Left Field: CHAPTER 34 - Simple Writings

One of my favourite films is Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Set in the 1820s, a young man is discovered at night in Nuremberg’s town square, hardly able to stand. He is dumb and has been kept in a cellar, without human contact, since birth. Adopted by a local doctor, he learns to talk and proves to be wiser than those around him. 

When I first saw the film, the friend I’d gone with told me the story reminded him of a character in a Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen novel. He said Simplex Simplicissimus was set in seventeenth century Germany at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. If I wanted to borrow it, he had a copy.

I discovered that it had been translated into English in the 1930s. Even though the language was archaic, I loved Grimmelshausen’s story of a peasant boy who’d been cruelly treated by his father and was hardly able to talk. As a mute, he was sent into the hills to watch over the family’s flock of sheep.

When soldiers attack his family’s farm, Simplex watches from the hillside as his parents are killed and his sister raped. He runs into the forest where he is befriended by a hermit who slowly and patiently educates him.

When the hermit dies, Simplex makes his way out of the forest and is found by marauding soldiers. Although he can discuss Plato’s philosophy and Euclid’s mathematics, he has no social skills. Thinking him a fool, Simplex is dressed as a goat and made a figure of fun. Since playing the idiot is infinitely better than killing, he willingly performs this role. He is eventually forced into one of the armies where he proves to be an invaluable military strategist.

SOLDIER (singing) It's too long a war, It's too long a war.
A self-important MAJOR enters

MAJOR (to SIMPLEX) You’re in the army now, laddie, although your beard needs to grow a little if you’re to be a soldier.

SIMPLEX I’m a match for any old man, Major. It’s not the beard that marks the man, else billy goats would stand in high esteem. 

MAJOR If your courage is as forward as your tongue, perhaps you’ll be useful. (To SOLDIERS) Now men, we’re going to seek out our enemy in that village. (He points) They have to be disarmed as we have information they have a cache of weapons.

SIMPLEX How do you know that, sir?

MAJOR (Laughing and winking at SOLDIERS) Because we sold the blunderbusses to them, you fool.
 
SIMPLEX This is a poor village, sir. We should travel further south. The peasants there are richer.

MAJOR Who asked your advice?

SIMPLEX If we raid this village, we will find little and there will be nothing left afterwards, then we will be forced south anyway. Travel to those villages now and there will be something to return to. It's better than scraping at an empty barrel, even if that barrel is standing beside you.

SOLDIER He talks sense.

MAJOR Shut your mouth. Prepare to fire.

SIMPLEX With respect, sir, wait -

MAJOR Troop advance

SIMPLEX Sir, they know we are here. It would pay us to wait and watch where they hide their weaons, or whatever it is you are seeking. If we note their movements, it will save us time and blood. Here, sir. Take this pen and paper and please accept this as respectful advice.

MAJOR (Waves quill about) You do it. I'm no clerk.

In 1986 I took the first draft of the play on holiday to Croatia. I would disappear from the family for hours to write under an olive tree in wild land above the sea.

Yugoslavia was beginning to fracture and the nationalism and aggression emerging from Miloševi in Belgrade was finding its mirror image in Croatia, even among my wife’s family of Partisans. My father-in-law would only smoke a brand of cigarettes called ‘Croatia’ and seemed to be breathing in the country’s nationalism with the nicotine. The Simplex story took on added urgency.

Back in London, a friend suggested I contact Michael Walling, a young theatre director on the lookout for original plays. Mike was excited by it and agreed to direct. We staged it at the Duke of Cambridge Theatre in Kentish Town.

Michael adopted a Brechtian approach with minimalist set, songs to interrupt the action and the actors addressing the audience with Shakespearean asides.

Curiously, there had never been a dramatisation of this book in Germany, despite the fact that Brecht’s Mother Courage was adapted from another Grimmelshausen novel, The Runagate Courage. An opera, Simplicius Simplicissimus, had been composed by Karl Hartmann for chamber orchestra in the mid-Thirties. I’m sure that Hartmann must have toned down Simplex’s radical message with the Nazis in power.

After a good review of my play in the Financial Times, (‘witty, bawdy, and as profound as anyone cares to consider it’), German ZDF TV filmed a performance.1 Excerpts were broadcast on their news channel, ‘Here is a small pub in north London and an English writer has adapted our great classic for the stage.’

The three-week run was a sell-out.

At one of my afternoon visits to Gustav Delbanco, he told me a story about a Rembrandt that had made a journey from Amsterdam to the Soviet Pacific island of Sakhalin at the end of the Second World War. It had eventually fallen into the hands of the Japanese mafia, the Yakusa, and in the early 1950s turned up at a gallery in London.

With encouragement from Gustav, I used this story and my knowledge of the art world to write The Old Master. Set in a West End gallery and again with Michael Walling as director, rehearsed readings were given at the Old Red Lion in Islington and the Lyric Studio in Hammersmith.
My sister had met a TV producer from Los Angeles and told him about my play. He rang to ask if he could come to the Lyric reading. I was thrilled. Of course he could.

That was the last I heard of him until some years later. I was in New York on War Child business and told an American friend the plot. She said she recognised the story as one of a series on TV about art crimes. I asked her if she knew who the producer was. She didn’t, but I did.

I have no copy of The Old Master. There was one in my house, as well as in a file on the Apple computer I left behind. Another victim of my divorce.

My next play had a connection with the art critic Mervyn Levy. After seeing Simple Writings, he wrote to me about a possible collaboration. He suggested that I might be interested in co-writing a play about Dylan Thomas. Mervyn had been to school with him and they’d shared a flat in Chelsea. In his letter to me Mervyn said, ‘I can show you copies of the evidence concerning Dylan’s stay in Macy’s morgue, New York, and wonder whether something can be made of this fact. Dylan and I were totally obsessed with the Marx Brothers – we used to go to their films together and I would like to get them into the play. It would be good to work together on this venture since I think we cast a similar wry and humorous eye on the world ... I can only hope that the idea appeals to you.’

Unfortunately, we didn’t get much further with those discussions because the BBC Arena film and the War Child years got in the way. Mervyn died in April 1996 and it was only after I had returned from Bosnia in 2000 that I picked up his notes again. Among them was this account of his and Dylan’s childhood years in Swansea. It had as its title ‘A Temporary Measure, Swansea, 1925’:

Dylan was in the coal-house feeling May’s tits. We had, as always, tossed a farthing for who went in first. Straggling home from the Grammar School, it was a game we often played about tea-time ... May’s breasts were as large as rugby balls, with rich brown aureoles and deep purple nipples that stood to attention as you felt and sucked ... May sat on a pile of coal sacks to indulge our pleasures, our knees often grazed or bleeding.’

With these notes as inspiration I got going on the play.

DYLAN Come and let me in and on. I’ll kneel to you and latch upon those great balloons, my teatime marathon. Lovely, scrumptious, rumptious, tits like lemons.

WOMAN No sultan could be better served.

DYLAN Rugby balls, deep-purple nipples standing to attention.

WOMAN Poke you in the eye though. Take care.

DYLAN Salty-sweet, delicious on the tongue, crystallised fruits.
 
WOMAN At Christmas.
 
DYLAN Wet and warm.

WOMAN Drive you mad.
DYLAN Her eyes traps to ensnare my fluttering heart. Your breasts, twin sisters firmly grown. Two hills.
 
WOMAN Oh no, oh no. (DYLAN presses teats and they hoot) Oh yes, yes.
 
DYLAN How lovely youth is that flies us ever. Let him be glad who will be. There is no certainty in tomorrow.
 
WOMAN Careful now. I’m not a cow. Oh, oh, give me cucumber and hooves.

Michael Walling suggested I set the play in Macy’s morgue and that I include the Marx Brothers. Acting on his advice, Spitting into the Sky opens with Groucho and Chico talking about death. Harpo is running around the stage, opening caskets and introducing the audience to the characters in the play, stacked one above the other in mortuary drawers: Dylan, his childhood sweetheart, his parents, his wife and his lovers. The backdrop to all this is the New York skyline – a skyscraper graveyard.

As the play unfolds, Dylan’s past emerges from the coffins, his childhood in Swansea, his time at the BBC in London and his visits to the USA. He delivers lectures and poems, falls in and out of love, argues with, and clings to, his wife, Caitlin, and wrestles with the two themes that obsessed him: sex and death. The boathouse in Laugharne is a place of peace and relative sanity in the chaos of his life. And it is all there, played out in Macy’s morgue.

The first draft had too much poetry, and when Anne first read it, she reminded me that people went to the theatre to see drama, not hear long poems recited. There was also no second act and I didn’t know how to expand it. She recommended I read Caitlin’s memoir, Double Drink: My Life with Dylan Thomas. In it, Caitlin tells how she arrived in New York as Dylan was dying and accompanied his body back to Wales. On the first night at sea, the captain put her below decks with her husband’s corpse because she got so drunk she wrecked the bar.

Anne suggested that Act Two had to take place in the ship’s hold. With a real sea captain in the play, there would be more than a nod towards Captain Cat and Under Milk Wood.

Ghosts are ever-present. Voices emerge from the gloom, reminding Dylan of a life he’d rather forget, but cannot escape, even in death. It becomes clear that, despite the alcohol and the women, he and Caitlin love each other. Towards the end, Groucho appears and he and Dylan discuss the hidden purpose of his humour and Dylan’s poetry. Both, Groucho says, are avoidance techniques, a refusal to confront the reality of their lives.
After receiving praise from John Yorke, former controller of BBC Drama, and from playwright Terry Johnson, the play was given a rehearsed reading at the 2004 Dylan Thomas Festival at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea.2 The cast included Sion Probert, Stan Stennett and Liz Morgan.

In May 2009, Anne collaborated with me on The Trainer, the Gaza benefit play, which was performed as a professional reading at Oxford House in Bethnal Green and later at the Hackney Empire. The cast at both readings included Tim Pigott-Smith, Corin Redgrave and Roger Lloyd Pack. Sadly, it was one of Corin’s last performances before his death in 2010.

The Trainer had its genesis in Keith Burstein’s opera, Manifest Destiny. After the opera was performed at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival, the Evening Standard claimed that it glorified terrorism. The composer took the newspaper to court and, after losing in the Court of Appeal, he was ordered to pay the Evening Standard’s legal costs. Burstein was bankrupted by this decision and the Official Receiver seized possession of all his works, including Manifest Destiny. 

The Trainer is a multimedia play set in a gym in the basement of a Mayfair gentlemen’s club frequented by Court of Appeal judges. Their trainer is Leila, a young Palestinian who has a Jewish fiancé, Josh. Using video excerpts from the opera, news footage from Gaza and breakfast TV, the play deals with Burstein’s bankruptcy, the love between Leila and Josh, and reveals the absurdities of UK terror laws. It delivers a darkly comic warning on the dangers of sleepwalking into a police state while, at the same time, highlighting the struggles taking place in Gaza.

As I write this, Gaza is once again under attack. Should Anne and I rework the play? It’s too depressing to consider. Maybe my next play will be about mountain flowers. 

Now go to CHAPTER 35

NOTES


1 Simple Writings reviews, the Duke of Cambridge, May 30th– June17th, 1989. 
Claire Armitstead, Financial Times, June 13th,1989 ‘David Wilson’s dramatisation, originally made for television, comes to the stage with a cast of ten who give themselves ably and ebulliently to the task of peopling Grimmelshausen’s world. A succession of scenes takes us from the orphaning of the child Simplex, through his conversion and education by an old hermit and his adventures as an innocent adrift in a bad world, to his final return to contemplative solitude. In the background and sometimes the foreground, rages the Thirty Years’ War. The astonishing thing to emerge from this production is that the novel has not been dramatised before: it is witty, bawdy, and as profound as anyone cares to consider it.’  
Ann McFerran, Time Out, June 7th, 1989. ‘Based on Grimmelshausen’s Simplicianic Writings, writer David Wilson unfurls a sprawling, vibrant, bustling canvas of 17th- century German peasant life in the Thirty Years’ War as he tells the story of a naïve boy, Simplicius, who, like the original author, was separated from his parents in adolescence. Since the action is continually counterpointed with the naïve wisdom of Simplicius’ philosophy, the play at times works like a painting by Breughel, in its juxtaposition of the ingeniously fanciful and the gruesomely horrific.’ Ham & High, June 10th, 1989. ‘David Wilson’s Simple Writings brings to often uproarious life a 17th-century German novel with overtones of Fielding and Rabelais, but with its own contemplative force besides.’

2 John Yorke, former controller of BBC Drama: ‘A powerful and beautifully written piece of theatre, and I have to say that your mastery of language isn’t far off Thomas’s himself. I thought you did an excellent job of interweaving between the man himself and the world of the plays and the poems, and adding the Marx Brothers into the brew lent a wonderfully surreal tone. Much as I enjoyed the piece as theatre, I think that’s exactly what it is, theatre’
 
Terry Johnson, Director, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (West End, 2004) and playwright (Insignificance; Hysteria; Dead Funny; Hitchcock Blonde; Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, etc.): ‘I read Spitting into the Sky and I loved its imaginative spiralling. I loved the setting and the theatrical gifts it allows you to indulge. I love the idea of the Marx Brothers taking us through the play: I think the language is grand, and worthy of the man. I think it’s very good.’






 

Left Field: CHAPTER 35 - Three Sisters

When my sisters and I were children, my mother’s sister, Enid, spent most weekends with us in Bromley. Every Friday evening, she would walk up the hill from the station with her small black suitcase and large red handbag. She would extract from it Smarties for us children and a bottle of gin which she presented to my father as a gift for the weekend. He was a beer drinker and my mother had her sherry. Enid finished off the gin on the first evening.

For us children, there might be toothpaste, biros she’d found on the train, a comb she’d picked off the street. My mother would say, ‘What are you thinking about, Enid? It’s filthy. Throw it away.’
I’d watch my aunt’s mouth turn into a hard line. ‘Don’t be silly, dear. Of course I’ll wash it before David uses it.’ Then turning to me, ‘You like it, darling, don’t you?’ Putting me in the line of fire.
Enid was always heavily lipsticked and high-heeled, the higher the better. Her visits to the chiropodist were as regular as my mother’s to the hairdresser. Although pretty, Enid never married. She worked as an assistant for a Harley Street dentist who was never without the latest model Italian convertible. Sometimes PK, as he was called, would drop her off at our house in Westmoreland Road. He was on his way home to West Malling to spend the weekend with his wife. Enid would throw her shoes onto the gravel driveway and, steadying her windswept hair, step out of his red Alfa Romeo Spider. 

My parents suspected that she and PK were lovers. I’ll never know for sure but, when PK died, Enid developed alopecia and all her hair fell out.

My mother, not Enid, told me that the love of Enid’s life had been an RAF Spitfire pilot killed in the Battle of Britain. His name was Peter and my mother used to tell me that Enid treated him badly. ‘That poor boy was devoted to your aunt and she ... I can’t tell you what she did to him.’ And she didn’t.

The two sisters had a love/hate relationship. My mother was jealous of Enid and her closeness to us children. ‘It’s all very well that sister of mine coming down here at the weekend and fawning over all of you. She doesn’t have to get you up in the morning and put food in front of you.’

Without the responsibility of being the parent, Enid was generous with her time and her dotings. That dedication to us lasted all her life. When my sisters and I became parents, she was always a willing, and welcome, babysitter.

She spoke with a stronger Welsh accent than my mother, but declared herself to be a proud English woman. She had decidedly right-wing politics. ‘The police are so marvellous.’ ‘I am so proud to be English.’ And whenever politics entered a conversation, ‘I’ve always voted Conservative, dear.’ When I told her she spoke with a Welsh accent and was Welsh, it became even stronger as she raised her voice at me, ‘Oh no, I’m not.’

She rented a room in a house in Allen Street in Kensington that was owned by a retired concert hall singer. Enid lived there for more than 30 years and when the singer died, she moved to Cricklewood and rented a dark, dank room in the house of an elderly Polish woman who shouted at my aunt every time she came home.

In neither place did Enid have her own kitchen. There was a small Belling cooker beside the bed and a handbasin in the corner of the room. When I was old enough to visit her, she would invite me round for dinner. It was always liver and bacon. ‘Lovely to see you, darling. It’s liver and bacon. I hope you don’t mind.’ I remember visiting her at the surgery in Harley Street and she would take me to the Prince Regent pub in Marylebone Road. ‘Darling, the liver and bacon here is lovely.’

Not surprisingly, Enid didn’t spend much time at home. In the evenings she sold programmes at the Royal Festival Hall. ‘So wonderful there. Such gorgeous music.’

‘What did you hear last night, Aunty?’

‘I have no idea,’ she would say in her Swansea lilt, ‘but it was lovely.’
Enid was a wrestling fan and had a friend with whom she went to matches at Wembley Stadium. In Bromley, she’d sit watching it on ITV at 4pm every Saturday afternoon, along with 16 million others. Her favourite was Big Daddy.

I would annoy her with my commentary. ‘Aunty, Big Daddy’s real name is Shirley Crabtree. Shirley!’

‘No man is called Shirley. Stop annoying me.’

‘Wow, Giant Haystacks landed on Shirley and he didn’t feel a thing. 

Aunt Enid, he’s 48 stone! It’s all a fix.’

‘That’s not the point. Now be quiet, dear, and let me enjoy this.’

She was always up and doing and that was her undoing because, when she reached her seventies, she would get lost travelling across London, putting us all to a lot of trouble.

Finally, she had to be put in a nursing home in Swiss Cottage. Like my mother later, she could not have survived out of care. She spent her days with other old people sitting in soiled plastic chairs, wearing clothes that were no longer hers and staring vacantly at the TV. She was treated kindly by the staff, but like a small child. ‘Have you been a good girl and eaten your biscuit?’

After less than a year there, and short of breath, she was taken to the Royal Free Hospital. She was placed on a drip and it was left to my sisters and me to decide what should be done. Many times, she’d told us that she didn’t want her life prolonged if she was incapable of living it fully. We asked the hospital to remove the drip. Within a few days, she died.

It was 1987, the year of the storms. She had loved walking in Kensington Gardens so my sisters and I placed her ashes there in a deep hole left by an uprooted oak tree.

I have a recurrent dream to add to the ones set in my childhood home. Enid is still alive and living in an old people’s home. Nobody is visiting her and I am continually passing by, feeling guilty that I haven’t dropped in to see her. I think she was very alone in life and my sisters and I were her only family. She was our second mother and it saddens me now to think that maybe we did not fully recognise the importance of that for her.

My two sisters turned out very differently to me. We were all sent to boarding school: I to Canford and they to St Margaret’s in Hertfordshire. But there all similarities end. Though we are close in age, Elizabeth and Joanna were children of the Fifties and I was a child of the Sixties. For them, it was finishing school in Switzerland and secretarial college. While I walked round Bromley with a CND symbol on my donkey jacket, Liz and Joanna were playing tennis at Sundridge Park Lawn Tennis Club.

Liz married James Watt in 1962. Their first child, Joanna, was born three years later. I remember it was 1965 because I babysat my niece at their flat on Ham Common when she was a few months old. That morning I’d bought Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back. The album had been released in the UK earlier that year. When I hear ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, I am back in that flat with that baby girl.

A year later my sister, Joanna, married a Sandhurst-trained army officer and went to live with him in Singapore.

It goes without saying that we have our political differences. As the black sheep in my family, I know that, for my sisters and their families, this has made me difficult to deal with. As the Uncle Bill of my times, I’ve not been the brother to invite round for a polite dinner party. From their point of view, I am that lone ship on the horizon, but I am proud to say that all my family were opposed to the Iraq war and, along with me, Liz took her opposition into the streets.
But it’s not just political differences that separate us. Like many people from our background, we didn’t share our formative years; we were sent away to school from a young age and that leaves its mark. ‘If the Church of England is the Tory Party at prayer,’ wrote John le Carré, ‘the Public School system may be called the Tory Party in the nursery ... The British are known to be mad. But in the maiming of their privileged young, they are criminally insane.’

Today, both my sisters live more comfortably than Anne and I do in our one-bedroom flat. I don’t say that out of envy. I wouldn’t give up my life for theirs and, I’m sure, they think the same. We are just different. I am surprised that they have remained as friendly and generous to me as they have.

When I’ve been down and out – and that’s been more than once in my life – both have come to my rescue. Mike and Joanna bought my Rabuzin silk-screen prints when I was struggling with the art world, helped host the artist’s visit to the UK in 1989 and sold programmes for War Child at the Festival Hall.

When I was organising Coldcut’s Balkan tour in 2001 with Hiroshi Kato, it was with sponsorship from Japan. Funding was suddenly removed and I found myself with 20 musicians in Dubrovnik who were unable to move, practically unable to eat. Joanna and Mike lent me the money so they could continue the tour. 

Liz was a trustee of War Child; she went through a lot of anguish with the problems there and helped me in every way. She and her husband, Peter, came to Mostar three times to help out. The first time in December 1997, Peter persuaded the Hampshire police to loan them a Peugeot van which they loaded with donated shoes, clothes and candies. They then drove the 1,200 miles to Bosnia from London, crossing borders without any papers, arrived in Mostar and with hardly any rest, took part in the distribution of the aid directly to the families in most need. They then stayed on to help out at the opening of the Centre.

Not so long ago when, yet again, I was sinking under a mountain of debt, they gave me a loan which they insisted be written off.

As I get older, I have become increasingly aware of the importance of family. Maybe it is because of what Bertrand Russell called ‘the terror of the cosmic loneliness’. In my own immediate, disunited family, I need to strengthen whatever remains that holds us together. My father’s last years and my recent brain surgery have taught me that. 

Now go to Chapter 36

Left Field: CHAPTER 36 - American Paint

America: drive-ins, pink Cadillacs the size of swimming pools, the Wobblies, Martin Luther King, Woody Guthrie, Joe Hill, Indians. Even as a boy, I always rooted for the Indians. 

I fell in love with American literature when I was at Canford and asked the English master, Andrew Davis, why we couldn’t have something contemporary and relevant like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain as a set book. Why, I asked, were they all British – Lord of the Flies, A Tale of Two Cities, Macbeth, of course. I remember hating Golding’s novel with its emphasis on how we are all born evil. He laughed and said he hoped I would overcome my infantile literary tastes. This only encouraged my passion for a hidden America that was ignored at Canford and marginalised in the States.

In the 1920s and 30s, American black jazz singers, Josephine Baker and Alberta Hunter, found their stardom, not in New York or Chicago, but in Paris and London. ‘The Negro artists,’ said Hunter, ‘went to Europe because we were recognised and given a chance. In Europe they had your name up in lights. People in the United States wouldn’t give us that opportunity.’

In the 1950s and 60s this happened again with the great blues singers who played to packed houses at London’s 100 Club and the Marquee. It was Europe and the UK, in particular, that gave them the recognition they deserved.

When these musicians arrived in London, their first booking was often at the Bromley Court Hotel, Catford, a short bus ride from my home. Blues greats like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley appeared there with British stars such as John Mayall, Alexis Korner and Spencer Davis.

With his pencil moustache, red Telecaster, sharp suits and from Rolling Fork, Mississippi – as far from Catford as you could get – Muddy Waters ‘Got my Mojo Working’.

The Bromley branch of CND used to hold meetings at the Swan and Mitre in the High Street, and I was delighted that being part of Ban the Bomb in south London meant I was among other blues fans. I remember one evening we cut the meeting short and decamped to the Bromley Court to hear Sonny Boy Williamson. I went home that night and dreamed of the Tallahatchie Bridge. 

One American’s arrival in Europe in the 70s was not as a jazz or blues singer, but as a ballet dancer. Anne Aylor was escaping from a border town in New Mexico where there was little culture of any sort. Her Dixie-born mother thought that ballet ‘was about as useful as a tit on a boar hog’.

After travelling in Europe, she ended up in London where she lived hand to mouth, working at a shop in Great Marlborough Street that sold brass and wind music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This poorly paid job was supplemented by even more poorly paid work as an usherette at the London Coliseum. But the 30-pence-an- hour evening job enabled her to see opera for the first time and, during the summer season, the great touring ballet companies of the world. During these years, she became a writer of short stories, novels and plays and then a teacher of creative writing.

In 1991, I was struggling to expand my ideas for Dylan Thomas into a full-length play. Michael Walling recommended that I attend a playwriting course run by Steve Gooch and Nick Darke in Cornwall. I booked.1

The week-long workshop was held at a beach house in Porthcothen. There were ten of us and one of them was Anne. She and I were always the first up. We exchanged life stories sitting at the kitchen table. I was fascinated to discover that she had Native American ancestry, describing herself as a ‘homeopathic Indian’. I laughed when she turned sideways to reveal her Indian nose. She said her maternal great-grandmother had been a full-blooded Cherokee and, although she didn’t know much about her father’s ancestry, he was hairless and dark-eyed. Both her parents were from Tennessee – Cherokee territory. She said that many whites from the southern States have Indian blood, whether they acknowledged it or not. ‘Take a look,’ she said, ‘at Elvis.’  

Anne talked about her career as a writer and ballet dancer. How she had hated her life in New Mexico and had escaped to California where she danced with the Oakland Ballet, then to New York and finally to Europe and London where she had been living for 20 years.

One morning at breakfast she told me that her play, Children of the Dust, had recently won a playwriting prize which resulted in its being produced by the Soho Theatre and that she was in the process of writing about the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. The title, she said, was Happiness is North of Here, a line from one of Tsvetaeva’s poems. Anne said that she shared many of the poet’s obsessions. She, like Tsvetaeva, always had to be in love, though not always with the same person. ‘I was madly in love with someone when I started writing this play,’ she said, ‘but like Tsvetaeva, the object of my obsession didn’t feel the same way.’

When she told me her hometown was where Billy the Kid had escaped from gaol, she was home and dry. The Balkans might have seemed exotic, but the technicolour deserts of the southwest US – that was exotic and here it was on the north Cornish coast. I fell in love with the look of her, just a little before I fell for all of her. Her mermaid hair reminded me of the pale, beautiful women in Gustav Klimt’s paintings.

Three months after the course, I received a Christmas card from her with a Zuñi prayer inside. It said: 

May you grow old;
May your roads be fulfilled; May you be blessed with life, Where the life-giving road Of your sun father comes out, May your roads reach;
May your roads be fulfilled. 
 
She’d sent the same New Year’s wish to several other friends, but because she’d signed it ‘Love’, I read more into it than was meant. I was so thrilled I put it under the mattress on my side of the bed so I could dream of her while I slept.

Anne had founded a writers’ group and, because she liked what she’d heard of my Dylan Thomas play, invited me to join. I went to several meetings before I had the courage to invite her out for a meal. I suggested we meet at Joe Allens, the show business restaurant in Covent Garden. After dinner and a bottle of wine, I told her that I fancied her like mad, that I had been attracted to her from the first time I saw her, that I had been faithful to my wife for all my marriage but, after witnessing the war in Croatia, I realised how short life was. I did not want to die with any regrets.

Anne was shocked at my proposal for a discreet affair, but her father, to whom she’d been very close, had died earlier that year from a long, wasting illness. After years of fear and grief, she wanted to live again.

A few days after the meal, I rang to see if she would meet for a drink close to the City Lit where we’d both taught. She nervously agreed.

When we met, she told me she had to go to John Lewis to buy a vegetable rack. I said I’d come with her, but why not first go to a hotel in Russell Square? I tapped my pocket. I had come prepared.

She was taken aback by my suggestion, but not to the extent that she refused.

The Hotel President shared an entrance with the Imperial 267 and I tried to look like a tourist when I asked for a room. I fumbled over our fake names as the girl at reception handed me a key to Room 303. Anne pointed to the bar. ‘I never drink in the day, but now I need one.’

Three stiff gin and tonics later, we made our way upstairs. When I tried the key, the door wouldn’t open. I called to a cleaning lady who was chatting to a colleague at the end of the long corridor. She opened the door with her master key. Inside the darkened room I could see clothes and shoes.

We stood there with no luggage and I said, ‘Those are not my shoes.’

The cleaner asked to see our key. ‘You’re in the wrong hotel, sir. This key is for the Hotel President.’

As we waited for the lift, we heard them giggling and started laughing ourselves.

In the right room, and with the vegetable rack waiting to be collected, I kissed her, or tried to. ‘I don’t think I can remember how to do this,’ I told her.

'Me too,’ she said. Anne sat on the bed, nervously facing the window. I wasted no time and started to undress. When she turned around, her eyes told me she was shocked to see my nakedness. Later, she told me she’d been hoping for a slow, romantic seduction, but since I had already disrobed, she had to undress herself.

The first time ‘the earth didn’t move’, but I had finally realised how hollow my marriage was and she, too, was in a relationship which was lonely in all senses of the word. That afternoon was the start of a love that had been sadly missing from both our lives for years.

On our way to the vegetable rack, I turned to Anne. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘For you or me?’ she asked.

It was the start of a relationship that was to see me through the trials of a bitter divorce and much more. She helped me in my struggles with War Child, years of drama and trauma, and became a supportive stepmother to my two sons.

When I was Director of the Pavarotti Centre, she spent eight months there as a practitioner of Chinese medicine, treating the war-wounded and those traumatised by war with acupuncture. She also taught ballet at the Centre and got her students in London to organise donations of ballet shoes and leotards. Her classes were over-subscribed with young girls desperate to take part. 

When she left, a farewell party for her was organised. There were a lot of tears. It was not just humans that were sorry to see her go. Anne adopted a feral kitten she’d found sitting on the rim of a tyre to escape the boiling sun. She named her Juba and this animal had amazing intelligence. There were no pet shops and so no litter trays to be had in Mostar. Anne trained her to use the garden below our flat at the top of the PMC. Once she knew the drill, we’d let her out and Juba would go to the garden and run back when Anne jangled her keys over the third-floor balcony. When we weren’t there to let her out, Juba taught herself to squat over the toilet pan.

When we left Mostar for a few days, the cat was always there when we returned. That is, until Anne left for good in September 1998. I took Anne to Dubrovnik Airport for her flight back to London and, when I got back to the Centre, Juba had disappeared and was never seen again.

Anne has a way with animals. When we were staying with friends in Limerick, there were three horses pastured in a field behind their house. I watched as they approached her and took it in turns to nuzzle against the side of her face and try to chew her hair. When we got back to London, our friends rang to say that the horses had been wild before we came and, when the farmer moved them to a new paddock, he couldn’t believe they’d been tamed.

They say we all have an animal double. Anne’s is the American Paint. Mares from this Western breed are fast- witted, intelligent and independently minded. When you see them in a corral, they usually stand apart from the others as if in contemplation. When they do approach other horses, they like to rub their heads against the flanks of their companions. They are silent.

I cannot end this chapter without a story about one of the few books Anne brought to Mostar for her stay. In her suitcase was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A lover of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Nabokov, Dostoevsky was a writer she’d never been able to read because she found his prose too careless, too charged with melodrama and unbelievable coincidences.

Before I left for Bosnia to take up my post as Director of the PMC, I’d told her that the book had completely changed the direction of my life. That it was after reading this novel that I quit my job as a lawyer’s clerk and decided to do something more worthwhile with my life. That it was this book that was responsible for me deciding to try to make the world a better place. She was curious to find out why.

In Mostar she started and gave up, started and gave up. When she had exhausted all her other books in English, she was forced to try again. After struggling through the 600 pages she said, ‘I’ve spent weeks and weeks reading a book I didn’t enjoy and I am no closer to understanding why it affected you so much.’ 
 
‘Crime and Punishment?’ I said, pausing for a moment. ‘Maybe it was The Brothers Karamazov.’

She threw the book at me. 

Now go to CHAPTER 37

NOTES

1 After recovering from a stroke in 2001, Nick was diagnosed with cancer and died, aged 56, in 2005. His wife, Jane, and son, Henry, continued his legacy in film. Written and directed by Jane, The Art of Catching Lobsters is a moving account of the grieving process and was premiered on BBC 4 in September 2007. Nick was a playwright, fisherman, environmentalist and beachcomber. A great workshop leader, he had written a play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Dead Monkey, a dark comedy featuring a childless couple, their monkey and a sexual liaison between the wife and the pet. A film producer saw the play in Washington DC and invited Nick to Los Angeles to write the film script, all expenses paid. He returned from the West Coast to his Cornish cottage and Cornish poverty and waited for the call which would change his life. Some months later, a fax arrived from the producer. ‘Dear Nick,’ it said, ‘This is America. We can have a monkey. We can have a dead monkey, but we can’t have a fucked dead monkey.’ Nick was not one to compromise. It was the end of his Hollywood dreams. With Anne, a slightly different story. Her first novel, No Angel Hotel, was published in London by HarperCollins. When it appeared under the imprint of St Martin’s Press in New York, the title had been changed to Angel Hotel. ‘This is America,’ she was told. ‘A negative title won’t sell.’




 

Left Field: CHAPTER 37 - Behind God's Back

This hooptedoodle is something Anne Aylor wrote on her first trip to Mostar. The New Republic was interested in ‘Behind God’s Back’1. The editor asked for a shorter piece that focused only on the bakery. Anne felt a truncated article about a heroic city that had been under siege for so long would be a sell-out to the people of Mostar. She chose for it to remain unpublished rather than shorten it. Which is why it deserves an audience now. 

26th July, 1994. Midnight, Dover. I am on my way to East Mostar, invited by War Child to visit their operations in Bosnia. As we sit waiting for papers from customs, a lorry full of cattle can be heard lowing. The word is too gentle for the terrible sounds they are making above the rumbling engines of sixteen-wheelers driving onto the Calais ferry. It is the cows’ last night on earth and they know it.

Outside Nuremburg, I first see the white trucks of the UN, a sign that we are approaching a war zone. A bronze Buddha, which I have taken with me as a talisman, slides back and forth along the dashboard in the lotus position.
We are delayed for an hour and a half at the Austrian border because we haven’t been given the right customs’ stamp in Dover. In addition to transporting bakery supplies, medicines and parcels to people in East Mostar, War Child is carrying three bags of human insulin. Life in a bottle. Packed in melting ice, it is warming in the blistering heat.  

Driving through Slovenia, we pass fields of corn, sunflowers, hops. Names with unusual patterns of consonants and more Js than you would see in a dozen English dictionaries. We pass a road sign to Vrnijka. Almost rhymes with Guernica.

In Croatia, near Karlobag, the hills are bare and rocky. Centuries ago, the Venetians stripped them of trees to build their city and ships for their fleets, which is why we can find no shade during a three-hour traffic jam on the road towards Zadar. We hear rumours that the delay is because a helicopter has been shot down. A sun-shaded army officer paces back and forth, screaming and cursing in Croatian. Two lanes blocked with traffic: a fire engine behind us, a bus in front. Utter chaos with no one in control.

Two hours later, we are told to drive up a small slip road, but there is no room for our pick-up. We are the last vehicle blocking the traffic and our driver is understandably anxious. We are in hostile territory with boxes addressed to people with Muslim surnames, clearly visible in the bed of the truck.

When the road has been cleared and we are given permission to continue our journey, we see what has caused the delay: two overturned container lorries that had been full of pigs. The ones that are alive are being hosed down by soldiers. What is eerie is that the animals are completely silent. They are traumatised, dead or dying in the 40 degree C heat. I wonder if it is the first time in history that an army has been deployed to help animals on their way to slaughter.

We pass the toppled containers and see dozens of UN vehicles facing the other way. It has been seven hours since the accident and these drivers will be here for many more. Seeing our War Child sticker, one of them waves at me. I ask him if he speaks English so I can tell him what is causing the delay. He shakes his head, says that he is German. ‘Schwein,’ I say, one of the few words I can remember from my high-school German, and thumb in the direction at the overturned lorries.

At Maslenica we drive across a pontoon bridge because the steel bridge has been destroyed by the Serbs. Piled high on either side are hundreds of old tyres. As we roll noisily across the pontoon’s metal plates, the clanking sounds like shell fire.
On the other side of the bridge is an area which has been ethnically cleansed. Croatian houses damaged by the Serbs, or vice versa, have gaping holes or are roofless. Those belonging to the minority ethnic group in the area, the Bosniaks, lay in concrete heaps, dynamite charges having been placed at the four corners so that they collapsed neatly, like a pack of cards.

We arrive at our pansion outside Split where the UNHCR and other aid agencies have their headquarters. The family who own the pansion have been kind to Jim Kennedy, War Child’s Field Director, whenever he is in town: treating him like one of their own, feeding him and relaying messages from his London office. Since the mobile bakery operated by War Child moved from Me ugorje, where it had fed Catholic Croatian refugees, and is now based in East Mostar feeding Muslims, their attitude has been decidedly chillier.

When we arrive, Jim is sitting at a table in the dark, smoking. We are a day late and he’s been waiting for us. He tells us that there has been an attack on a UN convoy into Sarajevo; a British soldier has been killed. ‘Don’t look like you’ll get into Sarajevo with the insulin,’ he says. ‘The Serbs have no qualms. If they’ll fire at the UN, they’ll fire at anyone.’

The pansion where we are staying tonight is on the Magistrala. On one side the beach, the boats, the towels reserving bathing positions, vine-covered terraces, baked and sunburnt bodies, children skipping stones. On the other side, the war and the rumble of white-painted convoys as they roll into central Bosnia to distribute food and medicine to the ethnically cleansed, the dispossessed, the sick, the hungry. The street itself is a metaphor: of the peace that is so close to war.

The Magistrala is where you find the aid agencies, large and small. For some, but not all, this has been a good war: a little work, a lot of R&R. Spanking new white Land Rovers are parked along the roadside which seem to have rarely travelled into the war zone.

After picking up our UN cards, we enter the ‘Muslim’ ghetto that is East Mostar. We go first to the War Child bakery which has been installed on the HEPOK industrial estate. Pallets are stacked high with tonnes of US flour donated by the UNHCR. Stamped on the bags, in blue capitals, NOT TO BE SOLD OR EXCHANGED. USE NO HOOKS. On other pallets, sacks of Danish salt. 

Fourteen local workers and six War Child volunteers are covered in flour, their arms and legs magnolia white like the Wilis in Giselle. A gloved Bosnian is using a long pole to pull the hot baking tins out of the ovens. Another leans over for a woman to brush the flour dust from his hair.

There are five mobile ovens for baking bread, but only three are operational because War Child doesn’t have the funding to buy diesel to run the generator to provide enough fuel for all of them.
It is three o’clock in the afternoon and, after working since 5am, the bakery staff are ready to go home. In addition to the UN Spanish Battalion which is based close to the compound, there are soldiers from the Bosnian Republican Army to protect the bakery. The week before, there had been an armed exchange between the HVO, the Croatian army operating in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the bakery guards. The HVO had climbed into the compound early in the morning and there had been small arms fire. One of the volunteers said that the attack had been provoked by the thousands of gallons of wine and rakija which are stored on the estate, but I think it is because the bakery, first situated in Croatian-controlled Bosnia, has moved into a Muslim enclave. Before the bakery arrived in Mostar two months ago, there had been no regular supply of bread in this part of town for over a year.

Like all of East Mostar, life in HEPOK is primitive, basic, hard. No electricity, no fresh food, no running water. The only water available is from the bakery bowser. Washing is done in a bucket, or in the River Neretva in town. Serbs on the hills to the east, Croats to the west, SPANBAT at the entrance. Everyone wants the jewel that is Mostar. On a building adjacent to the bakery is written OPREZ MINIRANO. Beware of mines. 

I take my first drive into the city. Everywhere you look are cut railway lines dangling in space, UNHCR plastic on all the windows, a wall with STOP KILLING THE CHILDREN daubed on it. On the street are rows and rows of metal lockers. A flimsy barricade against snipers, they look like dented upright coffins.

We drive through terrible devastation to reach the one pharmacy warehouse that distributes medicine to all of East Mostar. The insulin we deliver, which should be refrigerated, is put in boxes on the floor. Two fridges have been donated to the warehouse, but they are empty because there is no constant power supply. A boxed computer also sits unused because a surge protector is needed to stop current spikes. The pharmacy doesn’t have a desk or enough chairs. Their ashtray is a Petri dish which is normally used for growing cultures.

Before the war, the building had housed a large organisation with 40 employees. After the school had been destroyed across the road, the pharmacy improvised one in their former office upstairs. We ask if there are plans to rebuild it. They smile and say, ‘Only in a basement.’

The director of the pharmacy tells us, ‘My father is Serb, my mother, Muslim. What am I? I am married to a Croat. What are my children? What are they supposed to call themselves now? On the other side of the city they have everything. We used to have everything. Now we have nothing. We have only our lives.’

He is a refugee in his own city. When the war started, he had to flee to the other side. He hasn’t seen his wife and children for almost two years. He says the Croats have stolen his flat.


‘They stole my family. They stole everything. If someone steals something from you and they say they did it because, to them, you are nothing but a dirty Muslim, then you shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh well, it’s unfortunate that that is what I am.” At least there is some reason for it. But when they steal from you and that reason is not real, and the reasons they give for it are phoney and illogical, then there is no way you can live with that because you can’t say, “I’m a Muslim, bad luck on me.” I’m not. That is the crime. We don’t want to be Muslims. We are so mixed. They want us to be Muslims.’

He adds that 90 per cent of Mostar wanted to live together; they always had. ‘It is the scum who started this war. The fascists are a minority. The majority of people go along with it because of fear, and a few courageous people resist it.’

As we leave, lying in a triangle of land outside their office is an architect’s blueprint with the lettering Nova Podruma. I carry it to the car and ask the driver what it means. He says, ‘New basement.’

We pass a graveyard on the way back to HEPOK. The word for it in Serbo-Croat is groblje, a word that sounds as if it were a JRR Tolkien invention. Amidst the ruins of the city, this old Muslim cemetery is miraculously untouched. I mention it to Jim and he says they wouldn’t waste a mortar on a groblje. But graveyards, I say, are the past, as much as any building. Destroy the graveyards, I say, and you destroy the memories.

‘Mortars,’ he says, ‘are designed to get people into the cemetery and once they have accomplished that, they’ve done their job.’

Despite the destruction, Mostar is coming back to life after two years of siege, first from the Serbs and then from their former allies, the Croats. Some shops and bars are open. There is even an improvised outdoor cinema screen in the middle of town that a city official walked to Sarajevo for and carried back by hand.

That night we sit outside the bakery to have our only meal of the day. To the east, the Serbs, and to the west, the Croats. There are candles on the table and the sounds of a raucous wedding which echo across the valley.

We slap our arms and legs. The mosquitoes are out.

Jim says, ‘They don’t like the smell of yeast.’ He brings a packet out of the bakery. I wet my finger and rub the dry yeast over my skin. The wedding grows louder: singing, clapping, shouting, laughter, then the sound of guns or firecrackers. War or celebration? It’s impossible to tell.

At night, we sleep on the roof of the building next to the bakery. Improvised beds laid on flour pallets, positioned so that you will be in the shade when the sun comes up. But now it is night and the sky is clear and beautiful. Even without my contact lenses, I can see the Milky Way, a white river of stars. There is a breeze, the sound of cicadas. An owl hoots in the distance. I think to myself that we are light years away from Alpha Centauri, the nearest star. We are looking at history, at stars that might not even exist any more because they exploded aeons ago, their light still racing towards us. It is peaceful and still and, for a few hours, the war seems distant.

In the morning, I see an ashtray at the bakery, improvised from the end of a loaf of bread. A hole has been hollowed out of the centre and four grooves cut to rest cigarettes on. I think about a gypsy woman I had seen once in London with her young daughter. The child wanted a roll that her mother had in her purse, but it was too dry and hard to eat. The gypsy explained this to her little girl, then kissed the bread before she threw it away. This precious bread that people had been starving for only a few months ago.

Paddy, a black-and-yellow tom, is the bakery cat. Paddy belonged to an American aid worker who was living in Mostar at the height of the fighting. One day a friend came to visit and took a flash photograph of the ruins outside the aid worker’s flat. Seeing the flash of light, an artillery gunner fired a shell through her window. She was cooking dinner at the stove when her body was torn in half. The photographer was unhurt. Paddy came to live at the bakery. In Bosnia, even animals have their stories.

Despite all this, what strikes me in this place is the struggle for normality in spite of everything. Another thing that strikes me is the number of toothless men. That is until I find out from Ahmet, one of the bakery workers, that his teeth had been knocked out by the HVO. He shows me his arms that are scarred where the Croatian soldiers had slashed him when they came to his house to take him away. Ahmet lied about his age, said he was 65, and was left behind with the women and children.

He limps a little when he walks because the canvas shoes he is wearing are too small. They belonged to his son and, along with a vest and the shorts he is wearing, are the only possessions he owns. His son, now safe in America, was taken to a concentration camp during the war. ‘My son has been lucky,’ Ahmet says, ‘because the HVO would take 60 people and lock them in a garage until they died like pigs.’
Ahmet says that he went out at night to find berries for his granddaughter because there was nothing for her to eat. His life had been in danger because of the snipers on the hillside. He says they killed everyone, even the women who went out at night to wash clothes in the river.

I ask him what was the worst thing during the height of the fighting.

‘Fear. You didn’t mind being hungry as long as you were free. But fear, that was much worse than hunger. People were so frightened they would take four times the recommended dose of aspirin because it helped to prevent heart attacks.’

He shows me the hand-written ration card issued in his name by the Bosnian government, OCTOBER written at the top and the numbers from 1 to 31 ruled out by hand. A cross over a number indicated the days he was able to get food, a small bag of rice or beans. I count the Xs, twelve days in every month. A 14-day stretch with no food at all. He carries the ration card in his wallet. ‘This,’ he says, holding the limp piece of paper, ‘shows what I have been through.’

Despite all he has witnessed and suffered, Ahmet is not bitter. He looks forward to the time when he can see his Serbian and Croatian friends again. He distinguishes between those who committed the cruelty and murder, and those who happened to share the same religion. I was reminded of something Martha Gellhorn wrote during the Spanish Civil War: ‘You have seen no panic, no hysteria, you have heard no hate talk. You know they have the kind of faith which makes courage and a fine future. You have no right to be disturbed.’

I ask Ahmet when he thinks life will be normal again. He shrugs, talking more with his shoulders than his tongue. Holding up both hands he says, ‘Deset godina.’ Ten years.

On Sunday they have the jump into the River Neretva. It is an annual event in Mostar, but they haven’t had one in the past two years because of the war. Competitors stand on the rickety suspension bridge that hangs where their beloved bridge once stood and jump, or dive, 24 metres into the ice-cold water. Most are Bosnians, but Matt, an Australian volunteer at the bakery, is participating as an act of solidarity with the local people.

After the competition, hundreds of men and women sit in the square at tables or on the marble steps. There is nothing to eat, but you can buy beer or juice if you are lucky enough to be an aid worker; no one else has any money. Disco music blares in the background.

At first it feels like a fiesta: women in their best dresses, waiters running up and down the steps with trays of drinks. It seems as if things are back to normal until you look more closely. At the tables people are talking, but there is no laughter. No one is smiling. All the children are quiet and, if you study the faces of the young men, they have the hard, dead eyes of soldiers. They are not looking at the pretty girls, but staring blankly into space. We are the only ones who look relaxed. After two years of living in cellars, they have put on a show for themselves. East Mostar is traumatised. This is an attempt at celebration.

On Tuesday we are invited to dinner by the foreman at the bakery. By three, the bake of 4,000 loaves is done and there is the possibility of a swim in the Neretva. We follow him through the narrow streets to his home. He pushes a bicycle (‘my car,’ he jokingly calls it), two half-kilos of bread under his arm.

His house is not his house at all. The flat he had had in Mostar has been destroyed, and the house he built in the nearby village of Blagaj was finished five days before the war started. His house was on the front line; he hasn’t seen it for two years and doesn’t know if it’s still standing.

The flat he is living in now belongs to a Serbian-Croatian family who fled the Muslim side of the city when the war began. This, too, is on what had been the front line. Three houses at the end of his street are in ruins. He says the people in them were killed when the HVO rolled tractor tyres filled with explosives down the hillside.

His flat is cool and tidy. As in all Muslim homes, we leave our shoes in the hall. There is the Koran on the sideboard and a copper plate on the wall of an Arab leading a camel.

His wife talks about the day their flat had been bombed. Her husband was in the toilet when three mortars landed. She says they sat in the ruins laughing because they were grateful to be alive. ‘You can cry,’ she says, ‘or you can laugh. Laughing is better.’

She has prepared a wonderful meal: evapc ic i, cheese and meat pies, barbequed chicken, a salad made from cabbage, tomatoes, onions and chickpeas. We are lucky to eat so well because in Mostar there is little food. Jim bought all the ingredients the day before from a Croat shop outside the city. It’s the first fresh food all of us have had in days, not tinned beef or soup or pasta.

Before the meal, I was shown every photograph the family possessed: from the parents’ childhood pictures to those of their son’s. I was taken through one family’s journey of 30 years. I was shown photographs of people who were no more, of a country that was no more. The old people had not died a natural death; they had died violently from sniper fire and mortar attack. Many of the young men smiling from the pages of her album – cousins, friends, a brother – had died at the front.

Proudly, the wife brought out a baby book that she’d made for her son. She had neatly written his family tree, his first visitors at the hospital, his first words. ‘Tata,’ she said a little wistfully, ‘not Mama.’ She turned page after page, carefully translating the captions she’d written. She brought out a lock of baby hair and the black stump of her son’s umbilical cord which she’d kept for good luck.

By the time we’d reached his fourth birthday, there were only a few lines: ‘We are refugees and things are very hard.’ No picture, only some words. ‘There was no photograph that year because we had no money for film.’

On her son’s fifth birthday, the pages were completely blank. She said, ‘Maybe I should try to write something.’ She slowly shakes her head. ‘No, maybe it is better that nothing is there.’

Now I understand why his father had said what he did when I first met his son. I asked how old he was and he said, ‘My son is six years old, but he has had only four years of life.’

The following day we visit Azra Ratkusic’s family in the middle of town. They are refugees from Stolac. Azra is a diabetic and has to inject herself twice a day. Her brother, Kamel, speaks English he taught himself from a book and Spanish which he learned from the SPANBAT soldiers based in Mostar since the beginning of the war.

We ask Kamel what it had been like for his sister during the fighting. He says that Azra had almost died twice after being in a diabetic coma because she couldn’t get insulin and didn’t have proper food to eat. We ask to see her insulin supply. The bottles she has been given by another charity are a year out of date.

Azra’s grandmother appears at the door in her slip and offers to make us coffee. She is an old lady, but still has a glint in her eye. She giggles about the slip, then tells us she was driven out of her home by the Croats wearing what she has on.

The family had been well off before the war. They had had cars, videos, a summer home, vacations abroad. Sophisticated, cultured people, the old woman’s children were doctors and lawyers. The ones that survived live in abject poverty, their homes and possessions stripped from them for no other reason than the fact they have a Muslim name.
That day the old woman’s son swam across the Neretva. For two years he’d been living on the Catholic side of the city in fear of his life. ‘He isn’t here,’ she says, crying. ‘He is walking up and down the streets. He can’t believe he’s free.’

Azra’s aunt comes in from work at the tobacco factory. Before the war, Zilla had been an economist. Now she does menial work to provide for her children. Like so many women here, she is a widow. She tells us that she watched as her husband was shot in front of her eyes. It is difficult not to cry with her. I do, hiding behind my dark glasses. 

‘How can you go on?’ I finally ask.

She smiles sadly. ‘Moramo biti herojia.’ We must be heroic.

The next day, a BBC reporter, who came to film War Child’s activities in the city, goes with me to meet Hamid Custovic, the official responsible for food distribution in the city. Over whiskey, Hamid explains his view of the war. ‘Before the war, the mosques were empty. Even now, after all this talk of us “Muslims”, there are still only a few old women there at prayer time. The bridge was our life and they took that from us. They took what was most important. This war has nothing to do with religion. When you hear the muezzin call, you can tell the time of day.’

He adds, ‘I used to live in West Mostar, close to the cathedral. I loved that cathedral and I loved its clock. I used to look out at it from my flat. When the clock stopped because some idiot damaged the building, I was very sad because I couldn’t tell the time any more. Something important had been removed from my life. You know,’ he said, ‘that clock on the cathedral and the call to prayer from the mosque are one and the same.’

The reporter asks Hamid what the plans were for rebuilding the city. He smiles sadly, ‘The people here don’t feel they have a future. The fighting isn’t over. They would like to think that it is, but they know it is not. That is the real sadness of this place. The West did nothing to stop this war, and they will let it happen again.’

It is our last day in Mostar. Earlier this morning, the UNHCR informed us that the town is on orange alert and that all aid agencies should leave the city centre and return to their bases. Sitting under the guns of both the Serbs and Croats, War Child is one of the few agencies that live and work on the east side of the river. It was advice that could only be ignored.

We sit with two bakery workers in the one black-market restaurant on this side of the city: fresh meat and salad in a town without fresh meat and salad at a cost that only foreigners can afford. None of us have eaten for two days and we are looking forward to the grilled trout, beer and vegetables.

We have just been served when the shelling starts, a loud explosion perhaps a street away. At first I’m not too frightened because one of the Bosnians explains that it’s a pat. A word that sounds innocuous enough until he says that it’s an air explosion that rains down shrapnel. ‘Probably a Serb gunner who’s had his first slivovitz of the evening,’ he says. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

Eleven violent explosions follow, one after another, causing masonry to fall into the street from a nearby building. My ears hurt; my stomach goes into spasm. Even though everyone has not eaten for days, the food on the table remains untouched. Conversation continues, everyone pretending to be unconcerned, but the much looked forward to meal remains unfinished.

‘Are you scared?’ one of our guests asks.

I am afraid I’ll be killed, but I look across the courtyard at a baby crying, then at the men and women still walking past, unconcerned, in the street. To the people of East Mostar, this is nothing unusual. I reply with the only words possible. ‘I have no right to be.’

There is a saying in the former Yugoslavia, that to be in a terrible place is to find yourself behind God’s back. East Mostar is behind God’s back. 

LEFT FIELD POSTCRIPT March 2020

NOTES

1 Letter from The New Republic, September 19th, 1994: ‘Dear Ms Aylor, Thank you for submitting “Behind God’s Back” to us for consideration. We enjoyed the piece, but in its current form, it is too long for publication. We might consider publishing a 1,500−2,000 word piece on the bakery, however, and we invite you to submit something of that length. Sincerely, David Greenberg, Managing Editor’. 

BRIAN ENO INTERVIEW ABOUT 'LEFT FIELD'