Chapter 6

BEYOND THE PALESKI

Chapter 6

September came and our water went. I was in the shower one morning when the water slowed to a trickle and then stopped altogether. At first I thought that the pump had packed up but after pulling it to pieces and not being able to get it all back together I went looking for Big Jan the plumber. Unfortunately pumps turned out to be one gap in Big Jan's plumbing knowledge and he suggested I should ask Marek who was always having pump problems and should know how to put one back together. Marek was one of my favourite people in Bocwinka. He was tall, skinny and gaunt looking and always had a sickly look about him, probably because he was an alcoholic. His habit was no secret and he even made jokes about it - it was a fact of his life which he accepted and didn't seem unhappy about.

Drunkenness and alcoholism in Polish villages carry little of the stigma attached to the habit in Western countries but I will return to the subject later in the chapter. Just as I had found Ivan asleep at the milk depot, so I found Marek in the same state on the pavement outside the post office and left a note sticking out of his jacket pocket hoping he'd see it when he woke up.

Bogdan, the village intellectual, found the note and came around the house with it explaining that Marek couldn't read anyway. He asked what was wrong and upon receiving my answer went straight to the well, peered in for a second or two and told me that there was no water in it. I felt stupid for not having looked, like someone who couldn't start his car because he'd run out of petrol, and said I'd get Vladek to bring a tank full with the tractor and dump it down the shaft. Being short of water with only two of us in the house had us worried. Mr Polakowski had told us that the well was inexhaustible when we bought the place. What were we going to do when half a dozen people were staying in the house and taking showers each day?

Bogdan was of the opinion that the bottom had gone, although what this meant I couldn't imagine, and he disappeared returning later with two others and a length of rope. One man went down the well and they bailed every last drop of water out of it and inspected the floor. The wells all over Poland are all filled by seepage from ground water rather than being located over underground streams and sometimes, they said, the bottom will give way and let the contents run away into the earth. However, our bottom looked alright but they lined it with clay to be sure and brought a couple of big container loads of water on the back of a tractor and filled the well.

As time went by we found that we were simply using more water than the well could supply. The locals couldn't understand it, Polakowskis had lived in the house for years and never had a problem, and there were many theories put forward as to why we had developed a water shortage. A group of ladies engaged Alicja in a discussion about it down at the post office one day and concluded that it must be our washing machine but during the discussion it became evident that, by village standards, we were indeed big water users.

-Don't forget that you've got a bath too, one of them had said. -baths use a lot of water. If the pair of you go filling the bath up every month of course you'll have no water.

We already knew that people in the village weren't as familiar with soap and water as we were and we narrowed the water shortage down to this and the fact that people didn't water their gardens as we did - the thinking being that if an ornamental plant couldn't survive unaided, it wasn't worth having. Poland has the least renewable water resources in the whole of Europe and the vast majority of Polish villages have no other water supply than their individual wells, a fact of which we were totally unaware. In fact the best advice anyone at that party in Warsaw could have given us would have been "check the water supply before you buy."

However, Bocwinka was luckier than most villages as we had a vast underground lake beneath us, larger than the entire village, and a communal electric pump. The only problem would be getting the water to the house. We went over to see Vladek about it and he volunteered to bring water every day if necessary in the communal water container which sat on a trailer specially designed to go on the back of both tractor and horse. This was a great relief to us at the time but the next year when we actually had a few guests Vladek proved to be unreliable. His intentions were good but there was no predicting when he'd be drunk and unable to bring the water. Worse still, he'd sometimes attempt to bring water when he was paralytic and on one occasion drove straight through our closed gates, smashing them to firewood, and on up the path exiting through the fence at the other side of the garden before remembering what he'd come for and stopping the tractor.

It was particularly embarrassing on that occasion as we had the ambassador of a Western embassy and his wife staying with us to whom I'd written a letter inviting them to come for a free weekend in the hope that word of our venture would spread around Warsaw's diplomatic community. The ambassador's secretary had telephoned us the week before and one of her questions had been about security. I reassured her by telling her about Misha the guard dog and our security light. "If he's worried about the car being stolen he can park it in our garage and we'll put ours outside." I told her.

On the fateful day the ambassador and his wife were taking breakfast outside on the verandah and Alicja was approaching the table with a tray containing toast and orange juice. I was in the kitchen washing dishes when I heard Vladek's tractor coming up the drive at speed, which was nothing unusual, but there was always a point at which the engine would die and his brakes would squeal. On this day it didn't happen and I lifted my head just in time to see pieces of the shattered gate go flying up the path.

Misha, who'd been sitting in the middle of the drive barked the doggy equivalent of “arrrrrgh fuuuuck” and took off like a chemical reaction with ears flattened and her tail between her legs. This was followed by the ambassadors own rendition of the doggy equivalent of “arrrrrgh fuuuuck” in his native tongue and his wife screamed and damaged her knee on the table as she tried to make off in a hurry. Alicja just stood riveted to the spot with her tray of toast and orange juice in hand and watched Vladek go by in a mud coloured flash as he bounced right through the car park, where the ambassador’s car would have been, and disappeared through a hole in the fence that didn't actually exist up until that point.

Although I could appreciate that this was probably going to be a serious blow to our efforts to attract the "right class of clientele" I was stricken with an attack of the giggles and had to make myself scarce for a while. When at last I felt I could control myself and emerged to apologise to the lucky couple I could feel the laughter welling up inside me again and excused myself saying that I thought I should go and see if the driver was alright. I found Vladek sitting in the ploughed field where the tractor had stopped and we both burst out laughing and rolled around on our backs in stitches. And that's where the ambassador found us.

The peculiar thing about the incident was the publicity it gave us at the embassy down in Warsaw and over the next three months we had half a dozen other couples from the same embassy come to stay with us and they all wanted to see Vladek, his tractor and the newly mended fence. The memory of the expression on the ambassador’s wife's face is now imprinted on my brain and I still suffer from uncontrollable laughter whenever I tell anyone about it.

The end of water carting in this way finally came when Marek, who couldn't be bothered to wait the 30 minutes for the pump to fill the village water container, thought he'd take a short cut by backing the whole trailer and container into our lake where it could fill quicker through the hole in the top. It sank beneath the water and resisted the joint village efforts to pull it out for over a week. At the time our well was nearly empty and I took a trip into town where I bought two hundred metres of hose pipe to connect us direct to the village pump making us independent - or so we thought. Six weeks later the hose pipe was stolen.

But let me return to the every day drinking habits of the average Polish villager. Twelve years ago when we first visited Poland together on holiday I bought a Polish/English travel guide and on page 2 it said "never try to out-drink a Pole." Never was a phrase more appropriate although on that particular trip we stuck to the cities where, though the drinking can be hard, it in no way compares to the drinking habits of village Poles.

I'd already heard the stories - "once you open a bottle of vodka you don't stop until it's finished" and "you're not real friends until you've been drunk together" - but phrases such as these are usually taken at face value and do not prepare the Westerner for a drinking session with a group of villagers. These people don't drink for the taste, don't sit and sip whilst playing cards or talking about how many pigs they're going to sell next year. They drink solely for the alcoholic effect - they drink to get drunk pure and simple.

Vodka, of course, is the drink of the country and no matter what wonderful properties are attributed to this liquid anesthetic, it isn't a tasty drink. Although most Poles claim to be able to tell a good vodka from a bad one, I'm at a loss to see exactly how the connoisseur judges any alcoholic beverage when it only comes into contact with the taste buds for a matter of milliseconds. It's been my experience that if a Polish farmer invites you to drink with him he's actually saying "get drunk with me" and during the 40 or so minutes required to complete the process there will be no comments as to the quality or taste of the drink itself, in fact no appreciation of anything but the effect it has on the senses.

How well I remember comments at Western dinner parties concerning the quality of the wine - "that was a good Claret, full of body" or "I personally prefer a good Barsac to a Sauterne with my desert." And whenever friends were coming to dinner and we were in two minds what wine to buy to go with the food we intended to serve, we'd get a couple of bottles of rose because it went with practically anything. Well, in Poland, vodka is a bit like Rose in that it can, and does, go with anything, at any time and with anyone. It's drunk at weddings, funerals, board meetings, dinner parties and all other social occasions. In Bocwinka it's drunk in cellars, hedgerows, hay barns, outside the post office, on the back of tractors and in the fields at lunch time. Yes, a versatile drink is the vodka, a great social leveler - every man in Bocwinka gets leveled by it, socially or otherwise, at least once a week.

Drunkenness was such an accepted way of life in Bocwinka that I would find myself wondering why they bothered to come up with excuses for their drinking sessions, but they did, and they were surprisingly inventive about it:

International Women's Day:

There was a knock on Eva's door at 8am on this day and there stood six men who'd come straight from the shop after dropping their milk off at the depot. Between them they were carrying 4 bottles of vodka. Eva didn't drink, in fact she hated the stuff.

These guys must have heard that it was International Women's Day on the TV news, discussed it at the morning milk collection and decided to buy a few bottles.

-Good morning Eva my love, says Mishu -we've come to see madam to wish her the very best of health on this day of all days

-Sod off, he hasn't got time to get drunk today. We've got to move the cows to the lower field and fix the fences. Go on, get out.

-Eva my love, we haven't come to see your husband, we've come to see you. Don't you know what day it is? It's International Women's Day and you're an International Woman.

At this point Vladek, who'd been down at the shop himself but hadn't the courage to return at the same time as the lads, arrived home to be told by his wife that under no circumstances were these gentlemen setting foot in the house.

-OK then, said Ivan. -We'll just have a quick one out here on the step to toast your health and we'll be on our way.

Four hours later when Alicja went over to get our milk they were still there, including Vladek, on the step, laying on top of each other like a litter of new born piglets fast asleep.

I was outside in the lane early one May morning picking up the empty vodka bottles which had been thrown into our hedge, when Vladek came past on the tractor with his daily milk delivery. He tooted the horn and I stood up to wave when I noticed that he was steering with one hand and holding a bunch of flowers in the other. I'd never seen this before but thought no more about it until a few minutes later when Marek came past with his horse and cart, two milk churns in the back and a bunch of flowers balanced on top of them.

Something was going on and I went in for a cup of tea and mentioned it to Alicja who said it was probably a religious celebration and they would be putting the flowers on the shrine. The shrine was only 50 metres from our house and could be clearly seen from our upstairs window so I quickly grabbed my camera and went up to see if I could get a shot of some traditional, religious celebration. There was no one at the shrine but as I looked past it, towards the milk depot, I could see about 20 tractors and horse carts parked outside; all the drivers sporting bunches of flowers.

It was Jana, the milk collection lady's, name day and over the next 10 minutes I watched as all the flowers were tied to her bicycle completely obscuring the whole machine. Jana emerged from the building to a roar from the crowd and what I presume was the Polish equivalent of "happy birthday to you" was sung by all present. Then it started. Stan the poacher was the first to pull a bottle from his coat pocket and he held it aloft with a shout. Hands then went for bottles like they were six guns on the street at high noon. By this time Alicja was upstairs with me and we agreed that Stefan and Marek, who'd promised to come around to fell one of our trees, wouldn't be turning up that day.

A couple of hours later I was working in the yard when Vladek & Zenek appeared at the gate absolutely legless with their arms around each others necks. They'd come to a joint decision with regard to the short walk to our house; neither of them could stand on their own so they'd clung together and hobbled up to our gate.

-Peter. We're in trouble.

-I can see that Zenek.

-No, you don't understand. The man who drives the milk tanker is drunk and if he doesn't get it back to the factory the milk will be unsaleable. And he'll lose his job. And we won't get paid for the milk. And....he's got the milk from 5 other villages in there too.

-Oh dear, do you want to use our phone?

-Yes..No. Well... yes but that's not the point. Can Alicja ring the milk factory for us afterwards?

-After what?

-Oh yes. You're a good man Peter. Isn't he a good man Vladek?

-Yes, he's a good man. You're a good man Peter. You're a good worker and you help your wife to cook and... and what? Oh yes, you keep your grass short and you take Misha for walks.

-Issa good dog, Mish Mish's agood dog.

-Big dog, rip the arse off you wouldn't she Vladek?

-Yep, rip the arse off you.

-Eh Peter......you're the only man in the village who's not drunk except for old Miankowski but he can't drive because of his feet.

-Never could bloody drive you stupid sod.

-Just tell me what you’re getting at- I said.

-Oh, You'll have to drive the tanker.

-Christ, I can't drive a bloody great thing like that.

-Yes you can, iss easy. The driver will be with you, he'll show you the gears and everything....You'd be helping a lot of people.

It was stupid, I could have been in all sorts of trouble, but in the end I agreed and I got to drive my first milk tanker while Alicja followed in the car. I was terrified for the whole 12 kilometres to the milk factory and the driver was no use at all, he slept all the way. When we finally arrived at the factory gate there was a man waiting for us; we shook hands, he handed me a present of large lump of cheese in a polythene bag and I got back in the car with Alicja and went home. This was the one, singular event which told the population for miles around that I was a good guy - even though I helped my wife with the cooking and walked the dog - and the next day a gang of men turned out to fell our dead tree and knock our garden into shape.

Drunkenness occasionally has its amusing side and one such occasion occurred when we had our neighbours staying in the house while we were away in Warsaw. We returned to find a half used bottle of vodka inside the dog's kennel and asked everyone who the owner was. Nobody would own up to it but it was a good bet that it belonged to Vladek who'd probably hidden it in the kennel from Eva. Ever since there had been a standing joke in the village about our Misha being a drunk but it was over a year later that we found out a little more about what happened during that trip to Warsaw.

We had a visit from the local police department, two very personable young men who wanted to avail themselves of Alicja's translating abilities. We invited them in and they spent an hour or so moaning about the lack of government funding and then, when we were bosom buddies, told us an interesting story.

-A while back you had your neighbours looking after the place while you were away in Warsaw.

-Yes, that's right.

-Well, they had a bit of a party here and they ran out of food.

-Oh, that's nothing to worry about, we told them they could help themselves to anything in the cupboard while we were away.

-Yes, perhaps so, but they were also looking after your dog weren't they?

-Yes, so?

-Yes....... I don't know if your dog was any thinner when you got back but they were so drunk that they ate two tins of her Pedigree Pal and they didn't know it until the morning when they woke up and saw the picture of the dog on the tin. It's been the talk of the district for a long time but I don't suppose anyone here would have told you. After a pleasant chat they got up to leave and we saw them to the gate at which point, as they opened the car doors, one of them turned and with a smile said -and I hear you're a pretty good milk tanker driver.

We thought the Pedigree Pal story was hilarious and it was a frequent topic of conversation between Alicja & myself over the following fortnight, after which we forgot about it. Forgot about it, that is, until one night when Vladek and Eva paid us a visit and Sky News happened to be on TV. During the commercial break there was an advert for dog food and Vladek said

-That's what you feed Misha on, isn't it?

-Yes but we're going to start cooking up our own stuff for him like you do for your dogs. That way we'll know what goes into it. There's been a lot of controversy about Pedigree Pal on English TV lately. It seems that some of the Asian immigrants there couldn't read the label on the tin and a few of them ate it.

-What's wrong with that, it's good meat isn't it?

-Yes, it probably is but it has preservatives and chemicals in it which react with alcohol and would be illegal to put in human food - dogs don't drink you see, but Asians do.

-Oh?

-Yes, it can take anything up to 18 months before it reacts.

-So what's wrong with them - these Asians?

-Oh, I don't know much about it but a lot of them are in hospital. Apparently it starts with aching joints, elbows, knees and so on and it gets progressively worse the more they drink. The doctors don't know exactly what it is.

-Oh.

I knew that Vladek had had a problem with pains in his right elbow for some weeks and had trouble lifting anything with his right arm and now I reached across the kitchen table to top up his glass. He placed his hand over the top of it saying -no thanks I think that'll do for tonight. Got to be up early in the morning, got a long day in front of us.

It must have been a good fortnight later that I was driving home from town and stopped to pick up Ivan.

-What's wrong with your neighbour (Vladek) then Peter?

-I dunno, is there something wrong with him?

-Well, he's been on the wagon for a hell of a long time, not like him at all is it?

Vladek actually stayed off the drink for a whole month and he was as miserable as sin.

And when he eventually came home drunk one afternoon I saw him standing in the yard outside the house demonstrating to Eva that he could move his arm without pain. Eva was all smiles and glad to have the old Vladek back again as she helped him negotiate the door step into the house. There had apparently been a big drinking session that day and towards the evening a woman who we'd never met before, came to the house in agony asking to be taken to the doctor because every man in the village was too drunk to drive again. She was extremely apologetic and when we asked what the big drinking event was all about she said that a cow had been rescued from drowning in the swamp.

On another occasion I visited the doctor in town and he was fascinated at the thought of a Westerner living in a Polish village. When I told him I was from Bocwinka he told me that he had been in our village only the previous night with the ambulance. -Oh, I said, -nothing too serious I hope?. -No, he replied. -A man got so drunk at a name day celebration that he was sure he was dying. The worst drunk (from the point of view of being permanently drunk) in Bocwinka was Marek. A man of 42 years who looked 65 and whose wife left him because of his drunken habits.

The second winter after we moved to the village he fell into a stupor one night outside our house. It was 22 below zero and he was found some time later with frostbite on his toes. Not long afterwards Alicja and I were driving over to the next village one day when we came up behind a stationary motorbike and as we slowly drove past and looked at the rider we could see that he was going through the motions of riding. Both his feet were on the ground, hands on the handlebars and he was swaying slightly from side to side and looking straight ahead.

-Who was that, asked Alicja. -Don't know, I replied -but if he doesn't move off the road someone's going to drive up he back of him - I thought he was moving when we came up behind him.

When we were coming home forty minutes later he was still there, still going through the motions, but facing in the other direction. I told Vladek about it the next time I saw him. -Oh that's the forester from Borki - he was drunk and Jurek and Adam came past, stopped the tractor and turned him around for a laugh.

-But how did he get there?, I asked.

-Don't know but he's always doing it. He gets drunk and rides his bike and then just stops and sort of sleeps it off with his eyes open like a fish - never gets off the bike. A couple of years ago he had his headlight stolen while he was still sitting on it.

Halina and Ryszard, the couple we had been to see on the day we saw the Borki forester and his motorbike, were a couple of university educated drop-outs from Warsaw who became our best friends but were regarded as weirdoes by the local population. We used to see them every week and after living in the area for six years they had a fund of funny stories to relate and we often spent Saturday nights swapping experiences from our respective villages.

They told us that a friend of theirs was a drummer in a rock group and one weekend they were playing at a festival down in Crakow, a distance of 170 kilometres from their home town, and they set off in the late evening. Some time after dark they nearly ran over a drunken man who was laying with his push bike in the middle of the main Warsaw Cracow road. He was quite unconscious and stinking of vodka and they picked him and the push bike up and put them in the back of the van intending to drop him off at the next town.

However, an argument ensued between the band members and they forgot about their sleeping guest until they were some ninety kilometres further on. They stopped in a small town and attempted to revive the man but he was still out to the world and snoring heavily and so they left him on a park bench with his bike propped up against a nearby tree. Just imagine what this guy would have thought when he woke up! I bet he's still telling his kids -when I was your age I could ride ninety kilometres a night even after two bottles of vodka.

Another story they related to me was something they read in the paper. There had been a family gathering somewhere down south in the mountains in winter and three brothers had attended with their father who died in his sleep the night before they were due to leave. They had apparently discussed transporting the body back home to Gdansk and decided that it would be quicker and cheaper to dress him and take him home on the early train. The paper didn't go into all the details except to say that they managed to get the body into a compartment and laid it down full length on a seat as if he was asleep.

Then, being somewhat uncomfortable with the situation they moved to another compartment where they proceeded to drown their sorrows with a few bottles of vodka. The soporific effect of the vodka ensured that the three of them were sound asleep as the train came into, and went out of their home station and they slept all the way to the end of the line. They were woken by the train cleaning staff and went to collect the body only to find that it had disappeared and a row developed during which the cleaning staff were accused of stealing the corpse and the police were called. The body was found on the track the same day but how it got there wasn't clear until some weeks later.

Two youths had entered the compartment where the apparently sleeping old man was laid out and attempted to lift a heavy suitcase up onto the rack above the body. The suitcase had fallen down onto, as they thought, the sleeping man and when he didn't wake up they shook him, and on finding him dead, presumed that they had killed him and together they threw him out of the window. I read in a recent edition of "Newsweek" that in the town of Stargard "a man chopped off the head of his friend on a dare during a drinking spree". The judge’s comment was "it was a kind of a contest."

It's difficult for the average Westerner to imagine how anybody could possibly become so drunk as to invite a drinking partner to sever his head. But to anyone who's spent a fortnight in a Polish village in winter, it's entirely believable although it is interesting to speculate under which circumstances the decapitation could have occurred. Was it in a drinking establishment where an axe was borrowed from the barman?, in a wood shed, maybe, where the axe was readily at hand? or perhaps the participants were tree fellers drinking alone in the forest.

Imagine it happening in a pub in the Western World:

-Eh Fred, eh Fred. Fred, listen.

-Yeah, wot, I'm lisssnin.

-I dare you to chop off my head.

-Alright, I'll chop off your head.

-No you wouldn't.

-Yes I would.

-Wouldn't.

-Would, bloody would.

-No you wouldn't you gutless bastard - go on, go on then. Lets see you chop off my head - I dare you.

BONK - THWACK...........!!!!

-See, that bloody showed you didn't it? I say didn't it?


Enough material could easily be collected to fill a book on the exploits of drunks in Bocwinka and its neighbouring villages but the reader may be surprised to hear that Russians are considered here to be really serious drinkers - unlike the Poles. A Polish TV documentary on drunkenness in Russia recently showed people who were so hooked on alcohol, and so unable to afford it, that they shaved their heads and rubbed into their scalps a home made alcoholic preparation of floor polish, perfume, anti dandruff shampoo and pepper to simulate the effects of being drunk.

With the exception of Bogdan, who could be seen staggering once a month or so, I think it fair to say that every man in Bocwinka would be said to have a serious drinking problem if he lived in the West. And Bocwinka, I hasten to add, is certainly not an exception. I've often wondered why drunkenness is so prevalent in Poland. At first I was tempted to think it had its origins in the cold climate, to keep the circulation going, but it gets pretty cold in parts of Sweden and Finland and I don't think that farmers in those countries spend much of their time out of action through the effects of alcohol.

Is it Slavic? I don't think so because we've spent a lot of time in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Jugoslavia and whilst I've observed drunkenness on the streets of those countries I've never seen it as prevalent as it manifests itself in Poland. A product of communism? - no light at the end of the tunnel, despair and misery? Not so, because I've read accounts of travellers to Poland going back two hundred years and the writers have seen fit to mention it. Perhaps it's a combination of all these things and more.

In Bocwinka it is no exaggeration to say that a third of the men are drunk once a week in the warmer months and well over half of them are drunk at least twice a week in winter. There is no doubt that they would be drunk every day if they were able to afford it. During our second year in the house we were visited by a delegation of Western European agricultural boffins who were toying with the idea of setting up an EEC funded model farm in the area to show Polish farmers how to become more productive. They were full of questions about Polish farmers, their mentality, how many hours per day did the average farmer spend working at his living, could they work together in co-operatives, were they capable of adapting to change etc. etc.

I told them that the first thing they would have to address was the alcohol problem because, through alcohol, Polish farmers are out of action for at least one day a week, possibly more. It was easy to see that they didn't believe me and they put forward the theory that any farmer facing financial ruin would cut down on his drinking if he was shown a way to earn money. I'm afraid that I was unable to share their optimism and advised them to either teach farmers to drive tractors when under the influence or group them into cooperatives and roster the drinking sessions.