A police car pulled up, probably originally to pick up the policeman. Noticing the commotion another officer jumped out of the car and rushed over to his colleague. They kneed Alex in the stomach, hit him hard round the head and punched him in the face. Alex fell to the ground, and they dragged him over to the police car and violently forced him into the back. He was shouting and calling for help but no one listened or helped, they just quickly walked by, ignoring what was going on, frightened of saying anything or of getting involved. No one trusted the police and in Russia, most people were frightened of them because they can still more or less do what they wanted, they were all corrupt, there was no accountability and they would all stick together. I wanted to take some photographs but Inna quickly stopped me; if they found out I had taken photographs or saw the flash, they would have most certainly have stormed the apartment, confiscated the camera and the film, and probably arrested me and taken me to the police station where I would have been beaten and held for god knows how long. Russia, one of the biggest and, with its oil, one of the wealthiest countries in the world has one of the worst police forces and, being a foreigner, I had few rights. The police care for no one and nothing, and certainly did not care for not an old white-haired man standing up for himself and whatever he believed in. Alex’s wife had heard what was going on and rushed down to help, but she too was forced into the back of the police car and they both were then driven off. Neither of them came home for three days, when they did they were quiet and withdrawn. Alex told us that, because he swore and insulted a policeman, they had beaten him up and kept him without food or water. I always knew that Moscow was a difficult place to live, a place where its leader was supposedly democratically elected but where there was, in fact, very little democracy.
I hated myself for standing by, for watching, unable or rather unwilling to do a thing while someone we knew got beaten up and arrested. Although England has many faults, it is based and built upon an individual’s freedom and human rights but in Russia individual rights are ignored and disregarded and it revolted me. I realized there and then that I no longer wanted to live in Russia. So Inna quit her job and, on the 12 October 2003, we moved back to the UK - back to normality and relative stability.
Prior to moving to Moscow, I had lived in Manchester. Although my daughter still lived there I didn’t really want to go back to the north-west; I had had enough of a big-city life and yearned for somewhere more quiet and relaxed, and so we chose to move to Norwich, the city in which I grew up.
I wasn’t born in Norwich, but moved there when I was about five. Before moving me, my younger brother Mark, and my mother lived in poverty in a caravan in Langley, near Slough. My mother moved to Norwich as her mother and father, and two of her brothers, lived there and it would be easier for my mother to be closer to them.
My grandfather was a decorated Second World War fighter pilot and had been based at RAF Coltishall. He was Polish and my mother was born in Poland, but moved to England just after the war. I grew up and went to school in Norwich so it seemed the most appropriate place to move back to.
Norwich is a nice city; it has a beautiful Cathedral, an imposing castle overlooking the centre of the city, lots of cafés and bars, a vibrant nightlife, cinemas, theatres and enough culture for Inna and I to feel happy and settled. With a population of about 150,000 it was a far cry from the 12 million or so living in Moscow. Arriving in Norwich from Moscow was like entering a completely different world. The pace of life was so slow and relaxed and, at first, it drove us both mad. We would be hurrying around like idiots while everyone else meandered along without a care in the world. We would rush madly to wherever we were going, racing across the roads, zipping in and out of everyone while everyone else took things at a much more relaxed pace. For example, we would stand in the queue getting more and more frustrated as the shop assistant engaged in a cheerful conversation with another customer about something trivial like the weather, or aunt Mavis’s new shoes, oblivious to the line of people waiting. And amazingly the people waiting in the queue didn’t seem to care either; they were busy chatting amongst themselves. It was only Inna and me getting more and more irritated and irate.
It took us quite a few weeks to settle into the Norfolk way of ambling aimlessly through the streets, or driving as though there was no other vehicles on the road, or chatting about frivolous things to cashiers and sales people, or taking forever to chose the right margarine, or stopping suddenly in the street for no apparent reason, or talking and texting on the mobile in the middle of the road when the lights are green. Unlike Moscow, nobody seemed that bothered about these things in Norwich.
It took Inna even longer to understand the Norfolk accent; probably one of the laziest accents in England! For a while she just could not comprehend what the majority of the people in Norwich were talking about, even though she had studied English at university and spoke it almost fluently. They would greet her in the shop with; “Hi-ya-aw-rite?” which meant “Hi, are you all right?” Missing the first letters of most words and joining two or three words together frequently made the people in Norwich very difficult to understand, and Inna took a few months to really adapt to this new, strange form of the English language.
Norwich had changed considerably since I left the city about 12 years previously and we both felt it was definitely going to be a nice place to settle. There was the new Forum and library, the new Castle Mall Shopping Centre and another shopping mall under construction, loads of cafés and restaurants, two or three big screen cinemas and the new Riverside complex. However, there was one bad thing about Norwich that I noticed on our first evening out; the life on the streets after about midnight. Although, when I was a lot younger, I had worked at many of the nightclubs in Norwich, I never remembered the city centre being so aggressive and polluted with drunks and stupidity and fights and general disregard for others. Sadly, according to all the media reports, this was not just a Norwich problem but a problem nationwide. As Inna and I walked up Prince of Wales road at around midnight, I was appalled at the behavior of everyone around me and embarrassed and ashamed at being English. Inna had never experienced anything like that in her life! Drunken girls were throwing up in the gutter or lying unconscious in alleyways or by the side of the road. Groups of men were fighting, people were shouting abuse at each other and at no one in particular, spitting, falling over while groups of police just stood around watching it all.
“Is this how English people behave?” Inna asked in disbelief.
“Awful, isn’t it?” I replied disgusted.
I was taking my Russian wife out into Norwich for the very first time and I was embarrassed and shocked at the behavior of its people. To most foreigners we must seem like utter barbarians and complete animals. If anyone behaved in this way on the streets in Moscow they would be beaten by the police and put in prison.
“If this is what living in a free society does to people, maybe we should go back to Russia,” Inna said and I agreed. Moscow is frequently suppressive and often cruel and unkind, but the streets are clean, there is no obvious drunkenness, fighting is dealt with swiftly and sternly and never, ever would a Russian girl be seen intoxicated. Sure, all Russians drink, and they drink heavily, but you would never ever see a Russian girl with her arse in the air vomiting into some gutter while her friends whooped and wailed around her. Inna simply could not understand it. Norwich is a great place to live apart from a couple nights of the week in the centre of the city after the pubs close.
Inna and I had both felt guilty at not having done anything for Maria. We were coming back to England because we couldn’t stand living in Moscow; life there was not easy and things didn’t go as we had planned and we were affected by corruption and crime, and yet Maria sat day after day at her place outside the metro with her hand outstretched asking passers-by for a few roubles. Very early every Monday morning during the long winters she would wrap herself up, layer upon l
ayer against the biting relentless bitter cold, leave her son with Lydmilla and Natasha and travel to her dingy one-roomed apartment at the hostel nearer to the centre of town where she would stay until Friday. She would then get up every morning at six and beg until late evening, wishing the week would pass quickly so she could be back with her son, playing and laughing and being a mother. Maria lived a life Inna and I could never live, she endured conditions we simply would not survive in.
We sat in the back garden of our little apartment in Norwich drinking cheap red wine and discussing Maria and what could we possibly do to help her. We could not afford to financially support her ourselves; things were going to be difficult enough anyway during the next few months. I would have to find a full-time job, as Inna couldn’t legally work, and living in England was going to be much more expensive than living in Moscow. In Moscow I used to be able to get by on two or three hundred pounds a month, even earning that a week in England would still not be enough to pay all the bills. Inna only had a six month visitor’s visa with no facility to work, so I would have to support her. We had no possessions and no furniture, we quite literally returned from Moscow with two bags full of clothes and had to borrow household items from friends. Despite our hardship, we still desperately wanted to do something for Maria; we wanted to honor our promise to her and so, after lengthy discussions and a few more glasses of wine, we decided to start a small appeal and try and collect some money which Inna would then give to Maria when she next went back to Moscow. I persuaded Inna that people in Great Britain were actually quite generous when it came to charity and giving. Unlike Russia, in the UK there lots of different kinds of charities catering for lots of different needs and conditions and I felt sure that, with a lot of hard work, dedication and absolute transparency, we could collect at least a few hundred pounds. Inna didn’t believe me; no one did anything much for anyone in Russia. She simply couldn’t believe there were thousands of charitable organizations here in the UK, all trying to do something good for other people, the community, the disabled, the poor and the unfortunate. From huge international charities like the Red Cross to the tiny one-man-band, Britain and the British can be so generous and kindhearted and so moved to give. Inna asked how people could give when things cost so much in England, how could people care for others when it took so much will power and strength just to care for themselves? She was dumbstruck when I told her that the twenty or so dollars we paid every month for all the utilities in Moscow would not last more than a couple of days in the UK. We had rent, electricity, gas, water, council tax, house insurance, television hire, television license, telephone, car insurance, road tax, MOT, personal insurance, mobile phone - the list goes on and on. I told her that to live comfortably most households had to have two very good incomes.
What about children, she would ask. What happens when a couple wants children? I explained either they get thrown into poverty, struggling to survive on just the one salary, or the child quickly goes into daycare and the mother rushes back to work. This was also incomprehensible to Inna. Why would a society charge so much that it then forces families either into poverty or to break apart? I found it almost impossible to answer. I found it impossible to answer the many questions she asked me about life in England, and she simply did not believe me as I tried to persuade her that we could and would raise money for Maria. She thought it was impossible in a society that she initially saw as being incredibly greedy, incomprehensibly expensive and extremely aggressive.
Chapter Nine
A Celebrity’s Wife
The next day I designed some leaflets which, at our own cost, we had printed. On the front of the leaflet was a picture of Maria sitting on her wooden platform and on the back a brief description of her and her life and an appeal for help. We gave our home address, our home and mobile telephone numbers and an e-mail address, as well as inviting anyone to come and see us at anytime to discuss Maria and her story in greater detail. We also had a few other photos ready to show any visitors we might have. Although we were not a registered charity; just two individuals with a strong desire to help someone almost 1500 miles away and in a country most people knew or cared little about. We wanted to show that we were absolutely genuine and we were determined to be as open, honest and transparent as we could.
We bought a street plan of Norwich and plotted various leaflet distribution routes around the local area. At that time we lived at the very end of a small cul-de-sac, near the Hewitt School, and about twenty minutes walk from the city centre. It was a nice quiet middle class area, with rows of neat semi-detached homes with clean and tidy cared-for gardens and company cars parked in neat driveways. We ambitiously had 10,000 leaflets printed which cost us almost £200. Inna worried, but I assured her we would make the money back and, hopefully, a few hundred pounds extra for Maria. And so, one Sunday morning about two or three weeks after Christmas 2003, and once the leaflets had been printed and delivered, we got up fairly early, put on our comfortable boots and light jacket, as it didn’t looked like rain and we didn’t check the forecast, and headed for our first bout of leafleting the local neighborhood. We spent about an hour and a half popping leaflets through people’s letterboxes, until dark ominous clouds moved overhead and the rain started. As the heavens opened up we both huddled under a tree getting wet through and vowed next time to check the weather before leaving the house. We laughed to each other as we got wetter and wetter, wondering what Maria would have thought if she could see us now; getting soaked trying to raise money for her. I don’t think she would have thought; “how nice” but probably; “how stupid,” and she would have almost certainly thought we were both out of our tiny little minds. Nobody sitting on the streets of Moscow thousands of miles away would believe what we were trying to do, or why. It would have been incomprehensible to almost everyone. But we had promised Maria, and we were determined to fulfill our promise.
Once the rain had eased off we rushed home, and sat next to the radiator with a hot mug of tea trying to warm up, while looking out of the window. The sun came out and the weather changed back to a nice sunny afternoon. British weather! God must have thought how stupid we were too.
I don’t know what I expected but every morning for the following two or three days I rushed to greet the postman, hoping for something, however small. And then on the fourth day a cheque for £5 fell on the doormat. It was our very first cheque, from Mrs. Hingley, with no address, just a cheque and the leaflet. We were delighted. It was only £5 but it was a start, a glorious start to a very long road ahead. I stood admiring the cheque and reciting the proverb about oak trees and acorns. Inna just thought I was mad but each and very Sunday for the following few weeks we religiously went out with our box of leaflets; walking up and down streets and roads and driveways and paths, getting our fingers trapped in letterboxes, barked at by dogs and occasionally snarled at by suspicious householders. Everso slowly we started to collect money, a few pounds here and there and an occasional cheque for £10, £15 and sometimes even £20. We listed every donation; the amount, from whom and the address when given. Suddenly, on the 16 February a cheque landed on our door from J Ogden for a £100. We couldn’t believe our eyes and then on the 19 February David and Barbara Herman sent us £250 and the Tuesday before Inna was due to fly her Russian group, whom she teaches Russian to once a week, presented us with another large donation. It had taken us about six weeks but we had paid back the cost of having the leaflets printed and had almost £250 pounds to give to Maria. Inna was due to visit Moscow on the 28 February 2004 and we celebrated by treating ourselves to a nice bottle of red wine (for a change) and a few chocolate éclairs.
***
A couple of weeks previously, just as we started our appeal, I had arranged to meet my mother in the city centre for a coffee. I didn’t see her very often as I had been away for almost a year, but since back we would try to meet up now and then for a coffee and chat. We met on the 3 February when I told her ab
out Maria; the girl Inna and I were helping in Moscow. She suggested we contact the wife of a well-know celebrity who was regularly in the media for her philanthropic and humanitarian work. When I got home I told Inna about my mother’s suggestion and a few days later we wrote a letter to her via her agent:
Dear Madam
I completely understand that you get many such requests for help and may never actually receive this letter, but if you do please take a little time to read the attached leaflet.
I am a writer and Journalist and was based in Moscow for quite a while. Although I have now come back to the UK, my wife is Russian and we return frequently. I am still registered with the British Embassy. I won an award writing for IMPACT magazine about racism in Russia, and have had various other editorials published in magazines. My first book comes out next week. My wife Inna worked for a security company in Moscow until she moved with me back to the UK. We are perfectly genuine.
We met Maria begging outside a metro near to where my wife worked. Her beauty in a harsh, hard world struck us. At first I wanted to write her story and then give her the proceeds from its sale, but at that time there was no interest from the British press, so we decided to start an appeal. Although, I must just mention, I still hope to write a book on her life, as it is a truly fascinating and remarkable tale.
Maria's Story Page 14