Tanya Heaslip

These places where you're very isolated and you only have each other, and I was incredibly lonely because nothing in Settled Charney was in English.

There was nothing.

The only two English words I could find were, again, sex and polizzi, which meant police.

This was a language that I could not relate to.

It's that connection of being isolated and then just being really

curious about what is it that makes people here and nature for them, fashion them, shape them.

They quoted poetry, they wrote stories, they wrote songs, they played music.

There's something about that friendships are built in that kind of maybe a vacuum or a void.

And your fellow teachers, did you make friends amongst them as well?

Yes, yes.

The ones that were outward looking, there were a number there that did not want to engage, didn't trust me.

The Czechs can be maddeningly insular at times.

Yes.

Every morning recess was somebody's name day because all the saints, every day is a saint's day in Czechoslovakia and so everybody was connected to a saint so they had their birthday and their saint day.

And so every recess was bringing out the guitars,

and the vodka and the Slivovica and the Bekarovka and anything else that they could put their hands to.

And they would drink, drink all through recess and talk about the football, their local football, their neighbours, what was happening around them, the nature.

And to the extent I could infiltrate that, I did.

It was mostly through the music.

But yeah, otherwise, they were a small village in a south of Prague in an area that was still really controlled by a sense of community