Lilla’s greatest feat is to make us imagine the unimaginable

‘I was much surprised,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in 1873, ‘at the fortifications of Sydney Harbour. One would almost wish to be a gunner for the sake of being at one of these forts.’ He was right. Guarding the entrance to the city’s great inland harbour system at North Head and South Head are lookouts and fortifications in the most beautiful of situations.

The coincidence last week of the short walk to South Head, the long journey to Australia, and a book, led me to a curious sideways reflection on the fine old cannon still pointing across the harbour mouth. Which way to face? Who are the next enemy? Sitting near the lighthouse on the grassy promontory, to my left the skyline of Sydney itself, to my right the open Pacific, I studied the long explanatory plaque, and thought of the book I had just been reading.

The flight over from England had offered precious hours for a new paperback of something I’d been meaning for ages to read. Those hours slipped by unnoticed as I turned the pages. Frances Osborne’s Lilla’s Feast is a family history that reads like a novel — except it tells of a life so exotic, so packed with triumph, tragedy and adventure, that as fiction it might be thought fanciful. But it is the true story of Osborne’s great-grandmother. Beautifully narrated, it uses as a central thread the book of recipes and household hints that Lilla was working on through her darkest days (her three years in a Japanese concentration camp in China, for instance). Osborne has the gift of both explanation and evocation; and a story hardly taught here at home — that strange and disgraceful chapter of British imperial history, our 19th- and 20th-century exploitation of China — springs not just to life but to understanding.