To pay for all this we had to open the Sealed Fund, a large envelope of money issued to offices abroad for just such an emergency. With the applications in and the money ready, we set to work to collect food and water for the journey. Down in the cellar we found the empty gin bottles and packing cases we needed and assembled them in the outer office.
With the help of Our Friend’s black market connections our store of tins, some of them containing smoked lampreys and sour cucumbers and other less usual picnic fare, gradually mounted, and we were feeling optimistic when news reached us that, according to an edict just issued, no food might be taken from Latvia across the old White Russian frontier.
It was an invariable rule than an application to make a journey, which had to be sanctioned by the NKVD besides the Ministry of Transport in Moscow, once made, could not be changed. If we devoured a large packed meal this side of Vitebsk we could hold out until Moscow, but we were then faced with ten days in the Trans-Siberian without food. Our only hope was to throw ourselves on the mercy of the Moscow Embassy, but we had no idea how they were placed for stores. We only knew that they were short of currency.
While we were considering our unhappy position we heard from Our Friend’s brother that the whole of the Latvian Intourist staff had been sacked with effect from the next day. ‘I will see that your applications get lost,’ his message went. ‘Make out fresh ones, including food on the train, and allowing yourselves several days in Vladivostok as no one can tell how you will get on to Japan from there.’
Our party would consist of Co Froebelius and his wife Barbara, Nick and Dorothy, and ourselves. If all went well, we should have six first-class berths on the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow on Wednesday, September 4th.
Apparently, though the import of food was not allowed, the Russians had no objection to drink of any sort being brought over the former frontier, so we collected the last of our stocks and packed a strange collection of odds and ends, including tomato and celery juice and anything whatever containing alcohol, into a small crate.
But this tolerance did not extend to clothing, and to our dismay we were issued with a printed sheet laying down the norm to which we had to conform. Each man could take with him two suits, one overcoat, a change of underclothes, two shirts, one sweater, three pairs of shoes and a pair of goloshes.
The official imagination did not run to frivolities like ties and scarves. The norm for women ran along the same lines. We decided each to pack a case containing the norm, but to try our luck with the rest of the luggage, including things to be sold in Moscow.
The morning this bombshell hit us we had just returned to the flat when the front door bell rang and Herr Schonberg tottered into the hall carrying an immensely heavy parcel.
‘A small token of the gratitude of the Jewish Agency for all you have done for my people,’ he announced, his sad old face lighting up.
We undid the wrappings to reveal an immense cut-glass bowl rimmed with silver. It was filled with beautiful hothouse grapes, something rarely seen even in the happy days in Riga. The present, and the old man’s heroic effort in bringing it, were deeply touching and we enjoyed the grapes, but felt it was hardly likely the Russians would allow us to take such an emblem of bourgeois life-style with us.
Picturing the long days in the train and the stark conditions forecast, even in the first-class, Kenneth and I went on a foraging expedition to the Legation. Although the building was, in theory, extra-territorial it was clear that unless some miracle occurred it was lost to Great Britain. In the half light behind closed shutters we wandered through the familiar rooms. No sale had been organized here, and the Office of Works interior decoration, all polished mahogany and turkey carpets, remained as yet sedately undisturbed.
On a shelf in the Minister’s room was an old copy of the Times Atlas. We asked the Chancery Messenger still in charge of the building to fetch a sharp knife, and we cut out all the maps which might be useful during our journey, covering a course right round the world and bringing us back to England not so very far from where we now stood.
We took a supply of pencils and paper and a couple of packs of cards to help pass the time, but the most valuable find was a stock of toilet paper, fine firm Bronco with GOVERNMENT PROPERTY stamped on every sheet.
‘This will be ideal for the journey,’ I said. ‘Not just in the obvious way, but we can use it for scoring at cards, and to clean up our carriage and write little notes to each other, and to wipe our fingers if the water in the hand basin runs out. There’s no end to its usefulness. Each of us can hang a roll from our shoulder by a loop of string. The rest we’ll stuff into odd corners in the luggage.’
So we took a couple of dozen rolls from the store cupboard and bowled them across the polished floor of the Chancery to the entrance hall, where the Chancery Messenger gathered them up and put them into a Foreign Office Bag.
We found some more treasures in the Chancery bookshelf—a copy of Murray’s Guide to Russia of 1875, the account by a Swiss surgeon, Hans Jakob de Fries, of his journeys through Siberia between 1774 and 1776, and a copy of The Rabbit King of Russia by Reginald Urch. During his years as Times correspondent in Moscow before his imprisonment in the Lubyanka Gaol, Urch had forwarded to his paper an extraordinarily detailed record of Stalin’s drive to speed up industrialization and collectivize agriculture. After his release and expulsion from Russia he had embodied all the most interesting facts in a novel about a keen young Communist engaged in the rabbit-breeding campaign of the early thirties. Although the story was fictitious, the background was factual and accurately documented in a series of footnotes.
When we had visited Urch at his dacha he had shown us one wall of his study lined with files of newspaper cuttings bringing his Russian press records up to date. This treasure was probably lost when Urch was transferred to Helsinki and covered the Finnish War on behalf of the Times.
With no more visa clients and few telegrams to send, we now had our evenings to ourselves. While we played patience or marvelled at the oddities described in the ‘Rabbit King’ Tom, with his dictionaries spread out on the card table, worked tirelessly to extend his knowledge of Russian. There must be very few people who are prepared, hour after hour, to follow through the ramifications of a single word. Starting with a first group of meanings, Tom would look up each of these in turn and repeat the process until his research fanned out over a score of related words. Without his extraordinary memory the exercise might have been just a feat of endurance, but in his case, it was clearly rewarding.
But for the company of Reginald Urch our evenings would have lacked sparkle. As it was, we took it in turns to read his book and tell each other the most amusing bits.
‘Rabbitization was part of the Russian Five Year Plan,’ said Kenneth. ‘According to the Small Soviet Encyclopaedia a pair of rabbits, properly handled, might produce more than a million descendants in four years, and it was calculated that if a ship were half loaded with rabbits in Australia, by the time it reached Odessa of Leningrad it would have a full cargo.
‘At the Kraskovo State Rabbit Farm the animals were kept in wire-bottomed cages and moved forward each day, cropping the grass as they went. When they reached the boundary they were shifted back again on a parallel course. After twenty-five days’ round trip they should have been ready for skinning and canning. Izvesria in April 1932 published a full-page eulogy of the rabbit scheme, but Pravda on August 28th announced that seven thousand of the nine thousand rabbits supplied to a new State Farm had died in the first few weeks. Obviously this must be the fault of wreckers. Scapegoats were immediately produced and tried.
‘As an example of reprehensible non-eo-operation in such a splendid scheme the Sorzialislicheskoye Zemledeliye reported a message received from the director of a large State Farm, “Send no more rabbits. Haven’t ordered them, won’t take them and don’t want any more letters on the subject.”
‘My turn with the book,’ I said. ‘T
his is absolutely fascinating. It looks as though rabbits were only part of a wave of bright ideas for improving food supplies. Listen to this. In January ‘32 they set up a kangaroo farm in the North Caucasus. The animals were to be used for food, fur and, guess what, ornamental trimmings.
‘Then they set to work on a One Year Plan for Emu Culture. Six pairs of emus were to produce sixty eggs of which, due to the colder climate, thirty would be addled. The thirty surviving chicks would be hatched in incubators and then spend the winter in little wooden houses on the Steppes. People who tried emu flesh said that it tasted horrible, but the Soviet press announced that the eggs were very palatable. Each egg would yield about a pound and a half of nourishing meat, but the emus refused to co-operate and went off laying. All this was reported in the Times in August 1932.
‘In 1933 there was a scheme for making lubricating oil for agricultural machinery from locusts. Then there was the State Beetle-Soap Industry. Bugs and beetles of all sorts were to be used, but it turned out that their bodies didn’t contain enough fat.’
‘Then there was the pig campaign,’ said Kenneth, who had taken his turn with the book. ‘This started off with a blaze of publicity. “Pigs must be given pride of place in the Soviet system. The watchword is ‘All eyes on the swine’.” But the difficulty was to feed them. Each family was ordered to raise a pig, and the animals were to be used in the cities as auxiliary scavengers. But the owners ate the pigs and the pig food too, and on September 25th, 1930, forty-eight campaign directors and food specialists were shot without trial as saboteurs.
‘At the Petrovsk Kolkhoz the peasant Krivolok reported that one and a half tons of tadpoles had been fished out of the nearby swamps and offered to the pigs as food. Unfortunately the pigs didn’t fancy them until they were boiled into a stew with some goose feet for flavouring. Then each of the animals gobbled up five kilos and soon two hundred and sixty pigs were in prime condition. This was reported in the Moscow News of December 24th, 1932. But the tadpoles grew up into frogs and the food supply ceased. The Soviet tadpole industry was not included in the Second Five Year Plan.’
‘Listen to this, Tom,’ I said. ‘This is something really good.’ He looked up patiently, one finger marking his place in the dictionary.
‘Did you know that the Russians invented a scientific, laboursaving method of chemical sheep-shearing? A Professor Ilyin found that by giving increasing doses of certain “heavy” chemicals to the animals they would shed their fleece in four instalments, automatically graded from the coarsest to the finest wool. He was able to do this up to four times a year, but unfortunately the sheep tended to die young. The same process was tried with the reindeer in the Kola Peninsular. They only produced one coat a year and must have suffered considerably from the cold. Ilyin was made a hero of the Soviet Union.
‘And then a story came through that someone had seen a pack of naked wolves racing around in the snow in the neighbourhood of Minsk “to keep warm” as the report said. They had raided the local sheep farm. So people began to wonder if sheep shorn by the new method would be suitable as food ...’
‘You’re making it up,’ said Tom.
‘No, it was all in the Soviet Agricultural Bulletin on October 12th, 1936. They even found they could produce animals with coats of different colours by dosing them with certain chemical and varying the temperatures in which the animals were kept. You won’t believe this, but there was actually a reference in the Soviet press to Jacob’s success in producing black, white, spotted and piebald sheep and goats to. suit his contract with his future father-in-law. They’ll quote the Bible, you see, if it suits them.’
Kenneth was leafing through the book. ‘What about the plan to take a daily gallon of blood from all the horses and cattle in the Soviet Union?’ he asked. ‘They reckoned that with a herd of two hundred cattle one could make up to eleven hundred delicious dishes a day—soup, sausages, “chocolate” and so on, all at a very cheap price.
‘And they turned an old warship into a floating factory to catch the dolphins in the Black Sea and make them into sausages. That was in the Krasnaya Gazeta as early as July 22nd, 1930. And it failed like the other schemes. All this fun and games because they had killed off the human animals who were making such a far better job of production.’ Kenneth snapped the book shut.
Next morning we were all three to be inoculated with TAB, anti-plague and cholera vaccines. Our friend Dr Eichler had disappeared and the Jewish Hospital was closed. We must go to a Russian doctor, newly arrived. Two of the shots were made, as usual, in the arm, but for the third he told us to bare our tummies and, taking a roll of flesh between finger and thumb, thrust a large needle deep in the direction of our hearts. Later, we all felt exceptionally ill and tossed on our camp beds with soaring temperatures.
News was coming through of nightly raids on England. Surely, we felt, the boys would be safer in West Virginia. The Welsh hills might seem safe to my mother, who was apt to measure distances by the time they took to walk, but Cardiff was a target and what were thirty or forty miles to a Heinkel jettisoning its bombs? If only we could foresee what might happen.
The office was already closed to the public when Professor Pekšens knocked on the door.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ he said, laying the woollen cap which had replaced his grey Homburg on the counter beside his knitted gloves. He had the dehydrated look of the pet newt I had kept as a child, which had escaped from its bucket in the nursery and been found, days later, tiny and almost transparent under the sofa. I had carefully nursed the newt in a saucer of water, its head supported on a piece of damp blotting paper, and it had recovered. But it never regained the brilliant orange stripes which had been its pride.
‘I have been dismissed from the University,’ Pekšens said. ‘My lectures were politically unsound. I have lost my flat too and I’m going to join my brother and his family in Jelgava. They’ve been evicted from their flat and gone to live in their dacha. It’s very small, but even so it exceeds their housing allowance. You see the inspector counted the woodshed as living space. As you know, it would be far too cold in winter to sleep there. According to the authorities they have a vacancy and I must hurry to arrive before they put in a stranger. I am leaving everything here but a few books. I’ve brought you this ... Perhaps it will remind you of our happy meetings.’
It was a small, well-thumbed copy of The Diary of a Nobody which we had read together. In the margins were notes he had made.
‘I’m worried about the Addisons,’ said Tom one evening. ‘The old lady is determined to stay on here. “I shall die soon,” she told me, “so why ship me off who knows where, to be buried in some place not nearly as comfortable as our pine wood. That’s where I want to be planted.” She’s a naughty old pet and serenely unaware of Una’s problems.’
‘The sacrificial daughter,’ I agreed. ‘In Victorian families one of the girls was always destined to look after her parents and renounce a life of her own. I’m sure that’s why so many women made unsuitable marriages—just to escape.’
The Foreign Office plan to divide the British colony between Murmansk and Palestine had been discarded in favour of a scheme, equally unpopular, to send them all to Petsamo on the Arctic Circle, where a Vice-Consul was waiting to supervise their journey to England—no one knew by what means. Indignation was reaching fever pitch and a mass determination was building up to stay in Riga and be damned.
‘I’ve called a meeting for tonight,’ said Tom, ‘at the British Club. We’ve got to face this thing out. Will you two come and support me?’
Most of the colony were middle-aged to elderly, and used to having things pretty much their own way. Tom, with Kenneth beside him, faced them from the platform while I sat at a small table below.
Tom cannot have been more than twenty-four, with only a couple of years’ experience in the Consular Service while Kenneth, not many years his senior, had no experience of Consular work proper. The mood of t
he meeting was, understandably, ugly.
‘Why don’t you tell those silly buggers in London that I’m not prepared to send my wife and daughter to Murmansk to be clobbered by the Russians while I wander off to Palestine,’ shouted a thickset timber merchant.
‘The Murmansk scheme has been dropped,’ said Tom quietly.
‘And what’s this we hear about Petsamo?’ challenged an engineer, known as a formidable drinker. ‘I suppose you’ll let us all freeze together.’
There was an uproar. Tom waited unmoved. ‘Young enough to be my grandson,’ muttered someone in the back row.
‘When you’ve all settled down I’ll tell you what’s to be done for the moment,’ said Tom. At last there was quiet. ‘Now I know that many of you have had roots in these parts for generations, and have built up your businesses afresh after the Revolution. This time it’s different. There’s no land frontier you can cross to safety. Our country is at war, and encircled. Let us agree that our aim is to return home, and that we must wait patiently until orders come through. Meantime, we must get ourselves organized.’ The audience was now following his words quietly. ‘First of all I need the names and addresses of every single British subject who is still in Latvia, so in case you know of anyone who is not at this meeting, will you be good enough to ask them to call at the Consulate as soon as possible. As some of you know, I am there every day making out compensation claims for British residents.
‘Now I must ask you to give me the name and address of your next of kin in the UK, and for those of you who will ask to be repatriated at government expense, the name of a guarantor at home who will vouch for your repayment of the fare at a later date. If you come up to the table in turn, Mrs Benton will write these details down.
‘About the route, there’s no need for me to point out that the choice is limited, meantime it’s no good guessing. As soon as there are definite plans you will be informed. After all, we are a very small group and our country’s position is grave, so we must be patient and keep calm.’
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 15
