20. A Connection With Czechoslovakia

The Obsessive Diary · Sep 26, 2025 · 2m

There was a connection with Czechoslovakia that I didn’t think of as I set off in that coach, a shaved head, a disc slipping. In the tall, cold house in London where I’d grown up, we’d had a nanny, a refugee from the revolution, the Prague Spring that was crushed by the Russians. My mother had taken many people in and this nanny was one of them, she was given the flat in the basement and the job of looking after us. She had curly red hair, and she was traumatised though I knew her as frightening which was why as I set off on that coach for a Rainbow Gathering in the Gratzen Mountains, the…