‘The Scouring of the Shire’

I grew up in a small village at the fringe of the city of Vienna; when I was little, I came to believe that many older people were ‘bad’ cause of the way they looked at me. It was only much later that I heard that most of them had actually worked for my great grandfather and were consequently only looking at me in a strange condescending fashion so to gloat over the decline and downfall of my family’s fortune. My grandmother told me that, true, the Russians after the War had blundered lots of our stuff but that, were one to look into the homes and houses of that village, one would find at least as much of our furniture there as the occupation army had taken for spoils.