It would be natural for Women in a Village to be compared with Rebecca West’s masterpiece about her travels in the former Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Both West and Louisa Rayner were Englishwomen writing about a land and people relatively unknown to most of their readers. But West was never anything but a visitor to Yugoslavia.
Rayner, on the other hand, was a resident. Fascinated by the country on her first visit in 1936, she returned the next year, when she met and married a Belgrade fuel dealer named Stojan Božic. She would no longer be able to see the country “as a picture; I should not be able to stand back and disparage or admire. I was going to become a Yugoslav woman; I was stepping into the picture.”
That step may have ensured her survival after the Germans invaded in 1941. By then, she had become fluent in Serbian and fully assimilated into the culture, serving slatko and coffee to her husband and his friends as they sat and talked in their living room, working in the kitchen in the early fall as they canned great quantities of tomato sauce.
In 1944, she and her husband decided to flee Belgrade with their six-year-old daughter, joining a great exodus of civilians leaving the city as it became a target for regular Allied bombing raids. He chose Rušanj, then an isolated village along a hillside roughly ten miles south of Belgrade. Life in the village was so rustic that there was no notion of rent: the villagers simply took them in and made them part of the household.
Having reconnoitered the situation beforehand, Stojan chose to approach Savka, a grandmother, who was already sharing a two-room hut with two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren. Savka’s hut had only an earthen floor and everyone slept together in a single bed. The hut had no chimney; there was simply an opening at the peak of the tiled roof through which the smoke escaped. Instead of a stove, Savka cooked on an iron dome suspended over the fire.
Rayner, who’d taken a degree in classics at Cambridge, recognized the central room of Savka’s hut as what the Greeks called a melathron — a black room. “… [M]ore than a kitchen, but hardly a living-room and not quite a hall in the medieval sense. The walls and beams of this room of Savka’s were black with soot, for the smoke from the hearth visited every cranny before drifting out through the room.” She later wrote of her comparison between Savka’s hut and those of Homer’s time in an article titled “Kitchen Problems in Ancient Greece,” published in The South African Archaeological Bulletin in December 1956.
“I did not stay with Savka in her melathron in order to study Homer,” Rayner wrote. But “in that precarious and primitive way of living I found Homer a most cheering companion. Homer had gone through all this. Homer knew. And in all this smoke and dirt and toil Homer had kept his poise and his refinement.”
Rayner’s classical sensibilities are evident throughout Women in a Village. The way of life in Rušanj was closer in many ways to that of ancient Greece. Even before the war, the village operated more on a barter basis, and as the war made currencies fleeting phenomena with fluctuating values this became all the more so. As a refugee with little more to offer than labor and occasional contributions of food or cloth, Rayner focused on doing all she could to assimilate.
Thus, unlike Rebecca West, who could afford to be subjective, picking and choosing among the various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia, Rayner is at all times an empathetic observer. Reference to Homer was one of the ways in which she could deal with the radical changes forced by her situation. So she doesn’t recoil at what occurred after each meal:
… there was a black dog and his chocolate-covered mother. They served no purpose at all except to bark and lick the table clean after meals. The table (sofra) was about a metre in diameter and perhaps a foot in height. When the dogs had cleaned it, it was leant up against the wall out of the way. I suspect that the “table dogs” of the Odyssey also licked the tables and were not simply fed at table.
Rayner soon learns the merit of rustic ways, switching to wearing a wooden yoke after her first experience of hauling two bucketfuls of water from the well nearly a kilometer away from Savka’s hut. And when she finds the corpse of one of the neighbor’s chickens floating in a bucket, she simply extracts it and carries on. She comes to understand the importance of cattle in plowing even the smallest field and the tragedy of losing one of a matched pair. “She is a left-hand cow!” Savka chastises Rayner when she suggests borrowing one of another farmer’s spares. With many of the men having been conscripted into the Army or the partisans or forced labor in Germany, it is the women who do most of the work.
Rušanj is so far removed from its century that the villagers do not even observe St. Vitus’s Day, the day still held sacred by most Serbs, marking the death of the last Christian king in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. “It’s only a national holiday,” one of them remarks. The significance of that comment stunned Rayner:
Try to grasp the idea of the distance of stars. If you are not a scientist your mind faints in horror at the attempt. So in horror did my mind faint when I tried to comprehend the awful slowness of change. How long does it take for a new idea to be adopted — six hundred years? A thousand? Well, there is some hope. But how much more time is needed for that new idea to oust a new one? That is like the distance of stars. How long had it taken for the people of Rušanj, wherever they may have been living, to learn to worship oak trees — or the sun, or their ancestors? And how many millenia had they needed to forget whatever ideas they had before that? The mind faints.
Yet when it became clear that the Russians and Tito’s partisans were going to succeed in forcing out the Germans, the villagers adapted quickly to the emerging balance of powers — placing Rayner’s situation at risk. “It followed that a newly-converted partisan might be able to win the confidence of Russian and other Communists by denouncing someone who had spoken a word in favour of the British.” And even more so if the denounced were a British citizen.
Rayner and her husband returned to Belgrade soon after the Germans evacuated, but their stay would be short. By late 1945, they realized they would not be allowed to resume their former bourgeois ways and one or both could face imprisonment. Stojan arranged for visas through a friend in the French embassy and they left in January 1946, never to return.
Women in a Village was published in England in 1957. The book received enthusiastic reviews. V. S. Pritchett considered it “a most remarkable book…. Something quite new and original: war as it is seen by a distinguished, level-headed and sensitive woman. It is most interesting and well-written.” Most reviewers cited the author’s compassion and understanding. “Here is the drama of life and personality told with intelling perception in fascinating human detail and all on a level of taste and values calculated to excite the mind and heart at once,” wrote Monni Adams in the The Montreal Gazette.
By then, Stojan and Rayner had parted ways, she settling back in Cambridge. The book soon fell out of print and was forgotten. In 1986, however, it was translated into Serbian and serialized in the Belgrade newspaper Politika. This led to a journalist, Dragoslav Simic, tracking down Rayner, who was by then retired in a small village near Diss in Norfolk. Born Isabel Foster, she had kept her married name and had been known as Isabel Božic in England. Simic traveled to Diss and interviewed Isabel Božic, who explained that she had taken her mother’s maiden name of Louisa Rayner as a pseudonym. Simic then visited Rušanj, where he found one of Savka’s surviving daughter-in-laws, Vuka. A translation of Simic’s story can be found online at http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/engl/Louisa-Rayner.html. Isabel Mary Foster Božic died in 2004 at the age of 90.