Strangers on a train

It’s good to talk to strangers on a train.

Yesterday we travelled up to Edinburgh for the day and because it was the school half-term the train was very crowded. We found a seat at a table alongside a young woman and her thirteen-year-old son. After exchanging a few words about the view, we asked the mother where she was from.

‘Ukraine’, she replied.

After a pause, we asked if she was going to go home when it was over.

‘I can’t’, she said, ‘My home was destroyed’.

Then she paused, before adding, ‘I’m from Mariupol’.

And it was not only her home. Her whole family had been killed. There was no one to go back to.

‘And I don’t want to live in Russia,’ she concluded, even though she was a Russian speaker—and implying that she expected Mariupol to now remain in Russia for the foreseeable future. Given the current military news, she might, sadly, be right.

As she told the story, she spent two days walking to get out of Mariupol and, as she spoke, I remembered the television images of people like her fleeing that once beautiful city. It was many more weeks before she was able to finally leave Ukraine, staying briefly in several European countries before arriving in Scotland—which, she said (and we were pleased to hear) had been the most welcoming country. Now she works for a homeless charity and her son is acquiring a Scottish accent.

What was perhaps most remarkable about her story was that she told it without a trace of self-pity—just a clear, step-by-step factual account of what had happened and a hugely positive embrace of the new life into which history had so brutally thrown her and her son.

I once deeply offended a Russian correspondent by saying that Mariupol would join the list of place-names like Guernica or My Lai that symbolize the ultimate amorality of war. I have no doubt I was right.