Free A Partisan's Daughter by Louis De Bernières

drive fast, and Roza’s father used to sit at the wheel looking straight ahead while he got overtaken by Skodas and Voskhod mopeds. He used it daily to go to his offices in Belgrade, and after work he would quite often be irritated to find it surrounded by tourists posing for photographs next to it. If anything went wrong, a tremendous fuss would have to be made before spares could be found or made up, and in the meantime they would have to use public transport, which Roza alleged would always smell of goats, baby vomit and raw onions. She was like a lot of the Labour politicians we used to have in Britain back then, such as Anthony Wedgwood Benn: she was a toff who approved of the common people as long as she didn’t have to mix with them.
    She told me that there was an orchard nearby where she used to climb trees, and that was where she first started trying to write poems. I once sat for hours while she solemnly read her poems to me in Serbo-Croat, and then explained what they meant. It was pleasant watching her face as she read, because she was experiencing the emotions, her spirit shone out, and I liked being able to stare at her for a long time without her realising that I was admiring her. What struck me was how strange language is, when you don’t know what it means. She told me that the Bob Dylan Upstairs also wrote poetry, and I thought, “Oh dear.” Since I’ve known Roza I’ve struggled with modern poetry from time to time, but I confess that it often seems just like ordinary language cut up, or lists of cryptic crossword-puzzle clues. I need someone in the know to explain it to me. When I was at school we learned lots of poetry, but it was the dumdedum kind, with lots of rhymes, and the lines all the same length. I wasn’t kitted out for the modern stuff at all. Anyway, I never did read or hear any of the BDU ’s poetry. He could be famous by now, for all I know.
    I can understand why Roza might have wanted to spend hours up a tree, however. I did a lot of that when I was a boy. I went back recently and saw that the little tree I used to climb up has grown into a fairly large oak. I haven’t felt such a pang of lost time and painful nostalgia in many a year.
    Anyway, once Roza got into trouble for cutting open hundreds of apples in this orchard after her bald grandmother told her a folk tale about an apple with a diamond in it. She was made to gather up all the dismembered fruit in a wheelbarrow and take it down the road to a piggery. Roza liked the same things about her orchard as I did about the one in Shropshire. Sunlight coming through the leaves. Field mice. Sparrows mating. Starlings or fieldfares settling all around you because they hadn’t noticed you. I said to Roza, “One day I’ll take you to the house in Shropshire where I spent a lot of my youth.” She was pleased by that, but in fact we never did get round to it. It’s difficult to get time off with a young retired Yugoslavian prostitute when you’ve got a Great White Loaf at home expecting you to lay paving slabs and take your daughter to the cinema while she knits. Everything that happened with Roza and me occurred in that derelict and filthy house in Archway, mostly in the basement, always before I went home to Limbo in glamorous Sutton.
    One day Roza had an experience that she found very shocking, and it was brought about by a horse.
    She was picking up windfalls when she felt a nudging at her shoulder, and then a tugging at her jumper. She cried out with shock, and the equally startled horse shied and cantered away, kicking up its hind legs and whinnying. It was a very big carthorse, and it had a mouthful of red wool that it had detached from Roza’s jumper.
    She decided to run away, but a peasant woman turned up at the gate, huffing and puffing, and wanting to know if she had seen a horse, which was quite conspicuously nearby, eating apples.
    The upshot of all this was that the hairy-faced old lady offered Roza a ride on the