AS FAMILY members go, Dimitri Collingridge has an exciting one to boast about: he's related to Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg! Oh, and he's also got a great-great-aunt who may have been a Russian spy and had affairs with two of the most notable w
riters of the last century, which I guess is interesting too, though obviously not as much as Clegg's policy on ID cards.
Anyway, it was Collingridge's Auntie Moura whom he decided to find out more about in this evocative documentary, My Secret Agent Auntie. Moura Budberg was a glamorous socialite, a Russian baroness who, after two husbands, became a lover of Maxim Gorky. Through him she met Lenin and Stalin and once presented the latter with an accordion (which conjures up a startling mental image of ol' Joe on the squeezebox, pumping out a jolly tune while Cossacks danced).
Later she came to London and attached herself to the ageing HG Wells, who was entranced by her beauty and sharp brain. A film was even loosely based on her by Michael Curtiz (who directed Casablanca) in which Kay Francis played her as romantic and mysterious, helping to rescue stalwart British chappie Leslie Howard from the fiendish Russians.
In real life, however, she was under surveillance by MI5 who thought she wasn't quite the thing, chaps, especially when her friend Guy Burgess turned out to be a spy. Nothing stuck, but after her death stories came out that suggested everything from knowing, well in advance, that Anthony Blunt was also a spy to having been involved in a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik government in 1917. Perhaps with accordions.
Collingridge travelled to Russia to find out the truth, interviewing his own family and other friends along the way. His quest was, perhaps, inevitably fated to involve a lot of rumours, unprovable and contradictory, and while he nobly stuck up for his auntie, it wasn't clear what the truth really was. But that didn't matter, because this was a great story, told in a atmospheric way with period reconstructions that embraced the stylish mystery of the times.
In our own less mysterious times, Professor Robert Winston returned with his regular updates on the children followed by BBC cameras since their birth in 2000, in Child of Our Time. Now aged seven and eight, he found that their personalities were becoming more defined and their tastes were as rigid as any set-in-their-ways older person.
Experiments, such as putting the same drink into blue and pink packaging and asking them to choose their favourite, revealed the fairly obvious fact that girls will choose the latter, boys the former. Duh: anyone who's ever had any contact with children could have told him that, but there is something interesting in seeing just how entrenched such gender stereotypes have become. After all, until the mid-20th century, pink was thought of as a manly colour, being related to bold red, unlike wimpy blue.
It was sad, too, to see how the little girls were already so body-conscious and paranoid about becoming fat: "Fat people don't have friends," declared one. Many already want to become "celebrities" or at least know all about them, while they have fixed views on boys' and girls' roles.
It would be nice to hope that as the Child Of Our Time project continues, they'd all leave behind such limitations and embrace individuality, like Moura Budberg even, who certainly didn't care what anyone thought of her, but sadly I doubt it. Our times have changed.
The full article contains 608 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
