Ukraine and the long, dark tunnel waiting for us

Back in 2011, I travelled to the city of Kharkiv in Ukraine, to work with colleagues based there.

My main memory was of the people I met there. To an astonishing degree, they were bright, welcoming and friendly. No one could ask for better colleagues.

Being there, though, was an eye-opening experience. Kharkiv is only 30 km from the Russian border, and it’s a fundamentally Russian-speaking city. One colleague told me that, though she was a Russian speaker, with relatives living inside Russia, she was working hard to learn Ukrainian.

‘You see, I’m Ukrainian,’ she explained, ‘and I should be able to speak my national language.’

She was by no means alone in her attitude. Among my colleagues, the feeling was widespread that, Russian speakers though they might be, they were Ukrainian. Putin’s claim that these are ethnic Russians longing to be reabsorbed into their mother country has only the flimsiest basis in truth.

You can imagine how my old friends reacted to the arrival of Russian forces on their national territory.

Kharkiv during my visit in 2011
and after the Russian army’s in 2022

Recently, I’ve been thinking of them more than usual. That’s following Donald Trump’s decision to open negotiations with Russia over peace in Ukraine. Negotiations that exclude Ukraine itself, which one might be forgiven for suspecting had more than a passing interest in any agreement reached.

In turn, that got me thinking about Czechoslovakia. That’s a country that no longer exists. It, indeed, had a pretty brief existence. Up to the end of the First World War, the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia had been Austrian possessions within the Austro-Hungarian empire. Slovakia had belonged to the Hungarian bit. Just that fact will give you an idea that there were serious differences between the two sides.

Despite those differences, they were pushed into a single country, Czechoslovakia, which existed with only a break bestowed on it by Nazi Germany, until the last day of 1992. On the first day of 1993, following what has been called the velvet divorce, they peacefully separated into today’s Czechia and Slovakia.

It's the time of Nazi rule that I keep thinking of.

Now, let’s be clear. History doesn’t repeat itself exactly. What it does is produce circumstances with major parallels to something that happened before.

In the early phase of Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy, he focused on Germans living in other countries and therefore deprived of the blessings of his personal rule. The first group he focused on was the Austrian German-speakers, and in April 1938, he annexed the country to his German Reich (Empire).

Next on his to-do list was the German-speaking community of Czechoslovakia, the so-called Sudeten Germans. They lived all along the northern, western and southern borders of the country. Hitler, like most autocrats of his kind, loathed all acts of persecution, unless he was imposing them himself. He so hated persecution applied to friends, like the Sudeten Germans, that he was even prepared to invent instances of it if no real ones were available.

He made such a fuss about alleged Czech bad behaviour towards its Sudeten citizens that other nations began to worry that Hitler was about to intervene. Militarily. This was particularly worrying in Britain and France which both had alliances in place that obliged them to defend Czechoslovakia against foreign aggression.

When the German army conducted manoeuvres close to the Czech border in May 1938, it looked like things were about to turn nasty. The British Foreign Office went so far as to let it be known that France would honour its commitment to Czechoslovakia if necessary, and in those circumstances, Britain wouldn’t stand idly by. Even more impressively, the Czechs ordered a partial mobilisation of their army and quickly had 175,000 men under arms.

When no German invasion took place, the democracies made the mistake of crowing a bit about how a show of force had made Hitler back down. That was unfortunate. It got right up Hitler’s nose. The manoeuvres really had been manoeuvres and he hadn’t planned on invading just then. But the fact that other nations were apparently gloating over what they thought had been a humiliation for him made him all the more determined to teach the Czechs a harsh lesson. 

Despite what the Foreign Office had said, not everyone in Britain was keen on backing the Czechs. One Conservative MP and junior minister in the government, George Tyron, declared that it was nonsense to ‘guarantee the independence of a country which we can neither get at nor spell’.

It was only twenty years since Britain had emerged from the First World War, the bloodiest it had ever fought. Most people regarded the prospect of another with dread. That was certainly the view of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. When Hitler’s aggressive talk over Czechoslovakia flared up again, Chamberlain flew to see him on 15 September. On his return, he made the extraordinary comment that the Nazi leader was ‘a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word’.

On 22 September, Chamberlain flew to Germany again to find out just how much Czech territory the Nazis intended to take.  When he got back to England, he talked about how incredible it was that Britain should be contemplating war with all it implied, ‘because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’.

On 29 September, Chamberlain was back in Germany, accompanied by the French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, and the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, for a final round of negotiations with Hitler in Munich. Edvard Beneš, the Czech Prime Minister, wasn’t invited and no one represented Czechoslovakia. 

What emerged is known as the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938. It handed over a huge swath of Czech territory to the Germans, far more than the areas where there was a Sudeten German majority. With that territory, Czechoslovakia lost a large proportion of the defensive fortifications that protected the country. The French and British made it clear to Beneš that no changes were possible to the agreement and that he either had to sign or face the prospect of fighting Germany alone if it chose to invade, since France and Britain were washing their hands of their obligation to guarantee its independence. 

That meant that if Hitler chose to push again, Czechoslovakia would collapse and be overrun. That’s what happened on 15 March 1939, less than six months after the signing of the Munich Agreement. What’s more, after less than six further months, on 3 September, Britain and France would find themselves at war with Germany in any case.

And yet, when Chamberlain returned to England after the Munich negotiations, he declared that what he had brought back was ‘peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.’

That Czech story is one of terrible waste. There were moments in the 1930s when the western powers, principally Britain and France, might have stopped Hitler. The Czech crisis was the last. Perhaps by then it was already too late but it’s just possible that a show of strength might still have worked.

What the Czechs had shown in May, while their fortifications were still in their hands, was that they were prepared to fight for their independence. They needed help, certainly, but the two historically great powers of Europe, the French and the British had promised that help. But then Britain had ensured that those powers pulled the rug from under them.

They opened negotiations directly with the aggressor nation, Nazi Germany, and behind the backs of the Czechs whose fate was being decided. They agreed terms that made it impossible for the Czechs to defend themselves if there was another round of aggression.

I said before that history doesn’t repeat itself exactly but simply throws up parallels between periods. Ukraine’s history today isn’t identical to Czechoslovakia’s then. But aren’t the parallels striking – and frightening?

And the worst parallel? Throwing the Czechs under the bus didn’t even do the west any good. Throwing red meat to a land-grabbing autocrat like Hitler didn’t appease him. It just made him hungry for more.

Maybe Europe can step up and neutralise the damage that Trump’s causing by preparing to surrender to Putin. Some recent statements suggest they might. But will they really find the guts to resist both Trump and Putin? It’s hard to imagine, given their track record.

If they don’t, however, we may be opening a door to a long and very dark tunnel. 

Grandparenting: on life and death, on myths and art, on grateful dogs and kids with presents

Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, has developed an ability to come up with startling statements.

To be fair, and just to maintain the character of this series of posts as a true chronicle of our grandparenting experience, I should mention that she's not my only granddaughter. I have another but she, Aya, is twenty now. In my book, that means she's no longer a grandkid but a grandadult.

What's more, I have to confess to a bit of a gap in this chronicle of mine. We saw a lot of the grandkids last year but I failed to keep a proper record of their visits (or our visits to them). There were, however, some memorable moments.

There was Matilda's visit to us during which, as well as the many other activities we organised for her, she attended a horse riding class. It was a pleasure to see her again when her class crossed the road in front of me as I was driving to a supermarket soon after dropping her off.

A diminutive Matilda crossing in front of me with her riding class

Then there was the time when we and the grandkids’ family travelled independently to Ireland, to meet up in Donegal. That’s the county in the Irish Republic, sometimes referred to as Southern Ireland, that extends further north than the six counties still in the United Kingdom, often called Northern Ireland. Still, there are so many ironies in Irish history that the fact that the South extends further north than the North, barely registers.

Matilda and Elliott on a beach in Donegal

Elliott in the Emerald Isle

Matilda ditto

They came to see us in La Cañada early in August. We provided presents, of course (grandparent-esse oblige), and to make them more fun, we had the kids look for them in the woods.

Present hunt in the woods

Then I visited Elliott and Matilda in their home in Hoyo de Manzanares, near Madrid, later the same month. It was fiesta time in the village and there was plenty to entertain the kids. The activity that looms largest in my memory, perhaps because it was practically daily, was face painting.

Getting their faces painted during the Hoyo Fiesta

In October, they came to us to celebrate Halloween.

Matilda and Elliott enjoying Halloween
with their mother and grandmother

It was during a summer visit to us that Matilda came up with one of her startling statements. It seems that she and Elliott had discovered death. Obviously, that’s a traumatic event in any child’s life. It was in mine, I know. I don’t remember the exact moment but I do remember the horror with which I realised that my parents would die. And then it dawned on me that it was going to be my fate too, a discovery that struck me then as deeply annoying, as it still does today.

Matilda felt it was important to explain what this all meant.

‘When I’m older,’ she assured Danielle and me with earnestness, ‘you’ll be dead.’

Elliott (aged three) was of the same opinion. 

‘Yes,’ he confirmed, ‘you’ll be dead when we’re older.’

Well, they got no argument from us. That’s how we hope, and expect, things to go. 

Elliott is also good at producing breathtaking statements. Out for a walk with me, he pointed to what looked to me like a length of black plastic tubing discarded by someone on the street. Elliott saw it in a much more interesting way:

‘Look! It’s the frame of a rainbow.’

When a rainbow’s frame falls to earth
Like me you saw something duller? 
Time to break with prosaic realism

After all those exciting visits in 2024, the kids came back to us, with Nicky, their dad, in the week before Twelfth Night. That’s 6 January, an important date in Spain, since there are more presents for children at this, the Feast of the (Three) Kings. That was important for Matilda and Elliott, since they’d spent Christmas in Belfast, with their other grandmother, and they naturally needed gifts from us too. Or rather from the Kings, or perhaps I should say Reyes, this being Spain, after receiving what Santa had for them in Northern Ireland. 

Opening Reyes presents

When I say ‘Christmas’ I’m using the word deliberately, not just being non-woke and failing to describe the season in specifically non-specific religious terms. They were in Belfast explicitly for a Christmas celebration. It apparently went well, but left some important questions in Matilda’s mind. Sitting in our house and looking at the fire burning in the grate, she asked me:

‘How does Santa get down the chimney if there’s a fire burning?’

Well, I know that Nicky doesn’t particularly approve of maintaining the Christmas story for the kids. But far be it from me, I thought, to incur the wrath of Sheena, their mother, by undermining it.

‘Well…’ I said doubtfully, until inspiration came to me, ‘you have to make sure that the fire’s out on Christmas Eve. Otherwise Santa gets pretty annoyed and he comes to the front door to ring the bell, which wakes us up, and then he tells us off for not leaving the chimney ready for him to come down. Which is even more annoying for us as it is for him.’

I thought it was a pretty good explanation, but I have to say that Matilda looked at me quizzically, as though she wasn’t sure it really stood up. But she (and Elliott) have decided long ago that Granddad was silly (the silliest Granddad in the world, in fact), and she clearly felt that there was little purpose in pressing the point with anyone in that sad state. She dropped the subject.

One of the things that Matilda has decided she likes is foot massages. It took her a while to convince herself that if she put a foot of hers into my care, I wouldn’t just tickle it, but since she’s decided that she could trust me on that, she’s started not just waiting for a massage, but demanding one even if I’ve not offered it. That seems to be a genetic disposition. It’s something Danielle expects as a matter of course if we’re watching TV, and Sheena tells me she enjoys foot massages too and doesn’t get half as many as she’d like. Personally, nothing could persuade me to undergo one, but clearly there is an inherited predilection in their favour running down the female line of the family.

A development milestone it’s my pleasant duty to record here is Matilda’s progress in art. In the summer, she did a fine Etch-A-Sketch of a house. Now, most kids, including me in my own childhood, draw houses with a chimney, a door and two windows. Matilda went deeper into her picture. Deeper into the house, in fact. She left out the purely superficial features, such as doors and windows, to show us the bed inside. There’s a pillow on it too, and possibly the suggestion of a head on the pillow. Either way, what she seems to have produced is a sketch not so much of a house, as of a home. 

A bed inside the house? That makes it a home

That impressed me. Just like Elliott’s identification of the frame of a rainbow, a fine example of an artist's view of life. So much more interesting than a mere scientist's.

More recently, Matilda’s turned to portraits. She even did one of me. I know that it could be argued that she has perhaps marginally exaggerated the extent to which I can be regarded as slim. And I suppose, if we’re picky, it could be said that she needs to work a little more on getting a likeness absolutely spot on, but hey, when you’re five, you’ve got plenty of time to do that work. In any case, as she pointed out, she gave me a beard which is an important feature of the likeness.

Portrait by Matilda alongside a more photographic treatment

Incidentally, talking about that beard, in the summer she pronounced it irritating, and I dutifully shaved. I kept shaving for some weeks but the daily process started to get on my nerves, especially as I kept cutting myself. So eventually I let the beard grow back and, as the portrait shows, Matilda has accepted it.

That’s a win-win, I’d say.

In passing, let me say that I like the way she’s put a Spanish N with a tilde above it – what they call an ‘enye’ out here – in the label ‘Grañddad’. True, a pedant would argue that it isn’t right. But I like the way it underlines the fact that she was born in Spain and it’s her home. The enye’s a subtle wink to her Spanish-ness.

Max (left); larger and more intimidating than Toffee and Luci

One of the best things about the grandkids’ most recent visit to us is that Max, our largish dog (as opposed to Luci and Toffee, our toy poodles) who seemed somewhat ill-disposed towards Matilda and Elliott initially, now seems to have adapted to them completely. It no doubt helps that they both now give him treats from time to time. On one occasion when Matilda had given him one, I explained to her that the appreciative look he was giving her was his way of saying ‘thank you, Matilda’.

‘You’re welcome, Max,’ she solemnly told him.

Another high point of their visit was when the kids burst into our bedroom early one morning, when Danielle and I were fondly imagining we might get a lie in. They made a bee line for me.

‘You’re always up early,’ Matilda told me.

‘So you can take us downstairs,’ Elliott concluded for her.

So, of course, I did.