Posted by Peter Ceresole on April 20, 2015 at 06:05:36 user PeterC.
I'm reading (and greatly enjoying) Roland Chambers's "The Last Englishman", about AR's activities during the Russian Revolution on 1917. Chambers takes a sympathetic but critical view of AR's character and sctions at the time, but one small episode caught my eye.
We've talked here of Commander Walker's 'pierhead jump' in Flushing, in WD. Chambers quotes from AR's autobiography (I think) his account of boarding a coastal steamer in London, on his way to Moscow to make peace in Europe, report on that for the Manchester Guardian, and, his primary purpose, to rescue Evgenya.
He discovered that a coastal steamer was leaving London. He raced to the docks only to hear the steamer's whistle and see the ropes cast off. "A gap was slowly widening between the steamer and the quay. I threw my portmanteau on board, and, with my typewriter, jumped, caught the rail and was helped over it by a smiling sailor."
Flushing in reverse. And it does appear that AR's memoirs were as much novel as reality, so it could be that WD was the notional prototype, and the autobiography the developed version.
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