In the Park (Cecilia Peartree)

As I suppose is the case with many people at the time of writing this, my mind has been taken up with monitoring the news via various sources. There is only so much of the current news footage I can cope with at one time, and I don’t want to comment directly on what’s happening now. However, as I get older my mind tends to wander back to things I had almost forgotten about, and so the other day I found myself remembering a conversation I once had as a teenager in a park in Leningrad (St Petersburg).

I was fortunate enough, although perhaps that isn’t the right word for it, to be able to study Russian and German at school instead of the more usual French and/or Latin. I found Russian was much more difficult than German because of all the endings that had to be learnt, which in some cases replaced the need for definite and indefinite articles, and sometimes made prepositions redundant. However I did persevere with it for six years and almost went on to study it at university, but I had a last-minute change of mind and studied history instead.

One beneficial side-effect of learning Russian was that I became very interested in the literature, history and music of the country. As part of our studies we were forced to watch a really depressing black and white film, 'Destiny of a Man', which was only surpassed in misery by a tv serialisation of 'Jude the Obscure' that came out at around the same time. However, even now Chekhov is one of my favourite playwrights and despite not being very good at understanding symbolism in general I often find the symbolism in some of his plays, particularly ‘Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard’, very relevant to real-life situations.

A year or two later than the conversation in the park incident, I surprised – and very much upset - my Russian teacher by writing an essay about the country’s history which I concluded by saying I thought Russia was doomed always to be ruled by dictators. (He wasn’t convinced by that argument and for a while during the glasnost and perestroika years I felt I must have been wrong too.)

Anyway, another beneficial side-effect of my learning Russian was that my parents took the family on a Baltic cruise in 1963 because it called at Leningrad, among other places, and they wanted to give me a chance to practise my newly acquired language skills. We wouldn’t normally have been able to go on a cruise but they had discovered that a school cruise ship was due to leave from Dundee, easily accessible from where we lived, and that as well as space for the school parties on board there were cabins for extra passengers. The ship was due to spend three days docked in Leningrad, and my mother and I were booked on an overnight train to Moscow to spend the middle day there, which was an optional and very exciting extra.

We got a huge welcome to Leningrad with bands and speeches on the quayside. Apparently our cruise ship was the first one to call there, probably not for ever, but for a long time. On the first day we were taken round the main sights by a guide and then let loose for a time around the shops and so on. A bit unnervingly, some of the kids from the school parties asked me to interpret for them in a record shop after hearing me speak a bit of Russian to ask for ‘Midnight in Moscow’, a Russian song for which there was an instrumental version in the British charts at the time, played by Kenny Ball’s jazz band.

We escaped into a small park (not the one shown here!) after this to recover, and I fell into conversation with an old man who was sitting there. He turned out to be a Ukrainian. At first I tried to speak to him in Russian but I quickly got the idea he wasn’t very keen on that, although it might just have been because I wasn’t speaking it very well and he couldn’t understand me! We continued the conversation mostly in German, and although it’s so long ago now that I can’t recall exactly what we said to each other, I definitely got the idea he would prefer to be thought of as Ukrainian rather than Russian. As a teenager, even one who was interested in history, I didn’t know enough about the background to understand it, but the encounter, and his insistence he was Ukrainian, has always stuck in my mind.

Getting the chance to speak to a random stranger like this was not what we might have expected from a trip to the USSR in those days, so in a way it illustrated the fact that has become so much more apparent with all the social media options we have now, which is that it’s almost impossible to police all interactions between people, no matter how strictly controlled by the government of the day and no matter what the language barriers might be. And perhaps it also lends some weight to my long-held view that people are people, wherever you go.