Civilian Assembly Centre, Chefoo, late October 1942, ten months after Pearl Harbor

THERE IS SOMETHING particularly terrible about being forced to leave your home. Its familiar walls bulge with memories. Each room has its own atmosphere — a hidden smell that stirs your senses into the right mood to eat, talk or sleep. It's where your roots have pushed their way between the gaps in the floorboards and the cracks in the bricks.

And when you are torn away, the roots remain, ripped apart and weeping.


Lilla was to find the next three years of her life so horrific that she would hardly be able to talk about them. Not even to the BBC camera crew who would one day come to interview her about her experiences as a prisoner, about how she'd written her recipe book. It was her oppor-tunity for fifteen minutes of fame but she sat in a high-backed chair that stood by itself in her granddaughter's drawing room, legs neatly crossed, unable to bring herself to say a word. To her family she occasionally let slip odd snippets of information about her time in camp. Fragments that betrayed some of the pain and indignity she had tried to erase. And I have her recipe book — a book of the memories that she'd wished she had instead.

But life in this first camp and in the second, worse camp that Lilla was sent to was so restricted, so unrelentingly focused around the basics of survival, that her fellow prisoners have been able to paint me a vivid picture of what happened to her. Each of them gives a different view-point of internment, a different camera angle, according to their age and gender and whether they came from the business or missionary com-munity — the latter looking at the world through a softer focus. Gladys McMullan Murray came from a business family and was in her early forties when she was interned with her husband and four of her children, ranging from nineteen to four years old. Nearly all the others who have spoken or written about these camps were far younger than LiIla when they were imprisoned.

And if they are young enough to be still alive today, then they were too young to notice a grey-haired lady writing a recipe book in the camp. Also, to the young, like J. G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical Jim in Empire of the Sun, rather than curtailing their freedom, war and intern-ment offered a great adventure. In the words of David Michell, who was a nine-year-old pupil at the mission boarding school in Chefoo when he went into the camp on Temple Hill with his sister, Joyce, who was then ten, 'What school child wouldn't jump at the chance of a Tom Sawyer-like existence, where nothing was normal, particularly school work?'

But life for the older people in the camp was far, far harder. Norman Cliff, at seventeen, should have been graduating from the Chefoo mission boarding school that year but instead found himself being interned with his two younger sisters, Lelia, fourteen, and Estelle, twelve. He describes how 'the physical and mental strains of internment life' took their toll on the prisoners, 'particularly those over forty. There were mental breakdowns, workers collapsing on shift with fainting and low blood pressure.' Joan Ward, née Croft, is the only internee I found who remembers LiIla. She holds an image in her head of LiIla 'as a rather refined, elegant person walking down the street of the camp, her head up, bearing herself well'. She didn't know LiIla well enough to remem-ber her recipe book but still describes with feeling how 'the hungrier we became, the more obsessed with food we were'. And, as Ward was interned with her parents, she was acutely aware of how different the experience was for young and old. One of the most painful things for the older people in the camp was that, right at the end of their working lives, when they had just saved up enough to retire, they suddenly found themselves penniless. Like Lilla and Casey. 'Losing everything in your sixties, as my father did, was torment,' Ward told me. Particularly when you had no idea whether you would find work, or still be physi-cally capable of doing it, when you were released.


The mission compounds on Temple Hill contained several spacious detached family houses — spacious, that is, if a single family were living in each — a church, a hospital and a couple of schoolhouses. All were built, as the drawing I have shows, in a fusion style of Italianate arches and pagoda roofs. They spread over a broad swathe of the Temple Hill slopes that led out towards the sea on what was, looking from the Chefoo Club on First Beach, the far side of the harbour. To convert the compounds into an internment camp, the Japanese had encircled three areas, each containing one or two family houses, with barbed wire. As LiIla arrived with the rest of the business community — all the Chefoo enemy nationals who were not part of the mission boarding schools that still stood at the far end of First Beach — they were directed towards the houses next to the church, on the seaward side of the hill.

The houses were wrecks. After the missionaries had gone, the Japanese Army had camped in them and then left them to fall down. 'The rooms were dirty, and all the plumbing was out of order,' writes Gladys McMullan Murray. The stoves used for heating were broken. And there were only two houses for the hundred people filing in — the hundred who weren't German or Italian, and so on the same side as the Japanese. The hundred who had been foolish, hopeful or desperate enough to stay in Chefoo.

That made fifty prisoners to each family-sized house.

It worked out as anywhere between six and seventeen to a room. Dining room, sitting room, nursery or bedroom. Martha Philips, a missionary teaching at the Chefoo school but moved into a business community house, remembers five of them being put in 'a tiny upstairs room, which was not much bigger than a walk-in closet'. The rooms had bare floorboards, dusty corners, a broken-down broken-up metal stove squatting along one wall and wide windows that had once given a sweeping view of a busy Chefoo — and whose grimy panes now gaped curtainless across a dying town. Men, women, children, all ages, were jumbled up together. I imagine the arriving internees wobbling — nearly all of them, like Lilla, wearing as many layers as they could to take that tiny bit more with them — towards their spaces on the floor. Each dormitory must have looked like some grotesque boarding school or summer camp. Instead of fresh glowing teenage faces, the dried and bat-tered features of a terrified and already malnourished ageing population stared up from the floor.


The first night there weren't even mattresses to sleep on. Dodging each other's knees and elbows, the prisoners eased open their bags and piled their clothes into bedding on the floor. And then, trying to stick to familiar routines, in a vain attempt to convince themselves that every-thing was still all right, they tried to change for bed.

It can't have been easy Especially sitting on the floor in a small room, with no discreet corner in which to hide from several new pairs of eyes. Each time that LiHa's clothes caught on her underwear, baring the folds of skin that she would have struggled so hard to conceal, it must have felt like being forced to reveal a secret that stripped away her dignity.

One elderly lady couldn't bring herself to change in front of every-one else, writes Gladys McMullan Murray She sat on the floor, not moving, simply unable to do it. When the lights dimmed, she popped out into the corridor to be alone, unaware that the light on the stairs was illuminating her, like a stage spot, to everyone back inside.

By the time I started writing this book, Gladys was no longer around to talk to. But I've often wondered whether that was LiIla.


A couple of days later, the prisoners were allowed home to fetch mattresses and bedding. Those who could brought back curtains to divide their tiny spaces into mini-cubicles. These gave the prisoners a gesture of privacy but made the rooms feel even more jam-packed, leaving little space to move. And they couldn't stop the noises, or the smells.

It was hard to sleep. A single heavy snorer could keep a dozen of them awake all night. One lady 'snored every night, so loudly that the shingles rattled'. And it wasn't just the noise of the irregular, unfamiliar, heaving breathing that would have kept LiIla awake — it was its proximity I can imagine her lying there, fraying sheets enclosing her and Casey in an area the size of a small double bed, trying to sleep, but surrounded by the stale breath exhaled from a dozen pairs of lungs that belonged to people she knew well — her brother Vivvy, his wife Mabel, Mabel's octogenarian mother — but had never wanted to be quite this close to. The sweating dampness of so many strange feet and armpits in such a small space added to the ageing mist that crept around the room.

But it was fear, rather than physical discomfort, that made the greatest contribution to the prisoners' insomnia. 'We often lay awake,' writes Murray, 'thinking apprehensively of the future.'


Once they had been herded through the barbed wire into the camp compounds and the gates were locked, the prisoners were more or less left to organize themselves as 'the Japanese officials did not want the responsibility'. They were allowed to hire outside workmen to repair the boilers and stoves used for heating and cooking. And then, 'with no more servants around, we all had to pitch in . . . every one of us in camp had our regular chores, from sweeping floors to peeling potatoes'. In Philips's house, 'we selected two teams who worked on alternate days to plan, prepare and serve meals'. And in that of Wiley Glass, a Baptist missionary who was in the business camp with his wife and daughter, 'some chopped kindling and brought in coal . . . The younger men pumped water, two at a time. It was a strenuous job.'

The lack of running water in the camp meant few opportunities to wash. Whether it was for cooking or bathing, every drop was rationed. Once it had been pumped out of the ground it was then carried into the house, where it was systematically heated saucepanful by saucepanful 'with hot water being taken one way and cold water brought from the other direction'. If you wanted the luxury of a bath — in a tin tub filled for the purpose in a barely lit cellar — then the water had to be shared. And even bathing in somebody else's dirt was a treat, says Murray. So much so that one teenage girl, on finding the tub full, leaped in — only to discover the grease and leaves of a cabbage soup clinging to her skin. Nonetheless, 'folks managed to keep fairly decent'. But it wasn't just their own bodies that the prisoners had to keep clean. Packed like sardines into spaces designed for far fewer, the internees' elbows, knees and ankles must have risked rubbing each other raw, their flaking skins creating a snowstorm of dust to battle with. Added to this was the 'inconvenience', Glass mentions, of the 'lack of a dining room'. This meant that after the prisoners had 'picked up their plates cafeteria style, we took our food to our bedrooms and ate on the small bit of floor space marked out as ours'. Inevitably, as the internees ate squatting on their beds, dropping crumbs, splashing drinks and spilling food, bacteria bred unstoppably The prisoners did the best they could with the limited water supply but, as the weeks passed, the conditions deteriorated. The outdoor latrines were 'by far the biggest shock of the Temple Hill compound', as they became 'a seething sea of maggots'.


The dirt and ripened stench of such communal living must have been very hard to bear. Especially for Lilla. LiIla who loved to clean, who loved to put things in order, for whom being well dressed and washed was almost a raison d'être. She faced a daily struggle just to make her-self feel neat. I can see her, sitting on her mattress in the dormitory, trying to put her hair up in a way that would disguise the fact that she couldn't wash it as often as she'd like. Dabbing a little powder, rouge even, on her cheeks. Checking that her diamond earrings were still in her ears — the safest place for them. Pulling herself up, standing tall, shoulders back, and facing up to the shrunken world around her.


As October passed into November and then December the hours of day-light faded and the internees' spirits dimmed with them. 'A bitterly cold winter descended upon us,' writes Cliff, and 'clothes were wearing out'. Replacements were being stitched together from the curtains and drapes that the prisoners had brought with them. At least the body heat generated by so many souls living cheek by jowl meant that 'it did not take much to keep the rooms warm'. But even then the prisoners sifted all the ashes 'to find any cinders that might burn again'. And, hands and legs chapped by the cold, they often found themselves down to their last bucket of coal, unsure when another delivery might come.

At Christmas there was an attempt to raise the mood in the camp. On Christmas Day, the internees were allowed to visit the other houses in the compounds and each house made a card to mark the occasion. I have a photocopy of the cards from the two houses in the business- community camp. Two long columns of signatures sit beside oriental pen-and-ink drawings on each page. The names of Mabel Eckford and her mother, Josephine Lavers, are written in the same steady hand. This makes me think that Mrs Lavers, a small but once-strong woman head-ing towards ninety, was already too feeble to write herself. I am relieved to see Casey's signature still scrawled in his own writing on the opposite side of the page.

There are several signatures missing from Lilla's house. Maybe the internees' names have slipped off the edge of my photocopy Maybe they just couldn't bring themselves to join in the jollity Or maybe they saw the list for what it appears now — not the mark of a festive occasion, but a sad register of those locked away.

Strangely enough, Vivvy's signature isn't there although he must have been in the same house as Lilla, Mabel and her mother. I wonder if it's because he did the drawings instead? The drawings of a stick-thin temple pagoda perched on top of a hill. Of a lone hunched man on a donkey. Of a tree whose leaves look as though they would pierce your skin, its branches bowed.


Beyond the lack of space and sanitation, there was no orchestrated cruelty to the prisoners' living conditions. The Japanese authorities even encouraged regular visits from the town's German Jewish dentist — unaware that he was passing on in whispered French and German the news he had picked up from the radio. And in early 1943, when LiIla had been a prisoner for about four months, the camp commandant — nicknamed `Candleblower' for the face he made while listening to the regular morning roll-call — handed over to a Major Kosaka, who was 'immaculately dressed . . . with a kindly face and impeccable manners'.

Kosaka allowed sand to be brought into the camp for the children to play in, and even gave them a supply of fireworks to let off when crowds of thousands gathered for festivals at the nearby temple.

In general, apart from roll-call, where the prisoners had to call out their number in the line in Japanese — which they had to learn to count in — the guards' interference was limited to insisting that anyone with money helped support his fellow prisoners. 'In polite English, but with a bayonet at his throat, they told a Greek import-export man, "Yes, you put in money, please. Thank you." ' For the first few months the internees bought their own food through former Chinese house servants who had been assigned the task of coming to the camp each day to take orders. Even fresh bread was delivered daily from the baker still operat-ing in the town — who also seized the opportunity to pass discreet messages between the three separated camps of the business community and the boys' and girls' mission schools. And a few piglets were smuggled into the children's compounds, where they were hidden under the verandas and fattened up. 'We fed them aspirin to keep them quiet,' remembers the then nine-year-old Mary Taylor Previte.

Before the winter was over, however, the money had run out and the prisoners had to fall back on limited Japanese rations. 'We ran short of meat, butter and sugar,' and 'stocks of flour. . . often ran dangerously low only to be renewed in the nick of time'.

Little more is said about the food here in the Temple Hill camp. The reason for this, I think, is that it was barely any different to the miserable fare of peanuts, beancurd, cabbage and bread that the prisoners had already been scraping by on for almost a year before they had gone into the camp.

But later, there would be hardly any food at all.


In Chefoo, spring had always meant the beginning of summer, glorious summer, visitors and parties, new faces and dancing until dawn. And as the snow melted around them the prisoners must have held their breath in anticipation of something better to come. Surely this war had to end soon?

It didn't. Instead, five months after Lilla had walked into the Temple Hill compound, spring disappeared into a summer that brought a blistering heat to the bursting houses. Whereas sleeping — and living — a dozen to a room had been tolerable in the cooler months, in summer it became unbearable. With temperatures rising to 49 degrees Centigrade inside, some of the younger people moved their mattresses outdoors. But Casey can't have been up to this. And Lilla didn't leave his side. They must have stayed in their dormitory, being cooked alive like two lobsters in a pan, until the heat drove them to try to drag their mattresses and belongings out of the oven that the house had become.

And then, bent over the weight of their bedding, heaved away, tears in their eyes.

It must have been hard for Lilla and Casey to feel married in the camp. Imprisonment warps relationships, and everything that people expect marriage to be — a couple's own living space, moments alone together, shared dreams — had gone. At least Lilla and Casey could still share a hope to go on, to return to their old lives together. But the war ate into even this. Casey grew feebler. Both his determination to survive and his physical strength began to ebb.

LiIla nursed him as well as she could. And as she helped him move around, she had to persuade him that everything would, she was sure, be all right.

But she couldn't have been sure. The very worst part of being imprisoned was that as each empty day stretched into the next, with the prisoners struggling to fill their time, nobody had any idea how long they would be there. The internees may have called their prison a camp, but camp is a deceptively temporary word. Maybe deliberately so. Everything it suggests — packing up and moving on, starlit nights and open air, fresh game roasted over a wood fire — is everything a prison is not.

And as the weeks passed into months, the expectation that the war would end soon must have begun to recede — replaced by a growing, stomach-emptying fear that it might never end.

It must have made every gut rumble, stench, pile of dirt and breath of someone else's exhaled air all the more painful.

In the middle of all this hunger, this discomfort, this uncertainty, whenever the daily grind of cooking, washing, cleaning receded, Lilla was writing her recipe book. Her recipe book of cosy homes and full bellies. Of newly-wed lives and grand hopes for the future.

It can't have been easy to think about all that there. But, like her fellow prisoners, LiIla must have been desperate to find activities to fill her days. On arriving in the camp, Cliff and his friends had 'walked round and round the house, six times to a mile, to pass the time'. But after this initial enthusiasm, 'the months at Temple Hill dragged on monotonously'. As the weeks and months passed, the monotony worsened. And, sheltered behind her makeshift cubicle curtains, as if hiding from the oppressive tedium of the camp, LiIla must have perched the typewriter on her knees as she squatted at the end of her mattress and slowly and deliberately punched each letter in turn. `M-e-l-t t-h-e b-u-t-t-e-r . .

As I read through Lilla's book now, my mind stuck in the crowded, smelly house on Temple Hill, it seems hard to believe that the world of her recipes had existed so recently, so close by. A world of freshly pressed clothes, the scent of clean laundry tinged with a hint of hot-ironed starch. Of silver gleaming on long white tablecloths, the sunlight reflecting off it into little spots of light dancing on the wood-panelled walls. Of jazz playing on a gramophone in a room nearby. Of bottles of wine being poured into decanters. Of kitchens full of cooks and steaming pots. Of piles of thinly sliced beef and vegetables waiting on thick wooden chopping boards. Of great white meringues cooling under gauze. Of buckets full of raspberries and mixing bowls stiff with peaks of freshly whipped cream. Of the feeling that guests are about to arrive.

The recipes seem to cast a kind of magic as I read them. Somehow they bring this other, old world to life, take me right there and make me want to reach for a cocktail, hum along with the music. Sneeze because the smell of spice is tickling the back of my nose. And as she typed, Lilla must have escaped there too. Escaped back home for the moments her fingers were knocking the keys and her mind was absorbed in what to write next. Perhaps when Vivvy sat with her, whisking his strokes of pen and ink on to the pages she had finished, all this was easier to believe. Perhaps she read the recipes out to Casey — I can almost hear her doing so, her stutter tripping her at every line, yet still trying to persuade him to believe in it too.

Four decades later, when she pulled out the manuscript from the bottom of the suitcase it had been hiding in for so long, Lilla said that she had written the book 'for my fellow prisoners'. Perhaps, once she was in a prison camp, it was their desire to go on reading page after page that helped her find the strength to keep churning them out.

But each time Lilla stopped typing or reading, the aroma of rich gravy giving way to the damp smell of cabbage leaves, the jazz notes and dinner-party chatter being drowned out by the indeterminate groans and clatter of fifty people and a house bulging to overcapacity, the starched tablecloth dissolving into the crumpled sheets on her bed, the dining room disappearing into the chipped bowl she had to balance on her lap, the searing contrast must have burnt her like the fat from one of her dreamed-of pans.


The order to move came in August, ten months after LiIla had been taken from her home and put into the camp. The initial instructions from the Japanese were almost cryptically brief:

'MAKE IMMEDIATE PREPARATIONS TO BE TRANSFERRED TO THE WEIHSIEN CIVIL ASSEMBLY CENTRE' ...

... was barked at the internees by a 'top-ranking' Japanese officer who had appeared from headquarters. The Weihsien Civil Assembly Centre, the prisoners soon learned, was a much larger camp and already contained all the enemy nationals from Peking, Tientsin and Tsingtao, who had been there since March. The Temple Hill commandant, Kosaka, went to look at it. Take everything you have, he warned the Chefoo internees ominously on his return, the conditions there will be far worse.


By the time they left the camp it was September 1943. LiIla and Casey had already been in a prison camp for almost a year. They packed up their belongings, their mattresses, whatever tins, if any, LiIla had managed to keep, and walked back down the hill to the port.

Even the Chefoo outside the camp was a different town to the one of Lilla's recipe book. The old picnic panorama of town and bay, junks and steamers jostling in the harbour, Consulate Hill just beyond, that she had so often climbed Temple Hill to feast on had long since vanished. The streets were emptier. The harbour was subdued. The mass of Japanese gunmetal hulks that had come right into the shore — the US and British navies had always moored a little way out — had suf-focated the usual bustle of tiny boats. If Lilla had been able to see far enough, she might have spotted the strangers who had taken over her home — most of the vacated buildings in Chefoo were occupied by Japanese soldiers — bumping into the furniture, moving it around. If any had been left by the looters. Or even her little houses where, by now, the blue silk curtains she had designed would have been torn, if not ripped away completely by their temporary inhabitants. The furniture gone, every strip of woodwork smeared with black boot polish.

I hope she never saw that far.


The same crowd of Chinese faces that had watched the prisoners walk into the camp swarmed out to watch them pass again in their now dishevelled clothes and worn shoes. Lilla and Casey, the rest of the busi-ness community and the couple of hundred Chefoo schoolchildren were, remembers Gladys McMullan Murray, 'literally packed into a small steamer'. Although the old walled city of Weihsien was only about one hundred miles inland from Chefoo, there was no railway between the two towns and the prisoners first had to make the sea journey around the Shantung peninsula to Tsingtao and take a train from there.

The steamer pulled out of the harbour, past the row of red-brick houses LiIla had been born in, rounded Consulate Hill and headed out to the open sea, leaving behind the club, the beach, the hotels, the school and the Casey & Co. building that stood on the waterfront. I wonder whether Lilla was one of those on deck watching the only real home they knew disappear from sight.


The journey was tough. 'It was a miserable voyage,' writes Murray, 'the hold and every available space packed with people . . . our youngest slept in my arms . . . it was unbearably stuffy in the hold . . . and the smells on the ship were nauseating as the plumbing had gone wrong.' The 'floor was hard, the ship was rocking, our stomachs were hungry and rats were running over us', remembers the usually upbeat Cliff.

And it was dangerous. The portholes were 'covered by thick sacking lest American submarines should spot us' and 'there was also the danger of the mines left by the American navy'. Equally chilling was the fact that 'it was the season of the annual breaking-up storm for which Chefoo is famous' — a season marked in Chefoo's long consular records as an annual September toll of shipwreck deaths.

After two days and nights of merciful calm, the ship docked at Tsingtao early in the morning of the third day. Lilla must have wanted to leap for joy. The town's gingerbread churches and wooden chalet houses were untouched. Just as they had been on so many trips to see her brother Reggie, for those picnic lunches, those Empire Day Sports that he'd organized on the beach each year. But this time Reggie wasn't waiting to meet them. Of course he wasn't. Lilla didn't know whether he had escaped, died, or would be waiting for her at the next camp.


The first they saw of the camp was the watchtowers. The photographs show squat medieval stone turrets with pointed wooden hats, the tips of machine guns pointing out like black teeth. Then they saw that the high walls 'were electrified', writes Murray, and 'our hearts sank . . . we didn't know what was in store for us'. But it was when they drew through the gates that the real shock came. The streets were lined with hundreds of prisoners staring at the new arrivals. The men were bare-foot and bare-chested, wearing only shorts, their skinny backs tanned to leather from working in the sun, 'like creatures from another world'.

Lilla must have seen Reggie there. Standing in the crowd. Waving at her, calling out to her and Vivvy furiously. Reggie half his usual size, missing that crisply pressed open-necked shirt and the whistle round his neck with which he always seemed to be starting some race or umpiring some match. Reggie standing alone because his wife had made it back to England and his children had all gone off to nurse or fight in the war. Reggie smiling to see her, his eyes shining with relief that she was still alive.