Next day a message came from the Legation to say that our sailing would be delayed owing to engine trouble. Mr Preston would like Mr Benton to call round at eleven. We were to lunch with him at one, so I was intrigued to know what business might need attending to in the meantime.
‘As a matter of fact, it was a musical morning,’ said Kenneth surprisingly when he called to pick me up. ‘Tom Preston is writing the score for a ballet. His wife, who is Russian, is in England at the moment and his daughter is a ballet dancer, so you see ...’
During lunch Preston reminisced about the murder of the Tsar and his family at Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1918. He had been Consul at Tomsk at the time, quite near in Siberian terms.
‘One thing I am sure of,’ he said. ‘It was the advance of the White Russians which put paid to the Imperial family. The Bolsheviks couldn’t risk their being used as a rallying point, and what might have been their salvation actually sealed their doom. The Russians didn’t announce their deaths until the end of December, 1925, and then perhaps only to discourage impostors. With so much Romanoff treasure still waiting abroad to be claimed, it was a wonderful opportunity for fraud. And what a film it could make one day ...’
‘How was the musical morning?’ I asked as we returned to the hotel.
‘I’m to go back tomorrow. We’ve only come to the end of the first act. The trouble is that I can’t read a score—not that it matters as Preston makes it all wonderfully lifelike, humming and thumping and beating time with a ruler. “Now I bring in the drums, boom, boom, boom,” he’ll say, pounding the desk, “and here the cymbals.” Wonderful work for the fire irons, that. And then, of course, there’s the dancing to be explained. He’s devising a system of notation which leaves me flummoxed, not that this bothers him. He’s completely absorbed and all he needs is a presence.’
Preston insisted that we should stay on in Kaunas until the ship was ready to sail, though we should have preferred to move to Memel. His insistence was a measure of his boredom. There was nothing left for us to explore in Kaunas and the books we had brought for the five-day voyage were nearly finished. The hotel entrance hall, which offered the only alternative seating accommodation, was nearly as depressing as our bedroom. However, people occasionally went in and out and there was some movement in the street outside.
I was coming to the end of our last book, a history of the Baltic States, when our dining companion hesitated as he passed, and then stopped and bowed.
‘Dovydaitis,’ he said, pulling out a visiting card from an inner pocket.
‘Benton,’ I replied, but without a visiting card to prove it.
‘You must excuse me,’ he said gravely, ‘but I see that you sit alone for many hours—and that you are interested in my country,’ he glanced at my book. ‘Your husband is a diplomat? Or a merchant perhaps? Allow me to offer you a glass of beer. It is very light. Or some cranberry juice, perhaps?’
‘Please sit down,’ I said. ‘My husband is in the Foreign Service. May I ask about you?’
‘I am a refugee.’
‘Then you are not a Lithuanian?’
‘Oh yes, I am. I live in Kaunas since eighteen years.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘My home is in Vilnius, which is the capital of the Lithuanian people. Eighteen years ago it was taken from us. Vilnius was wonderful, a city of beautiful buildings, with theatres and concerts and culture. Kaunas is nothing. You have seen for yourself the best hotel.’ He gazed disdainfully at the dusty curtains and the single potted palm.
‘But Lithuania has been independent since the last war. How did you come to lose your capital?’
‘It was seized by the Poles in 1920. We gained our independence, but we lost our beloved Vilnius. So here I am. You understand now?’
The hours passed pleasantly enough chatting to Dovydaitis. Like many people with a national grievance his thoughts appeared to be mainly retrospective. Lithuanians remembered a glorious past when, in the fourteenth century, their dominion had extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Since then, they had been a pawn in the power game.
The Latvian and Lithuanian languages shared a common root. Both countries had a significant folk culture, a sense of nationality and a craving for nationhood, but the fact that LithuanIa, under Polish influence, became Roman Catholic while Latvia adopted the Lutheran religion, had created a certain distance between them.
Now, each country was independent and keenly concerned with its own affairs.
Looking back, the time in Kaunas was wonderfully restful. Stresses tend to accumulate, and a time of confinement with nothing to do and no demands on one can be remarkably restoring, provided it does not last too long, and the talks with Dovydaitis had just preserved the delicate balance.
It was a relief to reach the harbour in Memel and see the BALTEAKO, 1,328 tons of sturdy workhorse, tied up alongside the Baltic timber tramps, their decks loaded with pit props. ‘They carry a very profitable cargo,’ said our captain, Frankie Ayres, seeing our interest. ‘If they don’t get a handsome return on the pit props, they clean up on insurance for “cargo washed overboard in a storm”. Come up on the bridge for a nightcap before you turn in,’ he added. ‘This is my third seventieth birthday and it needs celebrating.’ His precise age had long passed into official uncertainty, but he was one of the most reliable masters in the line, and the company turned a blind eye.
In a corner of the cabin stood an embroidery frame holding a half-finished petit point of exceptional delicacy. ‘My way of passing the time,’ said Ayres. ‘At my age you don’t sleep much, and I never was one for the booze.’
Five days later we tied up in the Pool of London.
Chapter 4
The holiday was a delight. England, though a little shame-faced about Munich, appeared calm and unimpressed by the menace of the German military machine. Sam turned twelve eight days before Christmas and we took the boys to the circus at Olympia, and shook hands with the tail-coated gentleman who swung by his teeth from the high trapeze. Three weeks before, Kenneth had given him an entry visa to the U.K.
The boys were always busy. Sam was methodically sorting stamps and sticking them in an album. Mark, eighteen months younger, had decided with his usual inconsequence to collect only brown ones, and with no special purpose in view. Both boys were happy in my mother’s house, where we stayed, and at school. They talked excitedly of the five days’ voyage to Riga which they would have to make on their own at Easter.
When we returned to Latvia in the BALTABOR, a vessel from the Pacific run recently converted to carry cargo and the maximum of twelve passengers allowed to a ship without a doctor, winter had clamped down. Snow was falling as we sailed through the Kiel Canal and soon icicles, as thick as a man’s arm, were hanging from the shrouds.
As we approached the Bay of Riga a grey line bounded the Horizon—the ice. Winds from the north had broken the edge into blocks and piled them one upon another in a low ridge. The ship ploughed steadily towards it. Out on the open deck we leaned over the rail as the reinforced bows plunged with a grinding shudder into the ice wall. All around us the frozen sea stretched unbroken. Only a darker trace showed where the ice breaker had opened a passage which had rapidly sealed over with a thinner layer of ice. The ship was shivering under the strain, her plates grinding painfully.
‘She doesn’t like it at all,’ remarked a deck hand who was chopping ice from the rigging with an axe. ‘Even the breaker can’t cut its way through the field. It’s duck-shaped and slides up on the ice and smashes through with its dead-weight.’
We had sailed right into the heart of winter and the ice closed behind us. It would be nearly four months before the land was freed again to relax into leaf and blossom.
Riga was transformed under a mantle of snow. When the ship tied up we walked across the quay, round the great Vorburg block of flats and up to our own front door. Lotte was waiting in a clean apron.
The winte
r rhythm was now firmly established. The chill and apprehension of late autumn had vanished. Oppressive greys had given place to brilliant contrasts—sunshine which cast sharp shadows on the snow and, at night, great stars in a black sky. Sometimes one woke to a deep hush, and a brilliant diffused light filtered through the snowflakes which fell softly to blur every harsh contour.
The Canal, frozen now and snow-covered, had lost its identity and become a small winding valley. In place of the pontoon bridge over the Daugava a roadway was marked out across the ice, sign-posted in the orderly Latvian manner, ‘Alexei Berzinš Aleja’. We often wondered about the citizen who had earned this impermanent tribute.
Sledges had replaced droshkies, driven by the same izvozchiks, muffled now in two or more long overcoats turned fur-side in, their shoulders covered with short capes lined with scarlet, which flew back in the wind as they drove, standing up.
Sleigh-riding could be an exciting pastime. If one called to the driver to go faster, he would silently hold out his hand. To go fast cost double. Apart from the thrill, there was less time on the trip for the cold to penetrate the musty fur rugs under which one huddled. Sometimes a sledge overturned when the izvozchik cut a corner too fine and the runners mounted the piled-up snow at the side of the road. The horses’ shoes were fitted with spikes which bit into the ice, and the drivers, padded out with heavy cloth and bearskin, seldom came to any harm. Only the passenger sometimes took a painful toss, but after all, he had paid for extra speed, so what grounds had he for complaint? The most dramatic tumbles took place at night, racing home after parties, but the sudden impact of intense cold after the heat indoors sent any alcohol immediately to one’s head and acted as an anaesthetic.
As the cold increased, Lotte’s soups became richer and hotter. Food in Latvia was abundant and cheap. Every morning a bottle of fresh cream and 250 grammes of thick sour cream wrapped in paper were left on the doorstep with the milk, as a matter of course. Potatoes, turnips and carrots, which had been sealed in great straw-covered clamps before the snow fell, were dug out and sold in the market together with salted cucumbers and beans. Salads had vanished and oil was a rare imported luxury, but there were mushrooms of every kind, salted or threaded on strings to dry. Salmon glistened on the market stalls. There were fresh fish caught through holes in the ice, sausages of every variety and cheeses, smoked eel and tongue, and red and black caviar at 20 Lats (about £1) a kilo.
The Central Market (or Centralais Tirgus, if you were trying to buy a tram ticket) was housed in a row of four converted Zeppelin sheds, handsomely re-fronted. An English connection of the Kruedeners had married Count Zeppelin, who ran through her considerable fortune in the course of building prototypes of his lethal invention. When this was at last successful, it was used against the country that had helped to finance it. Now, at least, some of the fruits of the Armstead money were serving a useful purpose.
With shopping, cleaning and cooking all in Lotte’s hands and no job to do, the days were often empty. I decided to learn Russian and to take lessons from the accordion player at Schwarz’s Bar, but this would cost money. My salary had stopped abruptly on leaving Vienna and my alimony ceased when I married Kenneth. We now had to live and keep two boys at boarding school on his pay of £500 a year. We could not afford a car, and our margin for extras was slight, but with the help of Professor Pekšens a small English conversation class was easily assembled and this more than paid for my own instruction, as well as various minor amenities. Gilbert and Sullivan’s hero was right to congratulate himself on resisting the temptation to belong to any other nation. English is a saleable asset and no literate English-speaker need be short of the price of a drink or a meal when abroad.
On January 15th Kenneth was formally appointed Acting Vice-Consul and we gave a small party to celebrate. In my diary I made a note: ‘3 gin, 3 whisky, vermouth, smoked salmon, caviar, liver pate, smoked eel. Total cost about £2.10.0.’ In those days whisky, after travelling from Scotland to Malta, through the Black Sea to Odessa, up to Moscow and on to Riga, cost people with diplomatic privileges 4/6d a bottle. Gin was 2/3d.
We were still short of essential furniture, and we needed eight dining chairs to be ready in a fortnight.
‘Send for the Old Believers,’ said Lotte. The Riga Old Believers were members of a religious sect who had been brought to the city from the Volga Basin after the revolution of 1905.
In due course, a pair of flaxen-haired, bearded figures, wearing Russian blouses, knocked at the door. As usual, Lotte took over the operation. Handing them a page from the Heal’s catalogue which we had brought back from London, she pointed to the design we had chosen. The price was agreed. ‘Aren’t you going to write it down?’ we asked a little anxiously.
‘They can’t read,’ Lotte replied simply, ‘but they don’t drink or smoke and they never fail with their bargain.’ In exactly fourteen days the chairs arrived. Fashioned of pale ash wood and upholstered in hand-woven tweed, they were perfect in every detail.
In spite of the peaceful tenor of life in Riga an edict had gone out that attics must be cleared of lumber as a precaution against possible future air attack, and some queer objects were emerging. Friends of ours, the Whishaws, whose family had lived in Russia for four generations, offered us two beds, and the Kruedeners produced a secretaire made in Massachusetts in 1860. This splendid piece of furniture, six feet high, had two wings which opened to form a miniature alcove surrounding the writer. A letter box and a secret drawer were accommodated beneath the pull-down writing flap and the rest of the main structure, and the wings were fitted with tiers of drawers and pigeon-holes. The whole formed a complete mini-office.
We were now becoming accustomed to the cold, and the methods of coping with it. Inside, one was always warm. If there was no central heating, tall Russian stoves, their tiled flanks rising to the ceiling, were placed between each pair of rooms so that both were warmed. Every morning, a large quantity of hewn wood was pushed into the stove through a small iron door and set alight. Great care had to be taken to see that every scrap of wood was carbonised before the heat was sealed in by an iron clapper in the flue. Otherwise, carbon monoxide could seep into the room, sometimes with fatal consequences. For a rebellious serf, this often proved a convenient way of avenging his grievances, though suspects had been promptly executed.
Murray’s Guide to Russia of 1849 reassures the traveller, ‘... the temperature maintained by these stoves over the whole of the Russian house is remarkably constant, so much so that, in spite of the great external cold, there is perpetual summer indoors. No additional blankets are necessary, and no shivering and shaking is to be dreaded on turning out in the morning as in dear old England, when the north wind drives through every sash in the house. We are acquainted with a lady whose feet and fingers never escaped chilblains until she passed a winter in Russia.’
There were other ingenious ways of dealing with the heating problem. Baron Kruedener had described to me how, in his grandfather’s time, the chill of the ballrooms in the great country estates was sometimes broken by driving in a horde of peasants whose body warmth would, after several hours, raise the temperature. The result probably smelt no worse than the staircases of Versailles, which were used as casual conveniences. There were some basic rules for survival in the intense cold, one being never to drink spirits whilst out in the open, as this causes the body temperature to drop, and this sometimes results in death.
We learned to recognize the approximate degrees of frost, even without reading the thermometer which hung between the double windows of the drawing room. At –5° centigrade the snow squeaked beneath one’s feet. Five degrees lower, and the hairs in one’s nose froze. At –20° one’s eyelashes iced up and tended to stick together. As the weather became colder the kindergartens closed, then the secondary schools and finally, round about the –25° mark, the university. No-one went skiing for pleasure any more.
Outdoor clothing became a matter of defensiv
e equipment, not choice. Ordinary stockings were insufficient to prevent cold-burns around the tops of one’s boots, and an extra, woolly pair was required. Ears had to be covered, and sometimes a passing stranger would rush up and rub with a handful of snow the face of someone showing signs of frostbite.
For expeditions in the depth of winter a single fur coat was not sufficient and one needed a second, reaching almost to the ground with the fur—probably bearskin—turned inwards. Sheepskin coats, cured so that the natural oils remained, provided excellent insulation. A coat like this had been made for me by a small furrier. The wool was a soft grey and the cut stylish, but as soon as one came indoors the warmth brought out a pronounced and unpleasant smell. Any public building like the Post Office, where there was no opportunity to shed street clothing, was a place to be avoided by anyone with a sensitive nose.
Going out in the evening, women pulled long johns on beneath their evening dresses and felt boots over their slippers. All sorts of extra wraps covered bare arms and décolletés, so that the hostess’s bedroom looked like some badly organized jumble sale when the women guests had emerged in evening dress. The overcoats of the police and armed forces hung right down to the snow and the bottoms were left unhemmed, giving them an untidy look. The reasoning behind this was practical. In winter everyone was padded out with so much extra clothing that fit was no longer important and one size of overcoat would suit a large range of figures. A pair of scissors was all that was needed to adjust the length.
For those not concerned with its uneasy history or the tensions beneath the surface, Riga was a delightful post. The diplomatic corps was small, and protocol not oppressive. In Vienna the Legation had been run with a diplomatic staff of four, but here the scale of staffing was even smaller. Our own Legation consisted of the Minister, Charles Orde; a first secretary, Douglas MacKillop, and an archivist, Henry Froebelius, who had been born in Moscow. His young brother, Co, was clerk.
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 3
