“I was born in Prague in 1962 into an unhappy, violent home. My mother and father had a very unhappy marriage. When My mother was 17 he stalked her and she married him at 18. Her whole family boycotted the wedding and warned her not to marry him but she did. He was violent and abusive. Not a good man. I was born into this unhappy situation and by the time I was a toddler she realised I was in danger too.
My Grandmother lived in the next block and said to my mother you have to leave him and move in here or don’t come as I can’t deal with this anymore. Mum went to the Police and they said ‘Well you married him, what do you expect us to do?’ She was very traumatised and also had a traumatised childhood.
We moved in with my grandparents when I was a toddler but under Communism there was institutional kind of childcare in place where the mothers were encouraged to breastfeed for 3 months. If they worked in a factory a siren would go off for the all the mothers to breastfeed their babies who were kept in a creche. You were allowed to stay home with your baby for 3 months, after 3 months you were expected to go back to work. I think it was set up to dissolve family units. Everybody became a bit loyal to the state and all of these children were raised by other people. You were allowed one year maximum to stay home with your baby but you were considered a lazy woman if you did so my mother stayed with me for one year and at 12 months I was put into the child care centre. I have very early memories of not knowing where I am. I have a lot of abandonment feelings and needing to be loved. I don’t think I got enough love as a child.
My father abandoned me and I never heard from him again. He wasn’t interested in me. He was allowed to have me on Saturdays. He would pick me up, take me to his mums house, drop me off there for the day then pick me up and take me home. Mum would ask me what I did – ‘I went to the park with a lady and another lady with a pram.’ She worked out he was taking me to his Mums as his sister had a baby. Mum said to him. — ‘You needn’t bother if you are just dropping her off to your Mums.’ He never saw me again. I never got a letter or a call ever.
When I turned 50 I decided I wanted to meet him. I went to Prague and we had lunch. I didn’t want him to die and me not know who he was. I decided not to cry and think about the past. I just wanted to meet him as a person. He was really nothing to me apart from a biological father and I had only heard the most horrific stories about what he was like. Look, he was friendly, we had lunch he had 3 marriages all of which failed and he produced a child from each marriage. The others didn’t know I existed. He never spoke of me. I always had this sense as a child that I didn’t exist. I’d be in a room full of adults, I knew I was there but no-one interacted with me as people do with kids. I became very quiet and very, very introverted and I was very good, compliant and did everything I was told because I wanted to please.
Mum was born in 1942 in Prague when the Nazis had invaded and the sirens were going. Her father, my grandfather was also a violent abuser so when she moved in with them there was tension in the home. The father at that age had calmed but there was an uncomfortable silence in the house, a tense, unhappy feeling. My Grandmother was loving but she was a strict Catholic so she was very good at cleaning the house, making the soup and taking care of me and my mother used to go out a lot. She was only 20 and had a job with 12 hour shifts. Mum wasn’t very well educated. She had learning difficulties and left school at 15 but being a Communist country they found jobs for everybody. She worked in an office that gave soldiers their wages once a month so for one week of the month they would be very busy and the other 3 weeks would be spent sitting around doing each others hair and nails. They also learnt how to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. That habit stayed with her for her entire life. She could never give up, she was trained at work from an early age. She also became an alcoholic. Her life was just so awful and hard. Basically a lot of Czech people are alcoholic. It’s a part of the culture to drink a lot.
Mum fell in love with a man who was a musician. This was at the time we were living with my grandparents. He was the love of her life but she wouldn’t bring him to the house, she would go out and meet him. I have her diary, his diary and their love letters from 1968. I’ve pieced everything together. They were going to get married. I think she was pregnant but lost the baby. He was killed in a bus crash. The bus was full of amazing musicians who were touring in Ulanbatar, Mongolia. Mum thought it was a conspiracy that the communists put all these amazing artists on a bus with failed brakes and it crashed off a mountain. It was full of beautiful people, famous singers and wonderful musicians who had families. They were all killed. He possibly could have been saved had there been access to them by ambulance but he bled to death. They ended up putting all the bodies onto a truck.
Mum had a complete break down. I remember someone coming to our door and her collapsing on the floor in a heap. After a while she met a criminal on one of her nights out. He was 22, 5 years younger than her and also a musician. Criminals were good at finding fake passports. Russia invaded and I remember standing on the street holding my mothers hand and a tank drove past with a soldier holding a gun. I remember not knowing what was happening. People were running around trying to confuse the soldiers as they didn’t want them to find where the radio was being broadcast from. They took down all the street signs and changed them to confuse them. There’s not enough Czech people to win a war ever. They just always get invaded. So when we were invaded life looked even more grim.
We were on a waiting list for a flat but that was going to take years so the criminal, George got us out. I remember it was January and snowing. I was 6 and had started school. I remember looking up at the window and waving to my grandmother who knew we weren’t coming back but no-one else was allowed to know. She was so sad and now that I am a grandmother I know she would have been heartbroken. She had raised me and she knew we were leaving but didn’t know where to.
We had these fake passports and this guy George who was creepy. He just wasn’t a good man. We went to Vienna and my mother didn’t want to give up her passport. You had to go to the migrant hostels where the migrants fled to and you had to give up your passport. She was scared as they would have sent her back so they stayed at a youth hostel where children were not allowed. She used to hide me in the bed at night. My mother had red hair and she had a fake bee-hive head piece so at night she would put the fake bee hive on my head while I slept. She would hide in the toilets as they came around at night with torches to check. We stayed there waiting to go to Australia or Canada. I remember Australians came over and showed a big movie about beaches, palm trees, life is great in Australia and Mum always loved the sun. George used to go out and do work digging snow and all the money he got he would spend on cowboy boots for himself. We very quickly became aware that he wasn’t going to take care of us.
We got passage to Australia but at that time they didn’t want single mothers with children. They only wanted married people with families so she married him so she could get to Australia. We went to a Catholic church and there was this long queue of people getting married just because they had to. I can remember they would pass the bouquet to the next woman when they were done. They married and we flew in a plane. He took the window seat which shows what he was like. We were given little jiffy slippers on the plane and I wore those for months as I didn’t have any shoes.”