Note to self: Do not read WWII stories before bedtime. Leads to wakefulness and despair. Stick to fluff.
Note to others: But do read Safe Passage – just not at bedtime. Most hours of the day I can console myself for the evils of genocide with the heroism of those who have stood against it, and Louise and Ida Cook were quiet and shining examples. Also, though I’m not a fan of opera myself, I find that other people are usually most interesting when talking about their passion, and the intertwining of opera and war work here is fascinating.
My mother likes romance novels. I don’t, much (with exceptions; the stupid ones are really stupid, but since love is the central and best experience of so many of our lives, it follows that the best romances are the best human stories. Jane Austen has modern heirs, and some of them write romance.) Since I am the sort of person who will read cereal boxes if there’s nothing else around with words, I read a lot of the ones she had around in the 1970s and early 1980s. There were two authors who stood out for their detailed and consistent world-building: Essie Summers, whose stories were set in New Zealand, and Mary Burchell, whose stories were set in the world of opera, and who had enough characters from one book showing up in another to make the continuity even stronger.
It turns out that Mary Burchell was the pen name of Ida Cook, and that the earliest of her romances funded some astonishing refugee work by herself and herself Louise that saved the lives of 29 people by getting them out of Germany and Austria right before World War II and helped save the lives on a number of others. Then Ida stayed in London to do night watch work in an East End shelter during the Blitz – since everyone from Connie Willis to Noel Streatfeild to the authors of the recent Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society have written about that period, you all know what that entailed, and what level Londoners rose to.
It’s an extraordinary book, and a good thing to read to restore hope in humanity – for any mind less irrational and anxious than mine tends to be at 2AM.
Note to Alex and Vicki: please do NOT mention the book to Mom – it will be her Mother’s Day present! I don’t think she knows about “Mary Burchell’s” other life.