It’s a sunny day. We are going to have three more days like this. Gosh, our summer. Four days in a row. How lovely it would be to live in a country that had months of beautiful weather, mind you, Spain is 40° I would seriously melt. But to know that for the next few months, even weeks is going to be lovely weather you can plan things. We, could have rain in a few days, strong winds that are cold too.
When I used to go to Moscow, in the winters it was bitterly cold like nothing I have ever known in England. A different kind of cold though, dry. Whereas our winters are damp. There was little wind in Moscow very still thick snow which used to add to the atmosphere of the secrecy that used to be a daily occurrence back then. If I ever saw a man in a fur hat accompanied by a long leather coat, I knew they were KGB. They had something about them just to look at them you knew. Their expression their steely stare, which left you shivering, wondering what was about to happen.
As I used to stand at the top of Lenin’s hills, looking down past the ski lift, you just knew that you were being watched. Now whether it was because at the time I had high profile and they knew the world was watching me through the press, I don’t know, but I suspect that everyone in those days was being watched.
I have written before about when we used to enter any public building, we would be expected to remove our coats. We would be given a large plastic number to carry with us until we were ready to vacate the building, then handed over the number for our coats in return with a solemn look from the porter who wore a dark uniform with yellow stripes. Usually ex-army. Sometimes you got the ladies, who were not always, well, ladies. We always got our coats back though. Smile.
In the summer, it was a total different ambience. I loved Moscow in the summer. It was always really sunny. In public parks, people played with their families and in general the joys of summer came to most as a great relief after such harsh winters.
People went to their Dacha’s in the countryside. Often a wooden shack basically. Where the tap, a, tap, was outside in the garden and the toilet a bucket with a wooden seat was at the bottom of the garden in a hut that you got to by climbing up steps… I naively asked one day why did they have to have steps to the building? Of course, it was so the toilet could work as best as possible. Pretty grim really no sink or water to wash your hands in and certainly no plush toilet paper. I can only describe the toilet paper in those days as the equivalent to greaseproof paper on a roll.
But they were good days. Simple and everyone was so friendly, the normal people anyway, even one year though back in winter, I went skiing with a really sweet friendly man. He was a friend of a friend. It was later after he took me as a ten-year-old child, to the Moscow children’s puppet theatre and though I had been many times before, this time was to be extra special. I was to operate one of the puppets the lion. It was a live show, I didn’t have a clue what to do. The staff didn’t speak English. My Russian was fine, if I wanted to order food, drinks at the coffee bar or tell the taxi driver where we needed to be, and extra brilliant Russian when I was telling my nurse at the hospital I didn’t want her nasty needles and basically where she could stick them… But as far as a children’s puppet show? Instructions were given to me and I did panic. What if I were to get this wrong, you didn’t do wrong in Russia. Also, the size of the puppets? Oh, my they were huge. Great big heavy sticks that you had to lift above your head.
It was an honour that day, and it was because of the friend of a friend. The nice man who took me skiing.
He was the boss of the KGB!
I almost died in fright when I learned of this. As did my Mum. But that explained why the puppet theatre was so different that day. The fear of being sent to Siberia was injected into my veins, little did I know just how much I would grow to hate that place some years later.
The summers in Russia were really lovely days I will never forget. I had the excruciating pain of the needles which were inserted into my flesh every day. My eyes were blood red with the painful pins that were far from sharp, so blunt it made the incisions more torturous. But after treatments it was free time, as free as one could be in Moscow in the 70s and 80s.
Time to spend with friends on the banks of the river Moscow, with open fires cooking shashlik! Sitting among grasses that hadn’t seen a grass cutter and being eaten alive by furry faced creatures. But we laughed. I loved it and felt surprisingly safe. They were dreaded days but followed by happy hours.
My summers now days are so very different. Winters too. In fact, my life now is so far from those days. Sometimes years can pass before you think back and realise just what a life you had. As a child, my life was so very different to my friends. I guess that lifestyle has made me the person I am now, but sometimes I do feel like I had to get to early forties before I realised just who I was. Who I am. Back then, I was not me, I was who people wanted me to be. I continued that way through my young adult life. The way I am now, is a good place to be. X
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