My father stepped on a landmine and was brought home to us in pieces in a casket. After that, my mother was left alone, in a hostile environment, with four kids under the age of fifteen.
She was Catholic Croatian and my father was Orthodox Serbian. It was very unusual for people from these two backgrounds to marry, until 1940, when Tito tried to bring the country together as Yugoslavs under communism, and part of that was encouraging mixed marriages.
As a child, I spent my days looking after goats and sheep in an idyllic . . .