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On 15 February 1937, Eugenia Ginsburg was summoned to the NKVD (precursor of the KGB) office in Kazan. She asked how long the interview was likely to take. ‘Say forty minutes, perhaps an hour,’ was the reply. She would be gone for eighteen years.

 

 

By the time she was free again, Stalin was dead, along with her father, her mother and her elder son. Yezhov, the Commissar-in-Chief of State Security, had been executed, as had his replacement, Beria. Eugenia’s own personal interrogator, the smooth-talking Major Elshin, who had taunted her with offers of succulent ham and gruyère sandwiches, had died begging for bread in the very labour camp where she was serving out her sentence. World War II had come and gone, leaving twenty million dead, and the map of Eastern Europe had been redrawn. Five million had died in the gulag camps, one fifth of the 25 million who are reckoned to have passed through the system between 1929 and 1953.

But the camps were not extermination camps – the deaths were a result of hunger and disease, maltreatment and exhaustion. They were labour camps. The endpapers of Into the Whirlwind are taken from a fabric celebrating ‘The Five Year Plan in Four Years’. If Stalin’s First Five Year Plan for the economy, launched in 1928, could be spun in this way as having largely met its targets, the Second threatened to be less successful. Many more factories and apartment blocks were needed, as well as roads, railways and canals; weapons would be required for the war that seemed inevitable. The workforce had to be expanded. Meanwhile, the prison population was growing: criminals were being joined by uncooperative peasants, workers, officials, academics, journalists, political dissidents – anyone (as Beria himself would eventually discover) could be arrested for political dissidence. The solution was simple: increase the number of labour camps, and put the prisoners to work.

Prisoners couldn’t expect wages, or decent food, or more than the most basic living quarters. The camps would be turned into a profitable sector of the Soviet economy. If more workers were required, finding new pretexts for arrests would present no problem. It would however be advisable to establish the worst of the camps far from any prying eyes: the Soviet Union had been threatened with a boycott of their wood exports, a major source of hard currency – their Western trading partners were uncomfortable with goods produced by slave labour.

Eugenia’s prison neighbour, Olga, correctly surmised what awaited them, ‘It must have become uneconomical to keep so many thousands – millions, for all we knew – without work. And think of the gigantic staff of the security apparatus – what that must cost! And most of the prisoners were of working age, between twenty-five and fifty. “They’ll not just deport us, they’ll send us to distant forced-labour camps”’. In the North-Eastern corner of Siberia, Kolyma, to which they were headed, was one of the worst and one of the most distant.

 

 

Olga Orlovskaya was a journalist, long divorced from her Trotskyist husband, but nevertheless arrested as his ‘associate’. Eugenia had been arrested on even more spurious grounds. Her husband was Chairman of the Kazan City Council. Both were avowed Communists, but a colleague of Eugenia’s had written an article found ‘to contain certain error in its treatment of permanent revolution.’  Professor Elvov was part of a Trotskyist plot, and she had failed to denounce him. There was no plot. The ‘proof’ that Elvov was a Trotskyist was that he had been arrested. Eugenia faced a second charge: she was implicated in the murder in Leningrad of Sergey Kirov, a prominent member of the Party, and one time protégé of Stalin. That she had never been to Leningrad was no defence: ‘He was killed by people who shared your ideas, so you share the moral and criminal responsibility.’ The system had its own tragically absurd logic, in which the crime was made to fit the punishment. Eugenia later shared a cell with a Tartar woman who had first been arrested as a Trotskyist, only to have her file returned when it was found that the quota for Trotskyists had been exceeded, ‘but they were short on nationalists’: Rimma was re-arrested as a bourgeois nationalist.

Rimma, adds Eugenia, almost as an afterthought and un-judgmentally, had denounced dozens of Tartar intellectuals and party activists, including her husband, to shorten her own sentence, which it hadn’t. Naming names was a ploy suggested more than once to Eugenia: as many as possible advises one friend, on the grounds that ‘they can’t arrest the whole party’, but, having decided that the only way was to be ruled simply by the voice of her conscience, she refuses to accuse anyone else, or to confess to trumped up charges. ‘I was left with the big advantage of a clear conscience and the knowledge that no-one else was pulled in through my fault or weakness.’

Eugenia doesn’t pretend to be a heroine, but she admits to being obstinate, and, above all, to being lucky, lucky in that her interrogation was completed before the introduction of ‘special methods’, torture in other words. She was lucky, too, in being in her early thirties, neither too young to grasp how to work the system, nor to old to withstand it, and lucky to have her own teeth and good eyesight – false teeth and glasses were not easily retained in prison. Others envy her higher education, but that, she writes, was of little use, compared with her physical endurance and, although she doesn’t dwell on it, her astonishing psychological endurance, as well as a belief that the absurdity would end. Having feared execution, Eugenia meets her first sentence, ten years’ maximum isolation in prison, not with horror, but as a challenge: ‘I made a resolution from now on to eat, sleep, and do exercises every morning. I intended to stay alive. Just to spite them.’

 

As it turned out, eating, sleeping and morning exercises would not be hers to schedule, but privileges to be granted or withdrawn, generally with no explanation. In the worst of the prisons the rules were particularly harsh, detailed, and arbitrary. It was forbidden, among other things, to go near the window, to sit with one’s back to the door, or to talk or sing in the cell. Penalties might include confinement in a punishment cell, or trial by court. ‘Yet,’ writes Eugenia, ‘all we prisoners wanted was that the rules should remain unchanged … that things should get no worse, for every day brought fresh signs of the growth of terror and lawlessness. Someone’s devilish ingenuity was ceaselessly at work, someone busily sought out each remaining chink in our tomb and plastered it over.’ She apologises at one point for her repeated us of the word ‘suddenly’, but justifies it. Changes were sudden, new rules were introduced, prisoners moved without warning.

Into the Whirlwind covers only the first three years which Eugenia spent in prison and in labour camps, three years in which she was moved four times, from a small cell in the NKVD headquarters, to a somewhat larger cell in the Kazan prison, larger but not large enough for the six women sharing its three bunks, then to the (still) infamous Butyrki in Moscow – thirty six to the cell, thirty six bunks with straw mattresses, but with one floor set aside for night-time interrogations so that sleep was disturbed by the screams of the tortured and the shouts and curses of the torturers. Butyrki was a transit prison, a brief stop on the way to Yaroslavl, where Eugenia was to begin her ten year’s solitary.

 

 

From the first days in the tiny shared cell in Kazan, Eugenia had understood the importance of communication. ‘To help break down the strict isolation from the world and from other prisoners … was one of the basic laws of prison life.’ She had learnt to value friendship, or, at the very least, companionship, to treasure the small shared victories scored against the guards, one of whose own basic laws was to maintain that strict isolation. From single words scratched in toothpowder on the washroom shelf, followed by a pattern of taps on the wall she quickly mastered the prison alphabet. Soon she was sharing not just information but poems with her ‘neighbour’, and successfully plotting for a badly beaten fellow prisoner to be provided with soap and cigarettes, tied together with threads drawn from her cell-mate’s dressing gown, a combination of resourceful improvisation, cunning and generosity that she would enjoy time and again. Political differences, and in those uncertain years, there were many, were, largely, forgotten. She invites our pity for the poor woman who in reply to Eugenia’s taps, asks ‘“what party do you belong to?”’ Making out the answer ‘“communist”’, she taps back ‘“I have no friend in that party”’, followed by a blow of the fist on the wall and a two-year silence.

With such rare exceptions the sisterhood holds together. From her account the men manage less well.  Women sew on buttons and darn stockings for each other with needles stolen from guards, or fashioned from fish-bones. They contrive to keep their bras (not included in the detested prison uniform and therefore forbidden): washing them in the slop bucket,  wearing them during the cell search (carried out by male guards), and hiding them under the mattress during the body search (carried out by female guards). They sacrifice precious sugar lumps for sick companions, make gifts of silk scarves, or scraps of warm clothing, and memorise the names and addresses of each others’ children and relations for “later”.

In her narrow ‘solitary’s’ cell, with its one iron bunk, iron table, iron chair and iron grille, the silence is more frightening than the rats, but she bears it stalwartly, until the day the system (suddenly once again) works in her favour.  The overzealous programme of arrest and imprisonment having inevitably led to an insufficiency of single cells, Eugenia’s luck holds and she finds her sentence of solitary confinement commuted, by accident. For a year and a half she and her unexpected cell-mate are ‘united in pure sisterly neighbourly love’, a wonderfully rich period, described in fascinating and touching detail. When, suddenly as usual, the order comes for them to leave solitary for the labour camp, they wish that this break in their lives could be postponed, that they might have a few more days to wean themselves from their happy hermit life, reading, writing, and remembering their childhood. ‘Solitary confinement ennobled and purified human beings and brought to light their most genuine and deepest resources.’ Not the outcome that Yezhov, Beria, or Stalin himself had predicted or planned.

 

 

After a year and a half of something like calm reflection, the women must face the jungle law of camp life, which ‘was to degrade so many human souls’.  Eugenia does not minimise the degradation, but applauds the resilience of human decency, reminding us of the value of random acts of kindness and convincing us that it might be possible to find joy in the midst of such appalling injustice and barbarity.

It is hard to tell to what extent her political conviction helped or hindered. Although some of her fellow prisoners kept faith with Stalin, Eugenia did not. But she didn’t question the Communist Party. Writing this memoir in the 1960s she asks herself if after everything that happened she would have voted for any régime other than the Soviet.  ‘All I had – the thousands of books I had read, the memories of my youth, even the endurance that kept me going – I owed it to the revolution, which had become my world when I was still a child’, is her answer.

I have at the back of a drawer a crudely made badge bought in a Moscow market in 1989, in the heyday of Glasnost. It reads: “Everything is going to be alright”, or, more accurately “not bad” – Vsyo budyet neplokho.  But today the Mayor of Kazan is in prison (the same prison as Eugenia), almost certainly on political grounds, plans to turn Butyrki into a museum have been shelved – it still houses 2000 prisoners, some political, still taking turns to sleep on the floor. What would Eugenia Ginzburg have made of that?

 

 

 

 

‘November 7th – Plant the indoor bulbs.’ Too late, in the opinion of the Provincial Lady’s overbearing visitor, Lady Boxe.  Though the Diary has its more serious moments – not very serious, at least not overtly so, but more of that later – the opening entry is delightfully trivial, and perfectly chosen. Diary of a Provincial Lady was commissioned in 1929 for Time and Tide, a (moderately) feminist periodical owned and edited by EM Delafield’s friend, one-time suffragette, Lady Rhondda, and she must have felt confident that bulbs as a topic couldn’t fail: the early planters would feel pleased with themselves, the late planters would be reassured to know that they were not alone, and if there were a few non-planters they could smile at both.

Which of us has not on occasion (on many occasions in my case) failed to plant the indoor bulbs in time for Christmas flowering, having bought them from an inferior supplier, only to have our errors pointed out by a more competent neighbour? Within a page and a half we feel a true rapport with the Provincial Lady, though we don’t have an Ethel to bring in the tea tray, nor Cook in the kitchen complaining about the range (happily no range either), nor an exotic Mademoiselle minding our daughters. If we have ordered the bulbs, and the fibre, in good time, they won’t be waiting for collection at our local railway station, nor will we have been alerted by postcard: instead we will have received a text from DPD or Hermes and be worrying that we might miss the delivery.

 

 

Much has changed, but most of us and not only those who are, or once were, Provincial Ladies (would we say women now?), have a ‘Lady Boxe’ somewhere in our lives. EM Delafield’s Lady Boxe, was the Honorable Mrs Adams, owner of the Bradfield Estate in Devon, for which her husband, Paul Dashwood, was the agent. The Dashwoods lived on the estate close to the village of Kentisbeare, where Elizabeth, was a JP, the first woman to sit on the Bench at Cullompton, and chairman of the Women’s Institute. Early in her writing career, EMD’s mother, a prolific and largely forgotten playwright and novelist, had urged her daughter to write about what she knew, and she did.  Her two PB novels, Consequences (PB No. 13) and Diary of a Provincial Lady are both based in part on her own experience, the first on her year as a young postulant in a French religious order, the second on her life as the wife of a country land agent, mother of two and a pillar of the local community.

In setting and in mood the two novels could not be more different, but underlying both the message is the same: life is not easy. To navigate it successfully requires a capacity for hard work, a willingness to embrace the ordinary, self-awareness, and a sense of humour. Alex Clare has none of these. The Provincial Lady has them all. The tragic heroine of Consequences fights the system until she is beaten by it, the PL modestly adapts, accepts second best, holds her tongue, and wisely confines her grumbles to the pages of her diary. Where Alex, for all her tragedy, is dislikeable, the Provincial Lady is utterly loveable, and knowable, surprisingly so given that so many of her preoccupations and so much of the detail seem strange to us in 2018.

 

 

The Army and Navy Stores, from whom the PL orders Picnic Biscuits (what were Picnic Biscuits?) has disappeared, along with spirit lamps and kitchen ranges, and shampoo-and-sets every ten days. When did anyone last ‘break in’ a pair of shoes? Or serve ‘rabbit-cream’ and ‘coffee-shape’? Who but the very, very richest would employ ‘an expensive hospital nurse’ to care for a sick child? When did mothers last wear hats while chatting at a children’s party? Who now packs an evening dress for an overnight shopping trip to London? Do we even talk of evening dresses? Can anybody tell me what ‘a tennis coat’ was? Trimmed with a white fur collar, would Helen Mills or Suzanne Lenglen have worn one? I do recall the knife grinder calling when I was a child: I presume that like the PL’s he sharpened scissors, but I don’t remember him being ‘pleased to attend to the clocks or rivet any china’. Now we throw away our blunt scissors, and broken cups, and buy new batteries for the clocks. We no longer have accounts at the grocers, the cleaners, the chemist or the dressmaker. Instead we have our credit card bills to pay at the end the month. And we wait for the central heating boiler to be serviced and for the washing machine to be repaired, we load and unload the dishwasher and we unpack the shopping –but we never find ourselves saying, like the Provincial Lady, that ‘servants make cowards of us all’.

‘Why not butter the bread yourself’, is only one of the many questions I would put to the Provincial Lady. I suppose by that I mean ask E.M. Delafield, but the character she has created is so vivid that in spite of knowing neither her name (it’s her diary, why would she mention it?) nor even the colour of her hair (except when it is most unfortunately dyed), I find myself in imagination engaging directly with the PL. herself. Ninety years on there would be much to sympathise with, much to laugh about together.

 

 

 

The past is a foreign country. But the people don’t change. The provincial characters live on: the keen hunt supporter at dinner with whom one finds oneself agreeing because ‘anything else would be a waste of breath’; the Gardener who knows everything there is to know, but condescends to ask if one has problems with some rare plant with the longest of Latin names and to whom one longs like the PL to reply that ‘in my garden, the dear thing grew like a weed’; the Vicar’s wife who drops by for a couple of minutes after lunch and is still there at tea-time.  London, an escape for the PL, presents its own (unchanging) challenges: has one seen the latest exhibition and the newest play? Different but just as testing as their rural counterparts, are the metropolitan dinner guests, like the celebrated bestseller, who tells the PL in the kindest way how to evade paying super-tax. ‘Am easily easily able to conceal from him the fact that I am not at present in a position to require this information’, she writes, quiet acquiescence being in most circumstances a good option. She adopts the same strategy with her husband’s employer, when Lady Boxe, after an insufferable tea party, loftily, and unthinkingly, offers to ring for the PL’s car. ‘Refrain from replying that no amount of ringing will bring my car to the door all by itself’, she notes later,  confining the expression of her irritation to the nightly diary entry.

Bracketed ‘Mems to self’ and ‘queries’ are carefully phrased to ‘raise the tone’, or more conversationally to suggest a whispered aside to her imagined reader. ‘Must try to remember that Social Success is seldom the portion of those who live in the provinces’, ‘Does not a misplaced optimism exist, common to all mankind, leading on to false conviction that social engagements, if dated sufficiently far ahead, will never really materialise?’ and ‘Does motherhood lead to cynicism?’ are typical examples. The answer to the last is a resounding ‘no’. Anxious not to appear ‘foolish’ about them, she plays down her children’s qualities in public, while privately devoted to them, happily joining in childish games, and on occasion mediating between them and their father. ‘Life of a wife and mother sometimes very wearing’ is another bracketed comment, an understatement typical of the Provincial Lady.

 

 

 

Although they have largely been forgotten, EM Delafield wrote plays and film scripts as well as novels. The ‘voices’ of the Diary are brilliant, from the children’s truthful if not always welcome comments, to Mademoiselle’s fiercely held opinions, invariably referencing one saint or another, and old Mrs Blenkinsop’s laments which contrive to be both smug and self-pitying. She breathes life into all her characters through their wonderfully individualised speech. Only one barely speaks. The Provincial Lady’s husband is a man of few words, few of them kind.

Robert’s longest utterance in the entire book is ‘now that’s what I call an attractive woman’, about PL’s friend; his shortest ‘Well’, but this, adds the  PL, ‘very expressively’. Though she would never criticise him, even in the privacy of the diary, it is clear that in addition to being a stern father, as a husband Robert is, at best, undemonstrative, more often than not dozing over The Times. He takes not even a polite interest in the PL’s clothes. She is astonished when one day he asks if her cold, which he had previously ignored, is better. She replies that it has gone: ‘Then why, he asks, do I look like that?’ Asked by the PL at a local wedding if it reminds him of their own, ‘he looks surprised and says No, not particularly, why should it?’.

Never short of advice for others, Lady Boxe’s counsel to all girls was ‘to marry, no matter what the man is like, as any husband is better than none, and there are not nearly enough to go round’. Alex Clare’s failure to heed a similar warning led to her downfall. Are we to compare Robert with other EMD husbands? Laura’s Alfred in The Way Things Are (1927), ‘unalterable, in many ways unobservant, and yet with peculiar qualities of solidity and kindness’, or Monica’s Herbert in Thank Heaven Fasting (1932) ‘balding and boring’ but reliable and offering ‘a recognised position as a married woman.’ Is Robert ‘any husband, better than none’?

Towards the end of the Diary an unmarried feminist academic newly arrived in the village says to the Provincial Lady that she strikes her as being ‘a woman whose life has never known fulfilment’. The PL notes briefly, but so sadly, ‘Have often thought exactly the same thing myself, but this does not prevent my feeling entirely furious with Miss P for saying so.’ Diary of a Provincial Lady is warm, and funny, but not trivial.