LAST WRITE OF THE PROMS

Of course I blame Nigel Kennedy.

We’d been invited to a friend’s house for supper and a joint watching of the Last Night of the Proms which, apart from the wonderful Joyce DiDonato and Marin Alsop, also starred Nigel Kennedy.  At least he is British, the other two being and sounding - as Simon Schama was to observe - impeccably American.  Pomp and Circumstance internationalised at last.  But I miss the sea shanties.  Perhaps they couldn't be internationalised.

Still, Nigel Kennedy made me think of three very pretty female violinists who play ‘Kalinka’ on YouTube.  Well I guess they play it in lots of other surroundings as well but I always used to listen to them when I was writing my novel  ‘Boraya’ to put me in a suitably Russian mood and when I got home after the Proms I played the video again.

Suddenly I was transported back to Borayaland - to the Casa Malinka dacha:  an eerie feeling - half way between a dream and a memory.  I wandered through the rooms of the dacha, sensing the atmosphere as though in an empty house, being reminded of the events and the people and the conversations that I had placed there.   I had written these but now I felt that I had merely been a fly on the wall and that the events I had imagined had really taken place and I had seen them.  Strange and bewildering this confusion of memory and imagination.

Casa Malinka wasn’t based on any house I had ever seen being a Catalan house on the Gulf of Finland, with an onion dome on the roof; large windows, big heavy doors and a long garden, falling gently away from the house.  It was as though I had lived there once - which I suppose for the nine months I that was writing the novel - I had been.

'Boraya'  still has no takers, however.  The manuscript - or should that now be ‘e-script?’ - lies on a London agent’s slush pile awaiting the end of the month when the sands of hope will run out.  It is looking as though I shall have to publish it myself.  We’ll see.  It was a learning experience, though still a good read and a page turner.  Maybe a little unsubtle, but little in Russian life is subtle.  Some people have read it avidly, others it seems to have left cold.  I suppose as my first (possibly my only, who knows?) novel it has a special place in my heart.

All of which makes me yearn to get on with writing my second one - 'Henric's Mill' - which will be set in France and which spans the life of a refugee from the 1920’s Russian Civil war who escapes from Russia with his sister’s papers - something that leads to all sorts of complications.  The story set first in Paris and then in the Cantal runs through the Second World War and up to the present (more or less) when Felix, the protagonist and now in his late eighties becomes a refugee from French Justice and escapes back to Russia.  Felix's character is slowly forming in my head and beginning to tell me the hoops through which he wants me to jump.

But instead of being able to get on with composing such entertaining nonsense I am hard at work trying to publish all the Neolithic research I have done over the years in order at least to  have a proof copy of a small book when I have to give a talk to a student archeology society in November.  The text is more or less written but it is taking ages to transform it into the typeset and illustrated pdf file required by the publishers.  In this case it is the pictures rather than the characters that seem to have minds of their own.

Yet I did do something this week for the first time (or at least the first time that I can remember, which isn't the same thing) and that was to pick up my neighbour’s six year old from school.  The neighbour had had to go to London and my task was to take her daughter home and give her to the babysitter who would be arriving - or so I was told.

I stood in the rain with huddled groups of other parents awaiting the magic hour at which the school portals would open and the children emerge.  Except they didn’t.  They come out one at a time and these days each has to ‘spot’ a parent or parent substitute before being released.  Luckily Rose knows me quite well, but she was one of the last to come out and the rain was heavy.  I wondered if I had come to the right door.  But eventually there she was and so we were able to run home while she told me a long and involved story she had written that day about a white rabbit called Milly who had a brother and a sister (also white rabbits) and a Mother rabbit, called Lily (or maybe Lilly), who was Ginger.  I didn’t catch half of it and all the rabbits ended up in a tree at one point from which they descended by simply leaping to the ground.

I protested.  "Rabbits don't climb trees," I said unhelpfully.

“That’s the thing about stories,” said Rose a little crossly.  I can make my characters do absolutely anything I want.

Bright confident morning! Clearly the rabbits haven't started yet to argue with their author. 

KALINKA

The Snowberry

Some of you may know that my alter ego is writing a novel about the Boraya Chocolate Factory in St Petersburg - or Leningrad as it used to be. The novel has various historical flashbacks to the 1941-1944 siege of Leningrad when three-quarters of a million of its citizens starved to death. The encircling German forces were held just 15 kilometres from the city centre and across no man's land in temperatures of minus thirty degrees the opposing lines of soldiers would sing to each other. One German soldier, called Hockenjos, was so impressed with the Russian song 'Kalinka,' drifting on the night wind across the snowy ruins, that he memorised it and later wrote it down. An example of how music bridges even the most bitterly opposed cultures.

 There's a YouTube version of Kalinka performed in Leningrad - or rather St Petersburg - by the choir of the Red Army, assisted by some unlikely types known as the 'Leningrad Cowboys.'  I don't know quite what either the haircuts or the shoes of the Cowboys signify but close your eyes and you can imagine how, with a few vodkas, such singing could have kept the cold - and the enemy- at bay. Na Zdrowie! 

Despite the majesty of the rhythm and the catchiness of the tune, Kalinka, is more or less a nonsense song about the little snowberry - Symphoricarpos.  Wikipedia provides the picture of the snowberry above and also translates the Russian lyrics of Kalinka as

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, under the pine, the green one,
Lay me down to sleep,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Lay me down to sleep.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, little pine, little green one,
Don't rustle above me,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Don't rustle above me.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, you beauty, pretty maiden,
Take a fancy to me,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Take a fancy to me.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!



In fact there's another, instrumental version of the song played on by three young women with violins which is also very catchy.   And not only musically catchy.  For the trouble I find in trying, as a complete tyro, to write a novel is that the characters begin to take over.  There's this troublesome girl called Olga who works in the chocolate shop, who first demanded a friend and then a job in London and now she's telling me that I ought to have known that she also played the violin. Well, what can you do?  Another character, sent me to eBay to buy a silver 1866 Napoleon III coin which is his lucky charm and a third just saunters into the picture as a kind of Russian eminence grise.  He is actually, he tells me, the economic planning chief of St Petersburg who sits behind an enormous empty desk in a very large office in a fictional part of the Mariinsky Palace which I call the Prefecture.  I tried to model him on the Communist mayor of Calais who I met once when I was trying to help a British company build a new factory there, but as usual he has become his own man - at least he has tried to.  You reach his office by a 1930s lift which is very small and slow and full of carved wood and delicately engraved mirrors.  This actually comes from Barcelona.  It wasn't very practical but was very beautiful and riding it you almost regret that Mr Otis (if ever there was a Mr Otis) had been allowed to dominate the world's elevating industry.

Despite the references to the Leningrad siege, this is actually a love story surrounded by chocolate, or at least a chocolate factory, presided over by Ludmilla the elderly matriarch, who with her roller pin arms, wispy grey hair, liver spots and her Leningrad defence medals is all the wise and aged grandmothers you have ever known.  Her problem is that she will never stop working or stop fighting.

The main protagonists, though are Vladimir and Beth (who know each other as Lenin and Elizabeth). It is pretty obvious from the start that they will fall in love because this is a love story, but where will love's path take them?  They are like corks bobbing around on the turbulent river Neva and having met Beth briefly at a New Year party, Lenin now finds himself showing her the sights of St Petersburg on a cold snowy January day (which isn't exactly the best time to see the city).  Anyhow, here is a part of their journey.  (I have a feeling that he should be humming Kalinka and she joining in with the bouncy bits - you see how the characters dictate what they should be doing?)

They had reached the river now, and were standing on the abutment looking out across the river at the rushing torrent of black water with its cargo of ice blocks.  “Look down there, Elizabeth,” said Lenin, raising his voice a little against the tumult below and pointing vaguely in the direction of the water beneath them.   Beth tried to follow. 

“No no!  There!"  Again he held her arm and she experienced a frisson of delight.  She looked at him, the wind lifting the flaps of his fur hat.  His arm pointed at the grey granite of the abutment wall.
She could see now a  ledge about ten feet above the river where a little snow had collected.  On it nestled a shape.  “Is that meant to be a bird?” she asked, peering beneath her.

“It’s a statue of a siskin,” replied Lenin softly.  “A type of finch with colourful yellow and green feathers.  Very common here in summer.”   

“But it’s tiny!” exclaimed Beth.  “What does it signify?”

“The smallest statue in St Petersburg.  Only 11 centimetres tall,” answered Lenin, holding one hand approximately this distance above the other.   Too cold to stand still, they walked on as he talked. “The little siskin commemorates the old Imperial Legal Academy which stood just by here.  You know the students at the academy had to wear gowns of yellow and green so they became known as ‘siskins or Chizhik Pyzhik.’  I think there must have been some other statue or model at one time because we say that Chizhik Pyzhik helps students with their love affairs, especially when they don’t go too well.”

And so that little statue was Chizhik Pyzhik?” asked Beth, wincing at her memory.

“Well a new Chizhik Pyzhik” said Lenin.  "Because it was only put there a year or two ago.  I don’t know quite what happened to the old one.  In fact I think there are now several Chizhik Pyzhik for people keep stealing them.  They are supposed to help Russian students to travel around the city without paying on the buses or the metro!  Though I don’t know how!”  Lenin's face was straight though Beth could see the corners of his mouth involuntarily turning upwards.  "It's true! Really!" he protested.

Beth laughed and then she laughed again full and hearty against the wind.  “If ever I am sad, just say Chizhik Pyzhik to me and I shall remember the little statue and I shall smile a big smile” She beamed and without really being conscious of what she was doing she leaned against him slightly.  Lenin was now laughing too.  Despite the cold and the wind both felt calm and easy with one another, as though love had already arrived without either of them noticing or ever thinking that it might be remarkable;  and of course they would have denied its arrival, even to themselves.  

Lenin began to hum Kalinka.