Spies, Lies & Deception - Celia Rees

 Being interested in spies and all things spying, I just caught the end of this fascinating exhibition at The Imperial War Museum. 

I first visited the IWM in the Sixties and have been a regular visitor over the decades. In recent years, my visits were often focused on a particular exhibition which had direct relevance to something I was writing. Fashion On The Ration was really useful when I was writing Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook; Lee Miller: A Woman's War was invaluable as one of my characters was an American photojournalist. I like exhibitions. The mix of images: photographs, paintings, sketches, postcards, newspaper cuttings and the objects that people used, owned, carried and valued tell you a great deal about those people and their lived experience. To a writer of historical fiction, these things provide invaluable reference, enabling us to more accurately re-create and re-imagine past lives. 

I've also spent time in the Imperial War Museum Research Room, doing Real Research, reading contemporary accounts of life in Post War Germany for Miss Graham: diaries, letters, journals, log books and official documents. It's not just information, these documents provide really valuable details of people's lives. These are the 'nuggets' we depend on as writers to make our characters authentic to their time and make them come alive, details that it would be impossible, otherwise, to find or imagine. Even the paper, the handwriting, the writing instruments, pencil or fountain pen, the browning paper, the courier font of the manual typewriter are evocative echoes of past lives. 

The Imperial War Museum is also a place of inspiration. I was in another Spy Exhibition when I had one of those powerful moments when disparate strands of an idea come together and coalesce into something that you know will be a book, in this case Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook. 

Spies, Lies & Deception covered more than a hundred years of espionage through 150 different objects, photographs and interviews. It began with spying in World War 1 and went on to the interwar period and World War II: the deceptions, inflatable tanks and Operation Mincemeat; the gadgets dreamed up by MI9 the precursors of Q and the heroism of agents like Noor Inayat Khan who had to use those gadgets for real. 

Noor Inayat Khan

The exhibition continued through The Cold War period with the Soviet double agents, Cambridge spy, Kim Philby and  Karl Fuchs, the spy who gave away the secrets of the atom bomb to the Soviets. One of my favourites from this period is Melina Norwood, an 87 year old great grandmother, another atomic spy, who wasn't uncovered until 1999. As a woman, she was not considered a threat. 

Melina Norwood - great grandmother - and spy

The exhibition continued to the present, ending with the Salisbury Novichok poisonings and the role of Bellingcat, the online investigators, in uncovering the real identities of the two men responsible, both officers in the GRU,  Russia's Foreign Military Intelligence Agency. 

Matchbox containing secret messages.

We've come a long way from messages hidden in matchboxes to Bellincat's combing of open source data. In a world of deepfakes, where it is hard to tell fact from fiction, their investigation of the Salisbury poisonings proved it is harder now to hide and keep secrets. Just like mobile phones have made any citizen a potential news photographer, online open source intelligence organisations, like Bellingcat, keep an eye on clandestine developments in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.  

Celia Rees

http://www.celiarees.com  

 Miss Graham’s War, Formerly Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook), Harper Collins. Paperback publication, June, 2021

  
    

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

www.celiarees.com

Follow me on Twitter @CeliaRees

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Paris Remastered - Joan Lennon

Photographs and film footage from the past are always evocative, now matter how shaky or blurred.  Recently, advances in technology are being applied to them, partly in the name of preservation and partly as a way of bringing them even more vividly to modern audiences.*  Have a look at A Trip Through Paris, France below - 

Instead of the jerky movements we're used to seeing in early film, the footage has been slowed down to a more natural pace.  Instead of adding a (sometimes really dire) music sound track, there are the noises of horse traffic, bicycle bells and people talking.  Watching this, I had a real sense of people wearing clothes, not people in costume.  I loved the kid who stood right in front of the camera until poked out of the way with an umbrella.  And those moving walkways in the snow - if I had seen this before writing Slightly Jones and the Case of the Hidden City, set in 1890s Paris, I would definitely have found a way to include them in the story!


* Peter Jackson's piece They Shall Not Grow Old, done as a commission from the Imperial War Museum, is another example, though I haven't summoned up the courage to watch it yet.  (There's a short news report on it here.)


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Slightly Jones and the Case of the Hidden City.

100 Armistice Days - Day 98 - Joan Lennon

The Armistice 100 Days project is the result of a collaboration between the Imperial War Museums and the writers' collective 26 to commemorate the lives of 100 people who experienced World War I.  One hundred writers wrote a 100 word piece (a centena) in which the first and last three words are the same, and a 500 word creation story about the research behind the writing.  Click here to see this moving display of photographs, paintings, artefacts, writing and research.  Each story is vivid, heart-warming, heart-breaking, poignant, inspiring.  Each takes an individual by the hand and draws them close to us now.

My centena is called "Except ..." and was inspired by my grandfather, James Mortimer Clark, who was a doctor in the Canadian Army Medical Corps, before going to China as a medical missionary, where he died in 1925.  

Dr James Mortimer Clark 
Canadian Army Medical Corp

The repeating words I chose were "not the end" and the poem begins like this - 

Not the end – the beginning!

the beginning

of the end

                         of the World War wedge

all those boys’ broken bodies

driven between

              this Ontario farmboy

and his mission field 

the shout that drowned out the call would be stilled

the start and the end would be stitched back together

except … 

You can visit the page for Day 98 here.

The project has been running since 5th August, and is coming to an end in two days.  It was a privilege to be part of it.

(The 10th is usually Michelle Lovric's slot, but she kindly swapped with me this month.  You can find her excellent post Infamy Again on the 5th of November, here.)

(There is a selection of centenas stunningly performed by their writers on YouTube here.  And a beautiful book has been produced which is available from Just Giving (profits to go to the charity War Child).)

(I did a photo post for The History Girls back in 2013 about my mum in China before her father died called, unimaginatively, China and My Mum.)

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

Silver Skin.

Fashion On The Ration - Celia Rees

I recently visited the Fashion On The Ration Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum with my daughter, Catrin. We both have an interest in 1940's fashion and the exhibition did not disappoint. It gives a comprehensive insight into not only what men and women were wearing but the constraints and changes that total warfare brought to all aspects of everyday life. We think we know a lot about life in the War but as Julie Summers warns in the accompanying volume to the Exhibition, Fashion On The Ration, 

'How we see clothing in wartime Britain is shaped by our knowledge in hindsight of the whole war and the austerity that followed it ... Far from being a story of drabness and misery, it is a story of colour inventiveness and determination to carry on regardless of the shortages and constraints of the coupon culture.' 

There is something important in the above quotation: for writers of historical fiction, hindsight can be a dangerous thing. 

The changes to dress that occurred were dictated by necessity. Conscription meant enormous numbers of men and women in uniform. The increased demand for uniforms put huge pressure on the textile and clothing industries as raw materials and labour were directed away from civilian production. This affected fashion. Out went pleats, coats and dresses that used yards of fabric, in came close fitting suits (costumes), simple dresses and military style coats. This was not just a material saving exercise,  it became part of fashion itself, the cut and style of clothes influenced by the now ubiquitous uniform. 

 For the Military Alliance, Vogue, London, 1941

By 1941, the pressure on materials and labour resulted in the imposition of clothes rationing. A points system was introduced: eleven coupons for a dress, two for a pair of stockings, eight coupons for a man's shirt or pair of trousers, and so on. Every adult was allocated 66 points for the year. The clothes still had to be bought however, the coupons handed over with the money, and not everyone could afford 14 & 1/2 guineas for the military style suit shown here (£657.90p in today's money - Vogue doesn't change much).


Ration Book and coupons

It soon became clear that while the rich could have well made, stylish clothing made out of good quality material, the poor would have to make do with something far shoddier but shoddy clothes would wear out quickly, replacements would have to be bought, taking up more coupons, material and labour, which was neither fair nor good for the war effort. Something had to be done. In 1942, the government introduced the Utility clothing scheme, offering a range of well-designed, quality and price-controlled clothes affordable by all. Strictly specified Utility fabrics and clothes made from these materials, guaranteed quality and value for money and coupons. The Utility clothing scheme also meant that the government could standardise production, which aided the war effort.

Utility Clothing

Not everyone could afford new clothes and clothing coupons had to be carefully hoarded. As the war went on, the number of points allocated shrank and had to be used for the whole family. The women of Britain could not be completely dependent on a hard pressed textile and clothing industry, they had to start doing it for themselves. Unlike these days, nearly all women then could sew and most had a sewing machine, or at least access to one, so one of the great contributions to the war effort was Make Do and Mend.

Skirts, dresses, coats cut in more generous pre-war times were cut up and re-modelled. Worn out clothes were patched, darned, frayed collars and cuffs turned and when repair was no longer possible, cut up and used as patchwork. Make Do and Mend allowed women to be inventive and creative in their use of what was available to them. Embroidery and appliqué, not only covered darns, but gave old garments a bright new look. New materials were pillaged. Parachute silk was used for everything from wedding dresses to camiknickers. One group of women in a village near Redditch confronted a downed German pilot with pitchforks and broom handles, intent on getting his parachute which supplied enough silk to make knickers for all the women in the village.

parachute silk knickers

The silk escape maps issued to RAF pilots were begged from boyfriends and husbands to turn into scarfs.

silk escape map scarf

Many women were in uniform themselves and wore those uniforms with pride. Wearing that uniform and doing the job that went with it, did not make women less feminine, rather it made them feel smart, independent, responsible and powerful. Equal to men. After all, they were often engaged in the same activities. Even so, there was a concern that women should not let feminine standards slip for their own morale and for the morale of the nation's men folk. Makeup was never rationed and continued to be manufactured. Coty made face powder as well as army foot powder and helpful tips were given out about how to make lipstick go further by melting stubs together, or using beetroot juice as a substitute (I can't help feeling a man might have made up the last suggestion (or even the first)). 

Some of the most powerful images of the time show women in uniform, going about their duties, or dressed for the practical work that they had to do. Rather than de-feminise them, these images show just how important women were to the war effort, and how important they knew themselves to be. The images below were made by women (war artist Laura Knight, photojournalist Lee Miller). They show women in uniform and overalls, helmets and fire masks. Women who don't need lipstick and boot black mascara to bring out their beauty. These are our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers, who were young once and brave and powerful and to whom we owe a very great debt. 

Corporal J.D.M. Pearson, Laura Knight, 1941

Corporal Elspeth Henderson & Sergeant Helen Turner, Laura Knight 1941

Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring, Laura Knight, 1943

Night Life Now, ATS Searchlight Crew, London, June 1943, Lee Miller

Land Girl

Women with Fire Masks, Downshire Hill, London, Lee Miller, 1941

Celia Rees 

www.celiarees.com