In the house where I grew up in Leigh-on-Sea there was an old wooden trunk in
the basement that had belonged to my grandfather. Scarred with age and
dribbles of paint, it was just possible to make out some Cyrillic writing on
the side.
My grandfather, Pyotr Vassili Mironov, was a proud and loyal member of the
tsarist army, the son of a countess. In 1916 he was selected to join a small
delegation sent to buy military supplies from the British.
To begin with, he and his family lived in luxurious quarters within the
Russian embassy. My father, his son, attended a private school in London.
But then came the Bolshevik revolution.
The family were left in London with no means of support. The only way my
grandfather could earn money was in the time-honoured way of immigrants.
Instead of inheriting an estate, Kuryanovo, in Russia, he became a London
cabbie to support his wife and children.
My father had no choice but to finish his education early and to make his own
way in the world. Grandpa’s mother and sisters wrote to him, and for many
years I only had their letters, kept for years in his trunk, to give me
clues about what had happened to my family in Russia.
The information in them was guarded, since they were written in the period
coming up to Stalin’s purges, and then during the height of the cold war. I
knew only that the cemetery where my great-grandmother was buried was called
the Vagankovskoye, and during a trip to Russia on behalf of the British
Council I had visited it, but I had no idea where in this huge cemetery her
grave lay.
I wandered the aisles looking in vain, hoping she might call to me from the
grave and across the century. If she was calling, I was deaf. The story of
my Russian ancestors was mentioned in a newspaper and caught the attention
of a research journalist called Will Stewart, living in Moscow with his
Russian wife.
Will called me and asked if I was interested in him trying to discover more
about my Russian relatives. I agreed with pleasure and excitement. I gave
Will all the information I had: my grandfather’s memoirs, with hand-drawn
maps of his estates, and the letters from his sisters. In the meantime, I
spent hours on Google, with the maps by my side, trying to work out exactly
where those lands might have been.
This proved an impossible task, although I had a rough idea. Some months
passed, and from time to time Will called to say he had unearthed more
information. With the help of my grandfather’s maps he felt he had located
the exact area of the estate. He also found a miraculous thing: a stash of
letters from my grandfather to his sister in Moscow, written in the late
1940s and 1950s. In that trove were pictures of me and my family, living in
Southend.
These letters were found in the collection of the wife of a descendant in my
family. He had become a successful historian, and was, like me, fascinated
by his own family history. It was the other side of the correspondence from
Russia that we had kept for so long.
On another continent someone else had been hoarding the past. Will also
tracked down every other living descendant. This was an extraordinary feat,
as they all came from a line of women who had relinquished the family name
when they married. Furthermore, he managed to locate my great-grandmother’s
grave, and found that the ashes of my grandfather, who had died, homesick in
England, were buried next to his mother.
They had become reunited in death. Will, my sister and I felt it was time to
make another trip to Russia, and full of a mixture of trepidation and
excitement, Kate and I got on the plane. Understanda-bly, Will had met
similar emotions from “the family”, with a bit of suspicion thrown in.
Our first trip was back to the cemetery, to see great-grandma’s grave, and
grandpa’s grave. This was the first of a series of moving moments for me.
Actually, the word “moving” cannot really describe the sensation.
It was certainly emotional, in that crying-and-laughing kind of way, combined
with a strange sense of the past, present and everything in between coming
together: a sense of both the pain and the beauty of history, and the
inevitable movement of people through time; of loss and the banality of it,
and the shared human experience of the passing of all you know and hold
dear.
Then throw into the mix the instinctive and undeniable familial love, and you
have an indication of my feelings over the next few days. So there it was,
in Vagankovskoye cemetery, the very grave that held our great-grandma. My
sister and I shared a look that was to recur a few times in the days to
follow, a “don’t you dare cry . . .” kind of look.
We had brought flowers. I think the grave had recently been spruced up for our
arrival, and we were very grateful for that. We spent a good hour there; it
was hard to leave. It was a lovely, sunny day, and anyway I have always
loved cemeteries, whether my ancestors are buried there or not.
My photo album is full of pictures of other people’s graves. As we left, we
took good note of where her grave was so we could find it again. The next
day was the visit to Kuryanovo, to see the earth upon which half of my DNA
had been created.
Will told us that a Muscovite – an entrepreneur who wanted to develop it and
build a series of upmarket weekend dachas on it for the wealthy Muscovites –
had very recently bought the property from the local commune. He had
arranged to meet us there. First we saw the land from a distance, just a
line of trees much like any other in that vast landscape of Russia. Then the
road to the land and then the land itself. Here was the Muscovite to meet
us, with his sexy girlfriend on his arm, and two hefty armed bodyguards just
behind.
I think he was slightly nervous, wondering whether we might be about to claim
what he had paid good money for. He said: “Welcome to my land,” and I said:
“Welcome to my land.”
He was very gracious, however, and gave us access, having even cleared rough
paths through the completely overgrown landscape. Nothing was left of garden
or house. The house was right on the path of any army invading Russia. The
battle of Borodino against Napoleon had been fought not far away and the
Nazi armies of Hitler had rampaged across this land. Usually the Russians in
their mad courage had beaten them to it by destroying any houses or crops
that might help them along the way.
So whatever was left after the ravages of the Bolshevik revolution had been
swept away by war. However, those were the birds that Grandpa knew as a boy,
this was the smell in the air, and those were the clouds. We found the pond,
choked with algae, and some stones that might, just might, have been the
foundations of the house.
My sister and I had brought two rose bushes to plant in memory of our family
and especially our great-grandma, who loved and was so proud of her roses.
I remembered my Great-Aunt Lena’s words in one of the letters: “There weren’t
even any traces of the old garden paths but a few of the rose bushes had
fought their way through the undergrowth. I dug up one bush from the large
garden – this was the pink rose – and one from the front garden where side
flowerbeds used to be – this was the white rose.”
I had always dreamt of replacing those roses and here we were, Katherine Masha
and Helen Lydia, named respectively after Great-Grandma Masha, and Aunt
Lydia, and Aunt Elena, doing just that. The beefy bodyguards wanted to help
us, but we respect-fully declined.
This was a job for a Mironov and nobody else. I threatened the Muscovite with
ghastly consequences if he let the roses die. He promised to take good care
of them . . . We all repaired to have a picnic that the Muscovite had kindly
prepared with the bodyguards, who by now had put away their guns.
The Russian champagne was opened and drunk and, many toasts later, the
Muscovite was offering Kate and me a free lot of land for us to build a
dacha on.
We just might take him up on that. After this poignant morning, we visited the
village of Kuryanovo, the community made up of typical little wooden country
houses arranged on either side of a dirt road.
This is the village where the workers on the estate lived, the village after
which the estate is named. It seemed the kind of place where not much had
altered in a hundred years, even though in fact it had witnessed such
cataclysmic changes. It looked like a picture from a child’s storybook about
Russia, if you ignored the SUV parked outside one of the collapsing houses,
surrounded by chickens.
I had a chat to one of the very few people who live there all year round. Not
exactly a chat, more a smile-and-gesture conversation. On this sunny day,
with the fruit trees bearing and the bees buzzing and the flowers blooming,
it seemed an idyllic place, but in the midwinter, with months of snow and
sludge and mud, how different.
This Russian woman was of that stoic, courageous, suffering, rooted, obstinate
stock that have survived – and always will survive – in Russia. The
following day we were to meet the people who had become known in our
conversations as “the relatives”, most of whom were related to Kate and me
by blood. They were direct descendants of our great-aunts. Some were related
to us by marriage. Somehow Will had found these women – they were mostly
women – and brought us all together.
We met in a casual restaurant in the very centre of Moscow, near to where one
of our ancestors had lived and worked. Kate and I were full of trepidation,
not knowing what to expect. Neither of us relish walking into a room of
strangers and making polite conversation; harder still if you don’t speak
the language. All these people and their families had been through so much
over the generations, and our life had been so different that we were afraid
of being and doing the wrong thing.
Although on paper we were related, we had nothing in common with them. They
were total strangers. We walked into the restaurant. They were all there and
Kate and I did what seemed only natural in the circumstances.
We finally, and as one, burst into tears. Later, these lovely, warm,
intelligent women told us that it was this that made them realise we did
actually have Russian blood. I think they were originally more suspicious of
us than the other way round.
They had heard of me through my work but made it very clear that they were not
there to be impressed by any television or film star, and were certainly not
interested in dancing to the tune of some fantasist from Britain.
However, very soon we were poring over the photos and letters from our shared
past. Strangely, none of them looked remotely like us. However, on the
inside they were very much like us: hard-work-ing, middle-class women with a
healthy sense of scepticism and discourse and a strong leaning towards the
arts.
One had been a teacher like my sister. They had all made a successful way in
life, and one of my cousins many times removed was one of the most beautiful
girls I have ever seen. It was a truly memorable afternoon. This is really
the end of the story of the trunk, with the coming together of a family –
like so many other families – ripped apart by war and conflict.
As Kate and I walked into that restaurant, we experienced one of the great
mysteries of life: the mystery of community, of family, of tribe.
© Helen Mirren 2008
Extracted from In the Frame by Helen Mirren, to be published by Orion
Publishing on October 2 at £12.99. Copies can be ordered for £11.69,
including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
