A Train of Powder (43 page)

3

The place where William Martin Marshall and the Russian diplomat Pavel Kuznetsov met on June 13 was very close to Marshall’s home. It would have been quite impossible for Marshall to shake off any detectives who might have been shadowing him (as indeed they were doing, and as Kuznetsov must have suspected them of doing) during the short and direct walk which took him to King George’s Park. The particular section of the park he sought was not the one prudent men would have chosen. Originally the park was a strip of open land alongside the river Wandle, about three quarters of a mile in length and between two and three hundred yards in breadth, which was continuous grassland, though cut into sections by two roads and several fenced and asphalted footpaths. Since the war a colony of prefabricated houses has been planted on one of the interior sections, so that there are now two separate King George’s Parks, one on the north side of this settlement and one on its south. Two men who desired to talk in secrecy might well have arranged to meet within this colony and walked along its winding roads, or in the northern park, where there are a children’s playground, a swimming pool, and a restaurant to attract crowds, several entrances, and a good many seats along the path which runs right round the grassland. But Marshall and Kuznetsov chose to go to the southern park, which is quite simply a playing field and nothing else. It is a rectangle of flat ground, about eight acres in extent, and there is not a yard of it on which a man might find cover. It is grass, save for a cinder track which runs along the western edge from a gate in one of the transverse roads to a gate in one of the transverse footpaths. Ten trees are planted along this cinder track, and they shadow three benches. On one of these William Marshall sat himself down with his friend Kuznetsov.

The scenery around him defined his plight. Behind him flowed the river Wandle, separated from the park by a narrow strip of vegetable gardens. This stream, which looks as it might be thought water could not look, old and battered, had been the subject of continual pollution through the centuries. Cloth-dressers and hatters working on its banks for the London market accused each other of fouling it in the year 1376. Today it is clean enough; but all the same, as it flowed past the park where Marshall met his friend, the wreck of a baby carriage, stranded wheels upward on a knot of driftwood in midchannel, shook perpetually as its submerged springs were jostled by the current. This neighbourhood is not pernickety about tidiness. Farther along the river on the opposite bank are some industrial plants, none of them large. In London most of the great glossy corporation factories are north of the Thames, and to the south of it there are the family-size factories, and the tough little workshops, which are sometimes rickety and inefficient, but often do a limited job very well and sometimes hit on a mechanical idea that crosses the river and makes its fortune. But just behind this part of the park the opposite bank is taken up by a line of houses that are a survival of Dickens’ London, the eternal London, old and snug, with backyards cluttered up by hobbies. In one yard a rabbit fancier has stacked home-made hutches into skyscrapers of a miniature animal town; in the next a little dog sits barking most of the day on the tilted seat of an armchair short of a leg, among piles of doors and posts and planks which nobody but an unusually infatuated amateur carpenter could cherish; in another, outside a minute and crooked workshop, an old bicycle gesticulates with twisted handlebars from the top of a scrap heap. In such houses lively individualists, pottering away at their private pleasures, have to some degree acquired an understanding of scientific method. They are not delivered helpless over to what is said to them on radio and television and written for them in the papers. They have their own experience of cause and effect.

If the men looked to the right they saw twelve prefabs which had been allowed to trespass on the western edge of the park, which backs on the transverse road. These are of the frankly temporary sort which have been put up all over England since the war, and are white, white like a strip of bandage applied to a long wound in the town, except for the black sections of dismantled Nissen huts which serve as wash houses at the back. Their raw new gardens project into the park, uncluttered by rabbits or timber or metal. The tenants of such houses have often been bombed out and lost their livestock and their lathes and their carpenters’ tools. Not least among the losses suffered by Britain under bombardment were the informal laboratories of the backyards, where generation after generation had learned by practice the essentials of biology and mechanics. It is not cheap nowadays to repair such losses, and the younger tenants are unlikely to start these hobbies, not only because of the high cost, but because they were evacuated to the country during the raids and were separated from their parents and were never taught by Daddy to proffer the right sort of lettuce leaf to the twitching muzzle or how to hold a chisel; and since then they have been packed into the overcrowded houses of relatives and long for tidiness above all things. So their gardens are empty and orderly, and their amusements are public and standardized, films and radio and television, football matches and the pools. They love their houses, they live peaceably, they are good citizens. But with their hobbies they have abandoned their traditional approach to scientific method. Now they must get all their interest, and nearly all their knowledge beyond what their schools give them in childhood, from what they read and hear. They are not only sensitive to print, they are dependent on it, and they are less able to defend themselves by criticism than their fathers were, unless they do in truth become intellectuals.

If the two men looked straight across the park in front of them they saw some small neat castles, apartment houses built by the London County Council in the sound tradition of housing which it has followed throughout this century. Here are people who are even less handy and less scientific than the tenants of the prefabs; they have not even raw new gardens to fill with annuals or walls to cover with creepers; they must get every scrap of knowledge out of books. Nor can they make friends casually over the garden fence; they must purposely build a society on the basis of common interests, discovered at the Co-Operative Stores social or the Union Branch meeting. Here, in fact, the working class is manufacturing a new middle class. This is turning out to be not at all unlike the old, even to political compactness; it is said that the odd eccentric Tory in these apartment houses is quite unpopular. The successes of this new social enterprise are often spectacular; but the inauguration is not easy.

If the two men turned their heads to the left they looked across the last section of the park, which is planted with vegetables, at a region covered with low factories and workshops above which tower schools of an obviously outmoded pattern. When a society has staked its all on book-learning its hope must he in lavishness of education; but Hitler has hamstrung all such ambitions.

Young Marshall’s spirit ranged uncomfortably over these several planes of a community which was passing through a transitional stage. His parents belonged to the old traditional London, and he had inherited from them the individualism which made him ready to question authority. It was a pity that they had turned to handicrafts for their hobbies, for though they had robustly used their fingers to make a strongly coloured and ornate home, their son had only developed his taste for weaving silk mats, which obviously had not satisfied the demands of his inner nature and was unlikely to win him social prestige. No doubt he felt as if he belonged to the more modern world of the prefabs and the apartment houses by virtue of his occupation as a radio operator, though here there is an obvious irony. Though radio telegraphy is a recent discovery it is already clear that it will soon be superseded by more recently discovered methods of communication; and as the technique is easy to master far too many young men enter what is in effect a dying industry, which will not prepare them for any other occupation. Young Marshall was, indeed, in danger of becoming within a few years as obsolete as the clothdressers and hatters who had fouled the river behind him in the year 1376. It may have been some sense of his imminent plight which had drawn him towards communism. But it is possible that the determining consideration which brought him to this bench was of quite a different nature. He was a kindly lad; he had spent the earlier part of that day mending the vacuum cleaner which belonged to a spinster neighbour. He probably thought of himself as doing Kuznetsov a good turn not different in nature.

It was on the bench nearest the gate to the footpath that Marshall and Kuznetsov seated themselves. Again the young man was tempted into a small and exposed position, even smaller and more exposed than Canbury Gardens. The path was only about two hundred yards long, and he could not stray from it, for it was seven o’clock and the expanse of grass in front of him was covered with children having their last game before supper. All three benches could be watched from behind by anyone who cared to enter the vegetable gardens on the Up of the Wandle. These were allotments—that is to say, they were rented out by the local authorities to enthusiastic amateur gardeners with no gardens of their own; and this was the very time of day when such people were at work. A detective could loiter there, smoking a pipe and looking wisely down at the celery and up at the beans, or fiddling with a fork or a spade, and keep two men under his eye without doing anything out of the ordinary. But the pattern of the hunt had hardened into a simpler form. The detectives settled down on the bench that was farthest away from the one on which the two men were sitting, near the gate into the road. After ten minutes they decided they would like to be nearer and they moved to the middle bench. When the two men rose to leave the detectives closed in on them. This must have been, in a sense, premature, for they had not seen Marshall pass any documents to Kuznetsov, which is what they must have wanted. But perhaps they moved in to prevent an open scandal, for it was obviously only a matter of time before the pair, in their dogged search for conspicuous meeting places, would arrive at the vestibule of Scotland Yard.

When Kuznetsov was released from the police station, the Soviet Embassy having confirmed his claim to be on its staff, he left behind him a situation of very definite colour. He had made a clumsy assertion that Marshall was a stranger to him, and he had as clumsily refused to set it down in black and white; and he had done nothing to prevent Marshall from telling a story which was bound to be incompatible with what he had said. He went straight home to the floor of the Victorian villa which he occupied with his wife and child; but nobody was surprised that he slept there that night and no other, and that a Soviet automobile came the next day and removed him and his wife and child to the Embassy. It was assumed that the thunder and lightning of Moscow had descended on one of its servants who had failed in an assignment, and that he had been segregated to his shame until he could be sent back to Russia, there, no doubt, to realize something less than his normal expectation of life. Yet it is not impossible that this assumption was mistaken. Certainly Kuznetsov was ultimately repatriated. But to those who have visited the Normandie Restaurant and Canbury Gardens and King George’s Park it seemed that failure might not have been his portion in this affair; that through his contact with Marshall he might have achieved as spectacular a success as he was likely ever to enjoy in all his life.

Kuznetsov’s departure from Britain was not according to protocol. At first the British Foreign Office took it for granted that the Soviet Embassy would send him out of the country as soon as the court had found Marshall guilty; but when it was seen that he was not taking steps to get on the first Polish boat to leave after the trial, a formal request for his repatriation was handed to the Soviet Ambassador, Mr. Zarubin, who had not yet been replaced by Mr. Gromyko. Kuznetsov sailed on another Polish boat, the
Jaroslav-Dabrowski,
from London Docks on the night of Thursday, July 17, seven days after the end of the trial. The delay exasperated the British public, which regarded it as a wanton insult. But this was unjust. Kuznetsov had had to wait till his successor was sent from Moscow, and the business of handing over his files to the newcomer must have demanded more than a day or two. For it appeared that Kuznetsov was a more important person than had been supposed. Indeed, though it seems incredible that anybody trained in police work could have made the glaring errors which led to the detection of his meetings with Marshall, it is said that he was the London representative of the MVD. He must have worked quite hard during that month he passed at the Soviet Embassy, and been unable to find the pleasure that Russians usually derive from that handsome establishment.

For Russians find their Embassy very pleasant, for both sensuous and ideological reasons. Since Queen Victoria left it to go to Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace has been, what it is now, a refuge for needy royalties and court families; and in the 1840s it was realized that its grounds were far larger than was necessary for the palace’s needs. So in 1845 the kitchen gardens and paddocks which lay behind the palace, on the extreme western edge of the parkland, were put on the real-estate market, in the form of some thirty building sites, each suitable for the erection of a really large villa surrounded by its own grounds. Most of the sites were laid out to form a wide avenue running north to south, though a few, which were considered not so grand, were round the corner, out in Bayswater Road. All of them were grouped under the name of Kensington Palace Gardens, which has kept for a hundred years a certain plump and golden significance. These sites were enormously expensive and were sold as leaseholds for a period of ninety-nine years.

Rates were high. The sizes of the houses and gardens meant that their tenants employed from ten to twenty-five indoor and outdoor servants. Moreover, as the cost of building rose (and in the last thirty years it has risen by one hundred per cent), a heavier and heavier burden was imposed on the leaseholders by the terms in their contract with the Crown, which insisted that they keep their houses in the pink of repair. It was, therefore, from the beginning, a sign of great wealth to live in Kensington Palace Gardens, and as the cost of living rose it became the sober truth that nobody could maintain a household there who was not a millionaire in pounds. Today if one gives a taxi driver an address in Kensington Palace Gardens he is as likely as not to respond with a knowing nod and the words, “Millionaires’ Row”; and the millionaires have got a good return for their money. The setting is delightfully verdant; there is also a charming sense of consequence in residing here. It is in the Crown precincts, the avenue is a private road, and there are porters in the livery of the Crown Commissioners posted at each end to turn back pedestrians and drivers who have no business with the residents and are trying to use it as a thoroughfare from the north to the south side of the parklands. There is probably not a quieter and greener place to live in London, or, indeed, in any other great capital.