The Big Smoke

Last Monday afternoon, I conducted what will probably be my last interview for Time Out. By curious coincidence, this took place in Lisson Grove, a part of London that I unexpectedly moved to when I left the suburbs at 20 and stayed for seven years. Whenever I’m in the area, I check out my old abode – the lovely narrowboat called Dazzler that is pictured above.

Inevitably, I do so with mixed feelings. Revisiting a place that stores so many memories can be devastating because the memories do not return in a logical synapse-by-synapse fashion as they would when nudged by conventional means, but all at once, in a horrible disorientating rush. It’s like walking down the towpath and having a bucket of cold water emptied on your head.

This time was no different, although I was glad to see that Dazzler was in far better nick than last time I saw her, when she was rust-ridden, paint-peeling and looking like a dog that needed to be dealt with. In fact, at the moment, she looks like a rather jolly little boat, and that pleased me greatly.

Living on a boat in London is a terrific experience, and one I have written about many times so I’ll only say that if you are young and the opportunity ever comes up, grab it. This is a life that never gets boring. And Lisson Grove was a great place to live, central but forgotten, close to Edgware Road, Regent’s Park and Marylebone, with a proper cockney street market on Church Street, a great second-hand bookshop on Bell Street and an invigorating undercurrent of impending violence.

As I strolled down the towpath, the names of other boats triggered more memories – Shiralee, Promise, Christine, Romulus, Maud Gracechurch, Nemesis, Kismet, Scarlet. But it was to Dazzler I returned.

Some of the formative experiences of my life took place on this towpath, on this boat – relationships began and ended; jobs acquired and lost. At the time, each and every event felt like a full stop, the most important thing that would ever happen to me. Now, they lie lost in the corner of my brain. Full stops? They weren’t even semi-colons!

Dazzler had many owners before me, each with their own memories, and has new owners now who are making memories of their own. Last Monday, that made me happy. I am one of those people who likes to imagine that when I am not in a place, it seizes to exist, because life simply cannot carry on without me. But going back to Dazzler jolted that self-indulgent nonsense out of me. New beginnings, no regrets!

Ida and Louise Cook appeared to outsiders to be two ordinary sisters from the London suburbs. They travelled into town every day, working hard at their lowly jobs for the civil service and coming home to their warm and supportive parents. They never expected to marry. They were part of the 'singled out' generation that suffered because thousands of young men had been killed in or traumatised by World War One.

But these two spinsters lived lives more fulfilled than many other women at the time.

Passionate and courageous spirits were hidden inside the Woolworth cardigans, tweed suits and sensible shoes. Ida poured her heart out in romantic novels that became bestsellers for Mills and Boon. And with the proceeds, the sisters carried out dangerous undercover missions in the late 1930s into the heart of Nazi Germany, rescuing dozens of Jews facing persecution and death.

Their story will be related at London's Wiener Library, the world's oldest Holocaust library, as part of a city-wide Valentine’s week celebration. In some ways it’s hard to think of a more romantic tale. It would be easy to see Ida Cook as a best-selling romantic author who falls under the spell of a handsome and charismatic conductor. She knows she doesn't stand a chance so she something far nobler; she spends all the money she earns from her raunchy (for the time) novels on rescuing refugees from Nazi Germany after he asks here to help one of his friends escape.

In a way that is part of it. But only a small part. Mostly she does it because she knows it is the right thing to do. Then again, she and Louise loved music, especially opera, and genuinely believed in its transformative power. Opera was the essence of their lives and that was how it had all begun.

The sisters would queue for hours for the cheapest Covent Garden seats and, as they waited outside for autographs, photos and tickets, got to know some of the stars, many of whom were German and Austrian. Soon they followed ‘their’ stars to their home countries, and became involved in an extraordinary rescue mission that involved going back and forth many times.

When they started flying from Croydon airport on a Friday evening, returning usually by sea on a Monday morning, having smuggled into Britain some valuables for those they were trying to save, they were sometimes exhausted as well as emotionally drained. But they were also exhilarated. They had outfaced Nazi guards by posing convincingly as eccentric opera lovers – what they truly were – and that gave them strength.

Later they bought a flat in Dolphin Square but did not live in it themselves. They offered it as a safe haven to refugees and continued to live at home with their parents in Wandsworth. I love talking about Ida and Louise because they were emblematic of a strand of Englishness so secure in its tolerance and in its optimism that right will triumph over might.

'Rescue and Romance: Love in Word and Deed': Anne Sebba will be talking about the Cook Sisters at the Wiener Library on February 9 at 7pm. The Wiener Library is at 4 Devonshire Street, W1W 5BH (0207 636 7247). Admission free but booking advised.

1 I should be tired of typing this, but it's another excellent piece from Another Nickel In The Machine, this time on author Colin Wilson, the author who briefly became the toast of the London intelligentsia in the 1960s.

2 The wonderful James Ward has stoked up unexpected interest with his proposal to form London's first Stationary Club.

3 Jason Cobb on the free newspapers beloved by London councils. Mine is called Lambeth Life, and it isn't very good.

4 Bollards of London hit the No 50 mark, with this beauty in Westminster.

5 Jessica Cargill Thompson's How To Be Unemployed blog ponders the best comfort food for the out of work. I will be trying out some of these myself in the very near future.