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