Imaginary Latvian President of the Pacifist Club
in Nicholas Shakespeare’s “Inheritance” (2010)
She told him about her upbringing in Ceuta, where her grandfather peeled potatoes in the bus depot; her passage to Gibraltar, smuggled in the bottom of a sardine boat; her years in Paguera, Mallorca, where she cleaned for an eccentric deaf widow, and in Austria, as a waitress in the Café Western, where she met the musicians with brandy-swollen eyes, the folk part of an itinerant folk-rock duo from Ottakring — who would never be aware that he had had a daughter. In return, Makertich wound her back to the souk in Aleppo, the courtyards like Oxford colleges; the voyage out on the converted refrigeration ship, and the displacement camp where his family were interned, on a hill next to public gardens, an ex-compound for Italian POWs, two rooms for forty people, so that there was always a great deal of noise; and his first lesson in English, from a Latvian doctor, a gentle man who was President of the Pacifist Club, and how everyone teased him at his first school in Perth — so that he became a gang leader, a kicker and spitter, fighting and meeting at a certain rendezvous to argue things out — but not at the next school.
Nicholas Shakespeare, Inheritance (2010), pages 201–202
