AKL at Christmas

On an early summer afternoon in 1967, I drove out to a hotel on the Moscow ring road for a rendezvous with Adam, the new chief correspondent. He had driven alone from London and I had suggested meeting him so that I could guide him through Moscow backstreets - pre-Google map days - to SadSam*, the foreigners’ ghetto which housed the Reuters office and the bureau chief’s flat.

In the event, I was a fair bit later than the time I had set, while Adam, no slouch behind the wheel, had started early and driven the 500 km from Smolensk in what must have set an all-time Soviet record for the distance. I found him leaning against his car smoking a cigarette. "Hope you've not been waiting long?" I asked, feeling that I might have botched the first encounter with my new boss. "Not really," said Adam. "I've been taking the sun.”

It was a relief that he was so relaxed. But on and off I did wonder how long I had kept him waiting on that distant Russian Sunday. Years later, staying with him and Mary in their Hampton Court flat, we were swapping memories of our quite eventful time in Moscow in the late 1960s. "How long had you really been waiting?" I asked him. "Well, it was something over two hours, I think," he said. "It wasn't worth worrying you about.”

Although he already had a high profile (The Baron obituary) when he arrived in Moscow, he wore it lightly. He had to be prompted to talk about his Berlin Wall scoop, his time in Maoist China and how he covered apartheid South Africa. In fact, Mary - who died in 2014 (The Baron 20 May 2014) - was more ready to talk about their experiences than he was. On all three assignments she was in effect his office assistant, secretary and teleprinter operator.

It was difficult to think of them other than Adam and Mary. In those days, when Reuters could still at a stretch be regarded as a family news agency, they followed their predecessors, Sidney and Rosemary Weiland, in managing the bureau as a collective. It was only a three-man operation then, and Lars-Erik Nelson was the third.

At Christmas we would sit down with our wives, and perhaps a couple of lonely bachelor journalists from other news offices, to a festive dinner at around 2 pm in the Kellett-Long apartment on the 8th floor of SadSam. Adam was proud of a Santas Klaus hat that he said he had taken with him to wear at Christmas everywhere Reuters sent him.

Once he also sported a semi-translucent yellow cotton roll-neck shirt that he had bought on a shopping trip to Helsinki. "Thought I'd show a bit of nipple," he grinned. "Oh Adam!" said vicar's daughter Mary in the tone of affectionate exasperation she would often use when she thought he was venturing a bit beyond the pale.

During the meal, he would occasionally descend to the office for four floors below "to check the Tass machine," brushing aside protestations from Lars and myself that one of us should go. Christmas, Gregorian or Julian, was of course not even a secular holiday in the officially atheist Soviet Union.

One Christmas, the Foreign Ministry Press Department called a news conference - something it almost never did - at 2 pm on 25 December. Adam insisted that he would go. Dinner was pushed back and Adam eventually returned nearly two hours later. As an opener the Ministry's press chief Leonid Zamyatin, not the greatest friend of foreign journalists, announced that the timing had been chosen "so as not to spoil your Christmas." The "your", reported Adam, was stressed. And there was no news in the conference which was an extended monologue on some inconsequential Soviet industrial achievement.

Nevertheless, Adam proposed a toast to Zamyatin: "The Grinch who almost stole Christmas.”

*full Russian title: Sadovo-Samotechnaya 12/24 but known to us only by the acronym. ■