‘The Imitator’ by Rebecca Starford

The Kill Your Darlings Podcast
The Kill Your Darlings Podcast
'The Imitator' by Rebecca Starford
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In this special episode we’re talking to KYD publishing director Rebecca Starford about her new historical fiction novel, The Imitator, out now from Allen & Unwin. The Imitator is a page-turning World War II spy thriller set among London’s aristocracy, the MI5 intelligence agency, and a secret society aligned with the enemy.

Our theme song is Broke for Free’s ‘Something Elated’.

Further reading:

Read an extract from The Imitator.

Read about Rebecca’s writing routine and habits in Show Your Working.

Rebecca will be launching her novel at Avid Reader in Brisbane on Monday, 15 February at 6.30pm. This is a free event in-person and via Zoom, though bookings are required.

Stream or subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Soundcloud / Google Podcasts / Spotify / Other (RSS)

Let us know what you think by rating and reviewing in your app of choice!

TRANSCRIPT

Alice Cottrell: Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. I’m KYD publisher Alice Cottrell and today I’m bringing you a special podcast episode with KYD publishing director Rebecca Starford, whose historical fiction novel The Imitator is published in Australia this month. The Imitator follows protagonist Evelyn Varley from her early years as the ‘scholarship girl’ at a prestigious boarding school to her recruitment by MI5 in the early stages of the Second World War, to the postwar fallout of her counterintelligence work infiltrating a group of British fascists. I spoke with Rebecca over the phone to ask her about the novel, writing historical fiction, and what would cause a young woman to become a spy.

Can I ask you to start with just a brief snippet of a reading from the novel, to give us a kind of taste for those who haven’t read it yet?

Rebecca Starford: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve picked a short segment, sort of in the first third of the novel. It’s where Evelyn, I suppose, is introduced to her new employer. But it’s something of an unexpected meeting.

‘I brought Miss Varley’, Caroline said, peering around the jamb. Then to Evelyn, she said, ‘This is Mr. Chadwick’.

Chadwick stood with his hands on his hips, breathing hard, a pulse beating wildly at the base of his throat. He didn’t look much like a bureaucrat, dressed in a crumpled brown suit and surrounded by acrid ashtrays and half drunk cups of coffee, he could have passed more convincingly as a Soho bookie. His eyes were enormous behind a pair of bifocal glasses.

‘Thank you, Carolyn.’

He yanked out a desk drawer and rummaged around, finally producing a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and stood there smoking furiously for several moments. Then he nodded at the chair. ‘Take a seat.’

But Evelyn didn’t move, and her mouth was dry when she tried to swallow. This was fear. She realised cold brought fear, not because she was afraid of what might happen to her in the cell, but because she was alert to the understanding that she had stumbled upon something extraordinary—that quite possibly her life was about to change.

‘What’s the matter, girl? You look dazed.’

Evelyn nodded. She supposed she must, but then who wouldn’t after what she’d seen this morning? She looked around. Caroline Menzies had gone, her footsteps proceeding down the corridor, and when she turned back, Chadwick had drowned out his half smoked cigarette and immediately lit up another.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said slowly, ‘but I wonder if you might tell me what I’m doing here. The bus driver said this was a prison, but how can that be? When I first met Mr. Menzies, we spoke about positions at the war office,’ Evelyn made a sweep of her arm around the cell, ‘but unless I’m dreaming, I’m not back at Whitehall.’ From somewhere in the building came the loud clack of a typewriter and the rattle of keys in a lock.

Chadwick watched her carefully, his eyes so dark the pupils had disappeared. Then he dropped into the chair behind his desk. ‘No, you’re not at Whitehall, Miss Varley. This is Section Five intelligence. I’m head of the Transport Division.’

‘This is MI5,’ Evelyn said.

AC: Brilliant, thank you. So Evelyn’s story is loosely based on the career of a real person, and that’s a young woman named Joan Miller who was like Evelyn, recruited into MI5 in her early 20s. Can you tell me a bit about how you became aware of Joan’s story and what it is that made you want to write a fictionalised account about it?

RS: Yeah, I really kind of stumbled across Joan Miller through my research. I became interested in writing about female spies, that was my starting point. And I had always been interested in the Second World War and in particular the London experience. Obviously I’m not British, but I am very interested in London and have enjoyed spending time there before. So those two interests kind of coincided. And I just sort of did maybe what most people do and did a bit of initial research online. And I actually came across another story, which was an obituary for a woman in the UK who died sort of in her late 80s or even early 90s, and it was revealed after her death that she’d actually, like Evelyn in the story, been recruited into MI5. This wasn’t Joan Miller, this was someone else. But her story really struck me because she was very modest about her achievements during the war. So she’d worked, you know, in, in kind of operations that involved the D-Day landings and parachuting into France, occupied France. And, you know, the sort of stuff that we’ve seen in films, that doesn’t seem real. But she was very, she was very modest about, about those experiences and those achievements. And when the war ended, like for a lot of women, she just resumed her, her kind of normal—what had been her normal life, which was being a young wife and then later mother, um, and, and sort of never really spoke that much about what she’d done again. And so I thought, well, there must be other women like, like her. And so I sort of dug around a bit deeper and came across Joan Miller, who had written this memoir of her experiences in MI5, particularly around those early war years, that The Imitator details. And it gave me this entry into both a kind of young woman who was recruited into this role, and also some of the operations that she was involved in. And that was my starting point, really. And then I realised I needed to do a lot more research into into MI5 itself because I had, you know, a kind of, I think, ill-formed idea about what this agency did based on, you know, I think what most of us think about, you know, James Bond and and everything like that. But it was operated very much like, you know, an office. It was a kind of bureaucratic institution. And, yeah, that’s, that was my my entrance into into this world and the research that I then started undertaking.

AC: And what was that research process like then, sort of going on from that starting point? Did you go on a journey in terms of Joan’s story, in terms of thinking about the Second World War or about Britain in that period? You know, what—what did you learn that surprised you or changed your perspective? I guess that’s what I’m asking.

RS: Yeah. I think what I did is I started I started looking the kind of structural things, so I read a lot about MI5 itself, so the early years. So the passage that I read out is about Evelyn’s introduction to the actual office of MI5, which at the beginning of the war was based in a prison called the Scrubs, Wormwood Scrubs, in White City in London. And they had kind of moved everyone, the agency from their original building over to this prison to house all of these new recruits that they had. But everything was very disorganised. That was the first thing I learned. What had happened at the beginning of the war in the lead up to the war is that the intelligence agencies, you know, this is maybe something we still understand today, had been warning the government about the threats and in particular these kind of domestic threats. You know, they were very worried about this kind of insurrection within, within the UK that there were British spies and British nationals who who’d kind of rise up and work against Britain in the event of war. But the government were kind of very resistant for various reasons to listening to this agency. So they hadn’t done a lot of recruitment. They were quite disorganised. So what I found about Joan Miller was that she… She kind of got this initial job, which was entry level kind of position at MI5, kind of through her family connections. She, a friend of hers sort of put her in touch with someone, she had an interview and then she got a job. And that seemed to me kind of a crazy way to recruit, but that seemed quite common as I, as I began to learn more about this, their recruitment process. So that, so Evelyn’s kind of opportunity to work for MI5 through this sort of family connection is based on those, on those real sort of happenings at the time. And then, you know, I took these events from Joan Miller’s life that she wrote about in her memoir—I should note that Joan Miller is a bit of a contentious figure, the the British government tried to ban this memoir when it was published because it had revealed a lot of, I suppose, state secrets and processes for operations. They hadn’t declassified a lot of this information about these various operations that she was involved in. Key people who had been involved in her work and her life disputed a lot of what she’d written. So I very much read this memoir with a, with a grain of salt, but again, it gave me this kind of foundational structure for the kind of activities she was involved in. Joan Miller, interestingly, after the book was attempted to be banned in the UK, she took it it was published in Ireland. And then shortly after it was published, the car that she was driving was run off the road. So anyway, that’s another kind of spy story that that could be kind of investigated. But, you know, she… Evelyn is a very different kind of person to the to the one that Joan Miller presents in her memoir. And so that’s, I think, where then I kind of diverted my attentions. I had that kind of foundational structural world of of London in the late 30s, this kind of milieu that Evelyn exists in, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit later, about this kind of upper-class influential, wealthy sort of elite that that Evelyn has kind of infiltrated through her friendships during school and through university. But then I became most interested in what kind of person is drawn into this world of espionage, what kind of young woman conceals their real identity sort of throughout their life. And so the spying work that she does is also a kind of reflection of of her own internal journey as a young woman, and kind of coming to realise who she is, because for so many years, she’s she’s kind of concealed herself and worn this disguise. And so, again, when there’s a collision between the decisions she has to make in her work, and a kind of reckoning with her true self and her true values, that’s where hopefully that dramatic tension kind of resonates in the story.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And just going back to Evelyn’s kind of earlier life of where she learns to, to form this kind of protective skin, where she can, you know, imitate other people or sort of ingratiate herself with different groups. That sort of comes about when she goes to boarding school as a scholarship girl. So she’s joining a very different social class, and obviously, the UK is kind of famous for this rigid class system. Some listeners who have read your debut memoir, which was published in 2015, will kind of recognise that theme of boarding school. Bad Behaviour is about your time spent at boarding school as a teen, and the bullying and aggression that went on there. And so there’s some obvious parallels there with Evelyn’s experience in The Imitator. I was just wondering what it was about the boarding school setting or maybe that stage of life, particularly for young women, that interests you to write about?

RS: Yeah, it’s funny, I didn’t set out to write about school again, but it just worked its way back in there. So, you know, I think when we when we meet Evelyn, we meet her as a child or on the cusp of adolescence. And she’s already kind of exhibiting a bit of restlessness. She grows up in a, in a small town in, in Sussex, she has aspirations to kind of leave and explore more of the world. You know, mostly she’s come to understand that through reading in her early years as well. And she has a sense, you know, she can’t you know, initially she can’t articulate it so well, as I think, you know, many children can’t at that age, that, that, you know, her world feels feels a little constrained. And then there’s the opportunity for her to sit these scholarship exams, to go to this prestigious school that’s not so far from where she lives in Lewes. And she, surprisingly, I think to everyone, she gets in. And so her world changes when this opportunity arises for her. And she does, as soon as she arrives at this school, you know, become cognisant of this really deep class division. Her father is really kind of uncomfortable when he drops her off at the school, and the other girls almost immediately sort of make fun of her when they hear the way she speaks. And she realises very, very quickly that this is a world in which, you know, she, you know, her true self and identity won’t be respected. And so she can either kind of try and try and go against the flow of those sort of attitudes and that that kind of culture within the school, or she, or she can work her way into fitting in—and she decides the latter. She decides that she’s going to take up, you know, the the kind of attitudes and behaviors of these other young girls. And I think, you know, when you’re, when you’re 13 or 14, you are—well, I certainly was, and this is what a lot of my memoir described—you know, really desperate to fit in because I knew… I had a lot of empathy for Evelyn when I was writing the book because I understood what that felt like to desperately want to fit in. Even though you are aware that those you want to fit in with aren’t necessarily the best kind of people for you, and that in order to fit in, you’re not presenting your best kind of self. But it’s… It’s so very tricky at that age because you lack maturity. Well, most people do, I certainly did. You lack confidence and you lack that sense of self that you that you develop as you get older. One of the characters in the book that becomes really important to Evelyn is Sally, and she is a friend from school, and later they are friends again at university, or they remain friends basically throughout their young sort of adult lives and into, into the time when Evelyn’s recruited into MI5. Sally comes from this world of affluence and influence and wealth, but she has the capacity to, to appreciate Evelyn more for who she is, moreso than than the other girls that they go to school with. What the book does and what I explore, to an extent, is how Evelyn doesn’t really value that that relationship in the way that she does, or she compromises it by the decisions she makes throughout the course of the story, particularly around her work and her decisions. And it’s only later that she comes to understand this and it has all kinds of consequences as well. So, yeah, I didn’t think that I’d be drawing on autobiographical elements when I when I was writing a book about, you know, a young woman infiltrating a, you know, Nazi sympathiser group. But there we have it, it, it’s it happened. So, but yeah, I mean, I guess that’s what, that’s what you’re doing oftentimes with fiction, is you do draw on those, on those feelings. And, you know, Evelyn is someone who—yeah, who has been shaped very rigidly by those formative years of her kind of adolescence. And it’s meant that she hasn’t really kind of developed, you know, a kind of an emotional maturity as she gets older—which is in contrast to these, you know, activities and events that she’s involved in that, that require her to have such responsibility. So yeah, that contrast was kind of quite stark.

AC: Yeah, for sure. So let’s move on to those Nazi sympathisers then. (LAUGHS). So obviously I’m from the UK and there’s a lot of mythologising, I think, that happens about the Second World War and British society and what the war means, and what it says about our national character. You know, there’s still so much kind of obsession with the Blitz spirit and a real ideological bent, I guess, to a lot of the, um, the material that we read or see about it. And I’m sure there would have been a lot at the time as well in terms of the propaganda that was, that was put out. Yeah, so there’s not much recognition of those darker parts of the history, the anti-Semitism that’s rife throughout society and, you know, some of that tacit support for Hitler’s actions. I was wondering how you kind of found your way around those more propaganda-based depictions of the UK in wartime to something that, you know, is probably more true to what society was actually doing at that time?

RS: Yeah, it’s a really it’s a really good question. I suppose because I had… I had such a clear sort of focus on these figures who are, again, based on real people, that… You know, Evelyn’s, you know, we are familiar with with, like you said, the Blitz spirit and, you know, overcoming that adversity that we say, particularly with London. And it does resonate so profoundly. You know, the whole backdrop of the Brexit debate was all kind of formulated on this idea that, that somehow Britain was kind of reliving the war and that this was another kind of battle that they would overcome. And that—that kind of worked, those kind of ideas kind of worked their way into the writing. Because, you know, it’s that the prevalence of that, you know, that kind of… Those sorts of those sorts of ideas within, again, within the upper echelons of society and within government. So I—because Evelyn is tasked with infiltrating this group, I didn’t really concern myself with, with, I suppose, the way we think of those more common depictions of the war, and I wanted to dig I wanted to dig around and uncover the nastiness, because this is what was happening. And, you know, you make that point, which I think is really important, that these—particularly around the anti-Semitic attitudes, that were very, very common, obviously across Europe, but very, very common in Britain. So it was quite hard in a way to kind of separate, you know, the… In some respects, you know, a kind of spectrum of the kind of heinous activities of this group that she, that she infiltrates in the novel, which was based on a real group called the Right Club—in the novel it’s called the Lion Society—with more kind of common everyday sort of attitudes, within British society, but within particularly the upper echelons as well. So there was a lot of research that I did on the Right Club, which was a far-right group of establishment figures, notably a Member of Parliament, who’s the leader, who was the leader of this group. And then, of course, the leader of the women’s, the women’s section was a Russian emigre. And the real real woman who I based Nina on from the novel was a woman called Anna Wolkoff, and she was a Russian emigre, her family had been very influential and had high standing in Russia before the Revolution. And her father was a diplomat, so they managed to, you know, they were political exiles, they got out of Russia and had set themselves up in London, you know, after, after the Revolution. But they had been diminished—you know, they weren’t as wealthy or influential anymore. And Anna in particular is quite bitter and angry about what had happened. And this real woman, as Nina is in the novel, was was virulently anti-Semitic and had a real hatred for Jewish people, but also for communists as well. And so she she’s quite a well-known figure when it comes to this early period of the Second World War. So there’s a lot of literature and research I did about her and about her background and some of the things she said, some of the activities that this group were involved in. You know, they, they gave each other badges and things like that in order to kind of welcome new members. So that research kind of worked its way into the group. But it was really interesting to me that they had this men’s group and the women’s group, and obviously that was this this entry point for Evelyn as well. So that became a natural way that I could work my, my way into it. And again, Joan Miller’s experience, as we spoke about Joan before, had parallels with Evelyn’s story as I detail in the novel, where she, she, she arranges this introduction through another agent that’s already planted within, kind of tangentially to the group. And she kind of builds up this friendship with these women. And she, she earns their trust. And in order to earn their trust, she must kind of act and speak and behave like them. And so she has to adopt all of these terrible attitudes and ideas. But one of the things that I found really fascinating about Joan Miller’s reflections in her memoir was that later in the story, you know, she talks about having, having a kind of sympathy for these women of the group, and Anna Wolkoff in particular, despite—you know, she acknowledges all of these awful and horrible and abhorrent kind of attitudes and aspects of her personality. But because they developed, you know, a relationship, even though it was based on deception, she still felt a kind of, a betrayal when it came to what eventually happens, and what’s detailed in the novel as well. So that was really kind of psychologically interesting to me when it came to detailing the group. So I kind of approached the broad brushstrokes of these, of these activities, of this group, and then looked at kind of looking a little bit closer at the interactions between the key figures within the group and Evelyn, and how that kind of builds her, you know, what comes to be quite, quite a strong tension and confusion for her as the novel progresses.

AC: Mm-hmm. And on a kind of broader level, what was it like to immerse yourself in the time period? I know some writers, you know, will listen to music or, you know, eat or drink certain things and have this kind of, like, method writing thing, you know—were there any of those things during the writing process that helped you get into that mindframe?

RS: Yeah, I listen I listen to a lot of Vera Lynn and all kinds of, yeah, I had a kind of soundtrack to the thirties, late thirties tunes that were going on at the time. Looked up, looked up, kind of, you know, what what people were listening to on the gramophone. I realised as I was editing the book that characters just smoke and drink constantly. So I was probably lucky I wasn’t diving too much into the method, method writing in that respect, or I probably would have died as a result as a result of all of that. But, yeah, you know, kind of, it was really fun actually to to do that research. Obviously, I went to many of the places that I write about and spent time there to immerse myself in that kind of setting, because I find that really helpful to the way I write—I find it I find it quite difficult writing about place if I haven’t been there or spent time there and then kind of taken taken those notes and done that sort of field work. But, but a lot of—and I also read a lot about clothing, that’s not an area I feel super confident writing about, so I wanted to try and make that costume, that kind of period style costume as authentic as possible, you know. But when you’re writing historical fiction, you, you know, there’s so much that requires fact checking, so you can kind of bake in a lot of those details as you’re drafting, but then there’s a lot of going back over, combing through and making sure everything kind of matches up and isn’t anachronistic or anything like that. So but yeah, so I ended up taking, you know, huge, huge amounts of notes on food and clothes and music and various other modes of transport—I had, I ordered these old maps of London, so I had them pinned to, um, pinned to the wall in my, in my office, kind of tracking the routes that Evelyn does a lot of walking through the novel, so I had to make sure this matched up to this, and checking that that street was still named that, and, and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, I’m an editor, so I enjoyed, I enjoyed that sort of stuff immensely. So it was, it was great.

AC: And how did you find the experience of writing a full length work of fiction as opposed to a memoir?

RS: Um, yeah, it’s… It’s funny. People ask me that a lot, you know, how was it different, or how has it been different—and I actually didn’t find it all that different. I mean, the thing with the The Imitator is, you know, the plot was something that was kind of constantly evolving and taking shape, and that was probably the most challenging aspect of writing the book for me, and how, you know, how Evelyn’s character evolved in terms of, kind of, her motivations and how that was then, you know, tied into how the plot was sort of changing as well from draft to draft, whereas obviously with Bad Behaviour, it being about me and being about a specific period of my life, I had the shape of that story sort of worked out a little more clearly before I began writing. But in terms of the kind of writing process and everything like that, it was almost, almost the same. You know, when I wrote Bad Behaviour, I still returned, returned to the scene of the crime, I still took notes and and pictures and immersed myself in that place. And my writing routine remained the same for both projects as well. So I didn’t, I don’t see them as being all that different. So, you know, it’s, I think it’s just a kind of a continuation, really, of one project to the next. You just sort of pick up at a new point and start, start from there.

AC: Mm-hmm. And so for readers who loved your novel, are there any others in the kind of female spy genre that you would recommend?

RS: (LAUGHS). Oh, yeah, that’s, that’s great. Well, look, you know, one of the books that was, was really great for me when I began, sort of began thinking about writing the book was William Boyd’s Restless, which is also about a female spy during the Second World War. It’s in the later sort of years of the war, rather than during the kind of first year of the war as well. And she’s involved in all kinds—she’s much, she’s much more active and sort of involved in more action. But it was a wonderful way to encounter a female character engaged in these sort of activities within the kind of office of this sort of spy hub. And to see the way she kind of moved from, from investigation to investigation. So that was really terrific. And I really like William Boyd as a writer. Just generally, John Banville’s The Untouchable, which is probably about 20 years old now—that’s similarly based on a real figure, but he’s looking at the Cambridge spy who managed to sort of skip detection and become the, Anthony Blunt, become the you know, I think his role was head portrait curator for the Queen. So he had…

AC: For any Crown fans out there. (LAUGHS).

RS: That’s right, yes, recently seen in The Crown. So, yeah—I mean, obviously, I wanted that episode to go into much more detail. But that, again, was a really interesting sort of psychological portrait, again, of a man with these conflicted loyalties. And obviously, it moves much more through time than, than The Imitator. But those, those are two books that were really, that were really great, and I’d definitely recommend them.

AC: Perfect. Well, that was all my questions, Rebecca, so thanks so much for joining me.

RS: Okay, thanks so much for having me. It’s been wonderful.

AC: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. If you’d like to purchase a copy of The Imitator by Rebecca Starford, out now from Allen & Unwin, you can find a copy at your local independent bookseller. See you next time.