I have been thinking about Sir Ronald Syme (1903-89). He was one of the great historians of ancient Rome and an outstanding practitioner of prosopography: the collective study of multiple lives in order to explain the structures of politics and society. It appeals to me as a historical method, but this is not why I've been thinking about Syme. I've been thinking about him because he was my grandmother's lover.
My mother has been reminiscing about her mother-in-law, Larissa Childs, née Chumakoff. Born in 1903, ‘Lara' was the daughter of a Russian railway boss. ‘After the age of 11 all that interested me was the war and later the Revolution', she wrote to her son, my father, in the only letter of hers that I thought had survived. Her family fought the Bolsheviks, but were driven out in 1920. Retreating south, Lara was seen by her future husband Stephen Childs at a railway siding. She was wrapped in furs, holding a kettle over a spirit lamp. It was a ‘coup de foudre', he wrote (as Stephen Lawford) in his 1935 memoir Youth Uncharted.
It always sounded terribly romantic to me, as did tales of Lara hiding jewels in loaves of bread and nursing casualties in the boat from Odessa. But it also sounded like a White Russian trope, one of those stories perhaps better cherished as a granddaughter than scrutinised as a historian.
I've spent years trying to find the smallest details about Elizabethan recusants and 17th-century cavaliers, but I've resisted my own family history: if I could speak Russian, I tell myself, or if my father were still alive, or Uncle Vanya, or anyone who might remember Lara. Really, though, I'm wary of shattering the Pasternakian love story presented by Stephen and his sons. ‘There is the tendency to embroider the fading fabric of the past', he wrote. Uncle Vanya told fabulous stories, beginning with his birth on the Orient Express, but I'm afraid I didn't credit his suspicions of foul play regarding Stephen's death in a plane crash in 1943.
Now I'm wondering if I've been too cynical: about particular relations and the oral tradition generally. Words like ‘parochial' and ‘anecdote' seem designed to be said with a sneer. Occasionally, however, new sources emerge to reset and revivify the disjointed memories of our elders.
It is easy enough to trace Stephen Childs to the League of Nations – via Istanbul, Buenos Aires and Belgrade – and to Foreign Office placements in Paris, Washington and New York, where the philosopher Isaiah Berlin had the evident displeasure of working for him. But it is Lara's story to which I am drawn. She died in 1974 and her death certificate states that she was a ‘Researcher (Russian Section) Foreign Office (retired)'.
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