REBECCA STARFORD The Imitator. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Set in wartime London, Rebecca Starford’s debut novel brings a true story of espionage to life.
When I was halfway through this book I discovered, by accident, that it is based on real wartime espionage that occurred in London between 1939 and 1940. Evelyn, the main character in The Imitator, is a fictional representation of Joan Miller, a young woman from a very ordinary background who became an undercover agent for MI5. She infiltrated a secret fascist group whose members supported Hitler’s plans to invade Britain and she was responsible for the arrest of one of its key figures.
Rebecca Starford imagines Evelyn’s life and the mixed emotions and conflicts that might plague an ordinary woman who lives half her life as a lie, pretending to be what she is not, and seeming to espouse views that she actually abhors. It is a thought-provoking concept, and the plot twist and the dramatic (fictional) events in the final chapters of the book are unexpected and gripping.
Until I discovered this real-life parallel, however, my response to the book was lukewarm. The descriptive prose is often adjective-driven; Evelyn is a rather cold character, and the upper-class friends with whom she mixes are thinly drawn, living in mansions, dining lavishly, and enjoying fox-hunting. Apart from one episode in which Evelyn fearfully crouches in a cramped bomb-shelter during an air-raid, there is little feel for the ever-present danger, deprivation, darkness and deaths that governed the lives of Londoners during the war.
My response to the book was, perhaps, more personal that a reviewer’s should be, since I grew up in Pimlico (the area Evelyn comes to know well) in the immediate post-war years. Bomb-sites were our childhood playgrounds: there were three in my street alone and many, many more in the streets all around us. Food scarcity, and the rationing of food, petrol and clothes, was something that affected our lives daily, and rationing of clothes did not end until eleven years after the war was over.
In the middle of the war, however, meeting her friend Julia at the swanky Dorchester Hotel, Evelyn enjoys ‘Afternoon Tea’, which:
… arrived on a tiered stand. There were finger sandwiches with cucumber and cream cheese, chicken and mustard, smoked salmon and dill. Sweets were warm raisin and plain scones with homemade jams and Cornish clotted cream, as well as pastries. Evelyn ordered Darjeeling tea, Julia had champagne.
Unlike Evelyn and her rich friends in this book, ordinary Londoners would never have dined at The Dorchester or The Ritz or in expensive restaurants like Le Boulesin, and in wartime it would probably have been impossible to buy a silk dress in a couturier shop, as Julia does for Evelyn, since all available silk was being used to make parachutes. The dress:
… was made of pale blue silk, with silver buttons down the front and an apricot sash tied in a loose bow at the back. She checked the label – House of Worth – and asked the proprietress the price. It was twenty-five pounds, more than she could ever hope to afford.
‘We’ll take it,’ Julia said, sweeping past Evelyn towards the counter.
‘What? No, Julia, we won’t.’
Julia brought out her cheque book. ’What else should I spend my allowance on?’
For a while, it was the anachronisms which kept me reading: there were no urban foxes or squirrels in London gardens until quite recently; bilberries grow wild in England, but blueberry muffins, as we know them, did not appear until the advent of Starbucks’ first coffee shop in London in 1998; the chimneys of the Battersea Power Station were grey and smoke-stained during the war, not white, as Evelyn sees them. The most glaring anachronism came when Evelyn ‘took the underground to Pimlico’: Pimlico underground station did not open until 1972.
Picking out errors like this is unfair, since this is a work of imaginative fiction not a history book. Starford, however, is so meticulous about naming all the London streets Evelyn traverses, and accurately describing the interiors of some of the places she visits and works in, that I expected her to be equally careful with other things. And it was one of Starford’s careful descriptions that led me to the true spy story.
Evelyn is summoned to ‘an imposing red-brick apartment building called Chemley Court set back from the Thames’ in Pimlico and overlooking St George’s Square, where she begins to work for spymaster ‘Bennett White’. I recognised this building as Dolphin Square, which is two streets away from my old London home. I and my school-friends would save our pocket money to go and swim in its stylish pool, where, almost unbelievably, they also had hot showers.
A casual question by one of Evelyn’s colleagues – ‘You do know that Mosley lives in the building? Somewhere on the ground floor, goosestepping about’ – piqued my curiosity and I began to look up the history of Dolphin Square. MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight did live and work from there, and the arch fascist Oswald Mosley also lived there. This led me to information about Anna di Wolkoff and a secret society of fascist sympathisers called The Right Club, the women members of which met at Anna’s ‘Russian Tea Room’ in Kensington; and about Anna’s eventual arrest and imprisonment for passing War Office information to the Germans. In The Imitator, Anna becomes Nina Ivanov, her club is the Lion Society, and the Russian Tea Room is her ‘Arbat Tea House’ in ‘Harrington Road’ in Kensington. This is where Evelyn is first introduced to her.
After meeting Nina, Evelyn attends an inflammatory fascist talk at Caxton Hall. In The Imitator it is given by BL Chesterfield – a fictional name for AK Chesterton, who did, in fact, give such a talk. Walking near Green Park with Nina after the talk she witnesses a terrifying scene: a young man is being chased by:
… a gang of half-a-dozen men, all dressed in black trousers, belts with big brass buckles and black turtle-neck sweaters. They were gaining on the young man, who flew past Evelyn only to trip on a hedge a few dozen yards ahead and careen into a rose garden.
Evelyn sees their armbands and fascist insignia and she is desperate to help the young man but torn by her need to maintain her cover and convince Nina that she supports the fascist cause. In the end she hurls racist abuse at the man, to Nina’s approval.
When we first meet Evelyn, her spying days are over but her past complicates her developing relationship with a man who knows nothing about it. A sudden meeting with Julia, who had been an essential part of that secret life, threatens to bring it all out into the open. So, as the book develops, her whole story is told. Growing up as the only child in a working-class family, Evelyn wins a scholarship to an exclusive girls’ boarding school (a lightly disguised version of Roedean) where she is scorned for her ‘Sussex’ accent and her ‘summer sales’ clothes before she learns to fit in and makes wealthy friends. She goes on to study German at Oxford University, then works for a cosmetic company until a friend’s father organises a mundane job for her at the War Office. From there, like her real-life counterpart, Joan Miller, she is recruited by MI5 to work as a spy infiltrating fascist and communist groups. Evelyn’s ability to observe others and fit in with their way of living underlies her success. At their first meeting Bennett White sums her up:
I can see you are indeed calm and self-assured. Attractive. Not enough to draw attention to yourself, but certainly enough to charm. And, like all good spies, you never draw attention to yourself.
Later, he tells her:
… before you can gain this group’s trust you must start thinking like them. You must, essentially, become like them.
Evelyn’s life becomes exciting, stimulating and scary. Rebecca Starford manages to capture her mixed feelings and her ambitions, and to suggest just how damaging the need constantly to ‘become like them’ might be.
At the end of the book Starford’s acknowledgments refer to her research at the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives in London, to several books about wartime life in London, and to one about the ‘The Kent-Wolkoff Affair’. In the end, I found The Imitator both interesting and flawed, and I was sorry that more had not been made of that true story in promoting the book. It does, however, have all the ingredients of a popular TV series: a Russian woman spy, a female undercover agent, fascist thugs, violence, plus plenty of scenes of the exotic lives of landed gentry, lots of champagne and wine and gourmet meals, a society wedding, and even a fox-hunt. In contrast to this, the bombs and destruction, the darkness, and danger in wartime London would be very much more apparent on screen than they are in the book.
Rebecca Starford The Imitator Allen & Unwin 2021 PB 352pp $29.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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