Slender as the Willow

SLENDER AS THE WILLOW

Kate Ker

Chapter One

Visits to Granny’s were regular and memorable. She was the grand old lady, 85 when I was born, full of vigour but getting shorter, and ‘more herself ‘ as my mother delicately put it, every time we saw her; in the 1960s Granny believed that the British Rail workmen digging ditches for cables on the other side of her fence were really the British Secret Service digging a tunnel down to the coast for our spies because it was still wartime. She attributed her robust health to doing vigorous exercises in front of an open window every morning, come summer heat and winter cold, flu, dengue fever, pregnancy and accidental injury. She maintained that oxygen was crucial to one’s health and vitality. And one of these exercises involved standing and touching her toes, which she could still do to amaze her grandchildren when she was 100 years old. I was fifteen when she died a month before her 101st birthday.

She would begin a story about her years in China with ‘I beat off a pack of wild dogs with my parasol, you know, to save my babies’ lives!’

‘Yes, Mother, we know,’ my father would reply, eyes rolling heavenwards.

She had told my two older sisters such bloodthirsty stories that they had nightmares. When I came along several years later my parents were determined to stop her before she got to the gory bits.

So I grew up hearing tantalising snippets – ‘Shah! Shah! (Kill! Kill!) They all cried, waving their sticks in the air.’ And, ‘We had birds’ nest soup for the first dinner party we gave. The clarity is all-important, so I was nervous, but it was perfect. After dinner I congratulated our cook and asked him how he had managed to make it so clear, and he said, “It easy, Taitai [meaning ‘great great’ or ‘Mistress’], I strain it through Masser’s sock!”’

At Christmas family gatherings I saw everyone’s reactions, ranging from amused tolerance or boredom to irritation. My uncle used to tell me that she was talking nonsense – that all her stories were either exaggerated or born of an overworked imagination. As she had given birth to him and my father in China a few years after the Boxer Rebellion, they had probably been driven to distraction listening to endless repetitions of her stories over the years. I simply didn’t know what to believe.

I would giggle at the witty and teasing asides at Granny’s expense, but with a lingering sense of guilt. I was very confused. I knew she had married my grandfather in the late 1800s and gone to China to live with him, and that the Chinese description of her on her official visiting card read ‘Slender as the Willow’ which had caused much amusement later on when she grew less like the willow. I was told that my grandfather had worked his way up the British Consular service. They had lived through the Siege of Peking in 1900, where their little son had died, but I didn’t know how he’d died. The grown-ups would tell me, ‘There was a lot of fighting going on, but it was all right because Granny and Granddad were safe in the British Legation; they’d never been in any danger. Oh, and she’s written a memoir.’ (This was said as if it wasn’t important). And there were old family letters and photos I could look at one day…

In 1962 we heard that Hollywood had come to tea. For two days they lightly grilled Granny for information about the characters and events that she had witnessed during the Siege. She was in her mid-90s by then, with a formidable memory. She wasn’t paid, but given a Fortnum and Mason’s hamper for her trouble. I went to see the resulting film ’55 Days at Peking’ with my father when I was twelve. He suggested we might as well go one wet afternoon when there was nothing else to do. I squirmed with embarrassment as he roared with laughter at the most inappropriate moments and kept exclaiming ‘What rot!’ too loudly. I was so muddled by now that I thought David Niven was playing the part of my grandfather and that my grandmother was being portrayed as a simpering platinum blonde. Then their two children were shot (had my grandparents had two by then? Had they been shot? I wondered), before Charlton Heston galloped in to save them all. Why was my father laughing so much?

We sat and watched the credits go up. Granny was not on the list.

By now I was clinging to the wrong ends of all sorts of sticks. And I was outraged; feeling protective of her. I sat there in the gloom and promised myself that I would tell her story one day.

I had always felt protective of her, which was strange, looking back. She was a formidable presence, tiny though she was (the family joke was that as I was growing up, she was growing down.) We didn’t have a particular affinity; we were a mystery to each other. To me, she was like a blackbird in a nest of oriental splendour. Her house was full of Chinese rugs and antique cabinets glowing in the sun streaming through the study windows.

Now I see that the respect I had for her was a quiet, strong love. It was different from my relationships with people I openly adored. She wasn’t a huggable Granny. I was aware of her frailty; her deafness, her mental ‘away days’. She was so tough, though. Indefatigable. And when her mind was focussed, she was opinionated and always in the right, of course.

This is an abiding memory of her - a tiny figure, sitting on the sofa amongst her antique treasures, with her back to the rose garden and the dark trees through the bay window. The huge 1930s radio was turned on for the 6 o’clock news every day, as was a smaller radio placed on the table beside her. Both were at full volume so she wouldn’t miss a word of it.

And another, when she’d had her long white hair cut short. She was in her late nineties by then and when we arrived for a visit she was just getting up after her morning nap. She asked me to stay with her in her bedroom as she sat before her dressing table, looking at our reflection in the mirror.

‘Can you see the hair grips?’ she said, pointing to a bundle of three or four black ones gripping each other and about two short hairs from her new fringe.

‘I think they show a bit, Granny,’ I admitted.

‘Then I shall do this,’ she said, and moved them into a row, all clutching the same small lock of hair.

‘Do you really need them? I think your hair looks lovely without them.’

‘Oh no, dear, I cannot have my hair flopping into my eyes, d’you see.’

‘I see, Granny.’

And the subject was closed.

‘I just need a little face powder and I’ll be ready,’ she announced.

I watched, speechless, as she took up a large talcum powder puff from a glass dish, fluffed it into the talc and patted it all over her face and neck. Clouds of the stuff rose around her head before settling into dandruff-like specks on her navy cardigan. Her white face beamed at me from the mirror.

‘Well, now, I think that will do, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Granny, you look wonderful.’

I wasn’t a diplomat’s granddaughter for nothing.

As the Centenary of the Siege of Peking loomed in 2000 my childhood interest reignited and I read my grandmother’s memoir again. I rummaged through the pink suitcase in the attic stuffed with old family photographs and original letters from my grandparents to their families in Scotland and Canada.

An aunt wanted a ‘proper writer’ to write about her, which shook me a bit, but I persevered, visiting the newspaper library in London, the British Library and the London Illustrated News; the latter because my grandfather’s photograph was one of several diplomats’ photographs included in a memorial page to the deceased victims of ‘a massacre’ in the Siege. In fact, he had survived. There had been no reliable news from China because the telegraph lines had been cut and it was assumed that the foreign diplomats had perished. A commemorative service for the Siege dead was very nearly held at St Paul’s Cathedral before news of The Relief arrived.

My first phone call for help and advice was to the Foreign Office Far Eastern Research Desk, which sounded as if it was down a very long corridor to Siberia. Dr Jim Hoare, who answered, was stunned to know that I was the granddaughter of the man he’d just completed two years’ research on.

‘Why? He wasn’t famous or anything, was he?’ I said.

‘No, but an American bought your grandfather’s diary from an antiques dealer, and as it’s written during a period of history he’s interested in he’s donating it to the Peabody Essex Museum. He asked me to find out about him.’

So I didn’t have to do any research of my own.

Jim invited me to his book launch. I arrived drenched by a sudden downpour and was propping up my umbrella against the staircase banister when I bumped into someone who was propping up her umbrella. We laughed and introduced ourselves properly – her name was Susanna Hoe - and I went upstairs to the reception room where the sounds of talking and clinking glasses were coming from, where Susanna came over and asked why I was there and I explained I was writing a book based on my grandmother’s memoirs, and that she had been in the Siege of Peking in 1900.

‘What was her name?’

‘Lucy Ker’

‘Not Lucy Ker? I’ve been looking for her memoir for 10 years! Where is it?!’

‘Er, it’s in a pink suitcase in my mother’s attic.’

Susanna had been researching and writing a book about the women in the Siege. She and her husband Derek came to see me a few days later to discuss our books and she gave me a sweet photo of my uncle Murray, taken just before the Siege, and only weeks before he died of scarlet fever at only twenty two months old.

My book was incomplete; the memoir stopped at the end of the Siege. The few remaining letters were about life afterwards; four more sons, including twins who were feted by their Chinese friends, and the First World War and my grandfather’s promotions.

Some years later my aunt died and tucked away in her attic was a third volume of the memoir that had been forgotten about, plus a large wooden diptych in heavily carved and painted wood. It enclosed a letter of thanks, in beautiful calligraphy, to my grandmother on behalf of Russian refugees fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1917, whom she had helped when they arrived in dire need after their long journey into exile in China. I had grown up with the story of how she had helped run a camp for them in Tientsin (Tianjin) but had not known anything was written down. Now I could complete my book.

Oh how I longed to go to China….

Jim asked if a friend of his could contact me. She was researching a book on the British in China and kept coming across my grandfather’s name. She came, we talked for hours and she said, ‘But you must go to China!’ and later, ‘Of course! You must apply for a Travelling Fellowship with the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust!’

She explained that the WCMT was set up as a living memorial to Churchill to enable any British citizen with a serious passion for their subject of research to travel overseas, bring back what they have learnt to the UK and put it to good use. There was a writers’ category that year that might be just right for me.

I applied, was shortlisted, and waited for my interview a few months later.

The WCMT encourages Fellows to keep a journal. Maybe writing about my own experiences a hundred years after my grandmother’s would help me to connect with her. I wanted to know what it felt like to be so far from home, and in a country where the culture was so different. I hoped it would give me more understanding of her responses to the Chinese people. She married my grandfather, Bill, and moved to China with him as the Boxers (the term adopted by Western journalists for the Society of Righteous Harmonious Fists, after watching their combat exercises) grew in number. They were gathering more young men from every region, ready to kill their hated enemies – the Imperial family who were Manchu, not Han Chinese, and the Foreign Devils.

The network of telegraph poles being planted by the Foreigners across China was causing consternation among the country people, who believed that the moaning wind through the wires was the sound of the spirits of the dead. To the ancient traditional knowledge, the Tao, anything that pierced the earth harmed the energy there - the Chi - so people were afraid of crosses in the Foreign cemeteries and also of church spires, which pierced the heavens. Rumours were spreading that Christians ate the starving babies they rescued from the roadsides, and that during religious ceremonies the Christians drank blood to honour their God.

The rumours rumbled and tumbled into the growing discontent from the traders with their camel trains who had lost their livelihoods to the new railway. They also believed that the Foreign Powers who had made such huge changes to their way of life had caused the recent drought and resulting famine. They were now known as Foreign Devils. Granny was a Foreign Devil. Worse, the red highlights in her hair told the superstitious Chinese that she would attract evil spirits and that her pale eyes were able to see through the earth. In the late Victorian period the corsets women wore accentuated the female form, while Chinese women wore layers of clothes that gave them an androgynous shape. So foreign ladies scandalised Chinese society without a single word being spoken.

I needed new boots to grace such a smart area of London for my interview. I stood dithering for a very long time in a Surrey shoe shop in a pair too high and too expensive. Something was making me stay there rather than tell the Asian assistant I’d go for a coffee and a think. The assistant smiled and said the boots looked ‘very, very nice.’

As she was wrapping them up I asked if she was Chinese and she said she was. She was a young foreign student at Surrey University. She (Sophia, the anglicised name that sounded like her Chinese one) agreed to help me with my Mandarin if I got through the interview. I floated out of the shop.

It was my first interview in twenty years and I was nervous and talked too much – not my finest hour, as I’m sure Churchill would have observed.

Weeks later the WCMT granted me 6 weeks to travel across Canada by train as my grandparents had done after they had married, and then travel to the 7 places where they had lived in China from 1897-1927. I was to have a month there.

I rushed back to the shoe shop to share my good news and Sophia asked me which places I wanted to visit. All the old British consulates, I said – Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuhu, Nanjing, Beijing, Tianjin….’I live in Tianjin! My parents live there!’

We gawped at each other. ‘But that’s where I want to stay for about a week because so much happened there. It’s where my grandparents lived for over 10 years!’

We discovered she would be home when I was planning to go to China, and, yes, she would be my guide in Tianjin.

As I prepared for the trip, one or two old China hands did warn me that my expectations were probably too high. The Chinese were tearing down old districts in the cities and rebuilding at an astonishing pace. The former foreign concessions were sometimes targeted for demolition as they were reminders of the Chinese shame and anger at the foreign powers’ colonialism. I was also told that most people in China would not have been taught any of their history pre-1927, when the Chinese Nationalists came to power. 1927 also happened to be the year Granddad retired.

I might not be received with open arms by university history departments, and there would be no information about my grandmother’s work with the Russian refugees fleeing the revolution in 1917. After all, there was enmity between the two countries. Who would have made notes?

I had wanted to spend six weeks in China because there was so much to see and do, but I was advised to go on a month-long tourist visa. Apparently, applying for a longer one was a risky business; I might not be given one at all if I had to tell the authorities why I was going. I might be followed or have a government interpreter assigned to me.

I took the advice and applied for the tourist visa.