Back to the story of my great aunt Margery. Let’s return to where I began, which is to say in the middle. It is 1932. Margery is living with her five-year-old, Robert, aka Kompro (short for Communist Proletariat) and his Russian father, Pyotr (Peter to family back home in England) in a room by Lake Chalkar, forty remote miles south-east of Uralsk on the steppes in the northwestern corner of what has just become the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Peter has found work keeping the books for a collective that smokes and salts the lake’s abundant fish. Margery is attending to her Khirghiz neighbors. Khirghiz is what she and her Russian comrades call the nomadic peoples who have owned and roamed the steppe from time immemorial and are now in the way. Stalin wants them “sedentarized” and converted to communism. Margery is doing her bit. We do not know what she would say if told that one and half million will starve to death in the process. What follows are letters Margery writes her mother, whom she calls Mith, in 1932. The last item hints at a problem that runs in Peter’s family. It will loom large in the years ahead and may explain Peter’s extended stay in Uralsk. Wife and Home, in case you missed the first episode, is the English magazine for young upper-middle class mums to which Mith has subscribed her daughter, and which arrives, rather uniquely, like clockwork.
11 January 1932
No letter for some time from you. The posts here are awful. I hope you hear from me now and then. I am very busy with my sick people and my health work, painting posters of Khirghiz mothers and children and getting someone to write the words “Don’t swaddle me, I want to grow”, “Bathe me and wash my shirt”, “Fresh air gives health”.
The pictures I take from the lovely children in Wife and Home and put in oval eyes and straight black hair and they turn into little Khirghiz quite successfully. They are so like Chinese, the women and children in pants tied at the ankle, then a high waist print dress, then a long sleeveless coat sewn with money and gold braid, and money hanging from their plait of hair behind…
January 31, 1932
Last news from you was Wife and Home for November…
I am so interested in my work. The Khirghiz schoolmaster is my great friend and a great enthusiast. He asks for health placards for his school and I told him about vitamins and how we must teach the Khirghiz to eat vegetables and get them interested and obtain seeds for the spring for his schoolchildren to plant.
I am busy making pictures of Lenin and Stalin, and health placards for the Khirghiz who have cleaned and whitewashed their houses. The children will so love the pictures that they will give their mothers no peace until they have whitewashed. [The Khirghiz] do not understand the value of light. They formerly lived in felt tents and ate nothing but quantities of meat, keeping herds and pitching their tents wherever good pasture and water was handy.
The days are so short, by the time you have had breakfast (with lamplight) and tidied and washed up and done lamps in the intervals of seeing patients, Peter comes in for dinner with Robert and we hustle the guests out as tenderly as possible and lock the porch door for a quarter of an hour while we have dinner which is ready cooked in the stove still hot from the morning. In the evening, the floor to wash and ice to bring in and fuel, and after dark we light the stove to warm up our room and reheat our soup and second dish.
Peter is working in the evenings trying to get his yearly accounts ready. This is not allowed. He is supposed to work 7 1/2 hours only but whilst in the office everyone comes to him to verify and help them do their accounts.
The fishermen bring in loads of fish which have to be weighed and sorted and priced, and cartons arrive from Uralsk with stores for the cooperative. From here go loads of fish packed in basket crates or fibre sacks or boxes each with different weights. The fishermen are paid by the poud1. What with the two languages there are many misunderstandings and all come to Peter to smooth them out. Result: work at night while there is peace and quiet. They promised him a helper. We are expecting his arrival any time from Uralsk, then Peter will have some spare time.
He has bought a gun and is so delighted with it. In the spring there are masses of wild duck, wild geese and wild swans on the lake and you can eat them or give them in and receive materials etc. in exchange.
My [sewing] machine is working beautifully just now. One Khirghiz woman is very clever with it and sows for the whole district on it! We allow her this privilege, and her only, and she sews for everyone, otherwise various people would soon spoil it thinking they knew how.
We are having a very mild winter and are enjoying it. Robert plays out of doors the whole day long until dark only appearing for half an hour at dinnertime. In the evening he does a hasty lesson in Khirghiz and helps light the stove. He has gained one and a half pounds in weight. We also have a stock of meat and butter and bread quite sufficient even with visitors.
In three days time it is Robert’s birthday. I have about 50 wrapped sweets, 15 bought gingerbreads, two tumblers of sugar, last year’s eggs – a little doubtful – and butter and flour ad lib to make buns and feed all the little Khirghiz playmates.
I have got cardboard to make a top hat and Robert will dress up as a bourgeois and be blindfolded and make sport for his guests. They will all have red flags stuck on rushes to beat him with! Next letter will tell you how it goes off. I am only afraid of spoiling the buns.
February 8, 1932
At last a postcard from you after a silence of three months! So you are not getting my letters! I wrote just before Christmas, then sent Robert’s photo a little later, and now also try postcards. But I have had constant magazines from you, darling Mith… also a glorious parcel with colored bag, pillow cases, rice, sugar, suet and seedless raisins and several picture postcards, but no line from you. What a lovely present!
The pillowcases were so sorely needed and so white beside my bad washing. The suet and raisins have lasted our Christmas, New Year and Robert’s birthday and now are lying hidden for the next great occasion, Easter or May Day. So I have felt that you are safe and well, thinking of us, and have kept on writing in hopes you got my letters, and it turns out that you haven’t heard also for some time. One writes and feels like in “Tipperary” — “if you don’t receive it, write and let me know”. But do keep trying postcards; they come better, it seems.
Poor little Robert after counting the days all month to his birthday was vaccinated on the 1st (nurses are doing house-to-house vaccination as there is smallpox about) and exactly on the 3rd he was ill and feverish and had to put off his friends. However, the next day we had them and he was quite cheerful, having had two birthdays instead of one.
If you could have seen him making a toy himself for a tiny sick neighbor, sawing off, with a real saw, pieces of a stick to make wheels, persevering when they broke and again sawing off until he had two whole ones, and then patiently heating a needle held in my forceps over the lamp until red hot, and burning a hole in the middle of each wheel for the axle. Then his arm hurt and he couldn’t finish his cart and the little boy was taken to hospital…
March 11, 1932
You ask about the religion of the Khirghiz. They used to be Mohammedans but you see nothing of this among the young and middle-aged but I caught one old granny at her prayers bowing down her head to the sun and one husband who read the Koran when his wife’s baby was born.
Talking of babies, they stomp round the woman with tire irons to make the baby come quicker and she is delivered on her knees with her arms over a rope tied across the room. The new baby is clad in a shirt with raw edges, not hemmed, to make it grow better. Then there is a belief if a Khirghiz baby is ill it may be saved by wearing a shirt which belonged to a Russian or some other nation.
But nothing beats the new child’s bed. This is a marvel, a low wooden bed with a hole in it and a jar under the hole, the mattress also with a hole in it, the sheet also. The child is laid on the bed accurately over the hole and covered over with a blanket and strapped to the bed with its arms by its side and its legs straight, so tightly strapped that your fingers cannot pass under it. Through the hole and between its legs is put a hollowed-out bone. This is arranged to accurately catch the baby’s urine and conduct it into a receptacle which hangs on the bed.
Not satisfied with strapping the child down so tightly that when taken out its body is marked all over by the pressing of the straps, they cover the child with a thick blanket, raised from the face and body by a crossbar like a tent, so the child is in complete darkness and almost complete airlessness. It does not kick or move and soon tires of crying, as its lungs have no air, and lies quietly in its living coffin more dead than alive. Little wonder that it has chronic constipation.
I am attending a baby two miles distant and visit it with a ball syringe and am trying to win over the stubborn mother and the more stubborn granny. The child’s bed is several generations old as also the scooped-out bone. The father and the granny all went through the ordeal. I don’t yet know how long it goes on or when the child begins to walk.
They quite enjoyed my laughter at the bed and the father came in to know what was the matter and, when told, quite joined the merriment. But I don’t see much hope of them changing their customs. The nightwatchman has come in and says children walk when one and a half years old…
Nearly forgot to tell you of our great holiday, March 8, Woman’s Day. Do you keep this? I made a speech in Khirghiz and all the women in the whole district came to our house and looked at Wife and Home and danced and sang, then all went together to meeting and after meeting a free tea at the restaurant. We communists treated them and I baked biscuits.
June 16, 1932
Peter is going to Uralsk…I have never been so busy as now. I have the day nursery entirely alone from 8 am to 7 pm with interval of two hours at dinnertime with housework, cooking and washing to be done as well. I get up at five and cook a whole day’s meals for ourselves and children with aid of a hay box “thermos”, only boiling tea or occasional special food while the children are here.
I have as many as six babies from two months to a year and four older children. Have made them all swimsuits, shirts and pilches for tinies, sun hats, pillowcases, and cot covers out of a gaily flowered red material the co-op gave. Nappies made of odds and ends; sheets our own; beds home-made boxes looking like seed boxes, three in a row on a trestle table on the porch under a beautiful net canopy we bought years ago from Miss Babb, the other three on the floor, two in baskets, one on a wheeled box, also homemade, for the fractious who insist on being rocked to sleep.
The height of the season of fish salting is over. My mothers are on temporary work, making bricks for new houses. Peter will be away about a fortnight. This will simplify our home life and cooking. We shall simply cook more for the children and eat it ourselves on the porch so that the flies won’t come into the house.
The summer diarrhea is a great anxiety but I have castor oil, bismuth and rice and my hen obliged with her first egg today. Or has she laid elsewhere? She is a tremendously fat person so I shut her in for two days on a diet of water and behold, an egg appeared. The whites I shall use for albumin water and the yolks will provide vitamin A for the rickety children.
This is an off day…I have cleaned up and washed the floor and put Peter’s things in order for Uralsk and been at a party meeting about some spoiled fish. The Communist secretary blames the salter, the salter says the fishermen bought in stale fish, the fishermen blamed the director for not sending carts quicker, the director said the carts which they awaited from Uralsk with salt were delayed by an accident with the ferry on the way to Uralsk, so no one was found to be blamed and the meeting ended and we had dinner.
August 3, 1932
Peter has been away in Uralsk for nearly 2 months and expected to be gone 10 days! They kept him there in the office. We hear he is coming any day and bringing our cow with him. Kolkhoz2 cows are being given back to their former owners, it being found not necessary to socialize cows if a family has only one.
We have heard today that his leather coat has been stolen…Also we hear he has got a new post and that he has earned a lot of money in Uralsk by working overtime in the office. He will most certainly take his holiday (September) in Moscow if this is true. How sad we cannot fix a meeting with you. What can have happened to our line of communication? And we have sent our photos and you don’t mention them either. Do try a postcard.
Early September, 1932
Peter (do not rely on him for news) is a terrible correspondent, went to Uralsk for 10 days and it is now three months and only the other day wrote his first letter, very affectionate and promising to come on 20th. He is trying to get our cow back from our kolkhoz and they gave him someone else’s. Also he worked overtime in the office and had to go to law to get them to pay up!
I worked on the fish farm for a short time; was most interesting. I am now “Women’s Organizer” and wished to see what the work was like and get to know the Khirghiz women better. They never quarrel amongst themselves and chatter incessantly while working and are often very idle. They imposed on me as being tall when anything wanted lifting or carrying, calling me “English” or rather “Angliski”.
They seem to have a rooted dislike of Russians and are very wanting in political knowledge. I am trying to get simple books for them and have organized lectures. They have never been organized before and their husbands do not wholeheartedly approve of me and do not wish their wives to have a political education, only just a little about children’s illnesses.
Their psychology is very interesting and the Russians despise them and think them dirty and they think the Russians dirty! Of course, enlightened people or communists do not make these comparisons but the wives on both sides, if uneducated, are very “grand”. It is amusing to try and draw them together and there is great work to be done in education. I have no friend in my efforts because there are no other communist women among the Russians here and my home and the creche are more than enough to cope with.
September 20, 1932
Peter returned…and brought with him new radios, medicines, potatoes, melons, a real young soldier’s trumpet for Robert and many other gifts.
The day before yesterday our friend, the Hungarian Boris Douche, unexpectedly turned up on his bicycle and they have fixed up our radio and it talks and plays from Budapest and Czechoslovakia, Moscow, Warsaw, Germany, Tashkent, Tiflis and Italy and Algiers but not from England. I am very stupid about understanding but Peter assures me I will get used to it. I love the music best. All of a sudden, Chopin or Wagner turns up and I feel so linked up with the big world and home life, especially you.
Could you send us some quinine? We are out of it in Uralsk and my little Khirghiz children have got malaria. Robert had an attack…but we dosed him with quinine and it stopped. He is attending school.
Peter is not getting his leave because he took time in Uralsk for his own business and they had a little dispute at the office…Unfortunately, my Russian passport was in Peter’s coat pocket when he was robbed, so it will be hard to receive any parcels sent. Parcels are not given without documents being shown that you are you.
November 10, 1932
Got your lovely postcard and Wife and Home for October with great enjoyment. Read and reread it on the two days holiday which celebrates the October Revolution. We had a splendid two days, our radio going strong, giving us the crowds in the Red Square, Moscow, yelling “hurrah!”.
Robert was splendid in his red coat. He collected all the children, then made a speech in Khirghiz: “Today is a great holiday because in ’17 there was a revolution and the workers killed the bourgeois, hurrah!” Then he dressed up as a bourgeois and let the children enjoy “flouring him”, then handed round the biscuits, then gave each a flag and with his trumpet marched around outside.
The next day I dressed him as a “Red Worker” with red neck handkerchief, top boots and Peter’s cap on top of his own and he took a basket of biscuits to all the children who had not come, then after our lunch collected the children again for games. I taught them “oranges and lemons”, calling it onions and apples which Khirghiz love, and Blind Man’s Bluff and everything imaginable and Robert showed them his books.
Did I tell you all our men – the director, the salter, the baker, the carpenter and Peter – have bought a large fishing net and go out every evening fishing? Sometimes they get a splendid haul and give them to the state or receive money, flower, bread, millet, tobacco in addition to ordinary rations. Besides, we get the pick of the fish, so fresh that they jump off the table!
Undated
“Dearest Mith, could you possibly manage to send out to us this medicine. You sent the receipt [formula] a long time ago but I could not get it made up. Medicines here are different or different names. Peter’s sister’s husband and our present director’s wife beg me to ask. They are both against drunkenness. Please, please try. Marg.
Russian unit of weight, around 36 lbs.
Collective farm.
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