Tailor of Inverness, The (4 page)

We stayed in Lesna for nearly a month. The town lies in the foothills of the Karkonosze Mountains, a western offshoot of the huge Carpathian arc. We went on day trips to Swieradow Zdroj, a small mountain spa, and Szklarska Poreba, the main ski resort, pretty places, full of ornate wooden buildings, cafés and souvenir shops. The big chairlift at Szklarska took us up to 1300 metres and within a kilometre of the Czech border.

The weather was normally hot and sunny. We spent a lot of our time at Czocha, a man-made lake located only three kilometres from Lesna. Often we would walk there, making our way through the undergrowth at the back of the long garden, up the bank and onto a path which led through fields and then a forest in a deep gorge. We passed abandoned factory buildings, the workplace of slave labourers during World War Two, connected to a sub-camp of the huge Gross-Rosen
concentration
camp network. Eventually we came to the foot of a dam built in the late 19
^th
century, part of an early
hydroelectric
scheme. Aware of the great wall of water behind it, I was always a little apprehensive at the sight and was eager to scurry up the 300-odd steps to the top. I was in awe of the fact that this curved construction of blackened stone blocks
could actually remain solid, but not entirely convinced that it would stay that way. Despite the fact that the dam had stood resolutely for seventy-five years, my faith in those who built it and my understanding of its engineering remained
incomplete
. I needn’t have worried. It’s still there today.

The lake was surrounded by woods. It was about five kilometres long, wide at either end with a narrow bend in the middle, entrenched by rock walls. On the heights above the bend stood the round towers and halls of the 13
^th
century Castle Czocha, imposing and mysterious, especially from the water below. We often hired pedalos or kayaks and would look up at the castle’s battlements rising out of the rock as we paddled, imagining princesses and cannons, archers and coloured pennants, vampires and wicked barons.

On the flatter shore, by the field which became a car park in the summer, there was a swimming area marked by ropes and buoys, a campsite and rows of little summer houses, a café and a youth camp. Large groups of children would holiday there, the sons and daughters of railway workers, miners and such-like, from Poland’s industrial and urban centres. They’d walk in a crocodile from the camp, wearing headscarves and neckerchiefs, sometimes with the insignia of some youth
organisation
. Officially-sanctioned Trades Unions, Government and Party organisations would fund and promote these camps. There were groups of communist youths there too.

During my last childhood visit to Poland. In 1974, I went to a disco at the young communists’ camp. I was asked for my passport at the gate but was too young for a passport in those days. You only got one in the UK when you reached sixteen. This caused some consternation, and the fledgling Party official was forced to consult his superiors. My companion, Wladek Limont, a neighbour’s son, persuaded them I wasn’t a spy. Wladek and I were the same age, fifteen. We didn’t have much language in common, but we liked each
other nonetheless and kicked about together quite a lot that summer. Wladek’s father was an Argentinian communist, a political exile who had come to Poland to live a life which agreed with his ideology. I don’t know if Lesna met his
expectations
. My father told me that during his early visits to Lesna, in 1957 and ’59 especially, Mr. Limont had taken care to avoid any contact with him. He didn’t want to be seen fraternising with a visitor from the capitalist West. Memories of
indiscriminate
mass deportations to the death-ridden labour camps of Siberia were still fresh in those days. You could be accused and sentenced on a whim, without anyone having seen you do anything wrong. Talking to a westerner could be viewed as a highly suspicious act.

Maybe the person who spots you covets your job or your apartment or bears a grudge against you, and so you would be reported, denounced. You might survive this time, but a black mark now exists by your name and it only takes a minor change in the political temperature, a ripple of paranoia in the high reaches of the party, for a new purge to take place. Mr. Limont would have been seen by the two not-so-secret policemen who were always parked outside Uncle Adam’s house during those early visits, while inside the brothers mocked them and celebrated their reunion in one long private festival of love and vodka.

The disco was in a hall decorated with posters glorifying the Party, communist youth and industrial and sporting achievement. Most of the kids were too shy to dance. Wladek and I danced together and looked at the girls, as they looked at us. We had been listening to Radio Luxemburg that summer and Wladek had been recording some of the songs. His favourite was Hot Chocolate’s ‘Brother Louie’. He’d brought his recording of the song with him and managed to persuade the comrade DJ to play it. This was quite daring as the only western songs played up to that point were a couple of the
Beatles’ earlier, tamer tunes. We danced, happily ignoring the quizzical stares of a few young ideologues.

Although he was the son of a Party member, I don’t think Wladek was ever going to buy into the Soviet myth. I think by then, his father wasn’t really buying into it either. He seemed to actively encourage our friendship and enjoyed visiting Adam, Aniela and my parents for a seat in the garden and a glass or two, happy to chew over the failings of the regime and enquire about conditions in the West. I suppose it could have been a more subtle form of spying, but I don’t think so.

Wladek’s thirst for Western Pop was an example of another side to young Poland at that time, another side to conformism, a place where young people were eager to break out, to embrace a freer life. Gierek’s new consumerism and the student
radicalism
of 1968 had bred a strong desire for self-expression and independence from communist orthodoxy. The state made efforts to contain these impulses by sanctioning a few Polish rock bands, the most famous being the blues rock band with the defiantly English slogan-name, Breakout. The band’s long hair, its leanings towards the rocking lifestyle of the west, its flouting of convention and, most importantly, its music, were loved by hundreds of thousands of young Poles. Breakout’s gigs became a rallying point for disaffected youth. It all got too much for the state, though, and in 1970 a broadcasting ban was imposed on them, but their popularity grew and they kept on playing throughout the ‘70s.

My cousin Jurek was a Breakout fan. He was a student of mechanical engineering. He had long black hair and a leather jacket and a mate called Bogdan who rode a big motorbike. Jurek wanted nothing to do with Communism and I expect the Communists wanted nothing to do with him.

Poland was not the Soviet Union. Due to its size and perhaps the fact that it had achieved military victories over Russia in the past, the Polish Communist state was allowed a little more 
latitude by Moscow than its other satellites. I guess Moscow recognised the need to appease Polish popular opinion, that the violent suppression of the Poles would be more difficult than that of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. No doubt the Soviets closely monitored the Polish political climate and didn’t hesitate to put pressure on the Polish
government
when it felt necessary, but they left their Polish comrades in government to deal with protest themselves, which they did, with volence, imprisonment and killing, in 1956, 1970, 1976 and 1981.

Jurek wanted to get out of Poland, and in 1971 he came to Inverness on a tourist visa, ostensibly for a three-week holiday. He stayed a year. My father got him an illegal job as a mechanic with John Bloczynski, whose garage was in a backstreet near the town centre. Jurek’s English was virtually non-existent when he arrived and he quickly became lonely and homesick. He drank heavily at the weekends during that year and would regularly fall out of a taxi and into our house on Saturday nights, usually around 10.30pm after an all-day binge. The pubs in Scotland closed at 10.00pm in those days. My parents would usually be out at the Legion, so I would help him up the stairs and into bed. My mother got so fed up she suggested he move into the shed. By the end of the year, Jurek had succeeded in gaining an entry visa to Australia and had saved enough money to get there. He emigrated to Sydney and got a job with ICI in Papua New Guinea and, after a few years, opened a Russian restaurant called
Rasputin
. He returned to Inverness once, in 1978. I was about to start university and Jurek gave me £100, which was a lot then. I think he felt guilty about his bad behaviour. Jurek’s still in Sydney, having spent the latter part of his working life as a hospital catering manager. Now retired, he rarely returns to Poland.

In Lesna, Elzbieta Czupek, who would eventually emigrate to Denmark, became a friend of my sisters. She took me out
in a kayak on Czocha once, when I was ten and she was about seventeen, on a baking hot day. We paddled to the other side of the lake to visit a friend she knew was camping there. As we beached the kayak, Elzbieta and her friend exclaimed how hot it was, and her friend pulled off her T-shirt in one swift movement, to cool down. She was naked from the waist up. I was agog. I had never seen such careless abandon before! It was long before my puberty, so there was nothing sexual in it for me. It shocked me to see the young woman’s breasts though, and fascinated me. Coming from Presbyterian Scotland, it embarrassed me too. How could she do this and behave as if it was the most natural thing in the world? How could she so casually admit me into what I had been brought up to believe was a very private and shameful world? Why wasn’t she ashamed? Why was
I
? I think I felt a certain envy at her complete lack of self-consciousness, but concluded that what she’d done was perfectly logical in the circumstances and that this young woman was neither shameful nor wicked, merely free.

We had lunch with Elzbieta’s friend then kayaked the length of the lake, all the way to the stagnant swamp at the western end and back. We returned to be met by the ire of my parents. I had been out in the blazing sun for three hours with no protection. I knew I was sunburned, but didn’t realise how much. On the way home, I began to feel sick. By the time we got to Uncle Adam’s, I was delirious. I was in bed, shivering, sweating and covered from head to toe in an extremely
uncomfortable
sticky ointment for three days.

My second view of a woman’s breasts was equally
eye-popping
. One afternoon, my parents were entertaining with Adam and Aniela round a table in the garden, as they often did and, as usual, they had company. Adam’s best friend was Jan the Butcher, a man after his own heart: garrulous, playful, anarchic, a flouter of authority; a hard worker and a lover of 
vodka. He loved it too much. It would kill him before he was fifty. Jan was easily ten years younger than Adam. He had an attractive young wife, Danuta, short, shapely and strong. Jan and Danuta had come to show off their new baby. I was sitting at the table in the living room, probably playing patience or building a house of cards, when Danuta came in from the garden with her baby, sat in an armchair and fished out one of her full breasts for the child.

As with the young woman at the lake, this was clearly nothing out of the ordinary, but again, I was momentarily transfixed before coming to my senses and looking away. Women in Scotland just didn’t do this in the ’60s. Most of my generation had been bottle fed. I remember even in the ’90s being in a café in Pitlochry when my partner Virginia was asked to leave because she had begun to breastfeed. It was true that Danuta had left the revellers at the garden table for some privacy, but it was also clear that my presence wasn’t a problem and the wide open living room door she’d ignored when she entered suggested anyone else’s presence wouldn’t have troubled her either.

Uncle Adam’s garden was always a place of abundance during our summers there. There were the beehives. He grew huge beef tomatoes in the open, the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted: cabbages, courgettes, onions, beetroot, potatoes and carrots. He grew raspberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants. He had apple trees and pear trees and two big cherry trees. We spent many an hour up in the cherry trees, picking and eating juicy cherries until our stomachs ached. Adam would make a kind of cherry wine. Ula and Aniela would make cherry cakes and sweet
pierogi
with cherries, sugar and cream. There were lots of hens with their chicks and pullets, which we’d delight in chasing. Every so often, Adam or Jurek would select a hen for the pot, scurry after it, axe in hand, grab it and decapitate it on the wood block. It was an appalling and
fascinating sight to see the headless chicken scrabbling about, twitching and dying. Aniela would pluck it and then make delicious chicken consommé with parsley and home-made egg noodles. The hens roamed freely behind a high fence, in front of which was the yard and the steps leading up to the door. We’d sometimes sit on those steps in the evening and play cards while the adults sat around the garden table chatting, singing and toasting.

The vodka flowed freely. They drank it in the classic Eastern European style. The table was covered with little plates of food: slices of salami and tomato, gherkins, peppers, bread, carrot salad and cheese. The little glasses were filled, a toast was made and the vodka was knocked back. They’d shudder and gasp as the vodka thrilled through them and their hands would reach for some food and they’d continue their chat, always animated and expressive, with lots of gesturing and drama. After fifteen minutes or so, they’d repeat the routine. They could sustain this for hours. Sometimes we’d take a break from playing cards on the stoop to wait on them, replenishing the plates of food, supplying water and
kompot
to help them pace themselves or fetching another bottle. If the weather turned cooler, they’d move into the house and sit at the round table in the living room. They always preferred sitting at a table rather than in armchairs. The table provided a focal point which sustained an energy to their socialising. They’d get drunk, of course, but it was rare to see anyone legless. I only remember seeing my father in that condition once.