Viva Lewes Issue #132 September 2017

COLUMN
David Jarman
East of Ambridge
Summertime, and in
The Archers Adam’s
polytunnels are once
again the backdrop
for romantic mischief,
occasioned by the
presence of East
European fruit pickers.
Aeons ago, in prepolytunnel
Ambridge,
Kirsty had a fling with
some hunky Hungarian
heartbreaker. In 2012, it
was Adam himself who was venturing well beyond
the customary Europleasantries, with Polish
Pavel. This year, it’s hapless Roy Tucker and
Lexie. Their discovery of a shared enthusiasm for
the novels of Stephen King has led to some lessthan-Empsonian
critical analysis from Roy (“he’s
a master storyteller!”) Alas, their friendship is
unlikely to survive Roy’s opening conversational
gambit: “you must be missing Romania.” Lexie is,
as she points out, very patiently, Bulgarian.
I suspect that most Bulgarians, indeed most
Eastern Europeans, would recognise the
exchange with a weary resignation. Tom
Stoppard’s play, Travesties, is set in Zurich in
1917/18, a time when Lenin, James Joyce and
the Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara were all
living in the city. Here’s a conversation between
characters whose Wildean raison d’être in the
play it would be otiose to explain.
‘Cecily: You are not a bit like your brother. You
are more English.
Carr: I assure you I am as Bulgarian as he is.
Cecily: He is Romanian.
Carr: They are the same place. Some call it one,
some call it the other.
Cecily: I didn’t know that, though I always
suspected it.’
In her memoir,
Chernobyl Strawberries,
the Serbian writer
Vesna Goldsworthy
characterises herself,
rather alarmingly, as
‘two-thirds Simone de
Beauvoir, one-third
Tammy Wynette’.
Born in Belgrade in
1961, she describes
the many confusions
attendant upon her national identity when she
came to this country and took a job in an office
above the Natural History Museum.
‘Occasionally I spoke to an entomologist with an
interest in Russian coleoptera, who told me that
many of his colleagues in the museum believed I
was Russian because I once helped him translate
a Russian index card. There was also an occasion
when some botanists invited me to meet “a
compatriot of mine”, a visiting professor from
Budapest, and didn’t seem at all puzzled when
we started conversing in French.' I imagine that
it probably didn't help that her place of birth on
her Natural History Museum security pass was
printed as not Belgrade, but Belgravia.
I may be overly sensitive to this sort of cultural
confusion as I once, due to a lamentable lack
of close reading, took the first lines of Sir John
Denham’s poem entitled To Sir John Mennis, Being
Invited from Calais to Boulogne to Eat a Pig to be:
‘All on a weeping Monday / With a fat Bulgarian
Slovene.’ I gave an inordinate amount of thought
to the possible origins of this intriguing Slavic
hybrid before eventually noticing that the poet
was in fact talking about a ‘fat Bulgarian sloven’. A
very arresting opening to a not very good poem.
Illustration by Alex Leith
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