A few years ago, I was chatting to a friend with a passion for all things Russian. So I told her about my great-great-aunt who had lived in St Petersburg during the Russian Revolution. Oh, she said, one of my ancestors was there at that time too. Who was that, I asked. Arthur Ransome, she replied. He was a secret agent.
Fascinating. I wonder if they ever met, I said, as I tucked the thought away, a little switch jiggling in my brain, not enough to bring on the light, only enough to make it flicker.
And that, in a way, is the second story behind the story of my recently published historical novel (you can read the first story behind the story in last week’s newsletter, Lucy’s Secret Legacy).
A few months after this conversation, I was reading The Other Side of Silence, a spy novel by Philip Kerr, in which the writer Somerset Maugham makes an appearance. Maugham was a secret agent in St Petersburg during the revolution, Kerr mentions in passing.
Not another one! This time the light really comes on.
I rapidly discover that St Petersburg was a city of spies during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. The British were spying on the Russians and the Germans, the Germans were spying on the British and the Russians, and the Russians were spying on everyone. But it is the British spies who interest me.
Once you start looking, they come in thick and fast, these literary purveyors of secrets. Hugh Walpole, famous for his Herries Chronicles tetralogy set in the Lake District. But who also, it turned out, was in St Petersburg during the Russian Revolution running the propaganda unit for British intelligence; Robert Bruce Lockhart, prolific author of forgotten books and also a British secret agent in revolutionary Moscow.
When I started to look, I discovered they were everywhere, these English Edwardian writers who had been drawn to Imperial Russia like moths to a flame, some living there, some visiting but all of them dabbling in the secret world in one way or another.
Some of them you will know, such as John Buchan, author of The 39 Steps and also head of intelligence at the Ministry of Information during the First World War. So, if not a spy himself, then in charge of spies. It was a bit of a bonus to discover that he was also a friend of Princess Sophy Dolgorouky, the woman who employed my great-great-aunt as a governess. Buchan wrote the Introduction to the princess’s revolution memoir, The Way of Bitterness, in which he said that this book was ‘the most vivid picture I know of the chaos of Russia in 1920 – the hunger, the forced labour, the crumbling of all humanity’s foundations. …But the supreme merit of the book is the story – a story of heroism and fortitude which almost surpass belief.’
Then there is H G Wells, friend of Maxim Gorky, but who nevertheless had an affair with Gorky’s mistress, Moura Budberg, thought to be a double agent for the Russians and the British. It was a murky world. You couldn’t trust anyone with your secrets – or your women (or men in Walpole’s case).
But amongst this plethora of secret agents, it was the Ransome/Maugham moments that triggered my imagination, made me think of the ‘what ifs’. I could trace a direct link between Lucy and Buchan through Princess Sophy but what if there were others.
You can find out where that led in Know You Her Secret. Suffice to say, that by this point I saw Lucy King, my great-great-aunt, not merely as a governess to a Russian princess during the revolution – although that was exciting enough. I also saw her as a source of information for the British secret service.
As if I needed further encouragement, I could hardly believe it when reading Ashenden, one of Maugham’s spy stories, to discover that not only does he have a chapter headed Miss King (what a coincidence!) but his Miss King also turns out to be governess to a prince – a governess with secrets to tell.
‘… what dark secrets she must have known,’ writes Maugham. ‘…With her sharp eyes and sharp ears she must have had the chance to discover matters that were closely hidden from persons that seemed less insignificant.’
My Miss King, who I now think of as dear Lucy, is, of course, much nicer than Maugham’s Miss King but, all the same, I wonder what made Maugham hit on the name of Miss King for his governess spy.
And then there is Ransome, the most intriguing of all, who turns up in St Petersburg in the spring of 1914 researching a travel guide to the city which would, of course, include the royal palaces. It’s not much of a leap to imagine Lucy and Arthur, both with family roots in the north of England, meeting up and finding they have something in common.
A few months after Ransome’s arrival, Europe descends into a frenzy of death and destruction. Ransome becomes a war correspondent for a national newspaper, a job which fits in nicely with his other role working for British intelligence. He stays on in St Petersburg after the revolution, is accused of being both a Bolshevik and a traitor, and finally marries Trotsky’s secretary! If you thought that Arthur Ransome was just making up some of the adventures when he wrote Swallows and Amazons – think again.
By this point I have decided to take Somerset Maugham’s advice: ‘Fact is a poor story teller’ he wrote … ‘fiction should use life merely as raw material which it arranges in ingenious patterns.’ (Ashenden, 1928).
So that is how the seeds were sown for Know You Her Secret, my story of Lucy King’s life in war-torn revolutionary Russia.
Read The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers to find out about the real Ransome.
I’ve just started reading Know You Her Secret and finding the different threads fascinating