Jan Macháček

“To an extent we were just an ordinary family on the outside, in the light of how normalisation worked. So how we used to say that normalisation was the escape to privacy in case of my parents it was completely obvious. And they actually did not mind it too much, as they both enjoyed spending time together and did not care for social life a lot, they did not seek big company, nor parties, they were just together a lot, but exactly this kind of escape to cottages and gardens, they fit into that form totally, as they kept working in the garden, or the house, of course those were manual jobs mostly. A man can hardly imagine today that my mother, as we did not have an automatic machine for a long time, she was washing clothes downstairs with a kind of centrifuge and she normally washed our clothes in the washtub, so when she had her study day off once a week, she just kept washing, you know.”

“And so you could get into those little groups and gradually become a part of them, later we named it so called Košíře underground, as we mostly gathered in the pubs Na Klamovce in Košíře, where we used to hang out all the time in fact, if you were not devoting your time to art or reading. So we were sitting in the garden pub Na Klamovce, a part of that was for example Jáchym [Topol], who also lived there, as Viktor Karlík and another part was the Malá Strana underground, you know those boys, the Topols and their groups were from Malá Strana, so we would go to Malostranská café, Slávie, to have tea, that cost us one crown eighty or drinking beer in Klamovka, well and so gradually I became a part of this cultural environment.“