Polishing Conversation

I would be lying to say I spent one week in Krakow and two weeks in Warsaw, although that is probably what I told you. I started in Krakow, that much is true. It was not until I was still on a coach two hours after leaving the city behind that I realised quite how deep in the Polish countryside I was going to be.

The coach, filled with 40 Polish children and 20 English-speaking volunteers, slowed down to weave its way up the hill before turning off the road onto a cobbled courtyard. ‘Angloville’ was written in multi-coloured lettering on a banner outside. A good sign: we’d arrived in the right place, at least.

I was going to be volunteering at a summer camp for Polish children to practice their English. The focus was on speaking and this meant – yes, you guessed it – a lot of speaking.

Sometimes it was hard work keeping conversation going and time dragged its feet like a petulant child. Other times, the child took control. A petite girl called Melanie didn’t wait for me to begin the conversation but asked directly, ‘Where are you from?’

‘I’m from England,’ I replied.

‘Oh,’ she said softly and nodded, as if she wanted to embrace my answer ‘England’ in the roundness of her ‘oh’ – as if it meant something to her.

‘Have you ever been to England?’ I asked.

She nodded – again both sure and unsure, her voice wavering but with no doubt that she would say what she wanted to say: ‘I was in Bristol,’ she said, ‘and in Dayvon.’

‘You were in Devon? That’s where I’m from! Did you like it?’

She nodded fervently, her face open and joyful and excited, and told me about rose-flavoured fudge and bread with more flour than usual that you eat with jam and cream (scones) and about fish and chips.

‘I loved the sea at Sidmouth,’ she said, her eyes looking first at me and then into the air that became, for an intangible moment, the sea. ‘It is so… emotional! First it is light blue, then darker and darker until it is almost black.’

She turned back to me and now. ‘And you? Do you like Poland?’

Yes. Yes, I like Poland a lot. I like the real Poland, the one hidden behind the classroom case study of immigration into the UK. I like the Poland that these teenagers are proud to call their home. The European beauty of Krakow, the Soviet splendour of Warsaw, the history that threads between these diverse cities and through the lives of the individuals I met while I was there.

Strangely, though, it felt at times as if I wasn’t in Poland at all. I’m not used to spending time in a country where I don’t speak the language and it felt so wrong not even to be attempting Polish (apart from a few basics such as ‘hello’, ‘how are you’ and ‘the road is dry in drought’. It is similar to Russian, but not similar enough). Yet that was why I was there: to speak English.

When we weren’t talking we played games and helped the Polish participants prepare for a short presentation in English. Mealtimes centred around a guessing game – my experience of Russian cuisine gave me an advantage, although the vowels proved false friends (borsch is barsch in Poland). The volunteers stayed in a cabin in the woods that didn’t stay there at all but drifted to Canada and the USA and the UK and South Africa and Australia as we shared stories of home.

Later, time sped up. The second week was at a former palace two hours from Warsaw where there was no escape from the sticky heat or the mosquitoes – or a full, satisfied belly. The juniors bubbled with an energy that seemed to infect time itself and I found myself bouncing from the trampoline to a dance rehearsal to a scavenger hunt. The third week was in the Polish lake district a good five hours from Warsaw. In the evenings, off-duty, we swam in the lake and drank Polish vodka and roasted sausages over a campfire.

And then I was on a coach back to Warsaw (finally, after the other coaches that were meant to pick us up broke down – one after the other). It was time to head east…