THE STATUS OF THE BULGARIAN LEEK

Last week I went to London to see an old friend who has been giving me help with my novel Boraya.  She is Russian and now that the novel is written I have asked her to pick over any bits that don’t seem wholly authentic. I expect there are many. She is very kind. We met at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich and toured the Turner exhibition there before having a mid-afternoon meal in the Trafalgar pub just along the river.  The exhibition was fine up to a point, the point being that not all the pictures were by Turner for reasons not easy to ascertain - you’d have thought the Trade Descriptions people might have had something to say about it - and many of Turner’s best loved maritime paintings weren’t there either.  Still the well-known and staggeringly beautiful ‘Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight’ had been brought across the ocean from the USA and its presence made up for a lot.  How much more you see in a painting than in a print.

Greenwich features in Boraya: it is where Elizabeth is living when the story opens and I’d wanted to go to the Trafalgar pub because it too gets a mention.  I did go there once before writing it into the novel but now that the book is written going into the pub seems like some literary quest.  Something written about in a book of fiction becomes legendary in the sense that it acquires an existence beyond the ordinary.  The characters become ghosts, if you follow me.  This isn’t just ‘the Trafalgar pub,’ but the pub where Elizabeth and Ginnie have a rather strained meeting.  You wonder where they sat and what they ate or drank and who else might have been there at the time.  Given place, fiction easily morphs into fact.  And for the first time I wondered what other fictional characters might be hovering in the ether watching us while we ate our lunch?

As it happens at that time in the afternoon - too late for the lunch-time crowd and too early for those looking into the pub on their way home - the pub was almost empty apart from Maria behind the bar who hailed, breezily and bouncily from Bulgaria.  We began a conversation about leeks.

Once upon a time - not so very long ago - all those providing service to the public in London were born within the sound of Bow Bells - or near enough.  Now they hail from every country on earth, their English clothed in a panoply of accents. This is charming: a way of instantly engaging them in conversation. 

That was how I began to talk to Maria about leeks a conversation that seemed to carry over from the first Bulgarian that I ever met who happened to be the Chargé d’Affaires at the time Bulgaria joined the European Union.  A man built in the Brezhnev mould, mountainous and taciturn who I met at one of those celebratory receptions.  Trying to make small talk I rehearsed with the poor man Wales’ attachment to the leek as a national emblem, but he was at a loss: he appeared to have no idea what a leek was.  I drew a little picture but he continued in a state of bafflement.  Maybe he had only even eaten them in soup.

So, relieved at having met another Bulgarian at last I reverted immediately to the question of leeks and Maria at once reassured me that leeks were a culinary staple of the Bulgarians and that the second Bulgarian empire which dominated most of the Balkans, Greece and quite a bit of Russia in the thirteenth century, would never have grown as it did without the sustaining properties of these vegetables in the soup.  Or at least she might have done, had her concentration not turned at that point to pouring beer and seeing to the lunch: sausages for me, fish for my Russian friend.  The status of the Bulgarian leek was settled.

The light faded and the pub began to fill.  We drank our beer and talked of many things. Across the river Canary Wharf twinkled into a concrete Christmas tree and the roof of the Dome, exploded in a crown of floodlighting.  The blue sky, freckled with clouds, darkened to a robust indigo over the black water.  How much of this would the pregnant Elizabeth have seen, I wondered, that April day in the spring of 1997?   How much had the pub itself seen? The body of Nelson would have been brought along this very same river in 1805 and the pub looked as though it was old enough to have witnessed the event.