Lilla’s war with China

Little old ladies with bottles of ink, mounds of writing-paper and firm hands have long been the bane of government officials. There’s even a name for them: ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells’. My great-grandmother, Lilla, whom I remember living in that venerable Kentish town, was Super-Angry. She was so angry that at the age of 100, after an extraordinary exchange of correspondence lasting 30 years and consuming many sheets of Basildon Bond, she succeeded in extracting a cheque from none other than the communist government of China. And when I was writing Lilla’s Feast, the story of her remarkable life, I discovered how she did it.

Lilla had long been tough. In the 1930s she ran two businesses in a colonial trading port in China called Chefoo. When the Japanese half starved her in a concentration camp during the second world war, she defiantly spent her three years’ imprisonment writing a cookery book. When, in 1949, Mao’s Red Army separated her again from not just her home but her embroidery factory and five little rental houses — worth £20,000 then (the equivalent of half a million pounds today) — she returned to Britain and vowed not to let go of life until either Japan or China had given her something back.

She started with the Foreign Office, which appeared to be helping everyone else with war reparations. She typed out long lists of the personal possessions she had lost, including her Steinway, her gramophone and 300 crystal glasses. She copied the Japanese army rice-paper receipt she had been given for her 1938 Ford Sedan, confiscated a few days after Pearl Harbor, and its accompanying letter from a Colonel Shingo, promising to return it after the war. She itemised the crates of embroidered bedlinen, tablecloths, napkins and handkerchiefs that had vanished from their Chinese warehouses.