There was a group of blokes cleaning the streets with big hoses and whatnot. These streets were in Zagreb, late one evening in the 1980s, well into Yugoslavia’s last decade. I was a teenager, being driven home from dinner somewhere by a friend of my mum’s, a chap in his 30s, which felt like an old and wise age to me at the time. His name was Radovan. As we crawled past the wielders of the hoses, he said something that struck me as unusual and rather sweet, the significance of which I’ve been mulling over ever since. Nodding approvingly at the street cleaners beavering away, he said words that roughly translate to: “Our boys are doing a good job here.”
Where I lived in the UK, neither then nor now could I imagine anyone saying something like that, unless perhaps they were in charge of street cleaning at the council, or the boss of a street cleaning firm. Radovan was neither of those things, yet still apparently felt that the men – and I can’t imagine they weren’t all men – were his boys. Not in the sense that he had any authority over them, obviously. Rather, that they were all part of the same team, as fellow workers or merely fellow citizens. All working for, or at least with an interest in, the common good.
