277.4
Thande
Donor
From: “The Mariposa Yearbook 1964” (1963)—
Every year we are proud to bring you interviews with great examples of California ladies showing our sisters in other nations how it’s done. In 1963 we spoke to everyone from Global Games hockey team captain Priscilla Velazquez to aviatrix Galanga Jacobs.[12] However, our most requested reprint of all the year’s interviews came from way back in our February 1963 issue, when Carlotta Pérez spoke to Yevgenia Powell, first editrix of the Star City Clarion… [13]
Miss Pérez: Good day to you, Mrs Powell. Thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Mrs Powell: And good day to you as well, Miss Pérez. (Laughs) I always knew that my past crimes would catch up with me.
Miss Pérez: By which I assume you’re referring to your involvement with United Western Press?
Mrs Powell: Yes, it would shock many of my girls in the office to know that I spent over ten years of my life working as as a copywriter and sub-editrix on the Cometa Herald before I turned traitor and went over to the enemy. As you would see it.
Miss Pérez: (Coughs politely) Perhaps. But you have always done your own thing, haven’t you, Mrs Powell—you’ve charted your own course in life?
Mrs Powell: Oh dear, you’re not so different from my office girls yourself. Hero worship, I should say heroine worship—it’s all very well, but it’s all hindsight, I assure you. I had no idea what I was doing at the time.
Miss Pérez: You shouldn’t be so modest.
Mrs Powell: No modesty involved, Miss Pérez. When I think of how I first came to California, a slip of a girl who jumped at shadows—I don’t know how anyone else thinks I got to where I am now, because I certainly don’t know myself.
Miss Pérez: Perhaps start there, then, Mrs Powell—when you first came to our fair shores?
Mrs Powell: (Laughs) You sound like a tourism advertisement. Very well. I was born up in New Muscovy, just another province of the Russian Empire it was then. My father had fought in the war in Noochaland, the first one… (Pause) He did not like to speak of it. As far as we were concerned, we were just Russians. We might have lived fifty versts from (Pause) from Petrograd (Pause)
Miss Pérez: I’m sorry.
Mrs Powell: It—it’s AW. (Pause) The point I’m trying to make was…when I became a clerk, a typist, then a Lectel operatrix…my parents were good progressives and glad to see me making my own way, they did not want to just marry me off.
Miss Pérez: You were fortunate.
Mrs Powell: Yes…I think my father knew what had happened, too often, to women and children during the war. He would rather have a daughter who could think and fight for herself… but they knew there weren’t many jobs in Shevembsk. I could tell they expected me to go to somewhere like…well, Moscow when it still existed. Ha, perhaps even Fyodorsk! Somewhere where there were more jobs.
Miss Pérez: But instead you came here.
Mrs Powell: Not strictly by choice. I sat the civil service exams, sat them in a draughty shed in Shevembsk in midwinter with my dress blowing around my ankles. Somehow, instead of catching pneumonia, I got in as a Class Fourteen, at the bottom of the Table of Ranks. But it was higher than anyone in my family ever had been. I was surprised when they assigned me to the Foreign Ministry, and then to the Embassy in Monterey.
Miss Pérez: So that is how you came here.
Mrs Powell: (Laughs) Perhaps the old Tsar’s men just wanted to save money by sending someone who was already on the right continent. That railway journey terrified me more than anything before or since. Having to wait ten hours while they changed the gauge, then passing through American territory full of Yankees who wanted to [censored] and murder me, or so I thought at the time.
Miss Pérez: But when you came over the border here?
Mrs Powell: It felt like paradise on earth. Not just the lack of Okhrana and the free speech, but the wealth of the land, even when it bakes dry. And all the people, the melting pot! I think I spent the first month wandering around in a daze, sensory overload. If it hadn’t been for my work to focus on…
Miss Pérez: You said you were a Lectel operatrix?
Mrs Powell: Yes, a lowly role, but dealing with confidential documents of course. A lot of it was encrypted messages, but we still picked up a lot. It would have been a good place for a spy, that embassy, and it probably was. All sorts of rules that seem very strange now, about how to dress, and not to speak to strangers, and to stick to the Russian quarter of town…I think they wanted to arrange marriages for us at one point! Naturally, we were free-spirited girls, mostly from Alyeska or New Muscovy like me, and we ignored as much as we could get away with. We used to sneak away for Rattlebang dance concerts…
Miss Pérez: And this was in the…uh…the 1910s?
Mrs Powell: (Laughs) You needn’t blush, Miss Pérez, I boast in my years rather than being ashamed of them. Yes, it was an…eventful time. I was there when the economy crashed, and we were constantly telling…telling Petrograd of the news of all the companies and banks that had failed in California, and then we would be told of all the ones had that failed in Russia. But our, I mean Russia’s economy was still one of the strongest ones left standing, and that’s when the Tsar tried his policy of bailing out countries he wanted to get in with…
Miss Pérez: Which worked in many places, didn’t it?
Mrs Powell: Yes, of course the French and the Americans did it as well. But it didn’t work here in California. I remember perceiving that, even at the time. I was just a girl clerk, but I was closer to the action than all the people making the decisions back beyond the Urals. The Government had always acted as though beating America in Noochaland—all those lives like my father’s friend that were sacrificed for that—had pushed the Yankees out of California, the UPSA had collapsed so the Meridians were gone, and therefore now California was theirs.
Miss Pérez: Ha! That must have been a rude awakening!
Mrs Powell: I don’t think they ever truly realised that California was a force in its own right. Or that we, Californians I mean, had had a lot of experience in balancing the great empires trying to take us over.
Miss Pérez: That was around the time that we did more treaties with the Chinese?
Mrs Powell: That’s right. So the Tsar and the Soviet kept trying all these schemes as though we were already in a stronger position than we were, and it exasperated the Company.
Miss Pérez: The RLPC, as it was then. Were they also around in the embassy? Did you learn any of your corporate leadership skills from them?
Mrs Powell: Miss Pérez, the Company ran the embassy. All you folk who weren’t there think the split is a new thing, but that’s just the reality being recognised. The Company was its own animal, always was. The Embassy was run by Valentin Pozharsky…
Miss Pérez: Related to Prince Pozharsky from our War of Independence?
Mrs Powell: Yes, some great-nephew or something like that…far down the line for inheritance, I think he got the job because of the distant family connection. But he wasn’t some useless aristocrat, he was a good and capable man. Though he could be ruthless.
Miss Pérez: Towards Russia’s enemies? Towards Californians?
Mrs Powell: Yes, but also towards other Russians. Especially when the Tsar and the Soviet tried to interfere, as I said. Actually, that brings me to the most important point. I remember the day like it was yesterday. June 1922.
Miss Pérez: …Oh.
Mrs Powell: We all knew war was coming. I feared for my parents; I knew New Muscovy would be invaded by the Americans this time, without another front to distract them—as we thought at the time. I remember sharing rumours with the other girls. But real life ended up being stranger than all the rumours.
Miss Pérez: You mean…er…
Mrs Powell: I mean the betrayal. The Tsar had negotiated with the Chinese—directly, without consulting the Company—and had signed away lands that we had spent years developing and fortifying. Just like that. A huge slice of our income.
Miss Pérez: I didn’t realise the RLPC saw it as a betrayal as well.
Mrs Powell: Oh, [censored] yes. I can give you chapter and verse because I was there, working my telescripter,[14] when His Excellency Privy Counsellor Pozharsky stormed in, yelling at Major Volkov, who was the military attaché.
Miss Pérez: Oh!
Mrs Powell: The man might have been an aristocrat, but he had the vocabulary of a man whose grandfather had been a serf. I can remember the blushes spreading around the room as though the plague came years before it did. Pozharksy was beside himself, attacking the Tsar with language that would have had a lesser man strung up or shot at dawn. “The imbecile” was one of the politer terms I heard.
Miss Pérez: Oh my, that is a surprise.
Mrs Powell: He said the Tsar had swept away years of work in a careless heartbeat, and that this would be the ruin of the Company. Major Volkov tried to blame it on evil advisors in the Soviet, but Pozharsky was having none of it. From now on, he said, we are going to be like the Meridian companies used to be. It is in Russia’s interests to put the Company first and the Tsar second.
Miss Pérez: I’m surprised he thought he could get away with that.
Mrs Powell: Tensions were running high. It was at that point that I realised that, never mind the Americans invading, there might be a civil war. There wasn’t then, not quite, but it began bubbling beneath the surface then, and we all know how it ended.
Miss Pérez: Uh, yes, we do. Well, Mrs Powell, how did you end up leaving Russian diplomatic service?
Mrs Powell: On that very day, young lady. I knew from what Pozharsky said that conflict was coming; there would be loyalty purges and intrigue, and I had no stomach for it. I already had a little plan. I had sent money home to my parents, and I wrote a letter telling them to come to California—by boat, before the border closed. Bozhemoi, I thank God they listened. But I—well, I deserted, to be honest. Fled to Cometa, took on an assumed name.
Miss Pérez: You weren’t worried about them coming after you.
Mrs Powell: No. I knew it’d be easy for names to be lost in the purges, and Cometa was perfect. It had burned down barely a decade earlier and the records had gone with it. It was a shiny new city where nobody quite knew everything about everyone who lived there.
Miss Pérez: I hadn’t realised the earthquake was so recent then…
Mrs Powell: Ancient history to you, of course. But it helped me and my parents…though it would be a terrible thing when the plague came and the authorities were trying to control it. With the situation as it is in Russia—both Russias—now, I think I can finally come out and say who I was. Of course my maiden name was different.
Miss Pérez: Yes, when did you meet your husband?
Mrs Powell: Would you believe he was hawking newspapers in Cometa, and that’s how I got my first introduction to the Herald office? (Laughs) It sounds too convenient for reality, doesn’t it?
See page 222 for part 2 of this interview. And now, a brand new Teatime Teaser with our trilingual wordgrid puzzle!
*
(A further recording by Sgt Bob Mumby (BM) and Sgt Dominic Ellis (DE):
DE: Are you going to do the second part as well?
BM: Nah, that’d be spoilers. Anyway, I think next they wanted us to make a start on those political memoirs and the naval fiction?
DE: Fine. Tomorrow. Pub.
BM: Pub.
[12] This refers to field hockey, not ice hockey. Galanga is a Chukchi name, reflecting the influence of ethnic groups from Far Eastern Russia on California.
[13] English in TTL tends to use more gendered terms, and therefore people say ‘first editrix’ rather than ‘first female editor’.
[14] The OTL term is teleprinter or, more usually, the brand name Teletype being used indiscriminately.
Every year we are proud to bring you interviews with great examples of California ladies showing our sisters in other nations how it’s done. In 1963 we spoke to everyone from Global Games hockey team captain Priscilla Velazquez to aviatrix Galanga Jacobs.[12] However, our most requested reprint of all the year’s interviews came from way back in our February 1963 issue, when Carlotta Pérez spoke to Yevgenia Powell, first editrix of the Star City Clarion… [13]
Miss Pérez: Good day to you, Mrs Powell. Thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Mrs Powell: And good day to you as well, Miss Pérez. (Laughs) I always knew that my past crimes would catch up with me.
Miss Pérez: By which I assume you’re referring to your involvement with United Western Press?
Mrs Powell: Yes, it would shock many of my girls in the office to know that I spent over ten years of my life working as as a copywriter and sub-editrix on the Cometa Herald before I turned traitor and went over to the enemy. As you would see it.
Miss Pérez: (Coughs politely) Perhaps. But you have always done your own thing, haven’t you, Mrs Powell—you’ve charted your own course in life?
Mrs Powell: Oh dear, you’re not so different from my office girls yourself. Hero worship, I should say heroine worship—it’s all very well, but it’s all hindsight, I assure you. I had no idea what I was doing at the time.
Miss Pérez: You shouldn’t be so modest.
Mrs Powell: No modesty involved, Miss Pérez. When I think of how I first came to California, a slip of a girl who jumped at shadows—I don’t know how anyone else thinks I got to where I am now, because I certainly don’t know myself.
Miss Pérez: Perhaps start there, then, Mrs Powell—when you first came to our fair shores?
Mrs Powell: (Laughs) You sound like a tourism advertisement. Very well. I was born up in New Muscovy, just another province of the Russian Empire it was then. My father had fought in the war in Noochaland, the first one… (Pause) He did not like to speak of it. As far as we were concerned, we were just Russians. We might have lived fifty versts from (Pause) from Petrograd (Pause)
Miss Pérez: I’m sorry.
Mrs Powell: It—it’s AW. (Pause) The point I’m trying to make was…when I became a clerk, a typist, then a Lectel operatrix…my parents were good progressives and glad to see me making my own way, they did not want to just marry me off.
Miss Pérez: You were fortunate.
Mrs Powell: Yes…I think my father knew what had happened, too often, to women and children during the war. He would rather have a daughter who could think and fight for herself… but they knew there weren’t many jobs in Shevembsk. I could tell they expected me to go to somewhere like…well, Moscow when it still existed. Ha, perhaps even Fyodorsk! Somewhere where there were more jobs.
Miss Pérez: But instead you came here.
Mrs Powell: Not strictly by choice. I sat the civil service exams, sat them in a draughty shed in Shevembsk in midwinter with my dress blowing around my ankles. Somehow, instead of catching pneumonia, I got in as a Class Fourteen, at the bottom of the Table of Ranks. But it was higher than anyone in my family ever had been. I was surprised when they assigned me to the Foreign Ministry, and then to the Embassy in Monterey.
Miss Pérez: So that is how you came here.
Mrs Powell: (Laughs) Perhaps the old Tsar’s men just wanted to save money by sending someone who was already on the right continent. That railway journey terrified me more than anything before or since. Having to wait ten hours while they changed the gauge, then passing through American territory full of Yankees who wanted to [censored] and murder me, or so I thought at the time.
Miss Pérez: But when you came over the border here?
Mrs Powell: It felt like paradise on earth. Not just the lack of Okhrana and the free speech, but the wealth of the land, even when it bakes dry. And all the people, the melting pot! I think I spent the first month wandering around in a daze, sensory overload. If it hadn’t been for my work to focus on…
Miss Pérez: You said you were a Lectel operatrix?
Mrs Powell: Yes, a lowly role, but dealing with confidential documents of course. A lot of it was encrypted messages, but we still picked up a lot. It would have been a good place for a spy, that embassy, and it probably was. All sorts of rules that seem very strange now, about how to dress, and not to speak to strangers, and to stick to the Russian quarter of town…I think they wanted to arrange marriages for us at one point! Naturally, we were free-spirited girls, mostly from Alyeska or New Muscovy like me, and we ignored as much as we could get away with. We used to sneak away for Rattlebang dance concerts…
Miss Pérez: And this was in the…uh…the 1910s?
Mrs Powell: (Laughs) You needn’t blush, Miss Pérez, I boast in my years rather than being ashamed of them. Yes, it was an…eventful time. I was there when the economy crashed, and we were constantly telling…telling Petrograd of the news of all the companies and banks that had failed in California, and then we would be told of all the ones had that failed in Russia. But our, I mean Russia’s economy was still one of the strongest ones left standing, and that’s when the Tsar tried his policy of bailing out countries he wanted to get in with…
Miss Pérez: Which worked in many places, didn’t it?
Mrs Powell: Yes, of course the French and the Americans did it as well. But it didn’t work here in California. I remember perceiving that, even at the time. I was just a girl clerk, but I was closer to the action than all the people making the decisions back beyond the Urals. The Government had always acted as though beating America in Noochaland—all those lives like my father’s friend that were sacrificed for that—had pushed the Yankees out of California, the UPSA had collapsed so the Meridians were gone, and therefore now California was theirs.
Miss Pérez: Ha! That must have been a rude awakening!
Mrs Powell: I don’t think they ever truly realised that California was a force in its own right. Or that we, Californians I mean, had had a lot of experience in balancing the great empires trying to take us over.
Miss Pérez: That was around the time that we did more treaties with the Chinese?
Mrs Powell: That’s right. So the Tsar and the Soviet kept trying all these schemes as though we were already in a stronger position than we were, and it exasperated the Company.
Miss Pérez: The RLPC, as it was then. Were they also around in the embassy? Did you learn any of your corporate leadership skills from them?
Mrs Powell: Miss Pérez, the Company ran the embassy. All you folk who weren’t there think the split is a new thing, but that’s just the reality being recognised. The Company was its own animal, always was. The Embassy was run by Valentin Pozharsky…
Miss Pérez: Related to Prince Pozharsky from our War of Independence?
Mrs Powell: Yes, some great-nephew or something like that…far down the line for inheritance, I think he got the job because of the distant family connection. But he wasn’t some useless aristocrat, he was a good and capable man. Though he could be ruthless.
Miss Pérez: Towards Russia’s enemies? Towards Californians?
Mrs Powell: Yes, but also towards other Russians. Especially when the Tsar and the Soviet tried to interfere, as I said. Actually, that brings me to the most important point. I remember the day like it was yesterday. June 1922.
Miss Pérez: …Oh.
Mrs Powell: We all knew war was coming. I feared for my parents; I knew New Muscovy would be invaded by the Americans this time, without another front to distract them—as we thought at the time. I remember sharing rumours with the other girls. But real life ended up being stranger than all the rumours.
Miss Pérez: You mean…er…
Mrs Powell: I mean the betrayal. The Tsar had negotiated with the Chinese—directly, without consulting the Company—and had signed away lands that we had spent years developing and fortifying. Just like that. A huge slice of our income.
Miss Pérez: I didn’t realise the RLPC saw it as a betrayal as well.
Mrs Powell: Oh, [censored] yes. I can give you chapter and verse because I was there, working my telescripter,[14] when His Excellency Privy Counsellor Pozharsky stormed in, yelling at Major Volkov, who was the military attaché.
Miss Pérez: Oh!
Mrs Powell: The man might have been an aristocrat, but he had the vocabulary of a man whose grandfather had been a serf. I can remember the blushes spreading around the room as though the plague came years before it did. Pozharksy was beside himself, attacking the Tsar with language that would have had a lesser man strung up or shot at dawn. “The imbecile” was one of the politer terms I heard.
Miss Pérez: Oh my, that is a surprise.
Mrs Powell: He said the Tsar had swept away years of work in a careless heartbeat, and that this would be the ruin of the Company. Major Volkov tried to blame it on evil advisors in the Soviet, but Pozharsky was having none of it. From now on, he said, we are going to be like the Meridian companies used to be. It is in Russia’s interests to put the Company first and the Tsar second.
Miss Pérez: I’m surprised he thought he could get away with that.
Mrs Powell: Tensions were running high. It was at that point that I realised that, never mind the Americans invading, there might be a civil war. There wasn’t then, not quite, but it began bubbling beneath the surface then, and we all know how it ended.
Miss Pérez: Uh, yes, we do. Well, Mrs Powell, how did you end up leaving Russian diplomatic service?
Mrs Powell: On that very day, young lady. I knew from what Pozharsky said that conflict was coming; there would be loyalty purges and intrigue, and I had no stomach for it. I already had a little plan. I had sent money home to my parents, and I wrote a letter telling them to come to California—by boat, before the border closed. Bozhemoi, I thank God they listened. But I—well, I deserted, to be honest. Fled to Cometa, took on an assumed name.
Miss Pérez: You weren’t worried about them coming after you.
Mrs Powell: No. I knew it’d be easy for names to be lost in the purges, and Cometa was perfect. It had burned down barely a decade earlier and the records had gone with it. It was a shiny new city where nobody quite knew everything about everyone who lived there.
Miss Pérez: I hadn’t realised the earthquake was so recent then…
Mrs Powell: Ancient history to you, of course. But it helped me and my parents…though it would be a terrible thing when the plague came and the authorities were trying to control it. With the situation as it is in Russia—both Russias—now, I think I can finally come out and say who I was. Of course my maiden name was different.
Miss Pérez: Yes, when did you meet your husband?
Mrs Powell: Would you believe he was hawking newspapers in Cometa, and that’s how I got my first introduction to the Herald office? (Laughs) It sounds too convenient for reality, doesn’t it?
See page 222 for part 2 of this interview. And now, a brand new Teatime Teaser with our trilingual wordgrid puzzle!
*
(A further recording by Sgt Bob Mumby (BM) and Sgt Dominic Ellis (DE):
DE: Are you going to do the second part as well?
BM: Nah, that’d be spoilers. Anyway, I think next they wanted us to make a start on those political memoirs and the naval fiction?
DE: Fine. Tomorrow. Pub.
BM: Pub.
[12] This refers to field hockey, not ice hockey. Galanga is a Chukchi name, reflecting the influence of ethnic groups from Far Eastern Russia on California.
[13] English in TTL tends to use more gendered terms, and therefore people say ‘first editrix’ rather than ‘first female editor’.
[14] The OTL term is teleprinter or, more usually, the brand name Teletype being used indiscriminately.
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