The Russian Album (20 page)

One winter night in late 1918, while George was asleep, Mania was dismissed and told to leave the villa. George, then just six years old, awoke the next morning and instead of Mania found the tutor reaching down to pull him out of bed. George held on for dear life to his bedpost and when yanked clear in the struggle he hit his head and passed out. He woke up in Peggy Meadowcroft's room, panic-stricken and sore, listening to her say that he was now a big boy and would have to get along without his Mania.

Pitched out of the nursery world, he now began to be aware of the world beyond the villa gates. It was only after Mania's departure that his memory received its first imprint of horror. From the windows of the villa, he saw a man being dragged screaming along the dusty street just outside the green gates, his legs tied to the back of a horse, his captor riding along not even bothering to look back.

That autumn of 1918 the boys first became aware of how much the times had changed their mother. She was no longer the frail, vague, comical and retiring figure of their childhood in Petrograd. Hardship had weathered her. During their father's arrest, she had been like a tigress, enraged, tenacious and unafraid. Now that most of the servants had gone, she took over the housekeeping. She had never so much as boiled water in her life before. Now they watched her leave the house in the morning dressed in a shabby black overcoat, with her hair in a peasant woman's shawl, to queue at the baker's for crumbling loaves made out of corn, potato flour and bran. One of the boys went with her when she travelled out into the villages to bargain for mutton, cooking fat and honey. She had become sharp and shrewd and resilient. And she never railed at fate.

She had nothing but scorn for relatives in town who played cards with the Red commissars and who served tea and sandwiches for the search parties who came to ransack their houses. Natasha's rage, her sense of violation, made her fearless. When the search parties tried to take the children's clothes, she shouted at them; when they took her husband's family seal and Karamzin's history of Russia, she stormed down to Bolshevik headquarters to demand their return. When the commissars threatened her with imprisonment if she didn't clear off, she dared them to try. She astonished herself and her children. They knew she was terrified of mice and thunderstorms, but she was not afraid of anything else.

When the winter came in November 1918, the boys helped Vaclav the gardener chop down the poplars in the garden for fuel. They fed the green logs into the stoves to keep warm. Smoke filled the house and ice formed inside the cracks in the walls. The boys wore all their clothes at once, old army boots and potato sacking on their feet. The loaves in the market grew smaller, mouldier, more evil-smelling. The money was gone and they lived on fruit from the villa orchard, the mouldy bread and mutton broth. Vaclav could see the boys were going hungry. He went to his woodshed and pulled out his secret store and came to the Count and offered him a wad of Kerensky rubles. Paul accepted in tears.

The Whites settled into a siege of the spa towns and every day the windows rattled with the thump of artillery duels in the mountains. Two of the boys, Alec and Dima, began to write and edit a small newspaper which they sold to the neighbouring families. After a few weeks, when Alec wrote a lead story beginning, ‘Last night firing was heard,' Dima said he would never make a journalist. What kind of story was that? There was firing every night.

Far away on the western front, the Great War came to an end. At first Paul and Natasha thought the armistice would free the Allies to increase their support to the Whites. They expected deliverance hourly, waiting like supplicants for the tender mercies of the Whites. But as Christmas came, Paul and Peggy Meadowcroft sat in the smoky darkness with candles trying to plot a route of escape southwards across the mountains into Persia. Christmas 1918 was funereal. They all gathered in the dining room for evening service. Their local priest, Father Naum, led them in prayer and Paul sang the responses in a weak, unsteady voice.

They were singing vespers again one wintry night in January 1919 when a neighbour burst in with news that General Wrangel's White Army had retaken the town. This time deliverance was sickening in its vengefulness. The Whites slaughtered men, women and children who were retreating in the rear of the Red Army on the snowy roads to Stavropol. They erected a gallows on Hludovskaya street, within sight of the villa, and executed Xenia Gueh, the wife of the French-speaking Bolshevik commissar of Piatigorsk, together with the White lover who had tried to help her escape when the Whites surrounded the National Hotel. On the day of the execution, Paul came into the boys' room and drew the shutters so they wouldn't look. They looked anyway and saw the hooded bodies turning in the wind with signs saying ‘Traitor' around their necks.

Because Paul had survived the massacre of Piatigorsk, had refused to flee with Shkuro and had survived under the Red regime, the White authorities regarded the Ignatieffs with suspicion. The Whites arrested naive Professor Nechaev for cooperating with the Bolsheviks and when Paul went to the new White chief of secret police to demand Nechaev's release, the man threatened to have him arrested too. ‘Just try,' was Paul's reply.

Princess Panin, the only female minister in the government that General Denikin had formed to rule the territory in the Caucasus under White control, came to Paul and offered him the Ministry of Agriculture in the government they felt sure would be established when Moscow fell to the Whites in the spring. Paul asked Princess Panin what the White policy towards the peasantry would be. She replied that the land seized from the landholders would be given back. ‘It is impossible to tolerate such lawlessness and the triumph of the “property grabbers”.' Paul replied coldly, ‘So we accept from the revolution only what is pleasing to us?' He refused to have anything to do with the White administration.

As January turned to February, the hostility of the Whites and fears of the return of the Reds convinced Paul that he must get his family to safety. At first the Crimea seemed a possible port of escape but the White hold on Odessa began to slip. When British intelligence officers with Denikin's army arrived in Kislovodsk from the Black Sea port of Novorossisk, 100 miles to the northwest, Peggy Meadowcroft went back with them to Novorossisk to find a ship. She returned with news that there was a British cruiser and a supply ship in the harbour that might be able to take them on board.

First the family had to escape the clutches of the local Whites. A train coach put at the family's disposal by the Russian Red Cross was intercepted by the local White police, and a car sent by the Denikin government to take them to Novorossisk never arrived. By late January 1919, the Reds were in the hills outside the town, the railway lines were dynamited in many places. The whole country between the spa towns and the Black Sea was laid waste, and typhus and smallpox were raging. At this juncture their luck held. The wife of General Wrangel, who had come to Kislovodsk to convalesce from an attack of typhus, agreed to put the general's private railway coach at their disposal.

They left one cold February evening, all their possessions hastily packed in the faithful trousseau trunk, the jewels and money retrieved from the earthenware jar, the boys wrapped in all the clothing they had left. They said goodbye to Father Naum, to Koulakoff and Katia and Vaclav, who was clutching the money which Paul had managed to repay. Each knew they would never see the other again. The railway car was pitch black; the wind whistled in through broken windows, the trimmings and upholstery were ripped away, and the car was filled to bursting with other fleeing refugees. As the train gained speed, a haunting baritone voice started to sing in the darkness, and shadows took up the song until the whole darkened car was in full voice as it swept through the snowy night.

A journey which should have taken half a day took three days. The train crawled through a flat, blasted landscape dotted with frozen corpses, abandoned wagons and army horses rigid in the poses of death. At Mineralni Vodi station, which had been bright with the kerchiefs of peasant women and their full fruit baskets when they passed through before, the platform was crowded with starving, numb refugees who stared at the shocked white-faced Ignatieff boys in their warm carriage. There was a worse sight at the carriage window opposite. On the track next to theirs stood a railway flatcar loaded with snow-covered typhus corpses.

When they arrived in Novorossisk, the family rented rooms in a merchant's house overlooking the port and Peggy Meadowcroft set about establishing contact with the crew of the British cruiser, the
Grafton,
and an old British steamship, the
Huanchaco,
pressed into service as a troop transport. Both ships were in the harbour to bring supplies and assistance to the White forces. While they waited for their passage, the family saw still more White misrule. Nick watched from the windows of their rented rooms while Red prisoners, ‘pale ghosts, walking skeletons, scarcely human', were driven down the street and White officers on horseback mounted the pavement and forced every passer-by to doff their hats to the imperial eagle. Paul would close the curtains with disgust. From Odessa came rumours, which soon proved to be true, that the retreating White command was towing Red soldiers out in barges into the middle of the Black Sea and drowning them. Caught between Reds and Whites the family became desperate to leave.

Out in Novorossisk harbour lay their salvation:
HMS
Grafton
and the
Huanchaco.
Peggy Meadowcroft went down to the quay and put her charm to work on the ship's company. British officers came courting Peggy on the sofa, while the family hung back behind the closed doors of the cramped rented rooms. At night when there were rumours of incursions by bandits from the hills, the
Grafton
played its searchlights on their house to keep them safe. The boys went to sleep with the beams sending shivers of light through the shutters onto the ceiling. Salvation was as close as the source of the searchlight beam, but before the British could take them on board, the family needed exit visas from the Whites. January turned into February and February into March. The wind howled along the quays. Still no visas arrived. The Crimea fell and the Red armies closed in on Novorossisk. Panic-stricken refugees and disintegrating units of the White Army thronged the port. The clamour for places on the British boats grew intense. For several hundred pounds sterling Paul sold off half of his interest in his factories to four Moscow merchants who left rubbing their hands with glee at the bargain that misery had forced him to strike. This time, Paul's feeling of exhausted depression settled over Natasha.

Peggy Meadowcroft seized the initiative. She found a place on a filthy troop train leaving for Ekaterinadar, where the visas were issued. For twelve hours she fought off the attentions of the White soldiers on board the train and arrived in a fine fury at White headquarters. Astonished by this indefatigable English nanny hectoring them in Russian, the Whites capitulated. Triumphantly, she returned to Novorissisk with the necessary papers. Soon Mr Hough, one of the officers of the
Huanchaco,
had fallen in love with her. Privately he urged her to leave the family but she refused. She said she must get her boys into good schools in England. Mr Hough found the family a place on the ship.

One morning in May a truck arrived from the
Huanchaco
to cart away the sole remaining family trunk. Mr Hough arrived soon after to say they were about to weigh anchor: he found a Te Deum in progress, and the family in the sitting room saying the prayers offered on a great departure. He sat cap in hand in the anteroom until he could stand it no longer. He hissed in Peggy's ear that they must be going. A stretcher was brought for Paul – he was too weak to walk – and they all drove down to the quay and marched up the gangplank. At dusk the ship weighed anchor and the family stood by the taff rail and watched the last horizon of Russia vanish on the lip of the waves.

The
Huanchaco
steamed back and forth across the Black Sea for three weeks. They sailed to Batum, where the boys watched as Indian Sikhs of the British army in Turkey chivvied and smacked a load of mules up the gangplanks. Then they sailed to Constanza, a port in Rumania, where the mules were unloaded. The boys worked on their English with the sailors and the sailors gave them English nicknames that stuck to them for life: Jim, Nick, Alec, Lino and Georgy. The boys noticed that Peggy stopped calling their father and mother Count and Countess. For the first time they became Paul and Natasha. Their father didn't seem to mind but their mother stiffened whenever Peggy spoke.

From Constanza the ship made its way to Varna in Bulgaria. Bulgarians had fought on the German side against the Russian armies and for this reason Paul would not let the boys land, though they could see the sandy beach and the children playing, and Paul knew that there was a statue to his father, the father of modern Bulgaria, in the city square. When news leaked out that the son of Count Nicholas Ignatieff, liberator of Bulgaria from the Turkish yoke in 1877, was on board, the mayor arrived with a civic delegation to beg him to land. ‘Are your bayonets dry?' Paul wanted to know. The mayor looked down at his shoes and pleaded that Bulgaria be forgiven. So they landed and the refugee and his family were able to gaze for the last time at his father, frozen at the height of his imperial glory, staring unseeing over the square.

As the
Huanchaco
neared Constantinople and entered the Bosphorus on the last morning of the voyage, the ship was boarded by British and French intelligence agents who asked Paul where he was born. He looked out of the window and said quietly, ‘Constantinople.' They told him to be serious, and he said he was perfectly serious. There, just as he spoke, the ship passed below the gleaming white walls of the Russian ambassador's summer residence high on the bluffs of Byouk Dere. Standing there in the line with the other refugees Paul could look up and point to the second-storey window where he had been born.