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Vladimir Michaelovitch Rogov, lieutenant in the victorious Russian Army, owed his life to his knowledge of English, which had kept him out of the front line as a fighting soldier and placed him on General Zhukov’s staff as a junior Intelligence Officer.

From babyhood to boyhood he had always spoken English at home with his mother and sister, though he spoke Russian with his friends at school. There was a time also, though now it was a dim memory of childhood, when he spoke English and did English lessons with Miss Smith who had been his governess, until she died of typhus during the bad days of the Civil War.

His mother never spoke good Russian. He and his sister Olga used to laugh at her for that.

“Mother, your Russian is terrible!” he said to her many times.

“I wish I didn’t know a word of it,” she answered once. “I wish I had never seen a Russian, or ever come to Russia.”

“Then you wouldn’t have met Papa,” he told her, “and Olga and I wouldn’t have been born.”

“Perhaps that would have been better for everyone,” she said, and that answer shocked him so that he always remembered it; and he remembered how, when she spoke those words, she burst into tears and her face was wet when he flung his arms about her and kissed her many times. That was when he was a boy of seven or eight living at Kazan on the Volga where his father was stationed in the barracks there. It was the time of the Famine.

He had vivid recollections of his childhood, and always they were dominated by his mother’s character and humour, and all the stories she told him and the books she read out to him. Olga, who was two years younger, missed some of that, and could not even remember Miss Smith, nor the time when their father was fighting against Denikin’s army, nor the days when they took to the roads and travelled in farm carts, and were very hungry.

His mother had funny little ways, and funny ideas. She had a private name for him when they were alone together. She never called him Vladimir, but always David. For a long time he thought it meant the same thing as darling or some other pet English word, but he realized it was a proper English name when she read out some chapters of David Copperfield—young David in the boot factory and his long walk to find his aunt.

“Is that why you call me David?” he asked. “After David Copperfield?”

“I expect so,” she answered. “I wanted to call you that when you were born but your father insisted on Vladimir. It would be ridiculous if I called you Vladdy.”

“It’s a perfectly good Russian name,” he said. “It’s a pity you hate everything Russian. Sometimes I think you hate Papa. I’ve heard you quarrelling with him.”

She gave him a queer startled look.

“Little pitchers have long ears,” she said. “When have you ever heard me quarrelling with your daddy, you little limb of Satan?”

“Last night,” he told her. “I was lying awake looking at the moon. Then you and Papa started talking in bed. You said you would never have married Papa if you had known that he would be an officer in the Red Army. You said he was serving the Devil. Papa laughed and said he was a soldier of the new Russia. Then you said that the Reds were all murderers and that the Soviet State was another name for hell. Then Papa got angry, and then I fell asleep.”

He couldn’t have been more than seven when that conversation happened and he remembered that his mother’s face became very white and her eyes looked frightened.

“David!” she said in a kind of whisper. “Don’t say such things to anybody else, will you? Promise me you will never tell anybody else what you think you heard last night. It was a dream really. You were dreaming, David. But if you told anybody your dream they would come and take me away from you. You wouldn’t like to lose your mother, would you? You couldn’t do without her, could you? David darling, don’t tell anybody what you were dreaming last night. Promise me! Promise me, David!”

“It wasn’t a dream,” he told her. “But I won’t tell anybody.”

“It’s one of our little secrets,” she went on. “You and I have lots of silly little secrets together, David. Like the fairy-tales I tell you. Like the funny games we have together. They belong to you and me, my sweet. Nobody else must share them, do you understand?”

He understood perfectly. Even then, in some way which he couldn’t put into words, he knew that it was dangerous to tell people about his mother, or about the things they did together, like reading English books. Life was dangerous, he knew, long before he was seven. Fire burnt one’s fingers. Children were lost in the snow and died like birds. Grown-up people were sometimes dangerous. If one said the wrong thing they killed one. Bugs and lice and fleas were dangerous. It was Miss Smith who told him that. They gave people dreadful diseases, she said. It was dangerous—though he didn’t know this until he was past babyhood—to be called by certain names in Russia, names of the old families who used to be rich in the days before the Revolution. They had to hide because of their names, and their hiding-places were nearly always found. Then they were shot by the Cheka. The Cheka had something to do with the police. People never spoke about it out loud. They whispered the word “Cheka,” looking over their shoulders, first one way and then the other. An uncle of his was shot because he had the wrong name, a young man he called Uncle Sacha, though he wasn’t really an uncle. It was when they were living for a time in Novgorod, before the Civil War had flowed that way. Uncle Sacha used to come and play games. He was very good at hide and seek in the garden and he used to throw up little Olga like a ball and catch her again. He was frightfully good pretending to be a bear or an elephant, or an ogre, so that Vladimir was sometimes afraid, even though he knew it was only Uncle Sacha. He was very fond of Vladimir’s mother, and always kissed her hand when he came and when he went. They used to laugh a lot together, except once when Vladimir found them weeping. That was when he said good-bye for a long time. Then he turned up again in Moscow a year afterwards, and played more games. He could speak English very well, unlike most Russians, and liked talking English to Vladimir’s mother who was always glad to see him, so that her eyes lighted up and a little rose-like colour came into her white face, as Vladimir noticed, small boy though he was. Then he disappeared and never came again.

“Where is Uncle Sacha?” asked Vladimir one day. “He never finished drawing me that picture of knights in armour.”

His mother cried out in a terrible voice.

“They’ve killed him! Those devils have killed him!”

“What devils?” asked Vladimir.

She lowered her voice and put her hands to her breast.

“The Cheka,” she whispered.

“Did he have a bad name?” asked Vladimir.

“Hush!” said his mother. “We mustn’t speak about it. It’s dangerous. I ought not to have told you, David. Promise me not to speak about it.”

She made the sign of the cross over his lips. She had always done that when she wanted him to keep a secret.

Looking back upon those days afterwards Vladimir was certain that his mother was always frightened. Yet she hid her fear quite a lot and made him believe that she was gay and happy, except now and then. She was always playful with him and Olga. She had wonderful hands. She could make shadow pictures on the walls when the kerosene-lamps were lit before bedtime—rabbits and dogs and crocodiles and birds, and funny old men who opened and shut their mouths. She used to shock Miss Smith, who was very prim, by being boisterous and giving pick-a-backs to a six-year-old son, or hiding from him and little Olga in cupboards and cubby-holes. Once they had a piano, but that must have been in the very early days of his remembrance, before pianos were looked upon for a time as bourgeois luxuries, and anyhow they hadn’t one. But he remembered watching her fingers running about the black and white notes and making beautiful noises. That must have been when he learnt a lot of old English songs—children’s songs and some others which afterwards he tried to forget because they came from a country rotten and corrupt with bourgeois ideology, according to what he learnt in school. But they remained in his subconscious mind. Sing a Song of Sixpence. Ba Ba Black Sheep, Have You Any Wool? Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be? She loved one song called Annie Laurie, and when there was no longer a piano she sang it to herself while she was doing household work, keeping the rooms clean. It had a haunting air. It floated into his mind afterwards in places of ruin, stinking of death on the way to Berlin. Once when he was delirious from fever—that was in Kiev—he was aware of singing the old nursery rhymes which he had learnt as a child in English.

Ba ba, black sheep, have you any wool?

Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.

The doctor told him that he had been singing in English, the same song over and over again.

“Ba ba something. What was that queer stuff in English?”

He looked suspiciously at Vladimir as though doubtful whether this song in English were in accordance with Soviet ideology.