Vlasta Havlenová

“It was horrible for the children to have to sit on a stool by the hop plants from dawn till dusk. That would have been okay, we would have even kept them entertained, we even let them run around for a bit, but the accommodation was the worst. They stuck us up over a stable - the loft was clean, there were straw mattresses there, freshly made, some crates where the children could put their things on, the occasional hook in the beams to hang things from, but the entrance was the worst. You had to go up stairs with no railings. When a child needed the toilet in the night, it came to the open space of the stables. My husband and I didn’t sleep at all, and we took turns with our third colleague. The boys and girls were all in one room, of course, and there was always someone sitting by the entrance to make sure the children wouldn’t fall down.”

“It was about the Cowards. My husband spoke about it, and somehow it happened that soon afterwards - I guess it was a senior student, who heard this assessment of Škvorecký, and he came somewhere to the university of education in Liberec and spoke of Škvorecký in the way my husband had. He was informed that this was wrong. Then it happened that an inspection visited the school and sat in on our classes. They chose the lessons of my husband and me. They didn’t go anywhere else. It seemed strange to us, but we didn’t think about it at the time. A number of years passed by, there was a class reunion, and one of my husband’s students started saying: ‘Professor, I assessed Škvorecký according to the way you told us, and I was given a right dressing down, and when I had to switch to the university in Ústí nad Labem for family reasons, I spoke of Škvorecký again, this time in the way the inspection said I should have, and I was given another dressing down, so now I don’t know what to think about it.’ This minor episode showed us the probable cause of that surprise inspection, when both my husband and I were called in for a talk, even though I taught at the second level of the eleven-year school and he taught at the third level - it was this.”