I Hate Martin Amis et al. by Peter Barry

Yugoslav federation is Serbian dominated.’
    â€˜So what?’ He turned and scowled at me. He obviously didn’t like to be contradicted. ‘It has worked well for a long time, so why change things? Why do they suddenly want to become an independent state?’ He declared that when the Muslim majority voted for independence for Bosnia, and the country was recognised by both the US and the European community, the Serbs were forced into a corner. His conclusion, which scarcely surprised me, was that the war was the fault of the Bosnian Muslims. It could have been avoided; it was not what the Serbs had wanted. ‘We want to live amongst our own people, that is all.’
    He made it all sound so reasonable – doubtless as reasonable as the arguments of those on the opposing side. Before I knew it he had moved on to the battle of Kosovo in the fourteenth century. Doubtless he thought he was educating me. He insisted that although the Ottoman Empire conquered the Serbs, there were twice as many Turks as Serbs at the start of the battle, and twice as many Turkish dead as Serbian dead at the end. And that just about sums this place up, I thought: we were defeated, yes, but we killed twice as many of the enemy, so we really won. When I pointed out to Nikola that it was a defeat nevertheless, he snorted with rage and looked ready to kill me also. It’s over five hundred years later, but he was still upset by the defeat. The Serbs, I’d already learnt, have memories like elephants. A few minutes later he left us, looking even less happy than when he’d arrived.
    â€˜Watch him,’ said Santo. ‘He does not like you.’
    â€˜You think?’ I asked innocently. We both laughed.

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    I never spoke to the kids at school if I could help it, and they soon learnt not to speak to me. They left me alone, I left them alone, and most of the time we had nothing to do with each other. I ate my sandwich in the playground at lunchtime only if I could get the bench in the corner, beneath one of the plane trees, to myself. If I was there first, before the kids came out for their break, they didn’t sit with me. It was a kind of unspoken agreement.
    There was a patch of muddy grass and a large expanse of concrete in front of me. At the end of the playground there was a six-foot-high white brick wall, with a six-foot-high fence on top of that. They didn’t want the kids to escape, that was for sure. Behind this wall was a laneway. It ran between the school and some playing fields, and it was where, after school hours, kids would smoke, fight, touch each other up, plan rebellions against the adult world, cover the lane-side of the wall with graffiti, and do drugs. There was no access from the playground to the laneway; the only entrance to the whole school was at the front of the building, the two sides of the grounds lined with semis keeping their respectable backs to whatever was going on among the shouting hordes of young people across the road.
    I’d sit on the bench and listen to the kids – though I never made it obvious. I wanted to discover if their dreams were any different to mine when I was a kid. They were: they had bigger dreams. With every generation, the dreams get bigger, or that’s the way it seems to me. During the Second World War, my mother told me, all anyone dreamt of was peace, an end to the bombing. After the war they dreamt of having work, a job, that was their dream. ‘In those days we didn’t ask for a lot,’ was how she put it. But my generation, we wanted more than peace. We’d only ever known peace, and it was pretty meaningless. We wanted material things, and to be able to enjoy ourselves. Everyone I knew wanted the same stuff – the house, the flash appliances, the car – especially women, but it left me cold.
    Work we never worried about. There were more jobs than there were people, and if you didn’t like your