Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

12. On Different Planets

MOSCOW, I found, seemed to attract people who were ferociously smart, but often hungry and damaged, fleeing failure or trying to prove something to the world. Like a traumatic love affair, it could change people for ever. And like a love affair, or a drug, it would be exhilarating at first, but then as it wore on it reclaimed the buzz it had given, with interest. ‘What, you thought all that was for free?’ my Moscow Times colleague Jonas Bernstein would cackle whenever I showed up for work complaining of a hangover or nursing strange bruises. I suppose the answer was yes, we all did.

Moscow reached the apogee of its self-congratulatory hubris in late summer of 1997. The city’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, decided that Moscow’s 850th anniversary should be turned into a celebration of the capital’s wealth and success, decreeing a massive public celebration. On the day, Luzhkov rode in triumph past the old Central Telegraph in a motorized Grecian wine bowl as five million revellers packed the centre of Moscow. Luciano Pavarotti sang on Red Square and Jean Michel Jarre performed a son-et-lumière on the Lenin Hills, projecting his lasers on the soaring bulk of Moscow State University. I have a memory of staggering among a pile of debris behind a row of vodka kiosks near Park Kultury looking for a place to pee, and discovering a couple copulating among the discarded beer bottles and crisp packets. It was a night of misrule; as Jarre’s lasers blossomed over the city, crowds of youths rode on the roofs of packed trolleybuses and let off firecrackers in the crowd.

Yet at the same time Moscow had a filthy underbelly which people like Mayor Luzhkov wished didn’t exist. I spent two days at Kursky Station, below the platforms in a warren of dingy cubby holes inhabited by homeless people who had fallen as far as it was possible to fall. As the evening rush hour died down, the station’s secret dwellers would cautiously emerge from their underground world below the underpasses and reclaim the station as their own. Clambering down on to the railway tracks, I found families of tramps who lived in nests of cardboard and litter beneath the platforms. I shared beers with a gang of teenage pickpockets who handed half their takings to the police as protection money. A thirteen-year-old prostitute with a face that was plastered with white make-up and dirty hair held up with a shiny plastic clip tried to chat me up. I bought her a can of gin and tonic, and she explained that she had run away from a remote village where her alcoholic parents had beat her. ‘But now I’m here in the big city,’ she said, brightening, surveying her concrete world of litter and neon. ‘I’ve always dreamed of living here.’

I found other runaways hiding in a maze of underground heating ducts on the outskirts of the city. These kids scratched a living by picking pockets, fetching and carrying for the local market traders, all to fuel their habit of sniffing a cheap brand of glue called Moment. They were scruffy and emaciated but irrepressibly friendly and cocky, even though under constant threat from marauding homosexuals who tried to rape them, the police who periodically rounded them up, and American missionaries who brought them food and made them pray to Jesus. They were cunning and cynical as rats, but they lived like a family, helping the youngest ones who were just eight or nine, feeding and instructing them in the hard ways of their little world. They invited me into their den with great pride and asked me shyly to buy them hot dogs, the greatest treat they could imagine.

In August of that year, I moved into a new apartment on Petrovka Street. My landlady on Starokonushenny Pereulok, caught up in the frenzy of the economic boom, tried to hike my rent by 50 per cent with two days’ notice. I promised to pay, then did a late-night runner.

My new flatmate was a delightful Canadian flower-child turned stockbroker called Patti. Patti, like the thousands of expatriates who crowded into Moscow at that time, was riding high on the back of a giant boom which had followed Boris Yeltsin’s re-election the year before. Good times were rolling, for those who positioned themselves to take advantage of the sale of the century.

Moscow’s rich young foreigners were the conquistadors of capitalism, living in vast apartments once occupied by Stalin’s ministers, throwing epic parties in what had been the Politburo’s most luxurious dachas, scooting off for weekends in Ibiza, taking their pick of the conquered land’s womenfolk and generally reaping the fruits of a hundred billion dollars’ worth of Cold War NATO military spending which allowed them to be there. By day they would trade stocks, buy companies and peddle FMCGs – Fast Moving Consumer Goods – to the Russian masses, making fortunes selling Tampax, Marlboros and deodorant. By night they cruised around Moscow in polished black SUVs, guzzling cocaine and accumulating an entourage of astonishingly beautiful girlfriends.

One acquaintance of mine made millions through a cosy relationship he had going with the Russian Orthodox Church. The Kremlin was allowing the Church to import alcohol and cigarettes duty free, the profits supposedly going to the reconstruction of churches. Another friend made his cash doing audits for a major American consultancy company. The arrangement was simple enough. However doomed or decrepit the factory, he’d recommend that they lay off half their workforce, draw up a creative version of their accounts to sell to gullible Western investors and split the profits of the resulting share flotation with the management.

Russia certainly had a definite appeal for anyone with a dark streak of gross irresponsibility and self-destructiveness. And if you had it, there was nothing to stop you indulging it. It was a weird, Godless world, where values went into permanent suspended animation and you were terrifyingly free to explore the nastiest recesses of your own black heart.

But despite the good times Moscow got its revenge on its new masters, insidiously screwing with foreign psyches. You’d see young men who had arrived as cheery, corn-fed boys assuming within a year that hardened, taciturn look one usually associates with circus people. Selfish young hedonists quickly turned into selfish psychotic monsters – too much sexual success, money, vodka, drugs and cynicism in too short a time.

Patti, however, somehow always managed to keep her hippy cheerfulness, despite it all. I have an enduring image of Patti from that time. It was early in the morning, a summer dawn, and I woke to find Patti in my room, rooting in my desk, stark naked, looking for leftover amphetamines. She had an early flight to catch, scooting off on another business trip to Siberia to buy up factories. I stumbled to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw Nosferatu looking back at me. Patti, now pepped up by her chemical wake-up call, cheerily clacked down the hall in her Prada sandals, dragging her Ralph Lauren bags, and called goodbye.

‘Patti, darling, when are you going to buy me a factory?’ I called from the bathroom.

‘Soon, honey, very soon, when we’re all verry verry richl Byeee!’

As autumn 1965 approached Mervyn prepared to leave his rooms at St Antony’s for ever. He had accepted a teaching post at Nottingham University; by his own assessment, a place ‘towards the bottom of the second division’ of universities. Fourteen months of effort and he had got nowhere with Mila, and the loneliness was eating into him. In his last weeks at Oxford, he would drive out to Wytham Woods and wander alone through the trees.

‘I am very sad this evening, so I am writing to you, it helps,’ Mervyn wrote. ‘I was struck in your letters by what you said about your lonely walks. Do you really talk to me, call out to me? I thought all evening that I could hear your voice, low and sweet and sing-song, even though I could not answer. I think of you often and you are with me always… I thought how good it would be if you were here, we would sit in the garden in the sun or be doing something together. My sorrow is almost unbearable, but it goes after a time and I can pull myself together and work.’

With the end of his Oxford career came desperation. Conventional tactics were clearly not working, so Mervyn began thinking of something more unorthodox. In a final gracious gesture, St Antony’s offered to pay for Mervyn to go to a conference in Vienna, even though he had done no research and had no paper to present. The only condition was that Mervyn was to get up to ‘no funny business’, as Theodore Zeldin, one of the fellows of St Antony’s, warned him.

The conference was a lavish affair, with banquets and endless speeches. Mervyn slipped away and ate alone at a Russian restaurant called the Feuervogel, owned by a huge sweaty Russian who also waited at the tables and poured vodka even if it hadn’t been ordered. A Bulgarian guitarist sang melancholy songs and bickered with the owner.

Mervyn was indeed planning some ‘funny business’, which involved slipping into Czechoslovakia unnoticed on the day the conference ended, to send a confidential letter which he hoped would transform his fortunes. Though at that time no visa was required and the train ride to Prague was only three hours, Mervyn spent a sleepless night before his departure, fearing that he might be snatched like Gerald Brooke. But the journey was without incident; the border guards scowled at his passport but stamped it.

Mervyn arrived in Prague on 6 September 1965 and checked into the run-down Hotel Slovan. He found Prague livelier than Moscow, and even discovered a dingy nightclub where he had a solitary glass of wine. That night he sat down to write a long, frank letter to Alexei. Mervyn spelled out the propaganda advantages of letting Mila out, and offered a ‘substantial’ sum of money if this were to happen. He cited cases of Poles and East Germans buying their way out, unofficially but legally. He would be helping Russia, and though he was not rich he could find benefactors. The money could go to ‘charitable causes’ in the Soviet Union. ‘We are about the same age, Alexei, and we can talk seriously and honestly. Please help!’ Mervyn pleaded.

Unlike Mila, Mervyn seemed still to harbour illusions about the fundamental decency of the KGB, or at least of Alexei personally. What he did not include was an offer to cooperate – but by this stage such an offer probably wouldn’t have been accepted in any case. He sent the letter by registered post in the morning from the Central Post Office just off Wenceslas Square. He never received an answer.

Perhaps my parents found something in their separation which resonated with an emotional barrenness they each carried with them from childhood. But there came a point, quite early in their epistolary relationship, when they began to put so much of their lives into their letters that the recording of the experience overtook the experience itself, the material became too huge, the process of turning it into history began to rob them of their present.

In Moscow, Mila was settled into the private rituals of her long-distance love affair. As she left for work she would kiss Mervyn’s photo. On her way home she shopped for records for Mervyn, so he and his friends could listen to Russian music together. She consulted her doctor about Mervyn’s minor ailments. In almost every letter she refers to Mervyn’s diet, her obsession with food a hangover from her childhood.

‘Do you listen to your Mila? Please Mervyn, don’t eat too much pepper, vinegar and other spices. Do you drink your milk? I drink half a litre every night. Eat properly, as I taught you, eat fresh things.’ When Mervyn tried to object that he was partial to a curry from time to time, Mila would have none of it. ‘I respect your tastes, but I fear some of them hurt your health – I mean what I mentioned to you in Moscow, your passion for Eastern, Caucasian and Indian food. It’s too spicy for you, you are a person from a maritime climate. This is food for people with strong stomachs, but you are a delicate northern flower, you need to eat delicately.’

Mila asked for clothes, which Mervyn would buy in London [jokingly grumbling in his letters at the expense) and send to Moscow through Dinnerman’s, the only authorized parcel handler to the Soviet Union. Mila would buy books and send them to Mervyn in London in brown paper parcels tied with rough string. Soon there were hundreds on his shelves.

Mila’s virtual relationship with Mervyn was spiralling into a full-fledged obsession; she was plunging deep into an imagined world of her own creation. ‘It is as though I live entirely in a complex mechanism called Mervyn, I see all his bolts and wheels all around me,’ she wrote. ‘You are the point, the aim of my life… Soon I will begin practising a new religion, Mervusism, and I will make everyone believe in my God of joy and warmth.’

In many ways, it seemed to her that the life represented by the stream of letters was more real than her interactions with the live people around her. ‘I have no present, only a past and a future if I can believe in it,’ she wrote. ‘Everything around me is dead, I wander through the ruins, onwards towards some goal, towards you.’ She lived for Mervyn’s letters; ‘everything else, I invent just to fill in the time.’

Mila describes sitting in the courtyard at Starokonushenny Pereulok in the warm drizzle, laughing out loud as she reads Mervyn’s latest letters while a hatchet-faced old babushka peers out from a cellar window. ‘It was as though wings had sprouted from my back,’ she wrote. ‘All your soul, in the form of paper and ink, poured into me like a clear stream and filled my body and soul with strength. This is the best medicine I could have. Your letters are getting better and better, soon I will cry not from sorrow but from joy.’

At the weekend she went to the dacha. Olga read Chekhov while Mila knitted; a late summer hailstorm rattled on the house’s iron roof. When the storm cleared, Mila went for a long walk through cornfields, calling out Mervyn’s name. The burden of grief was taking its toll on her. ‘Mervyn, sorrow is sucking the life out of her… surely she’s suffered enough in her life. I am truly worried for her,’ Lenina wrote. ‘Probably because she never felt or saw the love of parents she suffers twice as much now. Our house is in mourning, literally… She has stopped smiling, laughing, she has tears in her eyes all the time. I ask you to write more often, she lives for you.’

Mila’s periods had stopped from worry, but her doctor told her not to be concerned. ‘In wartime women didn’t have them for years,’ she told Mila. Nevertheless she prescribed daily injections ‘for your nerves’, as well as a course of ‘magnetic therapy’ – evidently some kind of pseudo-scientific quackery of the kind beloved by the hypochondriac Soviets.

For a few months in 1965, Mila seems to have become preoccupied with the fear that her good-looking fiancé might be stolen from her. It even pervaded her sleep. Mila dreamt that she was at the Bolshoi with Valery and caught sight of Mervyn down in the stalls with another woman. She called and shouted, and was seized by an uncontrollable desire to throw herself over the balcony down to him.

The pain of separation had shaken loose all Mila’s deepest fears – of abandonment, most profoundly, but also lesser insecurities about her appearance. Mila felt acutely that she was no beauty. ‘This is the most painful question for me, and I never speak of it to anyone – but I am terribly sorry that I will not please your friends and acquaintances in this respect,’ Mila wrote. ‘I am so afraid of that, I worry about it. Though I do have one comfort – all my life I have had lots of friends, including pretty ones, and they all loved me and were attracted to me. I know that you like beautiful women, like any man. I love beauty too. I hope very much that you will see beyond this and see what others do not see. We will look at beautiful women together. I am not so insecure that I cannot acknowledge the beauty of other women if they are not bitches or fools. All my life I had very few photos taken of me – you know why, but if something comes out I’ll send it to you. I feel shy when you show my photographs to people.’

At work, Mila would show Mervyn’s letters around. She had a man, which in turn made her fully a woman. ‘I want someone to love me – I want people to know that I am not such an unfortunate.’ But the pain, and perhaps an obscure sense of shame and guilt at having lost her lover, kept her behind late at work so that she would not have to see other girls being met by their husbands and boyfriends.

In late September 1965, Mervyn saw a hopeful story in the Sun. Secret talks on swapping Brooke for the Krogers had got further than Mervyn had suspected. Wolfgang Vogel, a mysterious East German lawyer, represented the Soviet side. Vogel had a good track record – he had brokered the 1962 spy swap of the American U2 pilot Gary Powers for the veteran Soviet spy ‘Rudolph Abel’. Abel, whose real name was William Fischer, had, ironically enough, been the Krogers’ controller when they worked in the US in the 1940s, running messages for Moscow’s atomic spies in the Manhattan Project. Vogel was also rumoured to have arranged the ‘purchase’ of East Germans by their relatives in the West.

‘The British government has bitterly rejected all suggestions of a swap, now or in the future,’ said the Sun on 22 September 1965. ‘They consider Gerald Brooke, jailed in Moscow for subversion, is being held to ransom. But this reaction has not apparently deterred Herr Vogel… On Monday night his green and cream Opel was waved through Checkpoint Charlie without the usual close scrutiny of papers for a meeting with Mr Christopher Lush at the British HQ in West Berlin.’

Four days later Mervyn was on a train trundling eastwards through Germany. The heating in the carriage had been switched off, and he passed the guard towers and barbed wire around West Berlin at dawn, shivering cold. He stayed, as usual, in the cheapest hotel he could find, the Pension Aleron in Lietzenburgerstrasse. Mervyn telephoned Jiirgen Stange, Vogel’s West German lawyer contact, and made an appointment for the next day. He spent the rest of the day in East Berlin sightseeing. Wartime ruins were everywhere, and the place was tense and drab. Later in the afternoon he visited the Zoo and watched the monkeys staring at him gloomily from their cages.

Mervyn explained his case in detail to Stange, who promised to arrange a meeting with Vogel the next night. Their rendezvous was the Baronen Bar, a small and expensive place frequented by businessmen where Vogel often stopped for a drink before returning east from his regular trips. As Mervyn waited he noticed that the tall barman wore extravagant cufflinks, intended, Mervyn supposed, to inveigle the customers into giving him larger tips.

Vogel was round-faced, bespectacled and friendly. Mervyn’s German was poor, and Vogel had no English; Stange had explained that his knowledge of foreign languages was confined to Latin and Greek. But Vogel was upbeat, and made a lot of optimistic noises about improving relations. He suggested that maybe Mila and perhaps one other person could be exchanged for one of the Krogers, something that Mervyn thought highly unlikely. But he was heartened by the German lawyer’s enthusiastic tone.

As Vogel stood to leave, Mervyn sprang to his feet and offered to carry a small suitcase Vogel had brought with him into the bar. The case was impossibly heavy, and Mervyn could barely lift it. He staggered after Vogel and heaved the suitcase into his Opel, and waved as he drove off in an easterly direction. Mervyn never found out what was in the case, and never dared ask.

The next day Mervyn met Christopher Lush of the British Foreign Office at Western Allied Headquarters, and asked him to contact London for an official response to the idea of an exchange. Lush was dismissive. ‘We don’t want to become a channel for this sort of thing,’ he told my father. ‘We don’t want everyone coming here.’

Vogel never contacted Mervyn. It was another blind alley.

Soon after he returned from Berlin, Mervyn heaved his Oxford trunks into his battered Ford and drove north to his new academic quarters at Long Eaton, near Nottingham, doubtless sitting up straight at the wheel after Mila’s admonitions not to ‘slouch as though you are carrying buckets’.

Mervyn found Long Eaton a place of profound dreariness, a grimy industrial town which reminded him powerfully of the miseries of his childhood in South Wales. Nottingham University’s lecturers were accommodated in very much less style than he had been used to in Oxford. Mervyn did not like drinking in pubs, which left sitting at the laundromat watching the clothes whirl around as the only alternative local entertainment. After Moscow and Oxford, Nottingham was a fall from grace indeed, but at least he now had the time to devote to his campaign. Despite having an epileptic fit in the station cafeteria at King’s Cross – the first he had ever suffered – Mervyn resolved to stay optimistic.

‘From that day on, regardless of the news from Russia, I always made a point of going into the classroom with a cheery smile on my face,’ he told Mila. ‘I’m not in the least bit worried about the cancellation of my book.’ A photograph from that autumn shows Mervyn at his desk at the university, a tinny radio I remember him still using in the mid-1970s in front of him, books piled on sagging bookshelves behind. The room is small and poky, and he is earnestly reading a letter. He looks strangely childish and dislocated, among the unruly piles of his possessions, but quite content.

Mervyn’s mother, during one of his rare visits to Swansea, harangued him about giving up his self-destructive obsession with his Russian girl. ‘This morning my mother tiger showed her claws – leopards, to change the metaphor, don’t change their spots,’ wrote Mervyn as he sat in his Ford in the car park of Nottingham University sports club, where he took his daily swim. ‘She says I’m home so rarely and make her suffer so much – she said that the recent events in Russia nearly killed her. “And when I think of what’s happened to your career I am filled with horror,” she said. “Shut up,” I said, “or I’ll leave the house – the car’s just outside,” so she went quiet.’

Mervyn considered other options. One was for Mila to apply to visit another socialist country, meet him there, and somehow escape. The problem was that Mila would have to get a reference from her employers to travel, even to a friendly state, and no one at the library would dare risk giving her such an endorsement. She could also arrange a fictitious marriage to an African student, who could then take her abroad – but that idea, as well as being distasteful, was impractical since it required KGB permission, and would cast a shadow on their campaign if it failed.

He thought of bribery. A new car for a bent embassy official, perhaps? But again, with the case so politicized it was unworkable. He even explored forgery, spending days leafing through his heavily stamped passport studying the details, collecting printing sets and experimenting with producing false Soviet official stamps. Two of Mervyn’s friends, middle-aged ladies of the utmost probity, agreed to give him their passports. One applied for one even though she had no intention of going abroad, the other claimed to have lost hers. But after a few days the dangers of forgery began to dampen Mervyn’s enthusiasm. There was the problem of getting a one-way ticket out of Moscow, and Mila would have to risk years of imprisonment if passport control discovered that the exit visa Mervyn intended to manufacture was forged. He abandoned the idea.

In a newspaper article he found a reference to the story of a Russian who had decided to walk to China before the war, but had (seriously) misjudged the direction and ended up in Afghanistan. Mervyn began looking at maps of the southern USSR; perhaps there were areas where there was no border guard? In December 1965 he read of another young Russian, Vladimir Kirsanov, who had walked over the Soviet border into Finland. Could Mila do the same? Mervyn tracked Kirsanov down and went to see him in Frankfurt am Main in March 1966. But after listening to Kirsanov’s story for a few minutes Meryvn realized it was hopeless. Kirsanov was young and fit, and an experienced hiker and climber. Mila, with her disabled hip, could never hope to trudge through bogs and climb over barbed wire fences. Again, the idea was abandoned.

Two years had passed, and the separation gnawed. Nottingham was depressing Mervyn even more than he’d feared. By the summer of 1966 he decided that he had to be nearer to London in order to continue his campaign. He took a post at Battersea Polytechnic, which had just received a charter as the University of Surrey, and was then housed in a disused warehouse in Clapham. He bought a small flat in Pimlico, turning down other job offers because the Battersea job gave him a lot of free time to harass the Soviet embassy, the Foreign Office and Fleet Street. He never had anything other than contempt for the University of Surrey, its students and its academic standards, and he would criticize the institution where he ultimately spent most of his career with a kind of bitter self-loathing.

Mila, too, was sliding into morbid depression. She was losing weight, her ribs standing out on her chest ‘like a tubercular babushka’, and grey hairs appeared on her head. ‘Without you my life has stopped, hardened to stone – this is not just a first impression but a totally serious conclusion, irreversible,’ Mila wrote. ‘Why don’t we just build a hut for ourselves at the end of the world far from all the evil and cruelty and hatred? I could never be bored if you were there. Oh God, oh God, oh God, surely our sufferings aren’t in vain? I see what a short and fleeting thing life is, and how stupid, how perverse it is to lose these days.’ Mila paraphrased Konstantin Simonov’s classic wartime poem, ‘Wait’, which had so poignantly caught the fate of millions of Soviet women, condemned to wait for years with no news of their loved ones. ‘Wait for me, but only wait very hard, wait until the snows have gone, wait until everyone else has stopped waiting, wait…’

During a chance conversation with a friend in London, Mervyn learned that it might be possible to visit the Soviet Baltic states for a one-day trip without a visa. On further investigation at the Finnish tourism bureau on the Haymarket he was told that a Helsinki tourist agency called Haleva ran one-day tours to Tallinn, Estonia, and short trips to Leningrad, which also did not require a visa. They were meant for Finns, the girl at the counter told him, but she didn’t think there would be any problem if an Englishman were to buy a ticket. Estonia was part of the Soviet Union, and Mila would be able to travel there without difficulty.

Mervyn located an 1892 map of Revel (modern Tallinn) at the British Library and a pre-war German guidebook. He picked the town’s highest spire, St Olaf’s church, Oleviste Kirik, because it was the obvious place to meet, and not too far from the docks. In a series of letters in early August he dropped hints to Mila – did she plan on taking a holiday in the Baltic? Tallinn was very nice, he’d heard. Maybe Mervyn would have to be in Scandinavia on the 26th or 29th. Had Mila heard of St Olaf’s church? Mila took the hint and indicated that she would be there.

The plan was risky. Before Mervyn set off to Finland on 22 August, he left a letter to be delivered to the Foreign Office in case he did not return.

‘At the end of the month I am going to make one or two attempts to return to the USSR, in order to see my fiancée,’ he wrote. ‘I shall almost certainly try to go over to Tallinn. There is some chance that I may end up in a Soviet prison… I wish to make it clear that if I am seized by the Soviets I do not wish to have any assistance from any FO employees in the USSR, and I must tell you categorically that none of your people are to make any attempt to contact my fiancée. I hope that statement leaves no uncertainties in your mind… I regret having had any dealing with your office, and want no more.’

He posted the letter to a friend, to be sent to the Foreign Office if he didn’t return by mid-September.

Mervyn took a cheap flight to Copenhagen, then a night ferry to Stockholm and another to Helsinki. The next morning, a Thursday, he walked to the Kaleva Travel Agency office and booked a ticket to Tallinn for Saturday. He spent the rest of the day walking around Helsinki, sitting on old Russian cannon at the fort and writing to Mila, asking her to send her replies poste restante to Helsinki.

‘I just can’t find the words to describe the local beauty,’ he wrote. ‘The open sea with great bays and islands, smiling in the sun, and lovely white yachts sailing in the calm sea.’

On Friday he went back to the travel agency, and was given his small pink ticket without fuss, despite his not being Finnish. Mervyn and his fellow passengers arrived at the southern harbour the next morning at nine and boarded the SS Vanemuine. It sailed on time an hour later.

The day was sunny and blustery, perfect Scandinavian weather. Soon after they set sail a dour-looking Russian in a dark suit went around collecting passports in a box. As Mervyn gave his in he got a quizzical look from the plainclothes border guard. The crossing took two hours, and Mervyn stood on the open part of the bridge, staring across Soviet waters as the spires of Tallinn came into view. As the ship docked, the Russian re-emerged with his box and began calling out the names of the passengers to return their passports. Mervyn waited, a knot of anxiety in his stomach. But his name was called, the last on the list, and the Russian handed him back his passport with a blank look.

As he walked down the gangplank, Mervyn heard a woman’s voice, not Mila’s, call his name. It was Nadia, Mila’s niece, and she was beaming, and incredulous. She and Mila had been expecting Mervyn the next day, and she’d only come to the docks for a practice run. Mila was waiting at the Oleviste Kirik. Nadia had checked for goons, and seen none.

They walked past the customs house and bastion into the Old Town. As they approached the church, Mervyn saw a woman in a kerchief sitting on a bench, and called out. To his embarrassment, it wasn’t Mila. ‘Mila’s over there,’ said Nadia, pointing to a small, familiar figure by the entrance to the church. They embraced.

‘I cannot describe my emotions at that moment,’ Mervyn wrote to Mila later. Even after two years of separation, he felt an immediate closeness, ‘the same kind eyes, sympathy, common concerns’.

For a few hours in Tallinn, my parents lived in the strange exhilaration of stolen time. They were not meant to be there; the rulers of the ordinary world had ordained, in their peremptory way, that they should be apart. Yet there they were, wandering arm in arm around the Old Town, talking about plans for the future as Nadia followed them at a distance, looking out for the KGB. A chink in the wall had let Mervyn through, and that small victory was to give them the hope that the hours could turn into a lifetime. I do not think that they could have borne what were to be six years of separation without those moments in Tallinn when they proved to each other that they were truly still flesh and blood, not just words on paper, and that the battle could be won.

They dropped in on a girlfriend of Mila’s for tea, and sat on park benches in the watery northern sun. As they wandered back towards the port, they heard the ship’s horn blare. Mervyn looked at his watch – it was much later than he had thought.

They broke into a run, Mila limping as fast as she could. The ship was just casting off, but the gangplank was still down, and there were a couple of seconds for a brief hug before Mervyn ran on board. As the ship pulled away he watched Nadia and Mila on the quayside, waving, her small figure fading away as the ship pulled into the fairway. Mervyn was engulfed in grief, and hope.

The Lomamatka Tourist Bureau in Helsinki also offered a trip to Leningrad – two nights at sea, one in Leningrad, staying aboard ship. Again, no Soviet visa was required. On the evening of 4 September Mervyn boarded the SS Kastelholm, a small and venerable steamer, and set off for Leningrad. He admired the old reciprocating steam engine. A genial Finn collected the passports, and Mervyn slept more easily in the knowledge that there were no Soviet officials aboard.

The next morning as he went on deck he found that they were already steaming up the Neva towards Leningrad docks. Mervyn went ashore with the other passengers, and saw Mila waiting for him by a parked truck. They did not embrace, in order not to attract attention, and walked to the city centre. Mila was alone, this time, without Nadia to keep watch. They spent the day wandering the city, going to the Russian Museum, where for a few alarming minutes they lost each other in different halls.

Mila had booked a room in a student hostel, and managed to smuggle Mervyn in for a few hours in the early evening with the connivance of her fellow students. They were disturbed by a banging on the door, but it was a false alarm. It was someone who had mixed up the rooms, not the KGB coming to haul Mervyn away to jail. In the evening, after a greasy duck meal in a restaurant, Mervyn had to return to spend the night on the ship.

The next day was much the same – with no cosy place to stay and talk, they just wandered the squares and streets, holding on to each other. This time they returned to the docks in plenty of time. They said a quick goodbye among the parked lorries, and Mervyn walked to the ship alone. The parting was less sad than at Tallinn, but still the brief meeting had made the emptiness which followed all the sharper.

‘So, I’m on my way back to Helsinki, over the darkening Baltic waters,’ Mervyn wrote on the ship as he sailed westwards down the Neva. ‘I have spent the happiest two days ever during our two years of separation. It was wonderful, mentally and physically. I hope I did not say anything hurtful while we were together. I looked back as I was getting on board, and I saw your slight figure and legs disappearing. I felt very, very sad. I still love you and we will continue our struggle for happiness. Now I have the impression that everything will move quickly. You’ll see.’

From Stockholm on 8 September he wrote, ‘After our meetings in these northern towns my life has again begun to acquire a meaning… I think that things will never again be as bad as they were.’ Mila avoided mentioning the meetings directly in her letters. She had a bad scare when she read that a Norwegian ferry had sunk in the Skagerrak, but looked at an atlas and convinced herself that Mervyn could not have been on it.

My father decided to return to his old idea of applying for a Soviet visa in another country, in the hope that one would be issued in error. On 12 December 1966 he took a night ferry from Southend to Ostend, then a train to Brussels. On the first night he stayed in a cheap but clean hotel near the Gare du Nord, which turned out to be a busy brothel. A fat African guest in the next room kept him awake with his snoring. Mervyn found an agency which did tours to Moscow – Belgatourist on the rue des Paroissiens – and booked a five-day trip. Mervyn filled out the application using a different spelling of his surname to the usual, taking advantage of the fact that ‘Matthews’ can be transliterated at least a dozen different ways in Cyrillic. As he had hoped, the passport and visa came back a day later; his name had gone unnoticed when the Soviet embassy checked it against the blacklists.

Two days later he was in Moscow, once again staying at the National Hotel. It was strange to be back, and deeply worrying to be around so many goons who were busy watching the foreigners at the hotel. Because my father hadn’t been sure that the plan would work, he hadn’t warned Mila. He called her the evening he arrived from a public phone booth on Mokhovaya Street. She was amazed to hear he was in Moscow. Because he would surely be under routine surveillance in any case, he decided not to use any subterfuge. The next morning Mila came running up Mokhovaya to greet him as he waited outside the National Hotel. They went back to Mila’s room off the Arbat, which was unchanged. Then they telephoned the Palace of Weddings, and were told that Efremova, the director, would be in on Monday. The next day was Christmas, which Mila and Mervyn spent locked in Mila’s room. In the afternoon they walked to the Central Telegraph to send Mervyn’s mother a seasonal telegram.

On Monday they went again to see Efremova at the Palace of Weddings, who was plainly terrified to see Mervyn without official notification. She mumbled something about the ‘normal procedures’, and showed them out. But at least she had received them. Mervyn phoned the embassy, and the duty vice consul seemed surprisingly eager to help when the embassy opened for business the next day.

The next morning, however, as he stepped out of the National Hotel, Mervyn felt silent alarm bells ringing like a discordant note in a horror film – the goons were out in force, and keeping him under close surveillance. It was now just a question of time. That afternoon there was a message for him at the desk to contact Intourist at once. At the Intourist office he was told that his visa was being annulled and he had to leave immediately. Mila was distraught when she heard the news. ‘But Mervusya, we can’t do anything now,’ she sobbed.

At four that afternoon Mervyn was summoned to the gloomy OVIR office once again. The deputy head was waiting, and said just one sentence, twice: ‘You must leave Russia as soon as possible, today or tomorrow, on the first available plane.’

There was no option but to go. If the KGB turned nasty Mervyn could very well end up in jail along with Brooke, another useful bargaining chip to be weighed against the Krogers. For the third time in five months, Mila saw him off from Soviet soil – except this time it must truly have seemed like the last. To be caught again in Russia would mean prison for sure.

There was some press coverage of Mervyn’s second expulsion. The Foreign Office had received an official note of protest at Mervyn’s visit from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, but neither Mervyn nor the press knew it at the time. Des Zwar contacted Mervyn, asking for his cooperation on a big piece for the People on how to enter Russia illegally, which Mervyn emphatically turned down.

The press coverage did have one unexpected result. Mervyn got a phone call from Derek Deason, who had himself been expelled from the Soviet Union in October 1964, and had also left a fiancée behind. Mervyn suggested they meet at a pub near Victoria Station, the Albert – a dingy place near my school where, thirty years later, I was often to be found drinking illicitly with fellow sixth-formers. Derek was Mervyn’s age, and worked as a scaleman – a checker of scales – at the Dagenham Ford motor works. He had a broad, honest face and Mervyn immediately took to him. While on holiday on the Black Sea coast in the summer of 1964 Derek had met Eleonora Ginzburg, a Russian-Jewish English-language teacher from Moscow. They had fallen in love, and he had proposed to her. The marriage date was set for October. Derek arrived in Moscow with some days to spare, and because Eleonora lived with her sister in a cramped flat he decided to go to Sochi for a few days before the wedding. In Sochi he fell in with some Russians who organized a stag night for him. Derek, unused to vodka, got drunk and obstreperous, and the police were called. They bundled him on a plane to Moscow, and then he was put on another to London without having a chance to call Eleonora. The first she heard from him was when he called, in tears, from London. Derek had applied for an entry visa nine times since, and been refused.

Mervyn found Derek a spirited and intelligent companion in arms, and they met regularly in the Albert and another quiet pub called the Audley to plan their campaign. Unlike Mervyn, Derek had no history of confrontation with the Soviet authorities, and he had more to lose by associating with Mervyn than vice versa. Still, for both of them, having at least one ally was a great comfort. They exchanged Mila and Eleonora’s addresses so the two could meet in Moscow.

Return to the Soviet Union was now too risky; even Mervyn realized that he could not push his luck any further. But the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin was due for a state visit to London, and would be a perfect target for Mervyn’s by now well-practised lobbying. Mervyn decided to hand him a letter, in time-honoured tradition. He wrote to the Queen, who was to receive Kosygin, beforehand to ask her to raise the matter, but received only a formal reply saying that his letter had been noted by Her Majesty. He contacted the Special Branch to try and arrange a time and place to hand Kosygin his letter without causing embarrassment. The officer he saw was noncommittal, and Mervyn found, to his grim amusement more than anything else, that he was being followed by the Special Branch on the streets of London. He went to Downing Street and waited opposite Number 10, but KGB goons guarding Kosygin warned him to stay away. At the Houses of Parliament he joined a crowd and told a plain-clothes police inspector that he was planning to hand over a letter.

‘You can’t do that,’ the policeman told him.

‘But I’m not breaking any law.’

‘If you step out from the crowd,’ said the inspector, shattering Mervyn’s lifelong trust in the British police, ‘we’ll take you to the station and pin something on you.’

The third and last attempt to get to Kosygin was at the Victoria &Albert Museum, where he and Harold Wilson were visiting an exhibition devoted to Anglo-Soviet cooperation. Again, he could get nowhere near Kosygin. But as the Soviet Premier was driven away Wilson was left standing for a few moments at the curb, waiting for his own car to pull up. Mervyn pushed forward, and said, ‘What about our fiancées, Mr Wilson?’ Wilson turned, a flash of recognition in his eyes.

‘I know you!’ said the Prime Minister, and got into his car. The letter stayed in Mervyn’s pocket, undelivered.

Mervyn came up with a new idea. Perhaps he could get his hands on something valuable to the Soviets which he could barter for Mila’s freedom? Perhaps some undiscovered manuscripts by Vladimir Lenin – known in the trade as Leniniana of the sort Mila’s colleagues at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism had spent much of their working lives translating and acquiring? The Russians had an insatiable appetite for Lenin’s writings from the periods he’d spent in western Europe from 1907 to 1917, fomenting revolution and bickering peevishly with his fellow Communists. Maybe, for once in Mila’s life, dead papers could become a life-giving thing.

Mervyn, his imagination fired, rushed to the British Library to get some samples of Lenin’s handwriting. He ordered up Lenin’s application for a reader’s ticket, in the name of ‘Jacob Richter’, and studied the formation of the Latin letters, taking notes for future reference in case he ever got hold of any Leniniana which might be for sale. As he returned the papers to the Library desk he reflected that he could be holding the keys to Mila’s freedom in his hands.

Mervyn trawled his émigré contacts for possible undiscovered archives. In Paris he tracked down Grigory Aleksinsky, who had been a socialist deputy for St Petersburg in the Second Duma of spring 1907. He had known Lenin and corresponded with the Russian Marxist economist Georgy Plekhanov. Aleksinsky’s son, also Grigory, or Grégoire, was affable enough, in his mid-forties, and worked as some kind of plain-clothes functionary of the French police or security services. Mervyn took him out to dinner.

‘First we drank an aperitif together,’ Mervyn wrote to Mila, without telling her the real purpose of the meeting. ‘Then we went to have a meal at a “cheap” restaurant, (but the bill for the two of us was nearly three poundsl] That was with wine, which made my head spin. After that he took me to his home, where his wife was waiting with tea and gateaux. Their apartment was luxurious, and they had three magnificent samovars. There was lively conversation but my host kept switching from Russian to French in each sentence, so in the end I did not know which language I was supposed to be speaking!’

Aleksinsky senior was produced, a frail old man who mumbled his greetings. They showed Mervyn the archive, in boxes, but didn’t allow him to open any. The Soviets had shown considerable interest, but the old man was passionately anti-Soviet, and refused to sell. But to Mervyn, they might be prepared to sell the archive for just 50,000 francs – 3,700 pounds, or about a year and a half of Mervyn’s salary.

Despite the huge cost, Mervyn was excited. He wrote to Mila’s old boss at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov, without mentioning the reason for his interest in Leniniana.

‘I know that Soviet historians make great efforts to seek out manuscripts of Lenin in western Europe and return them to the homeland of the Great Leader of the Great October Revolution,’ wrote Mervyn in his best Marxistese. ‘I have recently discovered that the valuable archives of Grigory A. Aleksinsky, a member of the State Duma and close acquaintance of Lenin, are in Paris. At the present time Mr Aleksinsky’s son, whom I know well, is giving me the opportunity to buy his father’s archives. I personally consider that Moscow is the proper place for Lenin’s documents, and I would like to assist in passing them to Soviet historians.’

The Soviets were enthusiastic. Pospelov’s successor, Pyotr Fedoseyev, asked for more information. It was a ray of hope.

Mila took a holiday trip to Mikhailovskoye, Pushkin’s estate, and wandered through it looking admiringly at the English furniture. The air was cold and snowy, and she bought Antonovka apples by Pushkin’s grave in Sviatogorsk. She walked alone around the estate’s famous park. ‘Need I say how passionately I wanted to have you near?’ she wrote. ‘I asked the old trees, the forest and the birds and the air to grant this wish, then I began talking out loud with you, very, very gently I recited Pushkin’s poems. Mervyn, my dear, so much love and tenderness has accumulated within me, how can I give it to you? I love you more and more every day.’

On her return to Moscow, she spoke to Mervyn at the Central Telegraph. Not wanting to raise false hope, he said nothing of his plans. Still, she must have felt some optimism in his voice; walking home from her ‘phone call of life’ Mila sang, ‘Sweetheart, remember when days are forlorn; It is always darkest before the dawn.’

‘We are two pendulums swinging at the same rhythm,’ she wrote that night. ‘I kiss the dear end of your pendulum.’ She drew two stick figures with giant hearts on the letter.

Mervyn began writing to friends and acquaintances for money. Isaiah Berlin replied that he knew no one in Oxford ‘with a large bank account and a generous heart’. Rauf Khahil, an old Oxford friend whose family owned so much of Egypt that Raufwould claim that he ‘couldn’t bear to think about it’, had inconveniently dropped dead at his lectern a few years before while lecturing in Africa. Another friend, Priscilla Johnson at Harvard, was persuaded to ask Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the West in 1967, to part with some of her handsome book royalties in the cause of Mila’s liberation, but to no avail. Lord Thompson of Fleet, the press baron, with whom Mervyn had managed to wangle a two-minute meeting, gave no money, but offered good advice. Ask the sellers to give you an option, Thompson said as he gave Mervyn a lift in his big grey Rolls-Royce, ‘it won’t cost much and it’ll leave your hands free’.

But without money, Mervyn’s plan could get nowhere. Worse, when Mervyn went to the Maurice Thorez Institute of Marxism in Paris to see their Lenin expert, M. Lejeune, he firmly pronounced the notes in the Aleksinsky archive not to be Lenin’s writing.

Autumn fell in London, and the great paper chase seemed to be fizzling out. Mervyn’s meetings with Derek grew more despondent. The Finns had stopped their trips to the Baltics, and visits to Russia were out of the question. The Lenin papers had proved a flop, and his bridges were well and truly burned with the KGB. He had no money, and the end of the five years that my father had given himself to get Mila out of the Soviet Union loomed. The sharp desperation of their early love letters had worn down to a dull ache; Mervyn’s optimism became more and more forced. Truly, it seemed as though the end of the affair was near.

There was another lead – and though my father refused to admit it to himself, it was a last-ditch effort. A friend put him in touch with Pavel Ivanovich Veselov, a Stockholm-based Russian émigré who called himself a ‘juridical consultant’. He specialized in getting people out of the Soviet Union and had had eleven successes so far. His methods were unspectacularcareful documentation, campaigns in the Swedish press, string-pulling, much the same as Mervyn was doing already. It was a faint hope, but Mervyn had few other options.

Veselov wrote from Stockholm. ‘I am a hunter rather than a fighter, a strangler rather than a boxer,’ he told his prospective client. Mervyn was impressed. He was also poor. At the end of term, he took a boat from Tilbury to Stockholm. The smorgasbord dinner cost thirty shillings, and Mervyn went hungry rather than pay the money. His third-class cabin had four berths in it and was noisy and cramped. He continued to write to Mila, but through his friend Jean-Michel in Brussels in order to conceal his whereabouts from the KGB censors. In Stockholm he checked into the Salvation Army Hotel. Mervyn’s great crusade was becoming a distinctly threadbare affair.

Veselov turned out to be a dishevelled fifty-year-old with high Slavic cheekbones who lived in a tiny apartment on a nondescript street in a working-class area of the city. He introduced his young Swedish wife, who spoke no Russian, and then, with more interest, his black cat, Misha. They sat down to talk in the apartment’s single room, dusty and stuffed with furniture, Russian-style.

He described his past triumphs with great animation to Mervyn; one of his greatest successes had actually been released from a prison camp. Producing a large roll of what looked like wallpaper, Veselov walked to the end of the room and dramatically unrolled it. The wallpaper was covered with press cuttings from one of his cases. Mervyn admired his skills, both at collage and at getting people out of Russia.

Veselov spoke little of himself, but did tell Mervyn that he was an Old Believer, a schismatic sect of Russian Orthodoxy renowned for its traditionalism, which had been persecuted in Russia for centuries. He also said that he had served as a colonel in Finnish Intelligence in the war. Mervyn suspected that Veselov had deserted from the Red Army during the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-40. He had a heavy Volga accent, smoked strong cigarettes, liked company and was passionate about honesty. If the press ever heard that he had lied, Veselov said, they’d never accept another story from him again. He was also an enthusiastic amateur novelist, and was working on an epic about ancient Rome. His heroine was a lusty Roman courtesan, who resembled, Mervyn thought, a Volga whore. Late in the evening, Veselov treated Mervyn to a lengthy and passionate reading of his manuscript. Every so often its creator would pause and say, ‘Oi, Mervyn! What a girl, what a girl!’ When Mervyn finally plucked up the courage to cut him off and go home, in the early hours of the morning, Veselov seemed deeply offended. ‘Oh, that’s enough is it?’ he sniffed.

In July, after a long period of silence, the spirit, or rather the news that Alexei Kosygin was due in Stockholm on an official visit, moved Veselov to contact Mervyn. There was press interest, and Mervyn should try once again to get to the Soviet Premier and give him a letter. Mervyn was sceptical. One more letter, after all the others which had no doubt gone unread, would probably do no good. But the publicity might be helpful.

Expressen, the Swedish daily, was delighted when Mervyn called. A love interest was just what was needed to pep up the rather dour story of Kosygin’s visit. The paper agreed to pay some of Mervyn’s travel costs. My father’s expenditure on constant travel was by this point so far ahead of his income that he was considering selling the Pimlico flat and getting something cheaper in the suburbs.

Mervyn arrived in Stockholm on the eve of Kosygin’s visit, and put up in the Apolonia Hotel. The next morning he was met at the hotel by an Expressen car, a journalist and two photographers, armed with a detailed plan of Kosygin’s itinerary. The plan was to hand Kosygin a letter as he drove to the Haga Palace, the government residence. As he sat in the park he had time to write a letter to Mila.

‘As you probably guessed I’ve come to Stockholm to see Alexei Nikolayevich [Kosygin] and if possible give him a letter… Just now I’m sitting in the quiet park surrounding the government residence. He should be here in an hour. The residence is very large, with a beautiful lake in front. There’s a police boat on it at the moment. A typical corner of Scandinavia, rather sad. I’m glad they don’t charge you for sitting on the benches, but I am sure that the day will come when they fit coin boxes.’

In the event, the massive police guard kept Mervyn and the Expressen team far away from Kosygin’s speeding car. The Expressen men left immediately afterwards, and Mervyn wandered around uselessly in Kosygin’s wake, and in the late afternoon decided to ask the Swedish police if they could help him deliver his letter to Kosygin and his daughter, but he was arrested and put in a cell till the evening. He was finally released without explanation, and made his way back to Veselov’s, tired and indignant. Veselov was filled with joyous outrage.

‘Terrible! And this is a so-called civilized country! But it’s just what we needed. We might be able to win the case through this! Come on, we’ve got to get down to the Expresser: office, perhaps they can still get something into tomorrow’s edition.’ Veselov’s jaw was set hard, spoiling for a fight. ‘The police officer will have to be disciplined, and we’ll write to the Interior Minister about it.’

The next day the story of Mervyn’s arrest appeared in Expressen, and also in the Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter, with a photo of a haggard Mervyn talking on the phone. Mervyn was quoted somewhere as saying that Sweden was like a police state, which evoked a solitary letter from an indignant Swedish reader telling Mervyn that he should have more respect for the laws in a foreign country.

But all in all he had got nowhere, and ended up dropping his two letters into a postbox. There had been about a dozen small pieces in the British press, and a two-page spread in the German Bild, but in truth Mervyn realized that after four years he was still no closer to getting Mila out.

In December 1968, as Derek and Mervyn emerged from the Audley pub in Mayfair, they spotted a Soviet diplomatic car, registration SUI, parked outside the Mission of the United Arab Emirates. They got chatting to the chauffeur, who told them the Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Smirnovsky and his wife were due to come out shortly. Mervyn and Derek waited on the pavement till they emerged, and Mervyn accosted them. They both recognized Mervyn immediately, and Smirnovsky’s wife looked alarmed.

‘Mr Smirnovsky, why cannot we get married?’ Mervyn demanded.

‘We are well aware of the case,’ said Smirnovsky, flustered, as he pushed past Mervyn into his waiting car. ‘You must not create difficulties.’

Derek told the Evening Post that the encounter was ‘one of the most heartening things that has happened for a very long time. At least it proved that the Russians are well aware of our continuing fight to get married.’

Mervyn kept busy. One project, inspired by the Smirnovsky incident, was to write to all 110 heads of diplomatic missions in London pleading his case. He bought a second-hand manual rotoprinter to produce leaflets and circulars which he planned to distribute around London, but the machine just created mess in his tiny bedroom, covering his bed sheets in printer’s ink. In early April Mervyn designed a leaflet featuring juxtaposed pictures of Mila, Eleonora and Mrs Smirnovsky with the caption ‘Three Soviet Women’, with a brief summary of the story on the back. He had them printed professionally, despite the cost. Mervyn and Derek were threatened with arrest as they stuck the leaflets under windscreens of diplomatic cars in Kensington Palace Gardens.

Mila, in Moscow, was also beginning to feel her energy and optimism fade. She wrote a despondent letter in late December. On New Year’s Day, 1969, Mervyn replied in an indignant tone: ‘The situation may seem hopeless to you, if you really think so you should either say so outright or believe in me even more… In the course of the last nine months of 1968 about fifty articles have appeared in the newspapers of several countries on my attempts to sort things out. Apart from that please don’t criticize what you don’t understand, the point is that you have hardly any facts by which to judge my activities. And remember that today nothing could hurt me more than assertions that I am trying in vain. Today I am busy with our affairs, but I also started to prepare for term.’

On 2 January, in better spirits, Mila sent a telegram: ‘Best New Year greetings to my dear Celt, I love him faithfully, believe, and await our happiness, longing for you, kisses, Mila.’

Mervyn decided that he could risk writing a new book about Soviet society, since Mila was apparently safe and had suffered no further reprisals since her sacking from the Institute four years before. The project might even redeem the wreck of Mervyn’s academic career. At the very least, the prospect of researching another book energized him, and he began looking for funds. He took short holidays in Morocco, Turkey and the Balkans.

For good measure, Mervyn and Derek were also lobbying for a motion of support in the House of Commons; a Private Member’s Bill was tabled, calling on the House to ‘Urge the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to take up again the cases of Derek Deason and Mervyn Matthews, both of whom wish to marry girls who cannot get a visa to leave the Soviet Union, both on humanitarian grounds and in order to remove what is becoming an increasing obstacle in the way of better Anglo-Soviet relations.’

The book idea soon paid off. Colombia University in New York offered my father a three-month visiting fellowship. Mervyn was overjoyed. It would be a welcome change from the disappointments of London, and because Manhattan was home to the United Nations, it offered a whole new field for campaigning.