I tried to imagine my mother, young and full of enthusiasm, limping down these corridors for her first job interview with the Institute’s director. Or my mother, defiant and voluble, facing the viciousness of her colleagues at the Party meeting convened to censure her for her romance with a foreigner. But she wasn’t there; I couldn’t feel any ghosts in the place as it reverberated to the oompah music of the dance band.
By the spring of 1960 Lyudmila had been made a full staff member of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, yet the creaking wheels of the housing bureaucracy turned slowly. She was eligible for her own apartment or, as an unmarried woman, more likely a room in a communal apartment. In March her colleague Klava Konnova, her two children and ageing father, were finally allocated an apartment of their own, and they moved out of a tiny, seven-metre-square room in a kommunalka on Starokonushenny Pereulok, near the Old Arbat. Lyudmila put her name down for it, and moved in. It was tiny, but it was a home. She was twenty-six years old, and for the first time in her life she had a space entirely to call her own.
8. Mervyn
I was always fascinated by my father’s study, on the first floor of the narrow Victorian house in Pimlico where I grew up. It smelled of French cigarettes and Darjeeling tea, and it was filled with the sound of Bach cantatas and Handel operas. Now it seems a small room, but in my mind’s eye it is always enormous, seen from the height of a seven-year-old hovering by my father’s venerable armchair and gazing up at the towering walls of books. The cavalry sword hanging over the mantelpiece and the collection of model steam engines spoke of an unknowable but overpowering masculinity, while the drawers full of telescopes, compasses, family photographs and knick-knacks were a forbidden treasure trove. Even in my mid-teens, as my father and I grew apart, I remained fascinated by his past, which he refused to discuss and the key to which seemed to be inextricably linked to the mystery which was his study.
Once, when I was about sixteen, I found a packet of photographs of my father while illegally rooting though his desk drawers. The images were not of the father I knew, but a surprisingly cool-looking young man in a sharp sixties suit and Malcolm X-style sunglasses. In one photograph he was strolling along a sunlit seaside promenade. Other photos showed him in a heavy overcoat, standing on the ice of a giant lake; browsing among watermelon stalls in a picturesque marketplace in Central Asia; looking relaxed and confident in a seaside restaurant, surrounded by pretty girls. The photos all had when and where they were taken neatly marked on the back in pencil in his careful hand.
I asked my father later that day, perhaps seeking to provoke him with a confession of my brazen invasion of his hallowed desk, what he had been doing in Bukhara and Lake Baikal in 1961. He looked away, smiling thinly – his favourite mannerism – and settled into his chair.
‘Oh,’ he said noncommittally, as he poured himself tea through a strainer. ‘Baikal? The KGB took me there.’
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.