Nick and Ksana had set up a school for learning Russian in an old courthouse near Drogheda in County Louth, Ireland. Nick, a small, dark, chunky man with the splayfooted gait of a cavalryman, had been an army officer in Russia, and was reputedly a friend of the Tsar. He and his tall, fair wife Ksana had left Petersburg after the October Revolution in 1917, and had finally gravitated to Ireland and the village of Collon.
They took in and taught Russian to anybody who wanted to learn it. They had about a dozen students at a time, mostly undergraduates like myself cramming for their finals, but also a number of service officers and members of nameless departments collectively called “the funnies”. One of our university set rechristened them “the quite funnies”, though how he could have known was a mystery since they did not mix with us, spoke seldom, and moved around in impenetrable groups of no less than six. They were escorted by a one-legged major with a fine moustache who was said to have done well in the war.
Tuition was given by Nick, Ksana, the Prince – an elderly white-bearded aristocrat who was said to be Ksana’s uncle - and an assortment of Russians distantly related to Ksana. They all lived in the courthouse in 
a maze of hutches separated from each other by plywood partitions. These hutches also served as classrooms, although the teaching was not really of the sort that required anything so fancy. The original courtroom still remained undivided, and this served as dining room, kitchen, common room and everything else. Ksana supervised the cooking which was excellent , with piroshki, little savoury pastries, as the chief attraction.
We, the university set, were lodged in various houses around the village. On one occasion my friend James and I were in a pair of tiny garrets over a tobacconist’s shop which doubled at night as a shebeen. James was (in my view) a typical Cambridge undergraduate, long and willowy and languid, a condition not far from what the major described as “so wet you could shoot snipe over him”. Later he admitted that he was a boxing blue. At another time we were lodged in the great gothic vicarage of the local Church of Ireland priest at the end. of a long winding drive where the dark-green leaves dripped and the owls called to each other. One of the people sharing that accommodation with us was a girl from Girton who had to be consoled with whisky each time we negotiated the perilous path (“stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples …”).
We were prevented from too many excesses by Nick’s extremely strict discipline, based on an absolute ban on speaking any language but Russian from nine in the morning until nine at night. This was no occasional by-law but the foundation stone of the whole school. Nick meant what he said: a first transgression was rewarded with a caution, but after that there was no alternative to immediate expulsion. Even when we were far from our instructors we observed the rule – while scoring at tennis (in which we were advised to choose only our own people as partners) or swimming in the sea on one of our infrequent bus journeys to the coast. We were convinced too that even members of our university set would inform on us, and so we tended to avoid parties in the shebeen or the nightly poker games in Lindsay’s bar or Hoolihan’s. It was important, Nick felt, to identify with the village people, some of whom were, understandably enough, resentful of us as being even worse than the English. I was reminded of the difference each Sunday at Mass in the huge Catholic church, where the “ting” of my sixpence in the collection plate, interposed with the “tong”of countless pennies, made the whole congregation, and the priest, turn round in shock-horror.
The arrival of so many young men in the area did not go unnoticed by mothers with young daughters in the great houses of Louth and Meath, the atrocious mausoleums that successful Protestant politicians built to ensure they would not be forgotten. Almost every day at breakfast Nick would announce that such-and-such a great lady would like three or four for tennis, and we would either take a bus or pile into Nick’s little Sunbeam and spend the afternoon whacking tennis balls into the shrubbery while we argued about the correct way to call the score.
We had the whale of a time, but it really can’t have been very amusing for the girls. Some of the quite-funnies turned out to be good at tennis, and also had their own transport, so any bad feelings there had been between us were set aside for the common good. A further advantage of these tennis parties was the enormous tea that our hostesses generously provided, to say nothing of the ritual glass of sherry before departure. But we were always under Nick’s eagle eye watching for students making assignations with the daughters or trying to scrounge a second glass.
Remarkably, none of the students at the old courthouse rebelled against, or even criticised, the draconian regime or Spartan conditions. We had all come of our own volition and at our own expense, and most of us saw that strict adherence to Nick’s regime was the best way of getting our money’s worth. We were all aware that he and Ksana had had a rough time during the Revolution, and afterwards in exile in Paris and other European capitals, and recognised that both of them were great teachers, even if their methods were based on Russian village schools of the mid-nineteenth century. What sticks in the mind is poetry learnt by heart and recited aloud, often while being driven by Nick to tennis-parties. There was also interminable discussion of the prevailing political crisis where we had to be careful not to let slip any hidden liberal tendencies; the quite-funnies were good at this.
And so the golden summer passed with the smoke of Sweet Afton cigarettes wafting over us, in an age before smoking had become sinful. Shortly before the departure of the main body of quite-funnies the major proposed a farewell picnic. We would, he said, meet up with a party from the nearest great house and sail over to an island called Innisfree where we could spend the morning shooting rabbits. After lunch we would sail back.
We collected a number of shotguns from well-wishers in the village, and Nick came dressed in his grandfather’s Cossack uniform, much hung-about with bandoliers and murderous daggers, a veritable Lermontov hero of our time. We sailed across and spent a profitable morning shooting rabbits. Unfortunately, both parties in this agreement, the courthouse and the great house, thought the other was bringing the lunch. We discovered this state of affairs when the shooting was over, and there was nothing for it but to sail back.
By now, with the early start and the morning walking over the tussocky island grass, we were ravenously hungry. “I wouldn’t mind some lobster for lunch”, mused James as we were about half-way back to the mainland, and there in front of us was a whole row of lobster-pots. There was a gas ring and a saucepan below, and it was the work of a minute to get some lobsters aboard.”Hold on”, said Nick, “Ksana would never forgive me if we didn’t pay for them”. It did not take us long to work out that half a dozen lobsters equalled about a dozen rabbits, so we wrapped the rabbits in oil-cloth and left them in a lobster pot.
I often think of the fishermen’s astonishment on emptying the pot.
January 2007
