Ida and Louise

2.

Louise Cook, christened Mary Louise after her mother, was born on June 19, 1901, in the coal mining and shipbuilding town of Sunderland. Three years later, on August 24, 1904, Ida arrived. According to their mother's later account, when Ida appeared her father had cried, 'Good Lord, isn't she ugly!', proving that powers of observation are not always blunted by paternal devotion. But the three-year-old Louise thought the infant heaven itself. She clung to her as if she were her own, and when their nurse insisted on taking the child out for some air, Louise threw herself at the foot of the stairs in hysterics, fearing her sister lost forever. Their mother was a practical woman full of common sense. She soon began to instil these values in her four children—the sisters had two younger brothers, Jim and Bill. Kisses and cuddles were rare, but so were floods of tears and sulks. The one fanciful aspect to Mrs Cook's character was her belief in ghosts and spirits, a preoccupation which, as we have seen, she would pass on to her daughters. Their father, James Cook, was a hard-working officer for Customs and Excise. When he married Mary Brown, he and she found in each other all they needed and aspired to no more.

When Ida was two and Louise was five, the family moved to the London suburb of Barnes, near Wandsworth, and then in 1912 back north to Alnwick in Northumberland, where the girls were enrolled in The Duchess School, founded by the Duchess of Northumberland a hundred years before and housed in Alnwick Castle's old dower house. It was an enchanting place for girls like Ida and Louise, whose gazes were then directed firmly at all that had gone before rather than all that was to come. The dynamic of Ida and Louise's relationship was formed during these years. Ida was the more gregarious child, Louise the more reflective and discerning, the less emotional, the natural intellectual. Louise, the family joked, liked nothing more than settling into an armchair with Dante's Inferno or her Latin grammar, while Ida was inclined to entertain the room with her chatter. Train a telescope on them and the temptation is to think of Ida as the leader of the two, but the truth of their relationship is that neither could act without recourse to the other. By the time they became young women, they were essentially two halves of a whole. Looking only to each other and the goodness of their parents—at teatime Mr Cook liked to give his children lectures on morality—they continued to exist in the kind of domestic emotional security that infants feel, or are ideally supposed to feel, in the presence of their mother. As a result, they provided each other with a confidence that ruled out self-doubt. 'Two girls can often do what one on her own cannot,' was how Ida put it in We Followed Our Stars.

Their looks may have reinforced their mutual protectiveness. By 1919, when the family moved back to London and the house in Morella Road, it was clear that neither would be a beauty. Each had a high forehead and a large nose and lips. Ida had one or two teeth protruding at odd angles, heavy eyebrows and hair frizzed about her ears. Louise was always the prettier of the two, although false teeth eventually brought Ida some improvement. In London, they needed to work. Louise went into the Civil Service as a clerical assistant in the Board of Education, earning £2 6s a week (top marks in Latin in the entrance exams) and Ida followed her a year or two later as a copy typist. They were now independent young metropolitan women in an age which was breaking free from an older morality, and yet they craved none of its excitements. Young men were of course in short supply, thanks to the slaughter of the First World War, but the sisters didn't even make an effort in that direction. They didn't dance the charleston, they didn't drink or smoke. Instead they came home every night to their twin-bedded room in Morella Road, perfectly content in their own company.

Other than the routine sounds of conversation and household chores—the filling of baths, the crackling of bacon—the house existed in perfect unmusical silence. There was no radio, no gramophone, no piano. Ida and Louise had had no musical education and harboured no musical ambition: they neither sang nor played. So when, one day in 1923, the melody of 'Un bel di vedremo' from Puccini's Madame Butterfly, sung by the coloratura soprano Amelita Galli-Curci, flooded their bedroom it was an entirely new and profound sensory experience. This was Louise's doing. One afternoon at the Board of Education she had wandered into a music lecture given by the Welsh composer and organist Sir Walford Davies and came home that night 'slightly dazed'. Enlisting Ida to her enthusiasm, she spent a recent bonus by putting down a deposit on a £23 hand-cranked gramophone and the ten classical records that went with it: music by Bach and Gluck as well as the voice of Galli-Curci.

Soon after, while Ida was away as a bridesmaid at a northern wedding, Louise went into the gallery at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to hear Madame Butterfly. She went back with Ida to hear for the first time Tosca, La Traviata and Rigoletto, always from the gallery's cheapest seats. They began to see prima donnas as heroines—people to love and live for—and marked their places in the Covent Garden queue by hiring collapsible stools from people then called 'the stool men', which were placed outside the theatre during the day while they typed away steadily in Whitehall.

They stood patiently outside stage doors, hoping for a glimpse, an autograph or (they had a small camera by then) a picture.

One episode that reveals a spirit that was to serve them well in the future was the extent to which they took their devotion to the voice of Galli-Curci. Having heard her perform a platform concert in the Albert Hall—her first British appearance—and learning the crushing news that she sang in opera only in New York, Ida became determined that within the next five years they should travel there to hear her. Would Louise come? 'Rather!' she cried. They wrote to Galli-Curci outlining their plans and she replied by return of post: 'If you ever succeed in coming to America you shall have tickets for everything I sing.' Calculating that they needed £100 for the entire trip, they then spent two years of penury during which they ate only brown rolls, bought no new clothes or sweets, and never once took a bus if they could walk. If ever they were overwhelmed by hunger, they would study a Rand McNally guide to New York to remind them of their goal: 'We knew what we wanted and we held on to our purpose,' Ida wrote in a magazine produced by and for civil servants called Red Tape. 'Fortunately, we have always realized the futility of grumbling enviously about someone else's salary—it only makes you overlook what can be done with your own.'

In December 1926, they sailed third class on the Berengaria and rented a room in a hotel in Washington Square West, where, on arrival, they unpacked their trunks and laid out their opera outfits: scarlet for Louise, pink and silver for Ida, opera cloaks for both, all of which Ida had run up from patterns published in Mab's Fashions, a magazine read mostly by typists and edited by Miss Florence Taft. They then put on their smart little moleskin hats and went to the offices of Galli-Curci's agent to pick up their free tickets. The next night, they went to the Met for the first time to hear Galli-Curci sing La Traviata. 'We were two of the best-dressed people in the Opera House!!!' Ida writes in a letter home. 'People quite goggled at our cloaks... other people had diamonds and bare backs and all that sort of thing, but, with all due modesty, our get-ups looked so pretty and young and colourful—besides, they had the Mab's touch!!!'

During the encore, Galli-Curci picked them out in the audience and waved, a gesture they interpreted as 'truly romantic'. An invitation to her Fifth Avenue apartment followed, with a Cadillac to pick them up. Their letters home to their parents ('Mop' and 'Pop') are filled with a childish euphoria: 'Oh Rapture! Rapture! Rapture! [Galli-Curci] is more than we expected.' 'Isn't she a little duck?' they asked Mop in a later letter, by which time they had become the Italian soprano's new best friends. In her Fifth Avenue apartment, they curled up on her library sofa for chats about 'anything from Mozart's chamber music to reincarnation'.

For Ida and Louise, this first trip to New York revealed many things: that there was life beyond Morella Road and the Civil Service; that their profound faith in their own will was justified; that sublime music could belong to them just as much as it did to the ladies they had seen at the Met, bare-backed and adorned in diamonds; and that through their devotion to this high art, they could pursue and befriend their 'stars'. In 1929, they fell heavily for the American soprano Rosa Ponselle on her debut at Covent Garden singing Norma. Ponselle had started her career as a vaudeville act with her sister, singing between films in cinemas, until at Caruso's suggestion the Met hired her for the role of Leonora in Verdi's La Forza del Destino. The beauty of her voice became a talisman for them, the embodiment of all that was good about life. 'It's Ponselle weather today,' they'd say when it was sunny; in bleaker times they would comfort each other with the thought that there was 'always Rosa'.

The third serious contender for their affections was the Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss, director of the Vienna Staatsoper until he moved to the Berlin Staatsoper in 1935—a move which led to his appearance before a de-Nazification committee after the war. They saw him first in 1934, when he conducted his wife, the Romanian soprano Viorica Ursuleac, in Richard Strauss's new opera Arabella at Covent Garden. Then that summer they followed him to Salzburg. Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor, had just been murdered and Jews were leaving Germany in increasing numbers, but Ida and Louise had no intention of missing the festival. A letter home from Ida:

I rather gather that the English newspapers are still being very alarming, but it's all my eye really... Occasionally about twenty-five soldiers stroll along in the sun grinning a bit sheepishly and not keeping very good time, but that is the sum total of the military manoeuvres here!

Krauss was much more interesting. 'He's the most perfect poseur I've ever seen and gets away with it so marvellously that you can only gasp with amused admiration,' Ida wrote home in August 1934.

Before he does do any slipping away, he strikes a match and leans forward to light a cigar with every bit of his disgustingly good looks marvellously illuminated. The match is permitted to burn itself out—and then (and only then) off he goes in the car amidst the gasps of gallery rapture. It's quite perfect.

Letters, some of them twelve pages long, are given over to Krauss and Ursuleac's relationship, and are signed off 'Yours in a state of fizzle'. They sent red roses to Ursuleac's dressing room and one afternoon they followed the couple 'with a skill...of which Sherlock himself might have approved' back to their hotel on the outskirts of town. Later that year they stalked him in Amsterdam, where the beginnings of an unlikely friendship with his wife were forged after they were invited to her dressing room. 'I think she doesn't quite know what to make of us,' Ida wrote home. 'She thinks we're darlings evidently ("intelligent women!") but beyond that she's a bit at sea!'

Like Galli-Curci, Ursuleac became smitten with the two sisters, impressed by their scholarly knowledge of her art and touched by their adoration. Throughout the remainder of the week, Ida and Louise began attending her dress rehearsals, where they noticed for the first time that they had a female rival, a distinguished-looking old lady whom they had seen once or twice with the couple in Salzburg. As their Dutch trip neared its end, the old lady was introduced to them backstage as Frau Mitia Mayer-Lismann, the official lecturer of the Salzburg Festival against whom, they remembered, they had been initially prejudiced on account of her double-barrelled name. That night, having obtained permission to see Ursuleac on to her train, Ida and Louise found Frau Mayer-Lismann on the platform. Ursuleac took them by the arm. Would they please, please look after Frau Mayer-Lismann when she came on a short trip to London? They promised they would. 'Now you will be all right,' the soprano assured Frau Mayer-Lismann.

'We remembered that scene again and again in the years that followed,' Ida recalled in We Followed Our Stars, 'for, though we did not know it then, our first refugee had been commanded to our care.'

Back in London, Ida and Louise took the Mayer-Lismanns sightseeing. In Westminster Abbey, Frau Mayer-Lismann asked the sisters if it were a Protestant or Catholic church. The same question arose in St Paul's. 'Are you a Protestant?' Ida asked her. 'I? I am Jewish,' the old lady told them. 'Didn't you know?' They did not, nor, until then, what it had come to mean. Gradually, over the week, the Mayer-Lismanns explained the consequences of Hitler's rule. Ida writes of their growing awareness in We Followed Our Stars:

We began to see things more clearly and to see them, to our lasting benefit, through the eyes of an ordinary devoted family like ourselves. This was one of the most heaven-sent things that ever happened to us. By the time the full horror of what was happening in Germany, and later in Austria, reached the newspapers, the whole thing had become almost too fantastic for the ordinary mind to take in. It took a war to make people understand what was happening in peace time, and to tell the truth, very many never understood it. But our understanding of the problem grew quite naturally... To us, the case of the Mayer-Lismanns was curious and shocking, but not incredible. We were shocked, but we did what I suppose most people would have done. We asked, 'Where did they hope to go? What had they to offer in the work markets of the world? and, finally, what could we do to help?' It was all what I can only describe as un-urgent to us in those days.

By the sisters' own admission, once the Mayer-Lismanns had returned to Germany, concern over their 'affairs' was eclipsed by the opera season.