The Russian Album (21 page)

EIGHT

SAVAGE LANDS AFAR

While the family waited on board the
Huanchaco
in Constantinople harbour, Paul made his way up the hill to the Russian embassy, hoping the embassy would issue him and his family with papers that would allow them to continue their journey to England. At the entrance, he found that the gatekeeper was the son of the one who had been there in his childhood. The gatekeeper said the embassy was now occupied by a bad lot, representatives of General Denikin's White government in southern Russia. ‘If I were you,' the gatekeeper said, ‘I wouldn't go in there. Go and get the consul general, a man of the old school, to have a talk with Denikin's people first.' So Paul went and found the consul general and they came back to the embassy. Paul sat in the big hall while the consul general argued with Denikin's representative in a room that had once been his father's study. The consul general soon came out, muttering furiously that Denikin's representative had refused to help, saying, ‘I do not yet know if the presence of Ignatieff in Europe is desirable.'

Exhausted and despondent, Paul hurried back to the port to find the whole family dumped on the quay and the
Huanchaco
disappearing in the distance. Paul sat down on the trunk and despatched Natasha to find some rooms for the night. While she dashed from one seedy boarding house to another, Peggy and the boys wandered forlornly up and down the quay, which was thronged with Levantine traders and Turkish stevedores manhandling boxes, barrels and crates. The three weeks on board the
Huanchaco
had delayed the shock of exile. Now it hit them all with full force. Natasha returned, having been promised a room by a Frenchman she had met in the street. When they arrived at the boarding house, the Frenchwoman who ran the place took one look at the dusty family and shooed them away. They traipsed from one tatty hotel to another until they found rooms, as night fell, in a miserable and verminous boarding house run by a kindhearted Armenian woman whose face was bruised from her husband's beatings. They dined on greasy broth and locust beans from the carob trees outside the window and bedded down, all eight of them, in a pair of rooms. George slept in a chest of drawers. Thus they spent the first nights of exile.

When the Russian consul general found out where they were living, he took pity on them and moved them into his own apartment. Through contacts with the Russian provisional government in exile in Paris, Paul was soon able to force the Denikin representative to issue him with papers. The British still refused to admit the family, but Paul managed to secure a visa for France. But it took weeks before a ship could be found. When Paul tried to change his remaining rubles on the black market, his wallet was stolen and the family would have starved had it not been for a loan from a generous refugee friend. It was not until the end of June 1919 that the family managed to end its accursed stay in Constantinople. They boarded
La Flandre,
a passenger ship still filthy from its use as a troop ship, and sailed for France. They landed in Marseilles, made their way to the station and boarded a train for Paris jammed with demobilized French soldiers laughing and joking on their way home. In their midst sat the penniless Ignatieffs with Peggy Meadowcroft.

At the Gare de Lyon in Paris they were met by Paul's cousin, Colonel Alexis Ignatieff, who had been Russian military attaché in Paris during the war and whose father, Paul's uncle, was the governor of Tver province gunned down by an assassin in 1906. Alexis whisked them home to the fashionable apartment in St Cloud where he lived with his ballerina mistress and turned the boys loose on a real Russian feast. After a year of near starvation, the
koulibiaka, koulitch, blini
and
kissail
were like a promise of deliverance. Uncle Alyosha, as the boys called him, regaled them with stories of the time he quelled a mutiny among the Russian troops sent to join French forces on the Western Front in 1916. He told them about his meetings with Clemenceau, Joffre and Foch, all the great men of the war. It was several days before the family realized their cousin was the most hated man in the Russian émigré community. As Russian military attaché he had been entrusted with huge sums for the procurement of military supplies from French arms manufacturers. In November 1917, he transferred his allegiance to Lenin and helped procure munitions for the Red armies. Alyosha was only settling an old score. He believed his father had been gunned down not by Socialist Revolutionaries but by the Tsar's own secret police who wanted to eliminate his father for opposing the Tsar's concessions after the 1905 revolution. Alyosha felt free to betray a regime that had first betrayed him. Shunned by the entire émigré community and distrusted by the commissars who took over the Paris embassy, Uncle Alyosha must have been glad to see his cousin Paul, especially since Paul had his own reasons for distrusting the various White regimes in exile. Alyosha set the family up in a modest
pension
while they waited for visas to England.

Natasha decided she must go to cooking school to learn the rudiments of providing for her family. So she enrolled at Cordon Bleu, the only cooking school she had ever heard of, not bothering to ask how much the lessons cost. At her first lesson she learned how to cook a
risotto,
and at her second she learned how to make
marrons glacés,
glazed chestnuts. Those were the only cooking lessons she could afford, and so those two dishes became the dreary staple of family diet.

It would have been natural for the family to have remained in Paris. It was the capital of the Russian émigré community. The headquarters of the Russian Red Cross in exile, of which Paul was president, had been established there. French was Paul's second language. Yet he was determined to get to England. He knew that a Liverpool broker owed him money for a transaction involving cotton deliveries to Paul's factories near Moscow. If he could find the broker and get him to honour the debt, the family's destitution could be remedied. Paul also admired English education and both he and Peggy were determined to get the boys enrolled in a good school. Two years of civil war had done much more than interrupt their education; Paul feared that it had turned his oldest son, Nick, into a Bolshevik fellow traveller. A strict English education would turn them into proper English gentlemen and vaccinate them forever against wild politics. What Natasha thought of this plan, what she thought of Paul's increasing dependence on Peggy, she kept to herself.

In late July 1919, they arrived in London and went to stay with Peggy Meadowcroft's mother in her flat in a three-storey late-Victorian terrace house at 10
A
Oxford Road in Putney, a mile or so from Putney Bridge. Peggy moved in with her mother and gave her bedroom to Paul and Natasha while the boys were crammed in under the eaves in the attic. It must have been a cheerless summer for the boys, reconnoitring the streets of Putney, feeling hard looks directed at them from behind lace curtains, struggling to master a few English phrases for use in sweetshops and cafés. 10
A
Oxford Road was cramped and depressing, with a mean little English garden squeezed in between fences, where Peggy made them pose for her Brownie camera. In these pictures, the older boys are standing stiffly at attention in their new English suits, uncomfortable inside their enamel-hard Eton collars, their gangling arms held stiffly at their sides and their cuffs riding above their button boots. The younger ones are wearing sailor suits with knee pants and sport sailor caps with the names of Royal Navy warships on the hatbands. By then Peggy had taught them their first English song: ‘Rule Britannia'.

The youngest boy, George, was six that lonely summer. Soon after their arrival, he remembered, the family went to a Russian Orthodox church somewhere behind Victoria Station and stood for hours during an interminable Sunday service at which the Dowager Empress, the Tsar's mother, was present. It was hot and stuffy and soon George's head was swimming. Old ladies went round to the burning candles in front of the icons, deftly snuffing out the ones which burned down low, pinching life out between their fingers. The priest swung the censer, the incense rose in clouds around the altar, the choir droned on and George felt his legs give way beneath him. Someone picked him up and carried him outside. He came to in a superb car with mahogany fittings, grey cushions and leather upholstery. A chauffeur in livery was fanning his face with his cap. At first he thought that he was in heaven and then in Petrograd and that all the dreadful times in Kislovodsk and Constantinople had not really happened. He heard his mother say that he was still weak from the effects of malnutrition and so he knew he was in London after all. While his brothers looked through the windows, Natasha explained that he was in the Rolls-Royce of the Dowager Empress. She herself was still inside the church, standing as stiff and straight as she had stood earlier that summer on the afterdeck of
HMS
Marlborough,
watching with a kerchief in her hands as the shores of the Crimea slipped from sight.

Later in that summer of 1919, George and his brothers stood in the crowds with their father while General Haig marched up Pall Mall past Buckingham Palace at the head of a triumphant Allied victory parade. There were French and Belgian contingents but no Russian one, despite the millions of lives lost on the Eastern Front. The Bolsheviks' separate peace with the Germans at Brest Litovsk in the winter of 1918 had seen to that. Old Russia was now a disgraced and forgotten ally and the new Soviet regime was fighting Allied contingents on various fronts of the civil war. In the braying crowd, in the blizzard of Union Jacks, the family felt alone and apart. ‘Remember, Paul, Russia is a defeated nation,' the boys heard Peggy say. They were a defeated family and Peggy believed herself to be their saviour. She did not let them forget it. Paul had told her to turn the boys into English gentlemen and Peggy set about her task with a vengeance. In the tiny rooms of the flat in Oxford Road, the boys rose promptly at seven, had a stout English breakfast, a bowel movement promptly after breakfast on pain of punishment, and then hours of lessons. They were not to fraternize with boys in the street and games of any kind were forbidden. After dinner at six, the boys were supposed to practise their musical instruments until lights out at seven.

To cure George of the malnutrition that had caused him to faint in church, Dr Batteshaw, a paediatrician in Harley Street, prescribed a daily meal of fat bacon rashers. Peggy stood over him to make sure he ate every bite. ‘What did Mr Batteshaw say?' she would bark whenever he stopped chewing. ‘Fat, Peggy,' he would say, choking on tears and bacon. Lionel, two years older than George, went around with a look of permanent terror in his eyes from the punishment that Peggy administered when he missed a note on his violin. She would rap their knuckles with the ruler and make them write fifty times over, ‘I am a naughty boy,' in their exercise books. Worse than her dark regime was the knowledge that their parents seemed to approve. At least Paul did: his instructions to Peggy were clear enough and Natasha kept silent, distracted by continuing anxiety about Paul's health and aware, as they all were, that destitution had made them utterly dependent on their nanny.

They were penniless when they arrived in England, but there was the matter of the Liverpool cotton broker who owed him something like £25,000 sterling for Egyptian cotton which Paul had paid for but which the war had prevented from being shipped to his factories. The money Paul had paid for the cotton had been deposited in an English bank. A month or so after their arrival, Paul saw a notice in
The Times
to the effect that Count Ignatieff should get in touch with the Midland Bank, where he would find information to his benefit. Paul had no papers, no proof of his identity, but as luck would have it, he ran into his Moscow lawyer on his way into the bank and together they managed to prove the money was his.

In the autumn and winter, Paul checked into a rest-home to recover his health and Natasha began touring the estate agents in search of a house. The older boys were sent to a school in East Grinstead to prepare for the entrance exams to St Paul's School. The topics for the exam essay were ‘What Elephants Do in the Zoo', ‘English Railway Termini' and ‘Profiteering'. Dima – fourteen at the time – wrote his essay on the prophets Elijah and Moses, Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Despite humiliations like this and jeers from English boys that they were little Bolshies, the boys soon mastered English and in the spring they were accepted at St Paul's.

In the summer of 1920, the family moved to the farm Natasha had found between Hastings and Battle on the Sussex coast. There was a dairy herd, eighty acres of farmland, 170 acres of woodland, a farmhouse and on a hill overlooking the whole property a rambling Victorian brick house called Beauchamps. It had splendid arched doorways, stained-glass windows on the stairway, high ceilings in the dining room and sitting room and a warren of bedrooms under the eaves where the boys slept. From the high-gabled rooftop, where the boys quickly learned to scramble when their mother wasn't watching, they could look out over the trees at the English Channel. Natasha called it Beechums, and Paul called it Kroupodernitsa. He had recovered his health by then. Just turned fifty, he thought he would go back to his beginnings, to the days when he farmed his father's estate. But this time, everything would be modern and up to date. He would have the first dairy herd on the south coast to be tested for tuberculosis and he would have the biggest tractor. He would farm the place himself with help from relatives. He bought thick corduroys, boots and a cap and set out to be a farmer. Peggy took happy pictures of him digging into the garden with a spade and standing in front of a hay rick that summer of 1920 with his Sussex labourers standing around him. The pictures give an odd impression of
déjà vu,
as if Paul believed he was still in the fields of the Ukraine and these sunburned Sussex labourers were really Ukrainian peasants. The two eldest boys, Nick and Dima, enrolled as boarders at St Paul's, and Alec, Lionel and George enrolled as day boys, living with Peggy Meadowcroft during term time and coming down to Beauchamps in the holidays.