Two Caravans Read online

  After dinner I went back to the caravan and unpacked my bag. On a patch of wall below the head-level locker I stuck my picture of Mother and Pappa, standing together in front of the fireplace at home. Mother is wearing pink lipstick and a ghastly pink scarf tied in what she thinks is a stylish bow; Pappa is wearing his ridiculous orange tie. OK, so they wear terrible clothes, but they can’t help it, and I still love them. Pappa’s arm is around Mother’s shoulder, and they’re smiling in a stiff uncertain way, like people whose hearts aren’t in it, who are just posing for the camera. I looked at it while I drifted off to sleep, and a few pathetic tears came into my eyes. Mother and Pappa waiting for me at home-what’s so weepy about that?

  Next morning, when I woke up, the caravan was flooded with sunlight and everything seemed different. The gloomy thoughts and fears of yesterday had fled like ghosts into the night. When I went out to the tap to have a wash, the water splashing on the stones caught the sunbeams and broke them into hundreds of brilliant rainbows which danced through my fingers, cold and tingly. In the copse behind me, a thrush was singing.

  As I bent towards the tap, the orange ribbon slipped off my plait, swirling in the water. For a moment I remembered the orange balloons and banners in the square, the tents and music, and my parents, so excited, gabbling like teenagers about freedom and other such stuff. And I did feel a stab of sadness. Then I picked up the wet ribbon, shook it out, and hung it over the washing line. As I looked down over the valley, my heart started to dance again. I took a deep breath. This air-so sweet, so English. This was the air I’d dreamed of breathing; loaded with history, yet as light as…well, as light as something very light. How had I lived for nineteen years without breathing this air? And all the cultured, brave, warmhearted people that I’d read about in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens (OK, I admit, mostly in translation). I was ready to meet them.

  In fact I was particularly looking forward to meeting a gentleman in a bowler hat like Mr Brown in my Let’s Talk English book, who looks supremely dashing and romantic, with his tight suit and rolled-up umbrella, and especially the intriguing bulge in his trouser-zip area, which was drawn very realistically in black ink by a previous owner of that textbook. Who wouldn’t want to talk English with him?! Lord Byron looks romantic, too, despite that bizarre turban.

  English men are supposed to be incredibly romantic. There’s a famous folk-legend of a man who braves death and climbs in through his lady’s bedroom window just to bring her a box of chocolates. Unfortunately, the only Englishman I have met so far is farmer Leapish, who doesn’t seem to fit into this category. I hope he is not typical.

  Please don’t think I’m one of those awful Ukrainian girls who come to England only to ensnare a husband. I’m not. But if love should happen to come my way, OK, my heart is open and ready.

  The kettle starts to whistle. Andriy pours the water onto the teabag, adds two spoonfuls of sugar, and cradling the hot cup in his hands, he wanders down to the gate, where he sometimes stands when he has an idle moment, observing the passing cars and looking out for his Angliska rosa. Leaning on his elbows, he drinks slowly, enjoying the heat in his throat, the cool breeze blowing up the Downs, and the noisy chatter of birds doing their early morning stuff. The sun has come up over the hill and although it isn’t yet eight o’clock, he can already feel its warmth on his skin. The light is as sharp as crystal, marking out the landscape with hard crisp shadows.

  He likes to come down here, to look out at this England which, despite being just beyond the gate, still seems tantalisingly out of reach. Where are you, Let’s Talk English Mrs Brown, with your tiny waist and tailored spotted blouse? Where are you, Vagvaga Riskegipd, with your bubblegum and ferocious kisses? Since he came to England two weeks ago he hasn’t met a single Angliska rosa. He has seen them drive past, so he knows they exist. Sometimes he waves, and once one of them even waved back. And yes, she was blonde, and yes, she was driving a red open-top Ferrari. She was gone in the twinkling of an eye, before he could even vault over the gate to see the rear spoiler disappear round the bed in the lane. But for sure she lives somewhere nearby, so it is only a matter of time before she reappears. OK, so his last girlfriend Lida Zakanovka went off with a footballer. Good luck to her. There are better women waiting for him over here in England.

  He blows on the hot tea to cool it down, and thinks about his last visit to England. How long ago was that? It was about eighteen years, so he must have been seven years old. He was accompanying his father on a fraternal delegation to visit the mineworkers’ union in the city of Sheffield, which is twinned with his home town, Donetsk. Learn, boy, his father had said. Learn about the beauty of international solidarity. Though it didn’t do him much good when he needed it. Poor Dad.

  He doesn’t remember much about Sheffield, but three things stand out in his memory from that visit. First, he recalls, there was a banquet, and a sticky pink dessert, of which he ate so much that he was later horribly, messily, pinkily sick in the back of a car.

  Second, he remembers that the renowned visionary ruler of the city, who had welcomed them warmly with a long-long speech about solidarity and the dignity of labour (the speech had so impressed his father that he repeated it many times over), who had sat next to them at the banquet and kindly pressed more and more of that treacherous pink dessert on him, and in the back of whose car he had later been sick-this man was blind. The man’s astonishing blindness, the fearsome all-excluding wall bricked up behind his visionary eyes, had fascinated Andriy. He had closed his eyes tight and tried to imagine what it would be like to live behind that wall of blindness; he went around bumping into things, until his father slapped him and told him to behave himself.

  The other thing he remembers is his first kiss. The girl-she must have been a daughter of one of the delegates-was older and bolder than him, a long-legged girl with white-blond hair and a sprinkle of freckles on her nose. She smelt of soap and bubblegum. While the fraternal speeches droned on and on in the hall, the two of them had played a wild game of chase along the echoing corridors of the vast civic building, racing up and down stairs, dodging in doorways, shrieking with excitement. She had pounced on him at last and wrestled him down on the stone stairs, pinning him to the ground, pressing her strong body on top on him. They were both out of breath, panting and laughing. Suddenly she had swooped down on him with her lips and kissed him-a wet, insistent kiss, her tongue pushing against his mouth. It was a kiss of subjugation. He’d been too young and too astonished to do anything but surrender. Then she’d given him a bit of paper with her name scrawled on it, the Ts dotted with little hearts. Vagvaga Riskegipd. An incredibly sexy name. And a telephone number. He still has it, tucked into the back of his wallet like a talisman. At school, when the other boys chose to study Russian language or German, he chose English.

  He tries to conjure up her face. Fair hair. Freckles. The smell of bubblegum is vivid in his memory. An incredibly sexy smell. Does she still remember him? What does she look like now? She would be in her early thirties. What would she do if he suddenly appeared on her doorstep?

  They say Angliski women are incredibly sexy. According to Vitaly, who knows these things, Angliski women are as cold as ice to touch, but once they start to melt-once the passion heats them and they melt inside-it’s just like a river bursting its banks. There’s no stopping these Vagvaga women; these Mrs Brown women. A man has to keep a cool head or he could drown in the torrent of their passion. But getting them to melting point-there’s a real skill in that, says Vitaly. The Angliska woman is attracted to dashing men of action, men who are bold enough to make hazardous journeys and climb in through bedroom windows bearing boxes of chocolates, etc. This type of behaviour melts the Angliska woman’s icy heart. Will strawberries be OK as a substitute for chocolates? For all other acts in this drama he’s prepared. He’s ready for anything. He feels the life-blood pulsing through his body, and he wants to live-to live more sweetly, more intensely. “Be a man,” his father had said.
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  One of the annoying things about my mother is the way she always classifies people according to their level of culture. It’s as if she carries a perfectly denned hierarchy of culture in her head.

  “It doesn’t cost anything to be cultured, Irina,” she says, “which is just as well, because if it did, teachers would be among the least cultured people in Ukraine.”

  The worst thing is, I seem to have picked up her habit, even though I know you shouldn’t judge people by appearances, but sometimes you can’t help it. Take us strawberry-pickers, for example.

  Although they are Chinese, the Chinese girls are definitely cultured types. One is a student of medicine and one is a student of accountancy. I can’t remember which is which, but medicine is more cultured than accountancy. The Chinese Chinese girl has her hair cut short like a boy’s, and she’s quite pretty, but her legs are too thin. The Malaysian Chinese girl is also pretty, but she has a perm, which looks stupid on that type of hair. Maybe it’s the other way round. They are friendly towards me, but they talk and giggle together all the time, which is annoying when you don’t know what they’re giggling about. Their English is terrible.

  Next come Tomasz, Marta and Emanuel. Tomasz is some kind of boring government bureaucrat, though he has taken leave of absence from his job because he says he can earn more money picking strawberries-stupid, isn’t it? He claims to be a poet, which of course is extremely cultured, though there is little evidence of this, unless you count those dreary songs he sings whenever Yola is around. And besides he is quite ancient, he must be in his forties, and he has a pathetic little beard and hair almost down to his shoulders like a hippy. Koshmar! And there’s a dire smell about him.

  Marta is educated, and she even speaks a bit of French, but that Roman Catholic-type education is full of rules and mysteries and lacking practical content-like Western Ukrainians. Anyway, Mother says that Catholic is less cultured than Orthodox. Marta is nice and friendly, but she has a big nose. Probably that is why she’s still unmarried at the age of thirty.

  Emanuel is adorable, but he is not quite eighteen and also a Catholic, though he appears to be an intelligent type, and he wears a horrible green anorak even when it’s not raining. Of course he is black, but this does not make him any less cultured, because as any cultured person knows, black people are just as cultured as anybody else. He often sings as he picks strawberries in the field, and he has a beautiful voice, but he only sings religious songs. It would be nice if he sang something more amusing.

  Vitaly is mysterious. He never gives you a straight answer. Sometimes he disappears, no one knows where. He is clearly intelligent because he speaks good English and several other languages, but his manner is rather coarse and he wears a gold chain with a silver penknife dangling round his neck. His eyes are dark and twinkly with cute curly eyelashes, and his hair is black and curly. In fact he is not bad-looking in a flashy curly sort of way. I would give him seven out often. Though he is not my type. Maybe he is a gipsy.

  Near the bottom is Ciocia Yola (strictly speaking she is only Malta ’s aunt, but we all call her Ciocia). She is a vulgar person with a gap between her front teeth and obviously dyed hair. (My mother’s hair is dyed too, but it’s not so obvious.) She claims she was once a nursery school teacher, which is not a proper teacher at all, and she also claims to be the supervisor, and puts on airs which are unwarranted and extremely irritating. She likes to sound off about her opinions, which are generally not worth listening to.

  Right at the bottom is Andriy, the miner’s son from Donbas. Unfortunately miners are generally primitive types who find it difficult to be cultured, however hard they try. When he works in the field I can smell his sweat. He takes his shirt off when it gets too hot and shows off his muscles. OK, they may even ripple a bit. But he is definitely not my type.

  As for me, I’m nineteen, and everything else about me is still to-be. Fluent English-speaker to-be. I hope. Romantically-in-love to-be. Are you ready, Mr Brown? World-famous writer to-be, like my Pappa. I have already started to think about the book I will write when I get back home. But you have to have something interesting to write about, don’t you? More interesting than a bunch of strawberry-pickers living in two caravans.

  Yola’s eyes narrow as she watches the Ukrainian girl wander along the strawberry rows as if she had all the time in the world to fill those punnets. Out in the strawberry field it’s the hierarchy of the check-in that matters. Several times a day, the farmer counts the trays of punnets, checks them in, stacks them on pallets in the prefab, and notes down who has earned what. The women generally earn less. The men earn more. The supervisor of course earns the most.

  Yola is both the gang-mistress and the supervisor. As a former teacher, she is a person of natural authority and a woman of action. It is her belief that maintaining a pleasant sexual harmony within the picking team is the key to success, and for this reason she encourages the men to take their shirts off in the sun.

  She doesn’t want any griping or unpleasant comments behind her back, especially from those Ukrainians, now there are two of them. Not that she has anything against Ukrainians, but it is her belief that the high point of Ukrainian civilisation was its brief occupation by Poland, though the civilising effects were clearly quite short-lived and superficial. To be fair, this Ukrainian boy Andriy is quite a gentleman as well as a good picker, but he is inclined to moodiness, and he thinks too much. Thinking is not good for a man. He is quite nice-looking, though of course he is much too young for her, and she isn’t the type of woman to seduce a boy half her age, though she knows some who are in Zdroj, which she will tell you about later.

  Yes, if only there were more good pickers like that. Nobody understands the problems she faces, for her pay depends not just on her own efforts but on the performance of the good-for-nothing team she supervises in the field. She tells them-but will they listen?-to pick strawberries just right. Too white and farmer will reject. Too ripe and shops complain. And you have to handle correctly, and drop gently-don’t throw-into punnet. She tells them, and they just carry on exactly the same as before. Really, she is getting too old for this game.

  This is her second summer as a supervisor, her seventh summer in England, and the forty-seventh summer of her life. She is beginning to think she has had enough. During those seven summers she has picked almost fifty tonnes of strawberries for the Dumpling, and the income from this, added to the extra sums paid for additional services of a private nature, have allowed her to buy a pretty three-roomed bungalow on the outskirts of Zdroj with half a hectare of garden that leads down to the Prosna River where her son Mirek can potter around to his heart’s content. She has a photo in her purse of Mirek in the garden sitting on a rope-swing that hangs from the branch of a cherry tree in full blossom. Ah, those little smiling eyes! When he was born, she had to make a difficult choice-give up her job or put him in an institution. Well, she has seen those institutions, thank you very much. Then someone at the school said they were recruiting strawberry-pickers for England, and her sister said she would look after Mirek for the summer, so she seized the opportunity. And what woman of action but of limited choices would not do the same?

  Last autumn she invested some of her strawberry money in a pair of Masurian goats and this year there are two snow-white kids running about in the garden, bleating, jumping over each other, nibbling at the dahlias and generally causing mayhem. She was thinking of those kids as she lay on the straw in the back of the Dumpling’s Land Rover last night looking up at the swaying roof, while he toiled and puffed away above her. And she smiled to herself and let out some delightful bleating noises, which the Dumpling mistook for cries of pleasure.

  Usually Yola brings a team of pickers she has recruited locally in Zdroj, for there were always people desperate for a bit of cash since they closed the millinery factory, but this year nobody wants to come, because now Poland is in Europe marketing why should they work for that kind of money when they can earn better money leg
ally? Three friends who were supposed to be coming let her down at the last minute, and she has brought only Marta and Tomasz to England with her. The Dumpling has had to find additional labour through other agents of a more shady character, and has even hinted that he will not renew her contract. Just let him dare-we will see what the wife has to say.

  Being a supervisor is not as easy as you think. You have to deal with all types of personality. That Tomasz, for instance, has been hanging around making eyes at her, well, that is in itself not so surprising, as she is generally thought to be an attractive woman, but at the end of the day he has come to England to pick strawberries, not for any activities of a more carnal nature, for which there are plenty enough opportunities back in Poland, Lord help us.

  Or take Marta, her niece-her religious airs are enough to put anyone off sainthood.

  “Are you OK, Ciocia?” she asked, the first time she saw Yola lying on the ground with her shapely legs stretched in front of her, breathing deeply with her eyes closed.

  “I am letting the sun enter my body to warm me from inside like a good husband. Why don’t you do the same, Marta?”

  “Why would I want the sun for a husband?” Marta said sniffily. “I will let the spirit of the Lord warm me from inside.”

  Probably her excessive piety is not her fault. She could only have learnt it from her mother, Yola’s sister, who although very kind when it comes to looking after Mirek, can be extremely irritating. Well, it’s one thing to go to church and ask for forgiveness for your own sins, but quite another thing to rub other people’s noses in theirs.

  And while we’re on the subject of noses, it is of course not Malta ’s fault that hers is so big, but maybe it is why she has so little discrimination when it comes to men, for she seems to be drawn to the most unsuitable types and obvious sinners, like Vitaly, for example. Yes, Yola has observed the way Marta’s eyes follow him about the field, and she doesn’t want the poor girl to be taken advantage of. She knows that type of man. She was married to one, once.