LILLA’S FEAST
By Frances Osborne
Doubleday, £18.99; 289pp
ISBN 0 385 60666 4
Buy the book
A half-starved woman sits at a table in a freezing cell, typing out recipes for cakes, puddings and sauces. Though her hands are almost too cold to depress the keys and she has eaten nothing but watery stew for months, she is able to conjure up the memory of the lavish feasts of her pre-First World War girlhood, for the edification of her putative reader — the “housewife of tomorrow”.
Frances Osborne’s powerfully imagined memoir of her great-grandmother, Lilla Eckford, begins with a description of the recipe book — now on display in the Imperial War Museum — which was compiled by Lilla during her three years’ incarceration in a Japanese camp for enemy civilians in China. Pages from this work preface each section of Lilla’s Feast, imparting a flavour of a vanished colonial era. For Lilla’s parents belonged to the generation sent out to China, India and the Far East in the service of the Empire. Lilla and her twin, Ada, were born in China and grew up there; for the rest of their long and eventful lives they regarded the place as home.
Drawing on family letters and photographs, Osborne’s opening chapters evoke what life in the “treaty port” of Chefoo must have been like for the expatriate community at a time when British imperial power seemed invincible. Hers is not a sentimental portrayal: offsetting her account of the picnics and dances and race meetings with which wealthy people of the period amused themselves is a sharp critique of the means by which that wealth was gained. Chefoo and its fellow treaty ports had been ceded to the British at the end of the Second Opium War in 1857 — a war the British had started in defence of their interests in the opium trade. Opium was the currency which had bought all this privilege and pleasure; one of the virtues of Osborne’s book is that she avoids the temptation to gloss over such uncomfortable facts.
Nor does she sugar over the harsher realities of her subject’s personal history. Lilla, married at 19 to Ernie Howell, an officer in the Indian Army, soon found married life to be far from idyllic. Ernie, perhaps disgruntled by a less generous marriage settlement than expected, seems to have made strenuous efforts to leave his young bride behind when he returned to India. Lilla, displaying the stubbornness which was to stand her in good stead during her wartime ordeal, insisted on following him to Kashmir, where, according to Osborne’s beguiling account, she won him back with a mixture of blatant sex appeal and superb cooking.
Advertisement
Food is the motif which runs throughout this wonderful book, which combines the intimacy of a private reminiscence with the broader sweep of a social history. Aromas of the spicy dishes Lilla learnt to cook during her years in the Far East seem to cling to these pages, infusing the narrative with an exoticism far removed from the bourgeois complacency of England between the wars. For while Osborne celebrates the courage and stoicism which saw her great-grandmother not only through two world wars, but through the Chinese revolution, she is at pains to show that these were hard-won qualities. Lilla emerges as something of an outsider — an exile from the country she loved; never quite fitting in elsewhere. Perhaps it was this which gave her the strength to sit down at her typewriter in that prison camp: the knowledge that the vicissitudes of politics matter less than living well.