by Celia Rees
Meike Blatnik for introducing me to Dirk, and Lotte Foks, who acted as my guides in Lübeck.
Writer friends: Linda Newbery, Adèle Geras, Yvonne Coppard, Julia Jarman, Cindy Jeffries, and Susan Price for their help and support; Clare Mulley for advice about the SOE; Leslie Wilson for her help with German, and Helena Pielichaty for sharing her own family’s recipes with me.
The Polish community in Leamington, old and new, for their help with food, recipes, and the Polish language.
The Imperial War Museum, the British Library, Warwick University Library, as well as my local libraries in Warwickshire and Coventry. Without these libraries, research would be impossible.
The Leamington History Group for sharing Luftwaffe maps of Leamington Spa.
Sylvia Levy-Nichols for providing a magical place to write.
My old agent, Rosemary Sandberg, who was there for me when I needed her. My previous agent, Rachel Calder, for her input into the developing manuscript; my current agent, Stephanie Thwaites at Curtis Brown, who saw it through.
My editor Kimberley Young, Martha Ashby, Laura Gerrard, and everyone at HarperCollins, and Rachel Kahan at William Morrow, for their meticulous care and dedication.
My cousins, Ann Bannister and Stephen Price, for sharing family memories and family history.
Catrin for accompanying me on the spy walks and other London research trips; for being there at the beginning and helping me to see it through to the end.
Terry—for everything.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Celia Rees
About the Book
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Celia Rees on the Story Behind Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Meet Celia Rees
CELIA REES is an award-winning young adult novelist who is one of Britain’s foremost writers for teenagers. Her novel Witch Child has been published in twenty-eight languages and is required reading in secondary schools in the UK. Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook is her first adult novel. A native of the West Midlands of England, she lives with her family in Leamington Spa.
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About the Book
Celia Rees on the Story Behind Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook
It began with the chance discovery of a cookery book. My aunt had recently died, and I had been appointed the executor of her estate. I was going through her things when I found a cookery book on top of a cabinet in the kitchen. It was of the kind that used to be given away with gas cookers. The spine had long since broken and it was held together by tape and a petrified elastic band. Slotted between pages was a trove of newspaper clippings and handwritten recipes. I recognized my mother’s writing, my aunt’s, and what I presumed to be my grandmother’s. They had swapped recipes, as many women did then and still do today. I’d been through all my aunt’s papers and found no letters between them, although surely she must have written to her family, and they to her. The only record of any kind of exchange was this scattering of recipes. As such, it seemed important, precious even, so I carefully closed the book and put it aside to keep.
I kept other things, too: my aunt’s passports, her photographs, postcards, guidebooks to the different places she’d visited. A record of her life.
My aunt never married. She had been a teacher and, eventually, a headmistress in Coventry. She had studied German and was stationed in Lübeck after the Second World War, serving as an education officer with the Control Commission in the British Zone in northern Germany. The Control Commission was tasked with bringing some kind of order to a country whose infrastructure had been all but destroyed by the war.
Even though I was very young, I remember her coming home on leave in what must have been the 1950s and bringing me things: a felt monkey, a carved bear. I remember having to go on the bus to visit my grandmother because Aunty Nancy wasn’t there to look after her. In our photograph album, there were photos that my aunt must have sent from Germany: ruined cities and sunken ships. Strange, alien, shocking in an album of family snaps.
Even as a child, I sensed the resentment felt by the rest of the family, particularly my mother. Aunty Nancy had transgressed in some way, they seemed to believe, confounding social and familial expectations that the unmarried daughter should stay at home and look after my elderly grandmother. Instead, she went to Germany . . . for years. As an adult, I came to understand what an exceptionally bold and brave move it was, and I admired her for it.
All this was a long time before I began writing, but perhaps even then, I had a writer’s awareness that there was a story here. I didn’t know what that story was yet, but the idea never really left me. Rather, it lay dormant; then, on a visit with my daughter to the Imperial War Museum in London, it came back to me.
I was a published writer by then and was doing some research for a young adult book. We were in the gallery devoted to espionage: the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France, codes and code breaking, Bletchley Park, and the Cold War. There was a small section featuring the Control Commission in Germany, which was described as a hotbed of spies. I remember saying, “What if Aunty Nancy was a spy?” It was a joke, but as soon as I’d said it, I got that odd tingling feeling that comes with an idea. I thought, That’s it! That’s how I can connect it all together—family history, my aunt’s life, the cookery book, the photographs. It wasn’t impossible. One of my aunt’s cousins had done something in the War Office. She had spent time in Germany before the war. I remembered talk of a young man, Karl, who had stayed with the family in the 1930s but was never spoken of again after the war. A story began to form, and I knew it would be a book and I knew it would be for adults.
The idea has changed and changed again since then, and fiction inevitably pulls away from real life, but not entirely. A character rather like my aunt is there, at the center of the story, and so is the Radiation Cookery Book.
Reading Group Guide
As World War II winds down, Edith’s recalls her mother telling her to look forward to the future: “Then we can get back to normal. . . . By that she meant, how things were before. To Edith, the prospect of peace felt like a closing trap.” Why does Edith feel trapped by the prospect of returning to “normal”? What would that mean for her, and for other British women? How does that drive her decision to join the Control Commission?
When Vera recruits Edith for help tracking down Kurt von Stavenow, Edith reflects on her own past with him: “Whatever had happened between them, she’d thought Kurt fundamentally good. She’d often wondered what he might be doing, but she could never have imagined this.” Should she have realized Kurt was a Nazi? Were there clues she missed?
In Frau Schmidt’s boarding house, Edith’s roommate Angie sings the praises of their situation with the Control Commission: “We don’t have to do a thing. It’s a jolly good life, really. Better than at home, anyway.” Is she right? What does Edith come to discover about the “jolly good life” and the girls living it?
After Molly Slater is killed, Edith reflects about herself: “She should stop this spying. She wasn’t cut out for it.” Do you think Edith was a good spy? How did she compare to career operatives like Dori or Vera? Would you make a good spy yourself? Why or why not?
When Edith accuses Harry of being involved with Molly’s death, he is unrepentant, since the sabotage also killed a notorious war criminal. Edith tells him that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Do you agree? Would you have been willing to accept Molly’s death, as Harry was, in order to guarantee the death of a terrible person who would otherwise escape punishment?
Do you think Edith is a good judge of character? Whom does she misjudge? Whom does she see through immediately?
What do you make of Kurt’s story about the death of his son, Wolfgang, who was autistic? Edith thinks that the story Elisabeth had told her about h
er trip to the hospital “had been re-created, re-imagined in reversed polarity where evil became good. To be able to do that traveled so far beyond natural human feeling that . . . [i]n the face of such enormity, there was nothing to say. All words fled away.” Are Kurt and Elisabeth truly evil? Do they believe themselves to be evil?
When Dori accuses Elisabeth of using Edith, Elisabeth replies, “Didn’t you? The British Secret Service, the Americans. You all used her. Naïve, an innocent. The perfect vehicle. We both used her. Let’s not be coy about it. She was surplus to requirements.” Is Elisabeth correct? Do you think Edith would agree that she’d been badly used?
Was Dori justified in her final mission to kill Elisabeth? Would you have done the same?
Dori’s narrative at the beginning and end of the book gives us a glimpse at what became of each of the characters in the decades after Edith’s death. Did their fates surprise you? Was justice served? Were the good rewarded and the bad punished?
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MISS GRAHAM’S COLD WAR COOKBOOK. Copyright © 2020 by Celia Rees. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by HarperCollins UK.
Cover design by Lauren Harms
Cover photographs © Jacqueline Moore/Arcangel (woman); © Bruce Amos/Shutterstock (handwriting); © David Pinzer/Getty Images (city); © fhm/Getty Images (city)
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Digital Edition JULY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-293802-2
Version 05022020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293801-5
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