Goldsworthy was born and bred in Belgrade during the fag end of the Tito period. She had a privileged upbringing in a middle-class home, went to the best schools, did well at university, held a job briefly as a radio presenter before falling for her English husband-to-be. While at high school she had joined the Communist party as an act of rebellion, so out of fashion had party membership become except among ‘ditzy girls from old familes who had fallen for the hammer-’n-sickle chic and a good third of the basketball team’. She lapsed, due to non-payment of fees, but it was de rigueur to ‘put it about that you had been expelled for saying this or that.’
She writes with wit and nostalgia about the vanished country in which she grew up. Even now, when asked where she comes from, Goldsworthy answers instinctively ‘Yugoslavia’ before realising it is no longer there. Only then does she step back and respond ‘Serbia’. It is clear she doesn’t altogether like what her homeland has become as the result of petty nationalism. Some of the most moving passages describe her time during the Kosovo war. She worked the night shift on the BBC World Service at Bush House when she would read new bulletins on the Serbian Service about Nato bombing raids on Begrade, ‘the city that once I knew as well as I knew my own body’, where her parents and other close relatives still live.
Goldsworthy wrote this book against the clock and occasionally it shows. When she thought she was going to die, she wanted her English-born son, then aged four, to know something of his origins. At times her patchwork style, the hectic jumps in time and place, are annoyingly hard to follow. At others it is beautifully written — an elegy to a world that now seems so far distant that it is difficult to remember that it began to vanish just half a generation ago.
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