‘Hush, Doushinka! Hush!’ he whispered as my sobs redoubled. He looked round the quiet square apprehensively.
‘You mustn’t cry in the street – it’s not allowed. Look!’ He pointed to a notice attached to the railings of the gardens which read MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND STREET CRIES STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
CHAPTER II
Presently, I moved to another school, a big muscularly-inclined establishment considered to provide an excellent all-round education; but this merely meant that hockey (and cricket too) counted more than learning, and many exhausting hours were spent in the gymnasium. I loathed everything about my school days; especially the vaulting horse and parallel bars upon which I wobbled like an unset blancmange. Even the discovery that the gym-mistress had been born in Siberia could not diminish the miseries endured in these unheated, echoing vaults of athleticism.
It was said that Miss Volkhovsky was none other than the child of that celebrated Russian liberal writer, Felix Volkhovsky, who had been exiled to Siberia in 1878, upon vaguely worded charges of ‘belonging to a society that intends, at some time in a still distant future, to overthrow the present form of government.’ He had been imprisoned in the dread fortress of Petropavlovsk and later given a life-sentence to Tomsk. His young wife had followed him there but, at last, falling ill and believing herself a burden, she had taken her own life. Disasters pursued Volkhovsky: a daughter, Kate, pined and died; and he was sentenced to a further exile, in a small forgotten town on the Mongolian border. But from there, leaving his remaining daughter Vera in charge of friends, he succeeded in making a most daring escape to America, via Japan. The child, dressed as a boy, was smuggled out of Siberia to London and her waiting father.
That same little Vera was now the brisk, springy figure in a gym tunic, black plaits bound round her head, Russian-peasant fashion, who rapped out marching orders and chivvied us on to gymnastic feats. Even the nimbus of Siberian origins could not blind me to the fact she made my life thoroughly uncomfortable. Yet, hanging sullenly from a trapeze, I would forget my indignities and, watching her as she squirmed effortlessly through a pair of dangling rings, see her transformed into some legendary heroine of the Siberian snows. As she swarmed up and down ropes, I invested this exercise with the glamour of an escape from some prison stockade. Michel Strogoff, the Courier of the Tzar, no less, was hidden in the shadows, with a pair of fast-paced Mongolian ponies, and an unsheathed knife . . . Together he and I would flee the Khan’s torturers, and gallop to freedom across taïga and steppes. Yes, Miss Volkhovsky had known those vast and mysterious regions I craved . . . And then her voice would pierce my reverie, whip-lash sharp.
‘Well, going to hang there till tomorrow morning?’
My mind, like my body, thudding heavily down to earth, I would slink off to the pitch-pine-partitioned lavatories, my only refuge, where, having concealed a copy of Atkinson’s Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, or better still, Michel Strogoff under my gym-tunic in a squared-off bust effect, I would spend an hour or two in unmolested calm. Ignoring the thunders of adjacent flushings, or regarding them as the rapids of the Angara, I read:
‘ “Your name?”
“Michel Strogoff, Sire.”
“Your grade?”
“Captain in Your Majesty’s Courier Corps.”
“You know Siberia?”
“Sire, I am Siberian . . .”
“Here is a letter,” said the Tzar. “Give it to my brother, the Grand Duke, and no other! But you will have to cross a country up in arms, in the grip of rebels, and invaded by the Tartar tribes, who will at all costs try to intercept this message . . . Can you reach Irkutsk?”
“Sire, I shall reach Irkutsk!” ’
And twenty-six chapters later, by way of tortures and innumerable trials, he does.
Lovely stuff.
•
As my obsession gained in strength it coloured everything and, to my mother, appeared to distort my education (whereas, in fact, it merely developed it in an unusual direction). The Houses of Plantagenet and Stuart were meaningless to me beside those of Rurik or Romanov. America’s abolition of slavery in 1862 was for me only an echo of Russia’s liberation of the serfs, a year earlier, in 1861. The year 1479 was suddenly of particular consequence, because of the Tartar invasion of Russia, which befell that year, and, I thought, must have swept the first of the Traveller’s Mongol ancestors down on Moscow. Some odd numbers of the Penny Cyclopedia, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1837, which I had unearthed among a cupboard full of musty old yellow-backs, part of a collection of Victoriana my father had made, promised infinite bliss, for to me, 1837 was a fatal year – that of Pushkin’s duel and death. But there was no mention of the dark drama in the Penny Cyclopedia and when I complained of this omission to my father he merely suggested I should start my own Society for the Diffusion of Useless Knowledge.
‘Changeling!’ he called me when I enlarged on my obsession, but he spoke with comprehension, for he too loved Pushkin’s tales and also lived withdrawn in his own world of reveries, immobile for the most part, in a bluish haze of his favourite Latakiyeh tobacco, the daylight of daily life filtered fitfully through a heavy Moorish moucharabia he placed across the window of his dressing-room.
Between us both, my poor mother fought a losing battle for those practical issues she felt necessary, useful, correct, but which she too, in secret, detested. In short, ours was not a conventional or practical household.
The tone of my school reports was disquieting. Seems to be day-dreaming . . . Oddly lacking in team-spirit . . . Moody, secretive, were recurring phrases. The Head Mistress, a majestic figure hedged with self-importance, who was occasionally glimpsed sweeping down the corridor, her academic gown billowing in the blasts of fresh air to which we were so ruthlessly exposed, was more specific when discussing me with my mother. That is, when stating her views; she had cowed my mother with one look. A child of my age, she said, was not expected to know about anything so specialized as The Old Believers sect – a grounding in the Old Testament would be better – nor should I interrupt the history lesson on Queen Elizabeth to ask about Tzar Ivan’s matrimonial intentions: it was simply showing off. I spent far too much time in the Library, and was always trying to get out of Games and Gym. And how regrettable it was that I had refused to be Confirmed . . . really quite outside the Head Mistress’s experience! My mother had nothing to say to this, for she too, had found my obstinacy incomprehensible. All the girls of my age-group were being prepared for confirmation that term; some pompous talks were given by visiting clergy, in preparation for the ceremony itself, conducted by a Bishop of the Church of England. But I had taken a stand and flatly refused to be received into the fold. It would be Orthodoxy or nothing I told my mother, who, for once, lost all control and boxed my ears. I held firm, sustained by my father who refused to exact pressure in the matter; for to him it was of no consequence. This was just another example of my wilful non-conformity, said the Head Mistress. No team spirit, she hissed, and my mother wilted at this dreadful taunt. And then, to cap it all, I had chosen such a particularly unpleasant subject for my half-term essay . . .
Did my mother know of this? asked the Head Mistress sternly. But on learning it was the assassination of the mad Tzar Paul I, my mother breathed more freely.
She had found it, from the beginning, quite impossible to control or steer my reading. That term, Resurrection, had been my favourite book, one she viewed with mistrust, comforting herself with the belief (perfectly correct) that I did not understand half of what I read. She obtained no support from my father in the question of selected reading for he insisted I should be allowed what I liked, regardless of suitability. This naturally led me to the world conjured by Russian novelists, that immoderate world populated by so many characters considered inadmissible in the schoolroom.
•
Once, on holiday in North Devon, we were unexpectedly joined by the Traveller. The
telegram announcing his imminent arrival had been brought up to the house before breakfast by a sweating Post Office boy on a red bicycle, who, in my eyes, appeared to be some messenger from the Gods announcing bliss too great for mortal compass.
My parents received the news with mixed emotions. ‘Pity he doesn’t play golf,’ was my father’s reaction, while my mother sighed over the prospect of catering for so exotic a guest. The presence of the Traveller always seemed to make her nervous: she fussed over both the food and her own appearance: yet she welcomed him warmly, as did my father. They had both known him from some remote past, or so I thought it, before they were married.
I myself was consumed with anxiety lest I should not be allowed to go to the station to meet him, wearing my new party dress.
‘By all means if you want to look ridiculous,’ said my mother who, being the most feminine of women, sometimes appeared to cede before gaining her point: still, six o’clock found me in the pony-trap, outside the little yellow Victorian-Gothic station, gloriously attired in Liberty silk, and of course cutting a ridiculous figure.
The Traveller, an adept at pleasing when he chose, fell back before my splendours saying it was quite the loveliest dress he’d ever seen and made me look years older (a phrase which, at that time of life, gave infinite pleasure) and so I returned to the house in a glow of triumph, hanging on his arm.
He slipped into our ways ‘as into a goose-feather bed’, in his own words; eating buns, junkets, shepherd’s pie and other innocent foods with gusto. Even those I thought least agreeable, such as rhubarb, were gilded by the unexpected light he cast upon them.
‘Rhubarb! You don’t like it? You would, if you knew what the name signified,’ he said cunningly. ‘Rha is the dialectic name for the Volga. All along its banks this plant grows hugely. So since my country has always been considered barbarous by others, the Latin – barbara is tacked on. There you have it – Rhubarb – a plant grown in the barbarous regions of the Rha, or Volga. Yes. I thought you’d want a second helping after that.’
Sometimes we shrimped or collected glistening sea-weed; or there would be a family outing in a trap, to Bude, for a Cornish Cream tea where, seated in the tea gardens, spooning clotted cream into dollops of golden syrup or home-made jam, he would listen attentively to the talk at other tables, savouring the innumerable variations of the English accent. The niceties of Kensington English, Oxford Cockney, East-Ender Cockney, and all the rest fascinated him: he was particularly intrigued by certain homely phrases and would try to trace their significance and origin. The Cockney rejoinder, ‘the same to you with knobs on’, baffled him; but the nannies’ classic ‘ta-ta!’, employed either as a farewell formula or in the sense of an outing – ‘going ta-tas’, ‘going for a ta-ta’, derived, he was convinced, from some Elizabethan fur-traders’ expedition to High Tartarie.
‘It’s obvious,’ he said, and planned to write a monograph on the subject.
I had discovered a hiding place on the cliffs where, crawling under tropic-sized bracken, I could spend hours hidden in the green gloom. Here, reading the story of Yermak’s conquest of Siberia, I listened with relish to the anxious voices of my family, calling for me on the other side of the headland. This promontory was known as Gallantry Bower, and it was supposed to have been a smugglers’ lair. There were caves in the cliff-face, but I never discovered them, having no head for climbing. Gallantry Bower was something I kept to myself, until the Traveller’s arrival. Then we shared its green secrecy. We would scramble up the pebbly paths where tiny pink shells had been washed up among the fox-gloves. Sometimes the Traveller would ask the name of a tree or a flower. Forget-me-not, I would say, Love-in-idleness, Love-in-a-mist, Love-lies-a-bleeding, Heart’s Ease.
‘And they say the English are not sentimental!’
In return, I would ask him the names of Russian wild-flowers, but it was plain he had never known a country childhood.
After much thought: ‘There was one I remember in the Ukraine, green and white striped, I think we called it Snow on the Mountain . . .’ Then I would persuade him to tell me of the overheated, exotic winter-gardens which every well-to-do house boasted, in the Russia of his childhood: conservatories where gloxinias, stephanotis, orchids, and full-sized orange trees bloomed exuberantly, glowing against the whiteness of the encircling snows, and lit, on the night of a party, by hundreds of festive candles.
Crawling under the tunnels of bracken we would reach the heart of Gallantry Bower and, plagued by midges, spend the rest of the afternoon ‘talking Russia’ and, sustained by currant or ‘squashed-fly’ biscuits, play the Run-Away Game, something we had invented in the early days of our friendship when our Russian bond was first cemented. This game allowed our imagination full rein and permitted us to talk Russia by the hour. One of us would imagine some incident and place, in Russia of course, where we had run away together. The other would have to find us, in three guesses.
‘We are at the Fair at Nijni-Novgorod?’ the Traveller hazarded.
‘No. One guess gone.’
‘Mmm . . . We’re Jenghis Khan’s guests of honour at the Festival of the Banners?’
‘No . . . but you’re getting warm.’
‘Then we’re in Siberia . . . I know! We’re in a sleigh – we’re dashing through the forest pursued by wolves – but it’s all right, because the Cossacks arrived in time!’
Siberia! It held us both in thrall.
‘Why do you want it so much?’ he asked, but I could not explain.
‘Isn’t Gallantry Bower enough? I suppose you’d rather be in a Mongolian yurt? Or on the Trans-Siberian?’
Much rather.
•
I had been reading the travels of Huc and Gabbet in Tartary, the two Jesuit priests who travelled in the Mongolian hinterland, and whose accounts of the high-priest, the Kutukthu, stirred my imagination. Sometimes I persuaded the Traveller to speak some sentence in a Mongolian dialect, and thought it marvellously exotic to the ear: but when he wrote the characters down I agreed with Gilmour the Scottish Missionary – ‘Gilmour of the Mongols’, my nursery hero – that they looked like a piece of knotted string. Soon I had built up another fantasy life beyond Siberia, in one of the Gobis, in a splendid yurt hung with yellow silk and furnished with scarlet lacquer boxes. Here the Kutukthu and I had set up house together. I was his constant companion, queening it over the Mongols. Wrapped in snow-leopard skins we rode out over the wind-bitten plains, galloping our blunt-nosed little ponies towards the buried treasure of Kara Korum. As the dusk fell, we returned to the yurt where saffron-robed monks played to us on conch shells and blasting on gigantic copper and silver trumpets, summoned the encampment to watch the sacred dance of the Burkhans, or a wrestling contest. We had our own stable of wrestlers, which I knew was a mark of stylish living in Mongolia. Carpets were spread before the yurt and beside a heavy brass samovar we settled down to the entertainment. I brewed green tea – the best he’d ever tasted, said the Kutukthu, whose features remained shadowy. But as he crowned me with an intricately worked turquoise and coral tasselled headdress, he naturally became the Traveller.
This Asiatic idyll was soon confided to him and he countered with a jingle set to the tune of some current popular air:
I want to elope with the Kutukthu
If he won’t oblige, kind Sir, will you?
I must have you or the Kutukthu
If I can’t have him, then you will do.
‘If you only knew how much you’d be shocking the Mongols! The Kutukthu is considered a particularly holy figure . . . You might as well imagine setting up in sin with the Archbishop at Lambeth Palace . . . However, it’s a nice idea, you and the Kutukthu . . .’
Pleased with his versifying he had suddenly begun to caper about with astonishing agility, stamping and kicking with all the abandon of the three Ivans in Tchaikovsky’s ballet.
‘I didn’t know you could dance.’ I was enthralled by these violent leapings.
‘All Russ
ians can dance,’ he said curtly, and stopped as abruptly as he had begun. I never saw him dance again. He was entirely unpredictable.
He loathed snobbery, pretension, and all the protocol of convention. Yet, when annoyed by what he considered the lack of consideration, or the impertinence (a favourite accusation) of post-office officials, taxi drivers or anyone else, he would always relieve his feelings by a long-winded plaint reeled off in a muttered undertone. ‘And-to-think – that-when-my-great-grand-father-arrived-in-Kiev-the-Metropolitan-had-to-be-at-the-gates-to-receive-him-in-person-and-all-the-bells-were-rung!’
We never discovered why his great-grandfather merited this obsequious reception. ‘Perhaps some prophetic vision told them how illustrious the old man’s great-grandson would be,’ said my father, nettled by some of the Traveller’s exigencies.
•
Under the curled bracken fronds and fox-gloves of Gallantry Bower he lay on his back, the yellow shaven skull of the Chinese djinn cushioned on dried grasses and little speckled mauve flowers. The slit eyes stared up, unblinking, at the sun’s rays which pierced the bracken fronds overhead. As usual, he was fingering the beads of a Moslem chaplet, and as each bead clicked past he was singing, very low, a Russian song I tried to follow. The deep smoky tones of his speaking voice which, as with so many of his fellow countrymen, had a vitality and depth associated with basso-profondos, was retained when he sang; although that unmistakably national, smoky timbre veiled every range of voice, melting yet puissant, with nothing of the Italian treacle tones, even in the lightest tenors.
‘What are you singing?’
‘An old Russian song – nothing for you, miss – not yet, anyhow.’ He lay there, staring up at the bracken roof above us, smiling his secret smile.
I have heard the song many times, since. It is the song of the pedlar going to the fair bargaining his wares with a girl – a piece of red velvet for a kiss . . . Only the night knows how they settle their bargain. ‘Grow high,’ says the pedlar to the wheat-field. ‘Grow high to hide our secret.’
Journey Into the Mind's Eye Page 4