My mother was fascinated by everything she saw. ‘I can’t understand why the workmen here have to buy water. It’s so pure and fresh straight from the tap,’ she observed.
‘I don’t believe they ever drink it,’ said Kenneth, surprised.
‘Oh yes, they do,’ my mother insisted. ‘You remember that little shop near the docks, and there are lots more like it. You see men coming out with bottles of water and knocking the necks off against a lamp post and drinking it straight down. They must get very thirsty.’
‘Dear Mama,’ I said gently, ‘that was vodka. And those little shops belong to the State Monopoly.’
She was intrigued too by the abacuses used in the Post Office to sell even small quantities of stamps. ‘I thought those coloured beads on wire frames were only made to amuse small children.’
‘They’re an essential part of commercial life in these parts,’ Kenneth explained. ‘And not so simple to operate either. Personally, I prefer to add up in my head, but here even the petrol pumps wouldn’t be without them and the Latvian clerk in the Consulate has one on his desk.’
‘The public typewriters at the Post Office are fascinating,’ my mother went on. ‘I love to watch people using them. Some write in Russian, which looks rather difficult. Then there are the ordinary ones. I suppose they write Latvian as well as English. But this morning I saw a rabbi with a caftan and long curls typing away and, just fancy, the carriage was going backwards!’
‘Hebrew, Mum.’
‘Of course,’ said my mother loftily.
The Bay of Riga, being shallow, freezes over quickly, but in summer the water is at times almost tepid and it is hardly salt. A long submerged sand bar runs parallel to the Strand at a depth of about five feet, which varies very little with the limited rise and fall of the Baltic tide. This bar breaks the force of the waves and provides an expanse of safe water for bathing.
Since the Strand had been laid out in the last century and the plumbing arrangements of many of the dachas were of the earth-closet vintage, people often took a cake of soap to the beach as well as a bath towel. Wearing a bathing dress, a really good wash would have been difficult, but the Latvians had kept up the delightful Russian custom of bathing naked, though the whole affair had to be suitably organized. From eight to ten, men could bathe nude before leaving for the city. From ten to twelve the beach belonged to the women, and children under twelve, except for a mixed bathing zone every five kilometres or so. After mid-day, bathing dresses were worn and the beach was free to everyone.
Of course, life could not stop because of the proprieties. The fishermen must carry on with their jobs. The beach had to be raked clear of seaweed, and a policeman must be on patrol in case of need. So although any man found loitering in the dunes during the women’s hours was at once arrested and often heavily fined, policemen, fishermen and municipal cleaners were considered temporarily neuter and could circulate freely. At first it was surprising, as one lay drowsing in the sun, to be asked to move over by a man with a long rake or fishing net, but one soon learned not to worry and got used to strolling up to a policeman, tightly buttoned into his uniform, to ask how much longer until the red flag went up and we had to put on our clothes again.
My mother, on hearing about naked bathing, protested that she certainly did not intend to shed her bathing dress. But Lotte pointed out that, if she refused to strip, people would think that she suffered from some disfiguring disease, and that was the last we heard of her protest.
At four o’clock the wives and children scampered off to the railway station to welcome the fathers home, the women often wearing Turkish towelling wraps strained round their ample figures. According to local convention, when the businessmen returned from the city they exchanged their town clothes for a clean pyjama suit. Although some stout gentlemen looked peculiarly unattractive as they paraded up and down with gold watch chains stretched across flannelette bow fronts, one could only applaud the practical good sense and cleanliness of the outfit. If the wearer decided to substitute the jacket only, keeping on his dark trousers and black boots, then the effect was wholly unpleasant.
Further down the line an English family, the Addisons, had made their permanent home in a rambling dacha reminiscent of the Cherry Orchard. Old Mrs Addison, herself a third generation Anglo-Russian, was cherished by a devoted daughter, Una.
‘My children have to return to England to have their babies,’ Mrs Addison told us. ‘Otherwise, after four generations, they would lose their British nationality.’ The grandchildren were now scattered, but all of them returned from time to time to visit their grandmother.
Mrs Addison had a prodigious memory and told us of life in Tsarist times, when the Strand had been a favourite summer resort of many Russian families.
‘My grandfather used to travel from St Petersburg to Riga by malle paste for 35 silver roubles. In winter the fare was only 17. Partly taking advantage of the summer visitors, of course, but transport was always cheaper in winter because the snow was soon beaten down to make a smooth surface, whereas in summer the dirt roads were dreadfully dusty or else became seas of mud. That’s why the roads are so wide in Rus’Sian towns and villages, because you had to have room to take a fresh track every time the old one became a morass. My grandfather sometimes travelled from St Petersburg with the Queen’s Messenger. Those gentlemen had fast carriages and sleighs and they were not averse to turning a useful penny by taking a passenger at £25 or £30—a lot of money in those days.’
Life in summer was organized to allow the working population a long evening in the fresh air. Offices and shops opened at eight and closed about three. I often saw Kenneth off by the early train. After a swim before breakfast we were always hungry and the station buffet looked tempting. If time allowed, we would enjoy a cup of coffee and a croissant. West of Bulduri the line stretched dead straight to vanishing point. ‘If you start your coffee when the train is just in sight, you’ll have plenty of time to finish it without burning your tongue,’ Dick Whishaw, our neighbour, advised us.
Sometimes I too went in to Riga for shopping, and we would lunch together on curd rissoles with a salad of cucumbers and tomatoes in sour cream at an open-air restaurant on the bank of the Canal.
In their leisure hours, firemen were set to spraying the grass in the parks with their hoses. Once more, a practical Latvian idea. The beds were now filled with brilliant flowers, changed as soon as a few petals had faded by the women with the small wooden stretchers.
In this tranquil house-proud atmosphere it was difficult to realise that from the spring of 1915 until peace with the Soviet Union was signed in August 1920, Latvia had been almost continuously a zone of war and destruction, the anvil, as Lenin described it, hammered by both Germans and Russians. If, at times, we were irked by the complacent tidiness of the present-day Latvia we tried to remember that this nurseryrhyme scene had arisen from blood and ashes, and evolved out of chaos.
‘The Germans have had Donald Gainer removed from Vienna,’ Kenneth told me one day. ‘The Times says that during criminal trials—the ones we were lucky enough to miss, I suppose—it came out that he was mixed up in espionage. He wasn’t, as we know. Our people believe that this is a reprisal for the expulsion of the German Consul-General from Liverpool. Gainer is to be Minister in Venezuela, so I don’t suppose he minds.’
In the middle of June my sister arrived in a small ship from Copenhagen, where she had been waiting for a boat, and we made up a couch for her on the verandah. She was awaiting a new posting and recuperating after the strain of the last weeks in Prague. The long sunlit mornings on the beach and the free flow of air over one’s skin were ideally soothing. Often when the red flag was hoisted and we pulled on our beach clothes, we would lie in a warm hollow in the dunes, too lazy to read, while the small waves uncurled on the sand below and little creatures rustled in the sea grass.
Miggs was enchanted with the hedgehogs that bustled along on the boardwalks, sens
ibly avoiding the deep sand of the roads. ‘They always look as if their socks had come down,’ she said. ‘Something to do with their thin little legs above their large flat feet.’
On hot afternoons we lay under the pines reading or trying, in a drowsy way to analyze what it was that made up our happiness. ‘Surprise has something to do with it,’ I suggested. ‘Until your telegram arrived I never even hoped that you might come to Riga. And contrast too—the peace of our lives here after so many stresses. And a sense of transience, the feeling that our time is short—that we are in the eye of the hurricane.’
There was magic in the white nights, when the pine trees threw a double shadow, from the sinking sun and the rising moon. Though the light faded, darkness never came, only a hush and a dimming as the scent of the lilacs became heavier in the moist air. Voices softened and people brushed past one like moths. Quiet figures grouped themselves round a single lamp on a verandah table, the fretted woodwork like lace against the glow.
We had no newspaper deliveries or telephone at the Strand. News came with Kenneth’s return on the afternoon train. One day he announced that Henry Hobson, the Consul, had been asked by Radio Latvia if members of his staff would broadcast ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’.
‘I couldn’t even assemble a suitable cast for “Red Riding Hood’,” said Hobson, ‘but we must show the flag.’ He turned to my mother. ‘You’ll have to be the Duchess. They won’t know over the air that you’re far too young looking and not the type at all. You, Peggie,’ he said pointing at me, ‘can be the daughter—if there is one—and Kenneth, you’ll be one of those other fellows ... I’ll be Lord Windermere. We’ll soon have the whole thing set up.’
A few days later we were laughing over the glowing reviews in the press. Hobson was commended first, as befitted his seniority, though to be fair, his marvellously unemotional reading of the more dramatic scenes had appealed to the Latvian audience as being typically English and quite admirable. My mother was delighted to find that in Latvian her name became ‘Pollock Kundze’ Harold Hobson had become ‘Hobson Kungs’ and Dorothy Corrie, being ‘Miss’, was described as ‘Jaunkundze’.
We had applied for passages in the BALTEAKO for the boys’ summer holidays but the answer was slow in coming through. Following attacks on post offices and railway stations a wave of IRA bombs was now disrupting postal services in England. A few days later a telegram arrived calling Miggs to Oslo, and she set off on the long train journey via Berlin, where she planned to visit a friend.
When we went to meet the boys they were leaning over the rail of the BALTONIA. The voyage had been a happy adventure, the only disappointment being the absence of their friend, the negro cook, who had got a part as a slave in a West End musical.
On the first Saturday afternoon Kenneth and the boys set off to look for a boat. A long and rather leaky craft, flat-bottomed and pointed at both ends, was tied up by a jetty on the river below our garden. The owner said he would be happy to let it for the rest of the summer and would have no objection to Kenneth’s boring a hole in the thwart and fixing a mast. A whole week-end was spent with hammer and nails while I cut and sewed a rough linen sheet to make a sail. An attempt to attach lee-boards was unsuccessful, so Kenneth arranged with the local carpenter to fit a nine-inch keel, which just about allowed the boat to tack into the wind.
Opposite the dacha the Lielupe was wide and the water deep, with the dark translucence of smoked glass. In calm weather our boat slid along quite happily, but a sudden gust of wind would cause the leverage of the mast to strain the timbers so that they opened to allow a gush of water to well up between the planks. One of us was always ready to bail and the bucket was as important a piece of equipment as the home-made paddles. Nights were getting longer, but there were still several hours of daylight for swimming and sailing after Kenneth returned from the office.
At week-ends we would take a picnic and sail down the river and under the railway bridge, where men perched on the girders jerking for fish, a cruel but effective system. Half a dozen large hooks were fitted to a trace and held against the current by an iron weight. The line was lowered into a shoal of fish, easily visible in the clear water, and then jerked sharply up and down so that one or more ofthe hooks caught in the fishes’ flanks and they were dragged bleeding into the basket. No skill was required, only a certain callous doggedness.
Every time we passed the boat yard near the bridge the owner seemed surprised to see us still afloat. Left to itself, the boat would probably have disintegrated quietly, but we cherished the leaky old craft, the only one we could afford. Around the dacha the zinnias had just begun to bloom and the grass had grown so long that Ukermarks, our landlord, had to cut it with a scythe. At night we opened the window behind our bed and the stars came crowding in with the damp fresh air of the forest. On stormy nights we could hear the waves beating on the beach. Each evening before we went to bed we walked arm in arm to the gate and turned to look at the little house with the two giant pine trees tall in the clear night air, the brilliant arc of the plough stabbed out in the sky behind them. We savoured each remaining day of peace, but our minds were uneasy.
Chapter 8
One hot Sunday Baron Kruedener drove us to Rindseln. In the days when we lived there and made the long drive to the railway station in the brake, we used to dread a following wind which would keep us enveloped in the dust cloud raised by the horses’ hoofs. Now, at a spanking thirty miles an hour, Kruedener’s high-chassis Ford could outdistance the summer breeze. The Baroness, Tante Hella as the boys called her, was waiting for us in the porch of the low wooden building.
‘Welcome to Rindseln. Here is the Wirlin,’ said Tante Hella. The stout old woman who used to bake such wonderful bread and cook great dishes of mushrooms in cream and pike with butter sauce, came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Have you come back to us?’ she asked.
‘No, but I’ve brought the boys to see you with their new father,’ I explained, and changing the subject quickly, ‘Are the hens laying well, and does the fisherman still come?’ Once a month an itinerant fisherman would spend the day in the punt and in the evening hand over half his catch, some of which was stored in a tunnel by the lakeside, which was filled every spring with blocks of winter ice.
The boys had raced down to the water and were sitting on the diving board where Anukelchen, the peasant girl engaged to look after them, used to take them every evening with soap and towels for their daily bath. Tello, the old liver-coloured spaniel who had once nipped Sam sharply in reproof when he tried to push little sticks up his nose, was panting at their side.
As we sat chatting Sam and Mark took Kenneth to see the beehives and the privy, which had a drop so deep that we used to wonder how we could rescue them if they fell down the hole.
My mind returned to the sunlit summer of five years ago. ‘And how is Fuchs?’ I asked. It had been a great disappointment to Baron Kruedener that neither of his sons liked riding, the result of miserable hours spent as small boys on and off the backs of the vicious little Oesel ponies which, as long as they didn’t put a child off riding for life, must have made any subsequent relations with a horse seem quite pleasant. So the Baron had no companion on his long rides through the firebreaks in the forest and was delighted when I timidly agreed to ride the former hunter Fuchs, who had now been demoted to pulling the manure cart. In the heyday of Baltic life, before the First War, the local hares, which grow to great size and strength, were hunted like foxes in England, and there were still traces of the bloodstock brought over from England at the time. Fuchs clearly had respectable forbears.
As long as the Baron was about, Fuchs would respond to orders, but I felt uncertain how much I could influence him on my own. Determined to put this to the test, I had told the stablemaster to saddle the horse and bring him round to the back door on post day. So, with the saddle-bags attached, off we went on the fourteen-kilometre ride. Once we were out of sight of
the house, Fuchs strolled along the verge, stopping every now and then to pull chestnut leaves from the trees with an agonizing jerk. Things were no better when we left the avenue and he turned to eating grass. Finally he either satisfied his appetite or decided that an afternoon stroll was preferable to pulling the manure cart, and after a couple of hours we were safely back with the mail. Afterwards, Baron Kruedener had scolded me. ‘Do you realise,’ he had said, ‘that if you had met a car Fuchs would have bolted? Cars are so rare around here that unless they go very slowly the horses usually shy. The peasant women out driving just throw their skirts over their heads and hope they won’t fall too hard.’
But now poor Fuchs had gone very lame and couldn’t even pull the cart. The stable-master had brought out the spring-droshky so that the boys could have a ride. This is a primitive but very practical vehicle consisting of a long plank and two footboards running fore and aft between the front and back wheels. The passengers sit astride the plank, which is springy and gives a little at each bump, saving them a great deal of discomfort. A surprising number of people can be crammed onto a spring-droshky, especially if some of them are children. With baskets of food on our arms we used to set out for picnics in the forest, collecting the strange varieties of mushroom which one would normally be afraid to pick. Sometimes we gathered wild strawberries and white raspberries, or all the red and blue and purple berries which carpeted the clearings.
The Wirtin, calling to the boys, came from the kitchen with a great jug of the roasted barley drink which, with a spoonful of cream, served as a substitute for coffee, and Tante Hella handed round slices of Gugelhupf.
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 5