As I walk a little unsteadily about the house I have lived in for sixty years, I often fall into musing about the different turns life might have taken.
What if, for example, someone had not dropped in on me and my three-year-old son and left a copy of the New Statesman on the table? Leafing through it I came on an ad in the personal column reading: American professor seeks room in genial household . . . .
And what if, some years before that, I had said Yes. I could have spent a sheltered life at the side of an Oxford don.
But you can’t have it all ways and so much is a matter of luck. For instance, what luck that we had just bought our first viable car when told of a cottage to rent on a North Yorkshire sheep farm. The car’s very first outing got us there in time, and it was eighteen years before the drive to that enchanted place became too much: not for the car but for us.
And if, in our travelling years, it hadn’t been that particular taxi which took us to the Valley of the Kings, I would never have been led through that biblical landscape sitting on a donkey. This is what happened after I had admired the view from the rooftop of the taxi driver’s house, and it is is one of the happiest memories of all our travelling days.
Other What Ifs were more consequential: what if the outgoing editor at André Deutsch Limited — an Oxford friend — had not talked her employer into taking me on as her replacement? I was to stay there for thirty years.
And more momentous still: what if in October 1939 my Estonian grandmother had prevailed upon my father to leave us behind in the then safety of Tallinn . . . Only my brother and I (of the eight children seen here at my previous birthday party) were to be alive two years later.
I may have discovered (or, rather, been the first to recognize) a few writers, but my grandfather discovered a gold mine. Well, not actually gold but oil shale which for many years has been one of Estonia’s largest industries and, though now a denigrated substance, is still exported by them and used throughout the world.
It happened something like this: born in a small town in Belarus but orphaned at an early age, my grandfather was raised by an uncle and aunt in nearby Tallinn, and soon speaking some Estonian as well as Russian and Yiddish. English was to be added when, to escape the mandatory twenty years of military service (Estonia was then part of the Russian empire) he made his escape intending, we believe, to go to New York but – could he possibly have thought he was already there? – never getting further than England. There he found work as a tailor and, before very long, had not only married and started a family, but had his own shop.
But, though as English as could be in appearance, with his trilby and plus fours, he still drank his tea with jam, Russian-style, and dreamt of home. And as soon as his girl children were old enough to be left in charge of the shop he went back to Estonia, not just on short fur-buying trips – for the shop now sold furs as well as ladies’ outfits – but on a mission to help it achieve independence. He had already arranged for Estonian flax to be shipped to Scotland. He was now on the look-out for something bigger . . .
Some hundred or so years earlier, according to legend, the villagers of a small parish in Estonia had found that the soil with which they were building a protective wall around a camp fire was combustible. They called the substance Burning Stone.
‘Burning Stone’
Perhaps it was this which set my tailor grandfather off on prospecting trips with his friend, Gerhard Lukk, a mechanical engineer who would have provided the know-how which my visionary grandfather did not have. Be that as it may, before long they had found the site which was to become the giant mining complex where my mining engineer father was to spend the next twenty years.
My grandfather on the site that became the Vanamoisa mining complex
I have seen Vanamoissa only in photographs: when, in the early 1960s, I first went back to Estonia, where I had lived for most of my first five years, foreigners were not allowed to go to the mining area or, indeed, anywhere else. It took endless meetings with officials to get permission to visit the family graves. We shouldn’t have bothered. The graveyard had been razed*. There was nothing left to see.
But photographs tell me as much as I need to know about Vanamoissa and this happiest time of my father’s life, when he was doing the work he was cut out to do and had no idea what lay ahead.
My father (seated on chair with arms and legs crossed) at Camborne School of Mines
My father (with cigarette) down the mine
What lay ahead for everyone, was World War 2. What lay ahead for my grandfather, back in England for good now, was a peaceful old age. It was very different for Gerhard Lukk. He had been (I quote) taken away from his home by the NKVD in an official black car as his five children looked on.
This, and the date of his abduction – June 18, 1941 – I was to learn only relatively recently when an Estonian film-maker, Tiina Soomet, living in Canada, got in touch with me after reading an article which I had helped to translate** on the Estonian Jewish Archive website. These were the words that had drawn her attention:
in 1919, two mining engineers, Alexander Menell and Gerhard Lukk (about whom, alas, we know very little) approach the Estonian government for permission to carry out a surface examination.
Thanks to Tiina, I learnt that Gerhard Lukk’s five children all survived the war and ultimately settled in the UK, Canada and the United States. One of Gerhard Lukk’s granddaughters had become a particular friend of hers and enlisted her help in piecing together what had become of her grandfather. In this they received invaluable help from the Netherlands Baltic Association, for it turned out that my grandfather’s friend had been not only an engineer but also Consul General of the Netherlands.
Gerhard Lukk
Further information began to emerge and we find that in 1942 Gerhard Lukk was sentencedby the Special Board of the NKVD to 10 years in a Labour Camp. No more is known about the last years of his life but, In June 2001, it appears he was rehabilitated (posthumously) by ‘the resolution of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation.’ Small comfort.
But, happily, the story does not end there. In 2022, at an official state ceremony on June 14 (the National Day of Mourning***) a plaque with his name on it was unveiled on Tallinn’s Memorial Wall to the Victims of Communism, and his granddaughter was there to see this happen.
View of the dazzling 200 metre long corridor showing the section where 22,000 honeybees represent the number of victims
How little has changed. The town in Ukraine where my grandfather was born is a battleground. The country where he grew up and which he so loved is in imminent danger of being invaded, once again, by its powerful neighbour.
I am glad my grandfather doesn’t know this, nor that his granddaughter can’t sew on a button. The one time I did this it was sewn on so tight it wouldn’t button or unbutton.
Received last Christmas from one of my relatives still living in Tallinn
*The Germans overran the country in the first year of the war. Only eight Jews of the original 4,000 survived the occupation. The other Baltic countries, which had large Jewish populations, became killing fields.
**Burning Stone by Mark Rybak in the Estonian Jewish Archive
*** This day commemorates the victims of the June 13/14, 1941 mass deportations of Estonians to uninhabitable parts of Russia.
The discovery that dung beetles navigate by the light of the stars is just one of the many wonderful scraps of news I have picked up from turning on the BBC World Service when I come down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, to take some valerian drops or make a cup of cocoa. Another is that there is a language in northern India which has no name. Its 400 speakers just call it Our Language . . .
Of course, there is also Trump.
In truth, there is nothing like the World Service for the range of its topics and its deep seriousness about everyone, everywhere and everything. As the public parks are (for me) the best thing about London, so is the World Service (with Radios 4 and 3 a close second and third) one of the best things about Britain. When, a few years ago, the government cut its funding to the World Service, it showed a callous disregard for the three million plus people to whom it is a lifeline, and a culpable ignorance of the benefits it brings to this country: which is why, of course, when they belatedly woke up to its value as the most useful ambassador of all, the funding was restored.
Street Parade, Soviet Estonia in the early ‘60s.
Much as I love such items as the one about the dung beetles, it is memories of what the World Service meant to people I met in Soviet Estonia in the ‘60s and ‘70s that make me so passionate about it. The two elderly men, old friends of my parents who had risked listening to it throughout the years of Soviet rule, knew – as many of my younger relatives did not – that all was not as it was said to be. No, I had to tell my cousin, Eva, a convinced Communist, we did not send little boys up chimneys any more and Yes, we could leave the country any time we wanted. She found both these things hard to believe.
And then there was the young man on the train to Viljandi (my grandmother’s birth place) who heard us speaking English and told me how much he would love to have a copy of Fowler’s English Usage. Another clandestine listener to the BBC.
As Jilly Cooper said the other day, in a lovely piece about what it is like to be eighty, being up in the small hours comes with the territory; but these broken nights have, thanks to the World Service – truly a service – opened up not only new terrestrial worlds but also the firmament itself: how else would I have known when looking at the Milky Way that every dung beetle in our garden was looking at it too?
For more of this kind of thing see Esther Menell’s memoir, Loose Connections, available at £13.95 (including UK postage) via the link on the CONTACT page.
The discovery that dung beetles navigate by the light of the stars is just one of the many wonderful scraps of news I have picked up from turning on the BBC World Service when I come down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, to take some valerian drops or make a cup of cocoa. Another is that there is a language in northern India which has no name. Its 400 speakers just call it Our Language . . .
As Jilly Cooper said the other day, in a lovely piece about what it is like to be eighty, being up in the small hours comes with the territory; but these broken nights have, thanks to the World Service – truly a service – opened up not only new terrestrial worlds but also the firmament itself: how else would I have known when looking at the Milky Way that every dung beetle in our garden was looking at it too?