Journeys with Miss Graham - Celia Rees

Every book is a journey. A journey from first idea to publication with all the adventures, challenges, pitfalls and complications that an actual journey can entail. Even after a book has been published, its journey is not over. It is out in the world, beyond the author's control, subject to the vagaries of the market, the judgement of readers and critics, transitioning from hardback to paperback with a new cover and in this case a new title. Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, which I have blogged about here and here , is now Miss Graham's War.

When a book is published, it does not necessarily leave you. Miss Graham's War was eight years in the writing, a continual presence which comes back in glimpses and flashbacks. 

In the stasis of Covid, with travel impossible, I thought of the journeys taken by the eponymous Miss Graham and the journeys I had taken to follow her. It isn't completely necessary to visit the places that you are writing about, of course. The internet is a great resource, full of images and virtual tours. I find Trip Advisor particularly useful. There can't be anywhere on the planet that doesn't have an accompanying video or photomontage thoughtfully uploaded by a helpful traveller but, for me, research trips are important, giving travelling a clear purpose, sharpening awareness and observation. Research is an adventure in itself. It creates it's own stories and spying and writing have much in common: tracking your characters, their movements, where they go, who they meet. 

 Miss Graham's journey begins in London. My research began with scouting locations. I went on spy walks with my daughter, Catrin.  We went to the squares near Paddington Station to find Dori's house. It was now a particular house in a particular square. Then the journey is back through time to London in the war.

Dori's house was close to Paddington Station. One side was a great yawning cavity, the buildings flanking the gap showered with beams wedged against the walls. Dori's row was more or less intact, although some of the houses were boarded, either unsafe or waiting for their owners to return.

Miss Graham's War

From Dori's square we went to Baker Street to find SOE Headquarters. The building has kept its anonymity and is now offices above a Holland & Barratt. At the bottom of Baker Street, is a porticoed building which was also rumoured to be used by SOE. It was perfect. Not only that but just down the road was a spy shop selling surveillance equipment. Synchronicity. Always a good sign when researching. 

From London, Miss Graham goes to Northern Germany to her job with the Control Commission. She went by steam train from Liverpool Street Station to Harwich, then across to the Hook of Holland, on through Holland and into Germany, finally arriving in Hamburg. 

 I couldn't take that same journey, but I could map it in the Miss Graham's Notebook. For every book I keep a journal, just as one might when going on a real journey. It is a record of the progress of the book from first ideas to completion. 

Hamburg Station 1946

When she arrived in Hamburg, the station would have looked like this. Hamburg had been devastated by some of the most concentrated Allied bombing of the war. I flew to Hamburg and, of course, the city has healed but the church of St Nickolai has been left as it was, as a memorial, much like the cathedral in Coventry, Miss Graham's home city. She had seen devastation before, but not on the scale that confronted her in Hamburg. This is where fiction and life merge. Miss Graham is based on my aunt who took the same journey. Her story was where the book began. These and some of the photographs  she sent back to the family to show them what Germany was like in 1946. 

From Hamburg, her journey took her to Lübeck, the Hanseatic port on the Baltic where she was stationed. Lübeck had much in common with Coventry, both smallish, compact, medieval cities, both laid waste by bombing. Lübeck by the R.A.F on Palm Sunday, 1943; Coventry by the Luftwaffe on the evening of November 14th, 1940. Both city centres were devastated, both had cathedrals and churches destroyed.

When I arrived in Lübeck there were very few reminders of the destruction wrought on the city. The Marienkirche had been re-built, its iconic copper clad towers restored. Much of Lübeck's historic centre had been painstakingly re-developed, although a swathe of modern buildings through the centre indicated where the worst of the destruction had been. 

Marienkirche, Lübeck, Palm Sunday, 1943

Marienkirche now

 

Holsten Gate, Lübeck 

Miss Graham's journey did not end at Lübeck, she went to Berlin. I followed her there. Again, the city had been restored, re-built and was utterly changed from the city she found in 1946. 

The destruction wasn't necessarily worse than Hamburg or any other city. It was just bigger, more spread out, going on for mile after mile. 

Miss Graham's War

Berlin 1945 from the air

Brandenburg Gate 2013

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 1946

Berlin had suffered doubly, not only from Allied bombing, but from Russian shelling. It would continue to be scarred by the division of the city into Allied and Russian Zones which would eventually become East and West Berlin, divided by a wall with acres of no man's land on either side. The Wall was an extension and expression of the Iron Curtain, the division right across Germany and on through Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. 

The Iron Curtain started on the Baltic coast, only a few miles from Lübeck. A museum close to its starting point commemorates the division of a nation and a continent. A collection of concrete posts and rusting barbed wire fences, shows the border's evolution from a simple stringing of barbed wire between wooden posts and ending with three or more wire barriers, guarded by regular turrets,  the gaps between them sewn by mines. A chilling reminder of the development of the Cold War and the growth of the distrust between east and west. 

The land was the same on both sides. Undulating country, fields dotted with cattle ... The Green Border began on the Baltic. Lübeck was only a couple of miles away from it. An arbitrary line marked with sagging strands of barbed wire strung between rough-hewn poles from the forest. It followed the contours of the land, an inexorable progress up hill and down dale, through farmyards, railway stations, even houses, all the way to Czechoslovakia. The Great Divide had begun. The line had been drawn. A visible border for an invisible war. 

Miss Graham's War

I couldn't have written that if I hadn't been to that place. 

We can't travel back in time but we can go to the places we are researching. You will always see something, learn something that adds to the book, sometimes in profound ways. In the Marienkirche in Lübeck, the great bells that fell from the tower in that night of destruction are still there, melted and embedded into the stone floor. 

Marienkirche, Cross of Nails  

The bells in the Marienkirche, Lübeck

Close by, in an alcove, which still bears the signs of fierce destruction is a Cross of Nails sent from Coventry Cathedral to a sister city which had suffered just as cruelly. 

It seemed to me that in comparing Germany then to Germany now, I was witnessing a miracle of recovery and renewal, not just from the appalling and utter destruction of the Second World War, but the further bitterness and scarring of a Germany divided. 

I chose to start Miss Graham's War, not in 1946 but on the 10th November, 1989 and the falling of the Berlin Wall, a reminder of just how far and fast we have come on the road to redemption and reconciliation. 

Part of the Berlin Wall in the grounds of the Imperial War Museum

Celia Rees

www, celiarees.com

@celiarees1

@CeliaRees
Miss Graham's War, HarperCollins,  paperback publication, June 10th 2021

Miss Graham's Cold War Cook Book by Celia Rees

It was a very long time coming but it is here at last! Yesterday was publication day! I must confess to thinking that the day would never come. The book was in my mind when I joined the History Girls in June 2011.  I had always written Children's and Young Adult fiction but I knew that this book would be an adult novel. This would be a departure for me and and a challenge and I welcomed the chance to join a group of fellow writers who wrote historical fiction for all ages, including adults. I could not have asked for a more supportive group. Over the years, I've always been able to rely on a sympathetic ear through the book's vicissitudes and I have to thank History Girls, past and present, for their help, encouragement, and their generosity in reading and commenting on the finished book. 

I could have stopped writing at any point, not even started, turned back to YA, the writing world I know, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Neither could I change it, introduce some young characters, turn it in to a YA title. I knew it had to be an adult book. It had been brewing away in my mind for years. 

It began with the chance find of an old cookery book among my mother's effects. 

The book was a mystery in itself. I'd never seen it before. When, I opened it, I found clippings and cuttings from newspapers and magazines, some dating back to the war, and handwritten recipes - I recognised my mother's, my aunt's and what I took to be my grandmother's writing. As far as I knew, these were the only written connection between these three women. I had found no letters. I put the book aside. I knew there was something I wanted to write about there but I had no idea what it might be. 

Years later, I was with my daughter in the Espionage Gallery of the Imperial War Museum. I read on a wall panel that after the war, the British Zone in Northern Germany had been a hotbed of spying. One of us said, 'Perhaps Aunty Nancy was a spy!'. We both laughed. My Headmistress maiden Aunt a spy? How ridiculous was that? But then again, it was perfectly possible... 

She'd been in Germany directly after the war, working as an Education Officer for the Control Commission, the civilian branch of the occupying forces,  tasked with bringing some kind of order to the post war chaos. She'd been stationed in Lübeck, practically on the border with the Russian Zone. She had spent the war at home, teaching in Coventry and looking after my grandmother. Then, as soon as the war was over and much to the consternation of the family, she'd upped sticks and gone to Germany. She didn't come back until the mid 1950s. I remembered her coming back bringing presents for everyone, Benson & Hedges cigarettes for my mother, a carved bear for my brother and a stuffed monkey for me. I remembered other things about her. She'd led a bit of a hidden life. She was a fluent German speaker and had had a relationship with a German boy before the war. She'd also spent a lot of time 'jaunting about Europe' according to my mother, accompanying her her cousin who was rumoured to have been involved in something 'hush hush' during the war.      

My Aunty Nancy

 

I had been her executor, one of the reasons I knew there had been no letters. I'd kept some things that related to her time in Germany. She had sent photographs of ruined cities and sunken ships in bombed harbours; a shocking addition to the family album. I found more in a German chocolate box. 

I'd also kept her passports, so I knew when she had entered and left Germany.

 

Among the photographs were holiday snaps of Bavarian villages, ox carts, two women walking along a street festooned with swastikas and a photograph of a young man in a cricket sweater. Could that be her friend Karl? 

I knew enough about life to create the skeleton of a story. If she had been a spy, then who would she have been working for and why? What would she be finding out? If she was going to be sending messages via recipes, to whom would she be sending? I needed to know more about post war Germany and what was going on there. As for the coded messages and the recipes, it would make sense for the exchange to be between women. 

The more I found out, the more possible it became. There were, indeed, women involved in post war work in Germany. Vera Atkins, ex SOE, working with War Crimes, trying to find her missing agents.

Vera Atkins

Krystyna Skarbek

I already knew about the women who had worked for SOE during the war. I had read ex History Girl Clare Mulley's excellent biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, The Spy Who Loved. Suddenly a real plot was forming, new characters arriving and Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook was born. 

Celia Rees

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Ghostly Re-Union on World Book Day - Celia Rees

March 1st is World Book Day, as I'm sure you all know. Like many other authors, I will be visiting a school, Coundon Court School in Coventry. For a writer, visiting a place that provided direct inspiration for a novel evokes a particular kind of nostalgia and Coundon Court did that for me.. 

Coundon Court School - The 0ld House

Before I was A History  Girl, I was a bit of a Goth Girl. I wrote a few titles for Scholastic's Point Horror Unleashed series, beginning with Blood Sinister. Scholastic like my vampire story and wanted another book from me, something to add to the growing list of home grown horror that was the Unleashed, so I had to think of New Idea.

At this time, I was working in a College in Coventry. My students knew I was a writer and liked to hear about what I was writing. We got to talking about spooky stories, scary stories. Two of them had been pupils at Coundon Court School and they told me that there were stories about the school being haunted. Along with the rest of the class, I was all ears. Although most of the school was modern, it was based in and around a Victorian Gothic mansion which had once been owned by a local industrialist, George Singer, a manufacturer of bicycles and later motor cars.  After his death in 1909, the house passed into other hands, eventually being acquired by Coventry City Council. It opened as Coundon Court High School in 1953.

The house might have moved on but George has not.  Over the years, several members of staff have seen him in the Old  House. After one Parents' Evening, Janet Powell, an English teacher, glimpsed a middle aged man with greying hair and moustaches going into the library. At first, she thought it was a stray parent but when she followed him, he had disappeared. It was only afterwards that she realised that the figure she'd seen bore a remarkable resemblance to George Singer.

George Singer

 George Singer is not the only ghost to haunt the school. In 1907, a maid plunged to her death down the central stairwell. She has since been seen on the landing, a fleeting grey presence outside rooms that used to be the nursery and where children have been seen playing on a rocking horse...

A Haunted School! By the end of the ghost story session. I had my book. Not long after this, I  was asked to accompany a different group of students to - Coundon Court School. Writers don't believe in coincidence. It was meant to be. I began to recall other stories told to me by other students. As a teacher, I was naturally interested in oral history, story telling and ghost stories often figured prominently in these sessions.  The ones that intrigued me most were the stories that the children told to each other, the ones that had to be coxed out of them. Every school has ghost stories, even if it's only haunted toilets, but some are more - unusual. The first school I taught at in Coventry was a new school, no spooky history, but all the children believed that the sports hall was haunted by a girl who had been killed after coming off a trampoline. At exam time when assemblies were held in there, a certain spot on the floor was always left clear, no matter how often pupils were told to move along.

The next school I taught at was a modern school built on an old site. There had once been a monastery there and later a mansion, rather like Coundon Court. All trace of both had disappeared, except for landscaped grounds and an ornamental lake. The children had stories to tell of monks and nuns, cowled figures, women in white, but the most intriguing story of all centred around the woodlands that spread from the school grounds to a nearby common. In there, were nine steps, so the legend said (or five, or seven - depending on who was doing the telling). If you found the steps and went down them and  failed to jump the last one, you would go straight to Hell... Like the girl coming off the trampoline, this would not be found in any collection of Ghosts and Legends. It was their story. 

I had plenty of material for my haunted school story and more if I chose to expand it out into the city itself. Coventry has a long history and as M. R. James observed, history is never far from the ghost story.

Celia Rees

Guy of Warwick - A Very English Hero - Celia Rees

My last month's History Girls blog was about the gothic ruin,  Guy's Cliffe House, and the history and legend attached. One or two of the comments wanted to know more about Guy of Warwick, legendary knight and renowned hero who gave his name to Guy's Cliffe.

Guy of Warwick is one of those figures, like Robin Hood and King Arthur, whose existence is more legend than history. His story has been told and re-told over the centuries in early English 'Histories', Medieval Romances, chapbooks and ballads. There may be a kernel of history there. He was probably Anglo Saxon. His name is connected to the family of Wigod, Lord of Wallingford under Edward the Confessor and events re-counted place his adventures in the reign of King Athelstan. He is always firmly placed in Warwick and the surrounding area, just as Robin Hood is associated with Sherwood Forest, and I always think there must be some truth within these stories, or why would they endure?

Embellished, and expanded, Guy of Warwick has taken on the trappings of the times in which his story was told, or re-told. The Anglo Norman warrior, Gui de Warewic, first appears in the early thirteenth century. He was further transformed in the fourteenth century in a number of romances, adapted from the French.

Guy of Warwick, from an illumination in Le Romant de Guy de Warwik et d'Heraud d'Ardenne

 Guy's 'History' would not look out of place as a plot line in Game of Thrones. It goes like this:

Guy was a humble cupbearer, a page at the court of the Earl of Warwick. He falls in love with the Earl's lovely daughter Felice but he is rejected as being too low born to win her hand. He has to go out and prove himself worthy of her. He embarks on a series of heroic tasks, ridding the country around of the Dun Cow, a monstrous beast twelve feet high and eighteen feet high. A rib bone (actually a whale bone) was on view for many years at Warwick Castle - a nice example of how the legend passes as history. The castle also holds Guy's two handed sword. The Dun Cow is remembered in place names like Stretton-on-Dunsmore and Dunchurch and there are many Dun Cow pubs in the area. Once he has despatched the Dun Cow, Guy takes on a giant boar that has been terrorising Coventry.

Guy of Warwick slating the Dun Cow, tableaux in the Bull Yard, Coventry City Centre

He returns to Felice after completing these superhuman tasks but it is not enough. To win her, he has to be famous, he has to gain renown. He leaves for Europe to prove himself as a knight in battle and combat, now more a figure of chivalric romance than a heroic beast slayer (although he does kill  dragon). After knightly adventures on the Continent, he returns triumphant. Felice marries him but this is not the end of Guy's story. Full of remorse for all the violence in his past, he decides to embark for Jerusalem disguised as a pilgrim, leaving a distraught wife who is only prevented from committing suicide by the thought of her unborn child. He wears a gold ring as his promise to return.

Guy of Warwick

Guy reaches the Holy Land but on his return journey he is involved in more adventures, fighting as a champion and doing battle, righting wrongs and delivering justice for various people he meets on the road. He also discovers a magnificent sword (see above) hidden in a cave. He travels in disguise, refusing to reveal his name and is often underestimated in battle by his opponents, to their cost.  When he reaches England, he finds the country under threat from the Danes. Still disguised as a pilgrim, he goes to Winchester where King Athelstan and his court are praying for deliverance. The king has called for a knight to fight the Danes' huge African champion, Colbrond but no-one has come forward. The king is visited by an angel in a dream and told that his champion will be the first pilgrim to be at the North Gate of the city on the next day. That pilgrim is Guy. In an epic encounter, worthy of Game of Thrones, Guy defeats Colbrond. He then returns to Felice in Warwick. Still disguised as a pilgrim, he joins a group of poor men being fed at the castle gate. Unrecognised, he is invited to eat with her in the castle but leaves to visit a hermitage, on the nearby banks of the Avon, where he hopes to receive instruction. 

Guy of Warwick's Cave. Guy's Cliffe

When he finds that the hermit has died, he replaces him. On the point of death himself, he sends a message to  Felice in the form of the gold ring. She comes to him as he lies dying and the pair are re-united. Felice dies soon after and is buried alongside Guy. 

And there ends the story. Told and re-told, more myth than history, it contains a wealth of different motifs: the mythic monsters of English folklore: the questing adventure, the dreams and miraculous discoveries, the battles and single combat of chivalric romance and the exile and return narrative,  the long separation, the disguise and discovery, common to so many myths and stories including the The Odyssey. 

Guy of Warwick has been rather eclipsed by Arthur and the Matter of Britain but his story is full of romance and adventure. He is a very English hero and his name lives on, not least on that quintessential symbol of England, the pub sign.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com