Stalin's Children (17 page)

Lillian's emotional volatility is hardly surprising. Her life had been permanently scarred at the age of nineteen when she became pregnant by a married man, a local solicitor who refused to recognize the child. In the stern, Methodist world of South Wales, a child born out of wedlock was a stain for life. When William Matthews married her she was a fallen woman, a fact which coloured their relationship for ever. My father was brought up believing that his half-brother Jack was his uncle, and only learned the truth in his late teens.

The coming of the Second World War provided a deeply thrilling interlude in Mervyn's boyhood. His stories of the war filled my own childhood - the drone of bombers on moonless nights, the sight of the docks and railway lines bombed. At the war's outbreak, along with his schoolmates, Mervyn was hastily evacuated to the flower-filled meadows of Gwendraeth on the Gower Peninsula, clutching a small cardboard suitcase with his name and address carefully pencilled on to it. But most of the children soon returned from evacuation after their mothers decided the dangers had been exaggerated.

They were wrong. Mervyn was in Swansea during the heaviest bombing raids of 1941. He remembers the great thundering of the bombs slamming into the town, and the excitement of scurrying to the air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden with candles and an old brass miner's lamp.

Just before one of the worst air raids, Mervyn's mother took the boy to spend the night at his grandparents' house. There was no particular reason for her decision; she had simply been seized by a powerful desire to get out of her house. As Mervyn and his mother crested the hill to Lamb Street the next morning, walking hand in hand, they found that their house had been completely demolished by a direct hit from a German bomb. Half the street had disintegrated into a pile of smoking bricks, and many of their neighbours had been buried alive in their Anderson shelters. Mervyn was horrified, and, as any little boy would be, profoundly impressed.

Every father, I think, re-visits his own boyhood when he plays with his son. And by the same token, every small boy shares his father's passions, until puberty interposes the desire to break free. The landscape of my own childhood in London was populated by mementoes of my father's youth. More so, I think, than my schoolfellows, I had a very 1930s childhood. One of the first books I remember reading was my father's copy of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,
produced for the 1937 Disney film and illustrated with three-dimensional pictures you viewed through a pair of cardboard spectacles with red and green celluloid lenses. Later I loved his old
Boys' Own
annuals and thick adventure books filled with biplanes and menacing fuzzy-wuzzies. On the morning of my eighth Christmas I discovered a great hessian-covered suitcase standing in my bedroom. It contained a wonderful a-gauge Hornby electric train set, with a magnificent green locomotive called the
Caerphilly Castle.
It had been one of the few gifts my grandfather had given to my father, for the Christmas of 1939. Another year my father gave me his boyhood Meccano set, in a special wooden box with drawers and compartments for the bolts and girders and accompanied by wonderfully illustrated instruction books featuring boys in shorts and long socks. I would spend hours, alone, sitting on the floor of my attic bedroom constructing elaborate gantry cranes, armoured trains and suspension bridges for the
Caerphilly Castle
to cross over.

Sometimes my father would set his collection of model steam engines spluttering into life, powered by a little boiler fired with a methylated spirit lamp. I loved the smell of hot engine oil and steam. At weekends we'd drive to the East End to see the Thames barges at St Katharine's dock, or we'd go scavenging for bits of clay pipes and old bottles on the mud flats of the Thames at low tide. When I grew a little older, we'd go for long walks every evening through Pimlico. We'd ignore the neat white Thomas Cubitt facades of the main streets and turn instead down Turpentine Lane, a short cut which led us down to the great, sluggish Thames opposite Battersea Power Station. Of all the streets I've seen in London, Turpentine Lane, with its smoke-blackened brickwork and tiny backyards, looks the most like a South Wales backstreet.

We made model sailing boats together, not from kits but carved out of giant blocks of wood we'd scavenge from skips. We made the spars, sails and tackle with a little vice, a Stanley knife and an old pair of pliers. With special pride, he gave me a lovely wood plane with which I fashioned a large and beautiful Thames barge.

The turning point of my father's boyhood came when he broke his pelvis falling off a bicycle, aged fifteen. The break revealed that Mervyn had been suffering from a rare, wasting bone condition. To heal the pelvis and his brittle right hip, doctors prescribed a course of traction. Mervyn was strapped into a special bed and his legs were encased in plaster and weights attached to them. For hours at a time he couldn't move, or see anything but the hospital ceiling.

In all, Mervyn was hospitalized for over a year, most of it in agonizing traction. Like his future wife Lyudmila, also in hospital with a crippled right leg at exactly the same time, Mervyn had no choice but to devour books, and to think. It seems that the intense boredom of forced immobility at a formative age sowed a lifetime's restlessness in both of them. Their bodies were immobilized, but their young minds wandered far. My father's deep need to travel and appetite for quixotic adventures, his contempt for authority and his penchant for taking risks was born, I believe, at this time along with a certain talent for self-pity and unhappiness.

'It seems to me that my childhood mirrored your childhood, my universities were the same as your universities, my thoughts, your thoughts, your doubts and fears matched my doubts and fears,' Mila wrote to him in 1964. 'A certain physical defect and a mental superiority over your peers (remember how you wanted to excel at sport but were the first in your class instead?) - everything was similar in our lives, identical, even our illnesses.'

It was soon after his time in hospital that Mervyn developed an interest in Russian. For a young boy from the Valleys who had never travelled further than Bristol, the enthusiasm was eccentric, to say the least. Now, when I ask him to talk about the decision which was to shape his life, he can think of no other reason than that Russian was the 'most exotic possible thing I could think of'. Russian was the language of a universe utterly unrelated to the reality of his life in the Hafod.

It is hard, now, to strip away the Cold War associations and envisage just what Russia meant for an impressionable schoolboy in 1948. In the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee had just launched its investigation into Communist infiltration in Hollywood, searching for metaphorical Reds under the beds. But in Britain, attitudes were more equivocal, especially in a working-class city like Swansea where Trade Unionism and Socialism went hand in hand. Just a few miles away from Swansea in the collieries of the Rhondda Valley, Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, had recently narrowly failed to get elected to parliament. There were plenty of Communists in William Matthews' Comrade's Sick Club who had yet to get the message that Uncle Joe Stalin, an ally just a few years before, was now on the other side.

But, as the ousted Prime Minister Winston Churchill had recently observed in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, an 'iron curtain' had descended across Europe. The Soviet Union was rapidly transforming, in the eyes of its former allies, into a dark and threatening place. And when the atomic scientist Igor Kurchatov detonated Russia's first atomic bomb on 29 August 1949 at Semipalatinsk - the Godforsaken piece of Kazakh steppe where Martha Bibikova had been imprisoned in 1938 the Soviet Union became a very real and immediate enemy. The culture and country with which young Mervyn was becoming fascinated was, in every sense, alien.

By the time I was growing up, Communism and Russia were synonymous with menace. The only voice of dissent was a lumbering elderly neighbour called Vicky, who was the first person outside my family whom I had ever heard speak well of Russia. She lived round the corner in a council flat, had a beard and didn't wash very often (though I noticed her bitter smell was quite different from the hormonal, foody smells of Russian old ladies). Vicky would sometimes walk me to school and back, and on the way tell me riveting tales about 'milk bottle bombs' - incendiary bombs shaped like old-fashioned broad-necked milk bottles - which fell on London during the war. She'd also tell me how her father was in an Allied convoy taking American supplies to Murmansk which was torpedoed by a U-boat. He had been a stoker, and I was fascinated to learn that he was first scalded by the boiling water from the bursting boilers, then frozen as he drifted in the sea. I was convinced the two would cancel each other out, leaving warm bathwater.

'Them Reds,' said Vicky in her high-pitched cockney voice, 'was very good to me Daddy. I won't hear a word against them.'

My own school contemporaries had other ideas. The realization that Russians were enemies, Reds, Communists, dawned on some of my fellows, and spread through that strange psychic osmosis by which childhood cruelties multiply. When I was about seven, someone at school accused me of being a 'Red', and demanded to know when we would pull all tanks out of Afghanistan. When I protested that I wasn't, I was called a liar and, worse, a sneaky liar because of the vehemence of my denials. The crowd of boys, canny as a pack of bloodhounds, caught the scent of my desperation, and sensed something was amiss - did I really have something to hide? If I was so upset, I must be a Red, and that must be very bad. A fight ensued, and I ran home with a black eye. For nearly three years afterwards, I refused to speak Russian at home.

In 1950, after passing his Russian A-level, Mervyn was accepted by the fledgling Russian faculty of Manchester University. He was overjoyed finally to get away from the Hafod, and away from his mother. Among the thick fogs and flat vowels of Manchester he applied himself to the study of Russian, of which he achieved an impressive mastery. By the end of his Finals he had struggled through all 1,200 pages of
War and Peace
in the original, a spectacular feat of masochism which he would often mention in relation to my own, more faltering efforts to master written Russian.

My father graduated from Manchester with a solid First and his tutors recommended that he go to Oxford for a postgraduate degree. St Catherine's, the university's newest college, would be the place for a bright young chap from South Wales who had intellectual spark but not much social polish, they thought, entirely correctly. St Catherine's was an energetic institution, though not yet installed in its current modernist campus, which Mervyn, a conservative in architecture as in so much else, strongly disliked. When he turned up to his first out-of-college tutorial at New College, his new tutor asked politely if English was the young Welshman's first language.

Despite such hitches, Mervyn thrived, worked hard and avoided the beer-drinking social life of the college. After two years at Catz he was offered a junior research fellowship at St Antony's, a far more prestigious college which was home to the best British experts on the Soviet Union. It was the crucial first step to becoming a tenured don. To all intents and purposes, Mervyn, purely by dint of hard work, was on the verge of becoming a made man in the fast-growing profession of sovietology, one of the many bright young fellows then speculating on the strange machinations of the Red empire rising in the east.

But peering at the strange land from a distance was not enough. In 1957, the opportunity to visit Russia, unimaginable for anyone but accredited diplomats or the occasional journalist for the previous two decades, suddenly arose. Khrushchev had ordained a great Festival of Students and Youth in Moscow, with young guests from all over the great community of socialist nations (which Battista-controlled Cuba had yet to join) and also, stunningly, from among the 'progressive elements' of degenerate capitalist countries too. Mervyn signed up. Much to his surprise, he was granted that rarest of official favours, a Soviet visa.

The festival was a carefully scripted and tightly controlled affair, but to Mervyn and the six hundred Western students who attended it was an intoxicating immersion in the world they had studied for so long. Mervyn was so thrilled he barely slept, even though he found himself instinctively disliking the communal sing-songs and flag-brandishing parades through stadiums full of cheering young Communists. Muscovites were no less intoxicated. Young Westerners were as exotic as mythical beasts, all the more so because for the past two decades any contact with foreigners had been easy grounds for a spell in the Gulag. Some of the African comrades present took fuller advantage of the opportunities for fraternization than the authorities had anticipated, fathering a whole generation of mixed-race babies for ever known as Children of the Festival.

Mervyn fell in with a couple of bold spirits who had taken advantage of the atmosphere of licence the festival had created to chat to foreigners. One was a devilishly handsome young Jewish theatre student called Valery Shein, who wore jaunty caps and striped shirts, and his quieter cousin Valery Golovitser, an intense balletomane a couple of years Shein's junior. The three young men walked down Gogolevsky Boulevard, locked in intense and earnest conversation about their respective lives. When Mervyn's all-too-brief week in Moscow ended, they swapped addresses. It seemed unlikely, to all concerned, that the miracle of the festival would ever repeat itself, or that Mervyn would ever be allowed back. The prospect of the two Valerys ever having the opportunity to visit Britain was so remote as to be laughable. In a sense, they were right. Moscow was not open to a mass influx of foreigners again until the 1980 Olympics.

But the following year, 1958, Mervyn heard of a job opportunity in Moscow. True, it was in the British embassy, and he would have to live the hermetic life of a diplomat, sealed off from the real Russian life that he had tasted during the festival. But the job, a humble one in the research department, would at least get him to Russia.