By the time the train chugged to a halt in Murmansk she felt tired, dirty and sweaty. The port, once nothing more than a fishing village, was navigable throughout the winter owing to a quirk of the Gulf Stream, and so the last tsar had made it into a naval base for his Northern Fleet. They went straight from the railhead to the harbour and hurried on board just as the ship was sailing.

The weather was atrocious, with squally ice-cold rain and mountainous seas. Like many of the passengers she was sick and stayed in her bunk, but had recovered sufficiently to go on deck the day they were attacked in the North Sea by a lone German bomber. As its bombs landed unbelievably close, sending up huge columns of water, Lydia thought her last hour had come, but in her state of misery viewed the prospect with a kind of indifference. The ship’s guns were firing all the time, causing a great din, but eventually the bomber veered off, leaving the ship’s crew to assess the damage, which was thankfully slight, and they continued to Scotland where they berthed in Leith, cold and fearful and glad to be on dry land again.

Here they were questioned about who they were, why they were coming to Britain, and if they had relatives who would take them in. Lydia’s connection with Sir Edward and the fact that she was escorted by Robert stood her in good stead and she was allowed to continue her journey, though others were detained. From Leith they went to Edinburgh and from there to London by train, and then on to Upstone Hall and she was home. Home at last. Without her son and without the man she loved.


A few days later she was summoned to the Foreign Office for debriefing. Because British officials living in Russia were chaperoned wherever they went and only saw what the Soviet government wanted them to see, they did not get the full picture and were not able to talk to the people. They relied on spies to inform them – spies like Alex, because she had realised that was what he had been doing in Russia besides looking after her and getting her out safely. What a terrible burden she had placed on him.

She was questioned long and hard about why she had gone to Russia in the first place and asked to describe in minute detail everything she had seen: army movements, guns, factories, what the people were thinking, wearing and eating. She did not think she had been able to tell them much, but they accepted what she said, perhaps because she was open about it and also on account of her being Sir Edward’s daughter.

At the end of the interrogation, she was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and offered the job of translating and summarising reports coming out of Russia. To do this she was required to enlist, which she did, becoming a lieutenant in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the army, known as the ATS. After training she was posted to London and allowed to live at Balfour Place with her father. He had come out of retirement to work at the Foreign Office and stayed at Balfour Place during the week, going home to Upstone Hall at weekends.


It was a very different London from the one Lydia had left. Everything was blacked out after dark; not a chink of light was allowed to escape to guide the German bombers. Doors were protected by walls of sandbags and windows criss-crossed with brown paper tape. There were air-raid shelters everywhere and anti-aircraft gun emplacements in the parks. At first the Luftwaffe had gone for the aerodromes, hoping to win the war in the air, but when that failed they had turned on London. Sitting in the cellar of the apartment block with the other residents, eating sandwiches and drinking tea from flasks, Lydia could hear the drone of aircraft and the answering boom of the ack-ack guns, then the crump of an exploding bomb and the bells of fire engines. The people in the shelter reacted in different ways; some were silent, others tried singing and joking, some women calmly went on knitting.

On her way to work the morning after one of these raids, Lydia would see half-destroyed buildings, some still smoking, their contents crushed or scattered in the street, people walking about in a daze, tripping over coils of hosepipe, trying to avoid the broken glass, unable to believe their homes or businesses had gone. The casualties were frightening, but the buses and trains still ran, the theatres still opened, the shops continued to serve their customers, though their stock was much depleted. Food, coal and clothes were rationed. And yet the birds still sang in the plane trees and the ducks still swam in the Serpentine. Contrary to what she had read in Russia, London was far from destroyed.

It was a world away from Russia. And yet she maintained her contact with it through her work. Alex had been right; the Polish territory the Russians had gained in their pact with Germany was lost in a matter of weeks and, in June 1941, they moved over the border into Russia proper. Lydia’s fears for Alex and her son increased a hundredfold and she prayed constantly both might be kept safe. She read every bit of news that came her way, official and unofficial. None of it was cheering. A policy of terror was being pursued by the German troops who considered the Russians, like the Jews, to be subhuman and killed them with extreme brutality, even stringing some of them up on gallows by the roadside. They were apparently making no provision for prisoners, who were left to fend for themselves without shelter, food or medicine. The situation was not helped by Stalin’s scorched-earth policy; nothing was to be left that the Germans could use – guns, ammunition, food, fuel or shelter – which punished the local population as well as the enemy. Minsk, which had been extensively bombed in the early days of the campaign, was soon surrounded, trapping thousands of Soviet troops, some of whom melted into the surrounding forests and formed partisan bands to harass the conquerors.

‘I can’t help thinking of Yuri and wondering where he is,’ she said to Sir Edward, one Sunday in July as they strolled in Hyde Park in the sunshine. Huge barrage balloons swayed lazily overhead, creating moving blobs of shadow on the grass, but the Luftwaffe no longer came over every night, being more concerned with the Eastern Front.

‘I am sure all children will have been evacuated to the east long ago.’

‘I hope so.’

He laid a hand on her arm. ‘You mustn’t torture yourself over it, Lydia. You did all you could and so did Alex. Have you heard from him?’

‘No, not a word, not even through official channels. He was in Red Army uniform when I left him and I worry about him too.’

‘Try not to. He knows what he’s doing.’

But how could she not worry, especially when the German army seemed unstoppable, sweeping towards Moscow? The only way she could cope was by working, hoping that what she did might shorten the war and bring nearer their reunion. In her mind she coupled them together, Alex and Yuri, the two people she loved above all others.

She worried about Robert too. He was serving with the convoys taking war supplies to Russia and, apart from the weather and treacherous seas, they endured attack after attack from U-boats and German bombers, both during the voyage and in harbour at Murmansk while they were unloading. Whenever he came back from a voyage, he telephoned her to tell her he was safe. They wrote each other long letters, which had to be censored, so they were careful what they said, but the affection was obvious and that affection was gradually becoming more profound, but she did not try to analyse her feelings. It was enough that he cared.

They met as often as they could, sometimes going to a show or a dance. On one occasion they went to the first night of Noel Coward’s play, Blithe Spirit, at the Piccadilly Theatre. It was a comedy starring the indomitable Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati, a dotty medium who conjured up the spirit of a husband’s first wife and caused mayhem with the second. There was not a single reference to the war and, for an hour or two, they forgot their troubles and laughed.

Taking her home to Balfour Place afterwards, Robert stopped in the hallway and kissed her. She was taken by surprise, but did not protest. She supposed she had been half expecting it and it was not unpleasant or even unwelcome. In fact it roused her far more than she would have expected. He stood back and surveyed her with his head on one side, smiling. ‘What, no outrage?’

‘No, Robert, no outrage.’

‘But you’re not really ready for it, are you?’

‘For a kiss? Or something more?’

‘You tell me.’ He wasn’t smiling now.

‘A kiss yes, something more, no. I’m sorry, Rob. I still hope, you see…’

‘I understand. But we can still be friends, can’t we?’

‘Of course. I should be very sad if we couldn’t.’

‘Good, because I am a patient man.’

She knew that already and she knew she would try his patience sorely in the weeks to come.

Minsk fell to the Germans a week later and they had their sights set on the ancient city of Smolensk, on their way to Moscow. According to reports Lydia read, a pall of yellow smoke, caused by burning villages and the dust stirred up by the tanks, hung over everything. A few photographs came in the diplomatic bag which illustrated poignantly what was happening to the populace. One was of two little children, one aged about three and one a little older, standing in the ruins of Smolensk, crying. Another was of some refugees, trudging along a road away from the fighting. In the foreground a shawl-clad woman carried a little boy about the same age as Yuri. She studied the child, wondering if it could be her son. It was difficult to conjure up his face, and in any case her memory was of a four-month-old baby, and though she tried, she did not seem able to add the two years in her mind’s eye. Her eyes filled with tears and she couldn’t see to work.

The nightly blitz on London, the industrial cities of the north and the major ports around the coast stopped while Hitler concentrated on bombing Leningrad into submission. The Royal Air Force, which had been England’s saviour during the Blitz, was able to take a breather and bomb Germany to exact some retribution. But the convoys of vital shipping were still being lost to German U-boats in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the North Sea. And as another winter approached, the North Sea run became even more hazardous, with rough seas and sub-zero temperatures. Leningrad was under siege and Moscow threatened. All foreign embassies in Russia were being evacuated eastwards, which meant even less news reached the West, and rumours flourished until it was difficult to know what to believe.

But winter was Russia’s ally, not the invaders’. The cold affected everything: tanks and trucks would not start, vehicles and guns were frozen in and could not be moved until the ice had been tackled with pickaxes. According to reports reaching London, the Germans had been so sure of their swift success they had not even supplied their troops with winter clothing. Comparisons were being made with Napoleon’s march on Moscow a hundred and thirty years before; the winter had defeated him and it would defeat Hitler. At home in London, Lydia realised how lucky she had been and how much she owed to the absent Alex. He had been a constant presence in the background of her life all through her growing up, but it was only in Russia, when he had appeared just when she needed him most, that she realised how much she loved him, when it was almost too late. She longed for him to return to her.

Her daily scrutiny of all the reports arriving on her desk for his name became a ritual before she began translating, but it was never there. Surely if he were alive, he would have found some way of letting her know? She worked diligently, putting in long hours, using it as a kind of anaesthetic to numb the pain of being without her son and the man she loved.

It was Sir Edward who broke the news to her. She had arrived home a little before him and was in the kitchen preparing an evening meal for them both when he came in. He hung up his hat, coat and scarf and dropped his briefcase on the hall table as he always did. She heard the clunk of it and then his footsteps coming along the polished parquet floor towards the kitchen. ‘You’re just in time,’ she said without looking round. ‘I’ve made a casserole.’

‘Later,’ he said. ‘There’s something I have to tell you first. Come and sit down.’

She turned as he sank into a chair at the kitchen table, and noticed how tired and drawn he looked. He was working long hours and at his age it was taking its toll. She sat opposite him, the table between them. His hesitation was alarming her. ‘Papa, what is it?’