Ivan Kosenko

“None of us had much money. And the way things were there, you’ll find it ridiculous, but some of the children there were from farmers’ families, who were slightly better off. Well, and they would send for bread, for food, or for a snack from the shop in the town. And I offered to go get it for them. And they always paid me twenty-five hellers [25 hellers = 1/4 crown, the equivalent of a British farthing – trans.], right, twenty-five hellers for each delivery. And I saved those hellers up, those twenty-five-heller coins. I got myself a little wooden box. And we had, in the boys’ club room we each had a kind of locker, which closed with a bolt but couldn’t be locked, it just had the latch. Well, and I had it there. Never a coin did I lose. Not a single twenty-five hellers. The children were poor, but no one ever – they knew I had it there, I had as much as a hundred there afterwards, or more – but no one went there, no one took a single heller.”

“When my mother died, my father was left on his own. He was fifty-one. Well, and one Mrs Pinčíková from Mariánské Lázně paired him up with some lady, and he ended up marrying her. But, you can imagine, I had unruly blood, and I didn’t respect it. She was, I admit, it was a kind of intrusion into our well-ordered family, so I didn’t accept her one bit. Which caused certain problems and conflicts and ended up with them sending me, they told me I was skinny, malnourished, which was true, and they sent me to a sanatorium somewhere in Bukovany near Písek, or wherever. That was for a month. When I came back, I found that Grandma was gone. They’d stuffed Grandma into a care home in the meantime. And my father, I don’t know what magic he used, he then somehow got her to go to Yugoslavia.”