Remembering Hannah

I am in a strange state of mind. I have returned to finalize the house sale. Unless things get delayed, which they might, this is my last stay in my home. I am already saying goodbye to places I have loved for years, and not just places.

As I walked through the woods with Helena, and again when I went alone up to the woods above my house, I found myself thinking a lot about Hannah who introduced me to the Czech Republic and all things Czech. I owe this whole Czech adventure to Hannah. I realised as I walked with Helena, that the route was one that Hannah and I had followed on my first walk in a Czech forest several years before I bought my house. The same was true of the woods above my home, where Hannah gave me my first lesson in mushroom collecting. Over the brow of the hill the woods drop down to the road to Lake Olsina, where Hannah had her cottage.

Hannah's main home was in Cesky Krumlov. She moved three times in that town, so everywhere there are reminders of her. Although she died in April 2011, those memories never used to bother me. I always took comfort from them. But now I am glad the willows planted on the island she fought for have grown so large that they curtain the view of her last home, where my memories are most painful.

Selling my Czech home seems like letting her down. When she was dying she worried that the little colony of Brits that had grown up about her would break up. I told her: no offence but I didn't just buy the house because of her and wasn't planning to sell up after her death. She was relieved by this. It mattered a great deal to her that I bought the house as a place to write poetry. She loved my poetry and wanted to encourage it. The visit I made with her to Prague in 1990 was the inspiration behind my poem for voices Fool's Paradise.

I was chatting to her son the other day, who told that his mother would have been delighted that my poetry had suddenly blossomed and that at last I have a book of poetry accepted for publication next year with Indigo Dreams (more of that anon). I know too that Hannah would have understood the fact that I now need to be in UK to pursue my poetry dream. And yet...

New Book

I am planning a new novel, set in Prague, and drawing on my experience as an ex-pat. It will be a psychological paranormal mystery, so totally appropriate for Prague, that home of the esoteric, the Golem, alchemy and Jungian theory.

I am very excited by it. Having published five ebooks now, I reckon I can do something unexpected with the medium. This blog will play an important part in that, I hope.

Why I'm here. Part 2

I had two reasons when I bought my lovely derelict Czech farmhouse. The first as I said in my post of the 9th March was my friend Hannah Kodicek, the second was to create somewhere I could write.

The two reasons were not unconnected. Hannah always encouraged me to write. I think we really became close friends when she read a long poem I had written. She had known me as a manager, something that she respected but didn't love. At the time of the house purchase I was managing an inner-city regeneration programme working with the most disadvantaged. It was worthwhile work and I would have argued then that it allowed me to be creative in other ways than producing poetry that no one read. But Hannah begged to differ, she saw better than I did how one side of my personality was dominating the other, driving the poet and mystic underground. But when I came to visit her in the Czech Republic I found that side of me welling up in response to the landscape and history of Bohemia.

So I bit the bullet and bought the house. I said I wanted a hut in the forest, something that didn't need too much work, but my subconscious saboutaged that and I bought a huge farmhouse needing lots of work. I spent the next few years working hard at my job and pouring the money I earned into restoring the house, but still I did not write.

Things came to a head when one day I found myself crying in Hannah's study. It was soon apparent that I could not continue working in my wonderful but high pressured job. I said goodbye to my old career and came over to the Czech Republic and started to write. Not poetry but a children's novel. I loved the process. Even if my first book is now in a drawer in my desk never to see the light of day. The second one's there too. I am now on my fifth book. All of my books have been written in my Czech house.

Learning Czech

I really must learn Czech - it is getting more important for me to do so. Okay I have tried, believe me I have. It is a very difficult language for someone like me who has always found that the only way to learn a language is sheer hard graft. I have a vocabulary of several hundred words, but in Czech that is not enough. Each noun has six declensions (seven if you count vocative) and each noun has a plural form which also declines. It is this more than anything else that makes busking your way through the language so difficult. Add that to the British reticence and I find it very hard to open my mouth for anything more than a familiar phrase.

But I sometimes think that my inability to learn the language is somehow more complex than simply the fact that it is so hard. I rather like the detachment that not speaking the language gives me, it is the perfect excuse to not engage, to stand back and watch. My working life is all about communication and engagement. My job has been to help people express themselves and to negotiate peace in divided communities. And yet in that world of work I never express myself, I give and I do not get back. Here in my Czech home I am under no such obligations, I have the perfect excuse I cannot speak the language. One reason for buying here has been to allow me space for myself. Ironically in this country where the language is denied me, I find myself writing and communicating as I am doing right now.

I know I must learn the language now, if as I plan I will be working here. I know too that my failure to learn in the past has seemed to others, especially my friend, a denial of everything Czech, a refusal to commit. And I will learn, I promise, but I am afraid that it may change how I feel about my Czech homeland, that it will cease to be a release for the poet in me. We shall see.