W e had arranged to meet on the boat and travel together. I was part of an Intourist package to see the November celebrations in Red Square and Desmond was to give a series of lectures in the University of Moscow.
We thought that we would somehow wangle for me to stay on. There was a dreamlike quality to the train journey to Tilbury through that flat, forlorn landscape, edged by the backs of warehouses and with masts, funnels and cranes sticking up haphazard out of nowhere. Everything static, nothing quite real, nothing happening. Then suddenly the train drew up at the quay and there was all the fuss and bustle of boarding the ship.
I looked around for Desmond but there was no sign of him. I got my luggage stowed in my cabin but still no sign. In consternation I saw that they were pulling up the gangway and then there he was below, wild-haired and shouting to me against the wind. He stood there, waving apologetically, as though it were somehow his fault. It was a first taste of muddled, incompetent bureaucracy, for after all he was the honoured, invited guest, whereas I was merely a tolerated tourist.
I remember in particular a little wiry, fiery, red-headed Scot who harangued me about Marxist—Leninism as we paced the deck in a bitter wind. I also made friends with a Soviet engineer, Tolya, who had been attending a course in England.
He was a fresh-faced, rosy-cheeked young man with an engaging smile. I liked him very much and was pleased when he promised to look me up in Moscow. I do not remember much about the journey, except that we had large dollops of caviar every morning for breakfast and that one evening there was a party for passengers and crew with some propaganda talk and a great deal of singing and drinking. Peter Kapitza came to greet us at the hotel in Leningrad. He promised to take me out to supper after the opera—Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a new work by Shostakovich—for which we tourists had been given tickets.
