Backwards to Forwards by Kevin Ireland

Author:Kevin Ireland [Kevin Ireland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869796433
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

YOU’RE ALWAYS TOO BLOODY SOMETHING

In the Balkans the people are so contrary that still to this day they often shake their heads from side to side when they mean yes, and nod up and down when they mean no. In a world of endless, bewildering lunacy, I’ve always felt this to be a kind of accolade. For me, Bulgarians really do have a lot going for themselves, even if it means that you have to be particularly careful not to answer with head signs when a barber asks if you’d like just a little off.

I left the country with many friends and strange and wonderful memories. In 1959 people simply did not go into Eastern Europe without a bean in their pockets, then get married and stay on in the hope of thinking of something that would help get their spouse out some months later. I was an oddball, I’d been liked for being one, I’d been treated like an honoured guest, and I knew it.

I would probably have had to borrow the money to leave, but curiously it was doggerel that saved the day. By turning out screeds of appalling translations of the stuff – with the unflagging help of Margot, my wife and a lot of mind-numbing wine – I managed to earn two airfares to London, plus a few black-market American dollars.

Going back to London was like returning from cloud-cuckooland to the flinty realms of reality. The affluent West was a far tougher place to make a living than the threadbare but weirdly cosseted East and, as I’ve explained, it was only Kasmin’s help that gave me a lucky breathing space to ease my way back into a room and a job.

Getting a job turned out to be an amusing and enlightening experience. Kasmin was the first to come up with an idea. He had a friend called George, who bought The Times and the Daily Telegraph, plus all the main newspapers from abroad each day – Le Monde, the New York Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung among others – in order to check through them to see if there might be news of an inheritance he was hoping for.

George was a fat, affluent, amiable, well-dressed man, and he had no trouble in passing himself off as perfectly sane, so long as nobody got onto the subject of inheritances. In this single matter he was not only clearly right off his nut, but he became a real danger to himself. The piles of newspapers in his house were threatening to bring the place down and bury him alive. He needed someone to help him comb through the papers and to get rid of the tons he had accumulated over the years. But I had to turn down Kasmin’s suggestion that I should become George’s paid assistant – on the grounds that it was work for a trained nurse.

Then I remembered that during one of my last conversations in Sofia with Pip Piper, he had remarked in

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