‘I can’t go, Alex, you know I can’t. There’s Yuri…’

‘I’m afraid you must. I cannot always be with you and I shan’t have a moment’s peace knowing you are here alone. I promise I will continue to search for Yuri. The minute I know anything I will let you know and find a way of bringing him to you.’

‘You mean you aren’t coming too?’ She couldn’t believe that he would calmly send her away.

‘I can’t. There is work for me to do here.’

‘What work? Are you a spy?’

He smiled a little grimly. ‘Don’t ask, Lidushka, please. I’ll arrange for someone I trust to escort you safely home.’

‘But London has been all but destroyed by German bombs, it says so in the papers. I wouldn’t be any safer there.’

‘The papers exaggerate. Besides, London isn’t Upstone. You should be safe enough there. As soon as I’m free to come, I’ll follow.’

She wept and wept, which wrung his heart, but he would not give in. He almost dragged her, silent and numb with misery, to the British Embassy, an imposing building on the bank of the river overlooking the Kremlin, where he gave her into the care of Lieutenant Robert Conway, a naval attaché who was being recalled. Robert’s father, Henry, had been a great friend of Sir Edward’s and Lydia had met him once or twice in happier times. Tall, fair-haired and unfailingly cheerful, he was going home to active service.

Once the arrangements had been made, Robert left them alone to say goodbye. They stood facing each other, unable to put into words what the parting meant to them. Alex opened his arms and she flung herself into them. ‘Alex, Alex, I can’t bear it. Let me stay.’

He hugged her and kissed her. ‘No, sweetheart, I can’t. It is for your own good. I will come back to you, you see, and I might even have Yuri with me.’

Empty words, she knew, but she took comfort from them. The alternative, that she would never see him or her son again, just didn’t bear thinking about. Gently he put her from him and left the room without looking back.


Lydia was so steeped in misery on that journey home, she remembered it as a series of unconnected images. Robert was always cheerful and kind, taking her elbow to guide her, encouraging her to eat when she thought food would choke her, talking to her gently when she needed conversation, remaining silent when she did not want to talk.

They travelled north to Murmansk where a Royal Navy ship was waiting to take on British citizens who wanted to leave: engineers and businessmen, families who had been resident in Russia for many years, some who had arrived after 1917, wanting to help build a perfect state. It hadn’t happened and now their loyalties to the country of their birth had been revived.

The great distances between places in Russia made journeys tediously long, but every mile they travelled had been taking her a mile further from Alex, and as the train sped between Moscow and Novgorod, she wished it would slow down, or better still, stop and take her back. Novgorod was an ancient city whose cathedrals, churches and monasteries seemed to have escaped the Bolshevik destruction, but whether that was an illusion she did not know. They didn’t stop long enough to find out.

One night there in a very indifferent hotel, and they were on their way again. Forests of oak, ash, birch and conifers hemmed them in and blotted out the landscape as they travelled north. Lydia found her eyelids growing heavy and succumbed to sleep, her head on Robert’s shoulder. She stirred when they slowed down at Petrozavodsk where Robert left her to buy food and drink for them at the station. She ate it with little appetite.

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.