Mary Nichols - The Kirilov Star

Lydia had left the ATS to have her baby and so she was no longer privy to secret intelligence and had to rely on news bulletins like the ordinary citizen. But even the ordinary citizen knew something was up the following spring. For a start, a ten-mile-wide strip of coastline from the Wash right round to Land’s End was forbidden to visitors, and the concentration of troops, tanks, guns and aircraft could not be concealed. The second front was imminent. What was not known was when and where the landing might be and speculation was rife. The first Lydia and Margaret knew it was beginning was when they were woken in the night of the fifth of June by the droning of aeroplanes, hundreds and hundreds of them. They ran out onto the terrace in their nightclothes to stare up at the sky which was black with aircraft. And the following morning, the day on which Lydia had always celebrated her birthday – knowing it had really been in April had not changed that – they heard it confirmed on the wireless. As she opened utility cards of birthday wishes, she heard John Snagge’s steady voice announce: ‘D-Day has come. Early this morning the Allies began an assault of the north-western face of Hitler’s European fortress…’

They stood in the kitchen, hugging each other. ‘What a birthday present!’ Lydia said. ‘I wonder where Robert is.’

Robert, she discovered two days later when he rang her, had been in the thick of it, taking troops across the English Channel, but unlike his passengers, he didn’t have to stay. ‘From where I was standing it looked like hell,’ he told her. ‘But it was magnificent.’ He didn’t add that he would be going backwards and forwards for many more days, taking reinforcements and equipment, but she had guessed it anyway. They were assembling a harbour of precast parts, so that ships could dock and unload their cargoes, and they were being ferried out under intensive fire; the Germans had no intention of giving up.

‘Did you get my birthday present?’

He had sent her a silver brooch in the shape of an anchor, with their two names entwined in the rope around it. ‘Yes, it’s lovely. I’m wearing it now. I’ll thank you properly when you come home.’

‘I shall look forward to that. Don’t know when it will be, though.’

‘Never mind. Look after yourself.’

‘And you. Love you lots.’

‘Love you lots too.’

She put the telephone down and returned to Margaret, who was knitting thick socks for Robert in oiled wool. She was not a good knitter and the wool was hard on the hands; Lydia wondered if they would ever be finished. ‘Robert is fine,’ she said. ‘Looking forward to coming home.’

‘It won’t be long now,’ Margaret said. ‘It will soon be over.’

It was over for Margaret just ten days later.

She had gone to London to see Edward who was busier than ever and had little time to spend at Upstone. Lydia, who had stayed behind at the Hall with Bobby, was unprepared for the distraught telephone call and could hardly make out who was speaking, his voice was so thick with distress.

‘Papa, Papa, what are you saying?’

‘She’s dead, Lidushka. Your mama is dead.’

‘Dead?’ she echoed, hardly noticing that he had called her by the Russian diminutive of her name, something he had done when she was little. ‘When? How?’

‘A flying bomb. This morning on her way to meet me.’

Having no pilots, flying bombs had no specific targets and simply flew until they ran out of fuel and the engines stopped, then they whistled down, mainly on London and its environs. No one had known what they were at first and all manner of rumours abounded about crashed planes and pilots baling out and Allied shells falling short, but only that morning the BBC news had announced, ‘The enemy has started using pilotless planes against this country.’ It was only three days since the first one had arrived but already the damage and loss of life was huge. It stifled the optimism of the D-Day landings; Hitler wasn’t done for yet. If only they had known about the new weapon before Margaret left, Lydia might have persuaded her not to go.

‘I’m coming up.’

‘You can’t do anything.’

‘I’m coming anyway. Claudia will look after Bobby.’

She caught the first available train and took a taxi to Balfour Place. She found Edward sitting at his desk, staring into the distance. He had flung off his jacket and was in his shirt sleeves. His tie had been loosened and the top button of his shirt was undone. He had obviously been raking his fingers through his hair and it stood up on end. In one hand he held the brooch Margaret had been wearing and the pin had dug into his palm, but he didn’t seem aware of the blood. A cold cup of tea stood at his elbow. He hardly noticed Lydia’s arrival.

‘Papa,’ she ventured.

He turned towards her, his grey eyes so bleak they made her shudder. She ran to him and knelt at his feet, taking the brooch from him and laying it on the desk before wiping the blood from his hand with her handkerchief. ‘Oh, Papa, I don’t know what to say.’

‘We didn’t even have time to say goodbye,’ he said. ‘It was so sudden. One minute she was there, coming along the road towards me, smiling and waving and then… and then… Oh God, it was terrible. A whistle, a bang and I was thrown in a heap in the road. It winded me and for a moment I couldn’t get up, but when I did, I saw half the street had gone. Bodies everywhere. I ran looking for her. I kept hoping it hadn’t been her I had seen, that it was a stranger coming towards me, someone who looked like her. But then I found her. She was unmarked, not a scratch on her. I thought she had been knocked out by the blast and tried to rouse her. A warden came along and stopped me, took my hands away from her. Then an ambulance came and took her away… Oh, Lidushka, how am I going to live without her?’

She had never seen him cry; he had always been so strong, so in control, the one to whom she turned in distress. When they heard Alex was dead it was she that had collapsed and could not function, while he, who must have been mourning himself, was her comfort and gave her the strength to continue. Now it was her turn to comfort him. She made more tea and made him drink it. She made sandwiches for them both and sat on the sofa beside him the whole night while he talked. He seemed to want to talk, on and on he went, hardly drawing breath. It was as if he was afraid to stop for fear of being overwhelmed.

He spoke of his love for Margaret and how beautiful she was, how he had courted her, how she had resisted at first but then agreed to marry him. He described their wedding day, how happy they had been and how disappointed they were when they found she could not have children, and his joy when Lydia had come into their lives. The pace slowed in the early hours of the morning and at dawn he slept from sheer exhaustion. She covered him with a blanket and left him to prepare breakfast. Only then did she weep herself, a paroxysm of tears which ran down her face as she boiled a kettle and made tea. She found some bread and some dried egg in the pantry. The only way dried egg could be successfully cooked was by scrambling it. By the time it was done and the bread toasted, her tears had dried on her face and she was ready to continue being the strong one.

They took Margaret’s body home to Upstone Hall for burial. Most of the village turned up for the funeral, for she had been much loved. Life went on but Edward was bowed down with grief. He seemed to become old overnight, stooped and silver-haired. Lydia did her best to help him over it and sometimes she thought she had succeeded, and then he would say something about Margaret as if he had forgotten she was no longer with them, and when she gently pointed this out to him, he would say, ‘But Lidushka, she is still with us. She will always be with us.’ To which there was no answer.

And sometimes she wondered if it was the same with Alex. Even in death, was he still with her? Did he, in some way, watch over her as he had done in life? That did not mean she was unhappy with Robert; quite the contrary, their marriage was happier than she had any right to expect and she thanked God for it. It looked as though the war would soon be over and they could settle down in peace. After the turbulence that had gone before, it was all she asked.

April 1945

The rumours were running round the camp like wildfire. Where they had come from, when no newspapers or radio were allowed to the prisoners and possessing either was punishable by death, Alex did not know. But the whispers passed from mouth to mouth, were whispered in the bleak shower rooms as they stood naked under a trickle of cold water, muttered on the seats of the rows of toilets, sung as a kind of ditty as they waited in line every morning during roll call. ‘The Russians are coming. Didn’t you hear the guns?’

He had certainly heard gunfire, no one could be unaware of it when they were in camp, which was only at night if they were on the day shift and during the day if they worked nights. The overcrowded huts shook and it felt as if they would tumble about their ears. When they were in the factory which had been built alongside the camp, they could hear nothing of the outside world. The windows and doors were tight shut and blacked out against air raids, and the noise of the machinery drowned out every other sound, even their voices. The work was hard and unremitting and the shifts, which had begun as ten hours at a time, soon lengthened to eleven and then twelve as the need to supply the German army with weapons became more acute. Quotas had to be reached; the punishment for failure was a beating and a spell in the punishment block in total darkness on bread and water, and little enough of that. For many of the inmates, already on starvation rations, it meant almost certain death.

Alex had no illusions about what would happen to him if the Russians arrived. He would be executed, probably without the refinement of a trial. His alias as Major Alexei Petrovich Simenov would not save him. In fact, he doubted if any of the Russian prisoners would be sent back to their homes. He had learnt enough of Soviet ways to know they would almost all be accused of collaboration, simply for allowing themselves to be captured and made to work in German factories. If not put in front of a firing squad, they would be sent to prison camps in Siberia, from where few would ever return. As for what the Soviets did to spies, he dare not think of that. It would have been better to have died in that field outside Minsk. By all the laws of nature he should have died. According to Iosef Ilyievich who saw what happened, no one ought to have survived the barrage of gunfire that rained down on him.

He had been in the area, trying to keep his promise to Lydia to try and find Yuri. In spite of telling Lydia he thought all the babies must have been evacuated to safety, he had decided to resume the search back at the beginning and that meant returning to the hospital where Olga and Yuri had been taken. Someone who had not been on duty the day they visited might remember something others had missed. Sticking to his military disguise had been easier than he expected; officers were often sent from the high-ups in the Kremlin to find out what was really happening on the ground. Communications were chaotic, and provided he kept out of the way of officialdom, he felt reasonably safe, though always on his guard. At the hospital, he had been surprised to learn that Olga Denisovna Nahmova had not died but had been evacuated with hundreds of other badly injured patients to a Moscow hospital.

Remembering what Lydia had said about how Olga idolised Yuri, he felt sure the woman would not give him up and would set about looking for him as soon as she was discharged. If he found Olga, he might find Yuri. But the boy was a Russian citizen, he reminded himself; even if he found him, he would not be allowed to take him out of the country legally. He would cross that bridge when he came to it. It might be that all he would be able to tell Lydia was that her son was safe and well. Even this slight feeling of optimism was dashed when Minsk came under attack from the invading Germans with thousands of troops, tanks and big guns.

He had found himself watching a field gun firing on what had once been a convent but which had become a home for orphan children and, for all he knew, might contain Yuri. It had incensed him. Without thinking of the possible consequences he had taken a couple of hand grenades and crawled round to encircle the bunker from which the gun had been firing. He had managed to get below the gun’s trajectory without being seen and approached it from the side, but hand grenades were puny weapons against the gun and so he had crept closer than it was safe for him to do so. He was right on top of it when he pulled out the pin of the first grenade and flung it in the bunker. It did not disable the gun but it caused enough injury and confusion among the crew for him to toss the other down the barrel, a satisfyingly accurate lob. For what happened after that, he had only the word of Iosef, who had been hiding in a nearby ditch.