Colonel Pyat’s place smelled of the former owners of his stock: of moth-balls, stale perfumes and sour old age; of bortsch and a brand of Polish vodka he favoured called Starka, a matured, mellow vodka with the colour of Irish whiskey. The vodka was his single extravagance and I believe he drank it because it was a private link with the Russia of his boyhood. It is for some reason cheaper than brands like Stolichnaya which are more familiar to Westerners, but it is almost impossible to buy in England. He obtained his supply, I gather, through Russian seamen spending their shore-leave in London and Tilbury. It had a more pungent odour than most vodka and was also a stronger proof. He only once offered us a glass, and that in return for some papyrussa cigarettes I had been able to obtain for him during my own travels.
Although disturbingly ignorant of much English culture (he had remained close to Mrs Cornelius and the poorer parts of Notting Hill since, claiming Polish nationality, he had arrived there in 1940), he was neither an illiterate nor a stupid man. His contemporary cultural references were peculiar - to TV programmes and films in the main - yet he despised the English for their lack of ‘refined sensitivity’. He despised us, also, for our lack of idealism, for our pragmatism and for our hypocrisy, yet blamed almost every problem not attributable to Jews or Bolsheviks on our ‘weakness’ in relinquishing the Empire. Thanks to Lobkowitz’s insights, I realised life had wounded Pyat so deeply that he sought refuge in fantasy and bigotry; but it could sometimes be very hard to listen to the vile, and all-too-familiar, racialism with which he so frequently regaled us, particularly since by now he had come to regard me, at any rate, as a fellow spirit, ‘one of the few real intellectuals I have met in this country of yours’. He would insist that there was virtually no cultural life left in England. What there was, he said, betrayed our appalling decadence. His day-to-day experience was that of many other bourgeois European refugees who, speaking no English and having little money and few friends, arrived in England and America before the War. They had had to settle in the working-class districts of our big cities and encountered insular people ignorant of most of the political issues and cultural background they themselves considered essential. The nuances and humour of working-class Londoners were therefore beyond him and the genial tolerance of the majority seemed to him to support the view that the English were careless and lazy, and had somehow betrayed his trust in them. He had possessed a romantic attachment to this country, as you will see.
It was this limited experience, of course, which led him to suppose that Mrs Cornelius was as famous as the Queen. All the people he met in the area seemed to possess greater interest in Mrs Cornelius (and more familiarity with her name) than they showed in, say, Adolf Hitler or Margaret Thatcher. This was why Pyat honestly believed the present generation would pay him more for his memoirs of a somewhat extraordinary but largely unknown Cockney lady than they would for his personal anecdotes of the great dictators. (I must admit that my own imagination was fired more by Mrs C than by Mussolini, but I realised that there were few who would share my enthusiasm. It could also be argued that I had a vested interest in her fame, as well as the colonel’s, for I had also made fictional use of him in one or two books, even before I had come to know him personally.)
By the time I met him, his appearance had become fairly nondescript. He was an old Central-European, swarthy, hunched, ill-tempered, slightly grubby, with a seamed face, large lips and a big nose. His skin was unhealthy. He wore out-of-date, musty suits or sports clothes and his dress was distinguished only by the white golfing cap he wore winter and summer. He collected junk (the upper rooms of the flat were full of it) and owned a quantity of useless bicycle parts, petrol-engines, old spark-plugs, electrical bric-a-brac and so on: the place often smelled strongly of ancient engine-oil. His collection of photographs and greasy news-cuttings was the only evidence of his claims to have been handsome and agreeable. My wife thought he looked ‘lovable’, but all I saw was a fairly good-looking man with eyes which never seemed to focus on anything in particular. There were pictures of him standing by the gondolas of airships, sitting in the cockpits of seaplanes, taking part in the ceremonial opening of dams and bridges, the launching of ships. He had certainly travelled and been in the company of many well-known people. Mrs Cornelius appeared in only a few of the news-clippings, but most of his snapshots were of her, taken at different times in various countries, verifying her own claims to me to have ‘got about a bit when younger’. He put all this material, together with his manuscripts, into my safe-keeping. There was no question that he regarded me as heir to the memoirs and as his literary executor. The astonishing claims of Mr Frank Cornelius, against which I successfully defended myself in Court, have long since been shown to be groundless and I now possess legal title to the manuscript, if not the pictures. It is true that I did not know Colonel Pyat well for very long, but I did come, I think, to be his only friend. He often told me that this was the case and that I would ‘inherit the papers’ if anything should happen to him. I have been able to produce witnesses to support the fact that he often referred to me in public as ‘the son I never knew’ and the one who would vindicate his many claims to former glory. I was to keep his memory alive. I hold his manuscript in trust. I hope I am doing what he wanted me to do.
As I have said, in editing these memoirs I was faced with a whole variety of technical and moral problems. The colonel left it to me to reproduce Mrs Cornelius’s characteristic speech, for instance, but insisted I retain his ‘philosophy’. The vitriolic asides (on matters of sex, race and culture) were nearly always in a language other than English, so they could be isolated. To leave them out completely would be to destroy some of the reader’s perspective on the material and on Pyat himself. There is no doubt, of course, that the colonel was a poseur, a liar, a charlatan, a drug-addict, a criminal, but that he had once possessed great charm is evident from his successes. People felt protective towards him, and fell over themselves to help him, often at great inconvenience. It is from this evidence, rather than his own statements, that I became convinced he had not always been so obviously the ruined personality I knew. Moreover, he was not uncultured. He had a grasp of engineering principles quite unusual for a man of his time and background. He was familiar with art and literature (even if, as you will see, his taste was sometimes questionable) yet he remained, in a peculiar way, innocent.
I would prefer to let the reader judge what are lies and what is truth. That is why I have tampered as little as possible with the material, merely providing concentrated narrative links wherever necessary. I believe that M.G. Lobkowitz’s translations are excellent and very true to the spirit of the original. I have rephrased and reworked many sentences to improve their readability, but I have retained a certain crudeness here and there in case the reader should begin to doubt the genuineness of the memoirs. The problem of length was also daunting and I have condensed some episodes (though not, as might appear, the prison scenes). Usually I have resorted to literary methods - to paraphrase, for instance, producing an intensified version of the original text. The alternative, to present a précis of certain sections, would have been less appealing. I have been anxious to preserve as much as I could of the original because I believe Colonel Pyat’s story to be unique. He travelled widely and was involved, between 1920 and 1940, with some of the key engineering experiments of those years - years characterised by a euphoric, optimistic attitude towards technology which we have never quite recaptured (but which our hero fully exploited). I believe he possessed an insight into character rarely shared by more sophisticated professional commentators. These insights might be reduced to an observation that he was merely able to recognise his own kind, but I think he was, as he says himself, a survivor: his survival instinct, if not his moral instinct, was extremely highly-developed. It enabled him to recognise those he could use and those who would think they could use him. Certainly he does not come to us, even by his own account, as a noble person. He was either malicious towards the weak or else utterly oblivious of them; he was placatory and almost nauseatingly agreeable to the strong. Yet he reflects the spirit of his age. Some might argue he reflects it far too emphatically, but the same could be said of many of us to this day.