Edith was an experienced teacher, good with staff and children, level headed and resourceful. Added to this, most children had not attended school for years and many were poorly dressed and poorly fed. Much of the infrastructure had been destroyed, including schools, there was a shortage of teachers (anyone with Nazi associations barred), no textbooks (all tainted by Nazi propaganda), a shortage of paper and the most basic equipment. This, Rees explains, was “a daunting prospect.
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Her job is to get the schools up and running. Edith Graham, a character loosely based on Rees’ aunt, has an official role as Education Officer with Control Commission, Germany, the civilian administrators for the British Zone of Occupation (Northern Germany). With the cookery book and the Imperial War Museum as her inspiration, Rees began work on Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook (William Morrow, July 2020). I’d finally found a way to use the Radiation Cookery Book.” What if she had been a spy? “If she was,” Rees says, “she’d send coded messages. The British Zone in post-war Germany was described as a hot bed of spying and Rees recalled that her aunt had been in Germany after the war. Rees, a highly regarded and successful author of young adult fiction, remembered the book years later, on a visit to the espionage gallery at London’s Imperial War Museum. I found this connection between the women in my family, through recipes and cooking, very poignant, especially so because this represented the only surviving written communication between them. My mother must have kept it after her sister died. The book must have originally belonged to her and then my aunt. I recognised my mother’s writing and my aunt’s and what I took to be my grandmother’s. Some had been clipped from newspapers and magazines and dated back to the Second World War. When I opened it, I found recipes interleaved between the pages. The brown cloth cover was faded, crusted with ancient flour. It was falling apart, the spine secured with parcel tape and held together by a perished rubber band. “It was given away with Radiation ‘New World’ gas cookers and this particular edition is dated 1935,” she explains, “but it was not one of her cookery books.
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Years ago, when Celia Rees found a copy of The Radiation Cookery Book amongst her mother’s effects she knew it would impact her writing one day. Food is Always Significant: Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees