Fracas in Jablonna
In the summer of 1983 I was attending the RoManSy scientific conference. RoManSy stands for Robot and Manipulator Systems and the RoManSy conferences were aimed to bring together those scientists and engineers working on the design of this kind of intelligent machinery. Most were academics, from university labs in Europe, the USA and Japan; only a few were industrialists. The RoManSy conferences were noted for their informality and friendliness.
The conference venue switched annually between Udine in the Friuli district of north east Italy and Warsaw in Poland. This was because the two chief organisers of the conference were Giovanni Bianchi, an Italian academic who worked for CISM (the International Centre for the Mechanical Sciences) in Udine, and Adam Morecki, a Polish professor at Warsaw Technical University. Bianchi was tall and angular with a large-browed head. He was soft-spoken, urbane and gentle. Morecki was a Stravinski-like figure, small, darting, energetic, with a round bald head and twinkling eyes.
Once, when I worked in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Morecki paid a short visit. He spent much of his time visiting various doctors and chemist shops in the town buying contraceptive pills for his daughter – apparently they could not be easily obtained behind the then Iron Curtain. He also went home laden with electrical goods, shortwave radios, computer supplies, cameras and accessories; he must have had some well-established arrangement with Polish customs. Lena and I once invited him to our house in Newcastle when our two mothers happened to be staying with us. Morecki set out to charm them and did so with such effect that for many years afterwards they would still talk about "...that Adam from Poland, what a lovely man he was, such beautiful manners”. He was quite charmed by them too; afterwards, whenever we met, he would ask “How are the murthers?”
The conference this year was in Jablonna, a small village on the northern outskirts of Warsaw. Jablonna (pronounced Yab-Wohn-Ah with the accent on the Wohn) is at a three-way crossroads. Ten miles to the south is Warsaw; to the northeast, just a couple of miles away, is Legionowo, a major coal-mining centre; to the northwest a minor road, muddy and broken, wanders off between dirty fields, eventually to reach Plonsk forty miles away.
Jablonna was chosen as the venue for this RoManSy conference because of its palace. This is a large stately home, once owned by some branch of the Polish nobility, now owned by ‘the state’. It is used as a tourist hotel and as a place for marriages and other social functions. It had been hired by Warsaw Technical University as a conference centre. Jablonna palace is located just at the crossroads down a long tree-lined drive and in the centre of large ornamental gardens which reach southwards to the Vistula.
By Polish standards, Jablonna Palace was the height of luxury, but by the standards of the West or Japan it was pretty dire. The rooms were huge and high-ceilinged and decorated in a sumptuous rococo fashion, but the paint was cracked and the electric sockets were hanging out of the walls. The scent of decay and poor maintenance was everywhere. Outside, the gardens looked beautiful from a distance, but a closer look revealed that the paving stones were invaded by grass, the lawns were badly cut and the central lake was polluted and stinking.
The rooms were looked after by a small number of downtrodden young girls who looked as if they needed a good night’s sleep. They were dressed in almost caricature ‘maids’ outfits. The vast gardens were tended by a couple of surly elderly men.
But the most characteristic feature of Jablonna palace, shared by most other hotels, restaurants, bars and cafes in Poland at the time (except for those reserved for those working for ‘the state’), was the annoying shortage of any desirable commodity. Every item that appeared on a menu, and every drink advertised behind the bar, would ‘run out’ fairly quickly, to be replenished at some unknowable future date. Drink cola for three days, ask for a cola on the fourth day – “Sorry, no cola! We have run out of cola”. Enjoy goose on the day of arrival, ask for goose a couple of days later – “Sorry, we’ve run out of goose”. Sugar runs out, soap runs out, toilet paper runs out.
On about day three of the conference, beer ran out. I decided that while I could do without goose and, at a pinch sugar (I had prudently brought my own supply of soap and toilet paper), I really couldn’t do without beer. This was not because of addiction to alcohol (and anyway there was plenty of wine and spirits), but because drinking beer is one thing you can happily do when there is no other form of entertainment available – and in the Jablonna palace there really was nothing to do. No television. No radio. Weather too cold and drizzly for walks. No transport to or from Warsaw. Nothing. I had expected this and had brought some books to read. But reading a book is much better with beer.
So I decided, that evening, to walk up to the village of Jablonna and find a bar. I didn’t realize till later that this was quite an adventurous thing to do. Nearly all academics at this kind of conference stay within the confines of the conference venue, venturing out only to take part in organised trips to museums and theatres and other such places. I found this extremely boring. These academics would happily spend their incarcerated time talking to each other about their work – something I found not only boring but distasteful since it was always marked by a kind of puerile boastfulness – especially from the American delegates. So, as the evening darkened I strolled up the palace drive to the crossroads, a book in my pocket, imagining a long languid evening reading and drinking beer in some snug country inn.
Poland, outside of the large towns (and even in many parts of these), can be surprisingly primitive. The crossroads had few signs, but since there was little vehicular traffic, none were needed for traffic control. The only signs were those giving the directions of Warsaw and Legionowo with distances in kilometres. The signposts were bent and leaning dangerously and the signs themselves were covered in grime. There seemed little chance that they were pointing in the right directions.
The main traffic consisted of long triangular-sectioned wooden carts, with rubber-tyred wheels pulled by thin horses. These carts are everywhere in Poland. Their design must have evolved that way for a purpose but it is difficult to see why a triangular cart should be preferred to a rectangular one. The main roads (the Warsaw and Legionowo spurs) were cobbled, but only roughly. The third spur, to the northwest, was packed mud. This was late summer, so I assumed the roads were in relatively good condition. I could hardly imagine what they would be like in the middle of a wet, cold winter.
There were shops lining the two main roads out of the crossroads for a short distance along each. There were perhaps four shops on each side of each road, so sixteen in all. Farther out than the shops, for a distance of maybe quarter of a mile, the roads including the minor northwest one, were lined with rows of low dingy cottages. There were no pavements and hardly any signs of people. The atmosphere was murky, dirty, squalid and rather threatening. It was eerie, like that part of a childrens’ fairy story when the ogre or the wicked witch appears.
The signs above the shops were in Polish and it was impossible to say what each one sold. Nor was it possible to find out much more by looking in the windows. These were small dirty and curtained so that the interior was hidden. In some of the windows, behind the grimy glass, could be seen brown paper packets with labels hand-written in Polish and piles of small cardboard boxes like matchboxes. The impression was that there was little to buy and what was available was cheap and tawdry.
But one shop had its sign in English. It said BAR. Presumably there is a Polish word for ‘bar’ and I could not work out why English should be used in a village unvisited by English speakers. Except by me! This was what I had been looking for. I pushed open the door and went in. To my dismay, far from being a snug country inn, this bar was pure Polish primitiveness. It was a bare room with sawdust on the floor. It was furnished by a few tables each consisting of a pole with a circular piece of wood on top. There were no seats or even stools; no pictures or ornaments on the walls.
Along the back wall was the bar. It was a plain counter with a simple swing door. On the wall behind the counter were three rows of shelves. On these shelves stood a small number of identical clear glass bottles, each containing clear liquid. Behind the counter stood a huge woman wearing dirty white overalls and muddy wooden clogs. She was the barmaid. There were only two or three customers standing at the tables drinking clear liquid from thick glasses and smoking pungent cigarettes. I nearly choked on the fumes. What struck me most was the distances between the bottles on the shelves. It is usual to see bar shelves crowded with bottles of different shapes sizes and colours - whiskies, gins, vodkas, liqueurs. Here, the bottles looked like bleach bottles and there was only one for every yard of shelf. The bottles looked – lonely.
I walked up to the counter (you couldn’t really call it a bar). The barmaid said something in Polish and smiled a surprisingly warm and welcoming smile. I used the only bit of Polish I knew. “Pivo”, I said, “Beer”. She said something in reply which I didn’t understand. But the sad shake of her head told me the worst. There was no pivo. The beer had run out.
I turned my palms upwards, shrugged my shoulders, and hoped she’d understand this as the universal gesture meaning “Ok. Give me whatever you’ve got.” She understood. She pointed to the shelves of bottles and said “Vodka”. I nodded. “Ok. Vodka”, I said. She put a thick glass down in front of me, pulled out a clear glass bottle, no label, from under the counter and filled my glass to the top. It must have been at least a quarter of a pint.
Figuring that in Poland it was probably the custom to pay at the end of a drinking session I picked up the glass and moved across to one of the tables. I took a sip of the vodka and just managed to place my glass down on the table before I was overcome with a fit of coughing and choking as the vodka burned its way down towards my stomach. The barmaid smiled at me and, incongruously, made a thumbs-up sign. The other customers looked up and watched me suspiciously.
Gradually, as I carefully sipped the vodka down, I began to feel a glow of well-being. Here I was, in a remote village in a country mostly unknown to British people except as a tragic crucible of war and oppression. I saw the other drinkers as the sons of heroic freedom fighters who had thrown off the yoke of Nazism only to be re-yoked by Communism. I imagined them returning to their small but warm cottages where they and their families would huddle round illicit radio sets listening to the BBC and hoping to be liberated. I imagined that if they found out I was British they would rush across, shake me by the hand, slap my back and invite me to their homes for potato soup, dark bread and more vodka. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
One of the drinkers – a small rat-faced youth wearing a coal-dust streaked flat cap – had been watching me closely since my arrival. He now moved slowly over to my table and, with a crooked grin, said something in Polish. I grinned back and once again made the upturned palm gesture. He said something else. This time I replied in pidgin Russian, “Angliski – Ya na Jablonna pallach”, which I hoped he’d interpret as “English. I am from the Jablonna palace”. I pointed in the direction of the palace. His eyes never left me and he showed no sign of understanding. I wished he would go away and just then he did. He shouted something to the barmaid and then hurried out of the door of the bar.
I took some time to finish the rest of my vodka and was just about to pay and leave when the youth returned accompanied by about a dozen men who, by their appearance, were coal miners. This group went up to the bar where they each got a large glass of vodka which they carried across to a table on the far side of the room from mine. They were obviously discussing me and I began to feel uncomfortable. In any case, a quarter pint of vodka is quite enough and I decided to leave. I went to the counter and held out a handful of coin to the barmaid. To my surprise she refused to take my money and smiling, she pointed to the group of men. I assumed that my drink had been paid for by them and went back to imagining myself as the recipient of Polish gratitude to the British wartime saviour. I smiled and waved at them and made to leave.
My exit was barred by one of the group. Standing between me and the door and with his arms outstretched he gently pushed me backwards till I was standing in the group. The vodka that I had just consumed prevented me from feeling the fear that I should have felt, and which might have helped me avoid what was coming. Instead of making a bolt for it, I rashly decided to have another drink – after all, they had bought me one. I was Scottish. What else but to buy a round? Gestures worked again and before long each of the miners had a second glass of vodka sitting on the table and I had my second glass in my hand. “Slainte”, I said, raising the glass, thinking how glad I was that vodka cost so little in Poland.
One of the men, seemingly appointed as spokesman by the others, took me to one side and muttered in a thick accent, “Change dollar?”. Ah! That was it!. They wanted to change money from Polish zlotys to US dollars. To obtain anything worth having in Poland it was necessary to have US dollars. Cars and petrol, washing machines, television sets, medicines, even passports – all were available, but only for US dollars.
The unofficial exchange rate was ten times the official one – so a tourist in Poland could become extremely rich in zlotys quite easily. But, as it was impossible to take out of Poland anything worth having, there was little point in making the exchange. Also, each person, on entry to Poland, had to declare how much ‘hard currency’ – dollars, pounds etc they had on them, and what items of value, such as jewellery. On exit, they had to declare how much they were taking out. Any difference had to be accounted for.
Not wanting to get into trouble with the Polish authorities I declined the miner’s offer to exchange. Undeterred, he pulled out of his pocket a thick wad of zloty notes. “Change dollar?” he repeated pushing the notes into my face. “No, thank you”. “Nein danke”. “Non merci”. I said, hoping that one would get through. “I no money”, I tried, together with the over-used shrug and upward-turned palm gesture. Eventually he seemed to give up and he dissolved into the group.
But then another came forward and began a similar process. Again I refused his obvious offer. Again it was repeated with the showing of zlotys. Again I shrugged and said “I no money”.
He was replaced by a third contender. But this one was more forward than the other two, and as he repeatedly asked if I would “change dollar”, his hands moved up towards the front of my chest and he began pulling my jacket lapel and pointing into my inside pocket where he presumably thought my wallet was. This invasion of my personal space jolted me into an appreciation of the difficulty I was in. These people assumed I was carrying hard currency. They wanted it and were prepared to exchange zlotys for it. But if I refused the exchange, then they would probably just take it anyway. What could I do to stop them?
I decided, using brain cells soused in alcohol, that valour was the better part of discretion. I could not reason with these people since I could not make myself understood, (otherwise I would have told them the sorry truth – that I didn’t have much money on me anyway), so I’d show them I wasn’t someone to trifle with. As the third miner made to touch my jacket again I pushed his hands upwards and said loudly “Take your hands off me! How dare you” and scowled at him. He looked surprised and quickly backed off.
I congratulated myself on a sound stratagem and was just about to make for the door, and safety, when there was an almighty whack. To my astonishment, one of the other miners had come across and hit the one who had been importuning me. He went down like a sack of coal dust, his broken nose spewing blood onto the sawdust floor.
The miner who had done the hitting swaggered back to the group, but as he got there another miner hit him hard. He staggered, hit out back and a full-scale riot developed. The thick vodka glasses whistled through the air and one went through a window. There was a loud crack as one of the tables gave way. The barmaid screamed and disappeared into the room behind the bar. I stood bemused up against a wall watching a scene of mayhem. The fight seemed to go on for ever. I felt as though I was in a dream. It was so unreal that I felt only slightly alarmed and I even began to see how ridiculous the whole situation had become. And I started to laugh – not hysterically or out of fright but out of a strange delight at observing the sheer childish stupidity of the miners. “Crazy bastards!”, I shouted over the din, “If you’d only asked me I’d have given you my money”.
Then the dream took a nightmarish turn. The door of the bar burst open and in rushed a Polish policeman brandishing a pistol. The riot stopped immediately. The miners cowered back into a corner. The policeman shouted something at them. They pointed at me – still standing up against the wall. The policeman walked quickly across to me and, to my utter amazement, pointed the pistol at my forehead and barked out an indecipherable order to me. Once again I made use of the now somewhat hackneyed palm-and-shrug gesture but augmented it with wide open eyes and dropped lower jaw. He continued to harangue me and kept the gun pressed against my forehead.
I foolishly still felt no fear, and the sense of the ridiculous grew stronger. Here was I, a Britisher, being held up against a wall by a jackbooted officer wielding a pistol. I thought to myself “Please don’t let him say ‘We have ways of making you talk’”
The barmaid had re-emerged and the policeman went over and talked for a while with her. Then he shouted at the group of miners and indicated that they should leave the bar using his pistol to point at the door. There was a general shuffling but no real movement towards the door. Then the barmaid waded in and picking up the bruised and battered miners as if they were small children she carried them one by one to the door and threw them out. As each one was ejected he was followed by a Polish imprecation that must have meant “And don’t come back!”
When the last miner had been ejected the policeman put away his gun, turned to me and said something that sounded sad rather than angry and might have been an apology – or a warning. Then he too disappeared out of the door, which the barmaid quickly locked. I looked at her quizzically. I needed to get out. Why had she locked me in?
That was when real fear hit me. The barmaid pointed to the door and beckoned me to look through the curtained glass panel making up its top half. I did so and was horrified to see the group of miners gathered outside. When they saw me they gesticulated and clenched their fists at me. Two or three were brandishing knives. I looked in desperation at the barmaid. She pointed to the group beyond the door, then pointed at me and slowly drew her finger across her throat. That was unmistakeable. The miners were going to wait for me and extract a bloody revenge. For what? I couldn’t tell. Maybe they were now all in trouble with the police. Maybe they had been barred from the only drinking hole around. I couldn’t tell. I just knew that they, with their knives, were between me and the palace.
The barmaid pulled the door curtain shut. Then she indicated that I should follow her through the swing door, behind the counter and into the back room. Shaking with fear I followed her and found myself in a room that was mediaeval in character. A rough wooden floor covered in dirty straw, a table and a couple of rough chairs. A wide low fireplace, but no fire, just a pile of ashes and half-burned logs. There must have been other things in that room but I have no recollection of them, as the barmaid ushered me through it to the back door of the pub. This led out into a yard deep in mud and surrounded by a low wooden fence. There were several pigs lying in the mud.
The barmaid tapped me on the shoulder, looked meaningfully into my eyes, pointed with her index finger first to me and then in the direction of the palace. Then she brought her two pudgy hands together in a loud clap that said “Go! And don’t stop till you get there!”
I raced off up the yard, vaulted the back fence, then raced down the alley at the back of the shops till I reached the end. Across the road was the entrance to the palace. Without once looking back, and careless of traffic, I dashed across the road, through the ornate gates and down the drive. I didn’t stop till I got inside the palace. And even there I fancied I could hear the frustrated yelling of the miners.
Afterwards I heard nothing about this incident.
And now, many years later, I can find Jablonna on Google maps. The crossroads is still there, and the dingy shops. The horse-drawn carts have vanished and have been replaced by lorries and cars. The establishment in which I nearly came to a very sticky end is still there. The sign above the shop now says "CUKIERNIA" and in the window is "WYROBY WLASNE" - the bar is now a confectioner selling homemade sweets. I hope I was not responsible for the transformation!
In the summer of 1983 I was attending the RoManSy scientific conference. RoManSy stands for Robot and Manipulator Systems and the RoManSy conferences were aimed to bring together those scientists and engineers working on the design of this kind of intelligent machinery. Most were academics, from university labs in Europe, the USA and Japan; only a few were industrialists. The RoManSy conferences were noted for their informality and friendliness.
The conference venue switched annually between Udine in the Friuli district of north east Italy and Warsaw in Poland. This was because the two chief organisers of the conference were Giovanni Bianchi, an Italian academic who worked for CISM (the International Centre for the Mechanical Sciences) in Udine, and Adam Morecki, a Polish professor at Warsaw Technical University. Bianchi was tall and angular with a large-browed head. He was soft-spoken, urbane and gentle. Morecki was a Stravinski-like figure, small, darting, energetic, with a round bald head and twinkling eyes.
Once, when I worked in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Morecki paid a short visit. He spent much of his time visiting various doctors and chemist shops in the town buying contraceptive pills for his daughter – apparently they could not be easily obtained behind the then Iron Curtain. He also went home laden with electrical goods, shortwave radios, computer supplies, cameras and accessories; he must have had some well-established arrangement with Polish customs. Lena and I once invited him to our house in Newcastle when our two mothers happened to be staying with us. Morecki set out to charm them and did so with such effect that for many years afterwards they would still talk about "...that Adam from Poland, what a lovely man he was, such beautiful manners”. He was quite charmed by them too; afterwards, whenever we met, he would ask “How are the murthers?”
The conference this year was in Jablonna, a small village on the northern outskirts of Warsaw. Jablonna (pronounced Yab-Wohn-Ah with the accent on the Wohn) is at a three-way crossroads. Ten miles to the south is Warsaw; to the northeast, just a couple of miles away, is Legionowo, a major coal-mining centre; to the northwest a minor road, muddy and broken, wanders off between dirty fields, eventually to reach Plonsk forty miles away.
Jablonna was chosen as the venue for this RoManSy conference because of its palace. This is a large stately home, once owned by some branch of the Polish nobility, now owned by ‘the state’. It is used as a tourist hotel and as a place for marriages and other social functions. It had been hired by Warsaw Technical University as a conference centre. Jablonna palace is located just at the crossroads down a long tree-lined drive and in the centre of large ornamental gardens which reach southwards to the Vistula.
By Polish standards, Jablonna Palace was the height of luxury, but by the standards of the West or Japan it was pretty dire. The rooms were huge and high-ceilinged and decorated in a sumptuous rococo fashion, but the paint was cracked and the electric sockets were hanging out of the walls. The scent of decay and poor maintenance was everywhere. Outside, the gardens looked beautiful from a distance, but a closer look revealed that the paving stones were invaded by grass, the lawns were badly cut and the central lake was polluted and stinking.
The rooms were looked after by a small number of downtrodden young girls who looked as if they needed a good night’s sleep. They were dressed in almost caricature ‘maids’ outfits. The vast gardens were tended by a couple of surly elderly men.
But the most characteristic feature of Jablonna palace, shared by most other hotels, restaurants, bars and cafes in Poland at the time (except for those reserved for those working for ‘the state’), was the annoying shortage of any desirable commodity. Every item that appeared on a menu, and every drink advertised behind the bar, would ‘run out’ fairly quickly, to be replenished at some unknowable future date. Drink cola for three days, ask for a cola on the fourth day – “Sorry, no cola! We have run out of cola”. Enjoy goose on the day of arrival, ask for goose a couple of days later – “Sorry, we’ve run out of goose”. Sugar runs out, soap runs out, toilet paper runs out.
On about day three of the conference, beer ran out. I decided that while I could do without goose and, at a pinch sugar (I had prudently brought my own supply of soap and toilet paper), I really couldn’t do without beer. This was not because of addiction to alcohol (and anyway there was plenty of wine and spirits), but because drinking beer is one thing you can happily do when there is no other form of entertainment available – and in the Jablonna palace there really was nothing to do. No television. No radio. Weather too cold and drizzly for walks. No transport to or from Warsaw. Nothing. I had expected this and had brought some books to read. But reading a book is much better with beer.
So I decided, that evening, to walk up to the village of Jablonna and find a bar. I didn’t realize till later that this was quite an adventurous thing to do. Nearly all academics at this kind of conference stay within the confines of the conference venue, venturing out only to take part in organised trips to museums and theatres and other such places. I found this extremely boring. These academics would happily spend their incarcerated time talking to each other about their work – something I found not only boring but distasteful since it was always marked by a kind of puerile boastfulness – especially from the American delegates. So, as the evening darkened I strolled up the palace drive to the crossroads, a book in my pocket, imagining a long languid evening reading and drinking beer in some snug country inn.
Poland, outside of the large towns (and even in many parts of these), can be surprisingly primitive. The crossroads had few signs, but since there was little vehicular traffic, none were needed for traffic control. The only signs were those giving the directions of Warsaw and Legionowo with distances in kilometres. The signposts were bent and leaning dangerously and the signs themselves were covered in grime. There seemed little chance that they were pointing in the right directions.
The main traffic consisted of long triangular-sectioned wooden carts, with rubber-tyred wheels pulled by thin horses. These carts are everywhere in Poland. Their design must have evolved that way for a purpose but it is difficult to see why a triangular cart should be preferred to a rectangular one. The main roads (the Warsaw and Legionowo spurs) were cobbled, but only roughly. The third spur, to the northwest, was packed mud. This was late summer, so I assumed the roads were in relatively good condition. I could hardly imagine what they would be like in the middle of a wet, cold winter.
There were shops lining the two main roads out of the crossroads for a short distance along each. There were perhaps four shops on each side of each road, so sixteen in all. Farther out than the shops, for a distance of maybe quarter of a mile, the roads including the minor northwest one, were lined with rows of low dingy cottages. There were no pavements and hardly any signs of people. The atmosphere was murky, dirty, squalid and rather threatening. It was eerie, like that part of a childrens’ fairy story when the ogre or the wicked witch appears.
The signs above the shops were in Polish and it was impossible to say what each one sold. Nor was it possible to find out much more by looking in the windows. These were small dirty and curtained so that the interior was hidden. In some of the windows, behind the grimy glass, could be seen brown paper packets with labels hand-written in Polish and piles of small cardboard boxes like matchboxes. The impression was that there was little to buy and what was available was cheap and tawdry.
But one shop had its sign in English. It said BAR. Presumably there is a Polish word for ‘bar’ and I could not work out why English should be used in a village unvisited by English speakers. Except by me! This was what I had been looking for. I pushed open the door and went in. To my dismay, far from being a snug country inn, this bar was pure Polish primitiveness. It was a bare room with sawdust on the floor. It was furnished by a few tables each consisting of a pole with a circular piece of wood on top. There were no seats or even stools; no pictures or ornaments on the walls.
Along the back wall was the bar. It was a plain counter with a simple swing door. On the wall behind the counter were three rows of shelves. On these shelves stood a small number of identical clear glass bottles, each containing clear liquid. Behind the counter stood a huge woman wearing dirty white overalls and muddy wooden clogs. She was the barmaid. There were only two or three customers standing at the tables drinking clear liquid from thick glasses and smoking pungent cigarettes. I nearly choked on the fumes. What struck me most was the distances between the bottles on the shelves. It is usual to see bar shelves crowded with bottles of different shapes sizes and colours - whiskies, gins, vodkas, liqueurs. Here, the bottles looked like bleach bottles and there was only one for every yard of shelf. The bottles looked – lonely.
I walked up to the counter (you couldn’t really call it a bar). The barmaid said something in Polish and smiled a surprisingly warm and welcoming smile. I used the only bit of Polish I knew. “Pivo”, I said, “Beer”. She said something in reply which I didn’t understand. But the sad shake of her head told me the worst. There was no pivo. The beer had run out.
I turned my palms upwards, shrugged my shoulders, and hoped she’d understand this as the universal gesture meaning “Ok. Give me whatever you’ve got.” She understood. She pointed to the shelves of bottles and said “Vodka”. I nodded. “Ok. Vodka”, I said. She put a thick glass down in front of me, pulled out a clear glass bottle, no label, from under the counter and filled my glass to the top. It must have been at least a quarter of a pint.
Figuring that in Poland it was probably the custom to pay at the end of a drinking session I picked up the glass and moved across to one of the tables. I took a sip of the vodka and just managed to place my glass down on the table before I was overcome with a fit of coughing and choking as the vodka burned its way down towards my stomach. The barmaid smiled at me and, incongruously, made a thumbs-up sign. The other customers looked up and watched me suspiciously.
Gradually, as I carefully sipped the vodka down, I began to feel a glow of well-being. Here I was, in a remote village in a country mostly unknown to British people except as a tragic crucible of war and oppression. I saw the other drinkers as the sons of heroic freedom fighters who had thrown off the yoke of Nazism only to be re-yoked by Communism. I imagined them returning to their small but warm cottages where they and their families would huddle round illicit radio sets listening to the BBC and hoping to be liberated. I imagined that if they found out I was British they would rush across, shake me by the hand, slap my back and invite me to their homes for potato soup, dark bread and more vodka. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
One of the drinkers – a small rat-faced youth wearing a coal-dust streaked flat cap – had been watching me closely since my arrival. He now moved slowly over to my table and, with a crooked grin, said something in Polish. I grinned back and once again made the upturned palm gesture. He said something else. This time I replied in pidgin Russian, “Angliski – Ya na Jablonna pallach”, which I hoped he’d interpret as “English. I am from the Jablonna palace”. I pointed in the direction of the palace. His eyes never left me and he showed no sign of understanding. I wished he would go away and just then he did. He shouted something to the barmaid and then hurried out of the door of the bar.
I took some time to finish the rest of my vodka and was just about to pay and leave when the youth returned accompanied by about a dozen men who, by their appearance, were coal miners. This group went up to the bar where they each got a large glass of vodka which they carried across to a table on the far side of the room from mine. They were obviously discussing me and I began to feel uncomfortable. In any case, a quarter pint of vodka is quite enough and I decided to leave. I went to the counter and held out a handful of coin to the barmaid. To my surprise she refused to take my money and smiling, she pointed to the group of men. I assumed that my drink had been paid for by them and went back to imagining myself as the recipient of Polish gratitude to the British wartime saviour. I smiled and waved at them and made to leave.
My exit was barred by one of the group. Standing between me and the door and with his arms outstretched he gently pushed me backwards till I was standing in the group. The vodka that I had just consumed prevented me from feeling the fear that I should have felt, and which might have helped me avoid what was coming. Instead of making a bolt for it, I rashly decided to have another drink – after all, they had bought me one. I was Scottish. What else but to buy a round? Gestures worked again and before long each of the miners had a second glass of vodka sitting on the table and I had my second glass in my hand. “Slainte”, I said, raising the glass, thinking how glad I was that vodka cost so little in Poland.
One of the men, seemingly appointed as spokesman by the others, took me to one side and muttered in a thick accent, “Change dollar?”. Ah! That was it!. They wanted to change money from Polish zlotys to US dollars. To obtain anything worth having in Poland it was necessary to have US dollars. Cars and petrol, washing machines, television sets, medicines, even passports – all were available, but only for US dollars.
The unofficial exchange rate was ten times the official one – so a tourist in Poland could become extremely rich in zlotys quite easily. But, as it was impossible to take out of Poland anything worth having, there was little point in making the exchange. Also, each person, on entry to Poland, had to declare how much ‘hard currency’ – dollars, pounds etc they had on them, and what items of value, such as jewellery. On exit, they had to declare how much they were taking out. Any difference had to be accounted for.
Not wanting to get into trouble with the Polish authorities I declined the miner’s offer to exchange. Undeterred, he pulled out of his pocket a thick wad of zloty notes. “Change dollar?” he repeated pushing the notes into my face. “No, thank you”. “Nein danke”. “Non merci”. I said, hoping that one would get through. “I no money”, I tried, together with the over-used shrug and upward-turned palm gesture. Eventually he seemed to give up and he dissolved into the group.
But then another came forward and began a similar process. Again I refused his obvious offer. Again it was repeated with the showing of zlotys. Again I shrugged and said “I no money”.
He was replaced by a third contender. But this one was more forward than the other two, and as he repeatedly asked if I would “change dollar”, his hands moved up towards the front of my chest and he began pulling my jacket lapel and pointing into my inside pocket where he presumably thought my wallet was. This invasion of my personal space jolted me into an appreciation of the difficulty I was in. These people assumed I was carrying hard currency. They wanted it and were prepared to exchange zlotys for it. But if I refused the exchange, then they would probably just take it anyway. What could I do to stop them?
I decided, using brain cells soused in alcohol, that valour was the better part of discretion. I could not reason with these people since I could not make myself understood, (otherwise I would have told them the sorry truth – that I didn’t have much money on me anyway), so I’d show them I wasn’t someone to trifle with. As the third miner made to touch my jacket again I pushed his hands upwards and said loudly “Take your hands off me! How dare you” and scowled at him. He looked surprised and quickly backed off.
I congratulated myself on a sound stratagem and was just about to make for the door, and safety, when there was an almighty whack. To my astonishment, one of the other miners had come across and hit the one who had been importuning me. He went down like a sack of coal dust, his broken nose spewing blood onto the sawdust floor.
The miner who had done the hitting swaggered back to the group, but as he got there another miner hit him hard. He staggered, hit out back and a full-scale riot developed. The thick vodka glasses whistled through the air and one went through a window. There was a loud crack as one of the tables gave way. The barmaid screamed and disappeared into the room behind the bar. I stood bemused up against a wall watching a scene of mayhem. The fight seemed to go on for ever. I felt as though I was in a dream. It was so unreal that I felt only slightly alarmed and I even began to see how ridiculous the whole situation had become. And I started to laugh – not hysterically or out of fright but out of a strange delight at observing the sheer childish stupidity of the miners. “Crazy bastards!”, I shouted over the din, “If you’d only asked me I’d have given you my money”.
Then the dream took a nightmarish turn. The door of the bar burst open and in rushed a Polish policeman brandishing a pistol. The riot stopped immediately. The miners cowered back into a corner. The policeman shouted something at them. They pointed at me – still standing up against the wall. The policeman walked quickly across to me and, to my utter amazement, pointed the pistol at my forehead and barked out an indecipherable order to me. Once again I made use of the now somewhat hackneyed palm-and-shrug gesture but augmented it with wide open eyes and dropped lower jaw. He continued to harangue me and kept the gun pressed against my forehead.
I foolishly still felt no fear, and the sense of the ridiculous grew stronger. Here was I, a Britisher, being held up against a wall by a jackbooted officer wielding a pistol. I thought to myself “Please don’t let him say ‘We have ways of making you talk’”
The barmaid had re-emerged and the policeman went over and talked for a while with her. Then he shouted at the group of miners and indicated that they should leave the bar using his pistol to point at the door. There was a general shuffling but no real movement towards the door. Then the barmaid waded in and picking up the bruised and battered miners as if they were small children she carried them one by one to the door and threw them out. As each one was ejected he was followed by a Polish imprecation that must have meant “And don’t come back!”
When the last miner had been ejected the policeman put away his gun, turned to me and said something that sounded sad rather than angry and might have been an apology – or a warning. Then he too disappeared out of the door, which the barmaid quickly locked. I looked at her quizzically. I needed to get out. Why had she locked me in?
That was when real fear hit me. The barmaid pointed to the door and beckoned me to look through the curtained glass panel making up its top half. I did so and was horrified to see the group of miners gathered outside. When they saw me they gesticulated and clenched their fists at me. Two or three were brandishing knives. I looked in desperation at the barmaid. She pointed to the group beyond the door, then pointed at me and slowly drew her finger across her throat. That was unmistakeable. The miners were going to wait for me and extract a bloody revenge. For what? I couldn’t tell. Maybe they were now all in trouble with the police. Maybe they had been barred from the only drinking hole around. I couldn’t tell. I just knew that they, with their knives, were between me and the palace.
The barmaid pulled the door curtain shut. Then she indicated that I should follow her through the swing door, behind the counter and into the back room. Shaking with fear I followed her and found myself in a room that was mediaeval in character. A rough wooden floor covered in dirty straw, a table and a couple of rough chairs. A wide low fireplace, but no fire, just a pile of ashes and half-burned logs. There must have been other things in that room but I have no recollection of them, as the barmaid ushered me through it to the back door of the pub. This led out into a yard deep in mud and surrounded by a low wooden fence. There were several pigs lying in the mud.
The barmaid tapped me on the shoulder, looked meaningfully into my eyes, pointed with her index finger first to me and then in the direction of the palace. Then she brought her two pudgy hands together in a loud clap that said “Go! And don’t stop till you get there!”
I raced off up the yard, vaulted the back fence, then raced down the alley at the back of the shops till I reached the end. Across the road was the entrance to the palace. Without once looking back, and careless of traffic, I dashed across the road, through the ornate gates and down the drive. I didn’t stop till I got inside the palace. And even there I fancied I could hear the frustrated yelling of the miners.
Afterwards I heard nothing about this incident.
And now, many years later, I can find Jablonna on Google maps. The crossroads is still there, and the dingy shops. The horse-drawn carts have vanished and have been replaced by lorries and cars. The establishment in which I nearly came to a very sticky end is still there. The sign above the shop now says "CUKIERNIA" and in the window is "WYROBY WLASNE" - the bar is now a confectioner selling homemade sweets. I hope I was not responsible for the transformation!
