Lilla’s war with China

11 September 2004

Frances Osborne on how her great-grandmother fought Beijing for 30 years and finally won, aged 100

Her writing a little shaky by now, Lilla asked her grandson to fill in all the forms. He attached yet more copies of all her lists, receipts and photographs and sent them off from his ministerial office (he was secretary of state for energy). Lilla began to plan her funeral.

Then the British government department dealing with these claims against China wrote back to Lilla’s grandson. It said that of course it would be happy to process Lilla’s claim but there was one small administrative problem. This was that Lilla’s British passport, issued in 1939, no longer made her British. Along with tens of thousands of other British people whose families had furthered the British empire’s interests abroad, Lilla was discovering that now there was no more empire, Britain didn’t really want its colonials back.

In order to claim under the arrangements with China, Lilla had to provide her birth and both of her marriage certificates to prove her nationality and changes of name. Though she had survived the Boxer Rebellion, two world wars, two concentration camps and the Red Army’s ‘liberation’ of China, these documents — funnily enough — weren’t to hand.

Lilla’s grandson, who had inherited some of her letter-writing skills, wrote back pointing out that these were documents that couldn’t possibly be available. Six months later, in May 1982, Lilla heard that her claim had been approved. ‘Now I can go to Heaven,’ she wrote, and went. Luckily her departure was prompter than the arrival of the cheque. For when it came, instead of returning the half a million pounds she was expecting, it was for £1,400. She had been paid just one fifth of the 1935 value of her houses alone. If Lilla had been around to discover that, she would have been so angry that I think she would still be alive today.

Lilla’s Feast is published by Doubleday in hardback at £18.99.