We always want to hear about books that you love! Please welcome this guest squee from Friday. Thanks so much, Friday!

Friday is 30-something, lives in North Queensland and spends most of her working hours counting down to when she can get back to the important matter of reading, or how many more hours she has to do to be able to afford this month’s book tithe, and still be able to eat.

Her current favourite authors (Mercedes Lackey, Kerry Greenwood, Tessa Dare, Jill Shalvis and Shelly Laurenston) occupy the very top shelf of her bookcase.

….

Years ago, I found this amazing book called Beyond Heaving Bosoms (have you heard of it?) and through it, this equally amazing community. I was reading it for the umpteenth time and found a mention of the Cook sisters, a pair of Opera-mad English spinsters, one of whom was a writer for Mills and Boon, who travelled to Nazi occupied Europe to help rescue fleeing Jews. I dunno about you guys, but they sounded fascinating to me! I wanted to know more and found Safe Passage, a memoir of Ida Cook, the writing sister of the pair.

I’ve given it a solid B+, due to the unapologetic fangirling Ida does over her much beloved singers, and the distinct lack of detail regarding her writing career. But it’s such a good read, that even I, with my aversion to angst and drama these days, couldn’t put it down.

Now, if you aren’t a big opera fan, or even not that into music, it may not be to your taste, because when I said they were opera mad? I meant it. This book is stuffed with stories of them waiting in lines for hours for tickets, the excitement of their pricey gramophone and first records purchased. These were the girls who, instead of star-gazing after movie stars, were excited to get a casual ‘snap’ of opera singers heading into a concert hall. And if they could then get that same singer to autograph that picture? Even better! But I swear to you, all this back story is vital. Through this enthusiasm, unexpected friendships and connections were made with some of the biggest stars in opera. This becomes Very Important later on. Promise.

There’s precious little about Ida’s romance writing career. It’s clear that while she is good at it, natural, and enjoys that work, her real passion is opera and the work she did for the refugees fleeing Germany. It’s added as a bit of a throwaway “By the way, I’m also this massively successful writer”. So if you’re here for ‘Romance Writer Kicks Nazi Arse’ like me, you might be a wee bit let down.

The first half of the book doesn’t really touch on the encroaching war and isn’t much more than letting Ida rhapse melodic about all her favourite performers and the magical encounters she had with them. Honestly, if it were a film we’d all roll our eyes at the coincidences of fate that lined up to allow the events that transpired. But it happened for Ida and Louise.

I suppose it might be because, in England during that time, there wasn’t anything for them to worry about. A little tiff over on the continent, really. ‘That Man’ over in Germany, at it again. Ida herself recounts that they were shocked, but only a little, in that distant way of foreigners, when the Austrian Arch Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss was assassinated – but more importantly, would it change their Salzburg plans?

This is the same Dollfuss who banned the Austrian Nazi party after political shenanigans involving the three presidents resigning in short order and a dictatorship after that shemozzle and … and … I’m getting distracted by weird history again. Ahem. Sorry. On with the show.

Ida and Louise get into refugee work in a very organic and gradual manner, over months, if not years. It really didn’t get going until 1938, when the first tremors of war approached. First with a friend of a friend, then someone who’d heard something from someone else, until finally it was a case of ‘ask the Cook girls!’

Actually being in the countries where it was happening put a different face on the problem of the refugees fleeing the persecution. A human face. When you have to actually speak to someone, hear their story, how could you not bend under your own compassion to help them? Ida and Louise did this. Ida funded the expeditions and Louise learned German in order to conduct the interviews in order to place people with guarantors willing to house and feed them while they tried to find work.

Most of the book is in the pre-war years, the years that a pair of unescorted English girls could go traipsing about in Europe with little to worry them in terms of harassment from the Gestapo. They could even recognise some of the big players in Nazi history – they knew Adolph Hitler from the back of his head! Having said that, Ida later recounts from Pinza, their friend, a tenor and a terrible tease, told them how close they came to danger every time they visited – they simply didn’t realise there was so much risk!

People would often comment when the subject came up, that their refugee work must have cost them greatly. They meant that the frequent trips to the continent must have racked up a fortune, but for Ida and Louise, for them, it cost them concert tickets and trips to America to see their beloved singers. When things were at their toughest, when situations seemed most dire for them, when they were scraping together yet another guarantor, the hope that they would do those things again that set their souls alight. They could see Ezio Pinza, and Viorica Ursuleac and one of their favourites, Rosa Ponselle. It became a mantra for them, something to bolster their spirits when they were cooped up in a dismal German hotel, or bombs were raining down on their beloved London and they thought they might die: “When this is all over, there’s always Rosa!”

Remember I mentioned unexpected friendships earlier? Viorica Ursuleac and her husband, Clemens Krauss, two opera people they connected to were particularly helpful in aiding Ida and Louise. They were high up in the arts and were so good at what they did, they were favoured by the Nazis in charge. Because of that, they could tell the Cooks what was being performed and when, so they could have plausible stories for crossing the borders so often. Ursuleac and Krauss risked so much to help their countrymen, and it’s a damned shame they were condemned for being in the pockets of the Nazis, having to prove themselves in a court case.

Of course, as Ida recounts the years as they go by, situations get more and more desperate. The Cook sisters are inundated with letters pleading for help, they attend lectures and fund raised for those fleeing their country. Ida mentions a few times how often the photographs of the people she could not help in time haunt her, and it’s one of the few times in the book that actually brought me to tears.

There are so many stories of humanity triumphing in struggle. Despite the terrible happenings, it makes you feel a little better about humanity as a whole. There’s stories of a doctor, who absolutely can flee the country, but stays; in order to help treat the terrible cases of Jews released from concentration camps after being purposefully made sick. There’s one of a man and his Jewish fiancée who didn’t think they could bear to be apart a fortnight, and through a string of unhappy coincidences, don’t meet again until a year after the war is over in Brazil. That’s eight years total. People backdating documents to allow refugees to scrape into England, people skirting – and straight up breaking! – the law to remain in England, people refusing to divorce their Jewish spouses, even if it meant starvation, exile or death.

Obviously, Ida and Louise don’t go carousing off to Europe when the trouble really starts, when their blue British passports can no longer protect them. She notes that when the high-tension, high drama of her double life ends inexplicably there, she is left with only her comparatively boring writing job.

Oh sorry, did I forget to mention that this refugee stuff was her weekend gig? It totally was. She still had to do her boring Monday to Friday job too.

Naturally, her refugee work doesn’t finish, she still had to manage the funds and placements; but that derring-do, James Bond-esque part of the job was over. Mind you, Ida wasn’t exactly leading a boring life. War time London meant a lot of adventure came right to your door – whether you liked it or not. She says that seeing your own city on fire is a new and terrible feeling that you cannot prepare for, even if you see and hear about it happening elsewhere. Volunteering in a shelter as night watcher only brought those closer. A bomb brought down the building next to them, bringing everyone in that shelter perilously close to death. But it also brought Ida’s entertaining take on the operatic snores of a shelter peacefully in slumber.

I think that sums the book up nicely, actually. Horror, muted and softened by some snippet of everyday life that amuses.

When it’s all over, when the war is finished, it doesn’t end definitively. Not for Ida, nor for a lot of people. It brings to mind the way a person might come out of one of those shelters after spending a night, hearing bombs rain down on your city. You come out of the war in much the same way, and as a reader, you step out with them, just as tentatively, with equal parts of hope and fear. “Is it really over this time?”

Ida describes the shaky way the world comes back to its feet. Food is still rationed, but they managed to scrape together a party for when some of Ida and Louise’s opera friends pay them a visit for the first time since the war started. The woman almost coming to blows in order to bring a salmon to the gramophone party is one of my favourite parts and brought me to a soggy chuckle.

This is what brings the story to a sweet close. More tears were shed here when Ida and Louise travel to America for the first time in years and are met with the results of what amounts to a decade of work. The people who fled, the ones who not only survived but built families of their own in the United States send their thanks in flowers and telephone calls to their hotel room the day they arrive. The room is packed to the gills with floral arrangements, and they don’t get away from the phone all day due to continuous phone calls incoming. They are dumbstruck by the gratitude, and it’s only in this moment that what they have achieved, the true magnitude of their actions really hits them. It’s magnificent, and I’m not ashamed to say I cried reading those reunions.

Guys, I know there’s lots of spoilers, but it doesn’t matter because the story is just so good.

There is pain in this book, but there is also so much hope and joy. So much! Despite the dark subject matter of the story, this decade slice of Ida and Louise’s lives, it’s written in a surprisingly positive way. It occurred to me that probably wasn’t just the way Ida may have written her books, but also the way she lived. They might have been very ordinary women, and it didn’t appear to be a lifestyle they knowingly or actively sought out. They were completely ordinary people, in painfully everyday circumstances, and they managed to accomplish something glorious – seemingly by accident. But there’s something in that, that encourages you to just…be better. To improve. No matter how small and insignificant you feel, how powerless you think you are, there’s something you can do to better the world around you.

That’s when the magic happens. That’s when you stop merely existing, and start to live.

I think we can all agree that Ida and Louise Cook really lived.