Russian dolls

Sofka Zinovieff's grandmother, a Russian princess turned card-carrying communist, led an extraordinary life - the consequences of which are still being felt down the generations

Juliet Rix
February 3, 2007

Delving into family history is now something of a modern obsession, but few people have relatives half as interesting as Sofka Zinovieff's. As a direct descendant of Catherine the Great, as well as the first prince of Kiev, the founder of Moscow, and the closest adviser to Peter the Great, she was off to a good start. But the one she found most interesting was her grandmother, after whom she is named.

Sofka, or Moppy as her granddaughter knew her, was born Princess Sophy Dolgorouky, a child of the glittering aristocracy of imperial St Petersburg, just 10 years before it all disappeared in the Russian revolution. She would play with the tsar's son, occasionally joined by Tsar Nicholas, and her grandmother was an intimate of his mother, "The Dowager Empress of All the Russias". By the time Zinovieff got to know her grandmother, though, she was plain Mrs Sofka Skipwith, an elderly woman living in an isolated workman's cottage on a windswept heath in the middle of Bodmin Moor. And she was a card-carrying communist.

"She was such a strong personality," says Zinovieff. "She cut a swath through life, staying up all night reading poetry and drinking. And she claimed - quite matter-of-factly - to have had over 100 lovers." Sofka survived the Russian revolution, two world wars, internment by the Nazis, undercover communist activity, great wealth and real poverty. She lived in three European capitals, spent several years as secretary to Laurence Olivier, was divorced and widowed, and had three sons. No wonder she fascinated her granddaughter, who has now written a book about her.

"My first memory of her, I was about six or seven, and she came on a rather brief duty call. When she came up from Cornwall, she would check everything was OK with the family before going off and having fun. But I really got to know her when I was 11 and my parents split up. I went to stay with her in Cornwall and she was the first person to confront me and ask me what had happened. I burst into tears. She hadn't expected that and I still remember the look on her face. It said, 'Oh no, what have I got on my hands, an awful snivelling brat.' But she went on talking to me and it was good to talk. She knew all about broken families - they ran like a fault-line through the generations - and she was evidence that you survive.

"That was probably the meeting that pulled me very close to her. From then on she took a serious interest in me. I became a favourite grandchild and she'd load me down with books, especially horrendous books on the Holocaust. She also had a wonderful knack for giving you the right book at the right time."

When Zinovieff was 16, her grandmother gave her an old leather volume - her diary from when she was interned by the Nazis in France. She was grateful but not very interested and the book went into a drawer. It was only recently, 10 years after her grandmother's death and with two daughters of her own, that Zinovieff returned to the diary - and was drawn inexorably into her grandmother's life.

"I knew her as an old lady," Zinovieff says, "and it was thrilling to 'meet' her as a young person ... She always went against the grain, and lived her life as she felt like, not as the age or convention dictated." Her granddaughter admires her for that, and for her extraordinary ability each time her world collapsed, to pick herself up and start all over again. Zinovieff is less admiring of her grandmother's role as a mother. For Sofka, family often fell into the category of conventional behaviour, something that made Zinovieff's journey into her family's history all the more emotional.

"Sofka always said - without shame - that she wasn't interested in babies," says Zinovieff. Sofka left her first husband and their two sons, Zinovieff's father, Peter, and his baby brother, Ian, when Ian was just three weeks old. She was already deeply involved with Grey Skipwith, whom she later married, producing a third son, Patrick. This baby she left with the milkman's mother-in-law while she went off once again to live her own life. All three boys were shunted from pillar to post for most of their childhoods, only seeing their mother when they could be fitted around the rest of her life.

This behaviour has been neither forgotten nor forgiven by the Zinovieffs, the family of Sofka's first husband (the author's long-dead grandfather). His brother and sister are still alive, now in their 90s.

"They were quite vitriolic about Sofka," Zinovieff says. "Great-Uncle Kyril, to whom I am very close, didn't think I should write the book. His side of the family have blackened Sofka's name for 70 years. Such old memories are very fixed. They told me all sorts of stories, from her sleeping with the milkman-postman-window cleaner to the third child belonging to a Cossack dancer and that Grey Skipwith - the love of her life - joined the wartime RAF in a suicidal attempt to get away from her. Sofka did do some bad things, especially as a mother, but she wasn't as bad as the Zinovieffs think."

"[My research] brought some difficult times and some very tense conversations," she says, especially as the project progressed and she became closer and closer to her grandmother. Her relationship with Great-Uncle Kyril has survived. Now she is hoping other relatives will understand why the book sometimes contradicts their memories. "It is a delicate business," she says, "but in the end I had to tell my own truth."

One thing everyone agreed upon was that Sofka was only following family tradition (or even genes). Her mother was a successful surgeon and a bomber pilot in the first world war, while her father ran off with a gypsy singer when Sofka was five, only reappearing occasionally to take her on wonderfully unsuitable outings. In the absence of her parents, Sofka was brought up by disapproving Granny, with whom she escaped the revolution, first to the family's country estate in Crimea and then to England (leaving her parents in Russia).

Zinovieff visited Crimea, to see if there was anything left of her grandmother's life there. Post-Soviet Russians are fascinated by their pre-revolutionary roots, and Sofka's aristocratic name once more opened doors. With the help of local people she found the house and estate (now a state sanatorium) where Sofka always said the first seeds of her communism were sown. There she played with the lodge-keeper's sons. They asked why she should have lessons when they could not even read. She sided with them, and Granny would accuse her of being "a little Bolshevik".

It wasn't until she was interned in France that Sofka actually joined the party, becoming deeply committed to a resistance cell known (ironically, given Sofka's lack of familial commitment) as The Family. She remained a communist until shortly before her death in 1994, further enraging her White Russian relatives ("It was like a Jew from Germany becoming a Nazi!" insisted Great-Uncle Kyril) and unwittingly creating a remarkable resource for her granddaughter's research.

"MI5 have hundreds and hundreds of pages on her," Zinovieff discovered. "She was followed, her letters opened, phone tapped. I found it an extraordinarily emotional experience to sit in this little room [at MI5] going through all these bits of her life. It was the little intimate details that cut into me most, like a note of her meeting my father outside Peter Jones (the shop). It was haunting; a very strange way to get to know your own grandmother."

At times she felt, "quite taken over" by her grandmother. And the effect went well beyond the book. "My father and uncles seemed to rediscover their mother on different terms. They had always looked on her from their own point of view - with all the pain that went with that - but in my father at least, I think I saw a transformation. He began to see her through her own eyes and be more positive about the times they had together."

And there was an effect on Zinovieff's attitude to her father - and mother. "When they split up, my youngest brother went with my mother and I stayed (along with my middle brother) with my father. I was left feeling like the little woman of the house. I cooked and shopped ... My father took quite a few leaves out of his mother's book. He has had a very complicated life and married lots of times. He ran a music studio in the bottom of the house (he claims to have been the first person to have a computer in his home) and it was 'Oh, Pink Floyd are coming today' so life was always lively and interesting. But he was not the easiest parent to have." Nor was her mother, who, on reading the book announced, to her daughter's surprise, that she saw a lot of herself in Sofka.

"I have been very critical of my parents - and they have done things worthy of criticism," says Zinovieff, "but I saw some of the dreadful things Sofka did and yet felt understanding." In justifying her grandmother, the author found, she could also better understand her parents. The book is dedicated to them.

"My grandmother used to quote a favourite Chinese curse," says Zinovieff, 'May you live in interesting times'. I suppose you could add, 'May you live with interesting people'." She pauses, but she can't suppress the little bit of Sofka in her, adding, "But who would want to live with boring people!"

Princess of the revolution

3 February 2007

Only after Sofka, my Russian grandmother, died and I read her diary was I inspired to write about her. Naturally, I already knew that she led a remarkable life – the princess whose existence was shattered by revolution and yet who grew up to become a British Communist. I was named after her, and when I was young I would go to stay with her and her partner, Jack, in their remote stone cottage on Bodmin Moor.

She would show me the old photo albums, starting with her pampered childhood in St Petersburg, cocooned by nursemaids, footmen, an English governess and too many toys; she used to play with the young, haemophiliac Tsarevich at the Winter Palace. The subsequent pages were an exciting dash across the 20th century, her life a seismograph of its great events and political movements.

When I was a teenager, Sofka would give me Jack's home-made elderflower wine and her advice: 'It doesn't matter how many lovers you have' (she claimed more than 100, I later discovered) 'just don't have more than one at the same time.' She also recommended sitting on the pavement in crowded streets for its persuasive power on boyfriends who don't comply with your wishes.

I was 16 when Sofka gave me a beautiful old diary. It was 1978 and she was 70. Covered in dark curlicued brass and soft moss-green velvet, the diary had been made for her great-grandmother. The pages should have contained descriptions of carriage drives along Nevsky Prospect, invitations to the next ball and tender feminine secrets – the world my grandmother was born into a century ago as Princess Sofka Dolgorouky.

But by the time she used the book as a diary in 1940, everything had changed. She was Mrs Sofka Skipwith, a British citizen, Europe was at war, and her life would soon be violently dislocated by world events for the second time. It was seeing things unfolding in the diary that provoked me to write Red Princess. I couldn't have imagined how my journey would evolve into a strange game of grandmother's footsteps: trips to Russia to find her family homes; meetings with old friends, fellow internees and even a former boyfriend; unearthing secrets and lies; and confronting the intense reactions of people who hated her and others who adored her.

In 1940 Sofka was visiting her mother in Paris. She had intended to stay a few weeks, but was trapped by the Nazi occupation, and the diary became her confessional. She described the evacuation of the city, and the lack of food, but above all, she poured out her passionate feelings towards her second husband, Grey Skipwith. I was fascinated to encounter Sofka as an emotional young woman, before the cooling of time and her characteristic irony could straighten the tangle of events and emotions into tidy stories.

The couple had been married for only three years, and both knew they had found the love of their life. Sofka had divorced her first (émigré) husband, Leo Zinovieff, my grandfather, to be with Grey, who had originally been her pupil for Russian lessons. A boyishly handsome, intelligent 23-year-old, Grey had hoped to join the Foreign Office after Cambridge and had already learnt French and German. His conventional family was scandalised by his marriage to Sofka, believing that he had been 'snapped up' and ruined by a 'much older' (actually by four years), married, and even worse, foreign femme fatale.

Sofka and Grey had been living in Cookham Dean, Berkshire, with their baby son, Patrick. Peter and Ian, her two older sons by her first marriage, were already living with their father. Sofka found motherhood challenging, and though she had agreed to take all three boys to live in the countryside 'for the duration', she had been flung into despair and loneliness after Grey joined the RAF. Using her mother as an excuse, she fled – her well-tested reaction to troubles ever since escaping Russia aged 12. Leaving Patrick with the milkman's mother-in-law, she managed to cross the Channel in a troop ship in April 1940.

Sofka had numerous friends in the large White Russian community in Paris. Many were familiar from St Petersburg or the Crimea, where she and her grandmother had moved in 1917, and from where they escaped two years later on a British warship, along with the Tsar's mother, sister and other Romanovs. Few Parisian Russians had much money; they tended to live a faded existence of lost hopes. Sofka's mother and stepfather, Prince and Princess Volkonsky, were not alone in clinging desolately to the wreckage of old, exiled St Petersburg. It didn't matter that Sophy, Sofka's mother, worked as a night taxi-driver; what counted was that she had been born Countess Bobrinsky (a direct descendant of Catherine the Great) and that she was married to His Serene Highness Prince Pierre Volkonsky, once a brilliant diplomat.

Actually, Sophy had been much more than just someone with fancy titles and money. A successful surgeon (she won medals for bravery during the First World War), she had been one of the first women pilots in Russia, drove rally cars and published poetry. After escaping the revolution, she secretly returned to Petrograd and, helped by Gorky, rescued her husband from Bolshevik prison. The couple survived near-starvation and persecution before abandoning their country for ever. It was Sophy's old friend, the poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote: 'But to me the exile is forever pitiful/ Like a prisoner, like someone ill.' Indeed, Sophy was already addicted to morphine, which after the war drove her to suicide.

By December 1940 a Russian friend of Sofka's organised her escape back to England, but two days before the planned departure a gendarme knocked at the door. She was ordered to bring things for 24 hours, and then packed on to a train with hundreds of other women carrying British papers. Leaving the Gare de l'Est (from where many of the 70,000 French Jews were deported to their deaths), few guessed that they were headed for several years of internment. The first camp, in Besançon, in eastern France, was appalling. The women were crowded into damp dormitories with bed bugs; their food consisted of mouldy bread and inedible soup. Many died of dysentery and it took six months of British pressure before the 2,000 women were moved to Vittel, 50 miles away.

Before the war, Vittel had been an exclusive spa resort for the rich and unhealthy, but the Germans turned it into what they considered a model camp. Sofka was interned there for three years, from May 1941 until the summer of 1944. It is now a Club Méditerranée, and I went there with a friend of Sofka's, a fellow inmate known as 'Rabbit'. Now in her eighties, Rabbit described the unusual female population in the camp: 48 nationalities of all ages, including dancers (there were some Bluebell Girls who escaped), artists, writers, musicians, teachers and governesses.

Rabbit was 18 when Sofka began teaching her English and Russian. Like many internees, Rabbit was French but had British papers – in her case, on account of a long-gone English father. 'Sofka taught me everything,' Rabbit said. 'She knew about different countries, other ways of life… and her memory was so perfect that she could recite poetry for hours. We read so much together – every-thing from the Bible to Lenin.'

The 33-year-old Russian and her student would sit under Sofka's fur coat in the freezing garret she had managed to appropriate (away from the noisy dormitories, which were full of 'awful English women who moaned about everything,' according to Rabbit), boiling up tea and cooking things from the precious Red Cross boxes that now arrived: Klim milk powder, tinned fish, powdered eggs, dry 'dog biscuits'. Some inmates hoarded their supplies and one recorded a Christmas menu of ambitious proportions: 'Soupe à la Vittel, saumon à sauce blanche, cornbeef de l'espoir, tarte de la victoire, café de triomphe, cigarettes de rêve et de l'oubli.'

Sofka missed Grey desperately. The suspense of waiting for his two letters a month was agony ('My darling, darling girl… Don't let anything worry you because I'm quite safe…'). Still, she kept busy. Enterprising prisoners offered all kinds of classes, from cooking to painting, languages and music. Sofka lectured on Russian poetry (much of which she remembered and translated herself) and started a dramatic society, drawing on her six years of experience as private secretary to Laurence Olivier during the 1930s. (She and 'Larry' had been the same age, shared an enthusiasm for parties and passed through painful divorces in close succession. He had ordered a giant bed from Heal's with linen to fit as a wedding present for Sofka and Grey – their finest Sundays were spent not getting out of it.) Sofka later said that the sound of Olivier reciting Shakespeare was one of the things she longed for most during internment.

Some elements of Vittel's bizarre microcosm were portrayed in a 1944 film, 2,000 Women, which was based on the camp. Given the British film's propaganda function, however, certain aspects of internee life were not made explicit; in particular, there was no reference to the love affairs. Some inmates were already established lesbians – Parisian tolerance had long provided a haven – and certain couples were well known throughout the camp. Rabbit recalled a hefty Englishwoman nicknamed 'Monsieur Huntley-Walker' (sporting a man's haircut and coat and carrying a whip) who adored the feminine Lady Bradley, and everyone liked 'the Peewits', a quiet, music-loving pair. Sofka claimed in her memoirs that she had once tried 'lesbianism', but discovered that she was 'definitely "hetero" ' and was never tempted again.' Another former inmate told me about Sofka's affair with 'Stanley' – a fresh-faced English gym teacher with cropped hair, a beautiful smile and wonderful legs (she always wore shorts). She gave me a photograph of Sofka (shown above) in a tangled heap of women, sprawled around a bed. Lying with her bare legs in the air, leaning on a beaming Sofka, is Stanley.

The other women in the photo were members of what became la Petite Famille – a group of dedicated Communists. For Sofka their evenings discussing the forbidden subject of Marxism 'at last seemed to answer those questions about the in-equality of society that had so disturbed me all my life'. She had lived through poverty during the Depression, but she had also experienced luxury and privilege even as an émigré; the Duchess of Hamilton had 'adopted' her as an adolescent and later employed her in her Society for Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection.

Sofka had been close to the Douglas-Hamilton children and moved in their high-society circle. In joining the underground Communist party, she turned her back on that side of her life as well as the Russian community. But she didn't care; she never let go of the inspiration founded in these hidden, female conversations. Through la Petite Famille, she established links with the Resistance, largely via local men who entered the camp as maintenance workers; they would whisper news, supply wire cutters, and take out messages and sometimes inmates to a passeur.

In 1942 Sofka was informed by the camp authorities that Grey had been killed in action. She was so distraught she wanted to die. All hope had been brutally crushed and it was one of the few times in her life when she was unable to flee. After taking to her bed and refusing food, she was hospitalised and then gradually nursed back to health, chiefly by Rabbit, who sat with her through the night, soothing her when the growling drone of Allied aircraft en route for Germany made her hysterical.

Almost a year after Grey's death, about 300 un-usual-looking prisoners arrived in Vittel and were isolated. It emerged that they were Polish Jews, among the last survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, who had managed by chance, influence or 'Aryan appearance' to escape the round-ups.

Most had recently acquired dubious visas to Latin American countries or Palestine and lived in hope of getting there, but Sofka and Rabbit immediately realised how precarious their situation was. 'For the first time we heard the dread names: Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau…' Sofka wrote. And when she and Rabbit gave the Poles English and French lessons to help if they escaped, they observed how the strangely quiet, emaciated children drew pictures of Nazis throwing people from tall buildings.

Rabbit told me all about these prisoners. She had eventually married an Auschwitz survivor whom she met in France after the war and spent years working for an academic magazine about the Holocaust. Sofka, too, retained a lifelong interest in the Holocaust that sometimes verged on obsession. But what neither woman ever revealed was that Sofka had fallen in love again. I found a reference in a letter, picked up some details from another internee and then Rabbit confessed. 'He was known by everyone as "Darling". He was a very beautiful young man of about 30, with lovely blue eyes – very, very sad eyes – and dark hair.'

Like Sofka, Darling had been recently widowed, and he was accompanied by his mother and young daughter, Visia, whom he cared for with great tenderness. Rabbit admitted that Sofka and Darling had been inseparable: 'They clung to each other,' she said. They were able to be together in the camp until curfew, and I pictured them clinging literally: a bodily expression of the terrible things they had suffered; a defiance of death by making love.

Using a mapping pen, Sofka wrote down the names of all the Jewish prisoners on cigarette papers, rolled them into capsules and sent them out with a passeur to the Red Cross and to British authorities. Although she later found out that the capsules had reached their destination, there was no response. A year later, in 1944, trains with boarded windows arrived in Vittel – and the Poles immediately understood their significance; some tried to kill themselves, jumping from windows, taking poison or cutting their wrists, while the guards tried to reassure people that the Jews were 'merely being transferred'. By chance, Darling was not taken, but everyone was now panic-stricken. Sofka redoubled her efforts to contact the outside world and plead for British intervention in 'this matter of gravest importance'.

One month later, a second boarded-up train arrived. Rabbit showed me where she and Sofka sat in terror on a bench in the picturesque gardens near the commandant's house. Darling was going to be taken. Sofka begged him to go to her attic or the cellars where he could hide with several others who had escaped. There was a last chance. But it was an unenviable choice: what life could Darling have if he abandoned his daughter and mother to their fate? Voluntarily, he walked back to the guards. This time, even the attempted suicide cases were carried to the trains, and the prisoners were taken away to Auschwitz.

Sofka described her sense of hopelessness in her memoirs, but she never revealed her lover. After this, she believed she would never love again, and was plagued with guilt and fury that she (and the Allies) had not been able to stop these horrors. It was little comfort that she and Rabbit had saved a newborn Jewish baby, who had been overlooked in the camp hospital. He was sedated, put in a Red Cross box and Rabbit showed me where she and Sofka cut the wire in the perimeter fence and passed the infant over to the Resistance in the middle of the night. He was cared for until after the war, when he was sent to Israel.

After her repatriation in August 1944, Sofka threw herself into Communist party activities. Nobody in London guessed her internal anguish; to her numerous friends and lovers she was 'fascinating, intelligent, poetic, extraordinary' – a sensualist who loved parties as much as literature. 'Sofka's Saturday Soups', held in her basement flat in Chelsea, became hugely popular gatherings for bohemians and left-wingers. She helped set up Progressive Tours, a Communist travel agency, and took groups to the Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries, with the idealistic hope of preventing war through international friendship.

Sofka often spent months on end travelling; with her minimum-wage salary, rented bedsits and a man in every port, she was as rootless as she had ever been in her early émigré years. I was shocked to discover extensive MI5 files about her, which revealed an unexpected perspective on this era – Sofka was described alternately as a 'flamboyant creature… who wears rather outré clothes and looks a typical Chelsea bohemian type' and 'a brilliant linguist with vast contacts in all spheres… This woman is outstandingly intelligent, courageous and active.'

Six-year-old Patrick came back to live with her when she returned in 1944; her older sons remained with their paternal grandparents. She found it difficult to look after Patrick while picking up the pieces of a demolished life; he was shunted around to various people and then sent to boarding school. Family ties were not a great priority with Sofka, and her sons inevitably suffered from her absence. Although Peter, my father, was not very close to her while I was growing up, he vividly remembers the times he did spend with her as being inspiring and exciting. All three sons are still alive: Patrick is living in France; my father and Ian are here.

Sofka met Jack in 1957 on a tour of the USSR. He was a self-educated man, and a bright spark, but the 50-year-old widow's life must have appeared implausibly complex to the 40-year-old toolmaker, who had never married or moved from his home in west London. I don't think either suspected that what began as a casual fling would turn into the last great love of both their lives.

After all the pain and dislocation in her life, Sofka ended up with what she had been longing for – a house in the country with a garden, plentiful books and a love that she could rely on. Above all, she began to lose her fear that everything would be taken away. I sometimes wonder what she would think about Red Princess. I have written about things that she left out of her memoirs, and while I loved and admired her, there are times when I have had to admit she could have behaved better – her lack of dedication as a mother left a painful legacy for my father and his two brothers.

But Sofka always insisted that it was the searching and seeking that should be the most important thing in life. And I sometimes wonder if, when she gave me her diary, she fleetingly imagined that one day it might provoke me to search and seek for myself.

Wild at heart

I've always Felt a bond with my paternal grandmother Sofka - not least because I was named after her - and what I knew about her life, sounded remarkable. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, as a girl she had escaped to England with the Dowager Empress after the 1917 revolution, worked for the French Resistance and then, in a bizarre twist, become a Communist. In between. Sofka had also been Laurence Olivier s private secretary, survived We in an internment Cramp and fallen in love many times. After I started researching for my book about her, Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life, I became intrigued by the extreme views people held about Sofka, even 10 years after she died, aged 86.

Anyone belonging to her in-laws saw her as immoral: promiscuous, a bad mother, and a traitor. False rumours still held sway about nonexistent illegitimate babies, and according to a brother-in-law, she was a nymphomaniac - an affliction supposedly linked to Sofka's descent, from Catherine the Great.

Almost as extreme were the views of Sofka's loyal friends. She liad been, they said, warm, generous, a lover of literature and, above all, of freedom. And if she sometimes neglected her children, this was because she lived each day to its limit, whether that meant reading through the night, impulsively taking off with a Cossack performing troupe or working for the Communist Party of Great Britain. According to them, she had been principled, intelligent, brave and beautiful.

The first journey in my search for Sofka was to St Petersburg. I saw the apartment by the Neva where she was born in 1907, and the palace where her grandmother brought her up according to 19th -century etiquette: servants, elaborate dresses, carriage rides and visits to play with the young Tsarevich. Sofka's parents, however, were both rebels. Her mother (born Countess Bobrinsky) rejected court life to become a surgeon, and was one of the first female pilots in Russia. Sofka's father. Prince Peter Dolgorouky, was a fun-loving member of the Horse Guards, who caused a scandal by running off with a gypsy singer.

I travelled to Crimea, where much of St Petersburg's high society had estates, to see if I could locate the house where Sofka lived for two years after the revolution began in 1917. Sofka's grandmother had been lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress, and she had followed the Tsar's mother to Yalta when the Bolshevik'threat became too much. In 1919, a British warship arrived tg take away the Dowager Empress, who was the sister of Britain's Queen Alexandra. Accompanying her were 12-year-old Sofka, Sofka's grandmother and her governess. They ended up in England, where they would wait until it was safe to return. No one imagined that 'the Reds' would stay in power for most of the century.

Sofka lived a peripatetic adolescence, following her grandmother around the Russian communities of Europe, but her most stable point of reference was with the family of the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton. They had seven children, and she often spent holidays with them. Later, she worked as secretary to the Duchess, who was president ofthe Animal Defence and Ami Vivisection Society; the house was filled with animals, only vegetarian food was served, and guests were asked which dog they'd like to take to bed with them.

Though Sofka felt at home in England, she enjoyed being with Russians, and her first marriage was to a fellow emigre - Leo Zinovieff They had two sons (including my father), but the marriage was doomed when, after only a few years, Sofka fell in love. Grey Skipwith was the eldest son of a baronet; he had recently left Cambridge and was taking Russian lessons in the -hope of joining the Foreign Office. His relatives recalled that he had been 'snapped up' by a 'man-eating' foreigner, though both Skipwth and Sofka believed they had found the love of their lives and married after her divorce. In 1937, they lived for some months in Laurence Olivier's house in Cheyne Walk. Olivier gave the newly-weds a huge, seven-foot-square bed as a present, and their idea ofthe perfect Sunday was to get everything they needed (food, drinks, cigarettes, books) and stay there. However, their marital bliss was short-lived. In 1940, Sofka was interned in France by the Nazis; she had been visiting her mother in Paris and was trapped by the German invasion. It was at the camp, in Vittel, that she learned that Grey had been killed in action.

At first, Sofka willed herself to die, taking to her bed, but eventually she was nursed back to life. She was already an underground Communist, and worked with the French Resistance, some members of which had jobs in the camp. A year later, when several hundred Polish Jewish prisoners arrived, Sofka tried to do all she could to save than. What she never told anyone was that she had fallen in love with one of the Poles. 'Darling' (as he was known) was a handsome young widower with a daughter. The couple became inseparable, daring to hope for a future. After a year, many of the prisoners, including Darling, were removed to Auschwitz.

Sofka thought she would never love again, and, after the war, she put all her energies into being a Communist. 1 uncovered two MI5 files filled with police reports, phone taps and opened letters, which catalogued her movements in the 1940s and 1950s. Belief in a just, socialist future became her way of fighting for peace and, I realised, the memory ofthe loves she had lost. Working as a travel guide for Progressive Tours, a Communist-run agency, she took groups from Britain to the Soviet Union and Eastern-bloc countries. It was in 1957, while on a trip to the USSR, that Sofka met the last love in her life. Jack was 10 years her junior, had never married, and worked in a factory.So unlikely was the match between him and the older, cosmopolitan, Sofka that many questioned whether theirs had really been a partnership of love. However, having seen the letters Sofka wrote to Jack, I have no doubt of her ecstatic joy at finally, at the age of 50, finding someone she adored once more. Sofka and Jack left London for a cottage on Bodniin Moor, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Jack grew vegetables, walked their whippets and made gorse wine, while Sofka wrote, read and cooked Russian food. I used to visit them occasionally, and Sofka would show me old photographs, and reminisce about her extraordinary life.