That is my great aunt Margaret in the box. Put her in anything grander and she would have risen to give it away. The lugubrious onlookers are her friends and neighbors. The place is Simferopol in Crimea, her home for the previous 30 years. The date is July 6, 1965. She would have turned 77 that October. Margaret, or Margery as friends and family called her, was the daughter, granddaughter and niece of country vicars. She was raised in rectories around East Anglia, England’s stomach. From her mother she had the genes of an Anglo-Irish brewing and banking dynasty and the connections that went with them. How, from such a background, she ended up where she did I will relate in The Margery Book.
