1939

IT TAKES A GREAT DEAL of fear to make a person who loves the life she has 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, already in his late sixties, was too old to move to Malaya, India or Burma and start up a new business, a new life, all over again.

In any case, 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 fuelled 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 longstanding fear of the Communism that had taken over the old Russia. The appeasers — France and Britain — were sufficiently paralysed 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, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the 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 towards battle paused, swords hovering in the air just a few inches apart. Europe held 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 — a boat north 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 on to 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, in 1936 he had given up his commission 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 did she know 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 cell in a police station, 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 splendour 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 1938 Ford 85-horsepower 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.

From Ada's, Lilla went on to see her daughter Alice, her husband Havilland and their four children. All growing fast. Hard to keep up with who was doing what. Another week or so. Then back to Arthur. But now Russia had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. That left Poland open for Hitler's tanks to roll in. And Britain had committed itself to fight if it did.

The war that they had been waiting for was about to arrive. But there was a chance, the papers said, that it wouldn't come. That Chamberlain's Anglo-Polish Alliance would deter Herr Hitler. Arthur disagreed.

Lilla, Arthur and Beryl spent the weekend in the garden again. I can see them doing their best to pretend that Lilla's visit was just like any other visit, in any other year. Lilla makes a plate of raspberry jam sandwiches. Wasps keep hovering over them. Lilla raises her arm to brush them away. The children are playing. Arthur gets up to go and make a pot of tea. Lilla fills their cups. And a warm, muggy wind that peels back the blades of grass one by one seems to hover instead of disappearing over the next hill, waiting — like everything else in Europe — for what will happen next. This wind bears the faint scent of armies on the move, thousands of tons of thickly greased gunmetal turning freshly harvested European plains to mud. It seems to drift right over the children. Jane raises her head inquisitively to a passing gust, sensing the slightly forced scene around the table a few feet away, then resumes her teasing play. But the grown-ups, despite the warmth of the air, shiver. Their bare arms — Beryl's white flesh and freckles, Arthur's clenched forearm, Lilla's skin that has known sharper, colder winds — prickle into goosebumps.

It was the next morning that the call came. Monday. Arthur had gone up to his office in London. When he heard the news, he rang home immediately. Hitler had offered to `protect' the British Empire if Britain promised not to intervene if he attacked Poland. Britain had turned him down. Arthur was sure that Germany would now invade Poland. The war was, at most, a few days away. If Lilla was going to return to China, she had to leave immediately, he told her.

And the Siberian way was already out of the question; she would have to take the long route round by boat. She should leave today if she could. If she waited until the German tanks rumbled over the Polish border, it would be too late to go anywhere. That is, if she really had to go.

The discussion had been rattling on all August, ever since Lilla arrived, says Jane. Stay in England with her children, her grandchildren, with Ada, but with war coming in Europe — and they could all remember the last one, no mistake. Or go back to China, her `home', her husband? All your husbands have the same name, Ada would have teased her, a thinly veiled suggestion that Casey was hardly the love of her life. Why go back to him? But it was all right for Ada, she had her husband in England with her. Why shouldn't Lilla be with her husband as well?

And Lilla wasn't going to do what Ernie had tried to do to her and leave Casey on the other side of the world when things weren't going so well. It was too late now for him to join her in England. She had a fortnight, Arthur reckoned, to make it through the Suez Canal before the war closed it — and Casey would never be able to get there in time if he was coming from China.

Still, Arthur tried to tell her that she was mad to go. Even though they all knew what Hitler wanted to do in Europe, nobody was fooled about what the Japanese were already doing in China. What would happen to her there?

But now Lilla was going. She was leaving straight away. She was up and packing her cases in her room. Jane remembers her moving quickly, those elegant legs almost skipping along, her black hat already on her head. This time she knew she wouldn't be returning to England for a long while. `I hope the children won't forget me,' she wrote on her way to China.

Lilla left England that day, 28 August, and took a train straight through France to Marseilles. On 30 August she boarded the French ship the Félix Roussel, bound for Shanghai. The following day, Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later, Europe was at war. Five weeks afterwards Lilla wrote to Arthur and Beryl as she approached Shanghai, describing her journey. Her visit to her family was already a long, long way away. `It seems years & years since I left London. And what a lot we have gone through since.'

The first eight days at sea were the most frightening. France, too, was at war with Germany and the Félix Roussel was trying to make its way through the Mediterranean unseen. The ship crept south, under a complete blackout. A single cigarette light could betray them to the slender, invisible eye of a U-boat periscope and not even a candle was allowed on board after dark, leaving the passengers `creeping around' in darkness. `I shall feel funny having light again,' wrote Lilla, `especially going to bed.' At night, the ship was sealed up. Every crevice, every chink that might let out a forbidden glimpse of light, was stuffed with blackout lining. And for the first, worst stretch, from Marseilles to Tunis, the ship was overcrowded. Packed to the brim with every last desperate family that had clambered on board, trying to escape the tanks and guns that were on their way. A worried Lilla counted the lifeboats.

Not one of us could have been saved.'

After Tunis, the ship turned east. Past Sicily, then Malta, right over the spot where Ernie's ship had been hit. Lilla must have wondered if he was still down there. Somewhere on the seabed under a thousand tons of salt water, trying to make good soldiers out of the fish. I wonder if she lay awake at night, barely able to breathe in her sealed-up cabin and starting each time a large wave thudded into the ship's hull, thinking she was about to join Ernie in the cold black water outside.

The Felix Roussel reached Suez and then crossed into the Red Sea, where the heat `was awful'. The most dangerous part of the journey was over, but the blackout remained and with it the ever-present fear that this clunk or that rattle was something far worse than a chain sliding back on to the deck. The morale of the other passengers waned. They barely bothered, even the ever-so-chic French, to change out of their pyjamas. The men wandered the corridors in their dressing gowns until noon. The women flung on the clothes that they'd left on a chair the night before, faces bare of make-up and, to Lilla's horror, having `not even dressed their hair'. When Lilla asked them why they had given up making an effort, they replied, `We might be drowned any moment, so why bother?'

Lilla was shocked. In her view, letting oneself go was as good as allowing the enemy to win. She dressed in the half-light every morning and spent twenty minutes arranging her hair. In times like these, what you looked like was one of the few things over which you still had control. She walked down the corridor with her head held high, and sat in the salon and flirted with the Frenchmen on board. They flocked around Lilla, almost the only woman prepared to go on playing the game of real life. 'Très elegante,' they crooned, Lilla boasted in her letter. 'Très elegante. Your children must be so proud of you being so brave, so courageuse.' I can see her beaming from ear to ear. `You wouldn't believe,' she fluttered back, `that my children are thirty-seven and thirty-five.' 'Mais non,' her admirers replied, 'c'est impossible. You have not more than forty-five years yourself.' So it went on. But as dusk fell, conversation ground to a halt. The passengers fumbled their way through the blackout back to their cabins alone, the darkness reminding them of what was going on in the world outside.

At Colombo, a Mrs Wheman came on board. She was a widow from Surrey, moving out to Peking, and her mother was going to follow her from Canada. Lilla marvelled at her decision. `She says she wants to go back to Pekin [sic] and die there.' And `she proposes taking a house in Pekin & learning Chinese to give her occupation & an object to achieve'. And she was doing it now, come what may. Lilla sat with her and they talked about the wonders of China, the colours, the silks, the art, the people, the food.

At Saigon nearly everyone disembarked, leaving only a dozen passengers in first class. `If anything happened now,' wrote Lilla, `we could have a lifeboat each.' Nothing did happen, but the lights stayed out. And, at last, Hong Kong's junk-filled harbour made her heart leap with joy. `Oh what a lovely sight it was.' The Félix Roussel stayed in the harbour for six hours and Lilla darted on shore with Mrs Wheman. `She felt like a schoolgirl. The Chinese, the junks & everything connected with China she loves.' The two of them must have scuttled through the market stalls and up the alleyways, unfolded heavy silk fans and tiny paper parasols, wrapped embroidered shawls around each other and unwound great rolls of uncut chiffon, draping it this way and that. They would have walked past stalls laden with strangely still shark fins, stepped around pails groaning with writhing, sinewy green snakes that made occasionally successful bids to escape a fate of soup or stew, and felt the steam from a thousand baskets of rice settle on their skin, leaving a thin, pasty film. At last they were back in China.

When the Félix Roussel sailed out of Hong Kong harbour that evening, the lights in the city seemed to shine like `millions and millions of stars'. And as the ship moved further out to sea, the harbour searchlights followed it playfully setting the whole ship `ablaze with light'. To Lilla, the `utter darkness' of the past month was over.

Little did she realize how much darker things were to become.

For the first few months, China felt a long, long way from the war back in Europe. Over there, the Germans were the enemy. In China the Germans were allies, and the enemy was Japan. Briton and German, American and Italian, sat drinking side by side, bemoaning the Japanese blockades around the foreign concessions — in place to prevent the Chinese escaping from the cruel Japanese rule into the foreign territory of the concessions. The blockades meant that the streets outside the concession gates in Tientsin, Shanghai and other treaty ports were clogged with hundreds if not thousands of Chinese trying to push their way through. Taking a car out meant crawling through a narrow tunnel of waving arms and shouting faces, small hands pulling at the doors, trying to open them and clamber in. And although no Japanese soldier even so much as peeped an invasive toe into foreign territory — that would have been an outright declaration of war — they had ceased helping people and provisions make their way in and out. Inside the concessions, food supplies thinned. Business began to slow. But the parties, the tea dances, the cocktails, the treaty-port way of life went on as if almost nothing were awry.

In Chefoo, however, where the Japanese had long been in control of the entire town, things were slightly different. As the autumn of 1939 dissolved into the winter of 1940 and the foreigners' home nations became increasingly embroiled in the war in Europe, the courtesy that the Japanese had hitherto shown the other foreign residents in Chefoo melted away. The Japanese started to accuse the foreigners, especially the British, of assisting the Chinese rebels.

They ceased to be a helpful traffic-stopping local authority and began to insist that the treaty-porters, like the Chinese, had permits to travel, permits to trade. Permits that became increasingly hard to come by. That old decision not to have official concession areas and gates, to let easy-come easy-go Chefoo spread as it wished and be run by the Chinese themselves, had come back to haunt the Chefooites.

In these first few months of the war in Europe, as Japan was tightening the thumbscrews on the treaty-porters in China, Lilla at least knew that her daughter Alice, Ada and the grandchildren were all safe back in England — the terrible civilian bombing had yet to come. Arthur had rejoined the army, going straight back in as a major, and Lilla longed for him to become a general. `I won't die happy until I see my son General Sir Arthur Howell,' she had written on her way back to China. Much to Lilla's frustration she believed that if his wife hadn't pushed him out of the army and into the City just three years beforehand, `it could have materialised'. But now it was extremely unlikely and, she had hastened to add, `whatever you are, your mother loves you'.

However, whatever Lilla's hopes for Arthur, by the spring of 1940 she had no idea where he was. All troop movements were highly secret and every soldier's letters home were checked by army intelligence. Any references to, or descriptions of, surroundings were heavily crossed out so that no intercepting enemy spy or talkative relation could know where the writer was. As a result, these precious missives often arrived with thick black ink deleting half the words. But, for the moment, as far as Lilla knew, her son was alive and she kept sending parcels of socks and underwear and home-made jam to his regimental address for forwarding — as though, as long as the parcels went, he would have to stay alive to receive them.

And then, in May 1940, Germany invaded France. The British troops were beaten into a shambolic retreat. Bombed on the beaches at Dunkirk as they scrambled for a space in the small boats that had come to rescue them. Britain gave up on China. The home country was too busy keeping itself afloat. The few remaining British soldiers were pulled out of the treaty ports, leaving the civilians to stare at the departing ships, wondering what would happen next. Then the Americans went. All of them — soldiers, businessmen, officials, missionaries, wives and children — were advised to go home and many of them did.

But by that far into the war, anyone who had come from Europe either had no home left to go to or no means of reaching it.

The Japanese still didn't invade the foreign concessions in the larger treaty ports. But now that the Westerners had been abandoned by their governments, now that there was nobody to protest, the Japanese started to treat the foreigners in Chefoo like prisoners.

I have a letter from Lilla in front of me. It is dated 20 August 1941, several months before Britain and Japan were officially at war. The paper has yellowed, the ink faded to a dark blue-grey. And the only reason it ever reached England was because Lilla persuaded a friend with a permit to travel south to Shanghai to post it. By then, letters posted in Chefoo `don't leave this port'.

Lilla's letter is a reply to one from her daughter-in-law Beryl. Beryl, who had muttered disparagingly behind Lilla's back that she looked as if she had Chinese blood in her. Beryl, whose family had regarded Lilla's — the Howells as well as the Eckfords, and God knows what they would have made of the Jennings story had they heard it — as poor nobodies. Beryl, who might never have been in a kitchen before she married but who by now hadn't seen her husband for two years, was spending her nights firewatching and, like every other mother caught up in the war, was desperately worried about getting enough food for her children. Beryl was begging Lilla for money because, she said, her father wouldn't help. The only reason the letter was brought to Lilla's door was because Beryl hadn't put enough stamps on it and the postman could therefore ask Lilla to pay the excess in cash.

`My darling Beryl,' Lilla replies. Darling Beryl? How could Lilla be so forgiving? Is that what war does to you? Was she that pleased to receive a letter? Or did Lilla simply remember how tough being short of cash had once made life for her? My darling Beryl, Lilla wrote back, `your father is a rich man from our point of view, and surely he must realise that you want help.' But she still tells Beryl to ask Ada for a cheque for Jane's school fees: `she has a few pounds of mine left'. And she tells her about life in Chefoo.

`I cannot tell you all dear child but what we are going through.' The firms had been locked up. The offices, businesses — the Westerners' very reason for spending their lives in China — were bolted up, chained, padlocked and guarded `to see no-one comes in and no-one comes out' by those same Japanese soldiers who not long before had stopped the traffic for Lilla when she wanted to cross the road. All bank accounts were frozen, leaving everyone to exist off a complex system of probably unredeemable IOUs: `some people were clever & saw what was coming & got a few pennies in'. And, to Lilla's intense frustration — `Alas. Alas. We are not allowed to receive letters or papers' — the post stopped coming, almost cutting them off from life beyond Chefoo.

`The Post Office must be full up with letters, papers & parcels from floor to ceiling I should think.'

The one connection with the outside world was the radio: `what a comfort and blessing it is to one & all'. But, to Lilla, the hours between the radio news broadcasts, `7.45 am London, 1 pm Shanghai, 6 pm London, 9.30 pm San Francisco', loomed like a vacuum threatening to devour her. And it was this gaping emptiness day after day that she found hardest to bear: `We must all occupy our minds, as being prisoners is no joke.' Casey was filling his time going round the town trying to cheer up `the sick and nervy ones' by reading to them. Lilla was telling them to `Hang on. Perhaps after the war things may change for the better.' Then she went to cut the grass and weed the flower beds in the gardens of her empty houses on East Hill. When she could mow and dig no more she went to the church and knelt down by the altar, trying to mend the embroidered altar cloth. But the satin was so rotten that `it can't stand touching' and it fell apart in her hands.

It seems to have been Vivvy who gave Lilla the idea of writing a book. He himself was working on a history of Chefoo, `the start to the present day', wrote Lilla, `with his own drawings, really quite good'. Maybe Lilla's twinly competitiveness extended a little to her elder brothers. Maybe `labour lost' being `the end of all things', as Lilla put in her letter to her daughter-in-law, she leaped upon an activity that would produce something she could keep as well as fill the empty days. Or perhaps the reason was simply that given the futility of writing letters that would never arrive, especially those daily notes to Ada, she turned her urge to write towards something that didn't need to be posted.

It had to be a recipe and housekeeping book. It must have been the only book Lilla felt she could write. In any case, just as Vivvy clearly regarded the history of Chefoo as his area of expertise, Lilla knew that hers was food. The buying of it, the preparing of it and the serving of it — and making a home a place where you wanted to be. And good fresh food — the food that the treaty-porters had taken for granted — was fast disappearing from Chefoo's shops.

Or at least the Chinese seemed too frightened of their new rulers to offer it to anyone with a Western face. Vivvy's book about Chefoo was his way of keeping the old treaty-port life, the life that was vanishing, alive. Writing about food would be Lilla's.

And there was something else, too, that made Lilla want to write a cookery guide. An instinctive drive lurking deep in her subconscious. Although she reveals it herself in her letter to Beryl, I don't think she was aware that this force was driving her.

But, even four eventful decades on, Lilla clearly still felt the scars of Ernie's attempt to abandon her in England with their baby. As her world was turning upside down again, she found herself automatically talking about the misery of living with mothers-in-law, as a couple in Chefoo were doing: `The rows that go on, and now they have decided to part company — what a pity, as it will leave a bitter feeling for always now — why didn't they have their own little houses from the first ...' Lilla was desperate to convince her old Howell sisters-in-law of how optimistic and brave she was being. `I have written to Auntie Bob and Auntie Ada Henniker lovely long letters, worth printing,' she wrote, frantically adding at the top, `In case the Aunts Bob & Ada H haven't received my letters — give them my news will you — I know many letters have been lost.'

And longing to show what a good wife she could be.

The book she started to write wasn't just a recipe book. It was a guide for new housewives, with sections on economical dishes, economical menus and how to make sweets to sell `when a little extra pocket money is needed'. Advice on how to shop wisely. And scattered throughout, tips to keep household costs down.

Although Lilla might not have managed to erase what had happened to her forty years beforehand, it was through this weakness, this old ghost, that she would now find the strength to survive.

Then the anti-British demonstrations began. The Japanese hauled every single Chinese man, woman and child out into the streets and marched them up and down the seafront, chanting and brandishing banners bearing anti-British slogans. The mood darkened. Lilla stopped wandering around the town unless it was strictly necessary. She and Casey huddled together inside their apartment, watching their former factory and office employees march past their windows.

She began to write.