by Diana R Chambers
About ten years ago I learned that, during World War Two, Julia Child had served in America’s first espionage agency, the Office of Strategic Services—OSS—on the front lines of Asia. India…Ceylon…China.
The Julia Child? The “French Cook”? Really?
BAM. As a writer, sometimes it’s a place that captures my imagination. Or a person who intrigues me. A moment in history. Or all of the above. Julia Child as a spy in India and China in a world at war. That image grabbed me—and still hasn’t let go.
Diana R Chambers
The matronly French Chef with the twinkle in her eye had lived an entirely other life! My other projects and ideas fell to the wayside.
I’d studied and traveled around the Indian subcontinent forever, it seemed, visited China and Southeast Asia multiple times. It was all coming back to me. The monsoons and mud, the dust and dung fires, the music and art, the intense colors and flavors. The food. I was now smelling and tasting, seeing and hearing the worlds in which this story would play out. Julia had shared these experiences. An entirely different Julia than the one I thought I knew!
Before, I had seen her as a tall, quirky middle-aged woman. Julia Child had problematical hair and was holding an upraised spoon. She was serious about her teachings, that good cooking and good eating were important—and so much fun! I knew she was strong-minded, someone you might want to follow. Yet cooking was not really my thing.
But now, I was beginning to see her in a new way. And I did follow her—into the adventure of my life. I learned Julia was much more than her media persona. The more I got to know her, the more I admired her determination to find her own creative voice. I admired her adventurous spirit and appetite for life. I identified with her. And came to love her.
The spoon she held in her early years was a silver one. Born to a well-to-do Pasadena family with Mayflower roots, Julia McWilliams dreamed of becoming “a famous woman writer.” While ambitious, she drifted through her twenties, beset by doubt and insecurity. Yet despite the approaching specter of “spinsterhood,” she refused to play it safe, resisting her father’s ultimatum that she marry her eminent, L.A. Times-heir suitor before the age of thirty.
Then came Pearl Harbor. Julia hopped a train to Washington—where, for the first time, the doors of opportunity are open to women. And she charges through. An avid reader of spy fiction, she swiftly secures work in the secret files of the Office of Strategic Services. Here, Julia celebrates her thirtieth birthday. Dedicated to her critical work, she gains the favor of OSS founder, General “Wild Bill” Donovan, who awards her the highest security clearance.
Leaving behind the failures and losses of her past, Julia is empowered by her successes. Now she yearns to serve in the field…dreams of elephants, the Taj Mahal. Before long, she is promoted to organize a new secret file Registry in Delhi, India…as OSS liaison with Southeast Asia Command—SEAC—under Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten!
After her troopship docks in Bombay, India, Julia has sensory experiences she could have never imagined—sights, sounds, colors, smells, and flavors that blast open her taste buds. At her new base on the little island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) off India’s southeast coast, she finds conditions primitive. She must set up a secure file system in a straw hut! Every day is a new challenge; every day she is tested.
She meets OSS Mapmaker Paul Child. And he definitely tests her, this annoying, pretentious, beak-nosed, balding, almost-forty year old with whom she is forced to work. Then they are ordered to investigate a possible spy in Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command. Paul begins to earn Julia’s grudging respect. Then affection. But he is a womanizer and has hurt her once too often.
He’s transferred to the front lines of southwest China in Kunming, Yunnan Province, where the Japanese are launching a new offensive. And soon, she is, too, on a notorious C-46 flight “Over the Hump”—the vast, skyscraping Himalaya. They are ordered to work together on another case, equally threatening to the war effort—and their own lives.
By WWII’s end, Julia has been forged in the fire. Her life is transformed. “The war made me,” she would later declare.
This novel is Julia Child’s origin story, how she comes to know all she is capable of, her own power. The foods she’s tasted have opened her to the cultures around her, new worlds of flavor. And she is ready to step forward into whatever comes next.
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Oh, I can’t wait to read this one!