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Easter Saturday on the North Yorks Moors Railway (May 2012)
by Neil Hughes

“We’re going to the beach!” the anxious little girl, who had been trying to get into the adults’ conversation for some time, announced in a shrill voice.

Was it Scarborough, maybe? That was not where I was about to head off for that day but one look around the small group of us gathered in Helmsley youth hostel (in East Yorkshire) that doubtful, overcast, Easter Saturday morning convinced me that none of us was likely to stay warm that day. A little fitful blue sky rifted the corner of the mostly grey horizon. A small bird sang tunefully—albeit that a little mournfully—of possible Easter rebirth.

The previous day it had poured. Morning quiet – stations of the cross at church – then an afternoon cloudburst. I had spectated at a diligently-performed street presentation of a trial-and-crucifixion passion play in Kendal before the heavier precipitation, moving then through the rain-soaked dales—Sedbergh, Garsdale Head, Hawes, Aysgarth—to Thirsk and then after this to Helmsley. No-one really thought that today, the culmulation of such a long north country of England winter, would be any better. Though I was going to Whitby, ancient home of St.Hilda, her convent and its conciliatory, epoch-making synod, and also terminus of the North Yorkshire Moors railway, neither held any especial prospect in themselves of presenting me with glittering sunshine upon arrival.

It had been a silent winter—certainly for me in Cumbria. The silence of the snow, when it falls; the silence of mountains; the silence of the economic recession gradually enveloping the country; the silence of…silence, punctuated only by the occasional howls of countries that were being dragged into war, famine or the autocratic rule of dictators: South Sudan, Nigeria, Syria. I was relatively little aware of this where I was, of course, surrounded by fields, streams, owls and the rugged Cumbrian mountains. And I had a general disillusionment with politics too: was the British coalition government going to bring us out of the mess? Probably not in any way.

The previous evening at the youth hostel had been silent too, pierced only by the intermittent outbursts of chat from the individuals and from two or three families gathered around squat Formica-topped tables in the members’ kitchen, with that same optimistic, diplomatic little child and her parents among them. The cosy electric lamps glowed quietly, that same presumptuous bird hesitated a careful, cautious note or two outside in the dark once the drizzle stopped; punctilious drops of rain descended from the roof each time it started again. The immediate agony of Easter suffering was over; quiet calm announced itself once more.

But now each was off to Scarborough, Whitby or somewhere over a rainbow.. First thing in the morning I walked into the neat, limestone-walled town centre, buying bread and seeking travel directions. I had been before to the North Yorks Moors; I was just seeking, I suppose, some assurance that things were still pretty much now as they had always been then.

The day, in more ways than one, was undeveloped: still, hopeful, clear. Levisham station is in a hollow, reached by a tortuous, single-track road that winds down a valley side amongst trees, past a camping and picnic site, then over a level-crossing. On the way I stopped briefly to look at Lockton youth hostel, noting the friendliness of more than one local person who each helpfully guided me to where its agilely-concealed entrance lay. At Levisham station platform, amongst well-preserved Victorian buildings, I identified first, the booking office, then purchased a ticket: a rover for the whole line. In the end, I never visited Pickering down at its south end, though.

In experiences like this, is not the waiting as important as the event itself? One is waiting, hoping, maybe imaging; then finally the superbly well-preserved steam train, its column of smoke and prospectively a whistle, approaches the station. But first, the signal clatters up (indeed up, on the NYMR, not down). But it’s a diesel! I can’t say I’m overly disappointed, though; the day has only just started and it’s all part of the adventure. The multiple-unit diesel is quite a vintage one, too…

I sat down close to an Asian family and then exited at Goathland, the next halt along the line. Enough time was available here for a brief moorland walk, stroll into the picturesque village and visit to the veteran Hull and Barnsley railway carriage secreted behind the platform. The sense of proximate history is palpable. This is why so many families, couples, individuals and children are here to try to recall it as a small part of their past too. An ebullient stream runs underneath the solid brick station itself. In the waiting-room, although it is a little chilly and musty, a freshly-lit coal fire burns in the grate and there is a welcoming presence of staff. I emerge and sit awaiting a southbound train, a mite diffidently inspecting facial features. The motorbikes, the sirens, stress of potentially anti-social, threatening neighbours and other ills of modern life are ephemerally, critically forgotten, though not altogether. Waiting for a fascinating object, steam-hauled, to pull in one transiently experiences a real-life encounter with the past. Is there even a tear in one or two eyes present, maybe?

As its stentorian equivalent arrives on the opposite platform, my own means to proceed to the next station north, Grosmont, pulls in. It is fronted by a sparklingly-clean, green ex-Southern Railway loco complete with prototype smoke deflectors. Both I and other customers—even though this resplendent specimen is facing back-to-front—are delighted and jump in. Were I a trainspotter, I would note that this is certainly not one that I have seen before.

At Grosmont we discover the reason for this surprise, novel occurrence. A full wedding train, soon to be appropriated by an authentic bride and groom, stands prepared in the bay platform. Our own de-coupled locomotive, now crowded around with supporters, young and old, backs away down the line and then is reconnected to the front of the standing matrimonialised Pullman coaches. In a short time the bridal party arrives. I enquire tactfully of a member of staff how much it costs to hire the Pullman train. He immediately, with a sympathetic smile, gives me a leaflet. One cursory look inside decides for me that this is not something I’ll be making a project of to celebrate my sixtieth birthday.

Crowds gather inquisitively, not wanting to appear too prurient. Through a gap between coaches on the other platform—I have now crossed the track—I see bride and groom express a grateful embrace, the green locomotive being the wider frame, for the benefit of photographers. A few shafts of sunlight, piercing through, brighten the day. I then swallow down a sandwich on the fourth platform that is used only by the intermittent BR (Northern Rail) trains between Whitby and Middlesbrough. I have just witnessed an argument. Amongst a dysfunctional family, two adults and two children, one a teenager, one younger. Life as it is, I suppose; one day you’re married – as I may yet be—then, before long, arguments like this one. So when does true life actually begin?

My train for Whitby duly having arrived, I step in and spend most of my time aboard peering out of the end-of-carriage window, imbibing smoke, especially in one tunnel. People aboard are contented; now we are all going to the beach (or the seaside, anyway) notwithstanding the fitful weather. At Whitby I disembark as do many others, though together with a good proportion of people and a fresh influx of day-trippers who had newly gathered. I remain on the lengthy, harbour-side platform, watching the locomotive turned around and gazing, in so marking time, across a flotilla of yachts and busy engineering sheds to the hill where St. Hilda’s monastery still outlines erstwhile holy austerity, though more like a skeleton today than an edifice likely to influence the day-to-day running of modern political economy. In the secular world of 2008 and its aftermath, motorcyclists, scooters and other joyriders buzz about like angry bees on the surface of any credible, authoritative attempt at piety.

As the transformed locomotive, now attached to the front of the eight carriages and facing the correct direction, recesses then back into the station, a scurry for places is triggered. I find myself edging forward into a compartment in the front coach – probably not the one I would have chosen. The prevailing mood inside now did appear to be something like: ‘Fantastic – we’re in! Now let’s get the windows open and enjoy the view!’.

In my own compartment (Remember compartments? They still have them in France, Italy and elsewhere.) I find myself in the company of Jack, Sarah and Tom (the latter is Sarah’s boyfriend or maybe even husband and these are not their real names). Jack, from Peterborough (a lifelong rail enthusiast) had suffered a stroke some twelve months ago and had partially lost certain of his speech powers. In the manner of those, who of necessity, have to express themselves in this way, he used elongated speech patterns which the patient Sarah—a daughter and also perhaps a nurse—and the putatively, long-suffering Tom, do their best to translate and re-configure into acceptable English. Jack, although he doesn’t appear to have lost any of his intellectual capacity and, indeed, was at pains to be communicative, also tended—no doubt as a result of his stroke and perhaps also because he was now unleashed for one day—to be a little childlike in a capacity for also wanting to wander off and stand at the end of the coach, where anyone attempting any kind of confrontation or even interlocution would meet with pure gobbledegook. Sarah’s great worry—not perhaps unreasonable—is that Jack might perhaps inadvertently step out of the train at the wrong station and not be able to climb aboard again before it moves off. She keeps urging the good-humoured Tom to check that dad’s alright, which he duly did each time that Sarah requested it, even though the corridor is quite populated with many other enthusiastic passengers.

The only occupants of the compartment, we struck up an amiable relationship. Jack, it turned out, had been a rail driver himself and it was sad that he could no longer express himself as self-assuredly as he might once have done about many aspects of the railway operation here and railways today in general. Even so, as we pulled out of Grosmont an audible, even if frank, argument erupted between two members of staff about how a valve should be opened whilst water was being pumped into the locomotive’s tank. Jack, in his broken, curt and truncated language freely and readily joined in, sobering the participants down and ultimately needing to be restrained by Sarah (She feared, perhaps, that he might perhaps be inadvertently sanctioned—or even sectioned—by well-meaning though zealous bystanders). I had been about to doze off in the declining afternoon sun, but now was wide-awake. Jack, too, was delighted next as a previously unnoticed heavy freight locomotive was now attached to the front of the train.

“It’s a ‘ten’ – a ‘ten’,” he kept singing.

Following the locomotive change, however, the train remained in the station for a while; no one was quite sure why until an ambulance arrived. Jack, head out of the carriage window, observed this new happening with meticulous candour.

“A stiff, a stiff,” he soon announced through Tom, his attention not unnaturally aroused by the incident, soon assured us that this was not actually the case.

“Still breathing,” was his terse assertion after a quick scan outside—a less fundamentally morbid but still not wholly (in itself) reassuring comment. A wheelchair/stretcher was bundled across to the waiting vehicle; shortly afterwards our train’s own departure ensued.

“We’re going more further now,” Jack told us. The trio were up in Yorkshire for three days, staying at a B & B. The previous day they had visited the York Railway Museum and the ex- train driver had delighted in taking a steam-led trip along two hundred yards of track. Equally Jack’s eyes now shone as, ephemerally lifted from the debilitating rigours of his moribund condition, he was re-immersed in the world of pistons; motion, the thrill of a certain kind and, principally, a sense of mutual duty that he knew only too well gripped him now again, inexorably and comprehensively.

Momentarily my own thoughts regressed back to my own father, Allan. Brought up adjacent to or within the proximity of a railway line in two separate and discrete inner-city Liverpool dwellings he had acquired a rich love of rail and all its related paraphernalia,, transferred later to both his sons, my two-year younger brother Grahame and myself. He, Allan, had died of cancer, the prostate version of the latter that can affect even the fittest (and he was very fit). He played tennis, in fact, even until the last year of his life. As his newly indoctrinated children, my brother and I had been taken all over the country staring into countless rail sheds and goods yards, taking down numbers, seeking permitted entry into signal-boxes, sometimes to work the levers themselves. But now he, too, was dead and his memories and pleasures taken with him.

One night, as a child, I’d had a high temperature and been unable to sleep. My mother and father both attended the bedroom, uncertain of whether to call the GP, but principally trying to devise ways to calm me. Intermittently in the background of a still, frosty winter night we could hear a ‘mixed-traffic’ steam locomotive slipping as it tried to make the gradient of the semi-circular Liverpool dock route about a mile from our house. My father – just as much interested in the railway context as in what was happening in my bed – kept us both informed.

“They’ll be putting down salt,” he said. And my mother, being the quick-thinking maverick genius that she was, soon began likening my situation to that of the train.

“D’you think it’ll get up the bank? It’s trying quite hard. That’s what you have to do. Despite everything that’s stopping you, you have to try to get to sleep.”

Searchlights were put out along the track whilst my father continued watching intently from the bedroom window. Three tentative, tenacious exertions forward; then two back. Occasionally one could hear the semi-distant clang of an iron bar being moved or a briefer peal of a man’s voice. Inexorably—for me, imploringly—the heavy-laden goods train began moving up the hill, first like a spider scaling a sheer bathside wall, then gradually more confidently. It passed out of detection and moved on into the night. Within a few moments, the passion of my illness surmounted and metamorphosed into an incident of a far greater and enduring human scale—and its proper angelic overcoming too—I was asleep.

Our North Yorks Moors Railway train hurried Jack, Sarah, Tom and I each to our respective destinations. Afternoon sun now illuminated the entire landscape.

“Look, Sarah said, at the shadow of the smoke on the field.” Indeed, one confident billow after another was outlined on the tufty grass and moorland at the track-side. It was indeed a quaint, beautiful—and because we were all gazing at it momentarily at once—a uniquely uplifting, uniting and confidence-building sight despite the speed at which, as an historic remnant, each fresh puff rapidly disappeared from our vision.

And so on now—each to our own cars and homes. In the station at Levisham our train overshoots the platform. I earn admiration—not unmingled with perplexity—as I jump from the isolated carriage down on to the gravel.

“Couldn’t you have just walked down the train?” asks a liveried, exasperated guard as I pass (though not unkindly). Then I am ascending the hill in my car, which has emerged unscratched from the car park despite the exponential increase in the number of vehicles parked there since I deposited my own earlier in the morning. I ultimately wrest my neck to cast one final look at the shy cluster of pre- rail-grouping heritage buildings before I turn my back upon them until next time.

So away goes the train: away with Jack, Sarah and Tom, its argumentative crew, possibly the Asian family I met earlier or the disputatious trio at Grosmont, maybe even the little girl from Helmsley youth hostel. It’s been a good day for all and maybe I’ll meet them all again somewhere, sometime.

Maybe we can all love and respect one another better now too. Here today were, in tiny microcosm, many ingredients needed for a more understanding outer society too. I sit now in the cafe at Lockton, drinking coffee and eating a piece of cake. And I look out, thinking through these and many much profounder thoughts too.

Homecoming
by Pat Seman

The road lies before me. A dirt road. Empty. On either side vast fields stretch in long, smooth undulations to the far horizon. Not a house, a farm or a person in sight.

I’m about to visit my grandmother’s birthplace, the village she left so long ago to look for a better life in the New World. I’m here in the ‘old country’—a phrase my Dad always used, that I haven’t heard since my childhood.

I have no idea who, if anyone, is left of my grandmother’s family. All I have is the name of a village.

Now, only a few kilometres to go on the last lap of a journey that started in Amsterdam and has brought us more than a thousand kilometres through the forests and hills and wide plains of central Europe to this remote south-west corner of Ukraine.

We’ve just come off the main road—a switch-back road through gently rolling countryside, lined with huge trees leaning towards us, newly-leafed and in blossom.

A wooden signpost at the turning points the way along the dirt road which seems to go on and on in a straight line to nowhere. The village has to be out there somewhere. Surely not far now. I don’t know what to expect. A huddle of houses surrounded by an eternity of empty fields?

Dust rises from our car wheels as we hit the dirt track. We drive slowly, swerve to avoid shallow ruts and potholes. I roll down a window. A lark is singing somewhere over the fields. The earth is a deep, rich brown, alive with tender, green shoots laid out in long, neat rows.

The road goes into a long curve. Trees appear, a farm. The land on our right rises into a steep, grassy bank. We drive downhill past a memorial inscribed 1941-1945, with the figures of two men, strong torsos, heavily muscled, one bare-chested, kneeling, his arm twisted back in the grasp of the other who is booted, holding a gun.

A church, then another large concrete building that could be a school.

The road narrows, steepens, follows the course of a shallow stream. We’re drawn down into a tiny valley. Low houses painted in shades of blue and green amongst trees. Gardens with neat wooden fences. The land, carefully ploughed and planted, reaches down to the stream now lined with willows. Ducks float on the water, waddle in convoy across the road. We slow down to let them pass. The stream disappears. Houses hug the grass verge as the road winds and curves. It climbs round a bend and I look down on a small house with a steep corrugated iron roof, on its sky blue plaster walls and decorative panel work painted green, white and blue. There’s a wooden fence immaculate in exactly the same pattern of colours. A pile of logs is neatly stacked in one corner. I glimpse a vase of flowers at the window. A man pushes aside the curtain at the doorway and steps out into the yard.

I wonder if this is my family’s village. It feels sheltered, intimate. But the road widens, the houses fall away.

Then, on a rocky bank at the side of the road, in large concrete Cyrillic letters, painted blue,

VASYLIV.

All I had to guide me here was a scrap of paper on which, years ago, my father had written the name of his mother’s village. I remembered him telling me that it was near the town of Chernivtsi, the capital of Bukovina, which is now in Ukraine. He also said that my grandmother’s father was the mayor of the village. This was all the information I had. I’d never thought to ask any questions until it was too late and my father had died, taking any stories about the Old Country with him. So, when I decided to try and trace my roots, the first thing I needed was that scrap of paper. I knew that we’d kept it, put it away somewhere safe. But where?

It was my husband who finally hunted it down; in the attic, on a faded post-it stuck to the screen of an old computer that we’d stored way, gathering dust. We deciphered the faint letters to read ‘Vasolau’. Then poured over atlases – old atlases in which Bukovina was part of the Soviet Union, more recent ones placing it in an independent Ukraine; found nothing. So we homed in on Chernivtsi and its surrounding area on Google Earth. There were villages aplenty in tiny Bukovina: in the foothills of the Carpathians, on the banks of the River Dniester, close to the border with Romania. But none with this name. We’d come to a dead end.

I was teaching at a language school in Amsterdam and in one of my English classes was a Ukrainian student, Luba. She already knew about my Ukrainian roots and, when I told her about my failed efforts to find my grandmother’s village, she offered to look for information online on a Russian site. She came to the next lesson with a printed-out map of Bukovina. She’d circled one village as the most probable.

It lay thirty kilometres north of Chernivtsi on the banks of the River Dniester. It was called Vasyliv.

We drive past the large concrete sign into the village. A long row of low wooden fences stretches on either side of the wide road; beyond it houses set back in courtyards, down narrow side streets, spread out amongst gardens. The road is all but empty of traffic. We pass a group of women in headscarves. They turn and stare at the strangers in the red Renault with its foreign licence plates; at me sitting in the back, my husband, Jaap, at the wheel and beside him the slim figure of Tanya, our interpreter.

I’ve been more confident that this could be my family’s village since Tanya has thrown herself into the task. We were brought into contact with her when we asked at the hotel reception for an interpreter. This is the first time that she’s helped someone find their family and she’s curious, full of enthusiasm. She took us to her language school, to its small office at the edge of a school playground. We sat at a table piled high with English textbooks, next to two teachers preparing lessons, while she made phone calls in an attempt to trace my grandmother’s records. First to the regional office in the neighbouring village to Vasyliv where she was informed that the archives had just been moved to Chernivitsi, then to Chernivitsi where they told her that they were in the process of transferring all records to a new office. Finally, she contacted the chairman of the Vasyliv village council. When she told him my grandmother’s name he said,

“Bring her along. Of course her family is here. Half the village is called Semenyuk”.

I’m nervous, yet at the same time feel strangely numb. It comes, I think, from a sense of surrender. Now that I’ve set this process in motion, that I find myself in this remote corner of Europe about to meet complete strangers—strangers to whom I’m tied by blood and history – I’ve no choice but to take whatever, whoever, comes. I’m also curious.

Last night I talked to a young woman from Canada staying at our hotel, who’s also searching for her relatives. She wants to make a film. But first she must go to the village and find out if there is still family. And if she does find them, she has no idea how they’ll receive her, what she can expect.

When I was a child, about six or seven years old, a stranger came to our flat in London. I was sent down to open the door. Standing on the pathway, framed in the dim and foggy light of 50’s London, was a man in a long, grey raincoat, his face in the shadow of the hat tipped over his forehead. He could have stepped straight out of our tiny black and white TV screen—Harry Lime, the cold war agent, fresh from the war-torn streets of Vienna. In fact, he was an old friend of my Dad’s from his hometown, Brandon, in Canada. He’d just arrived off the boat and had come to see us before setting out on the final part of his journey. He was about to visit his family in Ukraine, to go behind the Iron Curtain—for me, at that time, an undefined but hostile world; a world that was uniformly grey, peopled by dour, unsmiling faces. I realise now that he was probably going to Bukovina. He must have called in again on his way back but I can’t remember. I don’t even know if he managed to meet his family; only that his by presence there and the fact that he was trying to make contact with them, the authorities were alerted and his family was put into danger. He was certainly not made welcome. It was a period, when all communication between Ukraine and the outside world was frozen, when the people and families trapped in that world for all intents and purposes disappeared.

The long line of fences and houses is broken by a football field, then a cemetery—a large field full of white stone crosses. We reach a small concrete building set back from the road. Mikola, the chairman of the village council, is waiting for us at the gate. As Tanya introduces us he reaches out to shake Jaap’s hand, then greets me with a courteous nod. He’s a short man with warm brown eyes, a drooping moustache and grey shoulder-length hair. He takes us into the building, down a wide corridor and into his office. It’s a homely and comfortable room. In one corner is a long three-part dressing table mirror over a small table. On the table stands a jar of wild flowers. Next to it is a computer desk against the wall. Its shelves are full of greeting cards and family photos and one pink toy dog. A big, yellow fishing net is propped near the door and there’s goldfish in a small tank by the window. On one wall hangs a portrait of Tsar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra and facing them, impassively, President Yevtuschenko. Three women rise to greet us as we enter. Mikola introduces us to his assistants; Vanya, Svetlana and his wife, Katya. Katya and Vanya are cousins. They are both Semenyuks. They greet us warmly with firm handshakes and big smiles.

We all sit down at a long table and Tanya shows the photograph taken in Canada of my grandmother and my father, a young boy in his teens. Looking full of responsibility, he stands sternly at her side. Gathered around them are his sister, Jean, his younger brother, Mike and sister, Ann. Only the little ones, Mike and Ann, are smiling. Tanya tells them that my grandmother’s father was chairman of the village.

In Mikola’s white Mercedes we’re driven to a small house on a rise where we’re introduced to Alexander, whose great-grandfather had once been the village chairman.

Alexander is excited to see us. He sits me down and kneels at my side showing me photo after photo of the family in ‘Moose’. Moose? I suddenly realise, he’s talking about Moose Jaw, the Canadian prairie town in Saskatchewan, where my father was born. So one after the other the villagers must have followed each other out to Moose Jaw and formed a community there – an extension of Vasyliv on Canadian soil. I’d had no idea. I’d always thought that my grandmother’s emigration had been a solitary adventure, that she’d followed her husband out to Canada and that they’d settled where there was work. The photographs keep on coming, but I recognise nobody. I can see Tanya shaking her head. Alexander is really keen to establish a family relationship but it turns out that his great-grandfather’s name was not even Semenyuk. The connection is on his mother’s side. He takes us out to meet her. She’s sitting on a bench in the yard. She is blind. She takes hold of my hand, tells me that she spent the years of her childhood in Canada, in Moose. She went to school there, but she can’t remember any English now. All the words have gone. And she certainly can’t remember my grandmother. It was so long ago.

The first time I met my grandmother was not in Moose Jaw but in another prairie town, Brandon, where my Dad grew up. I was eleven and had to take some extra time off school for the big trip to Canada. It was the first time my Dad had been back since before I was born. I remember my grandmother’s hair was tied into two plaits, pinned to her head. She wore dark clothes and an apron. She looked like my Dad, the same long, serious face. I remember the wooden house where she lived. It was long and low with a veranda and out back was a big garden full of vegetables and at the end of the garden, the toilet, a little wooden hut with a hole in the ground. I was scared to go in because the walls were draped with spiders’ webs. I remember her bedroom with an iron bed and plain white sheets. Underneath her bed she kept a trunk, which she drew out and opened to show me the white linen shift that she’d made and embroidered for her deathbed. I remember that she and my Dad spoke Ukrainian together but I had no ear for the lilt and the music of it then, no interest.

I also remember my Dad leaning against a wooden fence in Brandon as he talked in Ukrainian to my grandmother’s neighbour and the two onion-shaped domes of a Ukrainian wooden church that rose in the distance behind them. I can see already how much there is in Vasyliv that would have been familiar to him had he ever been able to come here; how little, at least on the surface of things, life has changed here since my Dad’s childhood, spent far away in Canada. I wonder what more I’ll learn about my father now that I’m in Vasyliv.

Mikola takes us for a tour of the village. He drives us to the river and parks in the middle of a field. in deep grass. We’re on a bluff looking down at a point where the Dniester is joined by a smaller river, the Siret. He tells us that, situated on this confluence, Vasyliv was once an important town linked to the great trade routes that flowed from the Baltic to the Black Sea by way of the Dniester. Here he says, pointing to the banks below, was a harbour and there a trading station, and there, pointing to a large field to our right, a castle. Vasyliv, he says, was once wealthy and powerful, a fortified town with numerous wooden churches and monasteries. All destroyed, burnt to the ground when the Mongols swept through. The bones of the slaughtered still regularly turn up in the gardens and fields around the village.

He drives back along the main street and draws our attention to the big, yellow pipes on either side, high above the ground. After years of wheeling and dealing he’s finally managed to bring gas to the village and is proud of his victory. As we drive past the large football field he points out a small white wooden tribune standing at the far edge – yet another of his achievements in the long struggle with the authorities to get funding to improve the village. He reels out story after story of official corruption and indifference. Yet, Mikola is in buoyant mood. He has plans. Vasyliv, he believes, with its gently rolling hills and river setting is the perfect tourist destination.

And, as if to prove his point, he takes us down another turning to the river; this time down a narrow, bumpy, dirt path lined with low fences and small wooden houses. Here on the left he tells us, along the banks of a tiny stream, were once a row of windmills run by several Jewish families. The path stops by a copse of trees and we walk down to a wide river meadow where two or three tethered cows and a piebald horse quietly graze. Just before us is a small island in the river. Two boys are swimming across the channel, another sits on the bank, fishing. To our left a narrow track trodden through the grass leads along the river, through the trees that crowd its banks, towards a row of small houses visible on the rise, their long plots of land, curving down to the water’s edge. To our right the river makes a wide turn, disappearing behind a high cliff, where the land rises into a steep hill.

The spring sky, high and blue with its thin drift of clouds, the sheltering trees. The green meadow and the winding river; its quiet, steady flow.

It is beautiful here.

On the way back along the bumpy path we glimpse a young girl walking towards us up the slope from a garden below, herding a flock of geese.

Now Mikola takes us along yet another path. It runs down between high grassy banks and this time comes to the river at a point where immediately opposite, on the other side of the water, is a high cliff, its earthy brown and green contours stretched into rippling reflections in the river’s strong flow.

Two women in wellington boots stand ankle-high in the water washing clothes, a pile still stacked in a wheelbarrow behind them. Two little girls sit close by, balanced on the prow of a wooden skiff beached on the riverbank, their feet dangling in the water.

Mikola leads us a few metres up the path again and then turns off and through a gate into a large yard. We’ve come to his house. A well stands in the middle of the yard. It’s made of wood and painted blue with an intricately fretted and decorated tin roof that gleams in the morning sun. Proudly he demonstrates his latest acquisition – an electric pump for the well. He turns on a switch and we watch as the water gushes out. He takes us around his property, shows us pigs in a sty, then a big garden at the back of the house with long, neat rows of vegetables. Their frail green fronds and leaves are just emerging from the soil.

He picks up a handful of soil, holds it out to us. “Black gold, they call it. The richest soil there is. Stalin came here and stripped us of our earth. Took it back to Russia in trainfulls.” He lets the soil slide slowly through his fingers.

Back at the office a woman is waiting for us. She is tall and wears a bright yellow, floral headscarf. Mikola introduces us to Maria Vasileyevna, a teacher at the village school and Vasyliv’s local historian. She’s here to help me trace my family. She sits down with us, puts on her glasses and studies the photograph. As she takes out a notebook I notice her large, work-roughened hands. She has the shape of my father’s mouth, his eyes. She tells me that she’s a Semenyuk on her mother’s side.

“We are one big family here,” she says. “ We all come from the same earth. It’s in our blood, we take it in with our mother’s milk. The earth of this village is a magnet. It pulls its children back. And so you have come to us”.

Maria finishes her notes and asks if she can take my grandmother’s photo with her. She promises she’ll do what she can to find my family.

Mikola drives us, together with Katya, Vanya and Svetlana, to a restaurant by a lake in the next village. We sit in a wooden arbour, eat stuffed chicken cutlets, cabbage salad and a huge carp, fresh from the Dniester. We drink vodka and each time the glass is filled for another toast – to our health, our wealth and happiness, to our continued friendship.

On the way back to Chernivtsi we stop off at a petrol station. In the office a man is leaning against the counter, drunk. As we leave he suddenly bursts into song in a deep, rich baritone.

The next morning Tanya calls me on my mobile. Maria phoned her at seven o’clock. She has found my family.