Weihsien internment camp, August 1945.
Lilla has been a prisoner for just under three years.

WHEN THE NEWS CAME it was like a bolt out of the blue. Spat into the camp by the bamboo wireless. The committees tried to keep it a secret, not let anyone know until it was confirmed. But this was a rumour that was fast on its feet. Within a few hours, everyone was murmuring its name — armistice. Peace. Nobody quite dared believe that it was true.

Still, just some hope of an end was enough. The whole camp looked, felt and even smelled different,' Gilkey writes. The odour of the ubiquitous mud from the seasonal rains stopped grating against the back of the prisoners' nostrils. Tired, shambling gaits quickened into lively steps. Eyes glazed over by years of malnutrition were glinting again. Smiles began to hover at the edge of long-cracked lips.

Two days later, on Wednesday 15 August, the news came again. `The rumour factory in camp was never busier,' says Michell. There had been an offer of peace, the war was over. Again, no-one could quite believe that it was true. Everyone was waiting for some convincing sign, some proof, some messianic apparition. There was no call to gather that evening. No message was spun around the camp telling people to come. Like hungry bees, every adult prisoner who could walk simply joined the swarm around the commandant's office. They literally buzzed with excitement as they waited for the official bulletin that the war was over. When a door opened, the commandant didn't appear. Another 'well-hated but secondary official, small, arrogant and mean', stepped out, writes Gilkey, barely looking where he was going until, suddenly, he saw the crowd around him. His face turned white with fear. And he ran for the cover of the Japanese quarters. The sight of this hated tormentor transformed before our eyes into a fleeing rabbit caused a howl of delight and laughter to rise ... as the most promising clue to the real state of things that we could have had.'

For the next day and a half, the camp held its breath.

Then, on Friday morning, they came. The plane passed overhead once, twice, its wheels skimming the tops of the trees. All the prisoners threw down what they were doing. They splashed their way along the muddy paths to the assembly field, the games pitch, whatever you called it, and stood mesmerized, their heads thrown back, chins in the air, mouths and eyes wide open as though they were witnessing the Second Coming. The engines stopped. For a moment there was a deathly silence, the silence you expect before a bomb. Then they appeared. Seven billowing parachutes floating to the ground, with arms and legs dangling below them. And the bold American flag painted on the side of the aircraft glinting in the sunlight.

The prisoners charged. Charged in a single pounding mass, squealing and hugging and weeping on the way. Out of the gates. Past the guards who half raised their rifles before lowering them again in astonishment. On across the fields to where the parachutes were landing. The crowd surrounded the men. Stared at them. Danced around them. Then, with a whoop of joy, picked them up, carried them on their shoulders, and marched back to the camp gates. As the prisoners strode back in triumphantly, the camp's Salvation Army band struck up a victory march — and the national anthems of every prisoner echoed, one by one, around the camp. The notes reverberated around the cellblock walls. Swept into each room. Blasted the hopelessness away.

When the prisoners and the American paratroopers at last stood face to face they looked like dwarves meeting giants. Even the healthiest internee was wizened compared to the soldiers. Two and a half years of wartime rations followed by three years of imprisonment had ravaged the internees' bodies. Their skin hung off their cheekbones in flaps, the whites of their eyes had reddened, the hair they had left was dry and brittle and their clothes were now a size, maybe two sizes, too big.

Then the chief giant, an American major, asked where the Japanese commandant's offices were. Once directed, he cocked the two pistols on his hips and, with a hand on each, strode in to meet him. The two men stared at each other across the room. Neither moved a muscle. Then the Japanese soldier reached into the drawer in front of him and drew out his samurai sword and his gun — and handed them over to the American. The American handed them back. From now on, he said, you are under my command. We need you to protect the camp from outsiders.

And once their enemy had become their friend, nothing else was quite as the prisoners had expected.

There was no swift departure. No rush to pack and catch a train back to Tsingtao and then a boat on to Chefoo, Peking or Tientsin. There wasn't any train back to Tsingtao — Chinese guerrillas had broken the tracks. And, the Americans told the prisoners, they needed time to be re-orientated, re-educated even.

And they had a lot to learn.

First, the internees had to learn how to eat again. The standard of food that they had become used to in the camp was so low that even when one kitchen prepared the best meal they possibly could for two of their liberators, drawing out `specialities from our store ... what to us seemed quite a treat', writes Cliff, `quietly and politely, the food was left uneaten ... to them [it] was unpalatable'. And the food that they had dreamed about, that Lilla had written about, that they all believed would save them, had now become their poison. Cartloads of vegetables, grain and meat — food that the Japanese had told them they were unable to obtain — were rolling in through the camp's open gates. But after years of malnutrition and at least a couple of years of near-starvation, their bodies couldn't cope with it. `During that first week, we could not eat a full meal without vomiting,' Gilkey remembers.

Then there was everything else. The world of empires and great social divides, of grand houses staffed by dozens of servants — already rocked by the First World War — was fast being sunk by the Second. `Magazines [were] distributed and a library set up, all for the purpose of paving the way for our much-anticipated departure,' recalls Michell. And the prisoners had to learn history. `Realising how little of the events of the previous four years we knew,' writes Cliff, the Americans organized classes to bring them up to date. `An officer sketched the initial retreat of the American forces following Pearl Harbor,' and then spelt out how the war had turned around in mid-1942, as they had begun to advance across the Pacific.

How deeply ironic this must have been for the internees. The Allies had already been winning the war by the time they were imprisoned. But then maybe it was because the Japanese had found themselves on the defensive that they had decided to round up all their enemy nationals in the first place.

And then, finally, the lessons came to the two atomic bombs that had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The grim reasons why the Americans were at the camp now, and not in a year or two's time. There was a long list of vocabulary to learn, too. Words that had been rolling off the tongues of people in almost every corner of the world, but which the inmates of Weihsien had never heard — GI, jeep, kamikaze.

Lilla must have wondered whether she'd ever use them back home in Chefoo. The Chefoo that she longed to return to. She would only have had to close her eyes and remember the sweeping bay, the smell of the salty air, the sound of the gulls, to feel a great rush of energy through her body. In a week or two now, she and Casey must have whispered to each other at night, we'll be home. We'll be home.

The hardest lesson was to come.

On a cold, grey day a month after the Americans had arrived, a British colonel turned up at the camp. He had come to speak to the British subjects, he said. Lilla, Casey, Vivvy, Mabel, Mabel's mother, Reggie and the eight-hundred-odd other British in Weihsien gathered in front of him. The moment Lilla and her siblings recognized him their spirits must have soared. The colonel was the younger brother of Bob McMullan from Chefoo. Bob who had died at the hands of the Japanese and Bob who had rescued Lilla's family from bankruptcy a decade earlier. This was another McMullan, he had to be rescuing them again. I can see their chests puffed up with excitement, their eyes gleaming — ready to catch every gesture, every word.

Then the colonel began. He began by warning them that they would not like what he had to say. But the situation was this. Their businesses had been destroyed. The Chinese had now occupied their homes and buildings. The British Army would not be turning the Chinese out. Nor would there be any money to help them start again. While they had all been locked up in the camp, it had been agreed with Chiang Kai-shek's Chungking government that the days of the treaty ports, and the foreigners' immunity to Chinese law that came with them, were over. They should all leave China. Those who had relatives in England should go there. Those who had no other roots apart from China, who had no connection with England at all, should try Australia, New Zealand, Canada. And start again.

The crowd was silent, every face around Lilla as white as a sheet. Some were shaking their heads. Some had tears running down their cheeks. `Others merely clung together mute, emptied of life,' writes Gilkey. Many were murmuring that they didn't know anyone anywhere else apart from China. That they'd never been anywhere else but China. `When that is taken from us,' one internee told him, `we have no place on earth that is ours.' For many of them, every single thing they had taken for certain had been swept away.

Eventually the railway was repaired and Lilla and Casey were taken by train to Tsingtao. Tsingtao was one of four key ports in China that the American forces had agreed with Chiang Kai-shek, whose Nationalist government they were now backing, they should occupy as soon as possible after the Japanese surrender — taking them out of Chinese Communist hands if necessary Now it had British and American ships moored in the harbour. And its hotels, and a few other recently deserted buildings, were put at the disposal of the Weihsien internees.

The Chinese and Allied troops set up a great welcome for the prisoners. As their train pulled into the port, `every roof was covered with Chinese waving British and American flags', Joan Ward told me. `It was a very emotional moment.' And as the internees came out of the station into that Bavarian town square so strangely untouched by the war, the band of HMS Bermuda began to play. A vast crowd of Chinese schoolchildren cheered, waving a sea of victory banners, remembers Cliff, `with slogans in Chinese and English, such as "Victory of the Allied Nations is the base of World Peace"'.

Some of the prisoners cheered and waved back. Some of them cried. But I don't think Lilla did either. It couldn't have felt like much of a victory to her.

She and Casey, her brothers too, were beginning to realize that they had probably lost almost everything they owned. Many of the treaty-porters were ignoring the advice they had been given in the camp and going back to their old homes in China to see what was left and what sort of life they could pick up again. But Lilla couldn't even do that. Unlike Tsingtao, Chefoo had fallen into the hands of the Communists, who, in their search for a new China, were deeply opposed to all elements of the treaty ports and imperialist rule — their viewpoint no doubt hardened by America's decision to lend its support to their enemy, Chiang Kai-shek. They made it clear that they would not welcome any of the internees back to Chefoo. It wasn't even safe enough for Lilla to go back and look.

Lilla stayed in Tsingtao, waiting to see if the situation in Chefoo improved. For the first time in three years she and Casey were living not just in comfort but in luxury, as they had been given a room in the former German consulate — one of the grandest houses in Tsingtao — where they were being waited on hand and foot by Japanese prisoners.

But I think all Lilla wanted was to go back to her home in Chefoo.

A few days after they arrived in Tsingtao, as the family legend goes, Lilla's old houseboy turned up on a bicycle. He had cycled the whole way across the Shantung peninsula from Chefoo with Lilla's fur coat tied to the back. It was the only thing he had managed to save, he said. Everything else had been stolen and vandalized. Not a single one of her possessions remained.

Lilla was devastated. She had worked hard, so very hard, to build her life in Chefoo. At long last she'd had everything she wanted — a beautiful home, a business of her own and money to give to her children. And now the Japanese had taken everything she had worked for. And although Casey was still there with her, the weeks of interrogation, those years in the camp, had taken most of him away too.

She must have wondered what she had done to deserve this.

But she wasn't giving up yet.

If she was going back to England, she was taking something for her children with her.

The German consulate in which she was staying was still full of pictures and furniture and silver and china and every type of possession under the sun. The Japanese had taken everything from her, she reasoned, and the Germans were the allies of the Japanese. Lilla reckoned she was entitled to something for her family. There were a couple of pretty china pots standing on the side. A pair of graceful, slender blue-and-white vases with lids, about a foot high, I think.

There are two vases just like this sitting quietly on a bedroom windowsill in my parents' house in Hampshire, thousands of miles and several decades away from war-torn China.

Lilla's son Arthur left them to my mother in his will.

Back in Tsingtao, Lilla stuffed the china in her suitcase and headed south to Shanghai. There the city itself appeared relatively untouched. `Shanghai bore few physical marks of war ... apart from the street fortifications and air-raid shelters,' writes Bernard Wasserstein, in a rare account of treaty-port Shanghai that goes on to describe life there after the war. As in Weihsien, the 100,000 Japanese troops in the city remained on duty, under Allied orders, and then disappeared into the Japanese civilian population, which, in an eye-for-an-eye gesture, was compelled to wear armbands.

Despite this, `the Shanghai party hardly missed a beat', continues Wasserstein. American sailors thronged through the shopping streets and `like manna from heaven, goods of every description suddenly descended on the Shanghai markets; electric kettles and toasters, typewriters, cameras, radios ...' The bars and brothels found themselves taking off, notwithstanding the `spectacularly unenforceable orders given to the victorious soldiery' to avoid them. On a tamer front, in November 1945 Shanghai's Amateur Dramatics Society revived its production of Richard III, banned by the Japanese three and a half years earlier.

But this wasn't a party that everyone could join in. Like Lilla, many of the internees found their homes and possessions gone. Another `bitter pill for the former internees to swallow', as Wasserstein quotes from a US intelligence report, was the sight of `scores of former collaborators' flashing their money around the town, in sharp contrast to `the gaunt looks and threadbare clothes of the camp residents'.

Either it was poverty in a bustling Shanghai nonetheless short of food and fuel, or a need to see her children and Ada, or both drove Lilla back to England. Anne Eckford, who was married to Reggie's son Donald, remembers Lilla and Casey still living in Shanghai in January 1946. But, shortly afterwards, clutching a suitcase containing Lilla's recipe book and fur coat, the few pieces of clothing that hadn't disintegrated in the camp and their stolen china, they sailed back to England.

At least Lilla had someone to go to there. Although Reggie had gone straight to see his wife and children in Britain, Vivvy was still in Tsingtao, trying in vain to start a business in a post-war economic environment that still didn't know what was going to happen when the Allied troops left. His son Erroll had disappeared in Burma, but Rae had survived the war in a camp near Shanghai and was staying in China. I don't think Vivvy — a huge, handsome and desperately kind man but somewhat hopeless when it came to finance and trade had it in him to move to a new country and start all over again. After all, he was now sixty-eight, and had lost everything not once but twice, the first time being when Cornabé Eckford had gone bankrupt. He, his wife Mabel and her mother must have stayed in Tsingtao with little to look forward to and a great deal of apprehension as to what might happen next.

Lilla was met at Southampton by her son Arthur. She must have known by now, and I wish I could have seen her when she heard, that he had more or less fulfilled her ambition for him. He had been promoted to brigadier, the first and lowliest rank of general but a general all the same, and had even held the post of acting major-general for a while. He wasn't Sir Arthur, and as he had rejoined the army just for the war he could only call himself Colonel now. But I imagine Lilla's smile, when she at last saw her son, almost cleaving her shrunken frame in two.

Maybe it was a good thing that Arthur couldn't tell her then, had to keep from her for years, what else he had been up to. For, while Lilla had been freezing and starving in the camp, he had been in the eye of the storm, working in the tiny team in the Cabinet War Rooms hidden beneath the London streets. His job had been to collate all the information coming in from the forces on land around the world. (A naval officer and an air force officer covered the sea and air.) He then briefed first Churchill and later, after the British public had voted their wartime leader out of office in July 1945, Ernest Bevin. Bevin was Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government that followed Churchill's, and Attlee delegated the War Rooms to him.

Bevin — a Churchill-shaped man (short but heavily built), whose thick round spectacles made him look like a frog — needed some guiding through the system when he came on board. Hidden at the back of a former broom cupboard in the War Rooms was a highly secret transatlantic telephone booth that had provided a direct link between Churchill and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Arthur found himself repeatedly being called down the corridor to help his new chief make the telephone work during his calls to Truman and Byrnes, the US Secretary of State, during the last days of the war. Bevin, a self-educated man who had taken control of the entire trade union movement in Britain, was an immensely powerful figure. This transatlantic telephone was probably the first thing in his life to defeat him. `He used to shout at it [in his thick cockney accent] as though shouting at it would make it work,' Arthur told my father years later, in 1970, when he became a very junior minister in the Civil Service Department in the same building. After hearing this story, my father took the lift down two floors below the usual ground-floor entrance and emerged into the underground labyrinth of the War Rooms. They had been sealed up when the war had ended twenty-five years beforehand and barely touched since. `It was very dusty,' he tells me. `There were handwritten lists still pinned to walls, and sugar cubes, which everyone had hoarded in the war, still in the desk drawers.' And, at the back of the broom cupboard, the transatlantic telephone booth was still there.

If Lilla had heard about all that then, she would have burst with pride.

And then she went to see Ada. Even though they had been apart, unable to write for almost five years, the twins' lives had been so similar that whilst Lilla had been resurrecting mouldy vegetables in the camp kitchens, Ada had been filling her days serving in the Australian Troops' Canteen in London. Just about the time when Lilla had first been herded into a prison camp, Toby had died. While Lilla had been locked up in China, Ada had been in an internal prison of her own. For months and months after Toby's death, she had sat down every afternoon, all afternoon, and cried her heart out on the shoulder of her postcard-collecting cousin Lulu. Lulu, whose womanizing husband had left her to pursue his interests in Paris, and died too.

When Lilla and Ada met, they didn't look like twins at all. Not even sisters. Ada was healthier, taller, fleshy, full. Compared to Lilla, she even looked fat. Lilla could hardly fill her own clothes. However far she pushed her shoulders back, they no longer met the seams where the sleeves began. She didn't just appear thinner, older, ill-fed. As one of her grandsons, my cousin, tells me, `She seemed half the size of Ada.'

#

England, 1947

IT TOOK almost two years for Lilla to fill out to look like her twin again. Her cheeks gradually fattened. The thin layer of muscle that had been stretched over her frame thickened. Her shoulders expanded to fit her clothes. Her eyes lost that rheumy look of hunger. Her hair, now completely grey, began to shine and the clumps that, for years, she had found in her hairbrush each night faded away. Slowly, either from relief at being out of the camp or sheer determination to catch up with Ada, her old energy returned.

It can't have been just the food. Food in England was still tightly rationed. There was even less to go round than there had been during the war. The only way to obtain a decent amount of meat each week was to have been friendly with the local butcher throughout. Lilla and Casey, as good as foreigners pitching up from China at the end of things, wouldn't have made it into this category. In the summer of 1946 even bread had started to be rationed — something that had never happened before. Nine ounces a week each, of a loaf made from flour so fully extracted from wheat husks that it was a dark grey, and barely digestible. Nor was there enough fuel. In the cold of early 1947, an already shivering British population was working in their offices by candlelight and forbidden to cook on an electric stove between nine in the morning and noon, and two and four in the afternoon. Traffic lights and lifts stopped working altogether. Even the national newspapers were cut to just four ...