at the perimeter fence

The camp’s black-market operation was run with the same precision as the kitchens and committees. Three Chinese—their bodies “blackened and greased”—would slide through the outer electrified fence and pass boxes of eggs and crates of wine through the inner wire into the camp. Another black marketeer, a Mrs. Kang, organized her small sons to help her “funnel a steady flow of eggs into a drainage tunnel that came in underneath the wall.”

Once the goods were in the camp, a group of former businessmen would quickly hide them behind a pile of loose bricks. Lookouts were posted in several directions. If one saw a Japanese guard approaching, he would blow his nose ostentatiously and the black marketeers would hide. At one stage, Gilkey reckons thirteen hundred eggs were coming through the walls each day; “an equivalent amount of jam, sugar and butter was there for the buying if one knew whom to see.”

For the first few weeks of their stay in the Weihsien camp, black-market eggs were the main source of home rations on offer to Lilla and Casey. A whole section of Lilla’s recipe book is dedicated to eggs. Boiled eggs. Boiled eggs with mayonnaise. Boiled eggs with fried bacon and tomatoes. Baked eggs with cheese sauce. Poached eggs. Scrambled eggs with ham, with smoked fish, with mushrooms, with asparagus. “Egg dishes,” she wrote, “are useful when unexpected visitors arrive.”

Something turns in my stomach as I read this. Its poignancy, its hope, stops my breath. Unexpected visitors. Lilla was locked up in a prison camp. Nobody unexpected would be turning up that day, or the next, or the next. But just maybe, she was writing, maybe one day, it won’t be like this anymore.

And piece by piece, Lilla must have sold almost everything she had to buy eggs. Her clothes, her lace embroidery, any tiny china pieces she had with her—if anyone wanted them. And her jewelry. Piece by piece, it went. Except for two items. Those diamond earrings. And the brooch that Ernie had given her. The one she’d torn the emeralds out of when she heard he had died.

And when she had finished washing and queuing and cleaning and bartering, Lilla would have pulled her typewriter out of its trunk and balanced it on the packing-case table in the corner of her damp cell. Wound a fresh rice-paper receipt, blank paper, American Red Cross paper, any paper she could find, into the machine and plunged her fingers onto the keys and into the world that the prisoners tried to remember as they worked in the kitchens. The world of seven-course meals and servants to run steaming baths. The world of food so fresh that you could hear the vegetables crunch as you broke them in two. The world where you had more than you could possibly want to eat. The world in which, long ago, somewhere between the London smog and the fresh Himalayan air, Lilla had learned she could reign supreme.

Perhaps when she lent her pages out to other prisoners to read, she felt she was reigning supreme again. And that’s what kept her head held high in the months to come.

Change came to the camp. Came soon. But not in the way that anyone had hoped. First the rains stopped. The mud dried out. And a couple of months after Lilla had arrived in Weihsien, the black market was brought to a shuddering close. Two Chinese black marketeers were caught and set before a Japanese firing squad. Another was electrocuted when trying to slither through the fence. “His body was left to hang on the wires as a gruesome warning to others.”

Then the cold arrived. A bitter, biting cold that swept down from the north and froze the ground. Froze the water in its pails. Froze the inside of the cells. Froze the very marrow of the prisoners’ bones. According to the UN War Crimes Commission, “only those who have experienced the winter cold of North China can appreciate its bitterness.” The prisoners piled on their clothes. Huddled under their blankets. Paced around the camp to keep the circulation going.

When Lilla sat at her typewriter, her fingers must have jarred stiff as ice blocks against the keys.

Chapter 15

HUNGER

WEIHSIEN INTERNMENT CAMP, NORTH CHINA, NOVEMBER 1943, THIRTEEN MONTHS INTO LILLA’S IMPRISONMENT

The prisoners had been freezing for several weeks by the time the stoves arrived. One stove for each cell, a leaden square box with an opening for fuel and an exit for smoke. Something that, even if it couldn’t make them properly warm, should at least keep Lilla and Casey alive.