"When they say I'm unbelievably optimistic, I'd say it isn't optimism, it's only that life is here for us to live it, not for us to avoid it. We have to know what we should do, and not be afraid of it failing. It can fail. But that's life. And it's beautiful."
"It was an express train, it only stopped at the big stations. The first one was called Ipswich. A lot of Czech (Czechoslovaks) got on. That didn't interest me, they were just quartered in the area my parents lived at. I had a newspaper and I was reading, but I kept feeling someone was looking at me. I blushed and felt ashamed. So I said: 'You read English, yes? Here, borrow my newspaper.' So I thought I'd have some peace now, that the Czechs would leave me alone. He pretended to read, and then he wrote on a piece of the newspaper: I would like to know you more. I wrote back to him that I'm not interested. But he didn't give up, and he wrote me his address. When we got to London, I waited for the Czechs to leave the train, that I'd get out last. The Czechs were gone and there he was standing by the door."
"I remember the first two-year plan. I was living in Slovakia and the second two-year plan was on way. It was 1948, we left towards the end of the year. I thought things were working now. There was a shortage of meat beforehand, and now the butcher's was full of meat. We lived not far from the River Váh, and it was completely dry. I found out later on that the farmers had had to kill off their cattle. My naïvety was such that I thought: 'Aha, so the two-year plan has started working.' "
"There was a glassworks in Lednická Rovná. We stayed there for almost two years. Lednická Rovná was a horrific experience for me. I never thought that people could live in such horrific conditions as they did there. I never thought that people who owned a bit of land won't have an animal to pull the plough. The one couple did it themselves. I've forgotten if the man was at the back or up front and barefoot. It didn't occur to me to take a photograph of that at the time. English was no use in a Slovak village like that of course. It was a great achievement for me when I went to the shop and pointed at the goods, that is if there were any there. The worst thing was that the rationing was so tight. We had rationing for years in England, but because I was in the army, the rationing system didn't affect me. I didn't know what to do, no butter, no eggs, no salt."
(Q: "What did you do in February 1948?") "I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know what it meant. I talked about it with Yvonne [Šebesťáková], and she agreed that our husbands hadn't told us anything about the political situation, that they'd been afraid we'd leave. We couldn't speak Czech at all, so it was easy [not to understand]. When we got English newspapers, which wasn't very often, what they wrote about us wasn't true, we knew that, but what was actually true, we didn't know. Even if I had known something about it, I would've been glad at the time that we'd won, as old Communists."
One of the last living “war brides”. Ivy Kovandová (née Norman) was born in 1922 in Suffolk, England. During World War Two she was a radar operator. In 1943 she became acquainted with the Czechoslovak soldier Oldřich Kovanda. A year later she bore him a son, Karel, and in 1946 a daughter, Marie. She has lived in Czechoslovakia since 1946. From 1946 to 1948 the Kovandas lived in the village of Lednická Rovná in Slovakia. They later moved to Říčany, and then to Prague. From 1962 onward she worked as a proofreader of English texts in the foreign section of the Czech Press Agency (ČTK).
