Displaced Persons 1: Typed in secret

In 1991, after almost 50 years, Latvia shook itself free of Soviet occupation and celebrated its independence. My Latvian parents, living in Montreal and exiled from their homeland since the Soviets had invaded in 1944, celebrated too. Soon after, my father began making frequent visits to Riga, hoping to use his Westernised business acumen to develop the country's nascent capitalist economy. It didn't work out. Soviet patterns of corruption and bribery were impossible to shift in that first year. As soon as my father was back in Montreal, unable to oversee everything personally, the small business he set up - making logs from paper for home heaters - began lurching from crisis to crisis until everything was gone.

I was then living in England, married to an Englishman. We had two young children, a son just into his teens and a daughter not far behind. Not rolling in riches, but well enough off for me to be able to visit Montreal at least once a year. On one of these visits, my father handed me a sheaf of papers. "You should read this," he said. "People have to know how Latvians suffered... this was written by a woman who was sent to Siberia."

The papers were a memoir he had been handed in Latvia, with the request to 'do something' with it. Carefully typed on an old typewriter during Soviet rule, the pages had been hidden away, for writing then of deportations, of Siberia, of slave labour, was risky. If found, the memoir would get the writer deported again, or worse. But she had promised others that she would tell of what had happened, to her and to them, that she would not let their experiences be forgotten. For seven years she had lived in a settlement of deportees on the barren shores of the Kara Sea, far above the Arctic Circle, fishing in all conditions to help provision the Soviet war effort. She had been a teacher, in 1941 taken from her Jelgava home at gunpoint in the middle of the night.

I wasn't interested. My own impending tragedy absorbed me. My marriage was ending and I didn't want it to end. It was inconceivable that I would have to leave the home I loved, a compact Victorian red-brick house in a village surrounded by fields, an hour north of London. There was a real working well in the front yard, and a generous back garden that rewarded my elementary efforts with seeds and trowel with splashes of colour all summer. Most importantly, there was community. I'd joined amateur dramatics and a poetry circle and happily took part in Safari Suppers and quiz nights and square dances. When we moved to the village from London, I'd announced to my husband that this place was where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. That was still true. Divorce wasn't in my plans. I wasn't ready to accept that it was inevitable.

No one needs to know about Siberia, I thought, sunk in my own miseries. So much has already been written about Siberia and its lags, its camps, its cruelties, its privations and deaths. The world has moved on to concern itself with fresh horrors.

I did not know yet that this woman, this stranger, was going to become my life raft, that her hard time was to accompany me through my hard time, and hold me up. I did not know that years later, I would tell her story and mine, together, in the work that became Displaced Persons.