Ida and Louise

1.

Money has overtaken and refurbished Morella Road, Wandsworth, just as it has overtaken many other ordinary streets in London. There is nothing exceptional about the architecture. The houses of Morella Road are bay-windowed Victorian terraces, fundamentally plain but with plasterwork and little spires added to give a French Gothic touch. London has a thousand brick-built streets like this and for most of the twentieth century they symbolized respectable middle-class living. Now such a house might cost close to £2 million—'now' being early 2007, when London house prices were rising on average at £7,000 to £11,000 a month. Audis, Mercedes and BMWs are parked in the street and the front doors are painted in the kinds of shades that suggest the householder has made a prolonged study of the colour charts. Among this evidence of wealth and fashion, it isn't easy to imagine how things once were: how the woodwork would have been sober dark green or black, how brokers' clerks and civil servants in bowler hats would have walked down the path each morning towards the railway station or the tram stop and come home again to plates of boiled root vegetables and cheap cuts of meat. An era of monochrome virtues: plain food, careful accounting, social deference, suppressed emotions, good manners—when nobody wanted to excite the interest of their neighbours, when it was best not to be extraordinary.

The sisters Ida and Louise Cook lived at number 24 Morella Road for more than sixty years of the twentieth century, from shortly after the First World War ended until the very last years of the Cold War. In many ways—though not all—they defy the generalizations of social history: they were extraordinary. One morning in March this year I took a train to Wandsworth, walked to where they had lived and looked up at the window of the highest room—the second floor, under the eaves—which had for several decades been Ida's study. So much romancing and typing had happened in this small workshop of make-believe. It was here that Ida had sat in front of her manual typewriter and clattered out her letters to opera singers, her magazine pieces, her romantic novels, and her and her sister's autobiography. But what I thought of when I looked up at the window was something else that had been composed there: an unpublished manuscript by Ida called 'Some Psychic Experiences', written in the 1960s, when Ida and Louise had fallen under the influence of a spiritualist, Leslie Flint. Flint, a former cemetery gardener and occasional gravedigger, had become a celebrity medium by specializing in a method known as 'direct voice'. Through seances held in Flint's large and gloomy drawing room in Paddington, many voices had come to the sisters, mostly those of the old opera stars who were their lifetime obsession; but only one had ever made them cry. When the sisters came back from that particular seance, Ida climbed up the stairs to her study and wrote up her account:

I suppose the most moving—and the most utterly unexpected—of all was one day when several people had already spoken and suddenly, out of the air, very clearly and distinctly though with a marked German accent, a woman's voice said, 'You may think it very strange that I should come and speak to you because you do not know me. But there are many people here you do not know who love you very much.'

Surprised and touched, we thanked her, and she went on, 'My name is Anna. I was—killed—in Dachau.'

'Were you, dear?' we whispered.

Then she hurried on, 'But I have long ago put behind me all that terrible time.' She went on to say that she had heard how we had tried to help some of her people, and now she wanted to thank us—which she did, in the simplest and most moving terms. At the end she evidently found it a little difficult to hold the line, because she finished, 'Well—I don't know—I meant to say so many important things but—I love you. Auf wiedersehn.'

Understandably, Louise and I—and Leslie too—were reduced to tears.

A voice from the Holocaust (though the sisters never knew those events by that term), relayed to two elderly English spinsters by the suspicious means of a gravedigger turned communicator-with-the-World-Beyond in a London room with the curtains drawn. To disbelieve it gets us nowhere. The point is that the Cook sisters did believe it. They were moved. In lives which swung dizzyingly between the purest fantasy and the utterly real they had every reason to be.

My interest in the Cook sisters began after a friend gave me a copy of Ida's long out of print memoir, We Followed Our Stars, published in 1950, which among other things tells the story of how she and Louise, plain and anonymous in their tatty cardigans and Woolworth glass beads, became among the most effective British transporters of Jews out of Germany between 1937 and the outbreak of war. During those years the sisters made numerous quick trips to Nazi Germany, avoiding the suspicion of German border officials by taking flights from Croydon and returning via Holland and ship to Harwich. It isn't clear how many Jews they saved—the record speaks of 'twenty-nine cases', but many cases were families rather than individuals so the number may have been closer to fifty, sixty, or more.

This considerable humane achievement takes up just over a quarter of a book that is mainly devoted to chronicling their love of opera, or to be more exact their star-struck worship of its singing stars. They had such small interest in what might be called the 'real', these two women best characterized by their sisterly devotion, their belief in the spirit world, and their long escape into the confectionery of the operatic stage and the romantic 'woman's' novel. Why and how did they become involved in the dangerous and expensive business of rescuing several dozen of Hitler's potential victims? This was the question the sisters had managed to avoid answering with any degree of satisfying honesty or self-knowledge throughout their lives. 'I don't care for all this modern emphasis on hidden motives,' Ida Cook told a reporter for the American magazine McCall's in 1966. 'There's altogether too much of this psychoanalysis. After all, what you are is what you do, isn't it?'