20. A Connection With Czechoslovakia

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 seats replaced with armchairs, a bed at the back, I didn’t think of her. I had shut her, and the crazed rampage of her, out of my mind. But everything is connected. We got the ferry to France, drove up the coast to Holland, stopped in a park in Amsterdam where my friends went out for the night and I stayed on the coach smoking pot. A man peered in at the many windows, circling. I huddled on the bed growing frightened, scenarios of rape and death ripping through my mind. I knew if he boarded the coach I’d be trapped. Something took me over. I went to the front, opened the door. Outrage at his imposition had made me wild. I doubled in size. I screamed fury at him, threw all the knives in my heart. He backed away and was swallowed by the night. I went back to bed. My friends returned. Somewhere in Germany a dawn filled with birds had us piled on the dirt road stretching from travel. I hung off the door frame to straighten my spine and bent on my knees to a tree seeing god in a halo of light. In the wooded mountains of Czechoslovakia we parked in a clearing, took acid and walked the last few kilometres of sandy road, collecting others as we went, this amassing of bare feet and blankets, dreadlocks and staffs to a place of tipis and fire and incessant drumming. Smoke curled into blue sky. I watched it circle the camp, giant and white above us, a snake, its mouth open, eating its tail. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe