Free Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy

a poultry coop. Even his hand gestures, suggestive of great distinction, looked as though they might merit five years’ imprisonment followed by thorough re-education.
    In his memoirs, Uncle Zhivoyin described the daily routines of a guards officer with a remarkable lack of pomposity. We loved the moments leading to grand parades – from the tips for high-gloss boot and brass-button polishing to the ways of applying a thin layer of face powder. My macho Serb compatriots were outdone by their Romanian neighbours, who favoured a barely discernible layer of lipstick on officers’ lips.
    I’d never known anyone quite like my uncle Zhivoyin until I met my future father-in-law. The bearing, knowledge of shoe shine and brass, even some of the hand gestures: it was all there in this Old Etonian and Indian cavalry officer, but with a kind of dishevelled, devil-may-care dash which revealed the peculiarly British, old-fashioned and upper-class horror of anything that might be described as sissy, prissy or any other issy adjective.
    I was sure that, in so far as any two people in our wider families would get on, my father-in-law and Uncle Zhivoyin would get on famously. My father-in-law, however, was having none of that. In the midst of some vigorous pruning in his Sussex garden, he declared that he couldn’t possibly understand a man who pledged his officer’s honour to the king and then worked for the communists. Not quite knowing how to respond, I suddenly grasped the sheer luxury of being a British male in the twentieth century. Every conceivable counter-argument notwithstanding – and I know there are many – the picnic rug on the moral high ground still came in khaki and red, the colours of his beloved regiment. My father-in-law stood on the high ground, wielding a pair of secateurs, chopping, felling and dead-heading, without a care in the world.

    I swore allegiance three times, even without counting my marriage vows, and I know a thing or two about both swearing and allegiances. The most recent ceremony took place back in 1991. About to become a British citizen, I walked up to the office of a local solicitor in Chiswick, in a room above an electrical supplier’s shop. A dark silhouette with fingers poised over a keyboard was clearly visible through the frosted door panel on which the partners’ names were etched in copperplate Gothic. The scene was reminiscent of the opening shots of aforties detective mystery, except for the sound, which was that of click-clicking rather than tap-tapping, and the no-smoking signs.

    My Yugoslav passport: first visits to England
    This was an important day for me and I was unusually diffident. My knock on the door was barely audible. I needed a commissioner for oaths to witness my signature on a document in which I ‘swore by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second Her Heirs and Successors according to law’. (That’s it, then. No republicanism in this house.) In fact, I could have ‘solemnly and sincerely affirmed’ instead – the atheist option – but I preferred the poetry of the wording which invoked the Almighty. I had never made any pledges involving God before, and solemn affirmations were a bit socialist for my taste. This was not to be a trade union Labour Day picnic. Sadly, given theMiltonian frame of mind, I didn’t even have to read the words out loud.
    â€˜Just sign on the dotted line, please,’ said a small man wearing an orthopaedic shoe and a smile even shier than mine, as he stood up from the enormous desk which occupied a good half of his office. Everything in the room, including him, seemed to be mushroom-coloured and slightly mouldy, as though salvaged from a shipwreck. He shook my hand, I proffered a five-pound note and off went the form, in a pre-paid brown envelope, to the India Building in Liverpool, its name a solitary, faint echo of