From Petrograd to

Paris – it’s the word on everyone’s lips this week, for all the wrong reasons.

Meanwhile, back to Russia, which has long held a bit of fascination for me.  It’s a subject that is widely represented on the bookshelves, though other than an all-too-brief long weekend near 20 years ago, remains to be explored.  Anyone wishing to contribute to a Trans-Sib trip with a week in a shed on the shores of Baikal do please get in touch.

The Russian reading shelves cover a wide variety, from factual accounts of the Gulags, to searches for the remains of the Romanovs; historical and modern; travelogues from the arctic wastes, or by troikas on roads of bones.

So when this book appeared on the shelves of Atkinson-Pryce on recent visit, it seemed to have my name on it.  A number of my other volumes on Russia have been published in translation, but this is the first translated from Welsh, and not the last.  For Petrograd is the first in a trilogy, and I’m hoping that the next two instalments will also appear in English in due course.

William Owen Roberts takes us to Petrograd, in the years before the Revolution, a century ago.  He takes us through the next turbulent years, through the fortunes and fates of a family from what I know today as St Petersburg.

The war years take their toll, and then we have the Reds and the Whites, and carnage all around.  Russia will never be the same again.  Families are torn asunder.  People struggle to survive, in whatever way they can.

This is a terrific story, one of my reads of the year, and no doubt one of the few works of fiction that will appear on that list.  A bit of historic fiction, built round factual events, is something that always draws me in, especially if set in a favoured place, a fascinating time.  Roberts pulls it off brilliantly.

I look forward to the next instalment, which was published in Welsh in 2013.  The third in the series is expected to hit the shelves in 2017.  Given that this volume appeared in 2008 it may be a while before Elisabeth Roberts completes her brilliant translations of the next instalments.  Published by Parthian, with help from Literature Wales, which minds me of old chums…

Oh, the second in the series, is Paris, and for the family connections to that fine city, you’d be best just reading this one.  It’s great.

 

Notes From The West Bank

It was one of those days; wild, windswept and very wet.  The soup pot for the week ahead had been filled, bread cooling from the oven; and there was a rose-petal & sumac-encrusted leg of lamb demanding that some fresh air and exercise aid the digestion.  It was the sort of day when will-power was needed every bit as much as the wellies and waterproof trews.  I recalled a walk made not long ago, and a promise to return, when the water levels were higher, and on the opposite bank.  So off I went.

Parking the car at West Lodge, a couple of miles outside Kirkfieldbank, I headed into the woods, leaving behind the buffeting wind.  Calm descended as I plashed through the puddles.  As the noise of the winds receded so a distant thunder grew.  The water levels had risen.

The path took me past the remnants of Corra Castle, which dated back to mid 14th century and itself had some tales to tell.  The remaining walls rose atop a sheer cliff, way above the river below; just the sort of place Stoker may have had in mind.  Young Martha Bannatyne, after the greatest wedding that ever took place in Lesmahagow and five days of feasting by the Clyde, raised the drawbridge, imprisoning her lover who had been intent on joining Charles II and his advance on England.  I can’t imagine he complained, too much.  That was back in 1651.

Since then many others had walked this path.  In the days when Wordsworth penned some doggerel – In Cora’s glen the calm how deep/That trees on loftiest hill/Like statues stand, or things asleep/All motionless and still. – the water surpassed what I saw even on this drenched day.  For the current is harnessed now for hydro, and no longer is it Scotland’s Smoke That Thunders but a few miles from Livingstone’s birthplace.

The river drops 100ft, in three stages; but it is the sheer cliff face, rising a further 130ft above the waters that close in, sheltering the glen from the tempest raging above.  Coleridge visited, as did Scott; Turner painted, Jacob More too.

There is a new viewpoint below the falls on the west bank, at a much lower height than that well-tramped path opposite.  A copper carpet led me there, and as I turned and headed back up the hill, through the woods to falls at Bonnington Linn, so it became bronze, then  golden, as the oak and then the sycamore replaced the beech of the lower levels.

The paths were silent, and at intervals three dogs walked their keepers in the wet.  An ancient lab toted a stick the width of the path and I stepped aside as she shuffled onwards.

The falls at Bonnington thunder down ledges, draping dark cliffs in mist; twin falls, creating a tree-crowned island.  From there I took the upper path, circling back to the lodge and a warm flask.  The last rays of the first sun of the day filtered through the trees and the  sky turned from pewter to match those beech-carpeted paths below.

If there is a better wee woodland walk in Lanarkshire I really would like to hear about it.