On 10 May 1990 my great Aunt Tata celebrated her 100th birthday. Beginning life as Countess Natalia Kleinmichel, older sister of my grandmother Countess Olga Kleinmichel, Aunt Tata saw in her birthday as Sister Mary of the Resurrection. The celebrations were recorded in this newspaper article from France, seen above
My grandmother did not spend her last Easter in Russia at the beautiful Assumption Cathedral in Novorossiysk (pic above) but she did help decorate it on the Saturday afternoon before Easter, as described in her book, Upheaval. She was in Novorossiysk in the spring of 1919 waiting for my grandfather
Surrounded by panic about the spread of Covid-19, what better way to spend an afternoon than researching my grandmother’s experience with disease during the Russian Revolution. I turned to her book, Upheaval, to find out how she was affected. She is not the best at recording dates, but I can
Fear lurked in the background of my childhood. It was never named when I was a child but, as I grew older, I learnt its name was Communism. Both sides of my family feared Communists and especially Bolsheviks, with good reason. In her book, Upheaval, my grandmother wrote of traumatic
My father was a hoarder. His house was not as bad as those you see on television, with stacks of newspapers lining the walls and furniture balancing on top of each other in the corners, but he certainly kept stuff. So much so that, when he died, I threw out
Is writing in the blood? Are writers born and not made? Can the desire, if not the talent, for writing be inherited? I write, my parents wrote – my mother authored a couple of non-fiction books – and my maternal grandmother was a published author of a memoir, Upheaval. I