22 October. I went on three dates last week. With different people. Same place, same cheese, same wine, same vague agenda. I was feeling low and wanted company, attention, affection. The dates were mostly hard and empty and sad. My behaviour – three dates in a week – was out of line. Out of line according to me. But I’ve felt out of line for months – debased, ashamed, feckless, perturbed – and so it’s little wonder I behaved accordingly. I’ve lost my way. (I mean, I got so drunk one night I wanted to become a politician.)59 And when you’ve lost your way, when you’ve slipped beneath dignity a notch, it is easy to stay lost, to stay slipped, to mistreat, to be fickle and unfair, to be weak. I am drinking too much and courting three women at once knowing nothing will come of it, wanting nothing to come of it. Does Anita have something to do with it? Do the nicotine and alcohol and their boring, noxious, accumulated effect have something to do with it? Is it being away from home? No. I don’t want excuses. I’m just like that sometimes. I’m capable of that. I can be basic and indecent and needful and excruciatingly selfish. It’s part of me. I know this sounds banal and boorish and self-involved, this confession of sorts, and it is all those things, but it also happens to be true, and an account of my time in Poland without it would be— would be the truth wrapped in cotton.
23 October. I am hungover. I take a tram to Starołęka then eat a miserable plate of food outside a kebab shop. Nearby children stare at me. I drink a beer then go to the convenience store and buy a hotdog and an ice cream. It’s that sort of day. When I arrive at the house, at my old school, Tony is putting what we’ll need in the back of the car. He looks at me with his customary sceptical grimace.
‘I see you’re wearing shorts. That’s good. You’ll be able to see the ticks on you.’ The what? ‘Ticks. They’re tiny but they burrow into your skin and give you brain damage.’ I look down at my legs, my shorts. ‘It’s fine,’ says Tony. ‘We have some spray. It doesn’t work very well but there you are.’ He can see I’m worried; he can sense he’s scared me. ‘What I do – right – after we’ve been picking in the forest – yes – is to check Marietta very carefully all over when we return. After supper or something. Isn’t that right, Marietta?’ Marietta answers from inside.
‘It is a nice thing to do – I check Tony, Tony checks me.’ I don’t want to think about this too much. How do you even get them off? ‘Tweezers,’ says Marietta. ‘They really are very tiny. I have to look everywhere, don’t I Tony? Anyway. Are we ready? No. Where’s the dog?’
When we get to the forest I want to be left in the car. I am not ready for four hours trudging around woodland looking for mushrooms and getting infested with brain-damaging ticks.
‘I think I’ll stay in the car.’
‘Ha!’
‘No seriously.’
‘Don’t you like mushrooms?’
‘I like milk, Marietta, but I don’t necessarily want to spend the afternoon milking a cow.’
‘Now,’ says Tony. ‘Let’s get serious. Be careful what you pick. Right? Or it will kill you. So: big stem with collar – no. Big stem no collar – maybe. Big stem no collar no spots – maybe, could be a Cossack. Big stem no collar no spots with gills – absolutely not, that’s a Fat Head and will kill you in a second. Right? Off you go then. We’ve sixteen acres to cover. See you!’
And with that Tony is off, on his own, with his crucial knowledge, to scour sixteen acres. Marietta is not much use. She’s playing with twigs and pretending to be a fairy. ‘It’s not really about the mushrooms – it’s a social exercise,’ she says, to herself, up a tree, stroking its leaves. For Tony it evidently is about the mushrooms. He’s already out of sight, hell-bent on showing us what a stellar mushroom hunter he is. I catch glimpses of him far off, between trees, beneath bushes, grabbing and prising and pulling at fungi, a fixed, earnest, maniacal grin on his face, like a mythical goblin creature thing, cackling each time he rejects a poisonous specimen – ‘He he he, you won’t get me!’
‘What’s that you’ve got?’ says Marietta.
‘A mushroom,’ I say.
‘Yes, but which one?’
‘This one.’
‘Yes, but has it got a—’
‘It’s got a collar and a coat and a backpack, Marietta, so what? I don’t care if it’s a Cossack or a Fat Head or a Black Head or a Shaggy Umbrella. I just want to fill up my punnet so we can go home.’
After a while, my hangover abates and I’m able to start enjoying myself. I grow conscientious and fastidious about what I’m doing. At first, I was flippant – I didn’t care if I got poisoned. Now I’m a pedant, purposeful, boastful. ‘Look Tony, you mad old plonker! Look at the size of this Lemon Dangler!’ A few hours later we call it a day and return to the car, where Tony carefully checks my mushrooms for anything dodgy. We must have about five bags of mushrooms between us. Despite my earlier misgivings, and despite being hampered by a hangover, I can see why mushroom picking is so popular here. It’s not only fun but it makes sense. The way the Poles are aware of the seasons and harvest the seasons is a great thing. They go out mushroom picking in October as naturally as they put up a Christmas tree in December. Strawberries appear in June, while apples, beets, asparagus and pumpkin all have their moment in the limelight. There’s an attachment to the land and its tides – its calendar, its virtues, its fruit – that is unquestionably good, something to aspire to.
I’m dropped home. Because Anna isn’t here, and Jenny and Richard won’t mind, I tip the bag of mushrooms onto the kitchen table. I look at them for a bit, then go to my room and watch Fry and Laurie for an hour, then return to the kitchen and look at them a bit more. I can’t just leave them there, like an ornament – Anna would kill me. Not one of the mushrooms looks up for consumption. I test the most suspicious on passing flatmates – ‘Jenny. Hey. How was work? Too bad. Try that. It’s a mushroom! It’s delicious. Just try it. That’s it. Good boy. All the way down. Good. How do you feel?’ – and then in the end just throw all the mushrooms in a large pot, add some butter and stock and herbs, let the whole lot bubble for an hour and then blitz it into a soup. It’s delicious. Then I invite Jenny into the kitchen.
‘Hey, Benny, how’s it— ooh, yum. Smells good.’
‘Yeah forget about that. Can you check me for ticks?’
27 October. I go to Tandem because a local Pole called Max is giving the second of a series of lectures called How to Survive in Poland. Because I could pass as a Pole, I haven’t had too much trouble surviving in Poland. Sometimes when I open my mouth it can annoy people, like that time outside the kebab shop months ago, when a bloke told me I was in Poland and should speak Polish, and I said fair enough and started speaking Polish, and we ended up talking about his cousin who lives in Scotland. And then there was the cage fighter in Wrocław, who wasn’t especially impressed with me, but these were exceptions: routinely I am treated with respect, with indifference, equally. It must be harder for others, for those more obviously from elsewhere – like Mohammed in Łódź, for example. Anyway, when I arrive, the lecture has already started. A group of twenty or so have gathered loosely around the lecturer, who is perched on a low wall in the courtyard with one of his very long legs less crossed and more flung over the other. His very long arms are also crossed, knotted even, and despite these eye-catching contortions the lecturer is able quite comfortably to manoeuvre a bottle of cider with one hand and gesticulate with the other. So pleasing is Max to behold it’s hard to pay attention to what he’s saying, which is a lot, in short. If this is the second in the series, then the first must have dealt with Poland in the Iron Age, for Max’s current musings range in time from Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps on an elephant to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1952. Max speaks more or less without pause – about gentrification (anticipated to commence in 2025), national characteristics (pugnacious, suspicious), the third partition of Poland in 1795 (not as good as the second) – for an hour and a half, at which point he uncrosses everything, mounts his sedan, and is carried off into the night by a team of Ukrainians. No, after delivering his theory of everything what Max actually does is invite questions, of which there are plenty, though they are, in point of fact, less questions and more corrections and complaints. An Indian man thinks it ridiculous to suggest the Alps could be traversed by elephant. A Polish girl says her parents and grandparents are suspicious not by nature but by training, which she considers an important distinction, while a Norwegian dentist takes exception to Max’s performance of the Swedish Deluge. As far as I could tell, the problem was that Max had offered his ideas as if they were truths, which got people’s backs up. ‘If the truth be told’ was just about his favourite construction, used to preface most of his instructions. ‘If the truth be told, the best way to deal with Poles who want something from you is to run away.’ ‘If the truth be told, Polish women undress on the nineteenth date, men on the third.’ ‘If the truth be told, there is no more nationalism or racism here than anywhere else.’ For all his peccadilloes, Max is clearly a sweet and bright guy, so I throw him a gentle question about the Polish habit of pickling then buy him another bottle of cider.
4 November. During a trip to England for a family occasion, I go to Harlow, Essex, because a Polish man was killed there.60 I remember learning of the news back in August. ITV said that a man in Harlow had been murdered for being Polish, and that the killing was evidence of a post-Brexit backlash against immigrants. Any evidence? The deceased’s cousin says so. I remember thumping my desk. I couldn’t believe how flimsy and irresponsible the reporting was. ITV – and they were not alone – had readily and baselessly cast Britons as vengeful nationalists ready to kill. The whole thing was confusing. Conventionally, if regrettably, it is the outsider that’s scapegoated. On this occasion, it was the native, the local, the insider. ITV framed the tragedy as ‘British racist kills innocent immigrant’, and yet when the bulletin went out there was nothing by way of evidence to confirm the reported motive, but what the heck, said ITV, said the British media, let’s run the story, let’s push the narrative, let’s whip up a fuss, let’s accuse Britain of racism, no matter if it puts Poles on edge, no matter if it puts dangerous ideas into impressionable minds, no matter if it’s just a hunch. Cause and effect; causality; consequences. These things are real. Yeah, says a teenager in Yeovil, having seen the news, let’s rough up the Poles, let’s force the point, let’s make sure they get the message. Alright, says a Pole in Wrocław, if that’s what’s going on, let’s do something about it, let’s rough up the Brits, let them know that Poles don’t put up with that sort of thing, that Poles fight back. I remember thumping the desk for a second time and upending my mug. So. Yeah. I wanted to go to Harlow.
I enter a betting shop, speak with the duty manager, hoping to get a sense of the area. I tell Jeanette I’m looking to buy in the area, ask whether she recommends the town. ‘Yeah. I suppose. There’s a Primark – that’s nice. And there’s a Wetherspoon if you’re looking to eat something. It’s not Gordon Ramsay though, not round here.’ The betting shop is busy. A rum cast of locals back horses in virtual races. It’s a cosmopolitan crowd but the mood is singular: it is sorry. I ask Jeanette if Harlow has changed for the better in her lifetime. ‘Nah. But that’s not the people’s fault. There’s intolerance and stuff but no more than anywhere else. All that was spun by the media, all that stuff about the Polish man. Look at this place – it’s the United Nations but there’s never an issue. People get upset when they lose, not upset with each other. Don’t you think?’
Most of the shops are vacant, but Kebab Land is busy enough. I annoy the owner by going in and asking for a restaurant. ‘We don’t have those,’ he says, ‘try the greasy spoon across the street.’ Jagoda serves me pie and chips with peas and gravy. The chef pays me a visit. He likes to call at the tables. He’s partly Turkish but speaks like a proper Essex boy.
‘I gave you a few extra chips,’ he smiles. ‘It doesn’t cost much to be kind.’ I tell the chef what I told Jeanette – that I’m looking to buy in the area. He turns into an estate agent. ‘I live in Brocklesmead. It’s murder central. Bloke got stabbed seven times there walking to work.’ I want to suggest that if I got stabbed once walking to work, I’d consider a different route. ‘Church Langley’s not as posh as it was. And Old Harlow’s alright, though you’ll be lucky to get a garage.’ We get onto the killing. ‘Manslaughter,’ says the chef. ‘It was manslaughter. It was in the paper last week. Trial’s just finished. Courts found that the Polish guy and his mate racially abused the young lad that did it. The lad that did it was British-Asian or something, from round ’ere, about fifteen. He punched the Pole in the back of the head, causing him to slip and bang his head on the floor. Wallop. It was that that killed him. Hence the manslaughter. You want any more chips?’ No more defensible, this version of events, the version of events, no less disappointing, but a very different version to the one reported, to the one broadcast to millions, by the BBC, by ITV, by the New York Times, to the one received as wisdom, to the one taken as truth, to the one whose influence went far and wide, certainly as far as Poland. The findings of the local court were not reported on ITV or elsewhere. As far as the mainstream media were concerned, the attention-seeking media, it hardly mattered anymore. After all, if the truth didn’t matter then, why should it matter now? Harlow has been misunderstood, says the chef. Britain has been misunderstood, he might have added.61
On the train back to London I sit opposite a boy and his mother. It is, I infer, the boy’s eighteenth birthday. He’s dressed in a suit, doesn’t stop talking. There’s a surprise waiting for him and his excitement is obvious. His love for his mother is equally obvious. The way he speaks to her suggests a small child recounting a momentous series of events at school, when so-and-so ate a crayon, and Mrs Green sneezed during the register. It moves me, involves me, as these things will when one is at a certain ebb, in a certain mood. I hope he never stops talking to his mother like that. The back page of an Evening Standard on the floor reveals that England are once more struggling abroad.
59 When I got back from the wedding I topped myself up with whisky then told anyone that would listen how I wanted to become a Member of the European Parliament and single-handedly bring the continent back together. There are several reasons why this is unlikely to happen.
60 Harlow is a ‘New Town’ that was knocked-up to deal with homelessness in London post-Second World War. Its master planner was one Fred Gibberd, who invited many of the country’s leading post-war architects to design buildings for the town, which is why it’s now a bit of an eyesore. It is also an unprecedented town: Harlow can claim to have the first concrete shopping precinct and first residential tower block, should it wish to. Historical high point: losing to Watford in the fourth round of the FA Cup in 1980. Saving grace: it’s home to a major collection of public sculptures by artists such as Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Rodin’s Eve can be found in the Water Gardens just in front of the Five Guys burger restaurant. Like Max the lecturer, Eve is pulling a rum pose: she is recoiling, shielding herself, as if anticipating a pull shot at short-leg.
61 I checked up on the story, lest the chef had the wrong end of the stick. He didn’t. In the Spectator, Ross Clark points out that Mr Jozwik’s death was not the only reported post-Brexit ‘hate crime’ which turned out to be nothing of the sort. When a Spanish restaurant in Lewisham had its window broken, it was hastily reported as a result of Brexit-induced hate, but later treated by police as a conventional burglary. ‘Then there was the abusive graffiti which appeared on a Polish cultural centre in Hammersmith. This produced understandable horror and a local MP, Greg Hands, underlined that Poles are welcome. Only later did it emerge that the graffiti read “Fuck you OMP” — OMP being a Polish centre-right think-tank which had backed Brexit.’ Britain – you’re not as heinous as you’ve been led to believe.