MISS GRAHAM’S WAR

The idea for this novel began with a cookery book of the kind given away with gas cookers. The book was pre-war, the spine long gone, bound by parcel tape, the cover boards held together by a perished rubber band. The gold embossed title, Radiation Cookery Book, had faded back into the brown cloth cover that was all stained and crusted with ancient traces of flour. I found it among my mother’s effects and I’d never seen it before.

I have it on the desk in front of me now. Inside, the pages are interleaved with recipes cut from newspapers and magazines, Ruth Morgan’s Wartime Cookery – Savoury Favours, Twelve new ways to enjoy RYVITA. As well as cuttings, there are handwritten recipes in different inks on different stationery: my mother’s handwriting, my aunt’s and what I take to be my grandmother’s, although I don’t remember ever seeing it. The book must have belonged originally to my grandmother, passed onto my aunt and then to my mother who had kept it after her sister’s death.

 When I first found it, I looked at the book for a long time. They were all cooks and all women who cook like to exchange recipes, so there was nothing odd about that, but they were all dead now and as far as I knew there were no surviving letters, so these recipes were the only written connection between them. I put the book aside, packing it carefully. I knew it was special. I like to cook myself and felt a poignant affinity with these women in my family. I’m also a writer and I knew there was a story here, but what it was or how I would tell it, I had no idea. 

Years later, I was in the Imperial War Museum in the gallery devoted to spies and espionage. The British Zone in Germany after the Second World War was a hot bed of spying, according to a panel on the wall. I knew that my aunt had gone to Germany immediately after the war, left her job as a teacher in Coventry to work as an Education Officer for the Control Commission. Maybe she’d been a spy… The idea was so absurd, I almost laughed. My maiden aunt, a spy?  She’d ended up an eminently respectable Headmistress, pillar of the community. And yet, why not? Fragments of family history came back to me. Her time in Germany, photographs she sent of ruined cities and sunken ships, her friendship with a German boy before the war. Much is concealed in a family, especially from children and I’d always had a sense that she’d led a hidden life. I do remember her concern for the children she found in Germany: native Germans, displaced persons, refugees whose lives had been torn apart by war. Their plight never left her. On her return to Britain, she worked tirelessly for the Save The Children Fund.

Through the alchemy that sometimes happens, one idea connected to another… the Radiation Cookery Book. I’d found a way to use it in telling the story of my aunt (or someone very like her) and her time in Germany. It isn’t a biography; I’m a fiction writer and too much of her life was unknown to me. It was a long time in the writing, seven years, nearly as many drafts with no promise of publication and a change of agent, but I wouldn’t – couldn’t – give up on it. I owed it to my aunt.