Free Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy Page A
Authors: Vesna Goldsworthy
the kind of reading material which fired my childhood fantasy of Britain. I wasnât sure if Messrs Henty, Haggard, Kipling and Buchan would have entirely approved of a foreign woman, a âsleeping dictionaryâ, signing any document in her own hand, but at least I now knew that I could dead-pan as well as any of their heroes. (I still canât hear the words âHer Majestyâ without at the same time hearing a line of metallic bugles blowing heaven wards. Luckily enough, in my circles at least, one doesnât hear them that often.)
My previous oath was given at a ceremony which took place in the dying days of February 1980, only a few months before my baccalaureate exams. These were called, appropriately, the Matura examination in Serbian, even if our maturity was not high on the list of aptitudes to be tested. The year ahead was full of initiation rites: my first heartbreak, my first holiday alone (in fact, with my sister, who, being a couple of years younger, enjoyed every hard-won freedom a couple of years ahead of me), my first autumn at university. This particular evening was to be the first of those firsts. With a small group of nervous fellow maturants gathered in the senior common room of my Belgrade lycée , each clutching a red carnation anda brand-new red membership card bearing a small black hammer and sickle, I swore allegiance to the Communist Party, which I was about to join. Not many of my former compatriots in that swathe of land between the nostril of the Adriatic Sea and the lush hips of the Balkan peninsula would now own up to having done the same (even if we all know who you are, my friends!).
In fact, the proper name of the organization I was joining was the League of Communists of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but there was no poetry in that. The jeunesse dorée of Belgrade called it the âKa-Pe-Yotâ. Its pre-war acronym sounded vaguely romantic, revolutionary and illegal, redolent of the heavy coats with astrakhan collars, thick silk stockings and night-pot hats of the twenties and thirties, and prisons in which you sat around a big table with the comrades, translating radical German philosophy and declaring that you recognized no court but the court of your own revolutionary party. If you missed the Spanish Civil War this was the next best thing.
Funnily enough, I donât remember the words of the oath, although I can pretty well guess what they may have been. I remember that I made no note of the event in my otherwise impeccably detailed diary for that year (the last year for which I kept a diary â sadly, just as the details were becoming more interesting, I seem to have run out of enthusiasm for recording them). It might be that I was aware even then of the need to airbrush the event, subconsciously mindful of its impending absurdity. I take it as read that the oath was not entirely in keeping with the one I subsequently pledged to Her Majesty (Ta-rraaa!), but the Almighty, probably even QE2 herself, will surely understand. Her subjects seem to me an increasingly fickle lot. Why I joined the Ka-Pe-Yot, and in 1980 of all times, is another matter altogether. Its head, Comrade Joseph BrozTito, was already in a hospital in Slovenia, waiting for a leg amputation in readiness for all those grisly jokes about knuckle stews that were to fill the many days of his grotesque obsequies in May 1980, and even I could hear the water sloshing on the lower decks.
My father, my national defence teacher, and Tom Courtenay have a lot to answer for. My father was a reluctant communist himself (membership was part and parcel of his job description) and a strong advocate of a wait and seeâ policy in all things, but in matters political more than anything else. Where I come from, it is the option of the wise, yet I would âwait and seeâ for no man. âWait and seeâ was my fatherâs way of saying you might well regret this later. The
My previous oath was given at a ceremony which took place in the dying days of February 1980, only a few months before my baccalaureate exams. These were called, appropriately, the Matura examination in Serbian, even if our maturity was not high on the list of aptitudes to be tested. The year ahead was full of initiation rites: my first heartbreak, my first holiday alone (in fact, with my sister, who, being a couple of years younger, enjoyed every hard-won freedom a couple of years ahead of me), my first autumn at university. This particular evening was to be the first of those firsts. With a small group of nervous fellow maturants gathered in the senior common room of my Belgrade lycée , each clutching a red carnation anda brand-new red membership card bearing a small black hammer and sickle, I swore allegiance to the Communist Party, which I was about to join. Not many of my former compatriots in that swathe of land between the nostril of the Adriatic Sea and the lush hips of the Balkan peninsula would now own up to having done the same (even if we all know who you are, my friends!).
In fact, the proper name of the organization I was joining was the League of Communists of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but there was no poetry in that. The jeunesse dorée of Belgrade called it the âKa-Pe-Yotâ. Its pre-war acronym sounded vaguely romantic, revolutionary and illegal, redolent of the heavy coats with astrakhan collars, thick silk stockings and night-pot hats of the twenties and thirties, and prisons in which you sat around a big table with the comrades, translating radical German philosophy and declaring that you recognized no court but the court of your own revolutionary party. If you missed the Spanish Civil War this was the next best thing.
Funnily enough, I donât remember the words of the oath, although I can pretty well guess what they may have been. I remember that I made no note of the event in my otherwise impeccably detailed diary for that year (the last year for which I kept a diary â sadly, just as the details were becoming more interesting, I seem to have run out of enthusiasm for recording them). It might be that I was aware even then of the need to airbrush the event, subconsciously mindful of its impending absurdity. I take it as read that the oath was not entirely in keeping with the one I subsequently pledged to Her Majesty (Ta-rraaa!), but the Almighty, probably even QE2 herself, will surely understand. Her subjects seem to me an increasingly fickle lot. Why I joined the Ka-Pe-Yot, and in 1980 of all times, is another matter altogether. Its head, Comrade Joseph BrozTito, was already in a hospital in Slovenia, waiting for a leg amputation in readiness for all those grisly jokes about knuckle stews that were to fill the many days of his grotesque obsequies in May 1980, and even I could hear the water sloshing on the lower decks.
My father, my national defence teacher, and Tom Courtenay have a lot to answer for. My father was a reluctant communist himself (membership was part and parcel of his job description) and a strong advocate of a wait and seeâ policy in all things, but in matters political more than anything else. Where I come from, it is the option of the wise, yet I would âwait and seeâ for no man. âWait and seeâ was my fatherâs way of saying you might well regret this later. The