SEER, Vol. 88,Nos. 1/2,January /April 2010 INTRODUCTION Personality and Place SIMON DIXON In what must surely be one of the most evocative recreations of a sense of place in any language, Richard Cobb (1917-96) conjured up an English childhood of the 1920sand 1930s in the Royal Borough of Tunbridge Wells. Still Life recalls a favourite gate, associated with a particular birthday; a small boy's fantasies about the giant ferns near the town centre (cThe Congo, Java, Borneo, the Gran Chaco lay, for those in the know, within a few hundred yards of the Pantiles and of [the church of] King Charles theMartyr'); mental snapshots, captured on teenage cycle-rides, to be savoured in a bleak moment (there were many) at Shrewsbury School.1 Above all, however, Cobb recovers 'a society based on elaborate, ifunstated, hierarchies of class relations of considerable subtlety'.2 Mount Ephraim ? home to 'the best dentists (but not the best doctors, less ostentatious) and elderly retired female courtiers' ? sat comfortably enough alongside aspirant, respectable, snobbish Mount Sion. But neither sensed much fellow feeling for 'the ill-defined population ofMonson Road and Calverley Road', still less for themenacing inhabitants of neighbouring High Brooms ? 'not a place, just a sordid word'.3 did not know anything about the Russian Revolution', Cobb admitted, 'though therewere flag-days and collections in King Charles for the Relief of the Famine in the Ukraine. But I certainly did know about class antagonism and class fear.'4 Swanscombe, where Lindsey Hughes (1949-2007) was born, and nearby Dartford, where she went to school, lay in an altogether less prosperous part of Kent than the Royal Borough. Increasingly Simon Dixon is Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at UCL SSEES. I am grateful tomy friend Jim Cutshall for helping me with this essay in so many ways, both spoken and unspoken. 1 R. Cobb, Still Life:Sketches fromaTunbridge Weih Childhood, London, 1984edn,pp. 9 and passim. 2 Ibid., ,xiii. 3 Ibid.,pp. 6, 7, 18,30 (p. 18). 4 Ibid., p. 32. 2 PERSONALITY AND PLAGE indistinguishable from the sprawling suburbs stretched out along London's eastern edge, they could boast none ofMount Ephraim's fading Regency charm; their shops were no match for the fashionable Pantiles; their air was not so clean (until the 1990s, Swanscombe was a centre of the cement industry).5 Yet behind the ubiquitous net curtains, 'the minutely defined frontiers separating middle class from lower middle class'6 were just as valiantly defended in the flatlands of the post-war Thames estuary as they had been thirty years earlier in Tunbridge Wells. Matched by anguish about lower-middle-class security among a generation haunted by memories of the Great Depression, such frontiers were still the crucial fault-lines of English society.7 Language was one obvious signifier in this status-obsessed culture ? 'amutual recognition of the right sort of accent, the emission and reception of a verbal semaphore in a recognised code that would exclude others'.8 Costume was another. At one level, it took historical imagination of a very high order for the adult Lindsey Hughes to reconstruct the dress codes of theMuscovite elite.9 At another, such distinctions had been with her all her life. In Dartford, as inTunbridge Wells ? indeed, anywhere in England in the middle decades of the twentieth century ? 'clothes called to clothes, cutting out words and greetings'.10 Lindsey first encountered Russian language and culture at Dartford Grammar School for Girls, where Marjorie Vanston taught her a crash-course '-level in her first year in the Sixth Form and cA'-level in the second. Only an extraordinary pupil would have been capable of the achievement; only an outstanding school would have offered her the chance. (It is some index of the commitment and flexibility of the best grammar schools, already under pressure from a Secretary of State determined to 'destroy' them,11 thatMrs Vanston should have returned from maternity leave to teach Lindsey in the upper sixth, having been allowed to bring the baby into school provided she 5 Elementary statistical comparisons can be attempted through , a digital resource supported by the University of Portsmouth and the Joint...