The Bravest Voices

by Ida Cook

  I spoke to her. I repeated her name; I repeated my name. I tried to hold her attention for that one precious moment. But she only moaned and muttered and took no notice.

  Then, out of the welter of shared recollections, I pulled the one I knew had always meant most to her. Of all the operatic loves we had shared together, no one had meant so much to Nesta as Krauss and Ursuleac.

  “Nesta dear,” I said, “try to go to sleep and dream of K and Vee.” I was using our affectionate nicknames for them.

  She stopped moving her bandaged head and said, “What?”

  I repeated what I had said. After a moment, she replied thoughtfully, “Yes, I will.” And for a little while, she was quiet and seemed to rest. Oh, blessed shared opera memories—they were almost all that were left to us then!

  I went after to see her mother, who was conscious and spoke to me a little, quite coherently. To my inexperienced judgment, she seemed rather less seriously hurt than Nesta. But she died the next day.

  And our brave, inextinguishable Nesta hung on to life day after day, though the nursing sister herself told me that by every known medical rule, she should be dead.

  Every day, I went to see her. Every day, I hoped that she would know me and speak to me. And finally, the moment came when she recognized me. She looked very brightly at me out of the one eye left to her and said, “It’s all right, Ida. Don’t worry. We’ll celebrate victory together.”

  She was the bravest thing I ever knew. In addition to the loss of an eye, she had terrible head injuries, which later necessitated months and months of plastic surgery. For a long time, we thought she would have to lose an arm. Yet I never heard her complain. And, more impressive still, she never altered her sense of values.

  One evening, when she had been in hospital about a month, I was sitting by her bed and it was growing dark. We had not talked for a while, and then she said reflectively, “I’d like you to know, Ida, that all this hasn’t made me feel any different about things.”

  “How do you mean, Nesta?” I asked.

  “I still think,” Nesta explained, “that we had to go to war to stop what was happening in Europe. I don’t regret it. I give you my word that never once, not even when you told me Mother was dead, or when I knew I had lost my eye and thought I must lose my arm, never once did I feel so bad as the day we signed the Munich Pact. I know now which are the really terrible things in life.”

  * * *

  There are so many crowded, yet clear-cut memories of those days. There was the afternoon of Christmas, 1940, when I had gone as usual to visit Nesta in hospital. As I came away, I was struck afresh by the scene of dreary ruin round me. The street leading from the hospital appeared to be an uninhabited shell.

  No one had had time to clear the poor personal possessions that lay about in gardens or gutters. Pictures, broken ornaments, bits of furniture, books, papers, clothes; they were all there. Rain-soaked, forlorn, horribly familiar, because I passed them each day on the way to the hospital. Some of them I knew quite well. There was an engraving of Kitchener greeting someone after an engagement in the Boer War. Once it had hung on someone’s sitting-room wall. Now it lay there in rain or snow, and I never could resist glancing at it as I passed.

  That Christmas afternoon, the scene was drearier than ever. I felt a bit like crying from sheer depression. I heard the sound of a familiar voice speaking.

  I stood still in the ruined street, in the grey chill of the December afternoon. From the basement of one of the apparently deserted houses came the voice. Someone was living in one of those ruined shells. Someone was listening to the radio. And over the radio, the king was speaking to his battered, but unbeaten, people.

  I stood there all the while he was speaking, too far away to hear the words, but following only the sound of that unmistakable, faintly hesitant voice. Presently the strains of the national anthem signalled an end to the broadcast. But I felt a thousand times better.

  The street was still in ruins. The afternoon was still grey and dismal. Kitchener was forever greeting someone in a rain-soaked picture. But the voice of Britain had spoken, literally, from beneath the ruins. It was strangely and heart-warmingly symbolic. For where there seemed to be only ruin and destruction, there was really life and hope.

  I also found my spirits unexpectedly raised at a point when they were sagging badly the first time I went back into what remained of Nesta and Jane’s home. It was impossible to enter some of the rooms, as the walls had shed most of their plaster. Only the inner framework remained, which gave the place a grisly likeness to the flimsy “slatted” walls in Madama Butterfly. I climbed what remained of the stairs, stepping over odd pieces of masonry and plaster, and found my way to Nesta’s room.

  All the ceiling had fallen here; the window had come in, frame and all; the floor was ankle-deep in rubble; and what remained of the furniture was in fragments. I don’t know now why I idly pulled at a picture cord that protruded from a pile of rubble. But pull I did, and from this heap of ruins, with its glass still unbroken, emerged Nesta’s enlargement of the snapshot taken of Krauss and Ursuleac outside Covent Garden on that sunny day in 1934.

  It was dirty, of course, and the cardboard backing had been torn. But it was there, virtually intact, a symbol of the days that had been, but, I believed in that moment, would surely come again. I took the photograph away, and to this day it remains among us, treasured, in its battered condition.

  Apart from the general fears and worries that everyone shared, I had hit a rather tough spot in my own affairs. I had gone into the war owing hundreds of pounds, which I had borrowed for the refugee work—literally everything I could raise. And I had undertaken to pay out something like half my income in maintenance for the various cases who were temporarily—or in some cases of old or sick people, permanently—unable to support themselves.

  I know this sounds very improvident. But in the summer of 1939, the sands were running out with fearful speed. It was no good planning to give help in the future, when money might have been saved for the purpose. The only thing was to undertake the responsibilities then, and trust to heaven or luck or one’s own gumption to be able to raise something to meet those responsibilities. Either one took the risk and people lived, or one played safe and they died.

  If I had time—! But there was no time. And so I had borrowed recklessly and mortgaged as much future income as I dared. There were times where I literally wondered where to find the next penny.

  I remember the most acute crisis, which had a flavour of real comedy about it. I simply had to lay my hands on eight pounds somehow. I had racked my brains, I had tried everything I could think of, and still the eight pounds remained elusive.

  Then I went to visit Nesta in hospital, having decided I must produce a bright smile and put my financial worries behind me for the moment.

  Almost her first words to me were, “Ida, there’s something that’s worrying me a bit.”

  I took a deep breath and asked what it was.

  “Well, they keep on sending me my salary from the office,” Nesta explained, “because this is the only address I have. But I don’t like keeping it here. Would you take care of it for me?”

  I laughed—much more heartily, even hysterically, than was fitting in a sick room.

  “Nesta dear, with more pleasure than I can possibly tell you,” I assured her. “May I borrow eight pounds of it? I’m in an awful jam.”

  “Borrow the lot, if you like,” Nesta replied. “I shan’t need it for a long time.”

  We often laughed about that afterwards. It was the nicest instance of “the Lord providing” quite unexpectedly.

  It took me the first two or three years of the war to straighten things out, but I did it eventually. I have sometimes wondered since if I ought to have plunged even further than I did, in that mad summer of 1939. I thought I had stretched things to the limit of my capacity.
But I don’t know. I suppose if any of us could possibly have conceived of what was coming, we would all have done more than we did.

  Every weekend, Jane, Louise and I used to visit Nesta in the hospital outside London where she had gone for long plastic surgery treatment. And presently, she was well enough at least to telephone us. We were expecting her call that first time, and the moment she spoke, one of us said, “Wait a moment. We think you would like to hear this.” And we played her Ponselle’s well-loved La Vestale on the gramophone, because we wanted her to feel there were still things of supreme beauty for her to enjoy.

  She was thrilled beyond expression. After that, she would telephone us quite often. The telephone operator was very sympathetic and used to forget about time limits for toll calls, so we often played Nesta a favourite record or two, as well as exchanging the news.

  I had always planned madly for the future and usually had one ridiculous project or another on hand; but at that time, I lived only for each day. One could not, dared not, plan for the future.

  Louise and I occasionally permitted ourselves to say, “One day—” but we no longer used expressions like, “There’s always Rosa.” As the years went on, we almost accepted the fact that all links with the past had snapped. The bright hopes that had sustained us through years of refugee work seemed unreal now. With some shock, we realized that it was ten years and more since those days we had accepted as the golden norm of existence.

  Were we really the same two who had saved our money, nearly twenty years ago, to go to America and hear Galli-Curci? Were we the same two who had basked in the beauties of every performance Ponselle ever gave in Europe? Were we the two who had sat in the opera queue in the sunshine and snapped the stars, until one day we took the snap that was to draw us into the dark melodrama that had enveloped Europe?

  We dwelt very much in the past in those days. We now knew that the one thing that can never be taken from you is the memory of the great times that once were. But we no longer expected to repeat them in the future. Urgent work in Europe had claimed us, and while we did it, we had assured ourselves that one day we would have a radiant reward. We would go back to New York. We would hear the kind of operatic performances that had irradiated our youth. We would know the same carefree happiness again. Above all, we would hear our matchless Rosa in the many roles we still had never heard.

  Now we knew that, at least, would never be. Ponselle had married and retired at a phenomenally early age. The bright, almost legendary figure of our happiest days was no longer before the public.

  And let no one think this was a minor matter. I can say quite honestly that the money and energy and thought that we put into our refugee work never really entailed much sacrifice for us. But what we did give as the price for our refugee work was the chance to hear the performances we loved best in the world and that would never come again.

  We do not regret our choice in the least and, of course, we would choose exactly the same way again. But when people say to us, “What it must have cost you to do that work!” I always think, It cost us Rosa’s Donna Anna and Carmen and Luisa Miller and L’Aficaine. That was what mattered.

  * * *

  However there was to be one more phase that would jerk us out of any leisurely nostalgia, or indeed, out of anything but the defiant desire to live until the end of the war, whatever it brought.

  In June, 1944, the first of the flying bombs came.

  Personally, I was more frightened of them than anything during the Big Blitz. Partly, I believe, because distant victory was in sight, and the thought of being killed now was unbearable. The horizon had been slowly expanding once more. We had begun to look cautiously into the future, any future. That it might be snatched away even now was unthinkable.

  During a long night, when the infernal things seemed to be whirring over our heads almost without interruption, and as Louise and I crouched under the dining-room table side by side, I suddenly and boldly pronounced a plan for the future once more.

  “If we ever live to see the end of this war,” I shouted to her above the din, “you and I are going back to America. We’ll fly there. We’ll do ourselves well over everything. We’ll go right over to California and see Lita and Homer again. And maybe, somehow, we will find Rosa. The Ponselle performances may be over, but I’m going to see her, if only to stand in front of her and look at her.”

  And much as she had replied to a similar plan twenty years ago, Louise said, “Of course. How soon after the end of the war, do you think?”

  “The first minute we can,” I vowed, as the ground shook under our knees, and our knees shook under us.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Our new American plan sustained us through the last ferocious months of the struggle.

  Less than a week after our decision, a doodlebug came down and pushed in the back of our house. But, crowning mercy for us, no one was at home. Louise and I had finally persuaded the parents to go to Northumberland. I had written an old school friend of mine asking if she could find somewhere for them to stay in her small country town. And, with the letter in her hand, she went to her father and said, “What about it, Dad?”

  To our lasting gratitude, he didn’t say, “Well, now, let’s see,” or “If we think it over, perhaps....” He said, “Telegraph for them to come to us now.”

  We saw them off the next morning on the ten o’clock train. At one o’clock, the flying bomb came down. When Louise came home from the office at six o’clock, it was to find the whole house blasted. And when I arrived ten minutes later, she greeted me with a characteristic Cook-ish announcement: “Yes, we’ve been bombed. But never mind the house. Igor is missing.”

  I cannot imagine how I have written thus far and not dealt with Igor, prince of cats and probably the most important member of our family. He started as Prince Igor, because he came to us in all his black Persian beauty during the summer that Rethberg sang in Prince Igor at Covent Garden, 1935. His aristocratic name, I regret to say, rapidly degenerated into Iggie in all affectionate moments, but he retained his superb and kindly dignity under any name.

  He had gone bravely through the war with us, running to his own personally selected air-raid shelter under the sideboard in the dining room whenever danger was near. And many were the nights we had gazed across at each other in sympathetic understanding—and strictly at ground level—as we crouched under the table and the sideboard. That he should now be missing was a tragedy transcending all mere material losses, and Louise and I went out to look for him immediately.

  * * *

  Eight houses had been reduced to rubble, and we were lucky, we realized, not to have had more damage than we had. Our luck had not ended there. We had the priceless assistance of our good friends, the Beers, who lived a few roads away. The moment Mrs. Beer saw the bomb flying down and realized that it must be near our house, she came running to our aid. She guessed that the house would be empty, and she was determined no looters should pick over our belongings before Louise and I returned.

  She stayed in the house until we came, and when she finally left, she promised to bring back her husband the moment he returned from work. Mr. Beer, who was so like a craftsman out of Shakespeare that one could hug him, so utterly and absolutely a constant British type persisting in all ages—Mr. Beer, she assured us, would know how to re-hang doors and strengthen shaky locks, so that the house would be safe at night.

  * * *

  Louise and I, having returned from a fruitless search, were standing in the plaster-strewn hall discussing our next move when suddenly, through the doorway where the kitchen door used to be, came Igor—a very dusty Igor, extremely annoyed about the whole incident—for which he obviously held us personally responsible—but intensely pleased to see us.

  We fell upon him with cries of joy. Then all three of us sat down on the stairs amid the ruins and congratulated ourselves on being alive and reunited.


  Every clean-up had been accomplished before the kind Beers returned. And, sure enough, Mr. Beer knew exactly what to do next. We moved all movable objects from the ruined back rooms, and he nailed off the shattered part of the house, rehung the centre door, and boarded up the windows. By the time he had finished, Louise and I felt we could, with a clear conscience, leave the place.

  With Igor in a large basket, we departed for the flat. When we were halfway there, it dawned upon us that we were the refugees now. Countless others had sought sanctuary in the famous flat. Now it was our turn.

  We lived there nearly four months, with Nesta and Jane, until the house could be roughly repaired. There were still some bad moments, of course, but from then until the end of the war, our spirits slowly rose.

  Will anyone ever forget that May day when it was suddenly all over? Well, not quite over. For of course, in theory and, to many people, in hideous fact, it was not “all over” until August. But perhaps Londoners may be forgiven for feeling that their own special war was over on that wonderful sunny afternoon when the voice of Churchill—that voice that had sustained and inspired us through so many months and years of mortal struggle—told us that the war in Europe was over and we knew then that the bombing had ended too.

  It was a superb day in every sense of the word. All London drifted happily through the streets and the parks, milling around the palace and calling for the Royal Family, who were so much part of us. So dear to us personally, so precious to us symbolically. For a few hours, it seemed that we must all live happily ever after. Grim realities were something in the past or in the future. On that day of days, I think we all recaptured something of the artless, carefree joy of childhood. We had come out, literally, into the sunlight once more, and we could only blink at each other, smiling incredulously.