Tailor of Inverness, The (2 page)

In 1956, three years before I was born, my parents moved to the electric flats in Dalneigh, a neat new council estate on the west side of Inverness. We stayed in the flats until 1967, moving just around the corner to a semi-detached house. Dalneigh was populated then with many young families making a new start. Most of these families, like mine, were incomers to Inverness, from Scotland’s Central Belt or rural parts of the Highlands, attracted to the growing town by jobs, new houses, clean air and the stunning surrounding landscape. The estate had an assertively modern new primary school which housed 600 children, baby-boomers smartly turned out by proud parents in their red and black uniforms, a peaceful, democratic re-
appropriation
of that dangerous colour combination. Dalneigh
encapsulated
the relief and optimism of post-war, post-rationing Britain, where ordinary people could aspire to, and began to achieve higher standards of living, where, for the first time, ordinary people could actually afford TVs, cars, washing machines and refrigerators. It was a new community in a new world, a perfect place for strangers to re-invent themselves.

There weren’t many Poles in Inverness then. Maybe twenty, each one a survivor of the Second World War from a country
which had lost one quarter of its total population. Twenty wasn’t enough for a community, for a club and a Saturday Polish school like they had in Glasgow and Edinburgh. There was a bigger group in Easter Ross around Invergordon, where Polish soldiers had been stationed during the war. We went to a couple of Polish cultural events there in the ’60s which featured Polish food and a traditional dancing group, some local daughters dressed in colourful costumes: black velvet sequinned waistcoats, skirts, boots and ribboned headdresses.

Me and my father Mateusz, the electric flats, Dalneigh 1961

Dad didn’t go to the Catholic church in Inverness, which must have curtailed his contact with some of the local Poles. We all went to my mother’s church, the Scottish Episcopalian St. Andrew’s Cathedral. I don’t think my dad was ever very religious,
but he was observant. He went with the flow and followed the form. When I learned of his parents’ separate creeds and their attendance at his father’s Catholic and his mother’s Orthodox church services, I understood his pragmatic attitude, even more so when I took into account the fact that my Scottish
grandparents
followed different creeds too. Granny was the Episcopalian, Grampa was Church of Scotland. There was also an anti-Catholic streak on that side of the family, as was the case in thousands of Scottish Protestant families at the time (and, sadly, even to this day), so life could have been more difficult for my parents if my dad had declared himself a ‘papist’. His pragmatism when it came to religion was just one aspect of his adaptability.

In his old age, my father regretted the fact that he hadn’t taught us Polish. He worked very long hours when I was young, so it would have been difficult for him. He also explained that someone had persuaded him that it would confuse us. I think that ‘someone’ was probably my mother. In her defence, I think this was a common view at the time. I’ve met many second-generation Poles like me who were never taught the language by their fathers.

Polish was spoken at home, though, when dad was visited by his Polish friends. I always loved hearing it. There was a sense of joy about it, as the men were released from the
restrictions
of their second language, and the Polish flowed out of them, animated, relieved, fully engaged with each other. I often wished I could join in, but satisfied myself with mimicking the sounds and the song of it, happy to recognise the few words and phrases I understood, happy because they were happy.

These visits usually took place at the weekend and they got progressively happier as the drink flowed with the talk. My father’s closest Polish friends in Inverness were John Bloczynski and Rura, and they were regular visitors to the house, especially Rura. Rura’s first name was Wladyslaw, but everyone knew him as Rura. It was simpler for the Highlanders to get their
tongues round his surname. Rura worked for the Forestry Commission and lived alone in a single room which reeked of tobacco in the Commission’s hostel in Cannich, a small village deep in the Highlands about 50 kilometres west of Inverness.

He was an energetic and immensely strong wee man with a quiff of reddish-brown hair and tanned, leathery skin. He had been a member of the Commandos during the war and now he spent his life in the forestry plantations of Glen Affric, Glenurquhart and Mullardoch. His English was poor, so my parents would help him with form-filling and officialdom. In return, he would help my father in the garden. He was a prodigious worker and would happily dig the potato patch at an incredible rate and chop logs which he’d bring from Cannich in his mini-van. He also had a carpentry workshop at the hostel where he spent much of his spare time. He made us many wooden objects: a couple of coffee tables, lampshades, ashtrays, a meat safe before we had a fridge, which still stands in my mother’s garden, forty-five years after he made it; a sledge and even a pair of cross-country skis for my sister, which she never used because they were far too heavy. He built our large garden shed, also still standing and watertight. He just couldn’t stop making things. They were always solid, built to last.

Rura would turn up on a Saturday, sometimes bearing his latest creation and always bearing whisky, rum or vodka, sometimes all three. Mum and Dad would go with him to the British Legion Club or entertain him and a few neighbours at home. Rura loved the socialising. His life in Cannich was lonely, so he was always ready to have fun when he got to Inverness. He laughed and joked a lot and made up for his poor English with his sheer energy and personality. He also communicated with his mouth organ and, later on, his accordion. He wasn’t a great player, but he loved playing and
had enough talent to drive through his tunes with gusto. He never read music, he just learned tunes he liked by ear, popular Scottish tunes of the time and the odd Polish tune: ‘Lovely Stornoway,’ ‘Sto Lat,’ ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers,’ ‘March, March, Dabrowski,’ ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’.

After I began piano lessons at the age of eight, my mother would usher me into the living room in my pyjamas to give the adults a tune. I always found this a strangely lonely
experience
, with my back to everyone, facing my music and the piano keys and feeling the weight of expectation bearing down on me. It always seemed to go quite well, though. The adults were indulgent and delighted, but I was still relieved to finish, smiling in response to the clapping and words of
encouragement
and scurrying out of the room with my glass of lemonade, away from the chatter and the smell of cigarettes and alcohol. Rura’s applause was always the loudest. He simply embodied
joie de vivre
.

After I passed my driving test, when I was seventeen, I would sometimes drive Rura back to Cannich. By then, I had decided to become an actor and he would always delight in acting out a High Noon scenario with me when we met, drawing his imaginary six-shooters and exploding into laughter. On one of the last occasions when we met, at the hostel in Cannich, he gave me the skull and antlers of a dead stag he had found. The beast had been wounded by hunters and had managed to escape into the forest, to die there. Rura died up there himself, struck down by a massive heart attack in 1985, when he was out working on his beloved hills. I guess the combination of his intense work rate and heavy smoking finished him. Perhaps the stressful effects of his desperate wrench away from Poland in 1939 and his lonely life in Scotland played their part too. He hadn’t reached sixty, which means he couldn’t have been more than fourteen when the war broke out.

I never found out how he’d managed to get to Britain then,
though I do know he trained as a Commando during the war at their base near Spean Bridge in Lochaber. Maybe he’d lied about his age in 1939 to join up with the Polish Army and was one of those Polish soldiers, like the ones in Invergordon, who managed to escape from both the Soviets and the Nazis at the beginning of the war, making their way to Britain.

Paul Makajewski, known in Inverness as Paul Mackay, was another Pole who lived alone, in a small council flat in Inverness. Like Rura, he never returned to Poland. Like Rura, he was a carpenter. He had been a member of the Polish Olympic team at the 1936 Berlin games, the Jesse Owen games. I think Paul was a hurdler. He had left a wife behind in Poland, but he would have been afraid to return after the war.

Those who did go back after service with the Polish Forces in the British army were treated by the Communist authorities as dangerous elements, contaminated by the West, potential spies or subversives. They were arrested. Some were summarily executed, most were sent to penal colonies in the Siberian Gulag, which could also be a death sentence.

Paul was a regular drinker at the men-only bar of the British Legion Club, where I worked for a few months when I was eighteen. I remember him as a sad figure in his later years. He used to visit my dad in his shop, always with a quarter- or half-bottle in the pocket of his long, shabby coat. Lonely and alcoholic, he craved company and some Polish conversation. He was soft-spoken, articulate, sensitive and, when I think of him now, deeply homesick.

The other Poles we knew in Inverness coped more
successfully
with their exile. Jan Bloczynski, or John Blo, the mechanic, made a modest success of his car repair business. He was a hard worker, ruddy-faced and rotund. He and my dad were quite close. They supported each other as they made their way in Inverness as small businessmen. John was from Pomerania in north-west Poland. Like a number of the Highland Poles,
and like many Poles from Pomerania, he had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the war and was captured by the Allies. He was still admitted as a member to the Legion Club, though.

Jan Orfin worked as a labourer and, unusually, he had a Polish wife. They were a diminutive couple, both dark-haired. Jan’s was slicked back like my dad’s and he had a little moustache which made us think of Hitler, but that’s as far as it went, for he was a kind man. The Orfins lived in a tiny cottage on Celt Street in the oldest part of the town by the river. The walls and furniture in their cramped living room were covered in embroidered cloths and crocheted rugs made by Mrs. Orfin. I was only there a few times during the 60s and early 70s, but that room made a strong impression on me as I had never seen one decorated in such a style. I never saw one quite like that again until I visited my father’s birthplace in 2003.

Mr. Sieczarek was an accomplished violinist who led the Inverness schools’ orchestra. He was born in France, of Polish parents. His wife ran a community centre and they had two sons who were excellent athletes. The younger son, Mark, went off to study with the Royal Ballet from the age of 11 and now has a very successful career as a dancer and
choreographer
in Germany. There was Richard the baker, Mr. Miller the key-cutter and Mr. Dow the shopkeeper. These last two had changed their names to British ones, for convenience.

That was about it. Polishness was far from ever-present in my life as a boy in Inverness. It was there, exotic, attractive, somehow a part of me, but distant too. We went to Glasgow a couple of times a year to visit Granny and my dad’s brother Kazik, and Dad had a couple of other Polish friends there, Kazik Kerr the tailor and Josef Samson the photographer. But apart from attending one or two of the Invergordon gatherings in the ‘60s, and a couple of dinners at the restaurant of the
Polish club in Glasgow, our contact with other Poles was very limited. With no community organisation, the Inverness Poles led lives which were quite isolated from their native culture, unless they made exceptional efforts. There was one way in which my father did make an exceptional effort. Beginning in 1957, when he received his British Passport, and ending in 1990, he saved and planned for what became biennial trips for him and his family to visit his younger brother Adam in Poland.

We’d travel to Poland by car from our house in Inverness. In the weeks leading up to our departure, my parents would buy gifts and luxuries which were either unobtainable or too expensive for my relatives in Poland: nylons, Cadbury’s drinking chocolate, whisky, even Kellog’s Corn Flakes. My father took great care in packing the suitcases and the car, filling every available nook and cranny, a shoe here, a hairbrush there. We’d drive down the winding old A9, filled with landmarks: the lonely white church on the hillside at Daviot, always a welcome sight as we neared Inverness on our return; the German soldier’s head in the rock wall at Slochd, a knobbly accident of nature, which we fired imaginary machine guns at as we passed in our bus on school and cub scout trips, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da!; the bleak high pass of Drumochter where deer grazed close to the road in winter; the tall, white Blair Castle, the only place in Britain where a private army is allowed; that tricky stretch of winding road at Killiecrankie.

We’d stop a night in Newcastle or Carlisle, at my Aunt Cathy’s, and sail on the overnight ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, stopping to buy huge, juicy peaches in a
market in Cambridge. This was in the early days of the A1, a few years before the M6 and ro-ro ferries. Our lovely red Vauxhall Cresta, with its leatherette seats and a speedometer which moved in a line from green to orange to red as it reached top speed, always fascinating for the boyish me, would be lifted into the ferry hold by crane. The car would be carefully driven onto two metal planks, the wheels rolling into snug cups. Four thick chains, dangling from the crane hook, were clipped to each end of the planks. The car would then be lifted, its weight ensuring stability. They did this with each car and truck, one by one. It was very exciting to my 6-year-old eyes. I marvelled at the gigantic structures around me: the cranes, the railway terminal, the quay and the ship, all to carry us to a foreign place, another home.

The holiday was one big adventure. I remember thrilling at the toy compactness of the ferry cabin, its turquoise and orange bedcovers and starched sheets, how we fitted ourselves and our overnight bags into the little bunks, us boys topping and tailing. I remember an overnight in Arnhem and a doubly exotic meal because 1) it was in a restaurant and 2) it was Malaysian, with dishes kept hot on metal stands with little candles burning underneath. My mother always loved being in Holland. She loved its neatness and industry and, to a degree, its liberalism. It was also the home of Arie and Hank, two former Dutch servicemen she and her sister had dated happily for a while in Glasgow around 1946. They were
en route
to what was then the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.

My mother tells me that I rarely expressed boredom during the long days in the car. My own memories are quite vivid and I recall an endless fascination for place-names as we drove over the millions of concrete blocks that formed the
autosnelweg
/autobahn: Delft, Gouda, Utrecht, Oosterbeek. This was aided by an impressively detailed route plan provided by the
AA’s Five Star Travel Service whose sticker was proudly displayed on our windscreen. It charted every town, village, junction, road number and the distances in between from Inverness to our destination, the village of Lesna in the
south-west
corner of Poland. It had been compiled specially for us and it contributed to the feeling that this was our special adventure. There was no one else in the world who would make our journey, Inverness to Lesna. Emmerich, Wesel, Bottrop, Essen, Recklinghausen, Gutersloh, Bielefeld, Hannover, Braunschweig, Helmstedt.

There was a three-hour wait at Helmstedt, the border between West and East Germany. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD) and the Deutsch Demokratische Republik (DDR). The People’s Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Which was which? Each name could have applied to either side, their difference lying only in their stress on the People and Democracy. They vied for legitimacy, each claiming true and just representation of their populations. I remember Berlin in the ’80s, the two sides of that divided city straining at each other over the Wall with the monumental products of their propaganda war, there at the epicentre of the Cold War: capitalist and socialist super-buildings; giant communist slogans and capitalist advertising icons; the consumerist paradise of Kurfurstendamm and the gigantic brutalism of Alexanderplatz. The People’s Republic of Germany (Social Democratic) and the German Democratic Republic (Socialist). Such similar names, but how different they were. Even at the age of six, and even by simply driving across the partitioned nation on its autobahn, never seeing a town or city close up, the differences were obvious.

At Helmstedt, it was always hot and it was always stressful. As we drove the last few kilometres towards the border which split Germany, there was a palpable change in the atmosphere of our journey. Like carefree children suddenly brought to
book by a stern schoolmaster, we became quiet and attentive as my parents fished out documents and checked that they were in order. Speed limits were progressively reduced. The low buildings of the border crossing came into view. Our eyes were immediately drawn to the machine gun turrets, sitting above and behind them. In the distance to the right and left, more lookout towers were spaced alongside the high barbed wire fences. Queues of vehicles formed, moving slowly through the West German crossing and into the large transit area. We parked. I imagine my father taking a deep breath as he stopped and gathered the papers and passports, before setting off for the transit hall. There were numerous forms to fill in, in spite of our transit visas, procured from the East German Embassy in London months before.

Queueing was at best haphazard, so queues were jumped and formless crowds, rather than queues, pressed in towards the perennially rude, surly and sweaty border officials. Often there were minor errors on our forms and the officer would insist on my father completing a fresh form, which meant another period of queueing and pressing. My mother would go to the transit hall every so often to check on progress, to bring him a drink or perhaps take his place in the queue for a while, and she had to make sure she was there when dad finally reached the counter, to be seen and checked. We would stay close to the car, visit the toilet and spend long periods staring at other British Polish children and their families before plucking up the courage to carry out the odd awkward
conversation
with them.

The seriousness of this border always discouraged the
development
of play. Anxiety pervaded the place. Waiting at Helmstedt was always tense for my parents, for my father in particular. Here was the strongest possibility of being turned back. We never were, but there was always the underlying threat that we might be. We were seeking admission to a world
of secret police and aluminium coins, of vodka and censorship, of political prisoners and peasants: Communist Europe.

It was at Helmstedt that the still unhealed wounds of the war were most clearly exposed. The partition of Germany was one of the most stark manifestations of the Cold War, but it was also a physical realisation of all the fear, paranoia and distrust engendered by the war itself. The greatest fear had been engendered by the monstrously effective Nazi war machine, so there was a logic for the Allies in splitting Germany, ensuring that it could not unite and rekindle its threat. In the early 1960s and, one might argue, right up to the end of the Cold War and beyond, the shock of World War Two was still very strongly felt. For many, it still is.

Only a few years ago, the Polish Sejm (parliament) voted for a tally to be made of the cost of damage inflicted on Poland by Germany during the conflagration. The wounds are still healing. The war came to a shuddering halt and the victorious powers were determined to impose their new order, to dragoon and control the shell-shocked European masses, to build a new peace, a disfigured peace, but a peace nevertheless. The Iron Curtain was part of that peace. Mass trauma creates mass inarticulacy: so few of the war generation were willing to speak of it. Aside from the pain that remembering could bring on themselves, they didn’t want to burden their children with it. Their new world would be one free from blood and death.

It’s only in my maturity that I’ve come to realise how short a time 20 years is. I was born less than 14 years after the war ended, in 1959. Then, everything was looking forward, it was an age of optimism and plenty in Britain. We read
Commando
comics full of war stories and watched ‘All Our Yesterdays’ on TV, but all that history and
Donner und Blitzen
seemed to us children to be in the distant past. Fourteen years is an eternity when you’re six. Now, of course, 1998 seems to me today to be very recent. Our journeys through Northern Europe in the
1960s really were journeys through a recovering continent.

The economic miracle fostered by the Marshall Plan and Common Market membership in West Germany, made
travelling
through there seem like a breeze. There were no border controls to speak of from the Netherlands into West Germany and comforting signs of prosperity were everywhere. The miracle had taken place: a devastated land had been rebuilt into Europe’s most prosperous in less than 20 years. My mother’s open admiration for the German recovery, which she put down less to the massive aid from the US and its victorious partners, and more to the popularly-held belief that Germans were intrinsically more industrious and efficient than anyone else, was symbolised by her purchase of pairs of
lederhosen
for me and my brother, which we dutifully wore. It never occurred to me that this might be viewed as a provocative act in Poland or Britain in 1965. I don’t think it occurred to her either.

When we had finally delivered the forms with all the answers in the right order, when they had been processed and approved and our 15 Deutschmarks had been paid and our transit visa stamped, when the car had been thoroughly searched, as it usually was, we would slowly pass the
machine-gun
turrets and electrified fence manned by East German and Soviet soldiers. We had entered the DDR. The transit visa was simply that: we were allowed to travel by a specified route through the country and we had to do it within a specified period, 12 or 24 hours, I can’t remember which. The speed limit was lower and now we really were on Hitler’s autobahn: there had been little resurfacing on the road, the original concrete blocks were patched up and settlement often made the joins uneven. Each block was the width of one carriageway and about 5 metres long, so vehicles would clunk-a-clunk-
a-clunk
-a through the quiet countryside. The traffic on this side was much thinner. Sometimes we’d see hardly any vehicles.
The border experience, the gun turrets and the quietness of the autobahn, save for the thudding clunk-a-clunk-a-clunk-a, made for a sense of loneliness and vulnerability.

Marienborn, Uhrsleben, Magdeburg. We broke down near Magdeburg once, at some roadworks. It was baking hot, that 1967 trip, I think, the year when all six of us went, Angela, Catherine, Graeme and I on the back seat. Graeme and I in our khaki shorts and white vests, treating ourselves in the sweltering heat to glasses of tomato juice from huge tins of the stuff my father had bought in anticipation of this long day’s journey. The car had overheated, or the fan belt had broken, the radiator was leaking, a circulation pipe was holed, something like that.

We pulled over to the verge. Lines of traffic slowly passed as workmen dug away in the distance. Patches of tarmac were melting, fields of wheat stood still and parched. My father had attended a night class in car mechanics in Inverness, so he could identify the problem. He didn’t have the means to fix it though. We were stuck. As Dad scratched his head and we wondered what was to become of us, a man pulled up on a motorbike. It had a side-car which contained two little girls.

They were from Magdeburg. They’d been swimming at a lake in the country. He was a mechanic. He was very friendly, handsome with black wavy hair, a round, open face with prominent cheekbones. He made a temporary repair, using tools he was carrying. It was done in half an hour. My father gave him some Deutschmarks, which he refused at first. We set off, with the man and his girls following for a few
kilometres
to see that the car was functioning properly, until they parted from us with a wave at the Magdeburg junction. I remember waving to them, knowing we’d never see them again, but feeling that a veil had been lifted, that the mystery and threat of being in this country guarded by gun turrets had been diminished, that the place had become humanised. We
had friends here, they were ordinary people. I wished that I could go to their house and play with the little girls. But we had a transit visa.

Burg, Wollin, Brandenburg. The Berliner Ring was tantalising. I wanted to see Berlin! The city seemed to be guarded by thick forests, so all I saw were trees. Trees, the occasional
rastplatz
, and the signs. Michendorf, Ludwigsfelde, Konigs-Wusterhausen, Friedrsdorf, Storkow, Furstenwalde. Their slip roads curved into the forest, large
Ausfahrt
(exit) signs at their bends drawing me towards them. I imagined myself speeding along and separating from the car, following the slip roads into the forest and on to these forbidden towns and villages. Finally, Frankfurt-am-Oder and Swiecko, the Polish border. We’d get there in the late afternoon or early evening, the two countries’ border stations on either side of the Oder, linked by a high bridge, the river cut into the deep gorge which had proved such a formidable obstacle for the advancing Soviet armies in 1945.

There were gun turrets here too, of course, but this border always seemed less threatening. The crossing usually took about an hour rather than the three hours of Helmstedt. We were leaving the DDR, and we’d successfully kept within the time limit of our transit visa, so the German officials weren’t required to apply the same degree of scrutiny as their Helmstedt colleagues. Then we’d be on the bridge, moving at a crawl, observing the 20km-an-hour speed limit, knowing we were being watched from the towers on either side, neither in East Germany nor Poland. I wondered at the freedom of the anonymous water below me, flowing unhindered towards the Baltic, indifferent to nations and borders. I wondered about this gap we were in, this no man’s land. While we were here, did it mean that we were nowhere? For those few moments on that bridge, did we somehow cease to exist? I felt a strange mixture of
claustrophobia
and freedom; that we were in a peculiar state of
suspension
. I almost felt weightless. I liked it.