The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald

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      Frank’s father, Albert Reid, had looked ahead – not quite far enough, perhaps, but to see too clearly in Russia is a mistake, leading to loss of confidence. He was aware that the time was coming when British investors, ironmasters, mill-owners, boiler-makers, engineers, race-horse trainers and governesses would no longer be welcome. Either the Russians would take everything into their own hands or the Germans would, but he thought that the good times would last a while yet. All that had really been needed, when he started out in the 1870s, was a certificate to say that the articles of association of your company were in accordance with British law and another form in St Petersburg to say that your enterprise was advantageous to the interests of the Russian Empire. Besides that, though, you had to have a good digestion, a good head for drink, particularly spirits, a good circulation and an instinct for how much in the way of bribes would be appropriate for the uniformed and for the political police, the clerks from the Ministry of Direct Import, Commerce and Industry, and the technical and sanitary inspectors, to get anything at all. These bribes, too, must be called gifts, and with that word you began your study of the Russian language. All the other formalities – sending the balance sheets, for example, to the central government and the local Court of Exchequer – were just paperwork, which he’d done himself, with his wife’s help, by lamplight, in the old wooden house on the works site in the Rogoznkaya. Like the Russian nobility and the Russian merchants, foreign businesses were given ranks, according to their capital and the amount of fuel (soft coal, birch-bark, anthracite, oil) that their factory consumed. Reid’s (Printing Machinery) was of moderate rank. Frank’s father and mother were the only partners. Both of them had come from long families, that was why Bert had been sent out in the first place to make a living in Russia, but they only had the one son. Frank was sent over to England once or twice as a boy, to stay with his relatives in Salford. He enjoyed himself in Salford because, given half a chance, he enjoyed himself anywhere. When he was eighteen he went back for much longer, to train in mechanical engineering and printing, first at Loughborough Polytechnic, then for his apprenticeship with Croppers of Nottingham.

      It was while he was at Croppers, doing quite reasonably well, and playing football for the first time in his life, that his father wrote to him to say that, as a kind of subsidiary to the business, he was going to start his own printing press, quite near the centre of Moscow, in Seraphim Street. There was nothing legal at the moment against foreigners buying property, as long as it wasn’t in Turkestan or the Caucasus or anywhere where they were likely to strike oil, and he thought the place could be got fairly cheap. He’d start with hand presses only, jobbing machines, and see how they went along. It was an old warehouse, this place, and there was room to expand. Even though the deal wasn’t concluded yet, the men were already calling it Reidka’s – dear little Reids.

      There was a photograph enclosed of Seraphim Street, looking like most of Moscow’s side-streets, almost past repair, blank, narrow, patched and peeling, with children crowded around a horse and cart selling something unidentifiable. Above was a white sky with vast, even whiter clouds. The shop-signs made Frank feel homesick. Perlov’s tea-bricks, Kapral cigarettes 20 for 5 kopeks, and a kabak with a name that looked like Markel’s Bar.

      His father usually gave the date Russian style, thirteen days earlier than the date in Nottingham, so that there was some adjustment to be done, but it must have been in March that year that there was mention of Selwyn Crane, who’d been taken on, not at the works, but to do the accounting at Reidka’s. A few weeks later it seemed that Crane was becoming very religious. ‘I’ve no objection to that, though on the whole I think religion is of more use to a woman than a man, as it leads to content with one’s lot.’ In the next letter, Bert doubted whether ‘religious’ was quite the right word. ‘Spiritual’ would be better. ‘Crane has now proclaimed himself a vegetarian, which I do not think is enjoined anywhere in the Bible, and he tells me he’s several times been in quite lengthy conversations with Count Tolstoy. Tolstoy is a very great man, Frank,’ he continued. ‘Fortunately, though, one doesn’t have to judge of great men by the oddities of their disciples. The truth is, though, that Crane has a knack with figures and has been up to now a pretty fair man of business – he came to me from the Anglo-Russian Bank. I asked him whether it was not rather surprising that he should have saved a reasonable sum of money, as I fancy he has done – he is not a married man – and continues to live off the said sum and the salary I pay him, while giving it out as his opinion that buying or selling of any kind or description is a sin against mankind. It’s rather, he said, that wealth shouldn’t be used for the benefit of individuals. Then, you consider me a wrong doer, Crane, I said, determined to treat the whole matter in a spirit of joke, the next thing will be that you’ll refuse to shake me, your employer, by the hand. I thought I’d caught him there, but what he did was to kiss me, first on one cheek and then on the other – a Russ habit, as you well know, but this was on the shop floor, Frank, not even in the counting house.’

      His father, however, had no hesitation about the chief compositor he’d engaged, a capital fellow, a very steady worker, it would take a revolution to dislodge Yacob Tvyordov. Frank thought, when the time comes, I’ll see whether I want these people or not. I’ll make up my own mind when it comes to it.

      In 1900 he transferred himself to Hoe’s of Norbury to get experience with more up-to-date machines. It was in Norbury that he met Nellie Cooper. She lived with her brother Charles, who was a solicitor’s clerk, and his wife Grace, at 62 Longfellow Road. It was a nice, substantial house, two entrance doors, the inner one with a stained glass panel, good new glass in art shades from Lowndes and Drury, representing the Delectable Mountains from the Pilgrim’s Progress, dining room and kitchen downstairs in the basement, sitting room opening on to a flight of green-painted iron steps which led into the garden, a bit of fencing to screen off the vegetables, three bedrooms on the first floor, one of them spare as Charles and Grace didn’t have any children. Frank had a room in a boarding house where, the landlady, probably unintentionally, as it seemed to him, was gradually starving him to death. He joined (as he had done in Manchester and Nottingham) the local choral society. At refreshment time (they were rehearsing, perhaps overrehearsing, Hiawatha) he had to excuse himself to Nellie, who was helping to serve out, for taking more than one fish paste roll. Nellie asked him what his job was, whether he had to heave things about in the open air and couldn’t help getting up an appetite. Then, without listening very attentively to his answer, she said she had been teaching for four years and was due to take her qualifying exam for the certificate.

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