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Book Review: Go Spy the Land
Aug. 16th, 2021 08:57 amI picked up George Alexander Hill’s Go Spy the Land: Being the Adventures of IK8 of the British Secret Service because the advertisement promised juicy details about Arthur Ransome’s time as an English spy in Russia right after the fall of the tsar and through the rise of the Bolsheviks. This is clearly a case of false advertising, as there are only a couple of pages concerning Ransome.
We do get this charming story: Hill’s hotel room had a bathtub, and Ransome’s did not, so Ransome would use Hill’s bathtub. As he bathed, they would argue about politics from room to room. (Apparently Ransome was politically very radical at the time, which I wouldn’t have guessed from Swallows and Amazons. Possibly longer acquaintance with Bolshevik excesses put him off radicalism for life.) When disagreement grew particularly vociferous, Ransome would rise up for the bath, whacking himself dry in a frenzy of disputation.
Lack of Ransome aside, this is a jolly good spy memoir. Hill seems to have spent the whole war going from front to front getting in and out of scrapes, like the time he and a compatriot arrived in Sebastopol to discover that the townsfolk wanted to kill Hill and co. on the grounds that they were undoubtedly there to lay groundwork for a British sea invasion. (Fortunately Hill’s colleague talked down the mob.)
Or the time he ran someone through with his sword stick, and afterward considered the blade with interest (he had never run anyone through before) and discovered it was only lightly filmed with blood.
Or the time that Hill’s train was stopped by a band of marauders, led by a woman in her twenty named Marucia, who suggested that Hill should become her lover and add his shiny new train engine to the strength of her brigands. Hill talked his way out of it by proclaiming his undying love for another woman, whom he could not, alas! betray, enchanting though Marucia was… His comment is something to the effect of “She was very pretty, but I’d heard too much about her viciousness to feel it was very healthy to have an affair with her.”
Later on Hill actually has to go undercover in a Russian, hiding out in a house with two English girls ALSO undercover as Russians (plus one actual Russian), where they narrowly escape death when they share some flour with their street monitor and in return he tells the Cheka searchers (who are just searching the whole street for funzies!) that no one lives there but some quiet over-worked seamstresses, no need to search that house... on the very night they have an unregistered guest (one of their couriers!) staying with them.
All in all, a very engaging account of derring-do.
We do get this charming story: Hill’s hotel room had a bathtub, and Ransome’s did not, so Ransome would use Hill’s bathtub. As he bathed, they would argue about politics from room to room. (Apparently Ransome was politically very radical at the time, which I wouldn’t have guessed from Swallows and Amazons. Possibly longer acquaintance with Bolshevik excesses put him off radicalism for life.) When disagreement grew particularly vociferous, Ransome would rise up for the bath, whacking himself dry in a frenzy of disputation.
Lack of Ransome aside, this is a jolly good spy memoir. Hill seems to have spent the whole war going from front to front getting in and out of scrapes, like the time he and a compatriot arrived in Sebastopol to discover that the townsfolk wanted to kill Hill and co. on the grounds that they were undoubtedly there to lay groundwork for a British sea invasion. (Fortunately Hill’s colleague talked down the mob.)
Or the time he ran someone through with his sword stick, and afterward considered the blade with interest (he had never run anyone through before) and discovered it was only lightly filmed with blood.
Or the time that Hill’s train was stopped by a band of marauders, led by a woman in her twenty named Marucia, who suggested that Hill should become her lover and add his shiny new train engine to the strength of her brigands. Hill talked his way out of it by proclaiming his undying love for another woman, whom he could not, alas! betray, enchanting though Marucia was… His comment is something to the effect of “She was very pretty, but I’d heard too much about her viciousness to feel it was very healthy to have an affair with her.”
Later on Hill actually has to go undercover in a Russian, hiding out in a house with two English girls ALSO undercover as Russians (plus one actual Russian), where they narrowly escape death when they share some flour with their street monitor and in return he tells the Cheka searchers (who are just searching the whole street for funzies!) that no one lives there but some quiet over-worked seamstresses, no need to search that house... on the very night they have an unregistered guest (one of their couriers!) staying with them.
All in all, a very engaging account of derring-do.
