11 parts Complete It all began back in 1983 when two masters from Dover Grammar School lead a group of a dozen boys on an adventure behind the Iron Curtain to one of the Warsaw Pact's most hard-line regimes. Bulgaria at that time was far removed from the mass tourist destination of today, and, aside from the infamous assassination of the dissident play write Georgi Markov with a poison-tipped umbrella on Westminster
Bridge, it was an not an exaggeration to say that few Britons knew much, if anything at all, about this strangely beautiful country. It was on that trip that I met my future wife; she was so taken with my fun sized Toblerone that one thing lead to another and we married and began our new life together.
My story, "A Foreign Field" tells of the transformation of a plot of land on the outskirts of Kozanovo, a small village in Bulgaria's Thracian plains, from a simple peanut field to our modern family villa and garden. The land, seized and collectivised by the communists in the 1940's was finally returned to the original owners and then developed into our dream family home. Back in England in 1983, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was talking of lifting government's controls over society and busily progressing Britain as a "property owning democracy". That Bulgaria, that staunchest of Soviet Allies,
would be queuing up to head down the same pathway and that I, together with a Bulgarian wife, would so enthusiastically be taking part in that journey seemed a far-fetched and derisory notion.