— [exerpts] ...

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.

[exerpts] ...

The cold ate away at everyone and everything. It `dampened our mood and stunted conversation’. Fewer people scurried along the camp paths. And when they did, instead of finding themselves stuck in the mud, they slipped and skidded on the ice. Even the Red Cross visits slowed. Home rations, comfort money, contact with the outside world, all dwindled. Sporting matches were unplayable. Musical and theatrical performances were abandoned. `Every effort was spent acquiring fuel, food and clothing.’

And then, after six months in Weihsien, eighteen months in captivity, just as winter eased, when Lilla must have thought that they’d made it, they were alive and now the cold was abating they would have a chance to build themselves up a little — the rations began to be cut.

Years of war and occupation, followed by a hard winter, had left food in China thin on the ground, the Japanese told the prison committees. What they didn’t mention was that, as US forces made their way steadily across the Pacific, Japanese resources were being diverted to try to hold their positions rather than run their new empire. The prisoners’ days of filling up on noodles and dough, of longing for home supplies of sweet spreads to smear on abundant bread, were over. Even at the start, the Japanese authorities had calculated food supplies on the basis of `quantities for two meals per day’, which the kitchens had stretched to three. Now this would be almost impossible.

Cereal was the first to go. That glutinous mass of stodgy millet porridge had sat heavy in the prisoners’ stomachs from breakfast onwards, choking their insides into believing that they were full. Then it was tea. No tea. In China. The last beaten and rebeaten teabags had disintegrated, the leaves washed pale. Hot water that you had to wish the flavour into. By the end of the morning, Lilla and Casey must have been struggling to find the energy to stand in the long queue for lunch.

Spring didn’t come to the camp in 1944. There was no warm Chinese sunshine and blossom.

No gentle awakening and flowering of a new year. Instead `the climate in the camp switched from arctic cold to tropic heat with clock-like precision’. With the heat came a sun that dried out every inch of the ground.

Left the alleyways punctured with ankle-twisting crevasses. Sent clouds of dust swirling through the air, into the cells, under the sheets, into the prisoners’ lungs. The prisoners must have felt their skin, still cracked by the winter, begin to shrivel further as the heat stole the last drops of moisture from them. The heat was unbearable. Although we wore only khaki shorts (without shoes [which wore out easily and so were saved for the winter months] or shirts), the perspiration just poured off us,’ says Cliff, who was so desperate for water that he often drank straight from the camp pumps — in direct contravention of the health committee’s orders to drink only boiled water. Obviously others had too, as `throughout the night there was the pitter-patter of feet down the corridor to the toilet of those suffering from dysentery’.

And, as the heat rose, the camp’s other inhabitants flourished, especially at night. `Mosquitoes buzzed around us persistently ... Rats ran over us and became such a menace that the Japanese authorities organised a competition to stamp them out.’ Bedbugs swarmed up through any gaps they could find in the floors and walls, and surfaced from the depths of the mattresses. The prisoners tried to slow them down by pouring boiling water into the cracks, but still `by the light of our two - and four - wick candles we could see clusters of little black-red bodies scurrying across the sheets’.

The heat besieged the prisoners in a different way to the cold. Cold chills you from the inside. Heat punches you in the face and chest as you step in it, awake in it. You feel as if a great fist will knock you over, evaporate you the moment you step into its glare. I can imagine Lilla trying to keep to the shade of the trees as she made her way round the camp, each step producing a trickle of sweat that defied gravity as it worked its way into every fold of her skin. Sticking her together with a persistent dampness that inevitably turned into the itchy red rash of prickly heat.

One afternoon in June 1944, a rumour ran round the camp that two prisoners had escaped to join a band of Chinese rebels. Avoiding the electrical fence, they had climbed through a watchtower during the guard’s evening cigarette break. The inmates’ initial reaction was elation. For a few precious hours, excitement buzzed from cell to cell. The knowledge that somebody, anybody, had made it into the outside world gave even the oldest and weakest prisoner a glimmer of hope. `The effect was electrifying.’

But by nightfall elation had been replaced by fear. How would the Japanese react?

Until this point, as in the Chefoo camp, the rule of the Japanese Consular Guard had been relaxed. The soldiers had been on reasonably friendly terms with many of the prisoners, giving some of the boys jujitsu lessons, helping others to dig their toy gardens in the dirt and even fielding a baseball team. And, perhaps because they were preoccupied with the bands of Chinese guerrillas fighting in the region around the camp, the Japanese had stated that their only responsibilities in respect of the internees `were to see that none escaped and to supply coal and wood for cooking and heating and “adequate” food’.

This escape therefore meant a great loss of face for the Japanese guards. Yet worse was the fact that the Japanese had not picked up on the escapees’ absence in the morning’s roll-call — and had had to be informed of the escapes by the prisoners themselves. The captain in charge was `livid with rage’. He ranted and raved at the camp’s committee leaders. He doubled the daily roll-calls to morning and evening and made the prisoners stand outside in the burning sun for hours on end as soldiers counted and recounted, barking at any internee who fell out of line. He imprisoned every other man in the escapees’ dormitory for several days, questioning them again and again as to what they knew.

And then he cut the rations. For two weeks there was no meat. Not even horsemeat or the `tablespoonful of donkey’ that the prisoners were becoming used to.

Yet, however hungry they felt, every single one was grateful that his anger had stopped at that.

After a couple of weeks of punishment the meat ration was restored. Shortly afterwards, the summer rains came. Water poured out of the heavens and seemed to turn to steam as it hit the baking ground. The hot, damp air hovered above the ground, as if trapped by the thick cloud above. With every inch of water, the earth softened and gave way, dissolving back into the rivers of stinking mud that had greeted Lilla a year beforehand. When the rains moved on, they took all the warmth with them. As quickly as winter had turned into a baking summer, so the summer flipped back into winter.

It was then, in September 1944, at the beginning of Lilla’s third year in a prison camp — as, unknown to the prisoners, the US military was pushing its way into the Japanese-held Philippines — that the more systematic cuts in rations began. I don’t know whether this was a calculated cruelty or whether the camp authorities were running out of the money or men needed to obtain the food. They admitted to neither, and simply told the prisoners over and over again that there was no more food to give them. The clearly ragged state of the Japanese soldiers that winter must have made these assertions all the more believable — `we looked at our bedraggled clothes and barely-shod feet and saw our reflections in the young, forgotten guards. They had put newsprint in their boots to keep their feet warm, and wrapped their legs in whatever rags they could find, as they, like us, had no socks to wear. Their uniforms were in shreds, and their bare hands, as they checked off the roll, were cracked and bleeding from the cold,’ writes Masters.

First to go was meat again. Not cut entirely, just halved. But halved from very little to almost nothing. I can imagine Lilla studying the stew that was ladled into her bowl at lunchtime. Sweeping her spoon through it, catching each lump and bringing it to the surface to see whether it was meat, or just another piece of aubergine. SOS, the prisoners called it, Same Old Stew, as each day’s ingredients were indistinguishable from any other’s. Flour went next. Just as the autumn weather was growing colder again. At the next monthly meeting between the supplies committee and the commandant’s men, the Japanese imparted the news with deadpan faces. The flour ration would be cut by half. From now on, Lilla would be lucky to see two slices of bread at each meal to go with her stew, thinned down to a cup of soup at supper.

The following month it was oil. Peanut oil. The prisoners used it for frying, baking and, most importantly of all, to supplement their diet. Peanuts are full of goodness, Lilla had written in her recipe book. Peanuts can be used as a substitute for meat when it is scarce. In a few weeks their fingernails would crack more readily than usual, a little more of their hair would fall out on their brush each night, their skin would feel even drier and, as the increasing cold bore down on them, would split into crevasses at every joint.

They came to dread these monthly meetings, wondering what would be taken away from them next. Whether they would be left with anything at all. Not a hungry soul could open his mouth without talking about food. `Our stomachs, like implacable slave masters, completely supervised our powers of thought. A conversation might begin with religion, politics, or sex, but it was sure to end with culinary fantasies.’ Adults talked about meals they’d had, evenings out, New Year’s feasts, in `intricate detail and tasting in our excited imaginations long forgotten dishes in restaurants visited in some dim past’. I can almost hear Lilla’s voice joining in, chatting away about h-h-how to bake this, h-h-how to cook that, as she scribbled down notes of new recipes before rushing back to her cell to type them up.

In conversation the images were there for a few tantalizing seconds — and then they were gone. Vanished. Not waiting to be turned over and rediscovered as they were in Lilla’s recipe book. She could flick back through the pages, though carefully, as most of the ricepaper was too fragile to stand heavy handling, and gaze at food words she’d typed days earlier. Eggs. Mix. Stir. Sift. Until steam rises. Chop the pork finely. Add garlic. Add cream. Add wine.

It was as though, by writing down the recipes, or even just the words — chocolate, sugar, tomatoes, lamb — Lilla gave them a life of their own inside the camp. And, as the book progressed through category after category, from meat to game to Chinese dishes to savouries to ice creams, Lilla recreated in her tiny grey cell an entire universe of the good old days. The good old days back in her grand apartment in Chefoo. The smell of course after course being carried into the dining room. The tastes changing from dish to dish so that you could eat more than you really had room for. That slightly bloated feeling of having overeaten. Or the good old days in a crisp-white-tablecloth restaurant in Shanghai, the long low-ceilinged room sending the noise and clatter of plates and the latest news echoing back around her ears. Waiters charging past, steaming platters held high. Even the good old days in Kashmir. Roasting the goose that Ernie had stormed in with so triumphantly, still wearing her nightdress over his coat. The good old days that would now always exist on the paper pages of her recipe book, ready to be picked up again the moment she was free.

As the chasm grew between the food that Lilla was eating and the food that she craved, or knew that she needed in order to survive, even bringing herself to type out these recipes must have begun to feel like self-torture. Chop the onions. Onions. Just onions. Raw, cooked, even sprouting with age. As she typed out the word `o-n-i-o-n’, Lilla must have yearned to feel its weight in her hand, brush off the dirt, peel away its papery skin. Wanted to bite into it. Even a raw onion. Crunch through the layers with her teeth. Feel its juices squirt into her eyes, making them sting.

By the end of 1944, food supplies were so low that children’s teeth were growing in without enamel. Girls were not reaching puberty — some would never be able to have children. The queues for what little food there was brought out the very worst in the internees.

Everyone was desperate to see his or her own bowl filled. As they neared the serving hatch, starving prisoners would literally pounce on the servers, accusing them of handing out too much to those ahead of them. Gordon Martin, a teacher at the Chefoo school, remembers feeling `filled with black poison’ when he saw the food run out before his family’s bowls were filled, leaving his young children to go hungry.

I don’t think that I could even have rasped out the words `roast beef’ at this stage. Let alone written a recipe. I would have cracked at the mere prospect of doing so. I think most people would.

Lilla, however, didn’t.

Maybe it was because she was so used to picking herself up off the floor that she knew how to take a deep breath and make the great mental leap required. Maybe it was because she had learned she had to fight to survive. And then, surviving this far might have weakened the prisoners’ bodies, but it had given them a lean inner strength. Enough to keep almost all of them alive.

It is still dumbfounding to read what Lilla was writing then.

By this stage she must have reached her recipes for pastries and puddings, desserts and cakes. Lilla had a sweet tooth and wrote chapter after chapter full of sugary, gooey treats. They take up a good part of her book. Recipe after recipe of indulgent dishes. List after list of cakes. Large cakes, tea cakes, scones, ‘i-c-i-n-g’, she typed. Dripping raisin cake. Chocolate layer cake. Honey gingerbread. Raspberry sandwich cake. Swiss roll. Cream puffs. Treacle scones. Waffles. A warm, sweet orgy of cakes and puddings.

Steamed sponge puddings, hot enough to burn your tongue, coated in a thick, sugary syrup that stuck to your spoon until you had licked every last sticky drop away. Trays of freshly baked apples just out of the oven that you could slide your spoon into as smoothly as butter, their cooked insides melting into a white sugary soup. Or bread and butter pudding. Thick, yeasty bread layered with eggs and milk and butter and sugar and raisins and baked until the crusts were still crisp but the centre had melted into a single hot sweet soggy mass.

This was Lilla’s feast.

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[further reading] ...
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