UKRAINIAN FAMILY HISTORY
READER STORY
Iwas born in 1963, and grew up in Huddersfield, a rain swept town nestling in valleys where woollen mills and terraces straggled below high moorland. In spite of my name I grew up in a very ‘Yorkshire’ environment, where dialect words such as ‘lekking’ had survived from the days of the Vikings. Yet something set me apart. I always knew when a new teacher reached my place in the school register. ‘Stephen’ they would say, and then shying like a horse at a difficult hurdle, ‘K… K… Kooo… Komarnukuj?’. My name went through various mutations and for years I was known as Ruskie by my schoolmates. I went to Ukrainian School for a while, which was held at the Ukrainian community centre in a big old Victorian house. Alas, baffled by the language’s Cyrillic alphabet and a grammar which to a monolingual English speaker seems as complex as quantum physics, I gave up.