One dank October dawn

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, Mrs Keppel and her daughter, Natalie Barnard and Romaine Brooks …. Diana Souhami has proved herself a peerless author of dual biographies, lives entwined, empathies shared.

Her latest book, Murder at Wrotham Hill, tells of two lives, but their conjunction was fleeting and fatal: it probably took seconds for Sidney Sinclair to murder Dagmar Petrzywalski, strangling her with a darned man’s vest that she was wearing as a scarf, on a dank October dawn on the grass verge of the A20 in Kent in 1947.

Sinclair was a middle-aged, recidivist, bigamist lorry driver. Petrzywaski was also middle-aged, a bespectacled reclusive virgin who had worked for 25 years as a ‘hello girl’ on a telephone switchboard, but had recently taken early retirement after she had been bombed out of her London flat in the Blitz and suffered a breakdown.

Each, in their tragic way, seemed the personification of postwar Britain — though not the ‘Face of the Future’ of Attlee’s Labour government, with the National Health Service and better educational opportunities.

Sinclair’s and Petrzywalski’s Britain was one of austerity and sharp-dealing. There were acute shortages of everything, including fuel, and food and clothes were still rationed. Much of London and other big cities lay in ruins; there was a universal air of shabbiness and 1946-7 would be the coldest winter for over 100 years, with snow and ice covering the country from December to March.

The British were exhausted by the continuing dreariness and privations of the peace after six gruelling years of war. But for con-men and spivs there were opportunities to turn a quick buck, selling on siphoned petrol, stolen goods and forged ration books. Sidney Sinclair’s wallet was bulging with pound notes as a result of such deals the morning he offered a lift in his lorry to Petrzywalski who was hitchhiking to London en route to visiting her brother in Woking.