Authors: Frances Osborne
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 nonaggression 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 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 goose bumps.
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 had arrived, says Jane. Stay in England with her children, with her grandchildren, with Ada, but with the 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 straightaway. 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 back to China.
Lilla left England that day, August 28, and took a train straight through France to Marseilles. On August 30, 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 afterward, 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
Félix 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-near fear that this clunk or that rattle was something far worse than a chain sliding back onto the deck.
The morale of the other passengers waned. They barely bothered, even the ever-so-chic French, to change out of their pajamas. 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 makeup 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 élégante,”
they crooned, Lilla boasted in her letter. “
Très élégante.
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 marveled 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 colors, 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 harbor made her heart leap with joy. “Oh what a lovely sight it was.” The
Félix Roussel
stayed in the harbor 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 the Hong Kong harbor that evening, the lights in the city seemed to shine like “millions and millions of stars.” And as the ship moved farther out to sea, the harbor 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, Germany was Britain’s enemy. In China, however, the Germans and the British 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, 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, her twin, and her 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 London 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 homemade 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. It 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 August 20, 1941—several months before Britain and Japan were officially at war. The paper has yellowed. The ink faded to a dark blue-gray. And the only reason it ever reached England was that 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.”