There were a few years when things went quiet. Not silent. Just the odd brief letter every now and then but not as many as there had been. Then Max wrote to me about something that was happening. He was very excited. He had done a lot of work on Herz and there was Russian interest in it etc. Consequently he had been going backwards and forwards to Russia and working with one specific translator on his theories and documents and also on the original Herz documents. That was Lucy. (Lyudmila) He said how much he liked her and that they got on very well and in a matter of months he told me he’d asked her to marry him.
He was infuriated that the British authorities would not believe it was a genuine love match and initially wouldn’t allow him to bring Lucy to England even if he did marry her. Eventually his perseverance and persistence brought results and they married and Lucy moved to the Uk.
I have to come clean here and state that I too was sceptical. It wasn’t just the British immigration authorities who felt this was fast and therefore suspect. Whist I desperately wanted Max to take his focus off me and find the real love I felt he deserved as a kind and caring individual I too had my doubts that this was the real thing. .
One of the things I had done over the years to supliment my income as a musician was work for an organisation called ‘The Centre for Social Action’ based out of Leicester as part of De Montford University. They specialised in training. Interactive training that was qualitative rather than quantitative. For example rather than going into a run down area and asking people whether they would like more security camera’s around, The Centre for Social Action’s approach was to go into the area and ask what people liked or didn’t like about living where they lived. This gave much more information and wasn’t a numbers game. It was time consuming and detailed. In terms of training my expertise was in Equal Opportunities issues and interactive training programs that allowed for in depth discussion and learning. This had been a knock on effect from my ‘Public Administration’ degree which essential turned out Civil Servants and the fact that I’d ended up as a policy writer, for two years, in an Equal Opportunites unit at Nottingham City Council. The whole team specialised in interactive training styles which I learnt and became part of including ‘Assertiveness Training’ amongst other things.
During that time we’d done quite a lot of work in Russia in the 1990’s, not long after the wall came down, in the new burgeoning voluntary sector. The Russians were keen to set up charities but wanted to find ways of avoiding patronising Victorian philanthropy and that was where we came in. We worked with a translator..Tania. Tania lived in a typical Russian apartment which was effectively one room with a tiny kitchen space to one side and a shower cubicle. Her main space was a living room that turned into a bedroom at night. Tania was in her 40’s and this was a normal living space although better than some people’s places. There were still many blocks that existed where several families shared a bathroom on each floor. This usually involved a well designed rota to ensure everyone could get through the bathroom and to work on time. So Tania’s apartment, with it’s own shower, was relatively luxurious. It soon makes you conscious of just how lucky most of us are to have the amount of space we have and that it is not necessary to have a huge amount of space or heaps of things in order to live a decent existence. Having said that Tania wanted out of Russia. This was mostly because she found Russian men old fashioned and misogynistic and, as she felt time was running away from her, she wanted a relationship but a better one that seemed possibly in Russia. She was already vilified to a certain extent because she was in her forties and had never married. There are other stories of my time in Russia but the point of telling you about Tania was that she eventually found a prospective partner on line. This was a Swedish man who she married and moved in with, leaving Russia behind as she had wanted.. As far as I am aware they are still together. So this history with this woman I knew well and the story she’d told me made me very aware that there were some people who would do almost anything to get out of Russia and women in particular. Hence my scepticism about Lucy.
But love prevailed and Max and Lucy wed. I was not invited. That didn’t surprise me as it was a small registry office affair with only the required number of witnesses present.
Things went quiet again for a while and I began to hope all was well and my anxieties were totally unfounded. Then I got a phone call. Max wanted to talk to me about music. He said Lucy was writing songs and would I come and talk to them about how to protect things etc etc. I had the time and up to Lancaster I went. This time there was no open door with the Old Swan band blaring out but I got to meet Lucy, who, despite the fact I was only there over lunch had provided enough food for an army. Plate upon plate of Russian fare, salads, meats, potatoes and more. I did my best but when we’d all finished eating there didn’t seem to be any less on the table. Then we talked. Max seemed quite on edge but he was always a bit awkward around me and having the two most important women in his life in the same room must have been stressful. At one point Lucy left the room and Max said to me, “You’re still my pin up girl you know”. I sighed and told him a) I was hardly a pin up girl at 53 and b) he shouldn’t say things like that he was married. He did manage to say the same thing twice.
They had written one song…when I say they, Lucy had written the words and Max had tried to help by writing a tune. They’s been to see a solicitor who had charged them £50 to copyright the song….that’s right £50 for one song. I said, ‘Max you don’t need to do that, you can record your songs and then send them to yourself in a registered envelope and that way you have proof they are yours and when you wrote them. This would give you recourse to the law if someone takes them and uses them. During all this I was bursting with curiosity of course but highly sceptical that these songs were going to be so good that anyone would want to steal them. It turned out that as well as being a translator Lucy had done some research work in Russia which someone else had stolen and put their name to and this made her completely paranoid about her work being stolen. The reason they wanted to see me wasn’t just for advice. They wanted me to record the songs as demo’s for them to then be able to sell or tote around. They genuinely thought they had merit and that they would be popular particularly in Russia.
There was one particular song they wanted me to record. Lucy had written the words and Max hadn’t ‘written’ the tune because he didn’t know how to but he could play it with one finger on a little casio keyboard he had. “How much would I charge to do this for them”?. I said, “No No. I’ll just do it for you but I’ll have to fit it around the other things I do”. “No we want to pay you” came the forceful retort. I didn’t say any more about it but took the words and a recording of Max’s one finger tune and home I went. It took me a little while but I did the demo for them and Max said they would come down to hear it. The thing was the words were absolutely terribly. I mean really terrible. I wished she’d write in Russian. I would have happily learnt how to pronounce it and was sure lyrically it would have been better in Russian than the in English (and I wouldn’t have understood what they said anyway0 but she wouldn’t hear of it. No it had to be in English as it would be more popular. It was wishy washy rubbish…I can’t really give you an accurate version as this is only from memory but it was something like:
Young Russian maid
Was walking through fields
Missing her home.
…and even that is better than her’s because hers read like someone who didn’t speak English. Max’s little tune, by contrast, was simple but effective and easy to put some nice chords to.
After I finished the demo they drove down to hear it. They were very excited and pleased with the result. ‘How could they get it heard”. I said,” at the moment unsigned artists tend to put their material on Myspace” (shows how long ago that was) . They were worried about protection and I did try to say, in the nicest possible way that no-one was going to steal it. They said they would copyright that one too for another £50. They wouldn’t listen to reason but they did let me set up their Myspace page and load up the track for them. Max insisted on giving me £50 for the work I had done and said there would be more songs coming in the post…and there was. The problem was I didn’t want to take their money and I didn’t really have much time to spare. They wanted to pay to make sure I did it. It was stalemate really as I stalled and stalled, mostly due to a very full diary and Lucy eventually lost it. I received a message from Max saying that Lucy was very angry and now accused me of trying to steal her songs. I was to send everything back and remove and destroy the recording from my systems and get rid of the MySpace page! Jesus Christ what paranoia. Lucy wouldn’t listen to reason and Max wouldn’t argue with her . I did as they asked and that was that.
Anytime after that when I tried to contact Max he said he couldn’t speak to me. One time we’d arranged a phone call but it was basically a chance for Max to say that I couldn’t ring because Lucy went ballistic. I couldn’t write because she would know and throw the letter’s in the bin and the final straw…I couldn’t email because she read all his emails. Unbelievable . I even tried ringing him at the University but he became convinced she would know.
It was like we had suddenly gone from A to Z with nothing in-between. The only thing that I felt could have contributed to Lucy’s anger was the knowledge that I had, that he still viewed me as his pin up girl….not nice for a wife. But he hadn’t married me he’d married her and I was just a fantastical musician in his imagination and a pretty ordinary real person that he was obsessed with. I had to let it go.
A couple of years ago Andy Cutting and I were staying with his in-laws and, as his father in Law is in the physics world I mentioned Max in the conversation. He looked him up on line and said,”I’m sorry to tell you he died two years ago”. God – I felt angry at not knowing but with no communication I suppose I wasn’t surprised that Lucy didn’t tell me. Why would she?
It was a sad end to someone who had been a constant in my life for 30 years and more. I was glad I went to Germany with his and learnt to understand him better and I hope that he was happy really. My impression sadly was that he was brow beaten and scared. I hope I’m wrong about that.
Thank you Max for being an extraordinary, infuriating, kind and generous individual. R.I.P.
Jo Freya’s Musings 