Cold War Confusion by Ronald Mackay
“I need your help.”
Vulnerable and forlorn in an ill-cut suit, Vytautas Morkūnas reminded me of an indignant Charlie Chaplin. I withheld my amusement. He’d recently arrived at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from the Academy of Agriculture in Lithuania as a participant in the 1970 bilateral scientific exchange between the UK and the USSR. Land reclamation was his specialty. As part of my university duties, I’d assessed his English proficiency. He’d scored highly.
Having myself returned recently from a two-year post behind the Iron Curtain, I silently sympathised with his call for help. I know the challenges, I said to myself. Massive bureaucratic hurdles. Living and working in a foreign language. Wife and children held as hostages in Vilnius against his return. An automatic assumption of secret police oversight in Newcastle since he knows for certain his British counterpart will be subject to 24-hour surveillance by the KGB in the Soviet Union.
“Please, sit, Dr Morkūnas. Tea?” In my job, I’d come to rely on its calming effect.
Gently, I led the conversation to the countryside, to farms, crops and the challenges of food production. Back on familiar ground, his composure returned.
“So, how can I help?” Now, he’s ready, I thought.
“They say I’m Russian!”
“Who?”
I read the document he handed me: ‘Newcastle upon Tyne City Police’. A photo of a pale, alarmed face. A red ink stamp overlapping one corner. ‘Dr Vytautas Morkūnas, Professor, Academy of Agriculture, Noreikiškės. Residency: 12 months in accordance with UK/USSR scientific exchange agreement, 1970. Residence: Vilnius, Lithuania.’ ‘Citizenship’: ‘RUSSIAN’.
Immediately, I understood. “It’s common for the name of a state to stand for an entire country.”
“It’s wrong!”
“What do you think my citizenship is?”
“English!”
“I was born in Scotland.”
“So?”
I changed tack. “Can you show me your passport?”
He took it from his briefcase. “Look -- Citizenship – USSR, not Russian. I am Lithuanian. Your police refused to believe me.”
My police? In his eyes they are, I mused. To Dr Morkūnas, I’m the equivalent of the KGB. But I knew that the error on his residency document would rankle permanently, so together, we walked back to the police station.
The desk officer, a patient woman with a Geordi accent, frowned. “If he’s from the USSR, isn’t he Russian?”
“Officer, it’s like me calling you a blown-away Scot instead of a Geordi.” I was relying on her regional pride.
“Eee! That bad, is it!” She scowled at the insult of being called a blown-away Scot. “Eee! Well, I’ll fix it.” She did. Immediately. Dr Morkūnas regarded me with even greater respect.
“Dr Morkūnas, Come and have supper with my mother and me. We’ll celebrate this victory.”
My mother was flattered by Vytautas’ old-fashioned courtesy. Together, we enjoyed the first meal he’d eaten outside the university canteen. I detected, however, that his suspicions about me were being confirmed. In his eyes, my position in the university gave me power over all non-native speakers of English. As a state-employed informer, therefore, I was probably hired not only to help resolve problems but also to keep a watchful eye on him and report on his behaviour. That’s how it is under communism. He’ll expect the same here.
The more to put him at his ease and with the intention of showing Vytautas that the UK was a modern and free society, I made him an invitation. “Come with me this weekend to visit the hill farm in Scotland where my cousin works. As an agriculturalist you’ll find it interesting.”
His formal nod suggested his acceptance arose, at least partly, from a sense of duty. It said: I’ll do what the English police informer assigned to me expects.
Once we reach the highlands, I thought, the tranquillity of a 75,000-acre highland estate will banish his concerns.
My cousin was a shepherd. The solitary cottage he shared with his wife and five children stood at the head of the glen, below the rounded top of Ben Vuirich, at a solitary point called Daldhu. On the vastness of these hills, three shepherds cared for 4000 breeding blackface ewes. Two gamekeepers managed grouse, deer, and a loch teeming with trout. He’ll return convinced of the majesty of Scotland and the superiority of Britain’s open, welcoming society.
Alas, our best intentions don’t always enjoy success.
“We’ll meet at Newcastle railway station, Friday at noon.” Vytautas showed surprise I owned no car.
After a three-hour journey north, we arrived in Dundee and walked to the bus station. When we alighted in Blairgowrie, the school bus, the sole means of transport for the final 20 miles, had already left.
“We’ll hitch a lift.” I was confident we’d cover the 14 miles to Kirkmichael with ease. I’d done it before. Optimistic, we slung bags over shoulders and set off.
No cars stopped. It was getting dark.
After three gruelling hours, we reached Kirkmichael. Vytautas kept glancing at me as if uncertain about where this invitation was leading.
“Here’s the Kirkmichael Hotel!” A wave of loud music, raucous conversation, and a wall of cigarette smoke struck us. Looking alarmed, Vytautas followed me to the bar.
“Anybody here from Enochdhu? or Glenfernate?” I asked the barman.
“Geordie Campbell.” He pointed to man in tweeds laughing with friends at a table littered with empty glasses.
With difficulty, Geordie brought my face into focus. “Where you goin’?”
“Daldhu.”
“Westood’s?”
“I’m his cousin.”
“Aye! I’ll tak ye baith tae Daldhu.”
“You will?” Another hour’s walk saved!
“But a’m no leavin’ till closin’ time!”
I looked at my watch. Forty-five minutes. “Pint for you and your friends?” He nodded.
“Who are these people?” Vytautas asked as we drank our pints.
“Employees from surrounding estates.”
“Estates?”
I summarised Highland land tenure. Landlords hired locals as shepherds, gamekeepers and ghillies. Regularly, landlords would bring guests to shoot grouse, stalk deer and fish.
“Serfs! Like Russia in the 18th century! They do what you ask.” In Vytautas’ eyes my ability to conjure up a lift confirmed his belief that I wielded authority.
I steered Vytautas towards safer subjects.
“Closing time!” The bell rang.
Geordie Campbell dropped us off at Daldhu, swung his Land Rover around, and back-tracked down Glenfernate. Derek welcomed us each with a glass of Highland Park and began a discourse on Wagner whose Ryde of the Valkyries was playing on the turntable. Anne and the children were asleep. Vytautas was struggling to make a pattern using the additional fragments of information about me that he’d collected since we’d left Newcastle.
The following morning, after meeting Anne and the children, we supped porridge with cream skimmed from the milk of the cow kept for that purpose. Then we stepped outside into a bitter wind. Purple hills rose from Loch Loch to the summit of Beinn a Gloe. The Fearnach burn splashed beneath dark crags on its east bank and massive hills on its west. A panorama I loved in all seasons.
As we walked, I explained to Vytautas the complications involved in managing a highland estate. From his facial expression he was filtering my explanations through the obligatory classes in Marxism he’d sat through in school.
Landlords owned Highland estates. Theirs was the ‘big house’ tended to by the wives of the shepherds and gamekeepers. Every employee was allotted an isolated stone cottages for himself and his family. Each shepherd was responsible for 1200 breeding ewes. Lamb sales were the estate’s financial life blood. To the gamekeepers fell the task of managing wild game for the owner-hosted shooting parties held at key periods of the year. Shotgun, rifle, and rod were dignified traditions of Scottish Highland life.
As we climbed, I fell quiet, unwilling to fuel the caricatures created by Vytautas’ communist education and his suspicion that 20th century Scotland was merely Russia in the 18th.
When we reach the top of this hill, I thought, we’ll enjoy the panorama. I’ll point out places of interest and beauty. We’ll leave politics, economics, birthrights, and informants behind.
I paused for Vytautas just below the top. Now, relaxed, he opened his mouth to express what I hoped might be a compliment on the view. Without warning, a thunderous, deafening roar shattered the silence. Its impact shook us to the very core. Thunder of the Apocalypse!
A jet fighter-bomber screamed overhead at what seemed like touching distance. I saw the rondels – red, white and blue -- on its swept-back wings. We felt the scorch of its twin jets as it hurtled down the hill, across the glen and up the far side to disappear.
The terrible suddenness, the herculean power of its engines and its equally abrupt disappearance, left us shaken and bemused. Had it happened at all?
My brother, an RAF officer, had told me that fighter-jets as well as the great Vulcan bomber in which he was navigator, practised high-speed low-level flying in Scotland and Canada where conditions were similar to those in the USSR. This was how fliers learned to evade ground radar, avoid surface-to-air missiles, reach their target, and strike! We’d just witnessed one such practice. Vytautas, however, lacked such an explanation for the shock we’d experienced.
The UK and the USSR were antagonists within opposing military alliances – NATO and the Warsaw Pact. To the average man in the street, alliances are impersonal and distant. But when war machines come so close that they assault, violate and bewilder, your response is immediate and intense alarm. I well knew that reason plays no part in such crises.
On two occasions when I’d worked behind the Iron Curtain, I’d felt as I imagined Vytautas must now feel. Once, I’d run into a troop of Romanian tanks in defensive fighting position in a forest bordering the USSR – a place I’d no right to be and a hostile tactical deployment I’d no right to see. I’d experienced similar panic when forcibly restrained by a score of armed, motor-cycle militiamen while driving my Land Rover in Bucharest. I was unaware that General de Gaulle, was about to arrive in uniformed glory to meet Nicolae Ceaușescu, General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, and my presence was breach of security.
I well knew how an acute crisis within an alien framework can instantaneously drain the human spirit and leave one struggling to recover. Here was Vytautas, a citizen of the USSR, who’d accepted an unexpected invitation to enjoy a quiet weekend in the Scottish Highlands. Suddenly and unaccountably he was buzzed by an unheralded, numbingly close, bone jarring fighter-bomber! Why here? Why me? What’s next? If, as a foreign alien in the UK, he needed further evidence of the omnipresent might of the British security service, here it was.
He was quiet over dinner.
On Sunday morning, under a clear blue sky, Derek drove us down Glen Fernate lined by rowan trees scarlet with berries, the Fearnach Burn a chain of deep placid pools and frothy waterfalls.
“Look!” Derek braked his Land Rover. “On that crag!” We heard the roaring before we saw its source. A mile away, high above us, stood a great stag, head raised, bellowing its challenge. “The rut’s started. He’s warning younger competitors off.”
Dr Vytautas Morkūnas spent the journey back to Newcastle-upon-Tyne immersed in a textbook on undersoil fluid dynamics. Never again did he visit my office to ask for help.
Deirdre with the mik cow at Daldhu
Derek and VM at Daldhu, Glenfernate, Scotland
Glenfernate in winter
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Derek and Ronald at Daldhu, spring 1974
The RAF practised low-level flying
in areas of Scotland like this 
Glenfernate, Scotland
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