Train-robbery

On my journeys to and from the Orkney islands by train and ferry I finished my books and then got writers' block; but anything can be produced artificially in the 21st century and that includes inspiration. First I chose my theme: train-robbery (the first thing that came to mind as something that could have enlivened my surroundings). Then I wrote a list of characters, roles, events, plot-twists, and other things of that nature, and gave them all sorts of designations – one, two, a, b, up, down, sideways, that sort of thing. Then I made little papers chits bearing the same symbols. Finally I sneezed on the whole assembly. The result: P.G Wodehouse meets The White Guard. The story so far is below: more to follow. For once I have actually come up with an ending and, what's more, written it. It's just the in-the-middle bits left to sort out.

(Yes I reused the bit about Autumn and mortality from 'Meanwhile, in the 1930s...'. I have to eat, you know.)


It was mid-afternoon on a pleasant estate in southeastern Ukraine, at the end of the long, troubled final summer of the Russian aristocracy. Autumn had arrived, bringing with it a revolution of such world-changing proportions that even the venerable landscaped woodlands had broken out in Bolshevik red and gold. This, combined with the birds singing elegies and the greatly exaggerated slowness with which petals fell from the dying flowers, made it clear to anyone with any knowledge of the Russian climate that a revolutionary front was incoming.

In the parlour of the manor-house it was afternoon tea. The beautiful young duchess (if you are young and a duchess beauty takes care of itself) Zina Panina, who had come into the ownership when Colonel Panin died in '17 of a venereal disease complicated by German shellfire, stared glumly out of the window at the insurgent forest.

On the one hand, of course, she was in favour of revolution as a necessary antidote to the sheer banality of everything, and the bloodier the better. The Bolsheviks only had their social theories to tell them that the upper classes should be shot and deprived of civil rights; she actually knew them. But on the other... well... a few years ago it had meant something to be a modernist poetess, famous bisexual, and semi-professional subject of scandal. (Zina was a well-educated, independent-minded woman and would never consent to be the direct or indirect object of anything.)

The other problem with the revolution was the deluge of Moscow refugees. Their factories, their diamonds, their command of Russian history they had all left to Comrade Lenin; but they had been sure to take their banality with them to Ukraine. Take her aunt Sofia, who knew as much about poetry as she did about bisexuality: that they were both probably virulent rashes of some kind. She was, as usual, asking the most ghastly questions.

'I meantersay, under Comrade Trotsky, who will serve the tea? Speaking of which... thankyou, Fedya.' Fedya, the aged, serf-born family retainer, had been a model of loyalty in every year which didn't have a social revolution (isn't statistical analysis a bitch?). Now he regarded his mistress with a look suggesting that it could well be her.

Zina turned away from the window and set down her teacup with a sound like the champing of teeth. 'Auntie. We are privileged to witness the emergence of the blazing red phoenix of chaos and change from the ashes of the old world. Can you not take your mind off the tea?'

Fedya and Sofia, united for once, gave her a look suggesting that it was very easy for a person with a cup of tea in hand to say this. The silence was broken by Bondaruk the village school-master. 'Ah, but it's all about who serves the tea and so on, isn't it? Marxism, I mean.'

'Marx!' Zina waved her hand, as if wiping away the forces of historical inevitability in exasperation. 'Marx no more leads the Reds than St. George leads the Whites. It is the end for all bearded prophets. That's the whole aesthetic merit of the revolution.'

'...Lenin's got a beard, doesn't he?'

'Auntie.'

'She's right, you know,' said Bondaruk. 'And Trotsky.'

'And Denikin,' said Father Grigoriy, who had been hurt by the dismissal of bearded prophets. He, too, needed to eat, after all.

'Kolchak was clean-shaven.'

'Is Kolchak dead?'

'Did Petlyura have a beard?'

'Is he dead?'

'You know, I always used to say the same thing to dear Vladimir when he was alive. Beards, I said-'

Zina put her head in her hands. Who knows what she would have done if not the the fortuitous bullet which at that moment shattered the window, smashed Father Grigoriy's teacup (had she been looking, Zina could have made rather a good poem out of the resulting black-and-white explosion; but she wasn't, and the old priest merely fainted), and buried itself in the stucco ceiling.

'Aw laun' tae the tylin masses!,' cried a voice from below in Ukrainian. (I have taken the liberty of a cultural-idiomatic translation.) 'Doun wi the pah-rasite explyter class!'

'What tiling masses?,' said Aunt Sofia. 'All the cottages round here are thatched. We can't keep that many tilers employed, surely.'

'Toiling, I think he was saying,' said Bondaruk discreetly: ten years spent trying to stop youngsters from speaking any Ukrainian in his classroom had given him a fair command of it.

Zina did not write in Ukrainian but had had a half-hearted affair or two with people who did, so it is probably just as well that she didn't hear this exchange. She was storming down to the garden; and it was a storm as portentous, as black and broiling and fertile with lightning-flashes, as that which had engulfed Russia generally at the start of the revolution. This really was too much.


To be continued! Thrill to tales of train-robbery! Gasp at the ruthlessness of psychotic White bandit Ataman Burbosh! Be flabbergasted by the cunning of People's Commissar Sholokhov! Witness Aunt Sofia confront and defeat the Red Army of Workers and Peasants! All this and more coming soon.