Friendship's Hand

As citizens of a city that was all but destroyed by the Luftwaffe in November 1940, the survivors of England's Coventry felt a warm bond of sympathy for the survivors of Stalingrad, destroyed two years later. They formed a Coventry-Stalingrad Bond of Friendship Committee, invited people from Stalingrad to visit them. There was no response. The Friendship Committee faded out. Then, one day last week, Coventry's Socialist Mayor Harry Weston got a telephone call from the Russian embassy in London. Madame Tatiana Murashkina, deputy mayoress of Stalingrad, was in Britain and would like to visit Coventry.

Plump, jovial Mayor Weston called a meeting of Coventry's Friendship Committee. The same day he received a shocking piece of news: his daughter's fiance, Lieut. John Godfrey, a 19-year-old Coventry lad, had been killed in Korea. But that didn't stop him, or Coventry, or the dinner of scarce roast beef and Yorkshire pudding he had arranged for the Guildhall ceremony.

Madame Murashkina proved to be a grandmother and an engineer, a pale, thin woman of 47 with drawn-back grey hair, austerely dressed in a rough tweed suit, shapeless black hat, flat-heeled shoes and rayon stockings. With her was a smart blond translator, a huge Russian MVD guard, and two solemn Tass reporters. Everybody was at the station to meet her except Mrs. Weston. The mayor said his wife had a cold, but gossips called it a diplomatic illness. Next day, to give gossips the lie, Mayoress Weston put on her hat, went to see Murashkina at her flat, accompanied her on a visit to the communal grave of Coventry's 1,100 blitz victims. Said Mayor Weston, hospitable to the end: "Nothing was said about Korea. What happened to John could have easily happened in Egypt or Malaya."

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