Katya & The Prince of Siam

 

 

 

KATYA

& The Prince of Siam

 

 

NARISA CHAKRABONGSE

with EILEEN HUNTER

 

 

 

 

 

To Lisba

In loving Memory

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

 

Eileen and Narisa would like to thank the following for their advice and encouragment throughout: Zamira Benthall, Lesley Blanche, Allen Levy, Robert and Rebecca MacDonald, Henry Maxwell, Olga Petithuegenin, Valerian Skwarzoff, Desa Trevisan

 

First edition published in Thailand by River Books

and distributed in the UK by

White Mouse Editions

3 Denbigh Road

London W11 2SJ

Tel 071 229 6765

 

A River Books Production

Copyright © Text: Narisa Chakrabongse and Eileen Hunter

Copyright © Collective Work: River Books, 1994

eBook Copyright © River Books 2011

 

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing fromthe publisher.

 

Design by Supadee Ruangsak

Picture research by Pattara Kharn

Editorial direction by Narisa Chakrabongse

Production by Paisarn Piemmettawat

Typesetting by Nicola Barwood

 

Printed and bound in Thailand by the Amarin Printing Group

 

ISBN 0 904568 76 8

 

CONTENTS

 

Foreword

Chapter I The Siamese Royal Family

Chapter 2 From Bangkok to St. Petersburg

Chapter 3 Katya’s Family

Chapter 4 East meets West

Chapter 5 Life Behind Palace Walls

Chapter 6 Birth of a Son

Chapter 7 A New Reign – Rama VI

Chapter 8 Return to Russia

Chapter 9 Life Under King Rama VI

Chapter 10 War and Revolution

Chapter 11 Death of a Queen and a Prince

Chapter 12 Katya’s New Life in China

Chapter 13 Chula is Left Alone

Chapter 14 Motor-racing

Chapter 15 Life in Cornwall

Epilogue

Bibliography

 

FOREWORD

 

After my father Prince Chula died when I was seven, my mother and I often used to spend the evenings at our house in Cornwall watching the many 16mm films they had shot together – films spanning a thirty year period from 1935 to 1964. We would sit together in the room called the ‘Bira Bar’ surrounded by my uncle’s motor racing trophies. At the time I was not sensitive to the fact that these films might upset my mother, but perhaps in a way they comforted her and brought my father close to her again. For my part, I simply enjoyed asking who all the different people were and hearing the stories about them. Thus it was that I first saw a smiling middle-aged woman and was told that this was my Russian grandmother Katya. (Apparently, I was taken to see her once in Paris when I was about two years old but no memory remains.) In the films she moves across the lawn with the slightly speeded up motion of 16 mm, or sits sipping a cup of tea on a terrace. The weather is always fine and I could gain no conception of what she was like, or the life she had led.

On my mother’s death eight years later, I was left with the daunting task of sorting through not only trunk loads of my parents personal correspondence, diaries and papers, but those of my father’s parents as well. Those of my grandparents were a mixture of Thai and Russian, of which I could read the former but not the latter. In the same trunk were many old photographs and elegant cartes de visites inscribed with the names of photographers in Kiev, St Petersburg and Bangkok. I gazed at the faces of stern-looking bearded gentlemen, severe matrons or a young girl in nurse’s uniform. On the backs in my mother’s writing were scribbled the names of my grandmother’s father, mother and Katya herself. I began to become intrigued and wanted to discover more, but not reading Russian and having to study for exams and later university, I had to put them aside for a while.

It was only 10 years later when talking with my aunt Eileen Hunter, the writer, in our favourite little Greek restaurant in Craven Hill that we decided that the story of Katya and my grandfather Prince Chakrabongse was one that should be told and that with my aunt’s experience as an author and my research abilities we would collaborate on the project. I immediately began translating my grandfather’s diaries written in Thai and searched out my grandparents’ letters to each other. However, finding someone to translate them proved somewhat problematic, more than a few Russian specialists being able to deal with my grandfather’s neat hand but finding my grandmother’s script and style convoluted and indecipherable. In fact, it was only when I went to live in Thailand for three years in the mid-1980s that I found some translators – a shaky old Cossack living in an old people’s home on the outskirts of Bangkok, a Scottish couple working as Russian specialists at the UN and finally a Pravda correspondent, who was probably in reality KGB. This latter man and his delightful wife seemed to develop an immense affection for me and the project while we worked together, but from the moment they left Bangkok despite numerous letters to them, I have never heard from them again.