Two Caravans

An idyll of the English countryside: a beautiful summer’s evening in a Kent field, and around their two caravans a little group of strawberry pickers is getting ready to celebrate a birthday.

But who picks our strawberries these days? The Ukrainions: Irine, just off the coach from Kiev, and eager to improve her excellent English and find true love with a romantic Englishmon; Andriy, the miner’s son from the other Ukraine; the Poles: Bob Dylan fan, Tomasz (whose smelly trainers will soon punish those in the men’s caravan); Yola, the petite, voluptuous gang mistress, and her religious niece Marta, who – finds the wild mushrooms to cook with the sliced loaf, then there is Vitaly, king of the new mobilion world of the shiny new Eastern Europe; two Chinese girls; Emanuel, the round-eyed eighteen-year-old from Malowi, come to England to look for his sister. And although he can’t exactly help pick strawberries, there’s also the Dog.

But these are a group leading dangerous lives – exploitative employers, British regulations and gang masters with guns will all threaten their existence as they take to the caravan road until each of them peels off to find their destiny.

Hilarious, gritty, moving and slapstick by turns, Two Caravans has every bit of the extraordinary distinctiveness, wit and heart that made A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian so successful.