Vesna Maric (2010) Bluebird.

The title comes from the old Vera Lynn number: ‘There’ll be bluebirds over/ The white cliffs of Dover,/ Tomorrow, just you wait and see.’ Somehow Vesna associated that song with England, a country she knew little about, but knew vaguely through obsessing over old and new songs. This gave her a bridge into learning English, which was to prove useful in later life, because at the beginning of this memoir, she is a normal sixteen-year-old girl living in Mostar. She watches on the news as a girl from Dubrovnik, a student, had been shot by a sniper. ‘The snipers were hiding in the Holiday Inn, built eight years before for the 1984 Winter Olympics.’ That seemed little to do with her, but closer to home an explosion shook the city. Indigenous Serbs, like her neighbour Mr Dusan, quickly and quietly left town. ‘We stayed behind and demonstrated for peace, like chickens waiting for someone to come and axe our heads off.’ A convoy was arranged to take women and children to the safety of Britain.  Vesna was on it. The journey on an old bus gets a few chapters. Paris gets two paragraphs. This is not a vocation. She charts what it was like being a refugee. Rada, the pacemaker lady, for example, took her role as a refugee very seriously. She didn’t comb her hair or wear make-up. All the other women did. But this was frowned upon. Refugees were supposed to be like a scene from Oliver, eternally fawning and grateful for the gruel they were given and never glamorous.  There’s dark humour. Wednesday was the day they were given their Income Support. Thirty-five pounds a week to live on.  An accountant was employed by the charity that sponsored them to take some of this money off the refugees and put it towards a Return [Home] Fund. But, led by Gordanna, there is insurrection. The refugees demand the money they paid in be paid back to them. Small battles in a larger war against poverty and the justifications for treating foreigners as second-class citizens. Vesna goes to school and adapts to this strange new life and even survives and flourishes living in Hull. An easy read, in small bite-sized chunks, but it holds a mirror up to the kind of fuck-you-I’m-alright society we have become.