The artist's quest. 6 The polka dot handkerchief and the stick.

 

When you have spent near a decade living in a tiny little village, in the English countryside which contains:

1 shop /post office, that sells everything stale & out of date .

1 pub you wouldn’t be seen dead at because all of the parental generation neighbours go there

1 gothic church with a very creepy graveyard

1 cricket pitch 

1 dismal playground

1 social hall

1 tiny village pre-school

& 1 convicted paedophile housed on the edge of the woods.

And had spent years going to school miles away, on a bicycle tough all the weathers, - unless some kind of free ride happened, 

because the 1 old ambulance that had been turned into a bus,

drove once, a day to the wrong town.

This precisely describes the village, Elford , where stepfather had uprooted us to, from the Adriatic sea side, where I was borne. 

When in a whoosh of heroic feeling , and live for the day kind of adrenaline, experienced every day of the 5 year long -triple whammy, Croatia/Serbia/Bosnia war in the 90's that marked the bloody end of the once  happy socialist brotherhood of Yugoslavia,  

he an retired army Engineer /English UN dude,  fell besotted with my beautiful younger mother, - his un mission secretary, and once he in the role of hero, helped retrieve my than kidnaped baby brother from war zone Bosnia,  they cut off their tails, and re-married one-another.

Elford was really pretty and really pretty boring. Come autumn at 5pm , all its 200 single race, single nationality, mostly retired, neighbours, cows, sheep, and houses all vanished into the river mists .

Warning.  

London , arriving form such a context,  may have appeared, more exciting, than to all the naturalised metropolitans who may lift their nose snobbily at the innocent enthusiasm with which

I packed all my belongings in into a polka dot handkerchief ,

tied it to a stick, 

and got on the road to the city paved with gold, 

as far as I was concerned.

Dickens , whose guide books to London life I was most familiar with from school Literature class, had not ruined any of it for me .