Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

  My father was born in July 1932 in a tiny terraced house on Lamb Street in Swansea. He grew up in a world of coal grates and tiny, unheated bedrooms, unused front parlours packed with heavy furniture, strident women and harddrinking men. I visited the street where he grew up a couple of times as a child, always on blowy days when a grey sky spat drizzle and the streets were empty. Swansea, in my mind’s eye, is always suffused with a dirty yellow light, somehow poisoned and gravity laden. The sea wind from the great sweep of Swansea Bay brought the smell of salt and oil. The streets were monochrome, as was the human flesh: heavy, sagging complexions the colour of suet.

  South Wales seems a washed-up place now, ugly and unsure of itself, filthy and emphysemic after many lifetimes of toil and smoke. But in my father’s childhood it was very different. Swansea was one of Britain’s busiest coaling ports, and the giant ships which docked there were the arteries of an empire which was still the greatest in the world. My father grew up during the twilight years of a great Victorian port city. Belching steam engines still hauled the colliery cages up and down, and a few handsome old sailing schooners still moored among the great liners and freighters at the docks.

  I imagine that I have, at various moments in my life, experienced a few echoes of that vanished world of my father’s childhood. Driving on a foggy evening through a miserable mining town in Slovakia in 1993, when I breathed damp night air suffused with the smell of coal smoke and frying onions. Standing among the endless rusty cranes and cargo ships at the port of Leningrad, leaning into a biting sea wind which came off the Gulf of Finland, bringing the tang of rusting steel and the clang of metal on metal. And there was a week in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the southern Urals, in the company of miners, hard-muscled men with moustaches and grimy faces who drank with grim determination, and said little. Their women looked drained, struggling to keep up appearances with a smear of lipstick and a fading perm. These are the images which populate my picture of South Wales during the Depression. A place, I imagine, where everyone’s share of happiness was tiny and precious, to be paid for by a lifetime’s drudgery.

  Mervyn’s immediate family were poor but respectable, clinging desperately to the bottom rung of petit-bourgeois life, keeping up appearances. Some time around 1904, my great-grandfather Alfred took his family to the photographer’s for a formal portrait which exactly reflected the family’s strained circumstances. In the daguerreotype, Alfred is every inch the Edwardian paterfamilias, in his stern black suit and gold watch chain; his son William and daughter Ethel are prim, he in an outsize jam-jar collar, she in a high-necked black dress and black stockings. But his wife, Lillian, looks pale and unhealthy, and the heavy chairs and potted aspidistra which frame the stiff group are photographer’s props, grander than anything they had at home. The giant photograph, expensively hand-tinted and framed, presided over Mervyn’s modest young life in the tiny house he shared with his mother and grandmother in the Hafod area of Swansea, like a reminder of the family’s inexorable fall from respectability.

  My father’s father, William Alfred Matthews, organized the loading of coal into the holds of ships so that it didn’t shift as the ship rolled. It was called ‘trimming’ the ships, and was, in its modest way, a skilled job. It was filthy work, but at least not quite at the bottom of the working-class social ladder. That place was reserved for the navvies who actually shovelled the coal, stripped to the waist and knee deep in the coal dust.

  William Matthews seems to have been a man of no ambition at all. His major interest in life was drinking his wages away at the Working Men’s Club with his old comrades from the trenches. He had been wounded five times in the Great War. But like many of his generation he had nothing to show for it but a strong head for drink, a collection of medals and the respect of his fellows in the Comrades’ Sick Club, a kind of cooperative health-insurance society, from whom in 1932 he received a cheap mantel clock which still ticks in my father’s study, in recognition of his services as Secretary. German mustard gas on the Somme had also fatally weakened his lungs, which he further abused by chain smoking Players’ Navy Cut.

  My grandfather was a handsome man. He always wore sharp three-piece suits with his father’s heavy gold watch chain, adorned with a sovereign in a gaudy gold holder. When he died in 1964, one of the few things he left his son were his pocket diaries, in which he’d marked off the days when he’d met his fancy women in Swansea parks.

  He neglected his son Mervyn and couldn’t bear to live with his wife Lillian. He took little interest in his son’s schooling and never read a book in his life. Mervyn was always deeply repelled by his father’s philistinism; one reason, perhaps, that he himself became so bookish and studious. From time to time William would assert his paternal authority arbitrarily over a son he certainly sensed was cleverer than himself, refusing to lend Mervyn his precious tools or scoffing at his lack of physical toughness.

  The humiliations inflicted by his father echoed through Mervyn’s whole life. In the letters he was to write to his Russian fiancée, Mervyn comes back time and again to his father’s cruelty and selfishness. Their shared experience of neglect in childhood became a powerful bond between Mervyn and Mila.

  ‘Your joyless, nasty, humiliated childhood, the constant lack of warmth and affection, kindness, respect, all your humiliations, illnesses, tears, I understand them all, to the point of pain,’ wrote Mila to Mervyn in 1965. ‘How I hated your father because he refused to give you his wood plane when you wanted to make yourself something out of wood. What horrible cruelty, what a lack of respect for a person – I suffered the same a thousand times! I so wanted to return those for ever lost minutes and buy you a whole workshop, to give you everything you wanted, to make your life rich and happy.’

  Mervyn grew up a rather lonely boy, I think. He liked to spend hours wandering alone through the shunting yards of the great docks and the machine houses of the collieries which ringed the grimy city, admiring the steam engines. On Sundays he would walk to the tops of the vast colliery slag heaps and look down on the ships in the channel, and the Irish Sea beyond, and he would dream, in the manner ascribed to young boys who end up following unusual destinies, of travelling to distant lands.

  He spent much of his childhood with his mother Lillian and his crippled grandmother. The family’s life was punctuated by screaming rows between his parents, which either ended in one of his father’s regular walk-outs, or by his mother taking little Mervyn and running away to stay with her mother. Mervyn’s mother was an emotional woman, prone to hysterics. Her son was the focus of her hopes, and she lived entirely for him – and Mervyn was to devote much energy to getting as far away from his mother’s intense, controlling love as possible. In later years, Mervyn frequently complained to Mila that his mother, addicted to hyperbole, would accuse him of ‘killing your old mother with your thoughtlessness’.

  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, w
orse, 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.