Whatever the politicians and experts may say, Brexit is a loss for both sides, for the United Kingdom and for the European Union. But, I suspect, the perspective of gains and losses is not the same, depending on whether you look at it from the West or from the East of Europe. And in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia was somewhat different than other communist countries. We learned the English language at school at an early age, we watched Hollywood movies and, from the mid-1960s on, we could travel abroad freely. British culture did not belong only to the Western world; in many ways it was ours too. Most of all because of its music. In the midsixties, when I was growing up, their rock and pop music became the main bridge between our cultures.
The most popular boy in my freshman class in high school was a certain Zoran. He was neither especially good-looking nor especially smart. But he had that special “something.” He had long hair. Not really long, just a bit over his ears. It was called “bitlsica” (the Beatles cut) and was modeled, of course, after the four band members of the Beatles. The year was 1964 and it was not a look commonly seen in our country. Teachers did not approve of it because it was considered to be a Western craze; parents did not like it either; and even some of the boys in the class bullied Zoran. I guess they were just jealous that he had the eye of all the girls. Zoran did not care much about what the old people thought, he was playing his electric guitar in a garage band and this was how a guitar player should look.
We were all fifteen then. The Beatles look and Beatles music were our thing.
We could listen to “our” kind of music on the radio. The radio was a magical source of music at a time when most households did not have a record player, that expensive and cumbersome machine for listening to vinyl. I remember that there was a daily program on Radio Zagreb from noon to 1:00 p.m. called “Listeners’ Choice,” which we always listened to and that’s where I heard the Beatles for the first time. Or we would listen to the legendary Radio Luxembourg, which used to air the latest hits. Later, starting in 1968, every Monday evening Radio Belgrade devoted its so-called “First Program” to rock ’n’ roll music in Yugoslavia.
This new band on the British and world music scene became a way of communicating, of being one with the world, while at the same time it gave us a sense of individualism, of looking different than our parents. It was more than a style of music, it was a style of life. We saw the photos of John, George, Paul and Ringo in our daily press and on our TV screens. Of course, the phenomenon of a bunch of screaming teenage girls, running after the Beatles wherever they went, was depicted as scandalous and decadent, as the mass hysteria of kids. Perhaps it even was. But such popularity for a band of musicians—Beatlemania, as it was known—was novel to us. We congregated en masse only when we had to—for some state holiday, standing and listening to endless speeches. Or for a soccer match. Big rock concerts had not yet arrived in our neck of the woods.
Soon, however, all the boys were wearing their hair longer, thinking it would make the girls run after them like with the Beatles. In the provinces young men were even beaten up for having long hair and had it forcibly cut off. But that lasted for only a short time, because by the seventies, when I went to college, the fashion and the music had become unstoppable: to be in, a boy had to have long hair, and we girls had to have skirts short enough to wear as a mini, introduced to the world by the British designer Mary Quant around the same time. These skirts were indeed mini, causing our parents much more of a headache than a boy’s long hair. It was only when I had a daughter of my own that I could understand their fears. Like many a parent, my father believed that if girls dressed that way, they were more likely to expose themselves to sexual violence and therefore he strictly forbade me from wearing a mini. The problem was easily solved in Yugoslavia, like elsewhere in the world I guess; I would hide my miniskirt in my school bag and change into it later. We wore proper-length skirts to school but the mini was obligatory for going out, to a party or the movies.
It is interesting, if not paradoxical, that most such rock ’n’ roll musicians, or “rockers” (as they were called ), were the sons of army officers, of the ruling class, the so-called red bourgeoisie. Perhaps they were more privileged and could afford musical instruments and vinyl, travel and be better informed. On the other hand, long hair and foreign music were a clear sign of rebellion against a father’s authority. One’s look was not as innocent as before—it became a statement.
For us it was perhaps the first notion that fashion could also be a sign of rebellion. For quite a while, long hair was considered if not a political provocation then at least a bad influence. However, as one’s look—that is, fashion—was the only sign of “deviation,” it was not seen as a threat to the system. Many youngsters in miniskirts and with bitlsica haircuts soon became members of the Communist Party. By the end of the sixties the musical Hair was staged in Belgrade, the first time ever in a communist country. Deep Purple gave a concert in 1975 and the Rolling Stones in 1976. The explosion of local bands playing Yu-rock , as the local variety of rock ’n’ roll was known, was inevitable.
But at the time when I first heard the Beatles, there were no cafés, no clubs, no place for us teenagers to meet, other than dance halls. I had my parents’ permission to go because the dancing was organized by the school and it was considered to be more of a dance school, not really an occasion for entertainment. It was a sad place, with benches lined up along one wall, and it was obvious that the dance hall also served as a venue for gymnastic and ballet exercises, Ping-Pong competitions and occasional amateur recital performances. The smell of sweat and floor polish hung in the air. It wasn’t much fun sitting there with your back to the cold wall, listening to the crackling sound of vinyl records, under the watchful eye of a teacher worried that we might misbehave in some way, dance too close perhaps. The dancers among us were very few; we did not feel confident enough in our bodies to follow the steps of the waltz or tango; and they didn’t play rock music or the twist there. It was some time before rock ’n’ roll took over the dance halls, clubs and private parties, allowing our bodies to move in a different way to a very different kind of beat.
One of the important elements in embracing Anglo-Saxon music, first and foremost rock ’n’ roll, was the language. By the age of fifteen, kids in Yugoslavia would have learned basic English at school. A foreign language was obligatory and usually the choice was among English, German and French. In my generation, only a very few chose German, it clashed with what we learned in history class about the role of fascist Germany during World War II. The French group was even smaller; the biggest was English. Some elementary schools had Russian as a subject, but even fewer kids studied that. As TV sets, those bulky boxes with small black-and-white screens, increasingly entered our homes, we were able to watch movies in the original, with subtitles in Serbo-Croatian, as the language was called back then. It was the same when we went to the cinema; all films were shown in their original language and the vast majority were Hollywood movies. This enabled us to get used to the sound of English—although with American pronunciation—and to expand our vocabulary. I remember the good feeling it gave us to listen to and understand the words of Beatles songs. It gave us a sense of self-confidence, even pride. The same was true of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or rock ’n’ roll in general for those born just a few years before me. But for some reason, for my generation the music of the Beatles, and also the Rolling Stones, meant more. Maybe because it appeared just when we were growing up and we considered it our own. They were exciting in another way too, even if the lyrics were banal and the melody rather simple, like “She loves me, yeah, yeah” or “I can’t get no satisfaction.” It was a distinctive sound that called for a different kind of dancing. It felt like a sudden rush of excitement filling your whole body, almost like a fever: it made you want to move your limbs.
Perhaps its biggest value was that it was so very different from what we in my country listened to in the sixties. There, music festivals were the most popular way of presenting light music, popular with the wider public. The singers were our first glimpse of stardom, they were our first celebrities. I still remember their names: Ivo Robić, Zdenka Vučković, Vice Vukov, Tereza Kesovija. A music festival was a big event, especially the one in Opatija, a small seaside resort that had been very fashionable among nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian nobility. At the time when Croatia was a part of that empire, it was known as Abbazia. The festival there started in 1958, organized by Yugoslav Radio and Television, a state institution, and was broadcast live.
It was glitz and glamour the communist way. Women teased their hair, wore heavy makeup, and stood stock-still behind the microphone as if afraid that their elaborate hairdo would collapse if they dared to move to the rhythm of their song. But more exciting were their dresses, worn with very high heels, probably bought in Italy. They were custom-made evening dresses for women, and suits for men, which today only the rich would be able to afford. That was because you could not buy such elegant garments in state-owned stores. Such festivals were as much a fashion event as a musical one. You could see long ball gowns and elegant evening wear in silk, chiffon, satin and organdy. Even if the TVs weren’t in color, the impact was great. Women copied the gowns and wore them for festive occasions. My mother had one such evening dress made out of black silk, cut tight at the waist, covered with tulle and glittery sequins, with two thin straps to go over her bare shoulders. To me she looked dazzling, like the movie star Ava Gardner. She would wear it for the New Year’s Eve party at the Officers’ Club where all the men wanted to dance with her—or so she claimed.
Our festivals were modeled after the somewhat older Italian San Remo song festival of canzone, also broadcast live on TV. I first saw it in 1961. We did not have a TV set, so I watched it on a neighbor’s small TV, giving a not very sharp picture in black-and-white. It was a magical experience for us children, but also a special kind of socializing. For example, it would have been out of the question for the owner of the TV set not to let his neighbors watch the festival. Some ten to fifteen people would squeeze into the living room, the children sitting on the floor. It was the same when there was a big soccer match; men would come in, filling the room with cheering and thick cigarette smoke—back then everybody smoked at home and at work, on buses and trains, even on airplanes. As with our singers, I still remember the names of the Italian ones: Domenico Modugno, Adriano Celentano, Milva, Gigliola Cinquetti. . . . We listened to them even though not many people understood Italian.
I think that the most important thing about the Beatles for us growing up at that time was that their music was the exact opposite of the dominant festival music we were used to. Not so much in terms of musical style (some of their melodies could pass for a schlager, or light dancing melody), but rather because it became inseparable from their look and the way they played, creating what became their own specific style.
Now it seems as bizarre to be able to listen to the Beatles parallel with the festival in Opatija, as it was to watch Mickey Mouse cartoons or the movie Casablanca in the land of comrade Tito. The mixture of the two worlds colored my generation forever, in both good ways and bad. Good, because we enjoyed greater freedoms than our neighbors; bad, because we were sufficiently satisfied with these freedoms not to see beyond them, not to demand more, not to stand up and create a democratic political opposition when it was needed in the late eighties. While the whole of Europe celebrated the 1989 collapse of communism, Yugoslavia was the only European state sliding toward breakup and war. . . .
From the days of the Beatles onward, my relationship with Great Britain was bound to be emotional. Its music became mine, its fashion, its literature and its TV series, as well as its weird, fantastic sense of humor. Everything except its weather and food.
London in the mid- and late sixties was more appealing (the word “cool” was not cool yet) than Paris or even Amsterdam, where young proto-hippie rebels called Provos lived on boats, listened to rock music and probably smoked weed (we did not yet!), which sounded like paradise to a teenager. London was a place of pilgrimage, and everyone who could afford it went to our mecca, bringing back home the latest vinyl. That is, if they survived driving on the left, “wrong” side of the road, the constant drizzle, their funny money that was impossible to figure out. Once back, these people were the soul of every party and object of envy. Let’s go and listen to my records was a standard invitation for romance.
I can still recall the face of the policeman at Heathrow Airport looking at my passport the first time I landed there, double-checking a list of non-visa countries. He could not hide his astonishment that visitors from Yugoslavia did not need a visa for a Western country, but maybe I was his first Yugo tourist. Usually the border police of Western nations had difficulty believing that anyone from a communist country would visit their country as mere tourists, suspecting we would look for a way to stay on. But despite all these suspicions, many of us did come for tourism. Nevertheless, besides visiting museums and shopping streets, there was another reason: going to record stores and rock concerts, which were the most important door into the country, its culture and language.
In the meantime, however, my interest had shifted to books. I studied world literature and read many novels in translation. But as soon as I could read them in the original, it became a special pleasure to delve into Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and, later, more contemporary literature. I would first go to Foyles on Charing Cross Road, the oldest and biggest bookstore, there since 1906, and wander among the shelves of books, just enjoying being there. Even now I would know how to walk there blindfolded from the Tottenham Court Road underground station. But after feeling elated, I would be overwhelmed with a sense of sadness: How many of these books could I read in my life? It did not occur to me yet that I probably would not want to read most of them anyway.
I also started to love the very specific kind of British humor. I can’t quite remember when it was that I became acquainted with their humor, but most probably not until the late seventies, when on our now color TV sets we could watch series like Only Fools and Horses, Blackadder, Keeping Up Appearances and my favorite ’Allo ’Allo or the legendary Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The Balkan kind of humor is often rough, often dark or simple—irony and sarcasm are not at home here, not to mention laughing at ourselves. The surreal streak that runs through Monty Python or the way ’Allo ’Allo laughs at all the warring sides is something else.
After my obligatory Mary Quant period of fashion, I fell in love with another designer—no, not Vivienne Westwood and punk, which should have been my logical choice, I guess. No, it was Laura Ashley—as if in contrast to Quant, whose miniskirt was a sign of opposition, a scandal, a slap in the face until it became an everyday item. While in London, I discovered Laura Ashley’s dresses. It must have been in the late seventies or early eighties when her romantic floral patterns became so widely popular. Her dresses were quite simply cut, but the colors were bright and the floral variations were printed on fine cotton, creating a good-girl look, if, perhaps, a bit rustic. To this day I have no better explanation than the fact that such dresses and lively patterns were not available in my country at the time.
But this is not why her flowers stuck in my mind. In a Laura Ashley shop, besides dresses you could also find sheets and bedspreads, curtains and towels, even wallpaper with the same design. The idea of living within such floral walls appealed to me. Years later, on another trip to London in the spring of 1991, I decided to bring the wallpaper back home to Zagreb and redesign my bedroom. That was all fine and well, except it was the wrong moment. I wanted to change the wallpaper when the whole country was about to fall apart. In Croatia, the bloodshed had started just a month or so before, on March 31 that year, during what became known as Bloody Easter. The first victim was a policeman killed in Plitvice National Park, when a busload of policemen went to recapture the territory that rebel Serbian minority citizens had declared autonomous, after Croatia proclaimed independence from Yugoslavia. His name was Josip Jović and he was only one year older than my daughter. At the beginning of every war people still remember the victims’ names.
Nevertheless, I brought home the wallpaper a month or so later. That is another thing that happens to you when war starts: you just assume it won’t touch you. It must be a defense mechanism, but it is true that, living in Zagreb, we did not fully comprehend that the front line was only some forty-five kilometers away. A half-hour drive from where I finally did put up the Laura Ashley wallpaper. It looked all cheerful and flowery while out there the real killing had started. Was I closing my eyes on purpose? Was it naïveté or a subconscious attempt to fend off evil?
Indeed, while I lay in my small Laura Ashley cocoon, the war did not hurt me, as if her flowers protected me, at least for a short while.
My subsequent visit to London was not under dramatic circumstances. The war was behind me, I had a publisher in London and moved in writers’ and journalists’ circles. I was interviewed on BBC radio, had readings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and started to feel more at home. That is how I once wound up staying at a place where another writer had lived while he was in hiding. People suffer and hurt each other in many ways other than war. That writer was Salman Rushdie, who went underground after the Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa (ordering his execution) in 1989 because of his “blasphemous” novel The Satanic Verses, whereupon any Muslim had the right to take his life. The small studio belonging to his then wife, the novelist Marianne Wiggins, was located on the ground floor in a row of identical white-façade buildings in Notting Hill. When I had met Marianne during my American tour, she kindly offered me her place to stay. The studio had a back door where Rushdie could escape through the gardens. I could imagine both of them under a red baldachin in that bed in the middle of the studio, with its beautiful carpets, unable to fall asleep, listening with apprehension and mortal fear to every sound out in the street. He must have felt like a hunted animal. In the USSR and other communist countries, dissident writers like Osip Mandelstam, Varam Salmov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel and Milan Kundera had been proscribed, exiled, served their sentence in the gulag or even perished. But they were persecuted by the state. In Rushdie’s case, virtually any thug had a license to kill him.
Do Brits really want to become small in the big world instead of big in the small world of Europe? As islanders they have their strange ways and habits, a kernel of madness, I think. I know this because my mother is an islander—although from a small island in the Adriatic.
I see that nowadays British writers and public figures are writing letters to Europe, as if their island were already sailing away from the continent, their politicians having exploited the vague feeling of fear and imaginary threat of Europe until it went further than anybody thought possible. Maybe these letters are their way of psychologically preparing for departure, saying goodbye by remembering their visits to the old continent and anticipating their loss. These are love letters, to be sure.
“Dear Europe,” J. K. Rowling wrote in a long letter in The Guardian on October 26, 2019. “At the time of writing, it’s uncertain whether the next generation will enjoy the freedoms we had. Those of us who know exactly how deep a loss that is, are experiencing a vicarious sense of bereavement, on top of our own dismay at the threatened rupture of old ties.”
Perhaps it is time for European writers to do the same, to write to “Dear United Kingdom,” or more intimately “Dear Britain,” and try to create checks and balances in the same way, to see what they have lost, to remember what they had gained. Britain has a great emotional value for me; it is an inseparable part of my youth. The country is no longer in the EU, but all of that will stay with me because Brexit can’t take any of it away; it is already part of my identity. The very same goes for Europe. Political and economic ties apart, Europe is not losing Britain. The British and their culture are so much a part of European identity that even when they sailed away, we had the best of them and will continue to do so. No politicians in this world can pull out their threads of the colorful woven fabric of European culture. It is just not possible.