Even The Bad Times Are Good ebook

Zofia Puszkarow

EVEN THE BAD TIMES ARE GOOD

Love Sweat and Tears

Copyright © 2021 Zofia Puszkarow

All rights reserved.

ISBN: B08Q6RVYF8

To Agata

CONTENTS

The 1970s

1. Across the cabbage field

2. Ways to purchase Fiat 126p in the 1970s

3. Popular destinations

4. Switzerland

5. Applying for a passport

6. Life in Poland in the 1970s

7. Radom 1976

8. Summer One in Sweden

9. We hit the road

10. Ann, our third friend, dies aged 32

11. Winter of the Century

12. Explosion in the very heart of Warsaw

13. Flying University

14. Pope John Paul II on his first visit to Poland

15. Summer II in Sweden and elsewhere

16. My Yellow Bahama Fiat 126p

17. LOT Flight 7 crashes in Okecie

The 1980s

19. Spring and summer 1980

20. 1981 – January – December

21. Sweden – December 7 – 12, 1981

22. Martial Law

23. Ration cards

24. 1982

25. Peter

26. Death of the Student

27. 1983 – the Pope visits Poland

28. The Nobel Peace Prize 1983

29. 1983

30. Hungary

31. Istanbul

32. Even the bad times are good

33. The Solidarity Movement Priest

34. Summer 1984

35. Chernobyl

36. 1987 - LOT Flight 5055 disaster

37. England

The 1990s and a few years more

39. A Brand New Fiat Uno

40. Salad Bar

41. Destination Odessa

42. Mom dies

43. Milleniun Flood

44. Poland joins NATO

45. The cats

46. Danka

47. World Trade Center Attacks

48. Eagle Job Search Agency

49. Falenica

Footnotes

www.goodtimes-badtimes.space

The 1970s

Across the cabbage field

We meant it to be a short “get away from it all” trip to Masurian Lake District. There were three of us in the car, a so-called small Fiat, or “Maluch”, and Maryla’s mongrel dog, Lobo. It was well after 2 p.m. because it took us longer than usual to leave Warsaw, and we were driving along a winding road, to a lovely spot by a lake we remembered from our summer sailing adventures.

Les, who took turn to drive, was whistling some tunes of “Jolka, Jolka,” a trendy song everyone knew, I was sitting half-asleep in the rear seat of this tiny car next to the restless dog, and Maryla seemed to be counting tall trees on the right of the road. I was just beginning to float off into a dream when I heard a high-pitched scream: “Stop!!! Stop immediately!!!”

Les braked with a screech of tires and looked at Maryla with amazement, his face pale.

“Why? Why on earth did you want me to stop?” he uttered.

“Not you! Him!!!” she pointed at Lobo busy with a pillow trying to make love with it. She grabbed the sinner and dragged him onto her lap.

“We can drive on now,” she said in a sweet voice, pressing the dog hard, so he could not escape her grip. “He will calm down soon.”

“You are lucky you bought the new tires, otherwise we might have skidded off the road and crashed into that tree.” Les remarked in a gloomy voice and pointed at an enormous oak tree at the side of the road.

“But we didn’t. Let’s go.” And off we went.

Les was right to mention the tires. In the 1970s and 1980s, buying new ones bordered on a miracle. If you wanted to face the challenge, you had to do a lot of detective work before the purchase. It was a must to call all car accessories stores to find out where and when there would be, say, twenty tires on sale. Next, if you belonged to the farsighted ones, you might fetch a blanket and a pillow, (some would even take quilts) and spend a night in your car in the car park in front of the most likely store you decided to choose. When you noticed other cars parking next to yours, it meant your choice was good. At around four a.m., the sleepy shoppers would emerge to the open and form a queue so everybody could see them well and no one new could dare cut in a line in front of them.

Maryla and I met all the requirements and managed to buy two sets of Fiat 600 tires, one for each of us. However, I was not proud of them for a long time. One night, at around 2 a.m., I went to the kitchen to get a bottle of mineral water from the fridge and I looked through the window. To my horror, I saw four individuals, their bodies crooked, busily unscrewing the wheels of my Fiat.

I dashed onto the balcony yelling, “The police are on their way! I know who you are.”

“Shut up, you bitch,” one of the thieves roared. They must have known the police were nowhere around. However, the noise woke my neighbors up, who, one by one, appeared on their balcony or in the window, dressed in pyjamas and nightgowns. Seeing so many eye-witnesses the robbers thrust the two wheels they had already unscrewed into the boot of their van and drove away, leaving me with a more serious problem I had had before. The task was buying new wheels.

We hit the road again. It was early September, and the days were already shorter than in summer. The day was cloudy, and we wanted to get to the lake before it got dark.

“Sophie, pass me the map, please,” Les said to me “It’s behind you, by the rear window.” He studied it for a while and then had an idea.

“Look, girls,” he pointed to a dotted line on the map, “There is a good short-cut here. We’ll get to the lake in no time at all.”

“Are you sure you know what you are doing?” Maryla asked.

“Sure, I do. Don’t you worry, woman,” was the reply. Les used to call her “woman” when he wanted to get on her nerves.

The short-cut appeared to be a narrow field path which led to a huge cabbage field and made its way across it. Also, the field spread down a hill and seemed endless, contrary to the path which ended abruptly somewhere in the middle of the cabbage kingdom. We immediately realized we got stuck in a miry place, between the two rows of green heads with weeds growing between them and blocking the way out. We could not go backwards to the main road because it was too far and the grooves we had made got filled with water, we could turn nowhere, so we had to drive on.

“A nice short-cut,” Marla murmured maliciously, “I wish I had never met you.” She added with disgust.

“You should’ve stayed at home instead of going to the wine-vault.” Les smiled with satisfaction.

“You’re right. I should’ve gone anywhere, but not there!”

I put an end to their happy chatting for fear it might turn into a row.

“You’d better look at that house over there,” I said in a quiet voice, “They’re bound to notice us any moment now and chase us with pitchforks.”

We got in and started struggling across the rest of the field, destroying some cabbages on our way, with the car tilting to the side like a yacht on a stormy sea.

“Dear ladies,” I caught a twinkle in Les’s eyes in a rear-facing mirror, “We are going to roll down the hill so beware of breaking your neck.”

“Don’t even dare, you bastard!” Maryla went red in the face, “Drive faster! Now!!!”

And he did. Somehow, it worked, and we left the field, undisturbed by its owners, leaving a trail of mud on the asphalt road across the forest, all the way to the lake.

It was dark when we turned left onto a narrow path which led to the turquoise lake we remembered from our last year’s summer holidays. We put up a tent feeling happy that we had found the quiet spot we wanted, next to the water and far from the civilization. Hoping to see the swans and ducks at sun-rise, we crawled into our sleeping bags with Lobo lying on his back between Maryla and me, his four paws up, halfway to the tent roof.

No sooner had we fallen asleep than we heard someone unzip the tent with no scruples, or mercy. The intruder searched the inside of our shelter with his torch and wheezed:

“You’re right in the middle of the round-the-lake path! Get out of here, or I’ll call the police!”

He was a forester on his morning patrol-walk.

Ways to purchase Fiat 126p in the 1970s

The history of Fiat 126p in Poland dates back to 1973. The government launched mass production of a friendly priced family car in Bielsko-Biala and Tychy. I meant it to be the car everybody could afford. The Polish license version of the Italian centoventisei became the most popular model on the roads until September 2000, when the last vehicle left the factory assembly line. Recently, Tom Hanks visited Bielsko-Biala factory and got enchanted by the Fiat 126p story. A few weeks later, when he was back home in California, he received a present from Poland. One of Bielsko citizens, Monika Jaskolska, had raised the money to buy Tom a Fiat. The famous actor became the owner of a white compact car tied up with a red ribbon during the event which took place in the residence of the Polish consul in Los Angeles at three p.m., on December 2, 2017.

There were four ways to become the owner of this dream vehicle. The lucky ones could get a voucher from the management of the company they worked for as a reward for doing a good job. The rich ones had no problems because they could pay in dollars without waiting for their turn for months. The rest of those willing to drive had an option to purchase a second-hand car in open-air markets. Choosing this option meant they agreed to pay at least twice as much as the official price for a used car was, with no guarantee it was safe to drive. And finally, the last way one could take was to earn enough money to buy one.

As it was highly unlikely for young people in Poland to afford to buy a dream car in their country, thousands of job seekers rushed to Western Europe to try their luck. However, they had to take part in a long-distance obstacle race before they put their foot on a foreign land.

Getting a passport was Obstacle One. There will be more about it later because it is a long and complex story. In those days, Poland belonged to the countries behind The Iron Curtain which was the imaginary boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas. In order to leave it, you had to have an invitation from somebody who was a citizen of France, the UK, or any other western European country, had a permanent job and declared to cover all the expenses and the cost of medical help if needed. If you were lucky enough to have such a friend, and if they promised to give you accommodation, you were half-way abroad.

Money was Obstacle Number Two. You needed to have much over one hundred and thirty American dollars you could legally buy in a bank. In order not to be penny-less in a foreign country, you had to smuggle your fortune or take some products you hoped to sell. This obstacle was too difficult to overcome for many of those who were not risk-takers. Obstacle Three was finding your first job abroad.

Popular destinations

In the early seventieth, Swedish farmers welcomed anyone willing to work black for them on their fields and in greenhouses. They would wait for Polish ferries in Ystad harbor, and there were always more employers than potential farm hands to bargain agreements. Once the terms were agreed, the two parties drove directly to the farms. Both the sides were in a win-win position, even though the newcomers from Poland were unskilled to work on farms, as they recruited from among teachers, journalists, engineers and students. Swedish farmers were happy to have cheap workforce; the Poles loved the idea to earn actual money. The farmers paid between ten and fifteen Swedish crowns per hour, and it was a lot of money. Mind you; the Polish zloty was not convertible in those days, and black-market exchange of the US dollar rocketed to unbelievably high rates.

However, Obstacle three was no longer an obstacle if your overseas family found a job for you before you arrived. Maryla’s aunt, for example, ran a pub in Chicago, and she invited her niece to stay with her family for a year, officially to study English in the States. My friend swears that at the time (1971), Polish authorities allowed travelers to take only ten dollars as pocket money. The shoes she liked cost twenty-eight. She remembers that well because she is a size 40 and it was not possible to buy such big shoes in Poland as nobody made them. Such circumstances forced her to make do with a 39, but it resulted in blisters and “tearing skin off her heels”, as she used to put it. To make things worse, too tight shoes pushed her toes together, made her walk “toe-out”, and hiss with pain.

Maryla stayed in America for a year, survived pub boozers, their primitive jokes, and her aunt’s husband’s soldier-like courtship. She also met Dorothy, a young journalist from Warsaw, and made friends with her. When the two of them returned to Poland, Dorothy hired a large goods vehicle and set for the harbor. Maryla said that the steering wheel was so big that her friend had to lean on it whenever she wanted to turn.

They sailed back on the Batory, a trans-Atlantic liner, and they enjoyed every minute of the cruise. This shiny, new colossus was 160 meters long and several levels high, complete with seven decks, guest cabins, dining halls, dance halls, three bars, a pool and a gym. The ship’s interiors had a light, modern elegance, and were decorated with pieces by Jan Cybis, a famous painter, draughtsman, educator and journalist, who was a leading representative of Colorist movement of the 1930s and in post-World-War II Art in Poland. Aerial photographs of the works by Zofia Stryjenska, a major Polish female artist of the inter-war period, decorated the cabin walls of the liner.

The ship was called the floating art showroom. It featured tableware from the best Polish factories. The most important thing about the liner’s pre-war history was the kitchen (there were over 500 dishes on the lunch menu alone) and the ship’s first captain, Eustazy Borkowski. People say he was a real salty old sea dog. He spoke a dozen languages, drank cognac like water, and was the life and soul of the vessel. His officers joked that if he ever was completely sober, disaster was bound to befall the ship. Passengers and journalists loved him.

When Maryla and Dorothy were on their way back home, the weather was wonderful, so they relaxed in deckchairs trying to get brown, ate in restaurants, and went dancing in the evenings. Two orchestras entertained the passengers. An octet played mid-morning symphonic concerts and evening balls in a large ballroom. A quartet entertained guests in the afternoon. The smaller bands played during dinner and evening dance in a small salon from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. There were quite a few alcohol-drenched evening parties and quite hangover mornings with white seagulls “tramping” on the deck.

Maryla saved up four thousand dollars in the States, and no sooner had she unpacked her stuff in Warsaw than she purchased a 40 square meter apartment in which she is still living. She bought her Fiat 126p after her next expedition to her aunt, two or three years later. This time, she did not work in the pub, but took care of an elderly German gentleman who enjoyed drinking liqueur.

Switzerland

My story was different. I did not have any family abroad, but I had a friend of mine who had a British passport and two citizenships: British and Polish. Her name was Barbara. She lived in Great Britain, and I taught her daughter English in Warsaw.

In early 70-ties, I worked as a teacher of English in one of the secondary schools in Warsaw, and I got on very well with my colleagues from work. Christina, a physics teacher, was one of them. She had a boyfriend, Mat, who was a painter and a graphic artist. Mat knew Mathew who had some experience in selling “pictures” (oil printings) in Sweden. Mathew convinced Mat that “pictures” are great for business, but Sweden had become too competitive, so he suggested Switzerland as an alternative solution. “To my knowledge, nobody has ever done anything like that there. It’s a brand-new market! And think about the Swiss franc! That’s the currency!!!” he said.

Our group counted seven people. There were Christina and Mat, Mathew and Alex, who earned in Zurich enough money in one month to buy 0.5 kg of 999,99 gold in a bank in Bahnhofstrasse. Barbara, her boyfriend, Allan and I made the rest of the group. She had a double citizenship and went with me to the Swiss Embassy in Warsaw to confirm her financial sponsorship for me on our trip to Switzerland. Her signature made it possible for me to get a visa valid for five days.

Thus, on a sunny summer day at the end of June, we boarded a plane and successfully took off. Destination–Zurich. On arrival, we checked into Hotel Otter, in an old but busy part of the city, steps away from Bellevue Square, within a 15-minute walk to Zebedee Enge. The hotel was a seven-storey apartment house, and it charged ten dollars per night per one person. We needed to spend three nights there to make pictures, so we took a 6-bed-mix Dorm on the top floor, wanting it to be as far from the other guests of the hotel as it was possible. We were aware of that the production process was smelly because of the chemicals the boys were about to use.

The following morning, I had to go to the Passport Office to extend my visa. I remember a very impolite female officer, who started shouting at me for no reason whatsoever, thrust my passport on the desk and refused to put a “Yes” stamp. “The next one!” she roared into the air. I was left with the perspective of only three more days in Switzerland, “the must” to pay for the room and no money to go back to Poland. When things turned hopeless, Mathew suddenly came up with a brilliant an idea. “Go to Lausanne; it’s in another canton. French. Maybe things will be better there”.

Christina promised to keep me company. Our friends gave me nearly all their money to show to the passport authorities, and on the same morning, we got on the train and went south. Switzerland is a small country, so it did not take long to get to Lausanne. I remember I liked the station architecture, however, I could think of nothing else but my visa and the inevitable bankruptcy, should I be refused the stamp again.

I needn’t have worried. This time, the officer was very polite and almost fatherly. He had a brief glance at the money I showed him, advised what to see in Switzerland, and extended my visa for two months. “It’s such a weight off my mind,” I said to Christina as we were walking down the stairs, “I wonder how many pictures the boys have made. Let’s hitch-hike back to Zurich. It’s not late.”

We took the national motorway number 1, and we did not need to wait ages for a long goods vehicle with French registration plates to pull up. The driver did not speak English or German, but he gave us a broad smile and said: “Zurich? OK. Allez.” He made an inviting gesture with his hand to hurry us up.

I gave a farewell look to vast green slopes of vineyards on our left and after a few seconds, the Frenchman smoothly joined the traffic on the road. He drove fast but never exceeded the speed limit. He was a talkative person, and he kept talking all the way to Zurich. He did not mind getting no response from us, except a monosyllable from time to time, but what I understood after a one-year-course of French at the University, was that there was a less monotonous way to cross the country if you drove through the mountain roads, not along the highway.

When we got back to Hotel Otter, the boys had finished working on our works of art and announced that we would leave the hotel in the morning and move to the camping site by the Lake Zurich. “We are starting with the sales the day after tomorrow,” was the eventual plan.

The camping site was a great place; it had a small store offering a variety of soft drinks, milk, some bakery products and vegetables. There was also a wooden building with a few rooms for the guests and a vast lawn for the tents. There were tourists from around Europe next to us, and at the end of our stay, we had new neighbors: water rats. One of them bit a big hole in my tent and ate all the bread I had left next to my back bag.

The next morning, each of us took some artistic stuff for sale and, after consulting the map of the city, we all set off in different directions in search of one-family houses.

I felt so ashamed and stressed out that I thought I’d rather die than utter a word in German about my drawings for sale. I did not want to speak English in case someone noticed my language fluency and asked me some uncomfortable questions about the technique I used when I was drawing, say, Basilique Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre in Paris. I decided German was safer because I could always say I did not understand what they wanted.

I was trying to find side streets with villas scattered among tall trees to put off the necessity to speak as long as possible, when I realized I was in an old garden and someone was walking in my direction. It was not possible to avoid meeting him. A tall man in his mid-fifties asked me if I had lost my way. I smiled sweetly even though my throat became dry and said, “Ich habe enige Bildre zu verkaufen. Wollen sie zahen?” ( I have some pictures for sale. Would you like to have a look?”)

My question surprised him, but he suggested we go to the arbor so he could see the drawings. “Where are you from?” he asked in German on our way. I thought I’d rather say anything but the truth, (I suppose I must have been ashamed of what I was about to sell), so I replied, “I’m from Omsk in the Soviet Union.” I could not remember any further away places at that moment. The man’s mouth fell open, his eyes became wide, and he went pale. He looked as if he was going to faint. Only a few hours later did I realize what had shocked the man and frightened him out of his wits. He must have thought I was a Soviet spy. He murmured something, looked around and hurried back home. “Ich habe keine geld, keine geld,” he repeated several times and slammed the door of his villa.

In the 1970s, there was still a lot of competition going on between capitalist and communist societies. Many people in western Europe thought that there was no actual difference between the Soviet Union and the countries like Poland, so they feared all those who lived behind “the Iron Curtain.” Despite the ease of tension between West Germany and the Soviet Union, which started in 1969, it was still unusual to meet tourists from the Eastern Block in western cities. Thus, it is quite understandable that the appearance of a young, artistic-looking woman wearing a long, colorful skirt who was trying to sell graphic art in your garden must have been alarming. The man I met was in his late fifties, so he remembered both WWII and Cold War very well. This meant that for many years he must have lived in constant fear of a surprise nuclear strike against Western Europe.

I hurried to a nearby park and sat on a bench close to the sandpit for kids. I was trembling all over, and I decided it was not a job for me. “I’d rather die than start selling again.” I thought. I closed my eyes and tried to calm down. I was leaning against a bench backrest when a woman and her little daughter sat down next to me. The mom was very young, and the girl was about five. The kid kept talking all the time and tried to climb onto the bench to sit on her mom’s lap. During one attempt, she must have kicked the drawings folder, and it fell down onto the ground. The pictures lay scattered all around the park lane.

The little girl gave a cry of delight. “Mom, look at it! What a lovely puppy!! And that cat! I want them! I want them now!!” She repeated and started jumping with joy over one of the drawings. Her mother bought two pictures–a portrait of a Cocker Spaniel puppy and a picture of a black cat on a tree branch. I stopped thinking about Omsk and the arbor and decided it was just “they always spoil the first pancake” case.

We spent about six weeks in Switzerland doing three hours of selling a day and relaxing during the remaining twenty-one. There was sunbathing, seeing the sights, drinking beer in the old town and doing nothing special. I even had time for a short summer-time romance with Robert, who was a waiter in one of the busy restaurants. He wanted me to stay in Switzerland with him and talked a lot about love.

One afternoon, I knocked on the door of a young Swiss married couple and made friends with them. Their names were Ellen and Hans. It appeared Ellen was terminally ill, and she died of cancer a year later. Hans was an engineer, and we were in touch for a couple of years. He came to Poland on business once or twice in the late 1970s, and when we met in Warsaw, he said he was shocked by what he had seen in my country. It was the time when there was no selection of food in the shops. You could see poverty everywhere: in dirty roads, grey houses and gloomy people's faces.

He spent unforgettable moments when he was driving from Cracow to Warsaw. It was the end of February so there was still snow around; it was cold, and the days were short. He got hungry, so he incautiously stopped by the first road bar he had spotted in one of the small towns he was passing.

When he opened the bar door, urine stench made him dizzy. He saw a couple of men sitting at a dilapidated table. Two of them were babbling something above mugs of beer, their heads nearly touching each other. The third individual was lying with his face down on a plate full of cooked beetroots and mashed potatoes. Banqueter four was snoring, his forehead on his folded arms and urine dripping under the table and spilling into a puddle. Hans decided not to dine in that place.

Back in Poland, I changed my place of work. I had worked as an English teacher in a secondary technical school for five years, and I thought it was time to earn better money teaching the language to adults at laboratory courses run by the Workers’ University whose main offices were in the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. They had a teaching center close to my apartment in the east bank of the Vistula River, close to Trasa Lazienkowska which is an important part of east-west transportation infrastructure. I worked for fifteen years there teaching from six to nine lesson-hours a day. There was a boom for learning English those days because many people were planning to leave Poland and earn money in the West, provided they got a passport, of course.

Applying for a passport

It took thirty days to get a passport and whether one got an approval or was denied the document depended on many factors, whose nature was unknown. Waiting for the decision gave you a thrill and filled you with horror for fear of getting a refusal on the grounds of Article 5 (other social reasons). Nobody knew what they were.

Most of my friends lived in the city center, so they applied for their passports in the same Passport Office. Luckily for Maryla and Les, there was a small newsagent’s in the same street. Their mutual friend Barbara ran it, and it was very near the passport decision center and the butcher’s shop. “Barb”, as they called her, had many clients not only because the kiosk was situated in one of the busiest streets in Warsaw, but also because she had a small business in it. It was doing many people little favors on the reciprocity basis.

The system worked well, and everybody was happy. For example, the manageress of the butcher’s needed colored magazines and better cigarettes every week. She could count on Barbara to remember about her. Barb in return might want a kilo or two top quality pork for herself or her friend from the Passport Office. She used to place the order with the meat seller, and they traded the stuff behind a pink-blue curtain at the back of the kiosk. So, if my friends asked Barb for help to get passports in a week instead of a month, the system started rolling and it went on, as long as Barbara was in love with Les’ brother, George. Things were like that till the end of communism in Poland, but in the mid-1970s, there were still fifteen years to go.

Life in Poland in the 1970s.

My life was very busy from October to the end of June. I taught English during the week, cooked dinners for my family at the weekends and met my friends in the evenings. We used to go to one of the three places to have a wine-drinking night: they were U Fukiera winery in the Old Town, Crystal Budapest (the Hungarian restaurant in Marszalkowska Street) and The Romanian Restaurant in the central MDM square.

On one occasion, when we were having wine in Crystal, we met a few guys who were anti-regime activists from Workers’ Defense Committee, KOR. We spent a great evening together, and on leaving the restaurant we saw the street was deserted. We were still in a cheerful frame of mind, so we started dancing on tram rails. No sooner had we begun than hidden cameras flashed and brightened the dim glow of the streetlights. They seemed to come from everywhere around. Counter-intelligence agents started their photo session.

We used to go to the movies pretty often becausecinema enjoyed one of its best periods and many good movies shot at the time are still popular today, that is over forty years later. “The Man of Marble” directed by Andrzej Wajda was launched in February 1977. The title refers to the propagandist marble statues popular at that time. Wajda attacked the socialist realism of the city of Nowa Huta and revealed the use of propaganda and political corruption during the period of Stalinism in Poland. The movie was on for many months, and the audience was always full.

Another popular movie was “Love or Walk out on Me”, a comedy with well-known actors attracted viewers in June, and a new war-time TV series “Polskie drogi” (Polish Choices) glued many fans to TV screens for eleven weeks.

In January 1978, Polish Television launched the first episode of a great series Nights and Days based on Maria Dabrowska’s novel. The Washington Post described it as Poland’s “Gone with the Wind”. The novel is a sweeping historical epic family drama. It received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1977. Waldemar Kazanecki composed the film score, which included a Viennese waltz that is still popular with Polish weddings as the first dance of the bride and groom.

In September, movie lovers welcomed a successful series “The Doll” based on Boleslaw Prus novel, which some have regarded as the greatest Polish novel. According to the writer’s biographer, the novel may be unique in 19th century world literature as a comprehensive picture of an entire society. The author did for Warsaw’s sense of place the same James Joyce did for his capital city Dublin in Ulysses a third of a century later, in 1922.

One of the greatest hits of those days was The Promised Land, a drama film directed by Andrzej Wajda, based on a novel by Wladyslaw Reymont, the Nobel Prize in Literature winner in 1924. The movie starring Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak and Andrzej Seweryn attracted crowds of cinema viewers for many months.

Television Channel 1 started showing a new TV series “A-Forty-year-old Chap” (Czterdziestolatek) which used to gather families all over Poland in front of the TV screens for decades. It is still popular at present.

In October 1975, my Mom and I listened to radio transmissions of the International Chopin Piano Competition auditions and to all the finalists playing one of the two great composer’s piano concerts: E minor or F minor. We were happy to hear Kristian Zimerman won the first prize. He played E minor concert, the one I used to hear every day when Mom practiced performing classical composers before the classes in the Academy of Music.

Days went by monotonously. I used to turn on the radio in the morning to listen to Sygnaly Dnia (The Signals of the Day). It was the first news and music program live, which was broadcast daily between six and eight before noon. In March 2003, the program celebrated its 30th anniversary. The President of Poland, Alexander Kwasniewski said: “We are happy that Poland has a valued opinion-forming program which provides information, commentary and very objective opinion.” True enough, the news was always short, the interviews interesting, and the music made you feel the world was a beautiful place.

To get to the school I worked in, I had to hurry to the bus stop on the other side of Trasa Lazienkowska, climb up the steps of the nearest footbridge (It was always windy there) and catch a bus to the city center. On the other side of the river, there were only four more stops to my destination in Czerniakowska Street.

I worked very hard in that school because there were no other teachers of English there, even though the school had at least six hundred students to teach. The classes were not divided into groups, so I had about forty teenagers, mostly boys, at one time in the classroom. Even though I was not much older than some students who wanted to try my stamina and test my nerves, I wanted to have things my way, and I did not give up. We made friends pretty soon, because everyone respected the rules.

The English-class code was fair for both the sides. All the students were supposed to learn English, but the ones who wanted to pass the Russian language in Matura (General Certificate of Education Exam) were allowed a pass in English at the level as low as forty percent of the correct answers. The students who wanted to pass English during the entrance exam to Technical University had to study much harder. I gave them a lot of extra work to do, and they had to get at least eighty percent to receive a good mark from me. My students decided the rules were fair and stopped making too much noise, so the atmosphere was moderately academic. I was a Form Four tutor, and we were on exceptionally friendly terms. I am still in touch with a couple (Mathew and Betty) who had fallen in love with each other, got married, had children and divorced after twenty-something years of marriage.

I was lucky my friends Jurek and Teresa lived in the apartment block opposite the school. When I had a free time slot, I could get there in no time at all instead of sitting idle in the staffroom. Teresa was usually alone at home because Jurek who was a sailor stayed away from Poland for many months. However, after their daughter Maggie was born, Teresa said no to his career and got him to give up overseas sailing.

Besides teaching in the technical secondary school, I had many private students in my tiny flat on the eighth floor of a huge apartment block. I earned relatively well, but even though I did over fifty teaching hours a week, buying a Fiat 126p was pure fantasy. I went abroad again and this time; it was Sweden.

My sister, Mary, had a friend whose brother had married a Swedish girl and could issue an invitation for me. We settled the details in April and as soon as the school year was over, I boarded a plane for Stockholm, and after what seemed approximately two hours, the plane touched down in Arlanda Airport. The flight went with no turbulence, but many passengers seemed worried and discussed recent strikes in Radom and riots brutally pacified by the militia forces. The official government newspaper available aboard the plane was full of headlines blaming “Radom brawlers” for everything. The truth was different.

Radom 1976

On June 24, 1976, the government imposed a drastic increase of food prices. Meat, sausage and ham went up by nearly 70% (top quality meat rocketed to 110%), the price of butter and cheese increased by 50%, sugar by 200%, rice by 150%, and vegetables by 30%.

The protest started when the workers from one plant took to the streets. Soon, other factories joined the first group and the number of demonstrators grew to thousands. The ones who stayed in the plants began the occupation of the buildings. At about 10 o’clock, the crowd of ten thousand workers gathered in front of the communist party committee headquarters. They demanded the government withdrew the new prices, however, until 2 p.m. the authorities took no decision. The crowd decided the government would never step back, and the protesters broke into the headquarters. Some of them started throwing ham tins from the buffet window, Lenin portraits from other windows, and the others began devastating the offices. The flag of Poland replaced the red flag on the mast, and they set the building of the party committee headquarters on fire. Soon, many students and second shift workers joined the enraged crowd, and the streets became the scene of violent clashes with the riot militia. At 8 p.m., the government withdrew the project.

Despite the high price many people paid in Radom, the riots created one powerful advantage for the future. For the first time in history, working class and intelligentsia got united. The victims of repressions received legal, medical and financial suport when the Workers’ Defense Committee came into being in September.

Summer One in Sweden.

Even tough I was working really hard teaching English for many hours a day, I did not earn enough money to buy a Fiat. I had to go abroad to find a better paid job. My sister’s friend’s brother Wojtek, who had officially invited me to Sweden, could not meet me at the airport because he was busy working as a chef in one restaurant in the center of Stockholm. We agreed I would take a bus to the city and wait for him at the railway station. I spent three hours there watching people around me, newsagents display of magazines, and gazing at red and green grapes in small stores. I remember them because they looked juicy and sweet and I was very thirsty. “Shall we ever have such titbits at railway stations in Poland?” I wondered. Wojtek dashed into the hall and kissed me on the cheek.

“Hi,” he said. “Let’s go. I’ll take you to the apartment I have found for you. There is a chap who is looking for a flatmate, so if you don’t mind sharing the bedsitter with him, it will be cheaper. Don’t worry. There are two beds there,” he laughed.

My roommate’s name was Christopher. He had been in Stockholm for a while and had some ideas on how to find a job there. In theory. He did not speak English, and he was shy, so his chances to earn money were none. He was aware there were two options to find a job. He told me that women who spoke English could try their luck to work black in some restaurants owned by Arabs, who hired them to do deep cleaning for ten crowns an hour. They had to start at six in the morning and finish by ten before the restaurant kitchen staff began cooking. Next, the cleaning agency boss drove them to clean private apartments. The agency had a contract with the city authorities to clean the apartments in social housing estates where tenants often changed. Those places were even harder for the cleaners to tidy because their tenants had devastated them before moving out.

The other option Christopher heard of was smuggling whisky and cigarettes aboard passenger ferries between Stockholm and the Aland Islands in Finland. All you had to do was to buy a return ticket in the harbor and board a ferry in the morning. Tickets were not expensive, and they became even more affordable if you purchased yours at the reduced price for pensioners. Each ticket allowed you to buy one carton of Marlboro cigarettes and one bottle of Ballantine whisky. The more ferry tickets you bought, the more cartons and alcohol you could buy. Ferry stores did not limit the number of bottles you were buying, however, bringing them back to Sweden was against the law and anyone who did it risked deportation to Poland.