I never met my great aunt Margery but she has been a presence in my life from almost the moment she died in the summer of 1965. I was 9. She was 77 and had been living in the Soviet Union since 1922. In the twilight of her life she showed signs of wanting to come home. My father, then Washington correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph, went to investigate, having convinced his editors that his father’s eccentric sister, though way off his beat, would interest readers. He came back with a memorable story but meant to do it fuller justice as a book when he reached retirement. He died before he could get to it, leaving the job to me. I have put it off long enough.
A clergyman’s daughter, Margery was liberated by the First World War. Until then she had been, in the parlance of the time, a “surplus woman”. She volunteered to nurse in Serbia after the Austrians invaded to avenge the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. That adventure ended with her capture. Her captors treated her well. Once home she wanted to return the favor by improving the conditions of German POW’s in England. The official response was icy so she signed on to care for victims of the Armenian genocide. Her hospital about to be overrun by the Turks, she joined a Quaker mission caring for refugees and POW’s in Russia. The October 1917 revolution found her somewhere east of the Volga. Her bliss-was-it-in–that-dawn-to-be-alive moment came in Petrograd the following May. She hoped to stay but was forcibly repatriated in 1919 after again being taken prisoner, this time by counter-revolutionaries. Back in England, she wrote a short book in praise of the Bolsheviks which HG Wells liked well enough to cite in a footnote. The authorities took a more jaundiced view. She went next to Poland to join another Quaker relief mission but was asked to leave for preaching her new gospel a little too ardently, endangering the mission’s official welcome. Home once more, she had trouble renewing her passport until 1922 when, after using the delay to earn midwifing certificate in London’s slums and join the Communist Party, she made it back to Russia, this time as a freelance relief worker. As you will read, her life thereafter became very hard, at least in parts, but she never lost her cheerful faith in Soviet socialism.
She was a piece of work. She bewildered a lot of people, not least that side of the family — the Guinness clan of beer and banking fame — to whose class she was guilelessly unabashed traitor. In those — as a rule the under-est of underdogs — to whose rescue she rushed whenever an opportunity presented itself, she inspired love and wonder. The tears shed over her coffin, a gimcrack cardboard thing that would have pleased her mightily, betokened real sorrow on the part of friends and neighbors in Simferopol, the Crimean town that was her home after World War II. She coveted nothing beyond the chance to help and save — in the secular sense, that is. She was raised in the Anglican communion and knew her Trinity Sunday from her Advent, but her goodness was robustly God-less, her Jesus real but thoroughly mortal. The closest thing to His reincarnation, as she saw it, was the birth of one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
She never left the workers’ paradise after 1922, but did stay in touch. She battled homesickness on occasion but would not succumb. She was fond of her mother, even more so of her father, and wrote as often as she could. Her father, proud but wistful, recorded his daughter’s adventures in what came to be known in the family as the Margery Book, starting with her aborted emigration to Canada in 1913 and ending with his death in 1928. Her mother saved her letters thereafter, stuffing them looseleaf into a notebook in more of less chronological order until the early thirties. After that we have to rely on third party accounts until 1944 when Margaret writes home to reassure the family that she has survived — just — the Nazi occupation. From then until her death, she wrote quite frequently to my grandfather, her younger brother. He passed the letters to his son.
Over time, the Margery Book, loose letters and sundry other bit ands pieces collected by my father found their way into a box which has followed me around waiting to be turned into a biography.
NEXT: Among the Khirghiz
