Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world. As always we choose the Czech Republic; and as always it disproves my point. I don’t know what it is about Brno, but I am as home there as I can be anywhere. And Sophie and the children feel the same.
We borrow the old cottage in the Moravian Sudetenland from which to explore a landscape wiped away by war. Since the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, their fields have gradually reforested themselves. The lanes between the crops, in which every intersection was marked by a stone Calvary or a shrine to a patron saint, are now overgrown, the lovely statuary stolen for some bourgeois garden. And the churches, though still functioning thanks to an influx of Polish priests, have a neglected air, their colourful festivals no longer honoured, their old congregations remembered only in the German-language gravestones. Yet here as elsewhere the death of one way of life is the birth of another, and the depopulated landscape offers to the new generation of Czechs a perfect place for camping, fishing, swimming in lakes, cycling in family groups, and in general reattaching themselves to their many-times stolen country.
The contest over territory is a major stimulus to art, literature and music. To it we owe the great flowering of a national culture in the music of Janáček, in the writings of Hašek and Čapek, and in the little theatres that united the Czechs between the wars in a spirit of self-satire.
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