How Not To Be A Writer - Part Nine: Poland

 

Aunty Wanda

I'd visited Poland when I was a student, but working there was different. I had to surrender my passport to the police. An odd feeling - that you couldn't just leave if you wanted to - even though with British Council sponsorship I had a certain amount of protection. 

The country was still under soviet sway, although slowly but surely things were changing. This was the late 1970s and communist rule wouldn't end until 1989, so there was a long way to go. But everything 'felt' subversive - especially art and theatre. There was a constant undercurrent of what can best be described as defiant dissatisfaction. 

In 1970s Poland, the Roman Catholic church was particularly subversive and so were many of the people I met whenever I visited my father's cousin Teresa Kossak in Warsaw. They knew what they were risking. They had lived through it all before, again and again. If you want to read more about what had happened to my father's family before and during WW2, you can read about it in my book The Last Lancer. I wrote this quite recently, but I had spent half a lifetime researching it, and much of the material came from my father, from Teresa and Wanda and her husband Karol, people who were still living with the aftermath of those times.

My students were a lovely bunch: three classes of around 30 each. I had to attempt to teach them 'English conversation.' There were two hurdles to this. One was the size of each class. Foreign language conversation classes are usually smaller. The other was a certain uncharacteristic reticence, not normally found among voluble Poles. I soon discovered, however, courtesy of a couple of older and more confident class members, that this was mostly the result of the teaching methods they were used to. It took them a while to adjust to a lecturer who expected them to participate. Once I had given them enough encouragement, asking them what they were interested in, we got along just fine. 

I was given an apartment of my own in central Wroclaw overlooking a pretty square where a flower seller sat. It was comfortable and warm, although the old German 'Junkers' boiler in the bathroom would occasionally throw a wobbly and indulge in a small explosion that covered the bathroom with soot. This had been Breslau before the war, until all borders shifted. I suffered with a certain low key illness for some of that year - something that I was told happened to all visiting lecturers. Afterwards, I wondered if it was down to the boiler emitting just enough carbon monoxide to make us all a bit sick, but not enough to finish us off. A worrying thought. 

I quickly learned that if I didn't keep all my kitchen surfaces scrupulously clean, little processions of red ants would come in and hoover up my crumbs. One day I bought a bunch of sweet violets from the flower seller and put them in a glass beside my bed. I woke in the morning to a procession of ants, making their stately way up to the flowers and down the other side. They were inoffensive creatures, and my students told me that the apartments that had ants tended not to have cockroaches. I saw this as a bonus, and it proved to be true, at least where my apartment was concerned. 

Winters in Wroclaw were a bit milder than in Warsaw. I visited my relatives there for Christmas, but not before I was persuaded to sing White Christmas for about 90 students, my three classes all joined together. In Warsaw, I had to dig out my Finnish woolly underwear and sheepskin coat.  

I was zloty rich and had some sterling too. In fact I've never been so cash rich since. I had a drawer full of notes that had to be spent because I was never going to be able to bring them home or exchange them if I did. There were special shops where you could spend sterling or dollars and buy imported goods. These were frequented not just by visitors like myself, but by Communist Party members, some animals being more equal than others. 

I was always looking for ways to spend my zloties. I remember finding gorgeous long red leather boots, a lovely, stylish, wool gaberdine raincoat, chocolate plums, flavoured vodka. I lived on rye bread with caraway seeds, plum butter or blueberry jam and soft white cheese or smoked mountain cheese as well as big apples, irregularly shaped, with specks on them, but sweet and delicious. 

The communist regime had distribution problems. This meant that a huge consignment of some random item would arrive, but instead of being distributed around the country, they would go to one city only. If you saw a queue, you joined it and asked what you were queueing for later on. Shortages and empty shelves were frequent and commonplace. You didn't so much go food shopping as foraging. That was OK when you were young and single and had recourse to sterling - not much fun if you were trying to feed a family on low wages.

I was lonelier than in Finland, mainly because my students, friendly as they were, were younger, whereas my Finnish students had all been the same age or older, and had been very keen to entertain me. It was good to escape to Warsaw occasionally, to visit my relatives who had survived the war. I went to Krakow and saw the sights there. At the same time, I was trying to keep up a long distance and (as it turned out) extremely unwise romantic relationship back home in Scotland. We ran up huge phone bills. On one occasion, I heard a Polish voice on the line saying 'Good evening, English girl'. As the British Council had warned us, my phone was routinely tapped. I said nothing subversive, but I sometimes wonder what on earth they made of those conversations. 

I went home to Scotland in February, when the university had a break, and flew back with a suitcase full of toilet rolls, the Polish variety being rather worse than our old Izal, if anyone remembers that. Polish loo paper back then was grey-brown, elasticated, and still had sharp bits of tree attached to it. The customs officer who checked my case grinned and waved me through. 

Meanwhile, in my free time, of which I had quite a lot, I wrote. People ask me, as they have always asked me 'Are you still writing' and I want to shout at them 'YES, OF COURSE I'M BLOODY WRITING. IT'S WHAT I DO, YOU WALLY.' But I don't, of course. Too nice for my own good, me.

So even though I was 'being' a lecturer, I wrote.

I wrote plays for radio, poems about Poland, and the occasional freelance article. I planned a novel. And I began to think about the possibility of a stage play about Poland, about the sense of subversion and unease about what might come next. It would be called Heroes and Others. It would be, as it turned out, the worst theatrical experience of my life. 

An Extraordinary Christmas (or Two)

Aunty Wanda

 

This is a picture of my great aunt Wanda Kossak. She was the elder sister of my grandfather, Wladyslaw Czerkawski, the grandfather I never knew, and about whose life I'm writing a book.

I first met Wanda in the1970s, when I travelled by train to Poland and stayed with her and her watercolourist husband, Karol Kossak, the last in a line of distinguished Polish artists that included Karol's grandfather, Juliusz, and his uncle, Wojciech. My enchanted autumn with them is a subject for another post. My Polish was about as basic as their English, but my French was better, and as with many Poles of their generation, their French was good, so that was how we conversed most of the time. Over the weeks of my visit to their apartment in a spa town called Ciechocinek, I got to know and love them.

They were no longer young, and by the time I returned to Poland to spend Christmas there, Karol was dead, but Wanda had a long life, from 1896 to 1983. In fact, I had two Christmases in Poland, although they have somehow become fused in my mind and I will have to rummage through my box of old letters before I can properly distinguish one from another. 

The first time was when I was teaching English in Finland. Flights home to Scotland were very expensive so I travelled across the Baltic to stay with my Polish relatives. The second time was in the late 1970s, when I was working for the British Council, teaching English at Wroclaw University. Our longish winter vacation was in February, which meant that, once again, I headed for Warsaw, to spend Christmas with my father's cousin Teresa Kossak, her partner Andrzej, her mother, Wanda, and a whole heap of Kossak relatives, with whom, sadly, I have since lost touch. (If any of you are reading this, I'd love to hear from you!)

Those Christmases have become a series of vignettes of a time long past. So here's what I remember.

Warsaw was cold. Colder than Wroclaw, so much further south. There was frost and snow. There was a cheerful covered market, smelling of apples and dill pickles and cheap tobacco and that wonderful smoked 'mountain' cheese that I've only ever managed to buy in Poland. 

Teresa's tiny apartment was beautiful, with her collection of porcelain cups, her bright textiles, her books and artworks. In fact it sometimes strikes me that much of what I've decorated or planned since then, in our own house, has contained an echo of that time, in that warm, cramped, hospitable flat that I envied and wanted to emulate. She and Andrzej kept dogs that were much too big for the place, and since I was extremely allergic, they borrowed another apartment from a friend for me to sleep in, so that I shouldn't have to wheeze too much! 

I remember visiting the studio of one of their friends, an artist in amber, and the pungent scent of old forests from the polishing. He took me for a magical walk round the newly rebuilt old town. He must have been in his fifties, although he looked younger. It was evening, one of those clear, cold evenings, when the light leaches slowly out of the sky, and trees and buildings are sharply silhouetted against a golden sky. We walked and talked. His English was fluent and he told me something of the history of each place. He told me that he had taken part in the Warsaw Uprising when he was very young. Many corners of the rebuilt city held sad memories for him, where this or that friend or colleague had fallen. 

'I can still see them,' he said. 'Ghosts everywhere.' 

Warsaw was not bombed from the air. It was blown up from the ground, erased from the map. But it was rebuilt, and I was privileged to see it for myself, and to see it through his eyes as well. 

I had a proper Polish Christmas Eve at the Kossak house in - I think - Zoliborz. This is always a lengthy meal with many meatless courses, and makowiec - the most delicious Polish poppy seed cake - at the end of it. 

The house was crammed with Kossaks of all ages.  These included autocratic, intelligent Aunt Joanna Skarzynska, Karol's sister. She spoke excellent English, seemed to me a little like Lady Bracknell and quite as unnerving. She had worked in the American Embassy as a young woman, which was her post-war undoing, since she had survived, only to be imprisoned by mad, bad Stalin as a western spy. She survived that too. I got the impression that she could have survived almost anything. 

I remember a son - Wojtek? -who had been working as an archaeologist, I think, in the Gobi desert. He sailed sand yachts and gave me a little bronze Tibetan Buddhist platter with a sun symbol etched into it. There was a scientist daughter-in-law who worked her socks off in the kitchen, and there were assorted teens and children, and other more remote family members. 

The Kossak house was old and spacious and had survived the war relatively unscathed. There were polished wooden floors, lights, warmth, the inevitable pictures - and a tortoise that clip clopped about the floor, and tried to avoid being trampled underfoot. 

My dear, sweet, loving Aunty Wanda was my saviour, especially on the days following Christmas Eve when we went on family visits. I don't think I have ever met anyone whom I loved so completely after such a short acquaintance. She carted me about with her, while I felt the need to protect this fragile little lady on Warsaw's rickety trams. We laughed a lot. We visited relatives of whom - at this distance in time - I have completely lost track. But I know that, like the book of Genesis, or those Gaelic clan recitations, I could see that they were intent on fitting me neatly into the family genealogy. I was Wladyslaw's granddaughter, Wanda's great niece, Julian's daughter, the one who had fetched up in England after the war and married an Englishwoman. 

And I remember bigos. Every house offered bigos and every bowl was slightly different  - much as you'll be offered mince pies or Christmas cake here. It's good in reasonable quantities, but I also remember Andrzej who was brisk and sexy and very kind to an awkward young woman, who was a little in love with him, saying 'Poor, poor Kasia. Not MORE bigos!'

Only a few years ago, one of Teresa's friends wrote to tell me that she had died, and she sent me a book that Teresa had written about her family, including a chapter about her mother, Wanda Czerkawska. By that time, both my parents too were dead. This year, a Polish friend translated Wanda's chapter for me, which added another, even more intriguing dimension to what I already knew about my Polish family. 

But you'll have to wait for my next book to find out more!