In 1914 Mary was twenty-four. She signed up as a Red Cross nurse with the Sisters of Mercy and went at once to the West Prussian front. A baptism of fire. She describes her first patients – a German with his liver shot to pieces, a Caucasian with an amputated leg – and the brisk comment of the head doctor: ‘If all the nurses are going to weep like this over every death-case, we shall all be drowned.’ Later, she sees a battlefield with frozen Russian bodies with their boots expediently stolen: ‘Fieldmice had made a nest in the head of one.’ Near Warsaw, the hospital occupied Teresino Palace, the country seat of a Polish prince, where she nursed an endless stream of gangrenous wounded in panelled rooms hung with tapestries. A gas attack nearby left the 21st Siberian Regiment almost wiped out and the nurses trying to work in a field strewn with men ‘lying motionless in orderly rows as far as the eye could reach… Their upturned faces terribly swollen and livid… their bloodshot eyes protruding, unable to utter a word, yet fully conscious.’
In the midst of this carnage, her own future was determined. In 1916, she became engaged to the briskly spoken head doctor. Alexander Britneff was twenty years her senior, himself the son of an army doctor who had been Physician-in-Ordinary to Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna (wife of Emperor Alexander III). The Britneffs were married in early 1918. The Tsar had abdicated the previous year (and would be executed in July 1918) and ‘these new-fangled persons who called themselves Bolsheviks’ had seized power. It is apparent that Mary was entirely unpolitical. She had been growing up amid the unrest and discontent of the pre-revolutionary period, but the events of 1917 seem to have ambushed her. Now back in Petrograd, the couple were pitched from the horrors of the war to the absolute precariousness of life under Bolshevik rule. Wholesale arrests were common – ‘complete trams were being stopped suddenly and all the passengers would be marched off like sheep to the Cheka [secret police] headquarters, to be sorted, like sheep again, and as inexplicably released a few days later, unless they were detained, in which case they were never heard of again.’
The Bucknall family was still in Petrograd. Their home became a centre for assembling food parcels to be sent to prisoners in the Peter and Paul fortress, where foreigners arrested by the Bolsheviks were incarcerated. One of Mary's brothers was in there, receiving messages and money from his wife, ingeniously smuggled by prising up the metal sardine clamped to the top of Amieux Fréres sardine tins. The prisoners were crammed twenty to a cell designed for one and even included the British Consul at one point. Young Bucknall was released after thirteen weeks, but the family now realized that they must leave. The Consul arranged for Charles Bucknall and his youngest daughter to leave with the consular party, with the rest of the family due to follow as soon as they could arrange for the disposal of their possessions.
Except for Mary, who elected to stay with her husband. And so was plunged now into the perils and privations of the Civil War, the famine and the years of the Terror. Alexander Britneff was mobilized by the Red Army and ordered to form the First Red Army Surgical Hospital and take it to the front. The prospect of serving under the Bolsheviks was deeply repugnant to him, but he took the view that it was his duty as a doctor to alleviate suffering, whatever the circumstances.
Mary went with him. For the next year or so they moved around Russia in hospital trains, accommodated sometimes in cattle trucks that were marooned in heavy snows. Mary became pregnant. Extraordinarily, she writes, ‘I was feeling wonderfully fit and well and thoroughly enjoyed the strange wandering throughout Russia, in spite of the rough surroundings and conditions.’ And it may indeed have been preferable to the preceding months in Petrograd, already hit by famine, with cats and dogs slaughtered to be sold in the markets and ‘decently clad men and women with grey, hollowed cheeks and great burning eyes’.
But the respite was not to last. In 1919 the couple were back in Petrograd, where Tsapik was born. When Alexander Britneff returned to the front his wife and baby son remained in the city, where they were to endure the conditions brought about by the Civil War and ensuing chaos. During her travels with the hospital unit Mary had seen the pathetic fall-out from the Great War, the Revolution and the Civil War – the ‘waifs’, the bezprizorniye: ‘In droves they moved over the face of Russia, following the sun and the rumours of food.’ Now, in her own home town, she herself lived with this stark deprivation in full view.
The Bolshevik control of the food supply was absolute. Rations were divided into three categories, with Red Army soldiers, bureaucrats and vital workers receiving the highest order, other workers the second (which was less than adequate) and burzhoois getting the entirely inadequate third category. The fatally bourgeois Britneffs and their like would have got that, described by Zinoviev as ‘just enough bread not to forget the smell of it’. For anything else they had to scavenge or negotiate. Mary gives an account of the barter system that sprang up – the meshetchniki, bag carriers who would collect clothes and household articles to take to outlying villages which they would trade with the peasants for flour, cereals, meat and eggs. It was not permitted for peasants to bring food to sell within the city: the vacuum was thus created into which stepped this army of entrepreneurs, many of whom could not be trusted. Housewives stripped themselves of their possessions for a scraggy chicken or a bag of flour.
Over 5 million people died of starvation during those fearful years. Those who survived – and those who didn't – ate rats, mice, grass and weeds. They made flour from acorns, sawdust, clay and horse manure. In some appalling circumstances they ate each other; cannibalism was a grim fact of the famine.
By 1922 it had become clear to both Mary Britnieva and her husband that she must leave Russia. She now had a second child, Maria. Both children were severely undernourished and developing rickets. Mary negotiated for permission to leave; after five months' delay she was examined by a committee of doctors presided over by a commissar and pronounced 80 per cent invalid – sufficient disability, it seems, to warrant application for a passport. When at last Mary arrived in England and was reunited with her parents, the thirteen-month-old Maria weighed only twelve pounds.
For the next few years Alexander Britneff maintained precarious communications with his wife. She had been allowed out only because of her dual nationality. He himself was quite unable to escape. And he was a suspect figure, because of having been doctor to the British Consul in Leningrad (as the city became in 1924). The Bolsheviks were paranoiac about foreign spies, convinced that the regime was encircled by enemies against whom there must be constant vigilance, both internal and external. Just as Britneff had managed to secure himself a job as ship's doctor on a steamer plying the Baltic and calling in at London (where Mary was), he was arrested. He failed to arrive as expected. Mary learned what had happened, and promptly boarded the ship herself to go back to Leningrad and plead his case. She was told he was a British spy and would probably go to Siberia. She seems to have been preparing to follow him there when he was suddenly released, in one of those inexplicable moves so typical of the regime.
The game of cat and mouse continued for Alexander Britneff for another six years. During that time Mary returned to England – torn between husband and children – and then came back once more to the Soviet Union. While she was there her husband wangled the job of ship's doctor again, as a way to make trips to London to visit the children, being cared for by their grandparents. His wife's presence in the Soviet Union would ensure that he did not jump ship. Eventually she could not bear the separation from the children and went back to London where, in 1930, Mary heard that Alexander had been arrested once more.
Back she went to Leningrad, to lay siege to the O GPU offices (successor to the Cheka), begging for information. For two months she was turned away each time she presented herself, then told that she would have to go to Moscow to find out what her husband's sentence might be. Weeks more of stalling and excuses in Moscow, only for an official to announce at last that the file had never left Leningrad. The official ad
ded an ominous coda: ‘Citizen, though I have told you to hurry back, you had better not be too hopeful. You may be too late. Perhaps several months too late.’
Alexander Britneff had been killed by the Bolsheviks soon after his wife arrived in Leningrad on her determined quest. A spy in the pay of the British Government – that was the charge. Many years later the Foreign Office obtained his death certificate for her from the secret archives of the Leningrad OGPU.
Mary Britnieva's two books are anecdotal, emotional, vivid and sometimes confusing. The second repeats with minor differences some of the principal events of the earlier book. She relates entire conversations, with apparent total recall, as though the hurtling events of that time had compacted within her mind into a continuous echoing present. In that sense they are a potent reflection of an extraordinary experience. I think of her sitting in the eventless tranquillity of Golsoncott, getting it all down, carrying in her head another world. One embarrassing product of her success as an author, after the translation into German of One Woman's Story, was the award of a literary prize by the Führer in 1938. It seems unlikely that Hitler actually read the book, but the German title (The Sun Sank in the East) and its indictment of the Soviet regime would have appealed to his advisers. Mary went to Berlin to receive the award from the Führer himself, in what now seems a rather unconsidered move.
Poor little rickety Maria blossomed nicely in England as a child ballerina and did a short stint with the visiting Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo under the direction of Massine. In later life she became an actress, married a lord and, in a further bizarre intersection of trajectories, formed an intense friendship with Tennessee Williams, managing his literary estate after his death and ferociously defending his interests and reputation.
Tsapik served with the British Army during the Second World War and fought at Arnhem. The third child in the photograph, Sandra, Mary Britnieva's niece, died in youth. Tsapik's son Anthony Britneff, my aunt Rachel's godson, was a frequent visitor to Golsoncott. He now lives in British Columbia and has provided further material on his family's traumatic history.
In 1941 my grandmother still rented a beach hut at Blue Anchor, near Watchet. That strip of coast had always been – and still is – a favoured place for family outings: the Blue Lias cliffs with their seams of pink and grey alabaster, the pebbled shore with its treasure trove of fossils, the melting grey-brown distances of the Bristol Channel. A photograph taken in that year shows a boy standing on the shingle. He wears grey flannel trousers and tweed jacket; he is smiling. This is Otto Kun, born in Vienna in 1924.
Otto came to England at the end of June 1939, at the age of fifteen. His parents had died when he was younger and he was cared for by his grandmother. After Kristallnacht (when he was rounded up by the storm troopers but later released) she made strenuous efforts to get the boy out of the country, finally securing an Agricultural Trainee Permit for entry to England. Thus Otto turned up at Toynbee Hall in Stepney, which seems to have served as a clearing station for such arrivals. And thus he came into the ambit of my aunt Rachel, in her capacity as a voluntary helper. She swept him off to Somerset, along with another lad, in ‘a dark green Rover 14 saloon with beautiful green leather upholstery’. The precision of Otto's memory can be relied on (and it proved useful in later life). Even amid the trauma of that time he was alert to the details of a car; his interest heralds his eventual flourishing career in industry.
Otto was not a part of the Kindertransport – the children's transports – but his experience runs parallel to that of the 10,000 children from Nazi-dominated Europe who were. He went to work on a farm near Wiveliscombe where conditions were much as they might have been a couple of hundred years before: ‘The slatted wooden door led into what appeared to be the only downstairs room with a huge inglenook fireplace… Water was taken from a well, cooking was done in [the] fireplace with utensils… placed on irons hanging from the chimney over large bundles of twigs brought in from outside… All the water was boiled in a black kettle hung on a hook in the chimney and when we bathed… water was heated in large pots in the fireplace.’ The boy from an apartment block in Vienna seems to have settled in gamely, but within weeks he suffered a hernia from heaving sheep into the sheep dip and had to go to Minehead hospital.
That was the end of his agricultural trainee experience. When he was discharged Rachel brought him to Golsoncott to convalesce. He then stayed on for a year or so as a kind of general help and handyman, sleeping in a room above the stables, playing the piano in the old nursery, reading back-numbers of Punch. Many years later, he provided in his unpublished memoir a fascinating eyewitness account of the household with much of its pre-war infrastructure and ritual still intact.
Then Rachel stepped in again. After leaving school at fourteen, Otto had been apprenticed to a stationery factory back in Vienna. My aunt clearly felt that thought should be given to his long-term future – he was now seventeen – and arranged for him to work as a mill hand down at the paper mill in Watchet.
The small Bristol Channel port has been a centre of industry for a thousand years and more: lime kilns, cloth manufacture, foundries, shipbuilding, rope-making, a flour mill and, since the seventeenth century, the paper mill in which Otto now found himself. The key to Watchet's industrial energy was of course its harbour and its prime site with access to the Bristol Channel shipping routes and the coast of South Wales. Its most thriving years were in the late nineteenth century, when iron-ore mining up on the Brendons was at its peak, with the ore being carried down to Watchet by the mineral line for shipment to the South Wales foundries. But the paper mill too was vitally linked to the port, with freighters bringing pulp from Sweden and coal from Wales and the paper itself being exported by ship. Otto worked eight-hour shifts in one of the several teams overseeing the transformation of huge tubs of slurry into pulp which travelled on belts over steam drying drums, and eventually rolled off as kraft paper.
There he stayed until March 1942 when he achieved his ambition. He joined the British Army, enlisting at Taunton in the Pioneer Corps at the age of eighteen and a half.
Behind this climactic moment in one young life lies the whole confused and complex story of Britain's reception and treatment of so-called ‘aliens’ in the early years of the war. Otto himself had escaped internment while he was at Golsoncott. In May 1940 the mass internment of Austrian and German refugees began. The initial targets were all males between sixteen and sixty within the southern and eastern coastal belts. Otto, at just sixteen, was technically a potential fifth columnist. In the event, he was put under the supervision of the local constable in Washford, Mr Fish, to whom he had to report regularly. Otto's own explanation of this deft circumvention of the official requirements is that a few quiet words passed between my grandmother and a friend and neighbour of hers who was a local Justice of the Peace. Very likely. As things turned out, Constable Fish and his charge struck up a happy relationship: the policeman was a radio ham with short-wave equipment which he enjoyed demonstrating when Otto reported in. The War Office would have had a fit.
It is one of the oddities of the whole internment process that the War Office was responsible for general internment while the Home Office was responsible for women internees – who were not rounded up until the second wave of internment fever later in 1940. Well before that, Austrian and German refugees had all been classified as enemy aliens and obliged to go before tribunals which sorted them into categories. Those arousing suspicions were placed in Category A, and could be interned. Those considered no risk to national security were assigned to Category C and exempted from restrictions. Refugees not falling into either of these categories – those without the credentials to win them freedom from restrictions but who did not arouse serious doubts – were put into the intermediate Category B, and forbidden to travel more than five miles without police permission.
But the mass internment of the summer of 1940 brushed aside these categories. To be male and of a certain age was enough.
The catalyst for this undiscriminating treatment of people, many of whom were themselves victims of the Nazis, was of course the German advance of May and June 1940 and in particular the stories coming out of occupied Holland – the rumours of a Fifth Column already in place, the guerrillas and saboteurs waiting to expedite the invasion. The War Office looked at Britain's refugee population and saw a potential parallel. Public paranoia was whipped up by some sections of the press: ‘Intern the lot!’ was the cry.
The authorities decided to do precisely that. Contemporary accounts all indicate a headlong and precipitate process. Those who were rounded up felt that they were being unceremoniously hustled out of the way. The sweeps could be as disconcerting as those in a police state. Detectives walked into Hampstead Public Library and announced that all Germans and Austrians present were being taken into custody there and then. Some of the most brutally arbitrary round-ups took place in Whitechapel, Shadwell and Stepney, where East End Jews were taken off to Brixton prison – many of them elderly men who had not been out of London for twenty years. Dr Mallon, the Warden of Toynbee Hall, protested in a letter to The Times at this indiscriminate treatment of ‘obscure and helpless men about whom the synagogue and their neighbours know all that can be known… Surely in the interests of sanity and humanity and the national cause the government will intervene.’ A peculiarly distasteful corollary to this episode is that some of the men detained in Brixton prison found themselves cheek by jowl with another category of local detainees, British fascists and Nazi sympathizers, who seized on the opportunity for systematic Jew-baiting – kicking and abuse – whenever the prison officers were out of sight.
Most of the internees were sent to the several camps set up for the purpose, of which that on the Isle of Man was the largest. Conditions in all the camps were cramped and uncomfortable, with a lack of any but minimal communication with family and friends a particular deprivation. In this climate, rumours abounded and depression was prevalent. That said, there is evidence also of an abounding spirit of self-help and improvisation. In some instances ‘People's Universities’ sprang up, with refugee academics offering classes and lectures. And, famously, three members of the Amadeus Quartet first met in the Isle of Man camp and took advantage of the opportunity to plan and rehearse.