Chapter 8

BEYOND THE PALESKI

Chapter 8

November the first for those who, like me, don't know much about these things, is All Saints Day and on All Saints Day Poles think about their dead. Everybody buys candles and takes a trip to the cemetery to place them upon the graves of their deceased relatives, friends, poets, authors, national heroes and, if you don't have anyone - the grave of your choice. Cemeteries are transformed for that one day, preparations usually starting a week beforehand with a clean up, and on the night, you can't get near a decent sized cemetery for traffic, in fact Poland's biggest traffic jams are caused by people visiting cemeteries on November the first.

Most of the candles are manufactured in glass jars and you can buy candles which will stay alight in the foulest of weather for two days and the cemeteries present a beautiful sight on the night of November first - well worth a visit by anyone and you can see the glow of the candles in the sky for a mile or more when approaching a large town cemetery. We were doing our weekly shopping in Gizycko on the Friday before All Saints Day and, at the market, Alicja bought four grave candles. I asked where we were going to put them.

-Oh, on a grave somewhere, I don't know yet, she said.

When we returned home and unpacked everything we put the candles in a cupboard where they completely slipped our minds until All Saints Day. The roads were slippery from a snow fall that morning and we didn't want to drive into town unless it was absolutely necessary so we decided on something else. There are four old German/Prussian cemeteries in and around Bocwinka and they've been out of use since the 1940s when the German population left and the Poles and Ukrainians came and built their own cemeteries. We discovered one of them when walking Misha one day. It was only twenty metres away from the road but we would never have found it if Misha hadn't found a badgers hole there. -I know, said Alicja. -Lets take Misha for a walk and put the candles on a couple of the graves down past where Marek lives, in that old German cemetery we found.

It seemed as good a place as any, seeing that we didn't have any relations buried in the village, and we set off candles in hand. The cemetery, like all German cemetries in the area, was badly neglected. The locals saw no reason to maintain the resting place of a race of people who they knew nothing about, and who had left the area before they, themselves, came to live here. It was hard to make out where the graves were, for most of them had trees growing up through the middle of them, but we uncovered two headstones and brushed the snow away with a branch, pulled up a few weeds and scratched around until they looked reasonably presentable. Not knowing who was buried there I scratched the names Hansel at the foot of one grave and Gretel at the other and we lit the candles and left.

It had been on a Tuesday and on the Thursday morning Vladek came over to the house to ask if he could borrow my binoculars. My binoculars were very popular in the village because most farmers have land on which they graze cattle away from their houses. Using the binoculars, they could check on their cattle thereby saving themselves a walk. I handed them over and didn't think any more about it until Alicja, who was going down to the shop, came back in the gate a few seconds later saying "here, come and have a look at this."

I walked out of the gate and saw most of the male population of the village standing outside the post office and Vladek, with my binoculars, sitting on the post office chimney. We ambled down to have a look and as we got nearer we could see all the women looking out of their upstairs windows. Alicja asked what it was all about but was met with a wall of silence and the chatter didn't start up again until we'd done our shopping and were walking back down the road almost out of earshot. It had us intrigued and we watched the proceedings from our upstairs windows for a while but couldn't make out what all the commotion was about.

Vladek was obviously reporting what he saw through the binoculars and everything he was saying seemed to be chewed over by the rest of them and twice someone ran up the road in the direction Vladek was looking in. We eventually became fed up with watching it, Alicja saying that whatever it was, she would hear about it sooner or later from Eva, who couldn't keep anything to herself for long, and we went back downstairs and carried on with the days work. This time though, Eva kept it to herself for a fortnight and we didn't find out until she'd had a few drinks at a christening one Sunday and came over to tell us what a good time we'd missed through not being there. -What was going on that day down at the post office when Vladek was sitting on the roof with the binoculars?, I asked her.

She sank in her chair and her voice dropped to a whisper as she turned to Alicja.

-Ghosts down at the old German cemetery, the one down by Marek's place.

I didn't know the Polish for ghost and asked Alicja what had been said. She told me in English and I remarked that we were lucky not to have encountered the said ghosts when we were down there lighting candles. Without changing her tone of voice Alicja advised me in English not to pursue the subject as she had inkling that we and the ghosts were one and the same. Marek had apparently staggered outside the house for a pee before bed time on All Saints Night, seen the glow of our candles at the cemetery and ran to his brothers house, some two hundred metres away, arriving there stone cold sober and screaming his head off.

Their neighbours had turned out of bed and seen the glow too and the next day, after a couple of stiff drinks, Big Jan had been persuaded to ride quickly past the cemetery and he came back with tales of strange markings on the ground and the snow having melted away on one of the graves. Rumours had begun to spread around Bocwinka of how cows wouldn't graze near the cemetery, dogs put their tails between their legs and whined whenever they got near the place and then someone from town was said to have been driving along the road and seen the ghost of a young German woman with a noose around her neck.

We'd unwittingly started something, the village was scared stiff but by the time we found out about it, it had already gone too far for us to admit to everybody that it was us who'd simply lit a few candles and we couldn't think what to do to ease people’s minds. The Soltys came to see us saying that it was all getting out of hand and he asked me for a lift to Kruklanki (the nearest village with a church) in the car to see the priest about performing some sort of right to get rid of the German woman's ghost. I waited in the car outside the priests house and when the Soltys returned he told me that the priest had told him that if it was a German cemetery and a German woman's ghost it would be a protestant soul and he, as a Catholic priest, couldn't do anything about it.

On the way home in the car the Soltys told me candidly that he didn't really believe in ghosts and asked me, as a Westerner, for my opinion. I told him that I thought there was probably some perfectly rational explanation for the goings on at the old German cemetery - perhaps some old German had come back and put a candle on his father’s grave?

-Why don't we take the dogs with us and go and have a look?, I asked.

-Not fucking likely, came the reply.

-OK , I'll tell you what I'll do. When we get home I'll get Misha and I'll go over there with her and have a look, maybe there's some footprints or something. But you'll have to stand in the road and witness that I've been there or people may not believe it. At home we parked the car, collected Misha and wandered up the road meeting Jurek on the way.

-What brings you down to our end of the village?

-We're going down to the cemetery, said the Soltys, and inclining his head towards me said -he's going to go over there with Misha.

Jurek spread the word on the Bocwinka Information Superhighway and I had a large following right up until I walked off the road and into the trees - they all stood back on the road. I collected the four glass jars which had held the grave candles, tied Misha to a tree and sat down for a smoke before returning to a heroes welcome. I held the glass jars up as I walked back across the field and the Soltys was shouting -see, see, it was just some old German who put some candles on a family grave. As we all walked back up the road I could hear the comments. I was fearless, they were saying, even though I didn't drink, helped my wife with the cooking and had been seen hanging sheets out on the line.

I was the Pied Piper of Bocwinka, all the kids walking along behind me and everybody crowding around asking questions. Everybody, that is, except old man Miankowski who made me feel uncomfortable because he kept looking at me and, although he didn't say anything, I had the feeling that he knew the real story or, at least, had put two and two together and come up with something other than ghosts.

The really cold weather started in November although without the wind it wasn't unpleasant, rather, it was deceiving. It was possible to work up quite a sweat walking around if suitably attired but we were lulled into a false sense of security as it seemed so warm compared with the cold snap we'd experienced a few weeks previously. The thermometer dropped to minus 23 and seldom rose above it for the next four months but the drop in temperature, like the last time, had occurred suddenly one night and I had no time to prepare for it. Everyone else in the village knew that it was coming as, at that time of year, they all watched the weather forecast as if their lives depended on it.

I stepped outside after breakfast and the first thing I noticed was that the snow had gone hard, but when I took a breath I thought my lungs were going to snap freeze. The rest of the day was spent in thawing things out starting with the kitchen water supply which I'd run too close to the cellar window and it had frozen. Next we had to insulate it and block up the cellar window with straw to prevent a repeat performance. Readers living in places like Canada would already know about cold weather and tend to dismiss the things we went through on that day as being the result of poor preparation and that's true but we'd never lived in such a climate and didn't know what to expect.

I tried to get into the garage but the door had frozen shut and I had to thaw out both it, and the door lock, with a hair dryer before I could gain entry. That wasn't too bad and I wasn't too surprised when I had to do the same to get into the car but what did phase me was that I then found that the diesel in the tank had frozen solid and I had to spend hours on my back under the fuel tank heating it up with a heat gun. All the fuel lines and the filter had frozen too as had the injector pump and it was nightfall before I finally managed to start the car after adding petrol to the diesel to stop it freezing again. We left a heater under the car all night and in the morning drove to town and bought some cold weather fuel additive at the garage as well as a bottle of windscreen washer anti freeze as the washer bottle was a solid block of ice.

-Is there anything else I'll need for the cold weather -I asked the man at the garage.

-Only a bottle of vodka, was the reply.

I smiled knowingly but he was serious. -You should always carry one in the car with you over winter, especially at night.

-Oh, why?

-If you slide off the road in these parts you may not see another car all night and if the engine stops and you've no heat, a bottle of vodka can stop you freezing to death - keep your circulation going.

Winter was looking more serious every day and we took his advice. Of course the cold weather affected other, every day things, too, which previously I hadn't given a thought to. Misha's plastic bowl was frozen to the ground and when I kicked it - it broke in half; I picked up the garden hose to store it in the garage and it snapped too. Once when we returned home from the shops we forgot to bring in a litre bottle of Coke and when I found it in car the next morning it had split its plastic container and was a solid, bottle shaped lump. I removed the plastic bottle and stood the frozen litre of Coca Cola on a garden seat where it stayed for weeks before finally melting.

Cigarette lighters wouldn't work; my camera shutter froze closed; ball point pens wouldn't write; padlocks on the outbuildings had to be heated with the heat gun before they would open. And I left a ladder on the ground one night and broke it the next day when attempting to prise it up from where it had fallen. A shovel which I'd left leaning against a veranda post fell over during the night and I had to dig it up with a pick axe in the morning after we'd had freezing rain.

This wasn't the coldest part of the year and one night in January the temperature dropped to minus 31 and the car battery split open. One thing we did like about the cold weather was that the tractors went inside and the horses and sleighs came out and every morning before eight o'clock a procession of them went by the house carrying the milk down to the collection depot. By this time we'd been in the village for more than half a year and we received in the post a letter informing us that my permanent residency papers had at last made their way through the system (if indeed there was one) and we were summoned to the county offices to collect my identity card.

We knew what sort of a day we were in for before we left home and we weren't looking forward to it at all. Polish government offices aren't the most inviting of places at the best of times and there is always some idiotic reason why you can't get all your business done in the one visit - necessitating another trip just to get someone to put a stamp on a piece of paper because he was on sick leave the first time you went. I suppose that wherever one chooses to live in this world one comes into contact with bureaucracy in one form or another. If you change address, have to re register your car, are blessed with a new baby etc. you have to visit the relevant office block and present your papers.

A sizeable book could be written on the intricacies of Polish government bureaucracy if anybody, including the bureaucrats could ever get to the bottom of it. I've been in countless government offices during my time in eastern Europe and there's little difference between them. What I describe here goes for Poland, The Czech & Slovak republics, Hungary, Bulgaria and the old East Germany. There seems to have been one central plan somewhere which dictated the architecture, the decor, pot plants and the miserable people who inhabit these places during their working lives.

For the most part, private enterprise has given its buildings a face lift in Poland but not so government office blocks where there's no money to spend on non essentials like decor. Our county office block was a large, shabby, less than imposing structure 6 floors high, built of glass and aluminum with a flat roof and surrounded by a pot holed car park and badly maintained gardens.

We walked up the crumbling concrete steps with the concrete re-enforcing wires sticking out of the edge of each tread. The steps were flanked by hand rails made from welded scaffold pipes, painted grey to match the concrete. I opened the aluminium framed glass door, which had once been fitted with an automatic door closer but now only displayed a number of screw holes where it had once been, and stepped onto a rag covered rubber mat made from old car tyres. The rags covering the floor mat had been placed there by the cleaning staff in an attempt to stop the worst of the dirt and snow being trodden into the building.

Once inside the dingy foyer, and standing on the carpetless, white speckled, grey terrazzo which covered the whole of the interior, my first impression was one of filth. This was not the case; the whole building was spotless but the decor so dismal as to give this impression - a riotous celebration of pure dinge. There was an all pervading smell of disinfectant. A very basic, un perfumed disinfectant I've smelled a hundred times in similar buildings and which immediately brought to mind unpleasant memories of hours spent waiting in line outside closed office doors for some minor clerk to condescend to see me.

Ahead of us was the information board showing the room & floor numbers of the different government departments and to the right were the lift doors between which was a much dented, galvanized bucket of sand which served as an ash tray. A dark corridor ran off to either side of us painted up to shoulder height in dark brown oil paint and above this ragged line was a flaking, off-white emulsion paint. The emulsion had been applied at a later date than the oil paint and the workman evidently was suffering from the after effects of a night on the drink when he did the job. We walked down a corridor reading the signs on each door as we went until we came to the one we wanted and sat down on a cheap vinyl covered bench seat with cigarette burn holes in it.

Two other people were in front of us in the queue, they'd already been there for two hours and we began a standard, winging conversation about the inefficiency of government departments. Both were holding small parcels which we knew contained presents to help grease the wheels of the bureaucratic machinery. How did we know? Because we had one too! I used to object to the business of bribing people to do their own jobs but soon learnt that it could save hours of waiting in corridors and, once the person you have to see spies that little brown paper bag, everything moves along at a faster pace.

They have strange way of running things. On the other side of the office door is a person who you want to see but as they have no way of knowing that you're out in the corridor, you knock and enter. If the person has someone with them you apologise and exit. It becomes a little confusing however, if the room is occupied by two or more officials who have people sitting on the opposite sides of their desks. You apologise and exit without knowing which official it was that you needed to see as they have no signs on their desks to tell you who's who.

When this happens you wait for someone to come out and then enter and ask the official with the vacant chair opposite them if they are the person you want to see. On finding that your official is the one who's still busy you go out to the corridor and tell the rest of the queue that the other official is free. When an official has finished with a person and the chair is unoccupied they wouldn't dream of telling anyone about it, shout out "next" or indicate in any way that they're open for business.

In the corridor were 24 office doors, each with a minimum of two locks but some with up to four. As we sat there, people came out of these doors with pieces of paper, shopping bags and kettles. Without exception they all locked at least one of the locks behind them. Every person has his or her own electric kettle in their office but no running water, and so they must walk to the nearest tap to fill up and as they're responsible for what's in their offices they must lock up behind them. Each office door was also equipped with two plasticine filled bottle tops of the crown seal type, one on the door and the other on the door frame with a piece of string running between them. When the occupant of the office leaves for an extended period of time they stretch the piece of string across the bottle tops and press it into the plasticine.

They then push their individual, state supplied, seal into the plasticine and this tells them when they arrive in the morning whether or not someone has broken into their office. They don't have a clue who has broken into their office but if the plasticine has been tampered with they don't enter before calling a witness. The peculiar thing is that some of these string & plasticine sealed doors have a frosted glass panel in them which, if broken, is large enough to permit entry without breaking the string. I presume that the cleaners have their own seals or they clean while the occupant is still in the room.

All the corridors in these state offices suffer from an overdose of strip lights in the ceilings but most of the tubes have been removed to save on electricity and this adds to the general feeling of dinginess. After finally getting to see our minor official we next had to visit the woman director of the passport office who had her own waiting room in which we sat for a few minutes as we were told that she was busy in another office. She was obviously an important person as she had a fitted carpet in her waiting room which I could see carried on through into her inner sanctum. It also carried on up the wall covering all the skirting boards and ended in a jagged, frayed line about ten centimetres from the floor. We sat down in the two arm chairs which I swear visibly winced as they took the weight.

There had once been decorative knobs on each arm but now only the holes bore witness to the fact that they were missing, and between us was a veneered chipboard coffee table, minus a considerable amount of veneer and on top of which was the only attempt at decoration in the whole room. There was a small plastic doily with a green pottery vase on it and these thing, I take it, belonged to the director because they were the only moveable objects in the whole room which weren't numbered.

Everything in state run Polish offices, factories, restaurants, railway stations etc. is numbered. I don't mean those little stickers which auditors on occasion will attach to office furniture in the West but ugly numbers an inch high painted in white oil paint with a ragged brush. One state run hotel in our local town of Gizycko was allocated a sizeable amount of money which they spent on new dark stylish chairs and tables for the restaurant. We went in there for lunch one day and I remarked to Alicja how much better it all looked with the new furniture but when we returned a week later all this beautiful new furniture had white hand painted numbers on it. W165/872A/37 - that's what was written on the leg of our table.

Back to the waiting room: On the opposite wall were two framed notice boards both screwed to the wall by someone who had one leg longer than the other, each with a small padlock, although it was difficult to see why because someone had forgotten to put the glass in the frames. To the right of the notice boards was the vinyl padded door through which we'd just entered. It bore 3 locks, the hole where a 4th had been, and a piece of string which was attached to the door frame by a nail and could be pulled through the hole and pressed into a plasticine filled bottle top in the corridor.

Good thinking here - only one bottle top was doing the work of two. I wondered aloud why other office workers hadn't adopted this bottle top saving method of door sealing but was told by Alicja that it was probably done during a bottle top shortage and that the director was most likely on the list for another bottle top which hadn't yet arrived. Behind us, below the drab lace curtains, was a battery of the most primitive radiators imaginable - simply galvanized water pipes with large, crinkly washers welded to them. Above these were the floor to ceiling windows, two of which were cracked and bore the hardened residue of sticky tape on either side of the cracks. The window frames were stuffed at intervals with cotton wool to keep out the draughts and almost screwed to the ceiling was a pelmet.

There was a novel hat stand/coat rack in one corner. It was in the ever popular, neo classical, communist agricultural machine shop style featuring a central column made of 2" water pipe welded to which were legs made from concreters steel fixing bars. The whole was painted in tired green which made a nice change from battleship grey. The walls boasted (if that's the word) 4 power points, each one hanging off the wall with live, un-insulated wires showing. Each covered in wall paint where the painter had missed his mark. In fact everything had splashes of paint on it - even the industrial pedal bin which looked as though it had seen prior service in a tank.

A glance up at the ceiling revealed that the room was fitted with a modern, infra red, heat sensing alarm system but obviously you can't beat the old bottle tops for maximum security because the door to the directors office had two sets of them. It also had 2 door locks, an empty fire extinguisher holder and a notice saying "Director" written with some artistic skill in black & yellow crayon on white cardboard. The brightest object in the waiting room was a healthy looking cactus obviously well looked after and standing all of 5 feet high. The only thing which detracted from its appearance was B/122/SJ13 painted on the pot in which it stood.

The director arrived looking exhausted and carrying 2 shopping bags overflowing with vegetables. She apologised for keeping us waiting and put the shopping bags down on the floor while she rummaged through her handbag for an enormous bunch of keys. One bag fell over and a cabbage rolled across the floor and as I bent down to retrieve it I noticed that one of her shoe uppers was parting company with the sole. And as she lifted the other foot I could see a large hole in the sole covered from the inside with a piece of rubber.

We were shown into her office and with great courtesy asked to take a seat while she sat herself down behind the desk. She was a woman of perhaps 40 years of age and thoroughly professional but her appearance would have led anyone to think otherwise. Her hair was older than she was and her clothes were ill fitting and not at all colour co-ordinated. When the conversation began I found the Polish too fast for me to keep up with and so gave up and concentrated on observing the room. It had all the standard features of the waiting room plus a few extras which befit a person occupying such a high position.

There were the three push button telephones, neither of which had a full compliment of buttons, two Russian electric typewriters and a disheveled looking wall unit which used to have Yale type locks but had been removed leaving the holes for use as handles - the handles having fallen off long ago. Two huge safes almost covered the wall behind her, standing about 6 feet high with big brass handles. It would have taken dynamite to break into them and it would have taken King Kong or the lady at our local post office to have moved them but, nevertheless, they were numbered just in case. And - you guessed it - they had bottle tops on each side of the doors and the string was in place.

Mounted on the ceiling amongst the flaking paintwork was another infra red alarm like the one in the waiting room and it caused me to ponder on how one would go about gaining entry to this room and breaking into one of these huge safes. I mean - what a headache for the intending burglar. You'd have a lot of equipment to carry and you'd have to de-activate two infra red alarms, get through 5 locks, dynamite the safe and after all that you'd be absolutely stuffed if you'd left your string cutters behind!

I lost track of what was going on between Alicja and the director and was brought back when the lady asked us if we'd please wait in the waiting room because she had to go to another office. She was most apologetic as she saw us out and locked the two locks on her door. She returned after an absence of an hour, handed me my papers and congratulated me on being a resident of the county. Having finished with the director all that was left to do was to get two bits of paper photocopied. This necessitated a trip to the basement and into a grotto which made the directors waiting room look like Donald Trump's lounge room.

It hadn't had a coat of paint in years, there were no windows, and if there'd have been any money to be made in cockroach farming I would have leased it like a shot. Two qualified, degree holding, mechanical engineers (as evidenced by their business cards) operated the brand new flashy Japanese photocopier and while it was warming up they gave us a written receipt for the equivalent of 25 cents which was in triplicate and included upon it our name & address. The counter was logged & a book signed by both operators before & after making our two copies.

That was it, we'd finished and we asked where we could find a restaurant for lunch. -Why not use the canteen, they said. -It's cheap and the food's good. We eventually found the canteen on the top floor after a trip in the lift which had no safety doors and we had to be careful not to touch the open front as it sped past the doors of each floor. The three walls & ceiling of the lift cubicle were of varnished wood paneling and the light wasn't working. The effect as we traveled upwards was one of being in a tea chest hurtling through space with planets rushing by at speed as the light from the door windows on each floor flashed by. It's most likely that Einstein conceived his theory of relativity in just such a place.

The canteen had seen better days, it's true, but it was the lightest, airiest place in the whole building with its tables & tubular steel chairs (all numbered) lined up with military precision disappearing into the distance. We ordered soup (Polish soups are akin to English stews) and a portion of beetroot salad each. The prices for each item on the menu were accompanied by the weight of each portion in grams and we got exactly the correct weight. I watched as my helping of beetroot salad was placed on the scales and then reduced by two spoonfuls to bring it down to the regulation 100 grams and I felt sort of cheated somehow.

I sat down on K 122/159 at a table called S 575/234 and we sampled our culinary delight for the day. It was excellent and the price ridiculously low but it wasn't an enjoyable meal simply because of the surroundings and we left the building, (and probably 2 or 3 grams of salad on each plate) and strolled down town to a private restaurant for coffee. It was like being on another planet. Trendy decor, trendy young people, trendy palm trees in trendy pots and a Sade CD playing in the background. After a three hour drive through a blizzard we were glad to get home and the day's events confirmed that our decision to leave cities behind and opt for country living had been right for us. I even found driving around the small county capital a nerve wracking experience and wondered how I had ever managed to drive around in a full blown city all day, when I was employed as a sales representative years ago, without having a nervous breakdown.

Meanwhile, down on the farm, the plaster on the walls of the apartment in the barn had dried and it was ready for painting which was a job I didn't mind at all as it required a minimum of skill and was one of those jobs where I could see where I'd been at the end of the day. I can never understand why Michelangelo worked himself up into such a state over the Sistine chapel ceiling, if he'd done the plastering he would have had something to complain about. The first thing one has to do when painting newly plastered barn walls in sub zero temperatures, of course, is to warm the place up. And with a wood shed full of nicely sawn old fencing material just waiting to be reduced to ashes I fired up the stove until it was glowing red hot and making that sort of Jabberwock galumphing sound as it tried to punch a bigger hole in the chimney.

But when I picked up the first container of paint I found that it was frozen into a solid block and so was everything else including the oil paints and varnishes so we had to move the whole lot to the cellar under the house where the temperature would stay above zero all winter. Alicja had been unable to find imported acrylic wall paint and so we'd reluctantly bought the Polish product and we set about thawing the stuff out in a bath full of warm water, a process which, it soon became obvious, was going to take hours. I was anxious not to loose the precious heat from the old stove in the barn so I made up a temporary bed out there and set the alarm to wake me every three hours in order to keep the thing filled with wood.

In the morning it was uncomfortably hot but I dressed myself in shorts and a T shirt and set to work. I was thrilled with the way the paint was going on, it was drying in no time at all and I thought to myself that we'd at last found a Polish product that was good value for money. I'd done the ceiling and three walls before Vladek arrived and he was suitably impressed - at first. Nobody in Bocwinka had real paint on their walls, just a mixture of lime, water and some sort of colouring agent stirred into it and when visiting anyone else's house one had to be careful not to touch the walls because it came off all over one's clothes.

-This Polish paint's great stuff, I said.

-Oh? I've never used it.

-Yes, it dries almost upon contact and it's washable too.

Vladek had never heard of washable paint and he ran his hands over a part of the wall.

-That's not dry Peter, that's frozen.

-It can't be. It's red hot in here.

-No Peter, there are no cavities in barn walls, not like houses with an air space between the bricks. This barn's all solid stone, it would take you a fortnight to heat it up now that it's frozen right through. The air might be hot in here but the walls are still cold.

Vladek's estimate wasn't far off. It actually took ten days of heating before the paint melted and ran down the walls onto the floor - another learning experience. Sometime before the middle of the month the bison came back to their old breeding station in the forest close by, and we went up to see them one morning after arranging to go with the foresters on one of their feeding trips. The bison were bred at this place years ago and turned loose into the forest in the 1960's where they roam at will until winter when food becomes scarce and they return to their old grounds where they're fed cabbages and sugar beet.

The fee for the trip was two bottles and we set off in a horse and cart with a pair of foresters, sitting on top of a pile of half frozen cabbages, wishing we'd thought to bring cushions with us. Both of the men had had a little to drink and were enjoying themselves with bawdy jokes by the time we arrived at the clearing and parked the cart. One of them took the horse away and tied it to a tree where it was given a few handfuls of hay and stood silently munching. Alicja climbed down from the cart to get a photograph of the horse and I was still sitting on the cabbages when a snort came from the forest and one of the foresters told me to get ready with the camera because the herd would be emerging from the larch trees at any minute.

He too jumped down from the cart and rolled a few cabbages across the hard ground in the direction of the snort and we waited silently. A big bull, the leader of the herd was first to make an appearance followed at a distance by about twenty smaller (albeit huge) animals. I was ready with the camera, which had a reasonably powerful zoom lens attached and I took my time lining up the definitive bison shot. Click - I got it. Those of you who've used a powerful zoom lens will know that on full zoom it gives a fairly limited field of view and that when you pull back to a wider angle you can see much more. This is exactly what I did, but as I did, a big eye came into view.

I lowered the camera from my face and found myself confronted with an enormous shaggy headed brute only a few feet from the cart sniffing and blowing great clouds of steamy, exhaled air in my direction. It was time to get out and I cautiously swung around to get down from the cart on the other side but found that I was surrounded by bison from all sides. I looked across to where the others were standing with worried looks on their faces.

-What shall I do?

-They said to just sit there- yelled Alicja.

-Can't they scare them off or something?

There was a discussion between Alicja and the two men at the end of which she turned back to me.

-They said not to move. They won't attack you but they say they're jumpy and if you make a sudden movement and they raise their heads they could gore you with their horns.

I was worried and through my head was running a TV news bulletin.

"This morning in the north east, near the Russian border, a Western photographer was ripped to pieces by a herd of wild bison whilst sitting on top of a pile of half frozen cabbages."

It wasn't exactly a feeding frenzy, in fact the bison were quite subdued, but every now and then one of them would remove a supporting cabbage and they'd all tumble down causing me to have to adjust my position. When this happened they'd all snort and stand back a couple of paces as if they were going to charge en masse. I was, well, frightened I suppose is the most polite way of putting it. I could smell their breath and see my reflection in their eyes and they were big, so big that I would think that the head of the big bull would have tipped the scales at about a third of my weight. They were lined up three to four deep around the cart and I was worried that they would begin jostling to get at the cabbages and perhaps tip the cart over. I yelled to Alicja that I was going to run for it the first chance I got, which wasn't long in coming, and as the bison moved around there was a gap at the end of the cart and I leapt off and ran for all I was worth.

I wasn't a bit frightened now - I was scared shitless, because I could hear the thundering of hooves behind me and I could feel the ground shaking. Reaching what I thought would be the safety of the trees I was unable to see one with branches low enough for me to be able to climb and I weaved in and out until I found a spruce tree with low branches and ran up it. I stood on a branch and turned to face the angry herd only to find that there wasn't a bison to be seen anywhere - they'd been more scared than me and taken off in the other direction. It was clearly the funniest thing the two foresters had ever seen and one of them literally had tears streaming down his face as he staggered about slapping his thighs and giggling.

I however, wasn't so happy. I'd ripped my new jacket on the tree, my hands were covered in sap and my camera, which I'd dropped on exiting the cart, had been flattened in the stampede. I sent it back to Pentax in Japan telling them it was bloody useless and that it wasn't even a big bison which had trodden on it thinking that the unusual circumstances might lead them to put it in the Pentax hall of fame or something and send me a new one but they didn't even reply.

Before November was out I had my first encounter with black ice on the roads and apart from having to learn to drive all over again it wasn't as bad as I had expected. We were perhaps lucky in having a four wheel drive vehicle and for most of the winter we managed to stay on the road with only the occasional excursion into the ditches. But one evening we had a small accident. We were driving along a perfectly straight piece of road which had two deep snow ruts in the middle of it, long since frozen over with black ice. In winter all the small roads turn into one lane tracks with two ruts in the middle and one has to drive with a wheel in each rut and slow down to walking pace when meeting a car coming the other way.

This slow speed is essential as extricating the car from the ruts is difficult. You turn the front wheels but the car tends to go straight head until the tyres grip and you quickly head out of the groove and keep on going until you finish up in the ditch. On this day a motorbike was coming towards us in the rut on our side of the road and he applied his brakes but the motorbike came straight at us with the wheels locked. The rider frantically attempted to steer the bike out of one rut and into the other but it didn't happen for him and as he fell backwards off the bike I saw that he had a canister strapped to his back.

The canister acted like a sort of toboggan and he spun around in the rut about ten times like an over enthusiastic rap dancer before sliding up the side of it launching himself into the air and he cleared the side of the road by a good half a metre as he flew away out of sight. He looked like some sort of Superman with a jet propelled back pack off on another mission. It all happened within the space of a couple of seconds and that's what made it funny. The man had been coming towards us, fallen off, spun around, flown through the air and disappeared all in complete silence - there was all this action and suddenly there was nothing left but the motorbike.

The man was out there in the snow somewhere, possibly hurt, and all we could do was sit in the car laughing at the spectacle which had momentarily appeared before our eyes and Alicja was in near hysterics as we got out of the car to look for him. The hysterics soon stopped though, when we looked down the embankment and found that he'd vanished completely. We walked up and down the side of the road looking down into the snow and there wasn't a sign of him. I didn't want to jump down off the embankment because I didn't know how deep the ditch was likely to be under the snow.

After a while we heard a muffled groaning noise and with a little shouting managed to roughly locate him on the other side of the ditch and I cautiously slid down the bank on my back. As I had suspected, the ditch, was indeed, deep, in fact over my head, and Alicja threw me the snow shovel so that I could dig my way through and up the other side. When I eventually found the man, all that was showing above the snow were the tips of his boots and he was laying in a perfect, spread eagled, imprint of himself about two feet deep as if he'd been dropped from the sky by a helicopter.

I grabbed hold of his outstretched hand to pull him out but he seemed to be inordinately heavy and all that happened was that I sank down into the snow and so had to dig around under one side of him until he could roll out. He struggled to his knees and slipped off the shoulder straps which held the canister to his back, leaving a perfect imprint of the canister manufacturers name in the snow, and I stooped down to lift it. It was heavy.

-What have you got in there?, I said.

-Twenty litres of petrol.

-Christ, what if you'd hit me and it had broken open. You'd have gone up like an incendiary bomb.

-Been doing it for twenty years and I haven't had a problem so far. Fallen off plenty of times too.

I helped him up the embankment and we put him back on his motorbike and that's the last we saw of him but I thought about the incident every time we drove past that spot. Shortly afterwards we decided that I'd have to go to England with a couple of big suitcases and buy some decent tools and a few other items (including satay sauce) which we were unable to find in Poland. I hadn't been back to England for a couple of years and I hadn't visited the area in Hampshire where I was born and raised for almost twenty but as I'd had a long standing invitation from my old school buddy Brian to stay at his place I took him up on it.

I'd forgotten how easy shopping was in civilisation and it only took two days to fill my suitcases with all sorts of hardware goodies it would have taken months to locate in Poland and I found myself with time on my hands. Brian and I got to talking about our school days and the conversation inevitably turned to old friends, girls we used to fancy and all the other things you talk about with old friend while realising that you're twenty years older than you thought you were.

He told me that Reggie Bundy was dying of cancer so I found his address and went to visit him. The Bundy family were, I suppose, a bit rougher than most in the village and as a kid I wasn't allowed to play with Regie and his brother but used to sneak around their house without telling my father I'd been there. There was always a good atmosphere in their house, five kids, father away in the merchant navy and always orange squash & biscuits. Mrs. Bundy had a horse & cart and on Sundays they'd all go out for a drive in it. It was the only horse left in the village and I used to enjoy giving it grass from my hand.

I found Reggie’s house and his wife showed me into the lounge room where Reggie was lying on a bed looking pretty bad but he recognised me straight away. His younger brother Vacuum was there too. I forget Vac's real name but he was called Vacuum because the science teacher once told him "a vacuum Bundy? a vacuum, my boy, is what you have between your ears". I talked with Reggie for a while and then Mrs. Bundy, who was by then 76 years old & looking the same as she did when I was a kid, arrived. We reminisced about the village as it used to be and I said -and you used to have that horse & cart, I loved that horse & cart.

She looked at me for a second and said -a horse & cart?. That, was a pony & trap I'll have you know.

There was something unusual about her face but, at first, I couldn't make out what it was. She had smiled at me as she entered the room and there was a continuous, unbroken line of teeth. Nothing unusual about that, but when she opened her mouth to speak she had only four teeth in her upper jaw at the top right and four lower ones at the bottom left and over the years her jaws had adapted to the situation. As she talked, her mouth alternated between the continuous ivory coloured line of the teeth and the two opposing rectangles of the black void. It was sort of like talking to a pianola keyboard or a set of semaphore flags.

I'd have liked to have spent more time with Reggie' but he was tired and I said goodbye knowing that I'd never see him again. I'd hardly given him a thought over the past twenty years but now his death would be a loss to me and a reminder that I too was mortal. Vac asked me if I'd care to accompany him to the pub for a swift half, adding that there would probably be people there who I'd remember and who'd like to see me, so we strolled down the road and into the Nelson.

The pub was busy and I was introduced to some of the roughnecks who I vaguely remembered from school and my teenage years, one of whom was Cecil Filmore, brother of Ray Filmore.

Inclining his head towards Cecil, Vacuum began.

-Ere, I'll tell you a funny story about 'is bruvver's nipper. I wuz in this pub in Porta fuckin' Reeko 'avin a jar an' in walks these sailors.

-Puerto Rico Vac, what were you doing in Puerta Rico?

-I wuz in the Merch (Merchant navy) wasn' I.

-What was Puerta Rico like then Vac?

-Dunno, only ever saw the pubs. San One (San Juan), that was the place, One Eaters Pub (Juanita's) it was called.

At this point Cecil Filmore intervened with -One Eaters? they only got the one plate then 'ave they Vac?

Roy Kemp then yelled from the other end of the bar -peraps the landlord lost 'is bottom set.

The bar-tender cut in with -you can probably get away with only one 'eater in an 'ot country. We got central 'eating 'ere.

-Ow come the tables ain't in the middle then?, replied Kempy.

Someone who I didn't know shouted -just as well you wazn't in Chilly (Chile) then, wiv ony the one 'eater. Could 'ave froze to deff.

Vac' continued:

-Funny bastards ain't they? if Kempy 'ad a brain 'ed be fuckin' dangerous. Anyway, I wuz avin' a beer an' in walks these fuckin' sailors an' I looks at one of 'em an' ee wuz the fuckin' spit of Ray Filmore. I sez "Ere... you". An' they finks there's gunna be a fuckin' rumble so they all walks over an' stans there like.

-Where you from?, I sez.

-An' Eee sez -England.

An I sez -I can fuckin' tell that but where from?

-Ampshire, ee sez.

-We narrows it down to where we both lives on the same fuckin' estate right 'ere. Turns out Eee lives in Calshot Crescent 'an I lives in Netley View Road.

I tells 'im that Eee looks the spit of a bloke I went to school wiv called Ray Filmore an' Eee sez "that's my ole man"

-Unbelievable Vac, small World, small World, I said.

-Fuckin' unbelievable i'nnit Pete, Ray Filmore's nipper in a bloody pub all the way over there? Wan anovver beer?

Vacuum used to hang around with Roy Jenkins so I asked what Roy was doing these days.

-Poor fucker's dead.

-Roy, dead! What happened?

-Yeah we wuz avin' a drink down the Grapes one Friday night an' Ee'd ad a row wiv'is missus an she'd blown 'im out about summfin'. Anyow, come closin' time Eee sez goonnite an' pisses off. Then Eee goes down Fatty Pullen's chip shop an' gets cod & chips an' goes down by the shore, puts an 'ose pipe on the exhaust an' frough the window an' fuckin' gasses 'imself poor fucker. Never even ate 'is fish & chips - cod it was.

It's unlikely that I'll ever go back to that particular part of England because my family all live elsewhere now, but my lasting memory of the people of my youth will be the women. Everyone ages and although women live longer than men, the women generally seemed to have suffered from the effects of living to a larger degree than their husbands. I called on Val' Lovejoy who I went out with for a while when I was about seventeen. We had a great talk about old times and who had divorced whom, etc. and she told me that she'd just been out for coffee with Janet Jones who I also used to go out with.

-Janet was always crazy about you, she said. -I bet she'd love to see you. I'm going to see her next Wednesday morning, why don't you come with me?

Feeling suitably flattered I was quite looking forward to it when we arrived outside Janet's door and I stood to one side out of view. The door opened & Val' started off the conversation with -do you remember that bloke you used to rave about years ago. The one with the red car we all used to go over to town in?

-No, she said.

Val was a little embarrassed and carried on prompting until she managed to kindle the faintest glimmer in Janet's mind and then said -well, he's here.

Janet looked around the door frame and managed a weak -oh. We went into the kitchen where she was busy making cheese rolls for her son & husband's lunches for the next day, neatly wrapping them in cling foil and placing them in Tupperware containers in the fridge.

-Don't you ever give them anything but cheese?, Val said.

-No, replied Janet, - if they don't like them they swap them with the other blokes.

Then ensued a discussion on what the two of them fed their respective husbands on and they forgot I was there so I asked how to make pastry because, in Poland, I'd been craving apple pies. Neither of them had made pastry for years because, as they explained, in England you can buy frozen pastry. So that was the end of my conversation for a while and they carried on talking about their husbands sandwiches until the kettle boiled and we retired to the lounge room to drink our tea. Janet opened the draw of a dresser and brought out some clothes she'd bought from the catalogue for her grand child and kids clothes were the subject of discussion for 20 minutes thereafter.

The lounge room was papered in the wallpaper that has been used to adorn the walls of cheap Chinese restaurants in England for as long as I can remember - that red felt fluffy stuff on a gold background, and the room was full of ornaments, iridescent kingfishers, wall plaques from Clovelly, porcelain crinoline ladies and small baskets of porcelain flowers and, of course, the drinks cabinet with neatly arranged, dust free cut glasses. And on the top, a cut glass vase with plastic flowers in it. Bocwinka was already calling me back home. I cast my eyes around for a talking point and found a wall plate from Greece.

They'd been there on a package holiday but wouldn't go again - too hot, restaurant kitchens were filthy and you couldn't tell what you were eating because all the food was mixed together.

-I like my meat and two veg' you can see what you're getting with that. Oh, and the wine. We had this bottle of wine somewhere that tasted like disinfectant.

-Retsina?, I enquired.

-No, can't remember where it was.

Mixed together Greek food led onto Chinese restaurants and the fact that you couldn't tell what you were getting there either but that it was most probably cat which, they assured me, closely resembled chicken when cooked. I pointed out that it would probably be easier to buy chickens than catch cats and you could be sure of a constant supply of chickens whereas cat supply was at best unreliable. They told me that although they probably keep a few chickens in the freezer to fool the health inspector, the Chinese bred cats at the back of their restaurants. I asked why they didn't breed chickens instead because chickens are a lot less fussy about what they eat than cats and poultry can convert vegetation to meat quicker and more effectively than animals.

There was a silence as they looked at each other and then at me and I realised that the theory of Chinese restaurant owners breeding cats hadn't been challenged before - it was a known fact - what planet was I from? Poor Janet, she used to be alive and good company. Now she's so much older than me, stuck in a self carved rut. It wouldn't be so bad if she was content in her ignorance of the World and what's happening around her but she complained about everything, winging constantly.

Val' and I spent three hours at Janet's house and other than the fact that I'd once been living in Australia she still doesn't know anything about me, where I live, what I was doing in England - she didn't ask. From the people I visited (mostly around the 45 to 50 mark) I formed the opinion that superannuation is what life's all about in England and that a retirement without financial worries is the best thing that can happen to a person.

-Ron's only got another seven years to go and we'll be alright - and it's index linked too. Janet had said.

-And does he like the Post Office?, I asked.

-God no, he bloody hates it, dreads getting up in the mornings.

I didn't get a chance to meet Ron but I felt terribly sorry for him as I'd feel for anyone who'd spent God knows how long working at a job he hated and was going to sacrifice another seven years of his life to it. I thought about Reggie Bundy and came to the conclusion that superannuation really is the curse of the working class.

Then there was Joyce- my friend Brian's mum. I first met Brian at school when we were both 9 years old and hung around with him until I got married and have always kept in touch. In those days Joyce would have been in her late twenties to early thirties and I used to like to visit their place because Brian's parents were much younger than mine and I had more in common with them. Brian's a bachelor and I stayed at his house for a week before heading back to Poland. His parents live next door to him and I saw Joyce at 9 30am & 5 15pm every day when she popped in. Of course Joyce is an old lady these days and she has only two subjects of conversation - literally. When Brian picked me up from the station he warned me about it.

-The old man can still hold a good conversation, in fact you'll find him quite well informed but the old lady's lost it. She's got it into her head to buy a carpet runner and she's been talking about it for bloody weeks - the only other thing she can talk about is our cat Winkle.

He was right. We arrived at Brian's at 10pm and straight away we went in to see George & Joyce before they went to bed. George was great, recalling instances of when Brian & I were teenagers and the pranks we used to get up to & so forth.

Then I heard -come & have a look at this Peter. Look at the way this carpet's wearing just inside the door. It's a good carpet, genuine Axminster, we've had it for 17 years. There's nothing wrong with it apart from this spot just inside the door, it's not worth getting a new one is it? I was thinking about getting one of those carpet runners from Simpsons Hardware, what do you think?.

-Well, I........

-They're only 12 pounds you know & they've got different colours to choose from. You'll be going up the village won't you?, have a look at them - see what you think.

George then asked me what it was like in Poland, did I think that Lech Walesa was really a great man, how far were we from the Russian border and a few other pertinent questions but before I could answer him a little voice from the corner said -only 12 pounds.

We discussed the carpet runner every day, twice a day, for a fortnight and I got so pissed off with the subject that I went up to the hardware store and bought her one after checking with the salesman that Joyce would be able to change it if the colour wasn't right - then we discussed it twice a day until I left two weeks later. Every night Brian would come home & say -what's the latest on the carpet runner? One night we were watching the news when Joyce came in. The health minister was speaking about the advantages of re equipping old Hospitals as opposed to building new ones. The quote was -you might as well use the resources you already have.

Joyce said -that's what I mean about carpet runners you see Peter. You might as well use what you've got. No use buying a new carpet when 90% of it's still alright.

This woman could have turned Einstein's quantum theory into a discussion about bloody carpet runners. She was even worse when it came to Winkle the cat - what he'd had for breakfast every day, how regular his bowels were, how she caught him looking at sparrows with evil intent etc. etc. I got to hate the poor animal and found myself making disgusting gestures at it when she wasn't looking. When the time came to head back to Poland I popped in next door and it was all quite touching. George told me to look after my health, to avoid stressful situations and take a daily walk. He then added that he was an old man and he didn't suppose he would ever see me again. We shook hands in typical, stiff upper lip, English fashion and I turned to walk out through the kitchen. She was waiting for me -there's the carpet runner see Peter, looks alright, what do you think?

The journey back was uneventful, apart from the fact that a mad woman on the train made off with one of my jumpers and a bar of chocolate at Frankfurt station, but the contrast between the two cultures was glaring.

No stiff upper lip in Bocwinka, Vladek threw his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. Polish men are confidently secure in their sexual identity - nobody's going to call a man a poof for showing his feelings. As for carpet runners, I looked at the floor in Eva's kitchen - she's not going to have to worry about carpet runners during her lifetime.