Katya & The Prince of Siam

Seriozha, was their mother’s special favourite and indeed was adored by all, being extremely handsome with the charm of both his parents combined. But he was a bit of a scapegrace, shockingly lazy and like his mother addicted to reading novels till dawn. This made early-rising for his studies trying in the extreme. He would therefore write a note in his mother’s name to say he was ill, summon his dog Aidyl (trained by him for this purpose) and despatch him with the note to the school porter. Seriozha would then return to bed until two-thirty when his mother rose, and then pretend to be just back from school. Yet even though Aidyl was often called on to pad off to the porter’s lodge, his master still managed to move up a class at the end of every year.

Seriozha was also a great flirt. Lydia was the name of more than one girl he had fancied and indeed had led to Aidyl’s name – Lydia spelt backwards. One of his ploys when walking up the Kreschatka, the main street of Kiev, was to douse a handkerchief with scent and drop it at the feet of a pretty girl. ‘Excuse me, is his your’s?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I though it was.’ Then, when they next met, greetings could be exchanged and the acquaintanceship got under way.

‘Eventually, however, he married one Mathilda Ivanovna pleasant modest German girl, quite different from all the Lydias who had once appealed to him. Sobered by marriage, he took a university degree but, most unfortunately, he yearned to own an estate and was encouraged by his mother in this ambition. And alas for them all, Duka, the contractor, made his appearance. He was a shrewd illiterate peasant, who saw profit in Maria Mihailovna’s property and drew on her funds with such cunning and confidence that she would not believe her friends when they tried to open her eyes to his activities’. This situation, which damaged irreparably the family’s already shaky finances, was compounded when Seriozha bought an estate near Kiev on credit and got in the words of Katya’s aunt ‘into a terrible mess.’

Far worse was to follow for, by the winter of 1903, Maria Milhailovna was dying of painful cancer, and Seriozha, with already two young children to support, fell seriously ill from stress and anxiety. Before she died, his mother told him: ‘I am not saying goodbye to you for long!’ Seriozha’s poor wife also understood the way things were, for showing a relative some light-coloured material to make a coat, she said ‘Its not worth cutting-out, I shall soon be in mourning.’ Sure enough, nine months after his mother, Seriozha was dead.

This then was the sad insecure background from which Ivan and Katya, aged eighteen and sixteen respectively, having borrowed a little money from an uncle, set out to seek their fortune in St Petersburg.

It was a courageous decision and, although Ivan, like his Father ‘lacked good looks and charm’, he too was ‘serious and practical’ and in addition possessed great aptitude for languages, on which he based his hopes of making a career in diplomacy.

As for pretty lively Katya, not only was she fired by a patriotic desire to serve her country, but with nothing but her looks and youth to rely on, she must have feared that had she remained in Kiev, she might have become merely a poor relation, one of those figures that move though the pages of so many Russian novels and finally fade away as unregarded as the shabby furniture in a tolerant relatives household. In addition, tantalising glimpses of an infatuation with a certain Igor sprinkle her letters of this period and it is likely that his absence at the front was a further spur to her ambitions. In St Petersburg, she stayed with one of her mother’s cousins, Aunt Sophia, who had married a doctor named Borodin.

 

Katya as a nurse in 1905.

IV

East meets West

 

It was in an atmosphere of extreme political and emotional tension that Katya left for Siberia in April 1905, where she served in a hospital train on the frozen Lake Baikal and, clearly, became a most competent nurse as, during the ensuing year, she was awarded no less than three decorations including the coveted Order of St George. Meanwhile in St Petersburg, Chakrabongse, having failed to obtain leave from his duties at the Military Academy in order to proceed to Siberia, had to content himself with bombarding her with letters and telegram.