by Celia Rees
Edith thanked the driver and went down the basement steps to the kitchen. She didn’t feel ready yet to join the party going on upstairs. Dori’s parties started early and went on late.
Easter time, 1941, she’d stumbled down these very steps with bells clanging, wardens shouting, half the square smoking rubble, and the trees on fire. After a weekend in Leo’s flat, she’d been trying to get home when she’d been caught in a raid and been diverted, herded into the shelter of the tube at Paddington. Adeline had been on the platform, taking photographs. An unmistakable figure, her flying jacket hung with cameras, her white-blond hair jammed under a soft peaked cap. Edith had first met the American journalist through Leo, and they’d hit it off immediately, meeting up when their paths crossed in London. Edith waved, relieved to see a friendly face among so many strangers. Adeline smiled, equally as pleased to see Edith. Adeline shared her small silver flask of bourbon, and they’d settled down together to sit out the raid, talking about who they’d seen, where they’d been, and everything in between.
After the all clear sounded, they’d emerged to fires raging. Then, guided by some kind of premonition, Adeline had hauled Edith into a deep doorway just as another bomb went off, very near. A delayed fuse, a tail ender dropping the last of his load. The explosion had sucked all the air. They had clung to each other, the vacuum pressing them together like giant hands, while bricks flew, bouncing past like children’s toys. Adeline had taken her by the hand, and they’d stumbled through fallen masonry and abandoned cars toward the entrance to the square. A warden shouted: “You can’t go no further!” and Edith had balked but Adeline had just gripped her hand tighter, pulling her down steps with the warden still yelling.
Half the square were in Dori’s basement. “Waifs and strays, orphans from the storm!” Dori had waved a bottle of gin in greeting. “Come and have a drink, darlings. It’s the only thing to do!”
Adeline had gone right back out. She had to capture what she’d just seen: the destruction of the square, the flames in the trees, the faces of firemen and ambulance crews strained and white in the flashlights’ glare, even the irate ARP warden would appear on American breakfast tables in the pages of News Illustrated. Edith was just relieved to be out of it, glad for the shelter and enjoying the impromptu party. So much better than being at a freezing station, waiting for the trains to start running; so much more fun than sitting in the air-raid shelter at home.
By the time the trains were running, Dori had taken to Edith: “You can cook! Come any time!” she’d said and meant it. Edith was equally taken with Dori; ebullient and flamboyant, she was fascinatingly different from anyone else Edith knew. She took to dropping in whenever she was in London and needing to find somewhere to stay when she was in the city; she joined the ever-changing group of people who periodically lodged with Dori. It was never for long: a day or two, a weekend here and there, a week at the most, but it became her lifeline.
Edith let herself into the kitchen and found a couple of young things standing by the kitchen table looking bewildered.
“Is that you, Edith?” Dori came from upstairs. “I thought I saw you sneaking in.” Her voice was slightly slurred, as though she’d started the party early, but when she appeared in the kitchen doorway, she looked lovely. Her green silk dress cut low, her black hair falling in deep, soft, sloping waves. A light dust of powder gave a hint of color to her pale, ivory skin; eyebrows defined to accentuate the tilt of eyes made to look even darker and larger by a sweep of liner and liberal use of mascara. “Meet Pam and Frankie.” The two girls bobbed their heads slightly, as though Dori was royalty. “You couldn’t help them rustle up some of those delicious canapés, could you, darling?” She gave Edith her best red lipstick smile. “I’ll pop the geyser on and run your bath.” She disappeared up the stairs again. “And check on my goulash!”
The girls turned to her expectantly. FANYs most probably. Dori had lots of friends in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Whatever their duties might have been, they did not appear to have included catering.
Edith went to the Aga and lifted a lid. “Good God! What is this?”
“The goulash?” the taller girl volunteered.
Edith inspected the thin stew feebly bubbling on the Aga. Dori was proud of her national dish, but she was no cook.
“What do you want us to do?” the other girl asked plaintively. Edith directed them to the larder to fetch corned beef and spam. She’d prepared something similar that first night to pay back the generosity of her hostess. She’d been surprised and delighted by Dori’s genuine pleasure in her skill at making something from nothing—canapés, a flattering term for tidbits on toast.
“Ooh, Stella Snelling’s canapés.” The girl smiled. “My mum did those at Christmas. She collects all her recipes.”
“You’ll know what to do, then.” Edith smiled back.
Edith went to her own shelves in the pantry for OXO cubes, Bovril, and her precious bottle of Worcestershire sauce. She raided Dori’s cupboard for the fiercely guarded tin of paprika pepper. A couple of teaspoons more wouldn’t hurt.
“Go upstairs, would you?” she asked the tall one. Frankie, was it? “See if you can find me Angostura bitters.” Just a drop works wonders! (Stella Snelling: Tips to Cheer Up Tired Dishes.) Pam was ready with the tidbits. “Under the grill. Not the Aga. The gas cooker.”
A recent addition to Dori’s kitchen. The Aga had become increasingly temperamental, and there was the shortage of fuel.
Pam opened the oven door. “There’s a book in here!”
“Well, take it out! When you’ve done that put some potatoes in to bake.”
Hanging above the Aga were herbs Edith had scavenged from a bombed-out garden. She broke off thyme, sage, rosemary, bay. The scent reminded her of home. She put that out of her mind. Mother would be at Edith’s sister Louisa’s by now sipping a festive sherry, already getting on her younger daughter’s nerves, complaining about Edith’s imminent departure for Germany. She would not feel guilty. Their problem now.
Edith took the narrow stairs up to the Bolt Hole, the tiny attic room she rented at the top of Dori’s house. It was her refuge. It offered a place to stay on her trips to see Leo or when she needed to escape the suffocation of home. It was paid for by the money she made from her recipes: she’d said nothing to the girl in the kitchen, but she’d been writing cookery tips as Stella Snelling for years now.
The great thing about Stella was that she had been a real person in Edith’s life—a friend from college who then became a fictitious, handy pal in London and holiday companion. The family had met Stella, so they never questioned Edith going to see her in London or their holidays abroad: cover for her trips with Leo. Even though he was family and they’d been in prams together, jaunting off with him would have caused more than a few frowns. Edith discovered that having a phantom female companion freed her, for a while anyway, from the dull routine of work and the constraints of the family.
The real Stella had married and immigrated to New Zealand, but Edith conjured her again when she began to submit wartime recipes, in answer to an invitation in Woman’s Journal. Edith enjoyed cooking and liked to think of ways to make the rations go further. There was no dearth of tips. Every woman she knew had their hints and tricks: her mother, sister Louisa, Mother’s friends in the W.I. and the Townswomen’s Guild. The magazine accepted her writing and wanted more. She sent her recipes as Stella Snelling, hiding behind the pseudonym’s anonymity. She didn’t want anyone at home to know, and she liked the idea of Stella as much as she disliked the way people made judgments about her based on her job and her unmarried status.
She stripped off Edith’s tweed costume and sensible blouse, balled her cotton lisle stockings, and wrapped herself in the burnt-orange shantung robe she’d come to think of as Stella’s. The tips and recipes didn’t interest Dori, but she’d immediately loved the idea of Stella, intrigued by this hidden aspect of Edith and happy to help find what Edith increasingly identifie
d as her “Stella side.” They had gone shopping for “Stella.” Dori knew all sorts of unfortunates ready to sell the most wonderful clothes for next to nothing. Any qualms were firmly squashed with a “Nonsense, darling, you’ll be doing them a favor.” Dori had taught her about labels and fashion houses, shown her how to wear her new wardrobe, put on makeup, do her hair. Become a very different version of herself.
Dori seemed to have a talent for this chameleonlike change from one personality to another. Nothing was certain about her: who she was, where she came from, how she had washed ashore in London, what she did exactly, even her age was a matter for conjecture. The stories changed depending on who was doing the telling. She was a Hungarian countess who had been married to a Polish cavalry officer who had fallen in the last charge. She had fled the Nazis, pursued on skis across the mountains. No, she was Hungarian all right, but Jewish, and had escaped through the Balkans. No, that was wrong. She was Polish, not Hungarian. She’d married a White Russian and had lived in Paris, got out just before the fall of France. The stories fed on themselves, each one more exotic. The only common thread? Dori was a spy.
This was true, Edith knew. Dori had spent time in France during the war. It accounted for her mysterious disappearances, and Edith had seen the scars on her body and the ones inside that she strove to hide. Once, she’d come back from one of these absences ill and weak, unable to sleep, dark eyes deep and wide with the horrors she had seen. Edith, down in London for the weekend, had come in to find her gaunt and wasted, hunched and shivering with a rattling cough. Edith had not asked where she’d been, what might have happened to account for the state she was in, and Dori hadn’t offered to tell her: Careless talk costs lives. She’d just reached out a thin hand, and Edith had answered her unspoken need for a friend. She’d stayed to nurse her, cabling Mother that she was caring for a sick friend. She’d sent Anton out to beg bones from the butcher for broth. When Dori was on the mend, the household had pooled their meat coupons and Edith had found paprika to make the goulash that she craved.
It was the Easter holidays. Edith stayed one week, then another. During this time of illness and convalescence, Dori had begun to reveal more about herself. She was from Hungary but had moved to Poland. She’d fallen in love with a British Flying Officer, Robert Stansfield, who was training Polish pilots. They’d left together when war broke out, made their way through the Balkans to Greece, then Alexandria where they were married before coming back to England.
Bobby had been killed in the Battle of Britain. He’d left her this house in Cromwell Square. That’s where the story, as told by Dori, stopped. A few weeks later, Adeline supplied the rest. With Dori, it was personal. The Germans had robbed her of her adopted homeland and the man she loved. She regarded them with a visceral, implacable hatred. She wanted revenge.
“She wanted to be able to kill ’em,” Adeline had told her. “So she volunteered for a secret outfit who’d let her do just that.”
Now it was all over, but ever since VE Day, Edith had sensed a restive dissatisfaction, almost despair about Dori, as if life was finished and everything to come would be merely a diminishing echo. Edith knew that others felt this too, but no one exhibited this restless ennui as strongly as Dori.
Edith went down the stairs to the bathroom. She could smell the Et Noir bath oil through the door. All the way from Paris. One of Dori’s sidelines. Got to make a penny somehow, darling! It was more than a sideline, and Dori was making more than pennies. Not just bath oil. Perfume, makeup, nylons, silk stockings. But it was a risky business, and Dori was in deep and getting deeper. Impossible to stop her. She needed the money, but she needed risk even more.
Back in the Bolt Hole, after her bath, Edith opened the drawer reserved for what she thought of as “Stella’s things,” unrolling precious silk stockings and laying out silk underwear. Silk, darling, always silk, Dori insisted. Then she flicked through her rail of clothes to find something nice for Leo: the midnight blue silk, long and tight across the hips with a slight flare in the skirt, the shawl collar dipped to expose her décolletage.
Satisfied with her choice, she moved to her small dressing table to do her hair, brushing out the dark-gold waves, smoothing and pinning up the sides, teasing the front section into rolls. She leaned into the mirror to apply her makeup in the way Dori had shown her: eyebrow pencil for definition, the merest hint of rouge. As a final touch, she uncapped a tube of Marcel Rochas lipstick in a silver tube and applied a shade she never wore in her everyday life. She worked her lips together and smiled at her reflection. The final transformation. This was the moment she relished most. She doubted that many of her colleagues at the Headmistress’s New Year’s reception would even recognize her as they sipped Miss Lambert’s sweet sherry and nibbled on sparsely-filled mince pies and meager sausage rolls.
3
Cromwell Square, Paddington
31st December 1945
Winter Goulash
A good, filling beef stew is always welcome on a night that might be spent at the Warden Post or in the Air Raid Shelter. This delicious continental dish makes a welcome change to more traditional recipes and can be made with the cheapest cuts of meat. It is simplicity itself to prepare: A pound of onions, a pound and a half of stewing steak (shin or the cheapest cut available--skirt will do), and any amount of root vegetables browned well for color and flavor. A little flour to thicken, a sprig of thyme if you have it; salt, pepper, paprika if possible. Canned or bottled tomatoes, a dash or two of Worcestershire sauce, and (my secret ingredient) a dash of Angostura. Enough stock to cover, made up from those kitchen stalwarts the Bovril bottle or the OXO cube. Simmer on a low heat or in a moderate oven (Regulo 2 or 3) for two or three hours.
Warming Suppers by Stella Snelling,
Home Monthly, November 1944, No. 36, Vol. 24
In the basement, the goulash was doing nicely, potatoes baking. The canapé plates had come back empty. Time for a drink.
The screen separating the downstairs rooms was opened up. Jazz issued from the gramophone, a tune Edith almost knew picked up and whirled away by a tenor saxophone. A couple were attempting to dance, but there was scarcely room to move. Men in chalk-striped suits with thin mustaches, Dori’s new friends, trailed girls with peroxided hair. Poles stood by the door smoking furiously, watched by a tall old man with long white hair, sunken blue eyes, and a sardonic smile under his yellowing mustache. Anton lived on the first landing and paid no rent. He supplied the paprika. He bowed to Edith, saluting with his ivory-topped cane.
The rooms were stifling, thick with cigarette smoke, perfume, and body odor. Edith drifted through enjoying it all.
“Canapés went down a treat. Come and have a drink. There are impossibly gorgeous men I want you to meet.” Dori took her over to the drinks table. “This is Edith,” she said to the young man serving. “Perfect genius in the kitchen and one of my best friends in the world. Get her a drink, would you, darling? Not the punch. The Poles have tipped a whole bottle of some dreadful hooch into it.”
“Pleased to meet you, Edith. I’m Harry Hirsch.” He reached under the table and brought out a bottle of Gordon’s. “Will this do?”
“Very well.”
“What would you like in it? Not a lot of choice, I’m afraid.”
“Lemonade’s fine.”
He gave her a wide smile, which Edith returned. Not tall, quite slightly built, but there was a wiriness about him. Good-looking in a delicate sort of way: very pale with thick, black hair falling across his forehead in a boyish cowlick. He was probably older than he seemed at first glance. It showed in the frown marks arrowing down over his nose; the purple smudges like thumbprints beneath his deep-set brown eyes. Edith watched his hands as he poured, his corded wrists, the way the veins snaked over the sliding muscles of his forearms, the skin burned brown, as if he had spent time in the sun with his sleeves rolled back.
“Where were you overseas?” she asked.
“Oh, Italy,” he said, “Eg
ypt, before that. And Germany. Just back.” He added a dash of flat lemonade. “I could add bitters to jazz it up, but it’s disappeared.”
She took the proffered drink. “What’s it like there? Germany, I mean.”
“It’s a mess.” He frowned.
“Really? I’m due out there in a few days.”
“Are you?” His eyebrows quirked up, making him look younger. “In what capacity?”
“To take up a post with the Control Commission. You couldn’t tell me a little more, could you? I really don’t know what to expect.”
“Of course. Happy to.”
He rolled down his sleeves and slipped on a tweed jacket. Moving out from behind the drinks table, he took her elbow lightly and led her to a quieter spot in the throng. His gray flannels had long lost their crease, if they’d ever had one. His white shirt was open at the neck and he wore no tie. Blueish shadow shaded his jaw and upper lip. He had a slightly raffish, bohemian quality that definitely wasn’t British. His English was faultless but spoken with an accent that Edith couldn’t quite place.
“What will you be doing in Germany?”
“D’you know?” She gave a rueful shrug. “I’m not quite sure.”
He laughed. “You’ll be in good company. Where will you be based?”
“In Lübeck. Schleswig-Holstein.”
“That’s a coincidence. I’m going there myself soon.”
“You’re stationed there?” Edith asked casually, hoping he’d answer in the affirmative. He really was rather attractive.
“B.A.O.R. VIII Corps District.” He gave a mock salute. “I’m a captain. Jewish Brigade. We’re conducting interrogations there. I am originally from Latvia, you see, and Northern Germany is full of DPs, displaced persons, from the Baltic countries. We have to sort them out. Sheep from goats. Good from bad.”
