From Newbury with love
by Anna Horsbrugh-Porter
In 1971, a lonely young mother and her little daughter arrived home at their flat in the cold war Soviet Union – and found a bright postcard in the letter box. It contained birthday greetings, and was signed "with love from newbury, berkshire, england". So began a 15-year friendship, a shaft of light and hope piercing the iron curtain.
Four years ago I was sitting at my desk in Sri Lanka when I opened an email with an unfamiliar address. It was from Amanda Gray, an old family friend, who wanted to know if I could help turn a vast collection of letters, postcards and photographs into a book. These, she explained, were the fruits of a 15-yearlong correspondence between her parents and a family from Kishinev, Moldova.
It all started in 1971, when Amnesty International launched a campaign to get members writing to the families of Soviet political prisoners. Harold Edwards, a 71-year-old bookseller from Newbury, read about the campaign in Amnesty International's journal and noticed that one child, eight-year-old Marina Aidova, had a birthday just a day earlier than his. (Marina's father, Slava, had been imprisoned for attempting to set up an illegal printing press). So - despite an age gap of 63 years - Harold decided to write to Marina. He and his wife sent a postcard which simply said "With Love from Newbury, Berks, England. Harold and Olive".
The postcard reached Kishinev in early June 1971. Little did Harold know it, but Marina's mother Lera was on hunger strike at the time, physically and emotionally extremely frail. Afterwards she and Marina described the arrival of that first card as being "like a miracle". Never again were they to feel so isolated.
As I read Amanda's email on that hot tropical day on my Indian Ocean island, the world of Soviet prison camps and guard dogs, freezing winters and KGB searches seemed very remote. But Amanda had also sent an attachment containing all Harold and Olive's letters. In addition, I found notes from the now-adult Marina - her memories of growing up with a father in the gulag for 'anti-Soviet propaganda'; her family ostracised. I was intrigued.
The next day I printed out the entire bundle and read it obsessively, lying on our bed with my two-week old son asleep beside me. The letters painted a vivid picture of Harold and Olive - their jobs as antiquarian booksellers, their views on Russian literature, their Newbury garden, their cats. They never failed to be supportive to Marina and her mother Lera, gently asking questions about their circumstances and offering to send books and clothes.
The more the years passed and the relationship grew, the more compelling the letters became. Harold and Olive seemed so humane, loving and generous in the face of real misery and the arbitrary cruelty of totalitarianism. But was my reaction just a case of nostalgia on my part, living as I was so far from home? I gave the manuscript to a Sri Lankan Muslim friend of mine for an objective reaction. She, too, was transported.
And so - with Marina's help - I agreed to edit the letters. As a result, on my next visit to England, I found myself at Amanda's house, sifting through two enormous boxes containing the other half of the correspondence - everything ever sent to Harold and Olive by the Aidov family, all meticulously preserved in their original envelopes. There were photographs, too, mostly in black-andwhite: a young girl in a ballet costume performing an arabesque in a cramped apartment, a beautiful, smiling young woman walking along a street holding hands with a handsome man. That same man, older now and with a beard, staring at the camera with a haunted expression, gaunt against a stark black background.
It was too precious a horde to risk taking back to Sri Lanka. Instead, I spent hours in a local library, carefully unfolding the tissue-like sheets of writing paper and pressing them gently onto a photocopier, terrifi ed of tearing them.
Back in Colombo, I began the job of transcribing these hundreds of densely-written, photocopied sheets and matching them to Harold and Olive's correspondence. Now the friends' lives really came into view - Lera's joy after her husband Slava's release, her worries about his ability to cope with life back in Kishinev, their constant house searches and surveillance, and in return Harold and Olive's unwavering concern and practical help. The friends had discussions which went on for years, too. Often these were about books - sometimes the same books - and intellectual debates, which rose above the diffi culties of their lives. The correspondence fi nally ended in 1981 with the death of Harold and Olive.
In July 2004, with the manuscript fi nished, my family moved back to London. I wrote to Amnesty International. In its archives we found old and faint microfi lm of Marina's letters, sent by Harold to Amnesty in the 1970s. I also saw Slava's Amnesty case file; his history as a political prisoner and conditions in the jail all carefully documented from what could be gleaned from information leaked out by dissident organisations. It was an extraordinary feeling; here, 35 years later, documents had survived about one individual amongst the millions who had disappeared or been imprisoned in the vast political machine of the Soviet Union.
It was a powerful endorsement of what I'd learned from editing all those letters: that the lives of individuals and what happens to them still matters. And it reinforced what Harold and Olive, Slava, Lera and Marina had spelled out all those years ago: making sure a story is heard and preserved is the only way to counter political regimes whose aims are to wipe out individuality by repression. As Lera Aidov put it: "It is difficult to explain how greatly our life changed after that fi rst post card. I never felt lonely any more... Harold and Olive's letters changed my life - they gave me hope."
Amnesty Magazine, September/October 2006
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