Stalin's Children (25 page)

My father was born into a generation whose fathers had walked in good order into withering machine-gun fire for King and Country. He grew up in a conformist age, and though much in his life was remarkably individualistic, the idea of betraying his country and capitulating to the blandishments of the KGB, never mind how delicately phrased, was something he could not countenance. But his refusal wasn't a question of choosing conformity over the extravagant folly of treachery. His deeply held sense of personal honour simply would not let him do it; despite a lifelong cynicism about politics, he never had doubts about his love for his country. He was to pay a heavy price for his principles.

A note arrived, on thin official notepaper, announcing that my parents' wedding date had been cancelled because 'a criminal case has been opened' against Mervyn - which wasn't actually true, as the police case was still at the investigation stage. The KGB had also called Valery Golovitser in for a long series of interrogations, on condition of strict secrecy, but he nevertheless let Mervyn know through mutual friends that the hammer had fallen on him. My father, by now thoroughly scared of what the KGB's next move would be, realized that the consequences of his stand were beginning to be felt by his friends.

One way, Mervyn thought, to stop this spiral of revenge might be to buttonhole the Labour leader Harold Wilson, at that time still leader of the Opposition. Wilson was in Moscow for a meeting with the Soviets, who took a keen interest in Labour's chances at the next election. Mervyn took a trolleybus to the National Hotel on the evening Wilson arrived, and used his foreignness as a talisman to brush past the hotel security and find his way to Wilson's room. Wilson himself answered Mervyn's knock, but when he began to explain his predicament and to ask him to intervene personally with Khrushchev, Wilson, smelling trouble, politely but firmly refused. A visit two days later to Wilson's shadow foreign secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, was even more firmly rebuffed. Walker advised my father, fatuously, to contact the embassy.

Mervyn and Lyudmila decided to show up at the Palace of Weddings on Griboyedov Street on their allocated date, regardless of the cancellation. Mila wore a linen wedding dress embroidered with pearls, and Mervyn carried a heavy red gold wedding ring he had bought for the occasion in his jacket pocket.

My father, in a gamble which ultimately was to do nothing but hasten the end, invited an entourage of foreign correspondents to cover his attempt to marry. Victor Louis of the
Evening News,
a mysterious character of Russian birth who was the doyen of the foreign press in Moscow, was present, as well as at least a dozen KGB goons. In the event, the wedding palace's director wisely chose to stay away from the building all day. Her stubborn deputy refused to marry the couple, saying that their reservation had been cancelled on orders from 'the administration'. Louis battled bravely on their behalf, pressing the deputy for a 'valid legal reason' for refusing to marry the couple. The bureaucrats retreated behind the old Soviet tactic of doing nothing for hours on end, and eventually their supplicants' energy dissolved into despair, and as evening fell everyone went home.

My father sensed that the inevitable reprisal after his failed publicity stunt was not far away, and went to ground in Lyudmila's flat. The foreign press, finding him missing from his room at the university, reported that he had disappeared. For two days, Mila and Mervyn clung to the illusion that a miracle might happen, trying to keep the terrible rip-tides of the world at bay outside the flimsy door of her room. Mila called in sick to work, and the two of them spent the days walking on the Arbat arm in arm, or locked in their little room reading and talking. But the shared telephone of the
kommunalka
ruined their desperate attempt to suspend time. Mervyn was urgently wanted at the British embassy.

One diplomat and one of the embassy's resident spooks stood waiting for him at the entrance to the Chancery, and took him down to the 'bubble', a supposedly surveillanceproof little booth where they could talk without being overheard. The reason for this cloak-and-dagger business was to inform Mervyn that the Foreign Office 'had reason to believe that Mila was a KGB plant' . No evidence for this assertion was offered. In what Mervyn later recalled as one of the proudest moments of his life, prouder even than his refusal to work for Alexei, he stood up in disgust and walked out of the room, and out of the embassy, without saying another word.

But though his disgust was genuine enough, the bravado was forced. Now truly desperate, his natural shyness overcome by panic and the rising sense of imminent catastrophe, my father took the trolleybus back to his little refuge on Starokonushenny Pereulok to await the inevitable. The next day, 20 June, two British embassy officials called at the apartment to deliver a letter. The presence of so many foreigners caused a sensation among Mila's whispering neighbours.

The letter informed my father that the embassy had received an official letter from the Soviet Foreign Ministry to the effect that one William Haydn Mervyn Matthews, graduate student, was now considered
persona non grata
in the Soviet Union and was to leave immediately. Minutes later, a uniformed militiaman and a
druzhinnile,
or civilian helper, rang the door bell. Mervyn had been living at the apartment without registration, the militiaman said, and he must come with them. He had little choice.

They drove quickly through central Moscow - the streets were still almost empty of traffic then - skirting Lubyanka Square, which for a nasty moment Mervyn thought might be their final destination, and instead heading up Chernyshevsky Street to OVIR, the passport and registration office. There, Mervyn was served with formal notice that his visa had expired and that he should leave immediately. A British embassy staffer present volunteered to help to find a place on an otherwise terribly crowded plane to London the next day, 21 June 1964. Mervyn was so disgusted that he refused to say a word in English, forcing the embassy man to have every word of his conversation with the officials laboriously translated.

They spent their last night together at Mila's flat. Mervyn didn't bother to return to the university to pack his things. Both he and Mila were almost dumb with grief. In the morning she accompanied Mervyn in a taxi to Vnukovo Airport, grey-faced and in shock. They embraced. As Mervyn went through the barrier to passport control and out of her life, probably for ever, Mila was overwhelmed with grief no less bitter than that she had felt when her parents had been taken away from her.

'God, what terrible minutes I spent there at the airport. I stood alone in the corner, watching your plane, overflowing with tears,' Mila wrote to Mervyn a few days later. 'The taxi drivers were trying to help, asking what the matter was; they said they'd take me for free if I didn't have the money. I couldn't leave for a long time, I hung around there, hoping a miracle would happen and you would return.'

11
Mila and Mervusya

My love
is
stronger than their hate.
Mila to Mervyn

Mervyn awoke to birdsong. Outside it was a bright summer morning in a neat English suburban garden. From the kitchen downstairs he could hear the clink of breakfast plates and the drone of BBC radio. As he lay in bed, the events of the last few days crowded in like the aftermath of a nightmare.

'He's a stubborn fool, and he should know better,' his forthright mother had told the
Daily Express
the day before, and she was surely right about the stubbornness. But there was more to it than that. Mervyn had fought all his life against the provincial drudgery that others had ordained for him. Now, he realized, he would have to fight for Mila too.

That morning Mervyn resolved to do everything in his power to get Mila out of Russia. This was no impulsive decision. Ever the pragmatist, he gave himself five years. Then, if it was still hopeless, he would reconcile himself to failure, and move on.

Mervyn set up an office in the back bedroom of his halfbrother Jack's small house in Barnes. From there he began making calls, picking up the strands of his life. One of his first was to St Antony's. The college's warden, Bill Deakin, had been following the press coverage of his student's antics in Moscow with increasing concern. Deakin suggested they have dinner at Scott's fish restaurant in Mayfair the next evening. Deakin was a stately character, patrician to the fingertips. He had been an associate of Churchill's during the war, and had parachuted into Yugoslavia to make contact with Tito's partisans alongside Sir Fitzroy Maclean. Though Mervyn liked and respected Deakin, he was exactly the kind of smooth establishment figure who put him on the defensive.

Deakin had taken little notice of Mervyn before he left for Moscow, but now that the shy Welshman had committed the sin of putting the college's name on the front pages it was time for a serious chat. The dinner was expensive and indifferent my father thought that Alexei's hospitality in Moscow had been superior - but Deakin was charming as he downed his whisky and sodas. His first concern as he extracted the full story from Mervyn was to ensure that he had not been involved in any criminal activity in Moscow which could damage the reputation of the college. Over coffee, Deakin suggested that my father 'have a talk with the security people' about his experiences. Outside, Deakin hailed a taxi, leaving my father to walk to the Tube. My father noted Deakin's lavishness with ten-shilling tips.

Even as he was boarding the plane in Moscow, Mervyn had come up with a plan bold enough to fulfil his urgent need to act. Nikita Khrushchev was due to visit Sweden with his wife the following week, and Mervyn planned to deliver them a personal letter, pleading for them to help two ordinary young people get married.

Somehow, either from something he'd said to the press or to his brother Jack, Mervyn's mother got wind of his plan. 'For my sake, Mervyn, give up the idea of going to Scandinavia to see Khrushchev,' she wrote to her son from Swansea. 'He is moving about with a terrific bodyguard and you might get shot.' Mervyn ignored her advice, which was to become a habit over the years to come.

He boarded a plane to Gothenburg, but landed just as the Khrushchevs were leaving. The Swedish police were waiting for Mervyn, having found out from the newspapers about his visit, and were enormously relieved when he arrived too late. 'Khrushchev gone,' a Swedish plain-clothes policeman told Mervyn, pointing up at the watery sunset.

Mervyn was invited to dinner by the editor of the
Göteborgs Handels och Sjöfarts Tidning,
and gave an interview. Having missed Khrushchev in Gothenburg, Mervyn followed him to Stockholm, taking the train through the rainy Swedish night. When he arrived he found himself a cheap room at the Hellman Hotel, and set up his tea kit: an electric spiral element, a perforated spoon for the leaves, and a mug. It was a habit he stuck to well into my childhood. I vividly remember the tea kit, always there on stained tables in cheap hotel rooms wherever we stayed, in Provence, Istanbul, Cairo, Florence, Rome. He also brought a plate and cutlery, because he couldn't afford Swedish restaurants. Instead, he ate snacks and sandwiches bought in grocery shops.

In the morning Mervyn made for the offices of the two big Stockholm dailies,
Aftonbladet
and
Stockholms-Tidningen,
where reporters told him that the security around Khrushchev was tight, and that he shouldn't try to get near the great man. They promised to run major feature articles in the next day's edition.

That evening, Mervyn went alone to an amusement park on one of the islands and watched the young couples dancing. They had to pay separately, he noticed, for each number. He imagined himself and Mila going through the turnstiles together.

At three in the morning he was woken by a knock at the door. It was Des Zwar, a reporter from the
Daily Mail.
Mervyn tried to get rid of him, but Zwar was persistent. He'd been round every hotel in town looking for Mervyn, he said. 'The office thinks there might be a good story in it, so they sent me over.'

They sat on the bed and talked. Mervyn told Zwar his story, and Zwar told Mervyn about the passions of his life, golf and beautiful women, 'in that order'. Zwar's story, a masterpiece of tabloidese which my father preserved in the first of many files of newspaper clippings, appeared in the next day's edition.

'Dr Mervyn Matthews, the thirty-one-year-old research student who was refused permission to marry a Russian girl, was in Stockholm tonight waiting for his chance to see Mr Khrushchev tomorrow. Earlier today he wandered around Stockholm's city centre with a letter to Mr Khrushchev in his pocket. He said, "I won't give up" . . . If Dr Matthews tries to break through the cordon of machine gun carrying police he runs the risk of being shot dead. Security men, nervous since the reported threat to kidnap Mr Khrushchev, are in the trees, lining the roads and even on horseback, with orders to shoot if there is a sudden move to get near the Russian leader.'

Mervyn's money was running out, and he had not succeeded in getting anywhere near Khrushchev. The next day, he flew back to Oxford empty-handed.

'I'm sitting at the window of our college thinking of you,' wrote Mervyn to Mila in his beautiful, cursive Russian script. 'This damned [postal] strike is still on, they say it won't be finished for a while, so I asked a friend to post this from Paris for me. A week has gone by and no news from you. I am waiting for your call very much.'

His language, in those very first letters, was guarded, the style formal. It is as though he was testing her reaction, her expectations of him. 'I would call myself but I don't want to interfere . . . I am still applying all my efforts to find a solution to our question. You can rely on me completely. I don't forget my Mila for a moment. I have your photos, those old ones, but I am afraid to look at them. They are in an envelope. I know that as soon as I look at your face I will be overwhelmed by such a wave of sorrow that it will be quite impossible. It's so empty, empty without youThe weather is hot and stuffy. A typical Oxford summer. The college is exactly the same, but I have changed. I want to know what your mood is - it will be easier for me if I know that you are not despairing. When I think of our parting my heart breaks. Do not worry - I will not leave things like this. Remember I am undertaking many steps to achieve our mutual happiness. Look after your little nerves, your health. Your, M.'