Friendships quickly formed between the two sides, boosted on one occasion when Pete Pascoe, a great hunter-gatherer, returned from a run with a handful of brown mushrooms he’d collected in the forest. The sight of them brought vigorous protests from our own guys. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ cried Whinger. ‘Throw ’em out. Don’t cook them, Mal, or you’ll poison the lot of us.’ But when the students saw them they went ballistic. ‘Beliye griby!’ they shouted. ‘Boletus mushrooms!’ and rushed out to the spot where Pete had found them in search of more.

These were the best, most sought-after kind of fungus. Pete became a hero, and Anna confirmed that Russians are crazy about mushrooms. ‘Weekends, at this time of year, thousands of Muscovites go hunting for them in the woods. They come out by train, car, everything. They’re like locusts, and sweep the place clean. But the training areas are out of bounds to the public, so we’re lucky.’

The week also saw an amazingly rapid proliferation of swear words far worse than any Valentina had taught us. The strangest thing was the way each nationality began to curse in the other’s language: very soon the Brits had adopted yob tvoio mat (fuck your mother) as their basic expression of disgust, and several of the Russians were giving brilliant imitations of Whinger’s ‘firekin ell’. They’d started calling Dusty ‘Dostoievsky’, and Johnny, with his high complexion, had immediately become ‘Svyokla’ – Beetroot.

After supper on Friday evening, before the weekend break, the students invited us round to their block for a drink. It was a strictly private affair, as drinking in barracks was totally forbidden even to officers. But somebody had slipped out for a few bottles of vodka and some cans of beer, and camaraderie flowered in an impromptu sing-song.

‘I hope to Christ this isn’t home-brewed,’ I said to Whinger as I downed a slug of vodka. ‘Otherwise we may wake up blind.’

I turned to Sergei Dva, holding up my glass, and said, ‘Not samogon?’

He looked outraged. ‘Samogon?’ he roared. ‘Nyet! Almas! It is Diamond’ – and he grabbed a bottle to show me that it had a big white diamond, flashing reflected light, on its blue label.

Somebody produced an accordion, and it turned out that a man called Yuri had a phenomenal bass voice. To look at him you’d never have suspected it, because he was slim and wiry: the voice sounded altogether too big for such a spare frame, and seemed to come right from his boots. After a few pints of Baltika No. 6 – a powerful, dark brew – he launched into the ‘Volga Boatmen’s Song’, and his mates joined in the choruses with terrific growls of ‘Ayee och-nyem, ayee och-nyem’. When Pavarotti hit back for the visitors with an impassioned rendering of ‘Drink to me Only’, he won loud cheers.