2 London to Budapest 1979

Somewhere now lost is a photograph of a house-fly sitting on a piece of banana peel. The peel rests on the small formica worktop of a VW camper-van's kitchen unit where it and the fly stayed throughout the journey from London to Budapest. After Zuzana and I first noticed this extra little passenger it was assumed that the stowaway would disappear as soon as the door was next opened.  But it stayed, all the way. No matter how often or how long the sliding side door or the windows remained opened when we parked the fly remained somewhere in the van. Sometimes it was uncertain if the fly had left or not until some miles down the road it would appear on the dashboard or somewhere. And so we called it 'Mucha', Czech for 'fly', and began to assume it had adopted us, this small black dot of a presence, even checking if Mucha was still aboard when closing the doors and resuming our journey. It always was.

Life for an inexperienced English driver on the continent is made easier by being channelled onto the  motorway on the 'other' side of the road as soon as you roll off the ferry. There is no immediate problem with unfamiliar road layouts or signage or vehicles driving threateningly towards you, and so the journey begins in relative comfort for the nervous system. We travelled across Belgium towards Germany and Cologne, and then to Geissen where Zuzana Bluhova and I would spend the night with friends before carrying on south towards Austria.

Things were not difficult. Leaving the autobahn for the first time and arriving soon after in the mid-sized university town of Geissen on a quiet evening meant negotiating an unfamiliar environment against little traffic and with few mistakes, perhaps the occasional momentary turn onto the wrong side of the road or temptation to travel clockwise around an island, but nothing which got me into trouble either with other road users or the law. As we parked I congratulated myself on a successful baptism into the ways of continental road using, little realizing what fires of automotive hell the cosseting smoothness of the autobahns was ushering me towards.

1 A hard, merciless light

The photograph shows a young woman, relaxed, reading a journal in front of a large window in what can only be some kind of institution. She sits next to a small table, in the foreground are more journals or newspapers, and a hard chair. It has the appearance of a reading room or part of a library. There is a modern feeling about the room, which is airy, and full of light. 

The photograph was taken in the student common room at the Dessau Bauhaus, Germany, in 1930. The student, Irena Bluhova, would go on to become a co-founder of the Communist Party of Slovakia and an internationally known photographer in the 'Worker Photography Movement'. 

The WPM lasted from 1926 until 1939, starting in Germany and the USSR, and spreading across Europe and America.  The movement promoted the depiction of proletariat life and working conditions. Communist affiliated groups of amateur worker-photographers were exhorted to depict 'in a hard, merciless light' the 'iniquities and social ills of capitalism'.

'Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary class struggle'.

In 1972, aged 68, Irena Bluhova, along with a group of other reformist intellectuals, was briefly arrested at her home in Bratislava. By 1979 her daughter Zuzana, a political refugee living in London, had decided to ensure the safety of her mother's negatives archive by having them spirited out of Czechoslovakia to the west.

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