Samovar on the Table

'What on earth possessed you to pack all this rubbish and carry it thousands of miles across Europe?' My mother was tossing carefully-rolled lengths of velvet ribbon, cards with broderie anglaise edging wound round them, cigar boxes stuffed with spools of bright=coloured silk thread and twists of paper with sets of jewel-like buttons out of my grandmother's suitcase and onto the blanket on my sofa-bed. 'They will be useful,' my grandmother said firmly, picking up the discarded ribbons and smoothing them back into shape. 'To whom? For what?' 'If Svetik has a pretty pendant I can make her a choker from the ribbon, very fashionable,' said my grandmother, reasonably in my opinion. 'What are these?' my mother asked furiously as she brought out sheet after sheet of tissue-thin paper crisscrossed with lines of dashes, dots, arrows and what looked like ancient hieroglyphics. 'Patterns', said grandmother picking up a small sharply-pronged wheel on a handle. 'You put the material flat on a table, then the pattern on top, and then run the wheel down the lines you want. When you take off the pattern the indentations are on the material as a guide to where you have to cut.' ‘How do you know which lines to follow?’ I asked with genuine interest. I had tried to make a dress from one of the Simplicity patterns on sale in the wool shop in Leyland and it had been a terrible failure. That came ready-cut in an envelope, grandmother’s sheets looked like a tangled maze. ‘There is a guide here at the top of each page, dress tops, skirts …,’ grandmother started to explain. Mother glared at her. ‘… I’ll show you tomorrow,’ grandmother said hastily. Maybe my mother’s work at the rubber factory and father’s absence had something to do with her outburst over the suitcase. Or it could have been the release of pent-up tension after years of badgering the Foreign Office to get her mother out of the Soviet Union. Mother rarely talked about her. All I knew was that my ‘other’ grandmother lived in Riga in Latvia, there were letters from her from time to time and my mother sent her photographs of me as I grew up. It was only in 1953, after Stalin died, when my parents started their campaign to get an exit permit for her, that I found out that she had not chosen to live in Latvia, that she had somehow got trapped there. Father had sent a long, detailed letter about her circumstances, backed up by his army service record, to the Foreign Office asking whether the British Government could in some way help. He was sent confirmation of the receipt of his letter, a few weeks later a printed form that his request had been passed on to the relevant department, followed by an official letter advising that this was a sensitive case and it would take time and patience … and then nothing. Every few months he would request a progress report and receive a polite answer that ‘every effort’ was being made. Before leaving for Cyprus he had sent a personal letter to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden. And then, suddenly, in June 1956, a letter arrived from the Foreign Office informing my mother that Ksenia Dimitrivna Scheffel had received her exit permit on compassionate grounds and would be flying in to London from Moscow. In Latvia, weeks before the Foreign Office letter arrived in Leyland, Ksenia Dimitrivna had been called in and interrogated by the supervisor of her building, the local police, the state police, the interior ministry and the KGB. They knew who she was. Even though she had been married to a law-abiding Latvian citizen since 1923 her documents still showed that her first husband, the father of her one surviving daughter now living in imperialistic England, had been a Cossack officer in the White Army in Siberia during the Civil War. In all her years under the Soviet regime she had never had a ration card or work permit. She was a non-person. Now a meddling Englishman by the name of Anthony Eden had written a personal letter to Nikita Khrushchev, pointing out she was a widow on her own and her daughter wanted her to live with her in England. It was unheard of as one of the officials stressed. Terrified by the interrogations so far she immediately guessed what was happening and started to hope. She could hardly believe it when she was handed a permit to travel to Moscow where she would have to go through the entire process again at the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry to receive an exit permit as well as a passport. She had already been told she would have to pay for her own travel arrangements. 'I came to England on my Singer sewing machine', Ksenia liked to tell everyone. A glorious image of a small, straight-backed elderly lady flying over Europe on a sewing machine. It was the truth, ‘Singers’, as they were always called, were worth a fortune on the black market and she had no trouble selling hers, getting enough money to pay for the train journey from Riga to Moscow and a plane ticket from Moscow to London via Prague and Paris. She knew only Russian, basic Latvian and some German. In Prague she was adopted by a Czech trade delegation who helped her transfer to the flight to Paris. In Paris there was a long delay and she panicked, wondering whether an official would come up and send her back to Russia. Somehow, someone was found to talk to the visibly apprehensive old lady in her shabby coat holding on tightly to a cheap cardboard suitcase. 'They were all very kind,’ she told us. ‘A lovely young woman in a very smart skirt and blouse took me to a room with soft armchairs and brought me tea and sandwiches. And then she helped me to the front of the plane where I had a very comfortable seat and a whole meal on a tray with this delicious peach.' She had been upgraded to first class by Air France on the last leg of her long journey. She had kept the peach for me because it was a juicy marvel she had not seen for decades and was sure was not available in the depression-era country she was going to, a country riven by poverty and misery according to official Soviet propaganda.