one of the basic things of life… If she had stopped and made a sentimental fuss of me I would have cried for hours. She just simply went on making pastry…she told me ‘you’re doing the best you can. Now tell me all about it.’” The period of which Ida is writing is not so long ago and yet, to read of the way she extols family values seems like another world, another era. At the same time there is a timeless quality to the sisters’ response to desperate people. Their insistence on trying to save whole families is just one aspect of what made their work so unusual; elderly aunts, uncles as well as parents were included too, if possible, just as today images of young children and babies clinging to parents desperate for warmth, food and a roof over their heads flood the media.
And through it all is the music; glorious arias permeate the pages. Music shored up their belief “that there was another world to which we would be able to return one day. Beyond the fog of horror and misery there were lovely bright things that they had once taken for granted.” The world of music is, after all, deeply romantic. Of all the arts it is arguably music which has the greatest transformative power; within musical genres, it is opera where rational belief has so often to be suspended.
Ida recognised the absurdity of sublime music existing in the midst of a hell hole. But she saw it rather differently. She saw the music as something that counterbalanced their unhappiness at the cruelty they were forced to witness. She refers at one point to the power they had to decide the fate of an individual, power she loathed because of the “terrible, moving and overwhelming thought—I could save life with it.” But the real power in the book is the redemptive nature of music and especially the high drama of operatic music. These two spinster sisters knew that, in the presence of their Prima Donna heroines, or Angels as they appeared to Ida, they could pull on their home-made cloaks and assume different personae themselves.
Now that’s romance.
After the War Ida and Louise settled back in to the family home in South London where they had lived for the last sixty years and into the safe and familiar routines of work and opera. But, in 1950, after Ida published her autobiography, We Followed Our Stars, the pair were soon bathed in a halo of publicity and embarked on a round of parties and award presentations. Several of the refugees campaigned to have Ida and Louise’s work recognised by Yad Vashem, the Israeli authority which honours those who helped save lives during the Nazi period. In 1965 the sisters were declared “Righteous among the Nations” in recognition of their work in rescuing Jews from Germany and from Austria during the dark days of the Nazi regime and in helping them to rebuild their lives in freedom. The citation mentioned “twenty-nine families” but the total number of those they helped must be triple this, not all of whom were Jewish.
They never went to Israel, receiving the certificate instead from the Israeli Ambassador in London. In 1965, they were two among only four Britons to be so honoured and few people other than those directly involved knew their story. But in 2010 the British Government announced a new award, British Heroes of the Holocaust, to recognise those from this country who had risked their lives to help others escape. Ida and Louise Cook were among twenty-five individuals, including Sir Nicholas Winton, the Briton who organised the rescue of 669 Czech children, and Frank Foley, who worked for the Foreign Office in Berlin and helped thousands of Jews escape by bending the rules on passports, most of whom were posthumously declared British Heroes of the Holocaust.
Ida, the talkative sister, was the one to whom journalists had always addressed questions and whose fame as a novelist attracted attention. But she was always insistent that whatever honour was granted, it must be for both of them. As she never tired of pointing out, it was Louise who embarked on learning German in order to conduct the interviews. But there was something much deeper. They were dependent on each other. Briefly feted though they had been, especially in America, which had become home for some of those they rescued, their lives remained essentially unvaried until the end. Ida continued to write romantic fiction for Mills & Boon and one work of non-fiction, a ghosted autobiography of the singer Tito Gobbi, her close friend, in 1979. But her heroines belonged to an earlier world. Her publisher, Alan Boon, commented: “Mary Burchell wasn’t sexy but she showed an awareness of it…it was a pretended form of sex, not suggestive in any way at all. It was instinct, not participating.”
Neither sister married but that does not mean they did not have romantic lives. They lived vicariously through their music, through their work and through their refugees. Ida was never ashamed of believing in romance or of writing romantic novels. When she took over as President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in 1966 she declared: “Romance is the quality which gives an air of probability to our dearest wishes… People often say life isn’t like that but life is often exactly like that. Illusions and dreams often do come true.”
Ida died at home on December 24, 1986 aged 82. Louise outlived her by another five lonely years. Obituaries talked of the sisters’ “Scarlet Pimpernel” operation. One of those refugees who wrote to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in support of their cause described them as “Human Pillars”. Ida said simply: “We called ourselves Christian and we tried to do our best.”
Anne Sebba, London 2008-03-20
Updated London 2015-12-19
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