‘Hypothetically Speaking’ by Leanne Moden

Say you see me, getting off the train. Say it’s past midnight, and the taxi rank stands empty. The chip shop closed hours ago, but the sharp scent of vinegar and grease lingers. The concrete bus shelter opens wide, like a mouth.

Say you see me cross the car park, stepping carefully through broken glass. Ascending the stairs to the bridge over the tracks.

Say you watch me stop at the top, look back, move forward.

Say you follow me then, through the nice part of town. Darkened windows, blinds down. Gated gardens, railings black, where the air smells of sweet honeysuckle and hot tarmac. 

Say you watch my pace quicken at the crossing, not waiting for the lights to change. Still slightly out of range. Strides widening briskly, in sensible shoes. The ones I always choose: double-laced, thick soles, comfortable control. Running shoes. 

Say you speed up too.

Say I’ve mapped every shadow between street lights. Where, even on warm nights, no one lingers. I count the paths on my fingers, choose the one closest to the road, know through luck and repetition the right way to go. I hear you breathing behind me, but tell myself it’s nothing, rushing past the edge of the skate park, roundabout, car park, housing estate. 

Say it’s too late to be out alone, that I should have got a taxi home, but I’m skint and I’m definitely not complaining. I mean, at least it’s not raining. 

Say I cross another road, cut through the precinct, and I think you’re still there. No, I know you’re still there. You’ve been behind me since the station. And it’s not just my imagination. So, I stop to tie my shoe outside the late-night KFC. Watch you hesitate, glance down, then walk right by me. 

Say I wait for three beats: one… two… three –

Say, I only follow when it feels safe, inwardly scolding myself for staying out this late. 

Say I walk behind you through the rough estate. Now, say you’ve slowed your pace. So, I slow down too. 

Say I’m scared of you.  

Say you look back at me, expectantly. Only three streets from home, on a narrow road. I’ve got nowhere else to go, and you step off the path, behind a tree. To wait for me. Waiting for me. 

Say I veer left, push through bushes that scratch my arms, running from harm across an unlit dual carriage way. Desperate to get away. Run as fast as I can go, don’t stop till I get home.

Say you never think about me again, but I think of you every night for months. Say the one person I tell says there must be a rational explanation. That men don’t just follow young women home from the station. That it must be my imagination. 

But it wasn’t, and they do, and it happens every day. Say these stories get dismissed, again and again and again. What else is there to say?


Meet the Author!

Leanne Moden is a Nottingham-based poet and writer. She’s performed at events across the UK and Europe, including WOMAD Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Sofar Sounds, and Bestival. Leanne’s latest collection, ‘Get Over Yourself’ was published in 2020 by Burning Eye Books, and she’s currently working on her second theatre show. You can find out more about her work on her website: www.leannemoden.com 

‘Beautiful Rain’ by Ian Smith

This would make an arresting opening scene of a movie, I thought, on my way to Heathrow to drop off my rental before crossing the channel for an assignment.  I had a little time to spare so exited the motorway, backtracking to her.  You never know when or where opportunity might present, and my luck was in often enough in those days.

Adapted to Britain’s wet weather, I parked in the emergency lane, indicator flashing.  Minolta always ready, roughly counting cash I carried, I knew I could change at the airport.  Her face lined, perfect, perfect, hair dark grey, silver jewels of fine misty rain set in, adorning it, lowering cloud shielding shrieking jets from our sight, I approached, smiling, choosing words, the right tone, body language.

She sat, silent, upright on a rug spread over the grass with her few possessions exposed, lorries slamming by on an overpass, tyre whine like a tomcat fight.  Asking how I might help, aware of time’s ruthlessness, I started recording even as I sought permission.  Those who record cannot intervene; those who intervene cannot record.  A pro, I sometimes disliked my voyeuristic self but honoured and respected timing.

Her face trickling with that rain, she looked like a gypsy beggar, her story an oral jigsaw of staccato bursts, dark eyes furious, nostrils flared, while I moved about her, sometimes for Dutch angle shots, murmuring encouragement.  This fallen woman daft with rage who could have spilled from a grimoire’s page presented a magnificent study.  I figured a man’s involvement.  No.  Two men, one her lover, the other a stranger, both hokey.  I would have given her angel’s wings if magic power were mine, capturing her lift-off from below.

One man, not her husband, was a betrayer, a breaker of promises, of hearts.  She had clung to belief in him because she had no-one else.  He said he would meet her.  Here?  By the motorway?  I asked.  She reacted with an expression I nailed shifting to the side and behind, her face turned, that said I was a fool.  From her havering I deducted the other man was a lorry driver who picked her up expecting payment for the ride with her body.  The shots I took of her contempt for him were gold.

I left, thanking her, pinpricks of rain her diamond tiara, my Drum ready-rubbed tobacco stashed somewhere on her, most of my cash in her bra, I think, wishing her better luck after she refused my quasi-earnest offer of a lift with a disdainful look I also shot and used, but thinking we make our own luck, elated with this impromptu plein air freelancing.  When triggered, earthy odours rain releases from soil and vegetation mixed with diesel and industrial fumes permeating my hippocampus, urge me to review my portfolio of these grainy treasures.  I now believe we each deserve precious luck on our fraught journeys.


Meet the Author!

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Ginosko Literary Journal, Griffith Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

‘Water Bodies: Four Liquid Recollections’ by Michele Nugent

I found water chilling my five-year-old bed-warmed feet as they reached the floor one grey morning. My tiny toes soon retracted, shocked and sloshing. 

It became my first conscious memory of water’s impact on my own body, my life. It became hard-wired, the first of many welling watery waves.

Around Australia today, 50-odd years later, countless small children are beginning to grasp the power of water. 

Their town’s rivers are rising centimetres daily, morphing from pretty local fishing spots to the places that swallow cars and houses. 

Their cars and houses.

My fine messy curls, slightly sweaty from a night of innocent slumber, flapped as I shivered at the weird, watery abundance.

It was licking at my ankles, splashing at my calves, spilling beneath my bedroom door from the linoleum hallway beyond.

Why was a paddling pool on my bedroom floor? A sense of forbidden fun charged through me as I scrunched my nightie in my hands, knowing I shouldn’t let it get wet. 

These new sensations were accompanied by a rhythmic swooshing sound. The shape of my mother efficiently sweeping watery waves towards our open front door came into view as I peeked into the hallway. 

An unfamiliar coolness had also pooled there in the darkened corridor. 

Outside the front door, a dull yet oddly bright morning was shedding light on our toppled rubber tree. Its split trunk and once sky-high branches now blocked our car’s exit from the carport and driveway. A fallen giant.

My brother and I were wide-eyed as we met in the hallway, our bare submerged feet tip-toeing their way through the dimness.

Mum broke her broom-wielding focus, scooping us close with her free arm. Her perspiration left a smudge on our faces and shoulders as she ushered us outside with the excess fluid, thin summer pajamas a novel uniform for the day.

We raced to clamber between the fallen branches and shiny purple-red leaves of the dense tree that had once separated our front yard from the neighbour’s.

They too were surveying this brave new early morning world and Tropical Cyclone Trixie’s hallmarks. I began to hear the word ‘damage’ repeatedly spill from everyone’s mouths – Trixie Cyclone, whoever she was had a damaging reputation.

And she was way stronger than anyone I knew. 

Everything was so different today. Perhaps yesterday was a dream. What would tomorrow be like? The answers didn’t make any sense.

I’d never met Trixie. Where was she now and why had she damaged our street? Would she come back?

Sheets of water had moved mounds of soil to the road below, mowing through the shrubbery of the gully beyond. 

It had created deep rivulets in the sloping remainder of scant lawn, exposing the roots of trees all along the street.

The big kids next door rode their bikes through the silty build-up, creating new roadways, raising the sense of excitement that sent pulses through the thick atmosphere. 

Small bugs were sticking to my skin, floating in the air, lost.  

Leaves of all shapes and sizes were strewn confetti-like, some stuck fast in the diamond-patterned cyclone screens encasing the windows. 

Soon my toenails and cotton nighty were stained with the familiar rusty red of the Pilbara as I embraced the freedom. 

The attention of the adults was concentrated elsewhere, and a new pecking order had formed. The big boy next door was the leader of our street’s kids, on the new red chopper he got for Christmas.

I could hear my dad’s voice in my head. “Don’t go through that puddle on yer bike love, the spokes’ll rust.” 

I stole glances at his wheels to see if they had begun to lose their shine. I was certain Trixie had the power to make his bike rust.  

The swish of bristles on watery floors syncopated with my father’s axe as he and the street’s men hacked through green wood. White gooey tree blood dripped onto the sodden ground, like primary school craft glue. 

Offhand but furrowed-brow warnings not to touch the sticky deposits interjected as we made sense of our rearranged front yard and street. 

It grew steamier as the sun radiated under the dense cloudy blanket, powerful rays trying to melt their way through.

Toast for breakfast hadn’t entered our minds in this new overcast, eerie playground but plates of bread with butter and Vegemite were a welcome addition to our adventures beneath the soupy sky.

We wolfed the stiff slices down, leaving black salty flecks in the corners of our mouths. We were powering up for our next expedition, like underdressed astronauts on a new planet. The garden hose washed brekky down, flushing away the crumbs.    

Mum had made headway with the interior rivers, keen for muddy-footed children to stay outdoors as the floors began to dry. 

All the doors and windows were yawning open, sucking in air. This was new! We had been trained to conserve the refrigerated air that relieved us from the usual stinging outdoor temperatures by closing the doors behind us.        

Could we turn the telly on soon. Could we change into our play clothes for a trip to the shops. Could we go to the beach for a swim. That’d cool everyone down and make us all clean again.

Talk turned to the eye of the storm, how long it would last until the rain and wind returned, how much damage would Trixie do to a place called ‘inland’. 

I didn’t know storms had eyes. I searched skywards, expecting to meet the angry gaze of a grimacing girl called Trixie.

All I saw were endless clouds, plump with steely rain, and the sun still trying to burn its way back through to us.


My baby brother learned to swim in a water tank named Violet.

She was sheltered from the late afternoon sun by a lonely stand of eucalypt. Her cool, pump-fed oasis protected from the Pilbara’s unrelenting evaporation by a flimsy, removable corrugated tin cover weighed down with red house bricks.

The creaking jangle of her Southern Cross windmill eked out a welcome call, audible from the stone homestead 100m away. Our heads would turn, anticipating an elusive waft, willing it to tickle our sweaty hairlines.

Magnetised to mattresses on the verandah, we would patiently listen for the faint Indian Ocean breeze travelling from 50kms west.

We were placated by the blades’ midnight maneuvers; the remote yet friendly family member grated out a one-way conversation our ears became attuned to.

Laying sheetless under mosquito nets, Violet’s bounty drip-fed a lattice of floor-to-roof chicken wire colonised by hardy creepers. The damp shrubbery caught and cooled any breath of air that reached it, an ambitious solution to the throbbing brick and stone walls of the homestead’s inner sanctum.

Her liquid miraculously flushed the frog-infested chain-operated toilet, and the solitary kitchen tap echoed before the flooding swoosh eventually shuddered its arrival. 

Daily the noisy plumbing summoned the ancient waterbody from deep artesian bores into domestic and agricultural duty, gifting we humans a false sense of power despite our outback isolation.

The impossibly deep iron bath was rarely filled higher than bellybutton height and its scalding bounty needed a half-hour wait before tender skin and hardened shards of yellow soap could be introduced to its sterilising temperature.

My baby brother’s bulbous cranium, feathery golden filaments flattened, bobbed happily, buoyed by the liquid bonanza in the cool circular water tank. 

His chubby, star-dimpled hands and smooth brown forearms doggy-paddled between my cajoling parents, tall and strong enough to stubbornly grip Violet’s slimy concrete floor with their curling toes.

His green water-filled eyes lined with dark clumping lashes blinked unaffected, matched by a wide pink grin over perfect baby teeth. Bunching his shining cheeks, my baby brother’s giggle was never far away as he gave Violet another life-affirming vocation.

I called him ‘baby’, but my brother was a sturdy toddler the year I went into Grade Five. I was already lamenting my entry to weekday primary school boarding and the time it stole from my dusty meanderings at the faraway sheep station.

Like all youngest siblings, he remains an eternal infant, cradled at the family bosom, even as it shrivels into the drought of life.

As I struck out from the rickety ladder to the centre of Violet’s pool, I would dutifully heed stern commands to steer clear of the windmill’s pump float. It would surely pull me under if I edged too close.

Our movement stirred green globs, tongues registering a faint dirt quality, palms and soles gradually turning a stubborn wrinkly white. No one wanted to leave Violet on those baking afternoons. A swim in her was a relieving reward after an arduous day that began with the rising heat of the east and its smug crow song.

The dog lapped at the cattle trough, claiming her share of Violet, slumping down panting on the shady side of her hard grey cylindrical bulk. The red mud stuck to her short blonde coat, quickly solidifying before drying to dust. 

I witnessed my baby brother’s paddling grow stronger every weekend as I returned to the station after five days in town an hour’s drive away. Swimming lessons in the freezing chlorinated pool were a poor swap for Violet’s lukewarm yet intimate acceptance.

My middle brother and I demonstrated the finer points of our mandatory Education Department swimming lessons, introducing freestyle and showing off our backstroke. 

As we grew stronger, three butterfly strokes easily spanned Violet’s girth. 

Our boisterous skills splashed her waves of gold over the side, muddy rivulets sending her life force back to its earthly spring.


Before retreating beneath the covers to read myself to sleep, I would drape my dark blue Arena full piece across the end of my bed. 

There my racing bathers would wait, primed to help me slice through the rectangular body of water across town early the next day.

Nanna must have known I’d need an alarm one day. Every day. Except Sundays. The dark green faux leather had little time to gather dust as my hands reached almost daily for the small folding clock, shutting off the irritating bell. 

Shorts, a shirt and rubber thongs also waited at the bottom of the sturdy piped cotton bedspread. An already-packed bag held a faded towel, goggles, knickers, 20c, a plastic shopping bag for wet bathers and a freshly powdered swimming cap. Red.

My hand silenced the jangling of Nanna’s clock, and my body would groggily glide, eyes still closed to the toilet and bathroom. With teeth brushed, face splashed, and chlorine-green tinted hair pulled back into a quick ponytail, I was ready for the morning ritual.

The house was still and silent as I headed out the front door toward my Malvern Star, its pedals usually tangled with those of my brothers’, the well-used machines shoved carelessly into the steel bike rack welded by my father. 

My middle brother was often slower than me to leave the house for our shared destination, but he always caught up, forcing a race as we approached the town pool and its turnstile entry.

Swimming lessons. The endless challenge of immersing one’s sweaty limbs into a vast, chilly body of water to join the splashing queue chasing our relentless taskmaster – the black line.

100m medley to warm up, the coach always repeated the directions chalked on the poolside blackboard as the latecomers ebbed and flowed through the entry gates. 

But the ultimate coach was that black line, leading us on, stroke after stroke propelling our lithe bodies 50m closer to the finish line under the unflinching gaze of the analogue minute clock.

The water, initially a shocking scourge, became a warm supportive friend as we battled that line, punctuated with tumble turns and a brief loss of it from immediate view.

Always it returned, sometimes obscured by a floating Band-Aid, or a glinting coin, or misplaced goggles. Teamed with the buoyancy and freedom of the water, this meditation became a coping mechanism, a way to regulate the breath and repetitive limb beats, sped up or slowed down on command, setting the day’s rhythm.

Slavishly I churned up the metres, building my resilience and strength, giving my brain time to turn the worries of the coming day over, and my eyes a private space to seep tears unnoticed. Deep sobs reverberated in my eardrums as I pushed out air before refilling my hungry lungs. 

I anticipated the only obvious reward, a long warm shower in the concrete changeroom cubicle. 

Then, goose pimples calmed and body cosseted in dry clothes, I’d set out for the mainly downhill coast toward home and the comfort of Vegemite toast and Milo before another bike ride to school.

This swimming lesson routine was matched each afternoon with a swift sunset glide toward home. 

Another race to the family chlorine-smelling shower, followed by pajamas, Doctor Who, dinner and the exhausted release of a Trixie Belden novel and sleep.

Dingdingdig. 

Splashsplashchurn. 


Dirty paws and spittled mouths left their telltale marks on the dented 1-litre plastic bottles. 

They had once contained sweetened orange juice but were now refilled with the quenching plentiful water borne by our kitchen tap. Warm. Often plain hot, despite the blue coding on the tap of origin. 

Refrigeration was the key to life in that searing town.

Every couple of months the bottles were retired, after a life of rough and ready handling, the loss of lids a regular reason for renewal. 

They were refilled regularly each day with the steady stream of hard calcium-laced water that killed our thirst. Bulging again, the malleable vessels would be thrown haphazardly back into the fridge door, testing the limits of the Kelvinator’s forgiving plastic and aluminium barriers.

We couldn’t have predicted these bottles and their dwindling contents would become an after-dinner treat. A before sleep soother. 

These nightly sips were a reminder of a life left behind and the delicious dawning of the new one ahead. Adulthood was gaining on us like a rising spring tide. 

Until then, the years ahead were unbidden, with no comprehension of a future threat to our plentiful drinking water. 

But that watery end of days did arrive, and we were collectively responsible for exhausting our limited supply to soupy dregs, dished out in ever diminishing quantities until the bottles were finally and firmly empty. 

There was no option of a refill. The source was a 3,000km round trip away.

The strong smell of chlorine had become a comfort, when previously it had been a recognisable olfactory assault only overcome by a tooth-aching chill. We greedily gulped, its goodness dispersing to all corners of our bodies via intricate deltas of river-like veins.

We grew to love it by default. Chilled water was the only effective antidote to the urgent thirst that was the hallmark of young boundless energy. Lemon Cottees cordial sometimes broke the monotony, but the plain tap taste was never really surpassed for its sheer ability to revive.  

It was needed to replace the sweat that oozed between the grime of outdoor play, sport, bike rides, hill walks, salty swims and the beating sun on our hatless heads and freckled noses.

In contrast but just as plentiful, the softer water of these new southern water pipes lacked flavour. It took too long to rinse the soap suds from our hands, hair and clothes – a symptom of not being treated to within an inch of its life like its northern cousin.

How we ached for the comforting taste of fluoride and chlorine-treated artesian water, and later the dammed spoils of the Harding River.

Our young heads had never grasped there would be such a noticeable difference in such a simple thing. Water from the kitchen tap.

We were pining for a life we’d so naively taken for granted, as all children who are lucky enough to live in the moment do. 

We had begun to realise how our bodies, borne upon water, were finally changing course.


Meet the Author!

Michele Nugent is a former Australian print journalist and editor of 27 years, published author, blogger and busy media/comms officer for a metropolitan coastal local government. A 2021 Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre Fellow, she is working on a 62k word coming of age manuscript that needs serious attention. She writes all day: in her head, via computer, pen and paper, to produce fact and fiction professionally and unprofessionally. 

Instagram: @printisnotdead Madam Editor – Perth, WA (@printisnotdead) • Instagram photos and videos

LinkedIn: Michele Nugent (4) Michele Nugent | LinkedIn

‘The Dig’ by Jeanne Althouse

A Creative Essay

“See this piece of clay,” Mrs. Aarden said to the children on the Monday of Kindergarten art class, holding up a fist-sized mound of oily brown modeling clay. “Hiding inside is a dinosaur waiting to come out. You don’t even know what kind of dinosaur it is, but the clay knows.”

“Or it’s a snake,” said Indira, who had rolled her clay into three long curvy slices on the art table. She picked up one piece and waved it in the air, pretending to frighten Jake, who had pushed other boys away to sit next to her.

“Or a dragon,” said Jake, who wanted to show he was better at ideas than Indira.

“Or nothing,” said Lamar, who was angry because Jake took the seat next to Indira, and he did not see himself as ever good at art projects, and he was afraid to fail, and be embarrassed in front of others.

This is exactly how I feel every time I face a blank page. I think I’ll never be able to discover another story. But I kept these thoughts to myself. This was Mrs. Aarden’s class, and my job was volunteer aid.

Mrs. Aarden nodded, agreeing with the children. “When you start to excavate, uncover, chip away at it, mold it, sculpt it,” she said, her eyes dreamy, unfocused, as if she had turned inward, remembering her own dinosaurs, “you have some idea, but you never know what you will find, because it goes its own way, it meanders here or there, unexpectedly, or a piece falls off revealing a wing instead of a tail, or the top half refuses to be a mermaid, or the way it warmed in your hand determined from the beginning it was never going to be a stegosaurus, it was going to be an angel.”

My subconscious is like that piece of clay, a fist-sized mound in my gut, waiting to be exposed, wanting out, wanting excavation, but holding its secrets.  I become a child, looking at it, facing its complexities. And how I feel on that day, at that moment, might prevent the dig, like a sudden storm interferes with the uncovering of the ancient treasures at the archaeological site.

There’s a perfect example. That metaphor—it meandered, from molding clay to searching for dinosaur bones in the ground. First it was an art project, now it’s a dig. I try to stay open to inconsistencies, synergies, connections. I go on with the digging.

 Morning is the best time for me to excavate. Every morning my body re-sets, after it sleeps and heals, like the sun, every morning, rises. With the colors of pink, red, flame orange, and with her clouds dipping their edges into the palette of blue-green sky- paint, the blinding bright sliver of round light slides up from the horizon behind the shape of trees. As the sun star holds me in her “great hands of light,” I hear the poet Mary Oliver singing.

On waking I am the new person I have become. I turn to the empty page, looking inside me, waiting for it to reveal.

Warning. Like staring directly at the sun hurts the eyes, it can hurt to look directly at the subconscious. Or another way of saying it, if I’m not slightly uncomfortable about it, or embarrassed to show the neighbors, or find myself not being honest, not telling the whole story, or not saying what I really got out of it, or what I really stole, or harmed, or meant to harm, or not saying who I loved and why, or not facing that I too once slapped my child, if I’m not being brutally honest, well, it’s bound to be a morning of a bowl-gray sky, with no sunrise, with no variety, ultimately, blank. Eyes down. Pen still.

The dig finds no artifacts at the expected location.

On good mornings, the best mornings, the words land on the page running. Sounds leap off their consonants in song.  Vowels kiss each other with expectation, like first lovers. Fresh images release their emotional juice slowly, like each sweet ripe red Cara Cara in the breakfast juicer releases its complex flavors of raspberry, cherry, rose.  The story comes alive so strongly, I can smell the flavor of it coming off the page.

But, alas, it’s half-baked. Or half-dug. Or not even half.

On thinking about it, all day, as I go about my business, filing out the tax form, or calling the plumber, or walking in the park, I realize I only have the first layer. These people on the page, they need names. My main character—is she a Mary, or Jasmine, or Rosa, or Leah, or Dolores, or LaDonna? Her name speaks of her ethnicity, her religion, her features, her hair, her eyes, her breasts, even the pink bottoms of her black feet, if her white lover likes to caress them.

What about her work? Is she trapped in a meaningless job answering phones on a complaint line? Does she deliver for the post office? Does she research coral reefs? What about her history?  Is she an immigrant? Was her great-great grandmother a slave? Is she adopted? What does she carry when she leaves the house; does she have a huge bag full of makeup, Kleenex, hand sanitizer, lip gloss, aspirin, a flashlight, a quirky old fondu pot she found at the antique store? Or does she leave with only her house key and phone tucked into her yoga pant pocket? Does she suffer micro-aggressions against women in silence or does she speak up every time? What is it about her that cries out to be told?

This is the day-work. It’s gathering the tools, the shovel, a trowel, the rake, a delicate brush. It’s looking for the soft ground, or the odd mound, the thing that won’t let go, that begs to be discovered, to be let out, to be explained. The day work is also reading, reading for joy, and reading like a writer, to learn craft. On this day I read “Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell. Her voice stays with me. She writes about the unexpected death of a beloved son. “Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”

When ready to sleep, I turn my mind once again to the dig, to the story, to the characters, to the Muse. I ask her to help me access the mystery. Then I close my eyes, hearing borne away from you like thistledown, and I let go.

Dream. 

In the dream a scent comes to me. The scent of White Linen, my mother’s perfume. She’s been dead for ten years, but I see her face clearly. I visit her last home, the retirement room with her four-poster bed, a family heirloom, in the corner. She wears her blue velvet opera dress ready to go out. She reaches out for me to hold her hand, as she walks to the door, to steady her, but, oddly, I refuse. I remember the feeling of her warm hand in mine, her middle finger bent from Dupuytren’s syndrome. In the dream I refuse to take her hand and she falls.

They say dreams come in service of health. I recognize a warning from the feeling of shame I have on waking. I have unfinished business with my mother.

I read on the internet: “When digging or excavating in your yard, a potential hazard may exist because your utilities may have underground equipment installed relatively close to the surface.”

There should be a warning. “When digging or excavating in your subconscious, you may discover conflict, pain, suffering, a moment of shame that undoes you for days.”

In the morning, I write. I find my way into the story through the scent. White Linen. As I dig deeper, I uncover the moment, the moment of conflict on which the story turns. The character, Spenser (“dispenser of provisions”), has unfinished business with her mother, Faith (“fully anticipating it to happen”).

Shoveling. Digging into the dark hole. Every day, another layer.

I begin to see pieces of the treasure: the themes, what their story is about, where it wants to go. The treasure is visible, but it is full of dirt, grime, or hard clay from years in the soil. It begs for cleaning, for a power-wash with humility, gratitude, awe.

What happens next? Does Faith die? Is she snatched away from Spenser in the blink of an eye, like Hamnet was borne away from his parents? I am consumed with finding out, in the zone, oblivious to the tax form, forgetting lunch, breathing inside the story.

More shoveling. Returning to work. Showing up. Persevering. Another layer. Excitement builds.

The next day, more is revealed. Faith does die, leaving Spenser broken, full of regrets, unable to forgive herself. I feel tears coming as I write the words, words that seem to come from somewhere else. The sadness overwhelms me. This guilt will haunt Spenser for years. I search for the words that will deliver this daughter’s need for peace in that important last sentence. I write what I think is the end.

But it is not the end. 

My drafts, of which there are many, need a huge amount of editing. The story will evolve through this work, the deepening knowledge and respect for each character, the reading aloud of every word, the considering of active verbs, of varied sentence structure, of order of paragraphs, punctuation.

That evening, while listening to a favorite recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma, I cook my mother’s Chili. The aroma of her Chili wraps around me, holding me in my mother’s warm embrace. I hear her voice reminding me not to forget to add a dash of sugar, her secret ingredient.

 In the morning, I look at the story again. I find another small treasure, lurking there at the bottom of the whole (interesting that word choice: “hole” or “whole”); it’s ready to be dusted off with the delicate brush. As she cooks dinner, Spenser hears her mother’s voice, reminding her to add the pinch of brown sugar.

In Mrs. Aarden’s art class, on the next day, she asked the children to find a seat next to someone new, someone they did not sit next to yesterday. She suggested that Lamar sit next to Indira, making them a good example of what she meant. She said that moving to a different place, looking at things from a different angle, doing something unexpected, something new, perhaps slightly scary, can help them uncover their dinosaur and let him out.

Lamar sits next to Indira; he wears a big smile.

When the story is the best I can write, I give it to my writing group, or to a writer-friend, to someone who did not sit next to it for ages, to someone who can look at it from a different perspective, to someone I trust who can tell me if I found my dinosaur—or a dragon, or a snake—or an angel in a blue velvet opera dress with my mother’s eyes.

Note to Readers

“The Dig” is an essay on creativity which tells how one writer digs into her subconscious mind to access the muse.

“Sing in me, muse, and through me tell the story…”

Homer, The Odyssey

Meet the Author

Stories by Jeanne Althouse have appeared in numerous literary journals including Gravel, The Examined Life, Birdland Journal, Penman Review, Inkwell and The Plentitudes Journal.  Her story, “Goran Holds his Breath” was nominated by Shenandoah for the Pushcart Prize. A collection of her flash fiction, “Boys in the Bank,” was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. She writes each morning, watching the sun rise, hoping to capture the light in words.

‘A Primer for the Women who Might Date My Ex-boyfriend’ by Megha Nayar

 What he says:

What he means:

I love that you have a spine.

You’re super sexy when you take others head-on. Others.

Why should you be ashamed of your past? 

My own shenanigans were far racier, so yours are forgiven. 

Until I met you, I had no hope of finding love again.

Six women had already dumped my sorry ass. Who’d be optimistic?

My parents are nasty ol’ buggers for refusing to give me more money. 

My parents know all about my train-wrecking ways. They’ve wised up. 

My siblings are pampered asshats who’ve profited at my expense. 

My siblings, just like my friends, have stopped indulging my nonsense. 

My friends are entitled asshats who’ve profited at my expense. 

My friends, just like my siblings, have stopped indulging my nonsense. 

How I use the money you gave me is none of your business.

I smoked it away. Send me some ASAP. Don’t ask me why. 

I won’t grovel for money. I hate grovelling.

How dare you ask me to account for how I used up your money? 

I should never have taken your money. 

You lent me money only so you could manipulate me.

We’ll rent a place and move in together.

I can’t wait to have sex with you.

Wear a crop top when we meet next time.

I can’t wait to have sex with you.

I miss you so badly.

I can’t wait to have sex with you.

I don’t drink on weekdays. 

My vices have standards.

I have never blanked out from drinking. 

My vices have standards.

I have never hit anybody in a drunken state. 

My vices have standards.

If it’s gonna make me mad, don’t say it.

I’m not a fan of the truth.

Why must you always make me mad?

I’m not a fan of the truth.

See how mad you made me!

I’m not a fan of the truth.

I’m not in this for the angst.

Stop pointing out my flaws.

Accept me as I am, else I can’t.

Stop pointing out my flaws.

You’re breaking me all over again.

Stop pointing out my flaws.

I’m smarter than your ex-boyfriends.

You’re a slut.

You need to raise your standards. 

You’re a slut.

Go back to that bloody dating app.

You’re a slut.

You will never find another like me.

(No comments)

***

He is right about that last one, though.

About the Author

Megha Nayar was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020 and the New Asian Writing Short Story Prize 2020. More recently, one of her stories was showcased at India’s prestigious Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2021. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Trampset, Variety Pack, Versification, Out of Print, Rejection Letters, Coven Editions, Burnt Breakfast, Brown Sugar, Marias at Sampaguitas, Cauldron Anthology, Harpy Hybrid Review, Potato Soup Journal, Postscript Mag, Ayaskala Mag and The Daily Drunk Mag, among others. She tweets at @meghasnatter.

‘Good Call’ by Ken Cumberlidge

Had one of those moments today.  They don’t happen often, but they happen.

I was in a big branch of Boots the Chemist, killing time while my prescriptions were being made up – loitering in the cosmetic aisles, idly scanning the nail polish shelves on the unlikely offchance of a stone cold bargain or, failing that, something sufficiently jaw-dropping to justify full list price. It wasn’t looking promising.

For the purposes of this account I should perhaps give a description of my appearance:

Black baker-boy cap

Denim jacket (seen better days. One more machine wash and it’ll fall apart.)

Woollen check scarf.

Dark red shirt.

Gloves (black, thermal. It was a cold day, despite the sunshine.)

Black corduroy trousers (second best pair – I was only shopping.)

Black faux-Converse plimmies (very convincing! – £3.99 from ALDI.)

This being the spring of 2021 and thus the time of Covid, I was wearing a standard-issue pale blue disposable mask, which I was having to re-seat repeatedly every few minutes as it kept getting caught on my 3-day beard growth and creeping incrementally off my face.  

Doing this for the umpteenth time, I became aware of a figure hovering – no, looming – a few yards away from me at the end of the aisle: a tall, wide, ungainly-looking man in over-heavy shoes. The store security guard – and it was plain he was watching me. From behind his dark blue “I got it to match my uniform so it would look kind of official” face-mask, he addressed me.

“Bit out of place!”

There was nothing confrontational in his tone.  It was good-natured – matey even – but, mentally ticking off the checklist of lazy assumptions that had clearly given rise to the remark, I rankled.  Inside my chest a tiny, very angry drag queen straightened her wig, bristling for a scrap. I quashed her, opting instead for my default weapon of response in such situations: Mr. Spock.

Specifically, the 1960s Spock, as portrayed by Leonard Nimoy in the original series. You know that slightly cocked-head expression of mild puzzlement he gets when faced with some new evidence of the aberrant illogicality of humans?  That one.  I adopted it.

“Sorry?” I replied. “How do you mean?” My tone was questioning but unprovocative.

He coughed nervously. “You must be feeling a bit out of place,” he said, “…in the make-up aisles.”

Wishing there really was such a thing as a Vulcan Death Grip, I dialled Spock up another notch.  “No.  Not at all.  I’m looking at nail polishes.”  As I spoke, I emphasised the point by removing my gloves, revealing two fistfuls of freshly-applied iridescent turquoise (£2.99 – bargain bin, TK Maxx).

I swear that in that moment the entire shop could hear the cog-wheels clonking into position in his head as he took on board the reality of me and my shopping preferences.

“Ah… right,” he said, and – to my relief – took himself off, out of my field of view.  Victory secured, I stood Spock down and resumed my browsing.

Within 30 seconds, he was back.

“Er… just so’s you know. Next aisle? There’s a 3-for-2 offer.  Rimmel.  Only you might easily miss it.  Cos of the label.  The writing’s very …er… small.”

“Oh lord!” I thought, “He’s gone into cis-het over-compensation mode now. His diversity training’s kicked in.  He’ll be stuck to me like a limpet.”

In an effort to shut down any further avenues for engagement, I shot him a polite, non committal nod and feigned deep fascination with a Revlon 3-in-1 Gel kit.  It didn’t work.  Even after I had turned away, such that I could no longer see him on the periphery of vision, he remained: I could sense him.  Looming.  He loomed.  Then he did something I wasn’t expecting.

He approached me, arriving at my side, somewhat more closely than permitted by the strict letter of social distancing I thought, and – in a voice several degrees softer, yet oddly more urgent – said:

“I wear nail polish. Just at home, like.  Buy it online. Couldn’t do it here. Difficult.  You know…the job.”

I turned, for the first time looked directly into his eyes and saw the sincerity burning there – saw also that in this drama, this petty slice of everyday tragicomedy, I was the idiot.  I spooled back to that initial exchange, re-ran his opening remark, and heard what I had missed – or perhaps had refused to let myself understand.

He’d thought I was a newbie: an older man, navigating the make-up displays for the first time and floundering, drunk on the sheer importance of it, scarce able to focus on any single item from the bewildering kaleidoscope before me, all the while feeling exposed and conspicuous, as if there was a giant neon sign over my head flashing the word FREAK, and – above all – completely unequal to the herculean trial of choosing a shade and taking it to the lady at the checkout. He knew what that felt like, just as I had once, and not so very long ago.  Far from challenging my right to be there, he had – in his gauche, clumsy way – been trying to show support: reach out to a fellow nailie.

From behind our respective face-masks we swapped acknowledging smiles and, in an act of gauche clumsiness all my own, I proffered a cheesy thumbs-up. 

“Whatever works, mate,” I said. “… and yeah, I’ll check out that 3-for-2. Cheers, man. Good call.”

About the Author

Ken Cumberlidge was born in Birkenhead and cut his performance teeth on the Liverpool pub poetry scene of the 1970s.  His work has appeared variously in print and in numerous online journals. Since 2011, Ken has been based in Norwich, but can be lured out of cover by good company and an open mic. This has led him to become an habitué of the slam poetry/spoken word scene. He likes it. A lot. 

Escape by Bronislava Volkova

From: Witness, Autobiography, Detroit, Michigan, March 1992, pp. 68-96.

The following story was told to me by my mother, a well-known violin virtuoso of Jewish descent.  It is the story of her escape from Hitler-occupied Czechoslovakia shortly after the War broke out.  The dramatic events reflected in her story have had, without my noticing it, far-reaching effects on my life, even though I myself was born after the war was over.  The aftermath of the World War II Holocaust in Europe has affected many others of my generation.

Already as a child, I suffered from frequent nightmares in which I was being chased by the Germans, being drowned by them in a well, being hung by them, being chopped to pieces, being imprisoned, jumping out of the window in an attempt to save myself, etc.  All the important “subconscious decisions” of my adult life had to do with this unconscious trauma, trying to “set it right” and I still have live and varied fantasies of torture suffered by the former generations.  These fantasies are not merely a “head talk”:  they are connected with involuntary physical movements and sensations.  It makes me realize how we literally carry in ourselves the experience of generations, rather than just our own; how the air we breathe is filled with each act we perform consciously or unconsciously; and how we and several generations after us have to bear the consequences of our thoughts and decisions.  This realization prompts me to share my mother’s story.

***

On March 15, 1939, the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia.  Already before that, the atmosphere was filled with great tension because all kinds of frightening and unsettling news was coming.  All kinds of people from German and Austria were coming – refugees.  For example, a brother of a famous socialist leader in Spain, Ernst Toller (a Berlin banker) came to us in evening tails when he ran away from some banquet.  He was looking for a place of refuge in Czechoslovakia.  I was, for example, on a visit to Mladá Boleslav at my grandmother’s and we read that in Mariánské Lázně [Marienbad] some famous scholar was murdered by the Nazis – the Henlein Party.  [The Nazi Party in the Sudetenland or border area of Czechoslovakia.  This area was traditionally settled by Sudeten Germans.]

My sister, who lived in Teplice and was married, moved from Teplice to Prague in 1938 because the atmosphere in the Henlein area was unbearable.  She even wrote a letter to the Department of the Interior or Foreign Affairs to try to make people aware of the fact that the Henlein Party was ostentatiously flexing its muscles and that the Czech police were not doing anything about it.  They were under orders not to provoke them in order to avoid any conflict.  Almost every day one could hear Hitler or one of his ministers – Goering or Goebbels – shouting on the radio how the great empire was being “threatened” by Czechoslovakia.  It all seemed very ridiculous to us.  At the same time, still a lot of people were coming to Czechoslovakia looking for refuge – Thomas Mann for example – so we were thinking that nothing nonsensical could happen here.  However, the Army was mobilized and was ready to resist.

But let’s return to March 15.

In the morning the telephone rang.  One of my friends told me that the Germans had crossed the border.  This was very early in the morning, perhaps 6 or 7 a.m.  So we were – how could one describe it – in English one would say dumbfounded.  Totally paralyzed.  But I told my friend that I had to go to the center of Prague to see what was happening.  We lived in Santoška in Smíchov [a Prague quarter] and your dad and I had a lovely three-room apartment.  It was just two years after our wedding.  And so we went to Wenceslas Square.

The first thing that caught my eye was that on the Můstek (lower part of Wenceslas Square) there was a big store owned by Loebl, that sold silk and sported a huge sign.  Not far away was another store, Schiller’s, a very fashionable store where my mother used to shop.  Workmen were already busy dismantling the signs of these two stores as well as all the other Jewish-owned stores.  So we went further, watching the terror that was grasping the city.  

Later on that day, around noon, I went to Národní Třída [one of the main streets] and there was a large gathering of people watching as the German tanks passed through.  In spite of their fear, the people were whistling at the Germans to demonstrate their outrage at the occupation.  But the Germans were passing through and they didn’t look either right or left as if they didn’t hear the whistling.  Later when we went on to some restaurant, the SS people in their black uniforms were already there, and the whole picture of the city changed in one moment.

Everybody knew that it was necessary for the Jews and for the opponents of the Nazis to leave – not simply to leave but to escape as fast as possible.  The first thing we did was to hurry to the police department which was already occupied by the Gestapo.  There was a terrible, seemingly endless line of people waiting to request permission or license to leave which amounted to a paper document inserted in the passport.  For twenty-four hours we took turns waiting in line with my brother-in-law.  Oddly enough, only your daddy got permission to leave, while the rest of us were denied it.  It was very peculiar.  Because the Germans had been extremely interested in your daddy’s automobile prototype and military vehicle and had invited him to Germany, offering him a lot of money to work for them.  As an automobile designer, he was a genius, very much ahead of his time.  His prototype tested in several international competitions ahead of Packard and his military vehicle was commissioned by the Czechoslovak Department of Defense [both prototypes were later stolen by the Germans].  He had, however, turned them down and yet now he had permission to leave.  It was very odd.

Back home, but still feeling great tension, we were wondering what we should do.  My sister who had moved from Teplice to Prague, was learning the trade from our former hairdresser, Mr. Topinka, whom you also know.  She was doing this because we thought that there were plenty of intellectuals escaping, but not enough skilled tradesmen.  Her apprenticeship was costing her 1000 crowns a month which, of course, was an unheard-of price, but she continued paying until one day Mr. Topinka said that he was sorry but his shop on Wenceslas Square drew lots of Germans and he didn’t dare do this anymore.  With her apprenticeship in the hairdressing business interrupted, she started to learn to be a pastry chef, studying with a chef in Nerudová Street.  She was very skillful and very intelligent and very anxious to secure her future because she knew that otherwise she would be without money.

Her husband, who was an engineer, was hustling about saying that he had to buy some machines and had to arrange something for his future life in exile.  So shortly I realized that my sister who loved me very much and who wanted us to emigrate together was held back by her husband’s frenetic attempts to secure their life in exile.

In the meantime, I was working nearby.  I had started teaching violin in a gymnasium (a secondary school), which was a very innovative idea in Czechoslovakia at that time.  I started teaching both violin and piano and it was quite a success because with the director’s support, they organized musical evenings and concerts.  Only a five-minute walk from where I lived, I taught every day for four hours.  At the same time, I was also giving concerts on the radio and other places.  One day, however, the director of the school, although enthusiastic about my teaching, wrote me a very nice letter thanking me but apologizing for having to fire me.

By that time, your daddy and I left the three-room apartment where we lived because it seemed too big under the circumstances.  We stayed in Smíchov but moved to Bezděchova Street, to a smaller apartment.  We also had to give up our maid.  Twenty-four hours after we moved, your daddy, who was offered a job in France, left the country.  I had managed to get him a French visa and since he was one of the lucky ones and already had permission to leave, he did, for a second chance might not present itself. 

I stayed in the apartment still hammering nails into the walls to hang pictures and constantly thinking about how it would continue and how I could possibly get out of here.

I was trying also to convince a good friend of mine to emigrate.  He had been a friend of my deceased mother and had taught me in my childhood.  He was a Germanist and a colleague of Prof. Siebenschein with whom he produced a large German dictionary on which he worked for several years.  However, it was not published under his name.  An exceptionally educated man, he spoke perfectly several languages and I tried to persuade him that with such a command of English, German, and French he should be able to make a living anywhere.  But he said I was wrong and that any maid in France could speak French and in England every sales clerk could speak English and that his abilities were nothing special.  He also said that he was a pure Czech (even though a Jew) and, moreover, a Germanist, who had done so much work for German scholarship that what was happening just couldn’t affect him and so I didn’t succeed in convincing him.  He and his very beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter were shot during the death march that followed the assassination of Heydrich (Hitler’s chief in Bohemia).  His wife and other daughter were taken to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. 

My brother-in-law, a handsome, charismatic and self-confident man, was walking around before the Germans came in a black coat so you couldn’t tell him from a Gestapo officer.  In fact, he managed to strike an acquaintance with a real Gestapo officer.  At the same time, your daddy had a friend from his youth who was from Moravia where his family owned a big factory.  This man now possessed great wealth.  He promised my brother-in-law that he would give him a million crowns and that he would take him with him if my brother-in-law could convince the Gestapo officer to grant them permission to leave.  My brother-in-law, of course, did everything he could to secure the necessary documents.  When the arrangements were almost finalized, with only the exchange of money for the saving of the life to be transacted, the wealthy Moravian suddenly backed off, saying that he had a better connection which would enable him to get out immediately and that he didn’t need my brother-in-law’s mediation anymore.  And he did get out, thus eliminating the way for my sister and brother-in-law to escape.  They were then both taken first to Theresienstadt and then put on the first transport to Minsk where they were gassed in the train.  This I learned from the Department of Welfare where I was shown documents after the war.

As far as my situation was concerned, one day I heard from the banker who financed your daddy’s prototype that the situation was as hot as it could get.  He told me that, since I still had some designs of daddy’s inventions which were very interesting to the Germans, that I was in danger of being taken.  This was a serious warning and I realized that I had to disappear and that I had to disappear immediately.  In the meantime the war had broken out and it was already September 1939.  I left my apartment that same night taking only a small suitcase and a winter coat.  On the winter coat there was a little Persian lamb collar which I took off because I decided that the Nazis might get interested in the coat to get the little bit of fur.  With my passport, I decided I could get at least to Bratislava (the capital then of the so-called Free Slovak State established by Hitler).  Some of your daddy’s relatives, who still lived in Slovakia, where he was born, could provide at least a place to stay while I made arrangements to try to get out.  And so I took that little suitcase and the winter coat.

My Italian Amati violin, which today would be worth several hundred thousand together with all other valuable belongings which your daddy and I had, had already been sent away through the mediation of your daddy’s banker who was not exactly very far-sighted.  I say this because he had shipped them to Belgium without even thinking that so far, in every war with the Germans, they had run over Belgium.  Why he did it, I do not know, but it was very dumb and not surprisingly everything was confiscated by the Nazis who soon after occupied Belgium and I never received a penny of compensation.  The banker himself with his wife, a well-known pianist, Aranyi, also perished.  I, however, turned up in Bratislava.  

In Bratislava, I lived with relatives of your daddy in a villa.  They also talked about the need to emigrate.  But they didn’t somehow take it seriously, perhaps because they just couldn’t grasp the scope of the tragedy that had befallen us.  I told them that I didn’t understand them.  Only Ďuri, the youngest one, an exceptionally handsome man of about twenty-four, understood the situation and agreed it was necessary to get out.  When I said that I had to leave, to get out, he was totally on my side.  Perhaps from tension and the excitement, I fell ill with a painful urinary tract infection that was so acute there was blood in my urine.  I called Prague to order a medication I knew would help my condition.  Sent by express mail, the medicine soon put me back on my feet and I was capable of doing all that was necessary to get out of Bratislava and to endure the traveling.

First I went to the French consulate to get a visa to France where your daddy was.  I spoke with the consul who was packing when I came in.  Things were being packed – the carpets – everything – was being packed in preparation for a move the following day.  I begged the consul to take me with him because I had to escape.  Finally he said, “Well, you know what, I would take you with me, but only under the condition that you can drive a car.  Because I can only take you in a diplomatic car, and I have to justify it.  I can take a secretary, and I could say that I need a person to help with the driving.”  But I was only just learning how to drive from daddy and didn’t yet have a driver’s license.  And even though I knew quite a bit, I wasn’t sure enough of myself to assume responsibility for the lives of other people.  Besides, it would mean traveling through foreign countries where I wouldn’t even know the signs.  Even at home in peacetime, I wasn’t sure of myself and so I couldn’t guarantee that I would be a good enough driver under such stressful and alien conditions.

So I declined and left.  Outside Ďuri was waiting for me.  He said, “Well if you can’t handle it, then for God’s sake please ask him if he would take me with him because I can drive.  I have a driver’s license.”  So I went back and said that I had a relative outside who could drive a car and who could easily do what he was asking.  But the French consul said that he was sorry, but he couldn’t possibly take a young man with him who was of the age of military duty and then he advised me personally to go to Budapest.

And so I took leave of Bratislava and the family who had hosted me in their beautiful villa.  As I was allowed to have only 100 DM with me upon leaving Prague, I borrowed money from them and went to Budapest.  Sometime later the whole family, including Ďuri, died in the gas chamber of a concentration camp.

In Budapest I wanted a ticket to Bordighera, a small Italian town near the border with France.  I was hoping to get to France from there and join daddy.  In order to reach Bordighera, I had to pass through the Yugoslav-Italian border.  When I asked for the ticket, the Hungarian railway clerk said, “All right, we will sell you a return ticket, but only a return ticket because you will not get through the Yugoslav-Italian border with your passport (I had two passports, a Czech one and a Slovak one).  You have to understand that it’s war, and that your journey is totally in vain.  This is a hard journey – the train goes all night – and so you will only be tired and you will have to take the next train back.  We guarantee you that.”  So I bought a return ticket.  The only reason they even sold me a ticket was that I spoke Hungarian, as I was born in Budapest.  The other refugees who tried to escape this way were taken to camps.

And so I went to Yugoslavia on that night train.  It was an express train and the conductor came to advise me or to warn me, “You want to go to Italy.  That’s impossible.  You see this train that is coming toward us right now?  That’s the train you will take back tomorrow.  Nobody has made it over that border yet.  Don’t you think there have been beautiful women and I don’t know what all they were offering?  Themselves, or jewelry, or what do I know?  Nobody has made it over that border yet.”

To be sure this was not very encouraging and I was already upset for having left a home where I spent only a few months.  But I was driven by the certainty that it was impossible to return to Prague, even though I had a large number of relatives who had stayed there.  For example, my cousin Marta (who was a doctor) and her husband.  On the day of the 15th of March he had a plane ticket and was supposed to leave the country.  He was a journalist who wrote against Fascism and had a ticket precisely for the 15th of March, the day of the occupation and on that day they took him, right from the airport.  They took him to Pankrác [a well-known prison in Prague] and they shot him.  And my cousin with her child stayed in Prague as did all my relatives and all perished in various concentration camps.  

Nobody else thought to do such an apparently absurd thing – to run away without having any money or any permission.  But I was driven as if by an inner force.  And then this one in the train was telling me that I would have to go back.  I said to him, “Well, so I will go back.  There’s nothing to be done.  I will go there anyway.  Don’t tell me anything.  It doesn’t help any and you only upset me here.  I will go.”  Shortly afterward on the border, the train stopped.  Nobody left the train, and the local police came directly to me and asked me to get off the train.  I got off the train and was taken to one Italian and one young Gestapo officer.  And they said, “Well, what is this about?  With this passport you can’t get any further.  There is written in this passport that you can’t go any further.  This is nonsense.”  I was tired, and it was hot, and I had this winter coat on that I had for times when it would be cold, because I had said to myself that that was important.  I didn’t have any money and I didn’t want to be cold.  All of this armed me with a certain indifference.  The young Gestapo officer said, “Madam, what are you going to do there?”  And nothing more clever occurred to me than to say that I was sick and that I would be taking a cure for TB in Italy.  Nothing better occurred to me at that moment.  He studied me and of course I was very pale from tiredness and fear and, moreover, I had this heavy winter coat on.  Well, whatever it was, we stood there at least an hour, and I was talking all the time with this Gestapo officer in German, because I knew German and then he said suddenly (I don’t know what got into him), “Well then, go.”

With that, I returned to the train and only when the doors of all the neighboring compartments started to open and people began to congratulate me – only then did I realize what actually had happened.  And so, in a miraculous way, I got permission to go to Italy.

My goal was Milano and of course in Milano I had to report at the police station.  And there were again lots of people.  I wanted to get to the French border and to get to France, but the war made every movement so difficult.  It was September 1939.  Then I met a clerk who took a liking to me and invited me to a bar for that evening.  He said that if I went to the bar with him, then we would see.  So I went to the bar with him and I stayed with him until very late, and then he gave me permission to go further.  I had only one address that I had gotten from my sister-in-law because she once took a vacation in Bordighera and it was there that I started to live with my little suitcase.

It was a boarding house, not a hotel, and the owner was very kind.  She would ask me what I wanted for breakfast in the morning and when I realized that I had very little money, and that I couldn’t afford all this, I said that I got up late and that I wouldn’t take breakfast or lunch with them.  She took notice of that and gave me a very nice room with a balcony with mosquito netting.  And so there I was in this very nice room.  When I came downstairs to the lounge, to my great surprise, I heard only the names of German aristocrats.  So I said to myself, well now I’ve gone from one wasp’s nest to another.  But miraculously, these Germans, these aristocrats, behaved in a very friendly way, even though they probably knew what was going on with me.  One of the barons whose name I don’t remember had an English wife and the two of them always argued fiercely.  She often called him a Fascist swine.  And so I thought that perhaps, if she could do this with impunity, it was perhaps not so dangerous here.  Then there was the Countess von Pappen, the sister of the German ambassador, or perhaps consul, I don’t know, who seemed to enjoy conversations with me and always asked me to accompany her on her walks.  And then there were some Swiss people living there.  And so the time passed.

Because I couldn’t eat there for want of money, I went to eat in a workers’ tavern which I found to be very clean.  There I got to know some emigrés who had somehow succeeded in escaping from a German concentration camp.  Now they, like me, were waiting for the possibility of escape.  And so we were all waiting and waiting.  One of them had been a soloist at the Munich opera, a tenor.  He showed me all his photographs from when he had sung Radamez in Aida, and in La Bohème, etc.  He taught me to sing arias so that we could distract ourselves and we also went together to the beach.  But still we were waiting and hoping that somehow we would be able to get out.

Every week I went to the French consulate in Ventimiglia and there I would beg the consul to let me go.  And he would say that he couldn’t let me go on the basis of my passports; that it was impossible; that I had to realize that I had two passports from two enemy countries; that I could easily be a spy; that if he let me go, he would lose his job; and that I should just wait.  In the meantime, your daddy had enlisted in the Allied Army and I argued that I was entitled to a visa on that basis.  The consul, however, said that I needed proof which I didn’t have and so I continued my weekly trips to the French consul in Ventimiglia where I was always told to come back next week.

I went there every week for nine months by which time I had no money and couldn’t pay the rent although I must say that the owner of the boarding house was extremely friendly.  I can show this even more clearly by relating the following:  One day a regular guest, a baroness, arrived, and I heard the conversation that took place in front of the door of my room.  The baroness insisted, “Well, I always had this room, so please give it to me again.  I have been coming here for years and I would like to stay here.”  To which the owner said, “You know, baroness, I’m awfully sorry, but I cannot throw this lady from her room.”  One could see that she was a very sympathetic person because otherwise she wouldn’t have let me stay there in light of the baroness’s insistence.  If I hadn’t heard this conversation, I would not have believed it, but I heard it with my own ears.

The situation, however, was becoming more and more unbearable, as I was totally out of money.  Once the baron asked me to play and because he wanted me to play and I didn’t have a violin, he got me one and I played for them.  I remember, it was really quite fantastic.  I played Beethoven’s concerto, even though I hadn’t been able to practice for months.  It was sometime around Christmas.  They then insisted that I at least spend Christmas evening with them and I agreed although I avoided their company as much as possible because, after all, they were all Germans.  The baron’s wife, the very influential English lady, when she realized my situation, gave me a recommendation.  If I succeeded in getting to France, she said that I should go to Schneider Creuzot, the famous arms factory, whose owner was a friend of hers.  She said that I would have great support there.  I accepted the recommendation even though, so far, there seemed to be no hope of getting to France.  

The situation was quite tense.  A man came to the boarding house who was known to take people illegally over the border by boat from Genoa.  I suspected that he had been sent there by some emigrés from Bordighera.  But it was very dangerous because on the French side there were Senegalian soldiers shooting fiercely at the people who tried to cross this way.  The man offered to take me for, I think it was 400 francs, which I was able to get through my sister-in-law, who had friends in San Remo.  I gave him the money for the trip from Genoa, even though I was warned against it by the owner of the boarding house who said that the man had been expelled from the area because he does this.  I understood that he had been expelled for helping emigrés to get over the border, but that was just fine with me as that was precisely my goal and I decided to try it.

So I set out on the journey.  When I got to Genoa, the man said that we had to go to the harbor and that then he would take us over in boat.  It was to look like a tourist outing and so people had to go without luggage.  There were about five travelers and just at the moment when I was about to get in the boat, the Italian police came and everybody was taken away.  As I was not yet in the boat because I was taking longer, or because I had just hesitated to enter, I’m not sure which, I saw the police and pretended that I didn’t belong with them and I returned to Bordighera.  

The owner accepted me with great enthusiasm and said, “See, I told you it would be bad.  Be glad that nothing happened to you.  You will have to stay here.”  And so I stayed.  Nothing could be done and so every week again I went to Ventimiglia.  Not having any money for food, I ate only spaghetti all year.  Every day, spaghetti and fruit, because that was the cheapest food available.  And I didn’t spend any money for the boarding house.  The baron – actually his wife – gave me some money for playing the violin and that made it possible for me to stay.

The consul to whom I went for nine months finally said, “You know, I just can’t look any longer at your suffering.  So whether I lose my job or not, I will give you the French visa.” 

Finally I could leave and I got to Nice.  In Nice were your daddy’s parents, who had emigrated there, at a time when it was possible to leave the country by paying the so-called Reichsfluchtsteuer which meant paying for every item they took with them.  I moved in with them and there I stayed.

Of course, your daddy was in the Army, in the Czechoslovak Brigade, and he was stationed in Agde, which is on the Spanish border where I wanted very much to visit him.  After I recovered somewhat in the house of his parents, I visited him in the military camp.

In Agde, it was impossible to find a place to stay, even if you broke an ankle.  Nowhere was there a place because it was so overcrowded with soldiers and their families.  There was one single hotel that had a water closet, and of course I tried to get into that hotel because of the water closet.  But this lady said, “My dear lady, the only thing I can do for you is put you up in the attic and even though these rooms are separate rooms, they are all full of officers of the French Army.  So if it doesn’t bother you to live in such close quarters, then I can let you stay there in that attic.  Well, at least for a night or two, so that you can stay somewhere.”  It turned out, however, that there was no room and I would have to stay in the dark attic hallway.

I moved in there anyway, because I had no choice.  The first night I woke up, because one French officer was trying to – I couldn’t say rape me – but he was trying to get me for whatever price.  I appealed to his honor as a French officer, intoning that he could not ask this from somebody who was in such a situation and, I must say that I convinced him to the point that he said, “All right.  Here are the keys.  I won’t be able to stand it.  You can lock me up.”  So I locked him up in his room.

I stayed in that attic hallway.  It was sort of tragicomical because in the morning the officer’s servant came and knocked on the door of his room, but the officer could not open the door because I had the keys.  So I gave him the keys.  And he returned the keys to me in the evening.  But of course, I couldn’t stay there indefinitely under the circumstances of having to lock Mr. Officer in his room.  Also I didn’t like it too much in the attic – it was a very strange arrangement there and so we were looking for something else.

Your daddy was granted a time for this purpose and a doctor who accompanied me on my walks – Dr. Kraus – was also looking for a place.  Finally we found a room in a Navy bordello.  Everything else was occupied making it impossible to find anything.  And so, I lived in this bordello, upstairs.  Downstairs there was a Navy tavern, and upstairs it was a bordello.  It had a brick floor, and the first thing I did was to wash the floor because god knows who lived there before and besides I like cleanliness.  So I simply washed it and put it in order.  And it is interesting that in spite of the fact that it was so primitive there, they had a bidet, which they say is not missing in any hotel or hostel, unlike in our hotels.  I liked it, because at least one could wash.

Your daddy got permission to visit me every evening for a few hours.  He had to protect me when I had to use the Turkish toilet downstairs in the bordello (during the day I went to the only hotel in town).  He watched the door with a bayonet because those sailors would have thrown themselves at me when I left the toilet.  Don’t forget at that time I was young and pretty.  So of course I was a welcome prey for them.  So he had to watch me with an upraised bayonet in the evening which was very comical.  He also brought me canned food from the military kitchen, but I didn’t like it and frequently gave it to the dog downstairs.

During the day I looked around this little town, or better said, a village.  I also went to buy the French croissants, which were filled with chocolate which I liked very much and certainly definitely better than the canned food.  And the days went by.  I watched the horse-pulled carts, when people took their painted pee pots which looked grotesque.  The village didn’t have any sewers and so they disposed of their excrement this way.  While it left a totally absurd effect on a civilized person, there it seemed to be something normal.  During the day I went to the only hotel that existed and in the evening I met with your daddy, and had the help of the upraised bayonet also.  

And so the time passed, but it was, I would say, sort of difficult.  The whole day I was alone and had to walk around because it was, after all, impossible to stay in the tavern with all the sailors going in and out and the noise of the drunken ones filtering all the way upstairs.  Yet walking all day in such a village wasn’t too interesting.  Sometimes Dr. Kraus, who probably didn’t know what to do either, accompanied me.  After some time I decided to return to my in-laws in Nice and I left Agde very early one morning, around four o’clock when the sun was rising.  It was an unforgettable sight.  The sky was a dark blue color, and it threw shadows on this quiet little village, giving it such a bizarre and even painterly look.  It was an unforgettable sight and were I a painter I would definitely want it on a canvas.

I told my in-laws how their son was doing and, of course, he was quite depressed having to serve as a lowly private when he was an academically well-educated person.  But when he was studying in Berlin, he managed to avoid the military compulsory service and that put him in this position, while all the educated men in the army who went through it were officers.  Moreover, he wasn’t used to military discipline at all and, with the tension in the air about the possibility of having to report to the front at any moment, it was very stressful for him.  Well, the situation after all was very tense all over.

It was now the summer of 1940.  I got to know some emigrés who had formed a sort of community.  They exchanged opinions about what was going to happen and what was not going to happen.  At about that time, I was at a court hearing of the emigrés who were with me in Bordighera, and who had later succeeded in escaping.  (I did not, however, have a chance either to meet or talk to them.  I only saw them at the court hearing.)  It was a court hearing for illegal trespassing and the emigrés were taken to some camp.  Later on, the French government actually turned them over to the Germans so these poor people who, after so much suffering, escaped from German concentration camps, were again returned there. Without a doubt they perished in a most terrible way.  So I decided that I would leave Nice even though my in-laws were very much against it.

I told my parents-in-law that I believed that the Germans would occupy the as yet unoccupied part of France sooner or later and that I wanted to leave.  “Without money, and without knowing where your husband is?” was their response.  “Where is it that you want to go?” “Well,” I said, “I have to get out of here.  I don’t trust this, even though this part of France is not occupied yet.  I absolutely don’t feel safe here.  After all, I know this from Prague.  There too, everybody thought that it would be impossible for the Germans to pass the Czech borders, and yet I was a witness to that.  And again in Bratislava, when their vehicles were passing through day and night to the Polish border.  One could hear at night the trains passing each other – those that went to the front and the others that brought back the wounded.”  These pictures I held vividly in my memory were ones which your daddy’s parents did not have and so they could believe that they were somehow safe where they were.

Their feeling of safety was reinforced all the more since they had relatives who were refugees from Vienna and who were living there in luxurious apartments.  There was the cousin of your daddy, Kitty, whom you also know and her sister-in-law, Lilly, whom I liked much better and whose husband was militarily interned there and who died at the age of thirty-five from typhus, leaving Lilly widowed.  And then Uncle Baumwald, the brother of your grandmother, the uncle also of Annie Feilendorf, whom you also know.  He was a former procurist of Rothchild, very educated, of excellent manners, and very smart.  It was a pleasure to talk to him.  And all these people stayed there.

And so my in-laws kept pointing these things out to me, saying, “Look, all these people are here and it doesn’t even occur to them to pick up and leave – and you without money want to set off on such a journey.”  But in spite of all their arguments, I was determined to go; however, before I made the final decision, an order came that prohibited civilians form leaving Nice.  

Now there was this new obstacle and so I decided to go to the commander of the town for permission to leave.  After many hours of waiting, he told me that only military persons could leave the town.  I then decided that I simply had to get a certificate stating that I was a military person from someone.  I was informed that there was a Czech consul in Nice and he was a brother of Baxa, the former mayor of Prague.  I went to his office and asked him to give me a certificate showing that I was a military person, a nurse in military service, because there was this prohibition against civilians leaving the city.  He didn’t want to do it because he said that he did not hold an office anymore and he failed to see why I didn’t understand that.  I became quite angry in turn and said, “For God’s sake, you are after all still sitting here in this office.  So you definitely still have the stamp.  It doesn’t cost you any special effort to put a different date – a date when you were still an acting consul.  You could give me that certificate.  I have already stood several hours at the office of the commander of the city – a French general – where crowds of people were waiting, almost as at the Gestapo to get the permission to leave.  It’s your duty to help people save themselves.

And so after a big discussion, he finally gave me the certificate after which I traveled again to the French general, the commander of the city, to ask again for the permission.  I put in front of him the certificate as evidence that I was not a civilian.  And on the basis of the untruth, he gave me permission to leave town.

And of course, I saw heartbreaking scenes here as well.  There was, for example, a woman who had three children, whose husband was in Palestine.  She was facing the possibility of being caught here and it was truly heartbreaking to watch her being refused permission to leave.  However, in my worst dreams I wouldn’t have imagined at the time that all these people would be turned over by the French to the Germans, who would then transport them to the concentration camps.

All in all, I hated my stay in Nice in part because it upset me so much to have to report every two weeks at the police station as though I were some sort of a criminal.  That was definitely contre coeur to me as was the attitude of the local people.  In Nice there is a beautiful beach and Nice is a beautiful town and there are these fantastic hotels and these people were sitting there in the morning drinking pernod.  They didn’t have anything else to do and I resented this vast difference between the suffering of those whose lives were threatened and those who were sitting in the morning in those restaurants drinking their pernod and it served to strengthen my decision that I had to get out of Nice.

So shortly I packed my things and my in-laws accompanied me to the railroad station.  At the station, just before I left, your grandfather said, “You know that I wish I could go with you?” That surprised me very much, because they were all against it.  But suddenly he must have felt that it wasn’t completely nonsensical.  Then my mother-in-law, who was very educated and spoke several languages said, “Look, here is a group of Englishmen who are also going away.  Join these Englishmen.  That’s probably the best thing to do.  Stay with this group.”  So I joined the group of Englishmen who didn’t seem to mind. But then, I couldn’t talk to them very much, because I only knew a few words in English so I guess they didn’t even notice me much.  And we boarded the train to Marseilles, arriving there at midnight.

Just as we arrived, the conductor said, “All of you have to exit the train.  There is a heavy air raid at the railroad station and you have to move quickly into a shelter.  The train can go no further now.”  The Englishmen decided there was nothing to do but to stay there overnight in a hotel.  I, who was kind of with them, suddenly, with some sort of miraculous intuition – like when you get a message from God – said to myself, “I won’t stay with the Englishmen.”  We were on the railroad platform and I stopped a passing conductor, and with my broken French asked him, “Is there any train that goes to the Spanish border?”  I wanted to get to Agde, thinking that the Brigade must also want to escape and in that I wasn’t alone.  Everybody will go away, I thought, and he said, “Right now the train is leaving.  You have it right in front of you.”  So I said, “Please help me to that train!” I never was in good enough shape to board a moving train, but I jumped onto it and the official of the station threw my suitcase after me and so there I was in a compartment of a moving train, in total darkness.

There was a blackout but I sensed that there was nobody in that compartment.  Moreover, the compartment was not connected with other compartments because it was some old-style French train.  If you opened the door, you were exposed right away to the tracks – totally out of the train and so, of course, I was seized by fear.  I was saying to myself, “Jesus Christ, where am I now?  God knows where this train is going.  Maybe you didn’t even understand him, this man.  You don’t know French very well.  Maybe he said something quite different.  You might even end up at the German front.  And you can’t even see your own watch – what time is it?”  It was dark as though in a bag.  I continued talking to myself, “Well, gather your wits.  Try to calm down.  Otherwise you will go mad.  That will not help any.  If you want to save yourself, then you have to keep calm.”

So I talked to myself as to a small child.  I was saying to myself all the time, “Well, calm down.  Don’t be crazy, calm down, it will end somehow.”  And so on, and I was sitting in this moving train in the darkness, and I actually didn’t know where it was going.  I said to myself, “Well, let’s hope that he said it correctly…that I understood him correctly.”

Toward five o’clock in the morning when it dawned, a conductor came and asked me what was doing there in this military train for God’s sake.  And so I said, “Well, I’m a military person.  Look here.  I have a certificate.  I am a nurse in military service.” And he said, “Well, fine.  You can go with us.  But, mind you, this train will stop in an hour or so in Montpelier or in Carcasson or somewhere.  And you will have to stay in the train that will be at the station for at least thirty-six hours, or possibly even longer because it is not possible to go any further.  Definitely you must know that all of Paris is running away.”  This mass exodus of which the conductor spoke is beautifully described by Ilja Erenburg in his book, The Fall of Paris.  He definitely describes it much better than I, but I can confirm every word of it.  It is true that all the cars and all the taxis were occupied because hundreds of thousands of people were on the run.  Well, I was aware of that, but I said to myself I couldn’t stand to sit here in the train for thirty-six hours.  I had to get out of the train.

A year later, my father-in-law has informed me that I could congratulate myself for not staying with the Englishmen I joined in Nice, as he read in the newspapers that they were all taken prisoners and interned in a German prison camp.

So I go out of the train hoping that perhaps I would find somebody who would take me to Agde – or at least in that direction.  I was lucky enough, after several attempts, to run into a young man who was going on a motorcycle, and he said he was passing by Agde, so he would take me with him.  So I jumped on the motorcycle, which was not exactly pleasant for me because I don’t like to ride motorcycles.  I didn’t even want to ride motorcycles with your daddy who passionately liked to ride them.  For many years he drove a motorcycle to the factory even in the bitterest cold.  I on the other hand wasn’t physically that fit to be able to do this.  But now I simply got on the motorcycle and we went to Agde.  It was now July or maybe September of 1940, I don’t remember exactly, but then it was forty-five years ago.  When we arrived, I set about the task of finding the Brigade.  They had to be here somewhere I thought.  But all I found were Belgians and Spaniards and French, and whomever I asked responded with “Czechoslovak Brigade? We don’t know anything about it.  It isn’t here at all.  There is French Army, Belgian Army, Spanish Army, and I don’t know who else.”  Finally I said, “For God’s sake, somebody must know something,” and then I met somebody who really knew.  He said, “Well, they are long gone. But the headquarters of the commander is not very far from here in some monastery.  The Brigade itself is at the front.”

Although much discouraged by this news, I decided to go to the headquarters of the Brigade which was now gone.  If everybody is running away, I thought, I want to take part in it.  But I again was not feeling well, was terribly hot in that coat and was exhausted by that night and by that tension and by that fear.  I sought respite in some house where there was at least shade.  The heavy stones of the old-fashioned houses provided a moist shade and I decided to rest there for a while to recover a little bit.  I stood and took deep breaths and began to calm down.  It was cool there, a coolness provided by the arcades (porticos) in the old-fashioned houses and I knew that with rest I could then set off on the journey again and look for someone who would take me to the headquarters which I understood was not far away in some monastery.  And when I found somebody – again it was a motorcycle – he took me there.

When I got to the headquarters, I asked to meet with the commander, a colonel to whom I presented my request.  I said that I wanted urgently to leave the country because the Germans were already in Paris and the whole population was on the run and that I heard that the Army was also ready to go.  He said, “Of course, we won’t stay here, because as you have said, the Germans already occupy Paris.  It is quite obvious that we have to retreat.”  But he did not advise me to go with them because my husband was on the front and I didn’t know whether he was alive or among the fallen.  In short, he said that I didn’t know anything nor did I have money.  On top of that the destination of the ship which was supposed to take them away was unknown even to them and would most probably be attacked.  So he advised me that I return to my husband’s parents.  That was the wisest that I could do according to him.  

I told him that although he was of that opinion, I had a different one and that I would not return there.  I argued that as the wife of a soldier of the Brigade, they had an obligation to take me with them, and NOT to leave me, and that how I would make my living was my problem.  I was not afraid of not being able to make a living even though I didn’t have my violin and I didn’t have money.  I was convinced that all those things were somehow attainable, but that one only has one life.  To make a long story short, after this quite unpleasant and sharp confrontation, he said, “All right, we will take you with us.  You are lucky you got here in the last minute.  Be prepared to leave this very evening.”  So I said, “Well, excellent.”

Outside there was a garden and in this garden there were strangers gathered.  There was a father there who had a son in the military.  He begged me practically on his knees to get him the same kind of privilege that I had.  It was embarrassing for me to tell him I didn’t have the least sort of privilege; that I had practically to “wring the commander’s neck” to get him to take me with him; that he was terribly against it and that I didn’t have any power to help; that I was terribly sorry, but I simply didn’t have it.  Scenes such as these took place everywhere, and it was more than embarrassing; it weighed heavily on my heart and conscience, but I couldn’t do anything. 

Thus we embarked on the military vehicles but because they were bombing the harbor Sète, which was our first destination, we had to stay overnight in the trenches, which, of course, was not very pleasant.  However, after about two or three nights we got into the harbor.  The bombing had stopped again and there was an Egyptian ship docked – El Kebir – which was supposed to take us on board.

We boarded the ship and, of course, before boarding, similar or perhaps even worse scenes happened than those in the camp because so many, many people again wanted to escape.  The captain could not take more people than were allowed.  And with three thousand soldiers on board and a few officers from the commandership and their wives, an Australian woman, and I, the wife of a “private” – the very lowest that could even appear on that ship – the quota was already met.  I was put into a cabin with the Australian woman who was very nice.

And so we sailed and sailed.  The captain said that he didn’t know where we would land as he got his commands from elsewhere.  Nor could he guarantee where and when he would be able to get us off the ship.  Life on the ship is, I would say, very monotonous, but also curiously different and interesting, especially as long as the sea is calm which it usually is in the summer.  There are beautiful evenings and the sunsets are magnificent and they last a long time, until about nine o’clock at night.  The sight was truly unique only, of course, as long as the sea was calm.  The captain had assured us that we had a convoy of submarines accompanying us so that we didn’t have to travel in fear.

As long as the sea was calm, time passed uneventfully although there was not much food on the ship because the ship wasn’t prepared for so many people and had not been supplied enough.  The civilians received only crackers or, at most, canned food because the soldiers had to have more proper diets.  But even though they hadn’t expected the civilians, we ate at nicely laid tables in a nice environment.  

We watched almost provocatively from a distance the table of the officers who ate with the captain as we were starved out at our tables and theirs was bending under the weight of gorgeous fruit and various delicacies.  We saw it only from a distance, because our table wasn’t right next to theirs, but the contrast was so enormous that, after all, everybody noticed it.  When there were thunderstorms, most of the people got seasick and one officer advised me that when such a thunderstorm came I should lie down so that the stomach would be at rest and if it’s not too full, he said that I wouldn’t get sick.  That was excellent advice and I would always lay down in the little lounge, and although most passengers did get sick, I did not.

I filled my time studying English with a very good-looking young Czech officer whose name was Holemář and who was later sent from London to the Russian front, where he was killed.  We studied every morning for two hours, and then we walked on the deck and watched the movement of the sea.  In the evening, of course, there was a blackout.  One wasn’t allowed even to light up a cigarette.  Everything was kept in darkness.

But this journey, too, held some strange adventures for me.  Once I mentioned to one of our officers that when I saw that beautiful fruit I craved it; that I would love to have sometimes an apple or another piece of fruit.  And I mentioned it with a big sigh that emphasised how starved I was for fruit.  He came a few days later and said, “You know what?  I will arrange it for you with the fruit.” I said, “How come?” He said, “You know the captain of the ship likes you very much, and he invited you for dinner.” And I said, “Well, that’s very nice, but how can I even make myself understood with him?  (He was an Egyptian.) And I will not go there alone, because I am after all not so dumb that when the captain invites me for dinner I do not know that he is thinking of something else, too.”  And I said, “Well, I will go to that dinner, but only with you.” And so he said, “All right, I will go with you if you won’t go otherwise.  I’ll go with you so you can be totally calm.  We won’t stay there long – at most until midnight.” I said, “All right, so you will go with me.”  And he did.

We were in the captain’s cabin.  The table was laid, and the servants – well, actually they were soldiers – brought one luxurious dish after another.  There was gorgeous Southern fruit of all kinds.  There was champagne.  It stood in an ice bucket that was covered in order to be chilled.  But one could see that it was champagne and that there was ice swimming in there.  And it was already pretty late when we started to eat.  

Then suddenly, the officer who accompanied me there said, “I have to go away for fifteen minutes to check whether the blackout is being kept, to be sure some burning cigarette somewhere won’t appear.  This I must do because I am on duty, but I will be back in fifteen minutes.”  I didn’t like that very much.  I told him in Czech (the captain couldn’t understand it, after all), “You can’t do that.  You can’t leave now.  We are just in the middle of dinner.” And he said, “I just looked at my watch and I have to go now, because otherwise they will lock me up.  I have to make my rounds. In twenty minutes I’m back.  So don’t be afraid.  I give you my word of honor that I’ll return.”

Soon the twenty minutes passed and the officer didn’t return.  In the meantime, Mr. Captain started to make advances to get me to bed.  He threw his wallet on the table.  It was so full that it could burst – with English or Egyptian – I don’t know which pounds, and he said, “Look, all this is yours.  You probably don’t have money and with this you could buy a house.  You are going to be rich.  And for me it doesn’t make any difference.  What am I going to do with the money?  I will earn more money anyway.  It only lasts a little while.  Don’t resist it.”  And he went on and on.

I became afraid, although of course to see such enormous sums of money when one is without money oneself is enticing. But it didn’t entice me at that moment because the fear that the man could have some venereal disease dominated me. As it was well-known that many Arabs had it.  But on principle, I didn’t like it, as after all, I am not a prostitute.  So I said,  “Well, sir, it’s really nice that you offer me your bursting wallet.” And he threw the banknotes on the table.  It was a huge pile. “And I believe you that I might well be able to buy with it I don’t know what…perhaps the house as you say, but I’m not for sale, and I have my head full of other thoughts than these.”

As I didn’t give in, even though he made all possible attempts, he finally saw that there was nothing to be done with me, and fortunately he wasn’t a beast like they show in the films.  Actually he behaved very decently.  He said, “All right, so I’ll take you back to your deck.”  Because it was pitch dark and my cabin was at the other end of the ship, I would never have gotten there alone. Moreover, it was necessary to climb some ladder in order to get to the other side and when he saw that I was afraid, he carried me over, which was very cavalier.  He in fact took me all the way to the side where my cabin was.

The next morning I met the officer who had escorted me and I told him that it was very low of him to have arranged such a thing and I threatened to tell daddy of the arrangement between them and that he had suddenly disappeared, even though he promised that he would come back.  He said that I was wrong; that because he patrolled late somebody had stopped him and he had been locked up that night for not having obeyed the command that he had to be on rounds by a certain time.  Under the circumstances I believed him but I told him that I had the Devil’s luck that it ended this way.

And so we sailed and sailed, south past Spain and then Gibraltar.  Sometimes the ship anchored, of course only for several hours, but we were able to see something.  And it sailed farther and farther, now heading north, until in twenty-two days it finally landed. It was at that point that I had another adventure.

We were approaching Liverpool.  After twenty-two days of sailing, everybody was eager and prepared to leave the ship.  We were all excited that we finally were going to land and that we were actually safe.  Then the tugboats came – these are boats that drag the big ship into the harbor – and it was very interesting to watch.  The British sailors had black coats with hoods, and next to me stood a Belgian who said to me, “Look! The British police.”  I said, “How come British police?  What are the police doing here?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s strange.  What would British police be looking for here?” I asked how he knew they were police and he said he knew British police when he saw them.  So whatever it may be, we all were standing and waiting, and the British police came directly to me.  

I must say that I didn’t even get scared, probably because I didn’t know at all what was going on and I had no idea why the British police would single me out.  They asked me if I spoke English or German and said they wanted to talk to me and I should show them the cabin in which I spent the nights on the ship, that I open my suitcase for them.  I went to the cabin and took the suitcase with me which I opened for them but they didn’t even look into it.

The incident shook me pretty badly and I asked them what it was all about.  They said that they had received an anonymous report that I was transmitting news into enemy territory.  They said that while on the one hand, they knew such activity would be totally impossible from this ship, they were obligated to check every such report and that I should give it no further thought.  I asked them if they in fact knew who had made such a report and if they did know, would they please tell me.  They responded that they were unable to give a name but that the person was one of my compatriots.  This was by far one of my greatest psychological shocks.

Later on, I learned from one of our captains’ wives with whom I was friends already from Agde that there was a Czech lady on the ship, a wife of an Ambassador who had an affair with the young officer Holemář with whom I was spending a lot of time on the ship.  So out of jealousy, she wanted to take this strange revenge on me.  I was told this under strict confidentiality.

I went over and over this in my head, wondering how it was possible that in the midst of war somebody, and moreover a woman in the situation of a refugee (after all she was saving her life), would report something that wasn’t even possible.  I could not understand it but I was very upset by it as I could well imagine what it would mean if the British had believed it, or had any kind of suspicion.  They could easily have interned me for five years.  I might have been suffering or dying for five years as a prisoner because some goose was jealous that I was studying with this guy, even though I didn’t have any other relations with him.  We had a book.  I don’t know, perhaps it was Eckersley, and according to this Eckersley book we studied English and that was all.

When we finally disembarked in Liverpool, we were put into an area surrounded by barbed wire for two nights.  Then they took us to London.  In London we were locked in a sort of gymnasium with no beds, only chairs to sit on.  Here we stayed for another two nights.  Outside, the soldiers were patrolling.  They were watching the camp or actually the gymnasium.  The police officers came and questioned everybody about their papers with unending “whys” and “hows” and “whats.”

It was there I got to know Mrs. Bondy, the writer, with whom I became friends.  She was pregnant at that time.  I knew her husband very well because he was a colleague of your daddy.  He also fought on the Spanish front.  He had married her in Paris, where he had gotten to know her and through marriage gave her a possibility to escape, as the wife of an officer.  And then their boy was born, whom you later got to know as a grownup in Budapest.  They remained together after the war.  

From the gymnasium, they took us into various homes where people offered to put us up.  That means that a whole number of British families offered their services; that they would take refugees into their apartments or houses.  Of course they were paid for that, but not by us.  I was put with a worker’s family which was very nice.  They were a married couple without children.  Their name was Flynn.  However, they lived immediately next to the Croyden airport where there were these ramps for launching antiaircraft rockets, so it wasn’t exactly safe in that sense, because just then it was September 1940 and the big Blitz on London started.  London was on fire.  The lady of the house where I lived ran out several times and called to me, “Look, the whole sky is red. Totally red.  All of London is on fire.”  Well, the fact is that not all of London was on fire, but many parts of London were.  And I lived with that, one can say, daily.  There were heavy bombings.  The house in front of ours was hit directly in the winter and for several weeks we had no windows.  

Once we went with one Czech woman to the movies at five o’clock in the afternoon to distract ourselves.  It wasn’t far from where we lived.  At seven we’d be home, seven-thirty at the latest.  But while we were in the movie, there was an announcement on the screen:  “Don’t leave the raid is on.”  I had a summer dress on and was shivering with cold.  And it was three o’clock in the morning, and the announcement was still repeated and repeated on the screen.  It was four o’clock in the morning and I couldn’t stand it.  The Czech woman who was with me said that she wouldn’t go out – it wouldn’t even occur to her.  And I said that I was trembling with cold and I couldn’t sit anymore.  We had been sitting since five o’clock.  It was twelve hours of sitting in one chair.  I decided to leave in spite of the warnings because I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

I left and of course I ran as fast as I could and, when I was approaching our house, the soldiers at the launching pad shouted at me, “Run away, run away, run away.”  So I ran away even faster and when I got home, the landlady said, “What happened to you?  You’re like a dying woman.”  I said, “Well, I had mortal fear when they shouted at me like that.  But thank God I’m here.”

There were also bomb shelters.  Of course they were not adequate against a direct hit.  We tried once what was called an Anderson shelter.  It was a tin-like place under the earth and one could stay overnight so that one would feel more secure.  These bombings lasted from September all the way to May uninterruptedly, to the point that one could set one’s watch according to it because it started exactly at seven o’clock at night and it lasted until seven in the morning.  Then there was a two-hour interruption, and at nine o’clock it started again.  

My income was negligible – as a wife of a private I had a ridiculous sum of money – how would I say it? – such a contribution wasn’t enough for anything.  Of course the wives of the officers had quite a different life.  They could live quite well.  So I started to seek connections in order to renew my profession.  I succeeded in contacting the London emigrés.  Among them were several very influential people who were interested and who also knew me by name.  And then I also found out, with the help of the Embassy, where your daddy was.  He had been rescued on another Egyptian ship, so we were perhaps sailing more or less at the same time.  It would be, however, a very long time before he would get any leave, but we at least knew about one another.  

I succeeded in getting a cheap violin after a year of having none and I started to practice.  Sometime later a famous Russian violinist, Stanislav Frydberg, lent me a very good one.  I formed the Allied String Quartet where I played first violin and we gave concerts at various official places.  One of these concerts was also attended by Jan Masaryk and President Beneš’s wife brought me flowers.  Another time we played in memory of Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk.

After a year, I moved to Kensington Gardens, because of the incidents while traveling to the rehearsals in the center of town.  For example, one would get into a bus and the bus in front of you was on fire.  I often admired the courage and discipline of the English who often had to spend a night in the subway because if you didn’t get on the bus by 6 p.m., you were not able to get home.  In spite of that, they never forced themselves into the buses when conductor said, “Full up.”

One time, I remember, I went to the cleaners at Oxford Street.  I intended to have my lunch afterwards in the nearby Lion’s Corner House.  When I left the cleaner’s, its roof flew into the air and Lion’s Corner House was no more.  Next to me was a young girl standing and crying, “My mom is there, my mom is there!”  Another time, I was invited to play at the house of a well-known painter from Vienna.  When I got there, I couldn’t find the house.  I asked the policeman, who told me, “Of course, you can’t find it, it has been hit.”  There was constant blackout and sometimes it was hard to find your way home. 

Later on, I was able to return the violin to Frydberg, with whom I also played, because the Government lent me an Italian violin from Hill, the world-famous violinmaker.  Before I returned to Czechoslovakia, I returned it.  I hoped I would get back my own one.

I played with ENSA (English Association for the Entertainment of the Allied Forces) in the classical section all over England and also in Dunkerque.  I went there on a battleship and on that occasion, I was lent the title of a British lieutenant for my protection.  On the way, I got an inflammation in my cheek bone, which was very painful and was accompanied by fever.  They took me from one military doctor to another.  I had a swollen face, but they assured me that they would put reflectors to one side so that it wouldn’t be seen.  I didn’t want to play under such circumstances, but they said that there were three thousand people looking forward to it, so I had to do it.  While I was playing, the shrapnel was cracking nearby, but I didn’t care.  I was more worried about losing my memory.  

After the concert, in order to humor me, the commander, General Liška, recently decorated by President Havel, took me in his military car at midnight to symbolically “open the fire”.  I pressed some button and the airfighters took off.

Your daddy’s technical ability made him soon indispensable to the unit and so he quickly advanced to a sergeant, and then to a captain.  His war story is quite different from mine, but equally full of life-threatening experiences.  After having been stationed for a long time in Scotland, he was part of the long expected British invasion into France and his tank got all the way to Pilsen in Czechoslovakia in 1945, where, as is well known, they were ordered to stop in accordance with the political agreement.

One of the side effects of the war for your daddy was that he became involved with Communist ideology.  It was this ideology that ruined all his plans and his future.  His enormous abilities were left unused, while he enthusiastically wanted to be involved in what he considered a patriotic effort of building socialism in his old country.  He never considered coming back to England and urged me to return to Czechoslovakia.  So I did. 

I came on a Belgian refugee train through Germany where only one track was left, and when passengers threw leftovers of food out of the window of the train, they were picked up by the starving Germans.  When I arrived in Prague, your daddy was waiting for me at the railway station with a truck and took me to Děčín (a border town in northern Bohemia), because even though our apartment in Prague was supposed to be returned to us by a decree, we didn’t get anything.  So we were forced to move to this town in the Sudeten area where your daddy got a job in a factory.  At this town we got a five-room apartment which we shared with another refugee family who were our friends.  These were apartments left open after the Germans were forced to leave the country.

Food was rationed and very poor.  The American (UNRA) help was very much appreciated.  Public transportation didn’t exist and as the apartment was on the periphery, I had to face long walks everywhere.  Your daddy’s job did not last very long because he couldn’t stand it in the factory.  He was constantly under attack and persecution, why, I don’t know exactly.  The fact is that he left for Prague with friends who were working with him.  So I was left alone in the large apartment and I was pregnant.  Because there was no telephone, your daddy, thanks to his inventive ability, made an arrangement of a sort of a ring that led to the second floor into an apartment of a German engineer who was very decent.  When the birth was due, as there was absolutely no transportation, I had to walk an hour to the hospital.  There you were born and your daddy came with all his friends from Prague to celebrate.

After a year, in 1947, we managed to move to Prague, to a small one-room apartment.  A year later, the Communist putsch came.  During all this time, your daddy was trying to get back his former workshop where he had a great number of valuable machines and instruments, some of which were his own inventions.  These were trusted to the head of his employees to keep through the war.  When he came back, this former employee refused to return anything and claimed that the machines were sold to him by your daddy before he left.  This was a lie, and even though your daddy took him to court, he didn’t get anything back.  I, myself, had inherited a large house and three hundred acres (1 214 056.93 square meters) of land in Mladá Boleslav from my grandmother.  This, of course, was taken by the Communists in 1948 and on top of that they demanded that I pay eight thousand crowns on the remaining mortgage.  The crown was devalued at that time 50 to 1, yet the mortgage was counted by them in the old currency.  I told them, “Isn’t it enough that you took my house?” After arguing for a long time, they agreed that I would pay only two thousand.  Any money that I had from before the war which I hid with my friends (fifty thousand crowns, which was a lot of money at the time) I lost to the devaluation. 

But all these financial matters seemed unimportant in light of so many losses of the nearest and dearest.  We had our hands full with finding work in our fields.

***

I heard most of this story for the first time by chance, when I was nine years old.  My mother was relating it to a close friend.  When I was growing up in Prague in the 1950s and 60s, my parents’ experience and Jewishness were kept more or less secret because the political atmosphere of the time made it undesirable “to come out.”  The Communists didn’t want to concern themselves with the fate of the Jews, and even within the other layers of the population, secret anti-Semitism was rampant.  Thus it was never talked about that twenty-six members of our family including my mother’s sister and my father’s parents were gassed in German concentration camps.  From that time on, my father, whose mother tongue was German (another thing that was better kept secret) and who had attended German schools, including the Technical University of Berlin where he got his Engineer’s degree, refused to speak German.  He preferred to speak hack Czech even at home where he didn’t have to.  I have never heard him speak about his parents, who were as a matter of fact Protestant by religion.  He seemed to have been too traumatized by the past.  I never had a sense of a broader family.  All of my relatives either perished before I was born or were dispersed all over the world and the distances and the Iron Curtain made it impossible to have more than a shadow feeling concerning their identity.  There was certainly no feeling of closeness or belonging.

Until 1989, the participation of the Western Army, including the Czechoslovak Brigade in which my father fought, was also silenced and many of its members, especially the plane pilots in the Blitz who played an extraordinary role, were even persecuted.  Only the Soviet Union was to be given credit for the liberation.

Paradoxically, I have been forced to repeat my mother’s escape after the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when even though my physical life was not in danger, my spiritual one was.  I was condemned to eighteen months in prison.  On my journey, I had an important two years’ stop in West Germany, which in the meantime became a blossoming country and one in which I met people who seemed not to want to feel responsible any more for what had happened a couple of generations ago.  It did not seem to have any real impact on them and they seemed only to pay lip service at best to the German “debt”; yet the absence of my family, their pain and the pain of my parents with which, I was totally identified, my nightmares, and the Communist desert that followed the German occupation in my country felt all too real to me.

It was very hard for me to find a true identity in myself separate from my mother’s, as the pain of my parents and those closest to them always seemed too overwhelming during my childhood.  Instead of taking care of myself as a child, I always felt I had to protect them no matter what since they had already been through so much.  I suffered enormous guilt feelings for “abandoning” them when I grew up, for I couldn’t stand the fact that they should go through one more loss.  “My case,“ my pain, was never really important in comparison with theirs.  When after many years the stored, private, “unimportant” pain became too much to bear, I ended up in turn hating my parents as that was the only way I knew how to claim my identity.  Trusting the outside world was always an enormous problem for me.  

In Germany in the early seventies I also met young students who were all for concentration camps, Russian-style, believing that this was necessary for the common good.  I met people who were very friendly and very helpful, but I also ran into animosity toward strangers and I even more into humiliating patriarchal attitudes.  After a long odyssey, I ended up in America, where I settled in Blooming, Indiana.  My father died before I ever could visit Czechoslovakia.  The Czechs did not even give me a visa so I could come to his funeral in time.  My mother is still alive and our relationship is finally healed enough that I feel free to put her story on paper.

About the Author

Bronislava Volková is a poet, collage artist, semiotics expert, essayist, translator and Professor Emerita at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. There, she was Head of Czech studies at the Slavic Department for 30 years. She went into exile in 1974. She has taught at the Dale University in Cologne, University in Marburg, and at Harvard, as well as the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. From 1982, she taught in Bloomington. She is a member of both the Czech and American PEN Clubs. She has written thirty books, including the extensive bilingual Czech – English anthology of Czech Poetry Up The Devil’s Back: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Czech Poetry, 2008. Her poetry has been translated into 12 languages.

Aside from poetry, Volková has also written extensively on the semantics of emotive language, semiotics of implied values and gender in Czech literature, as well as about exile. Volková has been awarded several international prizes for literature and culture. More Information at www.bronislavavolkova.com.

Like an Old Movie by Mircea Dan Duta

Translated by Natalie Nera

I’m sitting at Ginger Mary’s, a railway station pub in Ostrava. The place feels as industrial as the rest of this North Moravian city. A beer to say goodbye. An empty pint on my table. A pretty young blonde is sitting at the table in front of me. The femininity of her existence – her unreal blue eyes, her angelic face, her firm round breasts, her beautiful sexy legs, her narrow waist, her delicate knees, her thin ankles and elegant pumps, paired with the incomprehensible city of Ostrava… I am staring knowingly, urgently, and in vain. She doesn’t notice me at all. In fact, she doesn’t move at all, as if she were dead. Yes, I know she’s not dead, because that’s what I understand about Ostrava, that there are no dead blondes sitting around with a beer at Ginger Mary’s. But that doesn’t matter anymore, does it?

But what did I get from Ostrava this year?

A month (just a crescent) of authors’ readings, in which I was originally supposed to moderate thirty events, but in the end there were only fourteen of them.

A well-known poet promised to attend all of them, though he ended up attending only four.

I was invited to another illustrious reading, where, as the – would-be – main guest, I was supposed to read five poems, and in the end I barely read one.

A beautiful Slovak photography student, with whom I fell incurably in love, and vanished from the Ginger Mary’s together with two bright young classmates, without paying their bill.

The pissed-off publican who didn’t want to understand that I wasn’t really the father of those students, so I didn’t have to cover their bill.  The police officer finally solved everything by making me pay for his dinner in addition to their beers, liquor shots and plates of stew.

Futile dreams of promoting my poetry, if not in the Czech Republic, Moravia, Silesia or Ostrava, then at least at the Ginger Mary’s and at the Absinthe Club, and if not at the club, then at least at Les.

No beer at Dvanáctka, which is a theatre space.

A bottle of local liquor – Becherovka – gifted by the festival director, which doesn’t fit in my luggage, so I have to sip it in secret here at the Ginger Mary’s, or on the fourth platform at the Ostrava’s Central Station before my train leaves.

Two bus rides in full sobriety, to Brno to attend some conferences, followed by three drunken train rides back to Ostrava.

(I have never found the unshaven conductors on Czech Railways prettier and more seductive).

Seventy-two draught Ostravar beers, which I paid for out of my own pocket, and another thirty-six, which I would have been entitled to for free had I learned in time that as a festival participant I also enjoyed certain benefits, not just obligations.

The hands of the long-broken wall clock in my room, still showing three hours and twenty minutes of in all likelihood our era, as still as my empty pint here at the Ginger Mary’s and as still as the pretty young blonde at the table in front of me. I down the Director’s bottle of Becherovka. This year, like the years before, Ostrava didn’t show me any panties. My train’s on time. I won’t make it anyway. I don’t give a damn about them. Or him. And everything. I’m slowly falling asleep. Here in Ostrava at the Ginger Mary’s.

… to magically wake up at the Dragon bar in Brno.

A pretty, unapproachable blonde is at the table in front of me. She’s typing on her phone and smiling stupidly at the screen.

Next to me, a fat guy in a business suit. His cell phone keeps ringing, but he doesn’t answer.

The waitress is chatting with the bartender, they haven’t taken an order in half an hour.

There’s an empty pint glass on my table. Loneliness in Brno. In the old movie with the same title, they were just dealing with boredom.

I don’t know how they managed to bring me the first beer and cutlery. I’d like to cut my veins with the knife, which would solve everything, of course, but I don’t know how the fork would fit into the equation, let alone a spoon and tea spoon. And so, I hesitate over whether to stab myself in the wrist, throat or liver with the knife, and whether this would be better achieved with the fork, spoon or tea spoon, or just feebly with my own bare hands.

I look around once more. Certainly no one will teach me. The blonde is typing on her cell phone, the fat guy’s cell phone is ringing constantly and unnecessarily, the glass in front of me is still empty, the waitress is still chatting with the bartender – it’s getting unbearable. Just take the knife in your hand and then there will be a solution.

All of a sudden, the blonde giggles charmingly – you know, I’ve never heard such a charming and seductive laugh before; she spreads her beautiful legs like wings – spontaneously, unexpectedly, abundantly and willingly, oh man, as I enjoy the sight of her modern, transparent and immaculate white miniature panties, the fat man at the next table finally takes the last of these urgent calls, oh man, what a pleasant and willing corporatist voice, the waitress and bartender appear at my table, what would you like, sir, oh, man, how nice and helpful they are, oh well, I know what to do, life is worth living, the void around me can be filled after all, so I’m ordering another beer.

About the Author

Mircea Dan Duta (b. 27 May 1967, Bucharest) is a poet, a film historian, critic,  researcher and academic (he holds a PhD in the subject), translator (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Romanian, French and English), and writer who has chosen to express himself in another language – Czech. He has also produced and organised many literary events in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania. As editor, he works for Levure Littéraire (France, USA, Germany), A Too Powerful World (Serbia), Alephi (India) and Quest (Montenegro).

His poetry collections include: Landscapes, Flights and Dictations, Tin quotes, inferiority complexes and human rights (2014/2015, Petr Štengl Editions, Prague), Plíz sujčov jor mobajl foun senťu / Pliiz suiciof ior mobail faun senchiu (Next Page Editions, Bucharest, 2020, bilingual Czech-Romanian anthology). Examples of his academic work are: Narrator, Author & God (Charles University Press, Prague, 2009), The Holocaust in Czech, Slovak and Polish Literature & Cinema (ibid., 2007), The Czech & Slovak Film New Wave in the Social, Political and Cultural Context of the 60s of the 20th Century (Jozef Škvorecký Literary Academy Press, Prague, 2008) – last two titles are collective works.

His literary works have been translated into many languages and published in many countries: Britain, France, the USA, Serbia, Poland, Spain, India, Montenegro, Albania, Egypt, Syria, Korea and Kosovo. His poems have appeared in numerous international anthologies of contemporary literature – in the USA, UK, Mongolia, Spain, Czech Republic, South-Africa, India, Indonesia, Romania, Moldova.

Broken Glasses by Tom Kelly

I am myopic. I had broken my glasses and needed to go for my first job-interview. Not a good start. I thought, at sixteen, going on seventeen, meant I definitely could not go. My mother went apoplectic when I suggested I miss the interview, ‘I had to!’ I looked for comfort from Grandmother. She would realise I would feel very uncomfortable because of my poor eyesight and could not find my way there. Grandmother was incredulous. How could I think of not going? The dye was cast.

After finding a compliant wall I made my way to the shipyard office where I had to be interviewed. Picture Blind Pew from ‘Treasure Island’. Now the interview, like my eyes, is not clear. The office, however, is printed strongly on my memory: I had slipped into a Dickens novel. Take away the harsh fluorescent lights on the ceiling and everything else was Bob Cratchit. I was surprised, initially, as to why the rest of the staff did not talk about Ebenezer Scrooge. Heavy jackets and the arses of trousers shining like a brand-new half-crown were the order of the day. Shirts and ties, not matching, completed the dress code. Ebenezer may not have approved.

Outside the office, boats were being repaired in the shipyard and the noise was unbelievable. Frightening. Caulker’s hammers attacked the air and echoed around the docks. No-one seemed to notice. This was my new normality. At dinner-time I walked round the shipyard. Can you see me? Black Donkey jacket and a brightly coloured shirt with a tab collar. I still sense my insecurity.

‘What did I do?’ I worked in the Time-Office. I checked and calculated workers’ time spent on their job. Have you noticed how people rarely ask what you do at work after you tell them you have an office job? Words like ‘Accounts’, and ‘Wage Department’ seem to suffice. Then you talk about getting to and from work.

This is what I did in the Time-Office. I wrote in huge ledgers. How ‘huge’ is ‘huge?’ Spread both your arms out as far as they will stretch and about half that span is the width of the black ledgers. They are made of metal and you attach ledger sheets into punch holes. I hope the picture is clear.

I soon learnt some men were not always happy about how much they were being paid. Nothing new in that. Men, generally smelling of beer, would come to our window in the Time-Office and tell us that they wanted their pay sorted or they would ‘sort us’ out.

I would dive to the office door and lock it quickly or if that failed hold my foot and the rest of my body against the bottom of the door. One man told me, several times, his wages were wrong. He refused to accept anything I said. I stood at a window where queries were dealt with. I eventually closed the window on this man as he had drunk so much it was difficult to understand anything he was trying to say.

I brought the window down. And fastened the bolt that locked it. The next moment I was covered in glass. He had put his fist through the window. The police were called. The man stood in the yard, outside our office, telling of his complaints to any-one who would listen while blood dripped from his hand. The policeman asked if he had broken the window. He said, ‘No’. The policeman asked how he cut his hand. He said, ‘Shaving this morning’.

Shaving did not seem to feature with the Tank Cleaners. They took oil from the inside of tanks, going into the hold of ships on make-shift ladders, after a pump had taken as much oil out of the tank as it possibly could. The oil had to be removed before the ship could leave the dock on the tide.

These were mostly young men dressed in rags. No masks. No hard hats or breathing equipment. They had a portacabin where they kept haversacks with their sandwiches they would eat after the journey to the bowels of the hold. In the corner of the yard was a 45-gallon drum, filled with ‘Swarfega’, which helped clean the oil from their arms and faces.

It is winter. I am with the Tank Cleaners’ Foreman asking how many hours his men had worked during the night. The drum is covered with ice. A young lad, about the same age as me, picks up a metal bar and smashes the ice that is preventing him from getting at the ‘Swarfega’. The noise is of a skull being smashed. The ice shatters across the drum as I move my repaired broken glasses into my inside jacket pocket and the young lad becomes a blur that is with me today.  

About the Author

Tom Kelly is a Tyneside writer who has had a great deal of his stage work produced by the Customs House, South Shields. His ninth poetry collection This Small Patch has recently been published and re-printed by Red Squirrel Press who also published his short story collection Behind the Wall. His stories have appeared in a number of UK magazines and on Radio Four. www.tomkelly.org.uk

Ellen, Maggie and I by Tom Kelly

 

I am looking at a photograph from 1933 of Palmers, the great Jarrow shipyard on Tyneside. It had just closed making most of the town unemployed. My Great Grandmother Maggie is trying to making ends meet and failing. The Thirties are hard and it’s going to get harder. Maggie knew that better than me. Here are the notes and letters Maggie wrote. My mother gave then to me years ago and I didn’t read them until recently.

She lost two children in child birth, the infant mortality rate in the town was 11% in the Thirties, today’s it’s less than half of one-percent. I’ve not had a child. I don’t know if I will. Do I want one? My partner says I should make up my mind. My M.A. is ‘taking over’, he says. My dissertation is on Jarrow in the 1930s and Ellen Wilkinson, the town’s MP from 1935.

Here is a photograph of her in Jarrow during the 1935 election. I have written how she must have felt, ‘My first time in Jarrow. I had just turned forty and thought I had seen poverty but not this defeat in people: it made me ill. My heart was wrung out. I saw knots of worn-out men hanging round corners, lined faces told their stories: hunger, cramped lives, hearts and heads held in a giant vice, locked in pain. I looked again at these old men and women and they were young and trapped in cramped life cages. The government had closed ranks on them. It had decided, in the words of the President of the Board of Trade, Lord Runciman, that Jarrow, ‘must work out its own salvation.’ I was hungry to change their lives. I held a meeting on the Pit Heap at Jarrow and saw men’s eyes glisten in the blue-black-gas-lamped night and was lifted. I was guided by their pain. I was carried. The government has closed its all-seeing eyes and decided not witness the devastation it was causing. An entire town does not deserve to live like this.
I could hear the emotion in my voice and held-in rage as I spoke, “I will do my utmost. You will be my witness, if I fail you must tell me. My failure must not happen. Let’s reach for the stars….”
After the meeting I talked to families and they revealed the harsh realities of their lives, these were not mere statistics. Their demands for the bare necessities were being denied. I had a burning hatred for all in power, but I knew I could not allow that to rule.’
I have read so much about the 1930’s and marching as a means of protest was not unusual. The blind marched from Edinburgh and miners from Wales, all saying the same thing: what is happening can only be wrong. Jarrow Council organised a march to London in October 1936. I could hardly believe when I read Maggie’s notes but she was at Ellen’s meeting. Here is what she wrote in pencil. I had to photocopy them to save them:
‘I was on the Pit Heap. There were hundreds there. When Ellen got up to speak, she was wearing red, that’s one of the reasons she’s called, ‘Red Ellen.’ Aa’ll never forget it. Aa was lifted.  Aa thought she can do something; we can escape this. You know we had nowt. TB in Jarrow was aa scourge. Aa lost aa sister through it; she was only thirteen. Aa was hungry all the time. The walls in our streets were filled with beetles we would squash and see blood splashing on the walls. We felt our blood was being taken and wasted.
Our lives were being wasted. Do you know hunger? You can think of nothing else. Nowt. Don’t talk to me of problems, until you’ve known real poverty. You can’t even look at me. On the night of Ellen’s meeting the stars seemed to be sitting on me head, the air had aa bite but was fresh, it smelt of hope. She gave me a sprig of hope and that’s something aa’ d never known. Never. I loved and breathed something new, it made me forget about me empty belly.’
I felt Maggie was writing directly to me. I have cried over her words more than anything else in my life. I suffer from asthma, so did Ellen. Medication’s more sophisticated now, I use a spray. At the time they thought it was psychosomatic. She used tablets. There were doubts about her cause of death. She was only fifty-six, and the Minister of Education. Some intimated she committed suicide. Do people die through a lack of love? Is it enough for life to just drift on? Is that enough? We must need more. Ellen was a passionate woman and has stayed in people’s hearts and minds eighty years later. But was she really loved? She had lovers but was she loved?
I love this photograph, of Ellen in full-flow. She was not some bloodless, passionless facsimile but the real bloody thing. My partner says I have become too engrossed in Ellen, to the detriment of everything else. What he means is that the flat is a mess and why has he got to come home to a darkened room with me on my lap top looking at, ‘Ellen bloody Wilkinson photos?’  
This is a Jarrow Crusade photograph. Do you know who has the copyright on the photos? The Getty Foundation. The irony is not lost on me. In this photo Ellen’s leading the march. She didn’t walk all the way from Jarrow to London. She joined the march when she could leave The House of Commons. Here she is having a break with the marchers. And it wasn’t just a photo opportunity. This was the crusade to save a town. And what happened?  Defeat’s a bitter pill and it’s hard to swallow?
Their petition was ‘presented’ to Parliament and that was it. No debate. Some of the marchers were all for going back into the House and causing a disturbance but that would have been undemocratic and Ellen spoke to them and persuaded them not to. What did the marchers achieve? What were they given?  A second-hand suit and a third-class rail ticket back to Jarrow.
Here is another note from Maggie. I will include it in my dissertation. This is her during the Second World War. She must have written it in the shipyard, the back is covered in grease.
‘Aa got aa job as aa Lady Driller during the war. It was bloody hard. When aa first started aa couldn’t lift the drill, men would stand around, watching me struggle, laughing their socks off. By the end aa could throw it over me shoulder as if it was aa bairn. They stopped laughing. Mind you’ve got to be careful when the drill bits snaps, they fly all over the place. One flew off and hit the foreman right up the arse! All the lasses screamed but he never said aa thing. Just walked slowly to the lavatory, where he screamed like aa stuffed pig.
I’m expecting an’ aa pray it’s a boy. That’s what me man wants. Not that he has ever said. It might make him happy and pigs would definitely fly.  He never spoke much about the march. Except when he had a drink. He said they had been sold down the river. He used to get really mad but he was never good with words and they would spill out and aa would end-up battered and bruised and aa’d go ti bed with the bairns.’
I picture Ellen alone, after the marchers have had their boat trip on the Thames, after they have picked-up their second-hand suits and after being been waved off from Kings Cross.  Do you know that feeling? Not just the way you feel when you have the kind of loneliness that lasts for days. It is corrosive, drags its heels for years through your heart so you settle for second best, for anything rather the emptiness that brings such pain. You endure anything after that.
Is that the way I feel about my partner? Ellen and Maggie’s lives have made me look at my own: I have to do more. Maggie, on one of her notes said, ‘Me father could neither read nor write.’
I am writing this for Ellen, Maggie and me.

 

 





Tom Kelly’s Grandmother

About the Author:

Tom Kelly is a Jarrow-born poet, short story writer and playwright. He has had eleven books of poetry, short stories and a play published in as many years. His new poetry collection THIS SMALL PATCH has recently been published and re-printed by Red Squirrel Press.