Looking for Trouble

"Cowles is a bit of a forgotten author now, but I think she was one of the greatest of the American journalists to emerge from World War Two. She was first a gossip columnist, a fairly high-born lady in Boston, writing society gossip for Hurst Newspapers. But she managed to convince her editor to send her to Spain to cover the Civil War. It was 1927, and she was 27 years old. She arrived in Madrid wearing high heels and a fur coat. There she met Hemingway and all the other correspondents, and of course things changed very fast. She saw the villages burning in Spain, was there when Madrid was shelled. Very quickly she understood that reporting of war was not a question of drinking nice cocktails in a bar and talking to the famous Hemingway. It was about getting down and dirty with ordinary people. She followed the flames of that war across the map of Europe, to Poland, to the Arctic, to London for the Blitz. She was in Berlin when Hitler invaded Poland. I think her coverage from London in 1941, which is when her book was published, is one of the best accounts of what life was like in that city when the search lights where plunging up into the sky and the bombs were falling down, creating huge havoc. Here are the opening paragraphs: There is a full moon shining down on London and overhead you can hear the drone of German bombers. The streets are deserted, but every now and then the stillness is broken by the wracking explosions of the guns. On nights like this you wonder if future historians will be able to visualize the majesty of this mighty capital; to picture the strange beauty of the darkened buildings in the moonlight; the rustle of the wind and the sigh of bombs; the long white fingers of the searchlights and the moan of shells travelling towards the stars. Will they understand how violently people died: how calmly people lived? Beautiful. It’s a wonderful book, and it’s still in print, by the way. As I say, she was a high-born lady who stepped in and out of the grand hotels of Europe. She particularly liked Claridge’s and The Dorchester in London. She drank cocktails with the aristocracy here. But—and this is a huge but—if you read her book, you really understand what ordinary people felt, be it under the bombs in London, or in Paris as the city fell—she was in Paris as the Germans came, and only just escaped. A remarkable woman. This was her only book. She died in a terrible car crash in France. Absolutely. When I wrote Love in the Lost Land , it took me straight back to that time of my life. And it was very exciting. Africa in the 1970s was in ferment; the Portuguese empire had collapsed, Rhodesia was under attack from three sides, the whole South African regime was in play—as Kissinger realised. So it’s been a sort of time travel for me. But I also desperately wanted to tell a story about a small era of history, which—as I said—has yet to find its historian. I hope my book gives people some sort of flavour of what was happening then. It was probably the most futile war I’ve ever covered."