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.

Masopust at Cowley Road Carnival

In my post in February on Czech Carnival - Masopust I talked of our plans to bring a Czech masopust group to Oxford's Cowley Road Carnival. Well this weekend it happened. They arrived on Friday, having travelled across Europe in a van. We had managed to get them accommodation at St Hilda's College - a lovely Oxford University college near Magdalen Bridge. I took them for a meal at the Bodrum Kebab restaurant, which treated our Czech visitors to East Oxford's famous hospitality and a large mixed kebab each. Afterwards we went to a bar where they were welcomed by local artists and musicians. After a few beers and initial shyness Czechs and Brits were soon jamming and sharing each other's music.

On the Saturday the group explored Oxford and then travelled to the Cotswolds, ending up at my home for tea. They had asked me about typical English food at the Bodrum restaurant and I had said that English food was what people ate at home. And so we offered them a typical English tea - three types of cheese (of which Oxford Blue was a great success followed closely by Cheddar), pork pie and sausage rolls (I explained that food in pastry casings was very much an English speciality) and finally chutney. Remarkably the Czechs, who pickle everything as far as I can tell, do not know about chutney. Chutney is of course originally from India and a product of our imperial past which has evolved into something very British, so I suppose it isn't that surprising that the Czechs don't have it. Chutney was hugely successful. Afterwards we had scones with fresh cream and home-made strawberry jam - again a great success. This was all washed down with local apple juice and mugs of tea, drunk with milk in the English manner. After the meal I took them to the local Tesco's to buy ingredients for Czech Masopust doughnuts, English cheese, chutney and local ale, which they had sampled and enjoyed in a pub in Northleach.


On Sunday, with doughnuts in a basket and wearing their tall hats and rag coats, the Czechs joined the Carnival procession down the Cowley Road. It was wonderful to see them there. There were a whole range of carnival traditions - (as you can see) they were walking behind a Trindadian skeleton figure, in front of him was a giant puppet made with local artists, elsewhere there were samba bands from Brazil and a giant Bangladeshi tiger. When they saw me they dragged me into the road and danced round me - it is meant to be bring good luck, something I could do with right now. I spotted them several times through the day, walking through the crowds attracting a lot of attention with their top hats covered with flowers (they were surprised and delighted as people came up to them to talk and to ask to have their photo taken).

Towards the end of the day they came to my office and presented me with a special bottle of slivonic and a cd of Czech traditional music. They seemed very pleased with their reception and amazed by the size of our carnival. They have invited me to go to their town when they give a presentation to their fellow townsfolk about their trip to Oxford. As for East Oxford Action we have a wonderful record for the Heritage Lottery project we are doing on the traditions of Carnival and have a real tool to help us access the Czech community in our midst.

Chanterelles

As you will have gathered from my earlier posts I have caught the Czech mushroom collecting bug. Although you can find early boletus in the woods, my favourite at this time of year is the egg yellow chanterelle. You will find chanterelles in small troops nestled into moss on banks of dappled shade. They are good mushrooms for a beginner as they are easy to identify with their yellow cap fluted down into a yellow stem. Instead of the usual mushroom gills chanterelles have forked ridges which continue from the cap down the stem. Like all mushroom collectors of my acquaintance I have several mushroom identification books (my favourite by the way is the River Cottage Handbook No 1) and these talk about chanterelles having a scent of apricots. Well they do but only in the way that you get those white paints with a hint of apricot. Chanterelles smell of mushrooms with a hint of apricot, which you can miss if you haven't enough of them.

Today I returned home with enough of these yellow treasures to make a dinner of them for my husband and me. They have such a wonderful flavour and texture that they do not need fancy recipes, just fry them and then serve with scrambled eggs and a slice of bread (Czech rye bread if you can get it) and you will be in ecstasy. My husband was quite smitten with them.

PS Chanterelles were not the only thing harvested in the forest today, there were wild raspberries and strawberries too. However those small atom bombs of flavour somehow didn't make it to the basket. Don't tell my old man.

Finding the House 4 - The Old Man

After we left the barn we stood on the terrace and looked at the house. Through the orchard's high grass came an old man in a train guard's cap carrying a large crate of plums, which had been harvested from the hugely prolific trees. He was introduced to us as the father of the family. He enthusiastically greeted us. We asked if he had worked on the railways for long, "Oh no," we were told, "He just likes the hat!"

We were then invited up to his little cottage in the woods. I took one of the family - the daughter's husband - to go fishing on the lake at Lipno and then drove back along the main road and turned right up a barely tarmacked road and across the railway line. The old man's cottage was small and new - built, he said proudly, by his son. The son looked none too pleased by this, the old man appeared to be angling for me to employ the son to work on the house restoration and the son knew all too well just how big those repairs would be, although throughout the viewing he had assured me that there was very little to do and I believed him because I wanted to.

We sat outside next to the smoking oven and the slivovice began to flow. I was fortunate that I was driving and so had the perfect excuse for refusing the highly alcoholic home-made brew. The man in our party was not so lucky, the old man plied him with glass upon glass, and it rapidly became a matter of British masculine pride to accept and despite his partner's protestations he became happily mellow. The slivovice was accompanied by home-made Czech chocolate and courgette cakes, which sound weird but if you think about it are no weirder than carrot cake, and were very tasty.

The old man was missing a finger on one of his hands and emboldened by the alcohol our friend asked about its loss. The old man explained that he lost it in an accident when chopping firewood. We asked if he could have saved it - warming to his audience the old man explained that the finger had lain twitching on the floor and before he could grab it the cat had dashed out and disappeared off with it in his mouth. His daughter raised her eyes, clearly she had heard the story many times before and probably in a number of versions, and we all laughed.

An hour or so later we piled into the car and drove back to Cesky Krumlov. I had agreed to buy a Czech property, which was totally at variance with my wants list. The sun was shining, we were smiling after the family's hospitality, all seemed well with the world.

Looking back.

It is interesting this retrospective blogging, that I have been doing over these last few posts. It allows me to look again at my feelings and motivation for buying my Czech home, why this house, why then. So much has happened in the two and half years since I first stood in the farm's courtyard and looked up at the barn. It has distorted my view of things - the work, the times of despair and doubt, the discovery of one problem after another, and now the pleasure of the house transformed - all have in some way pulled a veil over those first emotions. I thought I knew them, but now through these blogs I find I did not.

In particular I had forgotten that it was not the house that really made my heart pace at that first encounter but the barn. It therefore strikes me as strange that whilst I have restored the house, pouring in far more money than I had calculated, the barn remains as it was then, with the exception of a new roof, which was forced on me by the heavy snow of the first winter. I am still in awe of its potential (so much more than that of the house) and it is that potential that perhaps stayed my hand. One could argue quite reasonably that I have not done work on the barn because of simple finances or lack thereof, but I am not entirely convinced by such a rational argument. I suspect, as is the case in my entire Czech property adventure, that the subconscious was playing its part too.

The truth is I still don't quite know what I am doing here. I feel like some hero in a Czech fairy story - I have followed the path into the dark forest and after some adventure have arrived in a large bright clearing. Here I rest and recover, but now I begin to make out another trail leading away and into a darker section of the forest. There things move in the shadows and I know that at some time I must leave the warm grass and go on. But now I wait for a sign - a deer or dove perhaps. In investing in the house I invested in a home, the barn however is for another purpose and I have no doubt that it is connected with my future work whatever that may be.

A first look at the barn

The most impressive building in many ways was not the house but the barn that ran at right angles to the house. It was typical of the barns of this area in South Bohemia - two storeys with a balcony. Originally the barn would have formed one side of a courtyard, but the barn that would have been opposite the house had been removed at some time. This had the effect of opening the courtyard out to the sun and offering lovely views from the house into the orchard.

The back of the barn, like the house, was built into a hillside and so the upper floor had two doors opening onto the hillside . This meant that the sheep and other animals could walk straight into the top floor. This was not an unadulterated success as we discovered when we entered the barn.

Inside the barn was a tumbledown collection of tat - much as the attic had been. But this did not disguise the fact that the barn was remarkable. The ceiling consisted of a series of brick vaults springing from the granite walls. The animal stalls were made of huge blocks of granite with carved finials to tie the beasts to. However at one point the ceiling had given way and straw hung down from upstairs. "What happened?" we asked the owners. "Oh the sheep fell through the ceiling," they replied. The urine from the animals which had overwintered in the barn had destroyed the bricks. Concerned we asked whether the sheep were hurt - "Oh no," they shrugged, "They had a soft landing." I could not help thinking that that might not have been the case for the ones that fell through first.

Upstairs there was an open space with large exposed beams, however in places it did seem as though timbers were missing - taken perhaps to prop something up or feed the winter stoves. Crowded higgledy piggledy into the barn were chicken coups, unidentifiable structures, old beds, and even a couple of wild boar skins, discarded probably where the animal had been carved up. The roof was made of concrete tiles, which no doubt had fallen off the back of a lorry. These were far heavier than the traditional Czech ceramic tiles and were placing quite a strain on the remaining timbers. I didn't notice this in my first flush of enthusiasm for the house. Suddenly instead of a simple retreat in this lovely country, I could see potential, so much potential.

Finding the House

I am trying very hard to remember what my first impressions were of the house I now know as home. Well, for starters, it was a lot bigger property than I had ever imagined I could afford, much bigger than the Cotswold cottage we had at home in the UK. But that said it was packed to the gunnels with a hotchpotch of furniture, all of it old and rather tatty, which actually reduced my appreciation of the size of the place. On that furniture lounged various members of the owners' family.

I was shown around by the daughter and son of the old woman, whose house this had been and who had died some seven years earlier. Since her death the house had been used as a chalupa by her children and grandchildren. Nothing much had been done to maintain the place in those seven years and one suspected not much had been done for many years before. Indeed everything had that make-do-and-mend look that I had come to recognise in many Czech properties, where an absence of money and access to DIY materials under the communists had led to sometimes brilliant inventiveness and more often to some very weird contraptions. This tradition has continued as a visit to the local DIY stores will vouch. Fortunately in the case of my house this seemed to have been combined with a degree of laziness that meant that the damage was limited, with the exception of an abandoned attempt at creating a shower (on the landing of all places).

In the large front room downstairs there was a sitting area with huge television and a kitchen made of punched metal (see above). Such a kitchen in the UK would have been a collectors' item, and would probably have been at a high specification of design, this cheap Czech version merited no such interest. Next to the stove was a door into the bathroom where there were two boilers (heated by wood), as the family had installed a new one and not bothered to remove the old. At the back of the ground floor were two cellars which were built into the hill behind and the door to the lower cellar.Upstairs were five rooms, one of which was being used as another sitting room. From the landing an open stair led into an enormous loftspace, so large that it could accommodate a reasonable-sized flat, but when I saw it first was a general dumping ground for broken furniture, old carpets etc. From the roof beams hung old duvets, which thanks to mice or martins were emptying their contents on to the floor. My friend told me that traditionally in Winter the roof space was used for drying the washing - it was as if the old lady had left her bedding up there to dry and never returned. The roof beams were huge compared to British ones and there were lots of them. The roof was covered with grey tiles which were beginning to fry and I noted would need replacing.

Despite the fact that I had said I didn't want to do any work on my Czech property purchase the potential of the place really appealed. Despite the tat and clutter the house spoke to me and it said "Take care of me!" and I listened in a way I had not done in any of the other places I had looked at.