Lilla's Feast (38 page)

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 eggplant. S.O.S., 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 important 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 rice paper 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 savories to ice creams, Lilla re-created in her tiny gray 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-tableclothed 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 have even rasped out “roast beef” at this stage, let alone write a recipe for it. 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, Lilla must have reached her recipes for pastries and puddings, desserts and cakes. She 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, icing, 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 center had melted into a single hot, sweet, soggy mass.

This was Lilla’s feast.

Chapter 16

SURVIVAL

WEIHSIEN INTERNMENT CAMP, JANUARY 1945. LILLA HAS BEEN IN A PRISON CAMP FOR TWO YEARS AND THREE MONTHS, OR A LITTLE OVER EIGHT HUNDRED DAYS.

Hope comes in many guises. It can float in on the wind as a familiar scent, a changing season, just a rumor, or even a definite piece of news. Or it can take a concrete form. A gift, a home, an item of clothing. Or food.

Hope came to the Weihsien camp in the form of American Red Cross parcels. They appeared out of the thick white snow one morning, rolling into the camp on the back of donkey carts. Donkey cart after donkey cart. Piled high, overflowing, almost tipping with huge parcels three feet long and half as wide again and full to bursting, the prisoners knew, with food. The entire camp downed tools, dreams, or whatever was keeping them busy and stumbled through the snow to watch this epiphanic caravan arrive.

The Americans were the first to weep. These parcels usually came to them. The rest of the camp had to use their cash to bargain for what they could. Only nothing had arrived for over six months. Food had become priceless. “In utter amazement, tears streaming down our faces,” remembers Langdon Gilkey, “we counted fourteen of those carts, each one carrying well over a hundred parcels!” As more and more parcels came in through the gate, quick calculations were made, and a rumor ran through the Britons and the Belgians, the Canadians, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Greeks, everyone else:
There’s enough for us, too!

Tears ran down the prisoners’ cheeks, cutting paths through the frost that was settling on their skin the moment they stood still. Each of them was imagining opening their own parcel. Imagining sinking their teeth through the firm flesh of tinned meat, the kick of caffeine in their veins, the fizz of sugar on their tongues. Tastes that had haunted their dreams. Tastes that—if supplies ground to a halt, and they well might—could keep all of them alive. A Red Cross parcel each!

But that wasn’t how everyone saw it. Just as the prisoners’ dreams seemed to be turning into reality, they were snatched away. The camp commandant was “mobbed by a contingent of angry Americans” arguing that the parcels should go to Americans only. And “afraid of an uprising,” he took the parcels and locked every single one up in the camp’s assembly hall until he could work out what to do. A “heavy guard,” adds Gilkey, “was posted to watch over them.”

The prisoners waited two days for a decision from the Japanese. For two long, cold days, the assembly hall seemed to bulge with promise. Finally, a notice was posted on the hall door. Every internee would receive one parcel. The two hundred Americans would receive one and a half. The parcels would be distributed at ten o’clock the following morning.

The line for the parcels began at dawn.

The queue was a jolly affair. The prisoners’ lips were buzzing with pleasure as they looked forward to what was to come. A late Christmas present for their children. A late Christmas present for themselves. Something to ease the pain in their bellies. Something to keep the cold at bay, the cold that—even though it was January and so bitter that they had stopped counting the degrees below zero—none of them felt as they waited for their packages. “What blessed security was promised to every father and mother with three, possibly four, parcels for their family, enough surely to last through to the spring, whatever might happen to our camp supplies,” explains Gilkey. As they stood in line, every British, Canadian, French, Russian, Dutch, Belgian, and Italian prisoner loved the Americans for their generosity.

A few minutes later, the Americans were more reviled than the Japanese.

Shortly before ten, as the queue began to shuffle forward to the doors that at any moment would open, letting them into an Aladdin’s cave of food, a new notice was posted. Seven American prisoners had again protested against handing out the parcels to any non-Americans. The commandant had referred the matter to Tokyo. There would be no parcels today.

It was as though the internees had jumped off a cliff only for the sea beneath them to vanish. Gilkey overheard an Englishman explain to his crestfallen children that the Americans had taken away Santa. “For the first time,” he says, “I felt fundamentally humiliated at being an American.”

For ten long days, the entire camp was on edge. However hard the non-Americans tried not to point their fingers, however well everybody knew that it was just seven out of the two hundred who had made a fuss, an ugly tribal instinct reared its head, threatening to cleave the camp in two. Lean and mean on their empty stomachs, the prisoners began to remember where each of them had once come from. Fistfights broke out over the parcels. Over old grievances. Over new grievances. Over nothing at all—if you can call a year of near starvation and the worry of whether you would have enough food to keep your family alive “nothing at all.” Every prisoner’s stomach ached for the treasures that were just out of their reach. And then the decision arrived from Tokyo. One parcel each for everybody, including the Americans. The remainder would be sent to other camps.

Lilla and Casey must have staggered back to their cell with their parcels—each weighed about fifty pounds—and unwrapped their newfound wealth on their beds. An endless picnic of powdered milk and tinned butter, spam and cheese, salmon and raisins, concentrated chocolate and sugar, jam, and several packs of cigarettes spread before them.

Nobody had to taste the food to feel its effect. Simply having it, possessing it, knowing it was there was enough to keep them going. It was as though “our small community had been whisked overnight from the living standard of a thirteenth-century village to that of a modern affluent industrial society. Now we had food to keep us all from hunger,” says Gilkey. And whereas, before the war, the food-loving Lilla would have turned up her nose in disgust at all these powders and tins, now she must have been close to tears at the sight of it. I can see her, in her freezing cell, prizing open the pages of her recipe book again and rereading the recipes that she had already typed. The scent of fresh basil and garlic, the rustle of brown paper bags squelching with fruit, the feeling of dough between her fingertips, the warmth of the oven all flooding back. She pulls the leaden typewriter out of its trunk with ease. Winds a new piece of paper—a new piece of American Red Cross paper that had arrived in the package—into it, throws a couple of extra coal balls on the fire, and starts to type. Drifting as she does so back into the comforts of that old, familiar world without feeling her stomach, her guts, her entire body, trying to claw her back to a bitter reality.