TWO Russians, Raisa and her daughter Tanya, are in Crediton, as guests of Laura and Gerald Conyngham.

Raisa and Laura have been writing to each other for 28 years, but had never met until a week ago.

Laura explained: “As a young teenager my family had a board game called RISK. It named far away places, Irkutsk, Yakutsk, Kamchatka. Then, at school, our Geography teacher taught us about time zones using the Trans-Siberian railway as an example. I was determined to travel on it.

“So, as a young teacher I spent 14 months in Australia. I saved and learned Russian in evening classes, in order to be able to spend five months travelling back including three-and-a-half weeks going across the USSR by Trans-Siberian Railway, and by air, to other cities. This was 1976. I was 25.

“In January 1989 with our family, we moved to Crediton.

“In May 1989 Thatcher and Gorbechev were having peace talks, which, in my opinion, weren’t getting anywhere.

“I wrote to them both and to the newspaper ‘Pravda’, explaining that I had visited Russia in 1976, that I knew that Russians wanted peace, as British people did, that now I was married and our children were aged seven and two.

“I enclosed a family photograph. My letter was translated and appeared with the photograph on the front page of ‘Pravda’.

“I never had a reply from either of them but, within a very short time, I received letters, first from western Siberia, then from St Petersburg, then from Raisa in Irkutsk.

“Each woman described her family and asked whether I would be her penfriend. Yes, yes and yes. But soon, as more and more letters, hundreds, streamed in, mostly written in Russian, I needed help from the Russian department at Exeter University, from an organisation called Mothers for Peace, inspired by Quakers, and from anyone I could think of who might agree to take on a penfriend.

“Four years ago, when our son Fred took a gap year and travelled the Trans-Siberian Railway from west to east, Raisa and her husband met him and his friend off the train, showed them around Irkutsk and drove them to a spa where they could swim in warm water even though it was snowing. So Fred had met Raisa, her husband Sasha, son Vasya and daughter Tanya, but I hadn’t!

“Earlier this year, my husband Gerald and I invited Raisa to come to Crediton and to London to stay. At last she is here, with Tanya, and in London they will meet our older sons, Danny and Matt.

“We are having a wonderful time. They are astonished and so appreciative!”

Alan Quick