I am reading Martin Stepek's book about his father Jan Stepek, and I want to review it in my blog. I shall do several reviews as I am taking it slowly and making notes to myself as I go through. So far I can say that Martin can write. Our own and our families stories are always interesting to us, but it needs a good writer to make them interesting to the reader.
He begins the book with a mystery visitor - a mystery which is solved and which also says a lot about the turmoil of the times, the tragedy in which we, the damaged children of disobedient Adam, are living.
Martin has evoked his father's childhood so well - as such a busy and happy one - yet all the while the reader knows that the horror of Hitler and Stalin is looming on the horizon. Jan and his siblings memories of their childhood so far echo mine, which took place just after the war, even though they were country children and we were townies. We lived close to the inner city, but also visited my granny's rambling old country cottage in a small village in Lancashire regularly.
Martin's father recollects his pre-war childhood, saying that "in the summer we were rarely in the house". And he remembers playing hide and seek in the fields. Me too. Us children of the post war baby boom years used to play hide and seek in fields of ... were they corn, or barley? But grasses taller than us, filled with a wonderful world of insects and wildflowers. So clearly there was still farmland within the city then. It will all have been "developed" now.
Martin's father, Jan, says: "In the winter I would pour water on the ground to make a skating rink and all the children in the area found this great fun." His sister Danka says "But there was much more to our play than just fun. We were learning so much through our activities and we got to know nature in a deep way."
Yes. I recognise that childhood as still existing in the post war. Even in the inner city there was nature, in the gardens, parks and numerous bombsites. And there was a sort of lore of childhood through which we knew which plants and seeds were safe to eat just as we knew which stones you could break to use to chalk hopscotch squares in the road.
And I do remember making icy pavements even slippier by making slides - with no thought for poor old ladies (like myself). Shudder...
Does this world of childhood Jan describes exist now? Can it? Or has the writer brought us a glimpse of a vanished world?
I am looking forward to finding out what happens next, though with trepidation as I know there are horrors to come.
I notice and appreciate how Martin is writing this in a very fair way. It is so easy to use the horrors of our past to make things worse in the present. But he writes with understanding of the divisions and hatreds that are soon going to become overwhelming.
He speaks of Jan's father's work to "try to reconcile all the minority groups in the area" - and how that work brought him into dangerous conflict with the authorities. Well, yes, it would, as isn't "the world" set up to divide us, and turn us against each other?
He writes of "the competing nationalist biases of the time", often between the Poles and the Ukrainians with fairness and understanding.
I will be interested to see if he can maintain this in describing what is to come, but am confident that he will.
Saturday was sunny and a bit warmer, and beautiful with blossom. Col set off for his trip to York - two big family birthdays - and I hate to be without him, but... as long as he gets back safely.
The older I get, the more precious the gift of life seems, and the more dangerous the whole mad system of things on the earth feels.
No comments:
Post a Comment