BARTLEBY

Building bonds

As I write this, the Russian army is advancing into Ukraine. With the threat of Covid apparently diminishing, you’d think we might be allowed a year off from death and disaster, but instead we’re faced with war in Europe. We’ve spent decades telling each other, ‘This must never happen again!’. But it is.

I’ve been aware of trouble brewing in eastern Ukraine for quite a while, not because I have a part-time gig as a roving correspondent but because our youngest had a Ukrainian friend at primary school. At the time the school was distinctly average in some ways. If it had been a football team it would have been hovering around the bottom of the table. But just as small teams often have the most devoted and tightlyknit supporters, so the school supported a wonderful community of kids, staff and parents – not to mention the dinner ladies, one of whom still lives near us. She had – still has – a booming voice, and when kept awake by partying students would appear on her doorstep the following day and harangue them as they scuttled past to the shop.

Ambitious local parents avoided the school. They took the narrow view that growing up is all about academic achievement, but what attracted us to the place was its strong community and the extraordinary mixture of kids who went there. When our eldest was in Year Three someone did a survey and found there were seventeen languages spoken (as a first language) by children at the school. There were children whose families came from Somalia and other parts of Africa, and others who had recently arrived from central and eastern Europe.

When a girl from Slovenia arrived unable to speak English, the class teacher sat her next to our eldest, who helped her out. I mentioned this to another parent, who was appalled that our daughter’s ‘education’ was being sacrificed in this way. We felt she was learning as much as the girl she was helping, but unfortunately there is no SAT for empathy or kindness. What the kids learned informally from their classmates about other cultures was likewise never tested. But we felt fortunate that the world had been brought to our doorstep.

As a port, Bristol has always looked outwards. The city’s involvement with slavery has rightly provoked debate in recent years, but we should also remember the long history of positive international relationships. At the time of the Spanish Armada, Bristol had a closer connection to Bordeaux and Porto than it had to London. You could walk into one of the old pubs on the harbour and have a glass of sherry straight from the barrel. Before the City Docks closed in the late 1960s there was nothing unusual in seeing a group of sailors from West Germany or Sweden strolling down Corn Street.

Despite Brexit you still hear people speaking Spanish or Polish in the street or in the park, and I know there are Ukrainians here in the city who are going through hell right now. If I remember rightly the family we got to know a decade or so ago had moved to Bristol from a town in Poland, but the mother was from Lvov, which lies just across the Ukrainian border. The parents were keen to practise their English so we had long conversations about our kids’ various ailments, the trials of homework, etc.

Knowing almost nothing about Ukraine I asked the mother what the country was like, a casual sort of question that elicited a long and impassioned answer. There were a lot of problems, she explained, but the chief one was that people in the eastern regions wanted to make the country part of Russia. Feeling very ignorant I went home and got the old globe down from a shelf to check Ukraine’s exact whereabouts. It took a while to find it, hidden within the pinkish mass of the Soviet Union. ■

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