“But Pappa, this is no excuse for her to mistreat you. She cannot abuse you like this.”

“One can forgive a beautiful woman many things.”

“O, Pappa! For goodness’ sake!”

His glasses have slipped down his nose, and sit at a crazy angle. His shirt is unbuttoned at the throat, showing the white hairs that sprout around his scar. He has a sour, unwashed smell. He isn’t exactly your Don Juan, but he has no idea.

“This Valentina, she is beautiful like Milla, and like Milla she has strong spirit, but also with an element of cruelty in her nature unknown to Ludmilla, which by the way is characteristic of the Russian type.”

“Pappa, how can you compare her with Mother? How can you even say her name in the same breath?”

It is his disloyalty that I cannot forgive.

“You made Mother’s life a misery, and now you abuse her memory. Vera’s right-Mother should have divorced you long ago.”

“Misery? Memory? Nadia, why you always want to make a drama out of something? Millochka died. That is sad, of course, but is now in the past. Now is time for new life, new love.”

“Pappa, it’s not me making the drama. It’s you. All my life, all Mother’s life, we had to live with your crazy ideas, your dramas. Do you remember how upset Mother was when you invited all the Ukrainians to come and live with us? Do you remember how you bought the new Norton, when Mother needed a washing machine? Do you remember when you left home and tried to catch the train back to Russia?”

“But that was not because of Millochka. That was because of you. You were then a crazy Trotskyist.”

“I wasn’t a Trotskyist. And even if I was, I was only fifteen. You were an adult-supposedly.”

It’s true, though, that it was because of me that he tried to leave home and catch the train back to Russia. He packed his brown cardboard suitcase-the very same one that had travelled with him when he left Ukraine -and stood on the platform at Witney railway station. I can just imagine him pacing up and down, muttering to himself and looking impatiently at his watch from time to time.

Mother had to go and plead with him.

“Nikolai! Kolya! Kolyusha! Come home now! Kolka, where are you going?”

“I’m waiting for the train to Russia!” Picture the dramatic gesture of his head, his blazing eyes. “Why not? It’s all the same. Now they are bringing in communism here, I don’t know why I ever left Russia. I don’t know why I risked everything. Now even my own daughter is helping to bring in communism here.”

Yes, it was all my fault. I went down to Greenham Common with my friend Cathy in 1962. (I went again in 1981, but that’s a different story.) We went to protest about the planned deployment of H-bombs at the nuclear base, and we got ourselves arrested. There we were in our drainpipes and headbands and groovy shades, sitting out on the newly laid approach road. I was reading Julius Caesar’s De Bella Gallico (GCE set text) while the police came and carried us away one by one. I may have been challenging the state through non-violent civil disobedience, but I was still my father’s daughter, and I did my Latin homework.

Some people were strumming Spanish guitars, and everyone started to sing:

Don’t you hear the H-bombs thunder,

Sounding like the crack of doom?

While they tear the heavens asunder,

Fall-out makes the earth a tomb.

Yes, I could hear the H-bombs. I could see the fall-out glimmering in the air, I could feel the strange rain falling. I did believe I would never live to grow up if we didn’t get rid of those H-bombs. But still, I was hedging my bets and doing my GCEs.

All the other people there were older than Cathy and me. Some had long stringy hair and bare feet, and wore faded jeans and dark glasses. Others were nice Quakerly types with sensible shoes and cardigans. They carried on singing as the police picked them up by their arms and legs and put them into furniture vans (they seemed to have run out of Black Marias). Cathy and I didn’t sing-we didn’t want to look daft.

An impromptu courtroom had been set up in the local primary school. We sat on infant-sized chairs, and were called to the bench one by one. Each person made a speech about the wickedness of war, and was fined £3, with £2 court costs. When it was my turn, I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I was only fined £3. (A bargain!) I had lied about my age, because I didn’t want my parents to find out, but they found out anyway.

“Kolya,” pleaded my mother, “she’s not a communist, she’s just a silly girl. Come home now.”

My father said nothing, but stared at a fixed point down the railway line. The next train was in forty minutes, and that went to Eynsham and Oxford, not to Russia.

“Kolyusha, it’s a long way to Russia. Look, at least come home and have something to eat first. I’ve got a lovely beetroot soup. And kotletki- your favourite kotletki, with spinach and beans from the garden, and little potatoes. Just come and fill your belly, then you can go to Russia.”

So, still muttering his rage, he allowed himself to be led back along the muddy path between the brambles and nettles, to the pebble-dash semi where we lived. Grudgingly he bowed his head over the steaming soup bowl. Later, she coaxed him up to bed. So he didn’t leave home after all.

Instead, I left. I ran away to live at Cathy’s house. They lived in a long low Cotswold stone cottage at White Oak Green, full of books and cats and cobwebs. Cathy’s parents were left-wing intellectuals. They didn’t mind Cathy going on marches, in fact they encouraged her. They talked about grown-up things like whether Britain should join the EEC and who created God. But the house was cold, and the food tasted funny, and the cats jumped on you in the night. After a few days my mother came and coaxed me home, too.

Years later I can still remember the smell of hot sun on freshly laid tarmac at Greenham Common, and the musty smell of Cathy’s bedroom. Only the image of my father is unclear, as if something obscure but vital has been blotted out, and only the raging surface is left. Who is he, this man whom I have known and not known all my life?

“But this is all in past, Nadia. Why you have such bourgeois preoccupation with all personal history?”

“Because it’s important…it defines…it helps us understand…because we can learn…Oh, I don’t know.”

Valentina and Stanislav have been given a cat. They call it Lady Di, after Diana Princess of Wales, whom they admire greatly. She came from Mrs Zadchuk’s neighbour, and she is more of a kitten than a cat-and not nearly as pretty as her namesake. She is black with random white splodges, pale pink-rimmed eyes and a wet pale pink nose.

Lady Di (they pronounce it Lye Dee Dee) sets to, shredding all the soft furnishings in the house. After a few weeks, it turns out that she is a boy-cat, not a girl-cat (my mother would never have made that mistake) and starts pissing everywhere. Now, to the smell of rotting apples, mouldering half-eaten boil-in-the-bag dinners, cheap perfume, and the odour of unventilated old-man’s room, is added the scent of tomcat’s piss. Not just piss, either. No one has taught Lady Di to use a litter tray, and no one clears up after him when, on wet days, he decides he is too royal to go in the garden.

My father, Valentina and Stanislav all adore Lady Di, who has a neat way of scampering up curtains, and can jump four feet in the air to catch a bit of paper dangled on a string. Only Vera and I don’t like him, and we don’t live there, so what does it matter what we think?

Lady Di has become a surrogate child to them. They sit together holding hands and marvelling over his brilliance and beauty. It is surely only a matter of time before he is taught to prove Pythagoras from first principles.