When Miss Emmie was in Russia by Pitcher Harvey;

Author:Pitcher, Harvey; [Harvey Pitcher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1159065
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2012-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

17

Turn of the Year

There comes a single brief period when Edith, Scottie, Louisette, Rosamond and Emmie must all have been in the same city at the same time. The city is Petrograd; the time—the turn of the year 1916–17.

Since 1914 Edith Kerby had become more and more absorbed in her job as assistant to Mr Wilcox of the Daily Telegraph. She soon added typing to her shorthand accomplishment, and they both worked very hard in their small office in Singer House on the Nevsky Prospect, carefully studying the Russian press and following the course of the war on one-inch maps. But as the war continued, their attention was constantly being diverted towards the political situation inside Russia. They became regular attenders at the Duma, where Edith took down the members’ speeches in shorthand. On one occasion there was a terrific scare inside the Duma building. Proceedings were suddenly interrupted by a loud crash of splintering glass. In the highly charged atmosphere of the times, the same thought passed through everyone’s mind: ‘This is meant for him!’ No matter that the Tsar’s hostility to the Duma was well known and his presence there most unlikely—everyone still jumped to the conclusion that for some reason he must be in the building and that an attempt had been made upon his life. But once the panic had subsided, it turned out to have been nothing more serious than a spectator leaning too heavily on a pane of glass.

During 1916 the speeches in the Duma, especially those of Kerensky, became increasingly inflammatory, but not a word of this was ever allowed to appear in the Russian press. When Mr Wilcox tried to send off his dispatch on the day’s proceedings, the censor would let none of it through, and by the autumn of 1916 this problem had become so acute that Lord Burnham decided to recall Mr Wilcox to London, in order to find out at first hand just what was going on in Russia.

So Edith’s job came to an end, but she had been well paid during those two years, and in sterling too. Her promised land of England was inaccessible because of the war, but true to the Kerby tradition of enterprise and self-reliance, she now conceived the adventurous idea of going off alone on a trip to China and Japan, and visiting her married sister in Shanghai. This was the sister who had outraged their father, Henry William Kerby, by insisting on travelling out unaccompanied to China after an engagement that had already lasted seven years. Times had changed to the extent that Edith’s mother did not object to her travelling alone, but did insist on her travelling first-class. Then came anti-climax: Thomas Cook could not give her a booking until January 1917 and this was only November. Every day the food shortage in Petrograd was becoming more critical. ‘We stood thirteen hours in a queue for our black bread, and even so, often came away without any, as it was all sold out.

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