Ida and Louise

3.

By now, Ida was no longer a civil servant. Ever since the 1926 trip to see Galli-Curci, she had kept in touch with Miss Taft at Mab's Fashions, supplying the occasional article on such subjects as country life in Northumberland and 'at home' with Galli-Curci in the Catskills. Ida did not take herself seriously as a writer: writing was a way to help to fund the sisters' operatic trips in Europe. Then, in 1932, Miss Taft offered Ida a job as a sub-editor. Ida refused ('I'm in the Civil Service,' she protested, 'and so are my father and my sister. There's the pension...') but Miss Taft persisted and eventually Ida made the short journey from the law courts, where she had been working as a typist, to the office of Mab's Fashions in Fleet Street. There she began to write short stories as well as edit. In 1935 the sisters were flat broke—'our appetite for foreign travel was beginning to grow alarmingly'—so when Miss Taft suggested that Ida attempt a serial for Mab's, Ida agreed, her mind running only on the high fees commanded by the most successful writers.

Miss Taft requested 'something strong'. Ida wrote three chapters. Miss Taft read them and changed her mind. She wanted 'sweet' instead. Ida fought her ground and won. The completed serial, Wife to Christopher, had a violent marital rape and was anything but sweet. Christopher, the hero, is tricked into marrying Vicki by her beauty. The rape is presented as the 'collection' of her debt to him: 'I'm going to collect what you sold, Vicki,' he tells her. 'And I'm not at all sure that it won't be rather sweet doing it.'

Christopher showers kisses on Vicki's angry, bruised mouth as the whiteness of her skin shows through the lace of her nightdress; he swings her off her feet, knocking the lamp over so that there is darkness; and then...she wakes up in 'sweet ecstasy', with the realization that 'if he came with something of the terror of an avenger, he came with the glory of a lover, too'.

'The terror of an avenger'? 'The glory of a lover'? Where was Ida getting this stuff? From the opera, perhaps? From her own sublimated desires? But Miss Taft knew exactly where to place such a book. She got in touch with Mr Charles Boon, the joint partner of the publishing house Mills & Boon. The imprint, then as now, was a byword for romantic fiction, so much so that the words 'Mills & Boon' came to recommend books to readers rather than the names of their individual authors. Less well known is their indirect role in financing the small operation that saved a few dozen people from death in the camps of Germany and Poland.

Boon, 'the original wideboy' according to one of his descendants, founded the company in 1908 with Gerald Mills, the son of prosperous Midlands glass-factory owners. Early authors visiting its gentlemanly offices near Fitzroy Square included P. G. Wodehouse, E. F. Benson, Jack London and Hugh Walpole. Its original success was built largely on Jack London's backlist and a series of textbooks penned by retired schoolmasters. In the Twenties, it was almost bankrupt before Boon took firm control and concentrated the list on what became known through their distinctive branding as 'the books in brown'. These hardback romances were a particular favourite of commercial lending libraries and corner shops. In Boon's view, their success depended on each novelist following a 'format' while at the same time writing with absolute sincerity. The heroes needed to be at least 5 feet 9 inches tall, physically strong and moody. Heroines should never have sex outside or before marriage, or, if they did, required to be punished in some way. Strong, even violent bedroom scenes were permitted to enhance a book's 'passion', but only if those involved were married.

Boon read Ida's manuscript, found it a perfect fit for his formula and bought it immediately. Ida got £40 for Wife of Christopher with royalties running at ten per cent thereafter. The book was a success and a few months later, in November 1936, Boon asked her to provide three longer novels of around 70,000 words each, with advances rising from £50 to £100. The following February, she signed a third contract, this time for four novels. Ida, writing under the name Mary Burchell, was about to become among the most lucrative and prolific of the Mills & Boon stable of novelists (another nineteen of them, all young women, published their first Mills & Boon novels that same year). Including her first, Ida wrote 129 novels over the next fifty years, many of them in her study at Morella Road, above the bedroom where she and Louise slept chastely each night. 'I am I think by nature a tale-spinner, and passionately interested in people,' she said later by way of explaining her success. 'The thing that I found I was capable of doing was romancing—rather strongly for my period.'

The money was good. By the late 1930s Ida was earning close to £1,000 a year from her books, about four or five times a typist's salary in the Civil Service, and she gave up her job at Mab's. But her unexpected good fortune did nothing to change the dynamic between her and Louise. Ida had been clear from the start that her money was their money and so they would regularly stroll around London 'discussing the extraordinary phenomenon' as if it were a heaven-sent miracle rather than the product of days and nights at the typewriter. They spent thousands in their imagination: cars; fur coats; trips to Europe; trips to America; Louise's possible retirement from the Civil Service. Then, at the moment of temptation, they found themselves thrown on a different course. 'Fortunately (oh how fortunately!),' Ida wrote in We Followed Our Stars, 'before I had any chance to alter my way of living...the full horror of what was happening in Europe finally, and for all time, came home to us.'

The sisters had kept in touch with Frau Mayer-Lismann, who was planning to leave Frankfurt for good. Only now did they start to understand the implications of the Nuremberg Laws as well as the practical difficulties and official obstinacy that German Jews faced when they sought refuge abroad. Britain saw itself mainly as a country of transit for Jewish refugees, and as a result most entrants needed to have prospects of re-emigration. (The United States, by contrast, admitted perhaps three times as many. By 1945, only 60,000 Jewish immigrants from the pre-war years remained in Britain.) Admission to Britain became tighter still when Austria was annexed in March 1938 and a complicated visa procedure clogged up government systems and led to dangerous delays.

The restrictions, as Ida and Louise learned them, were these. A refugee child could be brought over provided a British citizen would adopt her until the age of eighteen. A woman could enter on a domestic permit provided there was enough evidence that she had a job and that job had been advertised. Men between eighteen and sixty were accepted only if they had documentary proof that they were going on to another destination. In most cases, this meant proof of a quota number in the queue waiting to go to America, with the wait stretching from six months to two years. Such cases were accepted into Britain only if a British citizen would assume financial responsibility for them, from the moment they landed in Britain until they reached the final country of adoption. A searching guarantee was required and for men over sixty it had to be for life. The Refugee Committee dealt only in cases where the paperwork was complete.

By now, Ida's income from her romances was showing a steady rise. She became 'intoxicated' by the sight of her money and 'the terrible, moving and overwhelming thought—I could save life with it.'