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Introduction
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…
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I. Among the Khirghiz
Margarita Robertovna, as she is known locally, is writing to her mother, who knows her as Margery. She is squeezing words onto a small sheet of coarse squared paper. First the date. November 14, 1931. Then, carefully printed, her address. Урал Каз Край Рыбак Союз, Цалкарский Промысел, Анкотуиского Район. Copied correctly, this will direct her…
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II. The blood in her veins
On July 11, 1913, Margery Barber shipped out for Quebec aboard the Empress of Ireland. The passenger manifest listed Canada as her “country of intended future permanent residence”. The socialite wife of her uncle Benjamin had remarked that “when an unmarried young woman gets to 25, I’ve often noticed she begins to call old maids…
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III. Surplus Woman
The Land of Promise, a play by Somerset Maugham, opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End on February 26, 1914. Irene Vanbrugh starred as a paid companion who seeks a new life in Manitoba after her employer dies and leaves her penniless. The subject was topical. “Half the “gentle” families you…
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IV. Passage to Serbia
By April the following year, the rector’s mad daughter was at sea again, off to nurse in the Balkans, surplus no more. She owed the adventure to her brother Clement and the scarlet fever he brought home from the army. She caught it caring for him and landed herself in the Ipswich Fever Hospital. There…
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V. Doña Quixota
April 1915-March 1916 The Serbs sent the Berry unit to Vrnjača Banja, a spa town in the highlands 80 miles south of Belgrade. For their HQ and hospital, the Berry’s had chosen the Terapia, a grand sanatorium gone somewhat to seed but where water and a generator could be made to run with the aid…
