чудесная статья про несчастное детство и счастливые каникулы в Австрии.
Mark Strong: Austrian childhoodI was born in 1963.
читать дальшеAt the age of six I was sent to Reedham school in Purley, Surrey, a state-funded boarding school that provided kids like me, from poorer backgrounds, with a better education.
My mother first took me to my grandparents’ house in Schladming, central Austria, when I was a baby, and I continued to go there during holidays. I led a disciplined lifestyle at boarding schools in England until I was 18, so my grandparents’ house became the most significant home of my childhood. To be able to play with sheep and eat wild redcurrants was like visiting another planet. It took 17 hours to get there, non-stop, in a brown Ford Cortina from England, through Belgium, Holland and Germany.
The house was like a magic castle, with a Hansel and Gretel pointed roof. There was one bedroom on the ground floor, with two bedrooms on the first floor and two rooms in a large converted attic. When I was little, my grandfather was very ill and slept in the ground-floor bedroom. My grandmother nursed him, and he died of cancer when I was about nine. After his death, my grandmother took in lodgers. They were mainly families on holiday going skiing or hiking, and it meant there were more people for me to play with.
I used to sleep in the smallest room in the attic and had a big bag of goose feathers as a duvet; I don’t think I have ever slept in a more comfortable bed.
When I came down for breakfast in the mornings, my grandmother had boiled eggs ready. She always wrapped them up in a tea towel and placed them between two cushions to keep warm. I loved finding the cushions, slipping my hands in to get the eggs and discovering they were still runny because she’d timed it perfectly.
My fondest memories are of watching her cook, and looking out of the window at the picture-postcard view. There was a stove that you had to keep chucking wood on to keep alive. Whenever somebody in the village slaughtered a pig, my grandmother would buy some and hang it to smoke in the big open fireplace. I loved the meat, sauerkraut and delicious plum dumplings.
The cellar was like a dungeon. The home-grown apples, potatoes and rhubarb were stored on wooden trays. My grandfather kept his tools and the wood for the stove down there.
I grew up speaking German before English, and started skiing from the age of four. At the end of the road there was a ski lift — literally a metal seat. Skiing wasn’t a luxury sport then, it was just what everybody did.
In 1982, they held the world ski championships in Schladming, which transformed it into a high-tech resort, the old wooden bridge replaced with a concrete one. My grandmother, who is now 87, sold to speculators before the championships and moved to a flat in Vienna.
I haven’t been back since the house was sold and I don’t want to. To be confronted with an adapted version of the house and its surroundings would diminish it in my memory.
@темы:
жизнь прекрасна и удивительна,
любовь как случайная смерть,
mark strong