The story behind the story

The last thing you would expect when you are putting donated books onto our For Sale trolley, is that it will take you on a journey. Especially when it is a hardcover Mills & Boon from 1953 (which originally sold for the grand sum of 9/6. But here is what happened yesterday afternoon.

It is a rather tattered and battered little book called The Heart Must Choose by Mary Burchell and it does look suspiciously as if it may have been a library at some time in it's life. It's pages are brown and a little bit brittle, with stains and marks showing a well-read history. The blurb starts "Not many of us can manage to live the life of a debutante in the Coronation Year. But the next best thing is to follow the fortunes of Flora Elvain, who, by a piece of unexpected good luck, did have the opportunity to do just that."

It was intriguing enough that I searched the World Wide Web (all right - I Googled) the book title and author. And here's what I discovered.

Mary Burchell was a pseudenoym for a woman named Ida Cook who, together with her sister Mary Louise Cook, rescued Jews from the Nazi regime in the 1930's and smuggled in jewellery to help them satisfy the British immigration financial requirements. Ida began writing in the 1930's primarily to raise funds to help them with their rescues. The sisters used their passion for opera as an excuse for their frequent trips to Germany. Earlier this year both Ida and her sister were honoured posthumously as British Heroes of the Holocaust by the British Governnment (Ida passed away in December 1986).

Ida continued her writing, eventually producing over 100 romance titles. She also dabbled in Westerns (under another pseudonym James Keene). In addition, she used her knowledge and passion of Opera as a setting for the Warrender series of 13 books.

Ida produced an autobiography in 1950, We Followed Our Stars, which has subsequently been republished as Safe Passage and which is available in some of our neighbouring Auckland Libraries. It will be on my "To Be Read" list after 1st November when we merge into the "Super Library".

Sometimes the stories behind the story are even more intriguing than what you find between the pages. This was certainly one of those occasions.