An Estonian Childhood

In her introduction Tania Alexander writes, 'The Baltic philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling . . . once remarked: ''I am not a Dane, not a German, not a Swede, not a Russian nor an Estonian, so what am I - a little of all these.'' Tania Alexander felt the same, 'I share his sense of confused identity.' She was born in St Petersburg, but as a young child was taken to Estonia, at that time a province of Russia which was later to become the northernmost of the three independent Baltic States created in the aftermath of the First World War. The tone of her memoir, mainly set in Kallijärv, is almost idyllic, surprisingly so given the political upheaval of the period. In her own words 'my early life was influenced by three women, all of them complex characters and strong personalities, who had to find their own way of adapting to very different from those they might have expected to enjoy. My Irish governess, Micky, sacrificed her family and suffered exile - a mother ostracised by the