SLENDER AS THE WILLOW -
In Grandmother’s Footsteps
Beginnings
“K’o” Lu Hsi” are the Chinese characters on my grandmother’s red, official visiting card as wife of a British Consul:
K’o - Ker
Lu - Lucy
Hsi - Slender as the Willow (much to everyone’s amusement when later on in life she grew less willow-like)
It was September 1897. She had just arrived in Shanghai by ship from Vancouver along with her new husband, William Pollock Ker (known as Bill). He had been in the British Consular Service in China for about eight years when they had met by chance in London. He’d asked her to marry him, and after a year of letter-writing-longing, they married near her family home in New Brunswick, Canada, and now here they were being piped off the ship and greeted by a brass band on the dockside.
As the Consulate’s horse-drawn carriage trundled through narrow streets bustling with porters carrying huge loads on their backs or shouldering lidded tubs of hot water dangling from poles, they passed street vendors, men sitting at small tables playing Mah-Jong, card trick performers and eager audiences crowded around puppet theatres. Lucy held her handkerchief up to her nose as if to wipe it, smiling and nodding all the while. Bill had advised her not to let her true feelings show, and she wrote later that she wished she was wearing a pair of “the scented gloves of Paris” to provide relief from the overwhelming stench of fish, rotting rubbish and the effluent that had escaped from inadequate drains.
On the morning of their wedding from her home in Canada, she had gazed at her reflection in the mirror. She knew that this unrecognisable woman wearing a corded silk wedding dress and orange blossom wreath in her auburn hair had to grow into the persona of a British Consular wife. On board ship, Bill would teach her enough Chinese to read shop signs and manage her household where the servants spoke in many dialects and mangled English. The Chinese staff onboard ship would be the first to hear her few words of Mandarin, the official diplomatic language of the Chinese Imperial Court. This would enable her to pay her own diplomatic visits to the wives of Chinese officials. It was the polite, the expected thing to do, even though a British interpreter would accompany her.
She had to face one, certain fact, that she would not see her beloved family for at least five years. They could not afford such a trip and Bill’s furlough would take that amount of time to be earned. Letters could take six weeks to be delivered in the diplomatic bags. Otherwise, telegrams were only used for very important news.
The network of telegraph poles being planted by the Foreigners across China was causing consternation amongst 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 business to the new railway. Most people hated the Imperial Court because the Emperors and their dynasties, going back centuries, were Manchurian, who had seized power from the Han Chinese.
They also believed that the Foreign Powers who had made such huge changes to their way of life had also caused the recent drought and resulting famine. They were now known as Foreign Devils. The ones with red hair were evil and the ones with pale eyes could see deep inside the earth.
Lucy was unaware of all this as she’d patted her auburn hair at the mirror and gazed into her pale eyes, imagining what her life would be.
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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 Uprising, 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. I was told he 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…all in a pink suitcase in the attic.
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 & 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.
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Lucy was born, “plain and obstreperous” on St Valentine’s Day 1868 in New Brunswick Canada, to Scottish parents; a country doctor, Charles Murray, and his beautiful wife, Elizabeth. The second of seven children, and the oldest daughter, she was in competition with her brothers. In those days she would have been expected to remain at home and look after her ageing parents, but her father recognised her keen mind and a need to be “of use in the world” so agreed to allow her an extended education, which resulted in her gaining a degree in English and Mathematics at Dalhousie University. She became a teacher at her old school in Halifax, and in June 1896 she, a colleague and their redoubtable headmistress, Miss Margaret Ker, took a group of their girl pupils to London, to begin an educational tour of Europe. They were to be met by Miss Ker’s younger brother, Bill, at Tilbury docks. From the ship’s rail Miss Ker pointed out the fair-haired, slight figure dressed in an immaculate dark grey suit and Lucy “looked and approved”.
He was on a two-year furlough from China after a testing few years translating and interpreting for the British Consular Service during the recent Sino-Japanese war, and he was in London to study for the Bar at Middle Temple and catch up with his Scottish family. He was thirty two and also unmarried.
He spent as much time as he could with the group, accompanying them to art galleries and places of interest and eventually, when the pupils had gone to stay with relatives, Margaret and he invited Lucy to meet the Kers at their house in Aboyne near Aberdeen. The phalanx of aunts were horrified by her appearing at breakfast on the first morning still in her dressing gown and her hair in rag curlers and was told in no uncertain terms that this was a grave offence never to be repeated. She had a lot to learn in order to be deemed respectable enough to marry their nephew, but she held her own, and they were falling in love. They cycled and walked together and went on a cruise around the Summer Isles on the west coast. One evening it was decided they would throw an impromptu costume ball, so the men cycled to Aberdeen and returned with nearly everything they needed, but Lucy had to fashion a dress for herself as ‘Penelope’ out of a sheet, and another to be worn as a toga for Bill as ‘Ulysses’. They couldn’t find anything resembling a helmet, so used some laurel leaves from a nearby bush, twisting them into a wreath, thus elevating him to Emperor.
Weeks later she was walking up the ramp to board the ship back to Canada with a heavy heart when an officer handed her a note from Bill: Penelope, Weeping unceasingly, Your Ulysses.
She wondered if she “would ever see those eyes of heavenly blue again?”
She was beginning to settle in to the rhythms of a new term when she received a telegram: Will you marry me? She ran down to the telegram office: Yes.
Lucy was the woman for him. She was tough enough to live in China, clever enough to satisfy his intellect, fiercely loyal, patriotic and capable. And she loved him.
Bill was the one for her. He was clever, ambitious, kind and compassionate with an easygoing nature and engaging humour.
Eventually, he would be able to preside over a court in China, and have British cases brought to him at a British Consulate, which in those days stood on the British-owned ground they were built on, not like in modern times.
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As the 100th anniversary of The Siege of Peking approached, I delved into the pink suitcase and found photos of my grandparents with the last Emperor of China, Pu Yi, and Lucy’s typed memoir, corrected by my father, Alan. He and his last remaining brother had encouraged her to write it after Bill died in 1945. She’d had five sons. Five sons in China! She and her baby twins were feted and visited by every high-ranking Chinese official.
And her story about the crowd waving their sticks in the air and shouting ‘Shah! Shah! (Kill! Kill!)’ was chilling; I simply had to find out more. Go there. Do something.
I wanted to see that place in Suzhou, where it happened, and the British Legation in Beijing where the Siege took place with over a thousand people inside its walled compound. The family had kept their letters attesting to the fear as tens of thousands of Chinese tried to breach the walls and burnt down the ancient Hanlin Academy. The couple’s despair and consuming grief when their toddler son died. Their strength and resilience and love in letters home, which were kept in the Legation safe in case of their deaths. I also wanted to see Beidehe, the summer resort created by the Foreigners and now used by the Chinese government for their holidays. There are wonderful photos of my grandfather and three of his sons swimming in the sea. Tianjin, too, was where six thousand Russian refugees fled to from the Russian Revolution in 1917. Bill was Consul General there at that time and Lucy was President of the Ladies Benevolent Fund and worked tirelessly for years to organise food, shelter, clothing, and work for them, saving many lives. She was presented with a letter of gratitude written on their behalf, encased in an intricately carved wooden diptych, at a moving service at the Russian Orthodox Church just before Bill retired in 1927. It subsequently lay in my uncle’s attic for decades, untouched and in perfect condition.
The Churchill Fellowship made it possible for me to go, and so on the morning of my departure I gazed at myself in the mirror, wondering if I could grow into the sort of person who might look as though she knows what she’s doing.
I memorised Lucy’s memoir, set up a blog “In Grandmother’s Footsteps”, met my future Chinese interpreter in a Surrey shoe shop (of course - where else?) and began my journey on the Canadian Pacific Train to Vancouver, just like she did on her wedding day.
Two very different women, a hundred years apart, immersing themselves in that fascinating country - one for thirty years and one for four weeks. And I can’t stop talking about it, either.
