Eh-ALL-ing: Finding Poland in London

Photo by Nina Vlotides

By Emma Bielecki:

Let me take you to a part of London you probably don’t know, and won’t find on any map. It has a physical infrastructure, located in West London, but mainly it exists in people’s minds, and more specifically these days in their memories. It exists in my memory because it’s where I spent slivers of my childhood, taken there by my father, who inhabited it psychologically if not physically, and who would now and then announce on a Saturday morning: ‘Let’s go to Eh-ALL-ing.’

Going to Eh-ALL-ing — or Ealing, as people without Polish accents persisted in pronouncing it — most often meant going in search of foodstuffs then unknown to English supermarkets, with strange, sonorant names: kabanos, myśliwska, krakowska, chleb. Kabanos: a long, thin, leathery sausage hung in horse-shoe shapes behind the counter of the Polish delicatessen; myśliwska: a short, thick, leathery sausage displayed in bunches like bananas; krakowska: a fat cylinder of pork, paler pink on the inside than the others and with bigger white splodges, which comes in a synthetic casing you need to remove.

I remember how my dad would peel the sausage as he ate it, leaning against the kitchen counter with the sausage in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. I would try to imitate the gesture, the confident twist of the wrist, but I always made a mess of it, hacking off big bits of meat along with the casing. There was, though, something thrilling about the process. When I was a child, meals were often a formal and fussy affair: one ate sitting down, at the table, never standing up and never, never, in the street; one minded one’s manners, which meant worrying neurotically about one’s elbows and the correct way to hold the utensils. How liberating to be able to stand at the counter, to peel the casing from a sausage in a gesture that could never be described as either well-mannered or ill mannered, but was simply, perfectly, adequate to the task in hand. To see my father peeling smoked sausage was to see a man completely at ease in the world.  

Most often we ate the sausage withchleb and Kremska. A dictionary will tell you that chleb is bread. The dictionary is wrong — or was wrong in the 1980s, when bread was white and spongy when untoasted, but hardly ever untoasted or unbuttered; chleb was darker and harder, with a little aniseed kick from the carraway seeds. Kremska is a Polish mustard, and was a source of endless frustration and disappointment for my father. No jar of Kremska bought in London ever tasted right, which is to say no jar of Kremska ever tasted like it had back home. 

My father chalked this up to geographical displacement: in Poland, surely, Kremska still tasted like Kremska? He was wrong, of course, because it wasn’t physical distance that had wrought this change, but time. Kremska in Poland no longer tasted like Kremska either, that is to say no longer tasted like it had when my father was a boy.

Nowadays, all these products are widely available. You can get Polish sausage and Polish bread and Polish mustard in pretty much any supermarket in England. Along with Polish foodstuffs, the Polish language has become ubiquitous. I’m writing this in a café and I can hear Polish in stereo — a conversation between two young men in one corner, between two young women in another.  I think of pierogi, those little dumplings stuffed with all sorts of things. I like mine z kapustą i grzybami, with cabbage and mushrooms. When I hear Polish in the background, wherever I am, on the bus or the tube or in a supermarket queue, phantom pierogi always haunts my palate, the bassline rumble of affricate consonants like the deep umami taste of mushroom, the nasal vowels like the sharp acid burst of sauerkraut.

Sometimes, when we went to Eh-ALL-ing it was not to buy food but to visit friends of my father. In general, this was not an experience I enjoyed. My father’s friends seemed much older than him (they weren’t, but in his 60s he had married a much younger woman and had kids for the first time, creating an illusion of relative youthfulness) and much more old-fashioned. They lived in tudorette semis furnished with tasselled lamps and Roman Catholic wall art, smelling of herring and talc. 

As a small child I slightly dreaded venturing into such houses; as an adolescent, I sneered at their decor. It was only as an adult, at funerals, that I learnt about what had brought their inhabitants to Ealing in the first place. About Zula Stankiewicz, who spent her childhood in Dachau; about Andrzej Plichta, who had five older brothers, all killed at Katyń; about Halina Kwiatkowska, who lived for six years in the sewers under Warsaw; about Olga Rymaszewska, who joined the resistance at 17, was captured and tortured and sentenced to death, but who survived because, for some unknown reason — maybe she reminded him of his sweetheart back home? maybe it was his mother’s birthday? — the German officer supposed to shoot her let her escape. Now I regret every time I wriggled away from a bosomy hug, or rolled an eye at a tasselled lamp, or imitated an accent for a cheap laugh. Now I marvel at the how the heroic made a home in the most humdrum of English suburbs.

What I learnt from my father and his friends is that nothing is fixed: you can always rebuild a life, even on a heap of rubble and ash. The reverse is also true though — a life can collapse into a heap of rubble with very little warning, can go up in flames in the blink of an eye. The town my father was born in was in the east of Poland. When the Soviets invaded in 1939, he was sent with his mother and grandmother to a labour camp in Siberia. Now the town he is from is in Ukraine, and women and children are being deported once more. 

***

Emma Bielecki lives and works in London, where she teaches and researches nineteenth-century French literature. In addition to authoring articles on Balzac, Belle Époque detective serials, and radioactivity in the popular novel, she sporadically enjoys writing about other things that interest her, such as Bob Dylan, pet cemeteries and the history of Poles in London.

Sedgeland (rara avis in terris)

By Rebecca Dempsey: 

From a lookout above the marsh I had my Black Swan event. 
I was a child where life felt unchanging. 
It wasn’t the case. The wetland was seasonal, precarious, great birds pushed through phalaris. 
Amongst cutting grass and bulrushes, paired swans nested and fed. 
Random as dragonflies darting over the broken surface of brackish water, I was the outlier. 
Swamped in a sea of dead bracken, growth spirals stalled, perched upon a stranded dune and, undone by unknowing the why of me where everything had its place. 

Undirected, seated where an ancient ocean once lapped before withdrawing, nothing indicated my arrival to run grey grains of sand through my fingers, watching swamp harriers quartering the sky. 
White ibis, shelducks, the brolgas belonged, like the swans. 
Never inevitable, yet I was there with those fly ins, those long distance, faithful returnees from northern climes to the southern hemisphere.
However, I was wrong to believe we were similar: I was the rare bird. 
I was the one passing through. 

***

Rebecca Dempsey is a writer. She was born in Adelaide and grew up in rural South Australia. She lives in Melbourne, Victoria. Her poems, short stories and reviews have been published around the world in a variety of outlets. She can be found at WritingBec.com.

The Loch Insh Osprey

Photo: Duncan MacDonald

By Merryn Glover:

The ospreys have gone. I went away for a week and when I got back, the strath had slipped into autumn and the eyrie above Loch Insh was empty. On the same day, my two sons returned to university. Their courses will be online, but after five months of being back under parental wings they are ready to stretch their own again. They came back to our Highland home at the start of lockdown and two weeks later, the osprey arrived, flouting all restrictions in their 6,700 kilometre journey from west Africa.

The male came first and began to ready the nest, a large twiggy crater the size of a truck tyre. Balanced precariously at the top of a tree on a small island, it has commanding views of the Cairngorms to the south-east, the Monadhliaths to the north-west and the River Spey between. Their arrival always speaks to me of Mark, a wildlife guide friend who first told me their story on these shores five years ago; he was diagnosed the following April with a brain tumour and died in April two years later, leaving a wife and three sons. As he was lowered into the earth of Insh churchyard, the newly returned osprey soared above.

Most osprey pair for life, only coming together during the breeding season when they return to the same place. The female arrives a week or so after her mate and my diary note from April 16th says: ‘Both perched on the nest, looking at each other from time to time and touching beaks.’ As the female adds to the eyrie, the male woos her by delivering trout. One of the few birds of prey to live almost entirely on fish, osprey can see their underwater catch from 40 metres up and have reversible talons that help them grip. Working from home this year, I paid closer attention to my near neighbours. I saw the male perform his sky dance, crying out as he rose in sweeping circles above the nest with a long reed in his talons. The female sat on the spear tip of a dead tree nearby, motionless and haughty as Horus.

By the beginning of May, she had settled down in the nest, presumably won over and incubating eggs, and I watched and waited through the lengthening days and the greening of the strath. At last, in early June, tiny heads appeared above the twigs – one, two… three! A beautiful, bumper brood and the most an osprey is likely to hatch. I caught glimpses of the mother feeding them and the gradual rise of their small, fluttering bodies.

One evening, a large heron flew up the river towards the nest and the male osprey bore down on it with vicious shrieking and flapping of wings. To my astonishment, the heron did not beat a hasty retreat but kept circling, evading the ever-more strident attack. Finally after several minutes of this aerial dogfight, the heron – twice the size of its assailant - made its stately way off down the loch.

Summer swelled and the loch thickened with green rushes and the growing company of birds: curlews, oyster-catchers, martins, geese, ducks and swans, many trailing flotillas of young in their wake. Both my boys were summer babies and these long, light days remind me of that ecstatic, exhausted time. By mid-July the osprey chicks were stalking the rim of the eyrie, stretching their wings and lifting for moments into the air while the parents sat in nearby trees calling. To urge their young to fledge, osprey gradually reduce the fish they deliver, literally starving them off the nest. We have not resorted to such ploys but, like all parents, we know the push and pull of need and independence.

Who can know if they have witnessed the first flight of a bird? I cannot, but I thrilled to see them gradually take to the skies, their voices ringing in the amphitheatre of this hill-bordered loch. Who can hold onto life? It was at this time that our beloved friends, Mark’s family, moved away.

All five osprey were in the nest when I looked in late August, but within two weeks, they were gone. The mother goes first, travelling up to 400 kilometres a day till she is back in Senegal. The father follows and then the young, flying all the way down over the Sahara. They travel alone. No one has fathomed how they know the route or the destination or how, three years later, they know the way back. It is mystery and miracle. All I know is that in the great, thick hush of these five months, when my own dear ones came and left, the osprey’s journey has passed right through my heart.

***

Merryn Glover’s stories and plays have been broadcast on Radio Scotland and Radio 4, her first novel, A House Called Askival, was published in 2014 and a second, set in the Highlands, will be published in 2021. She was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and is currently writing a non-fiction book in response to Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Her features have appeared in The National, BBC Countryfile Magazine, Northwords Now, The Guardian Weekly and The Guardian.

Paper Ghosts

By Anna Evans:

By the water’s edge, the monument to the immigrant, looking back at the city, looking out across the wide and muddy river. Situated at the point of arrival, the old port of New Orleans, marking the point of embarkation, the journey’s end and the start of crossings and travels, hopes and dreams. A two-sided statue, a decorated figure, like those carved on a ship’s prow looks out to the water; an immigrant family look towards the city. The crescent city lies at a bend in the Mississippi River. A city haunted by its migrants, by their comings and goings, the history of these streets and those who walked them.

I remember our arrival. Crossing the Lake Pontchartrain causeway and losing sight of land, as if the train travels an endless bridge to nowhere. New Orleans is a surprise to me, a last-minute change to our plans, an unexpected part of our trip. And like the surrounding Louisiana swampland, it is like a new language, one I had never learned but feel I should know already. 

We have travelled 1300 miles across the land, thirty hours, half in sleep and half in daydream, and it is as if our souls lag behind. From our arrival at sunset, darkness quickly descends to shroud the streets in mystery. We are hushed and excited on arrival, caught in a tangle of new places and new impressions that makes this place feel curiously flat and enclosed, and we wonder what it will look like when daylight comes.

In the morning the sun is caught behind deep overcast skies, waiting to break through. We spend hours mesmerized in the pattern of the streets and the architecture of the old French Quarter. The city of music leads a dance in circles. The vibrant buildings with their elegant shutters, iron porticoes and ornamented balconies, the graceful sweep of the trees above. There are wooden verandahs and carved iron railings, with intricate patterns that take the solidity of iron and give it a careful fragility. 

In the square a group of musicians assemble, playing of impossible dreams, laying their heads beneath the stars of a thousand nights in a hundred different places, drawn to New Orleans from far and wide. Sleeping under the stars and dreaming of boxcars, of all the miles that went before. Something about this place grips and calls them back, the struggle and the sadness. City of roamers, the restless, or those who never had a home. The place to settle if you don’t wish to settle. 

Out on the street the rain comes again as we walk, at a distance from each other so that you are crossing the road while I am standing still staring fitfully, as if the answer could lie in these elegant streets of the French quarter. The rain descends, gallops down from the sky, and we watch from a corner of the street, sheltered by balconies and trees. The skies have darkened, and the rain still comes. For a moment we walk through and it soaks our clothes, water grows in puddles across the streets. The balconies and verandahs make a passageway through and we continue our walk entranced by the rain. Reflected in the pavements, in pools and rippled water forming, are the shadows of the pillars that are everywhere. A place of shadows, the rain brings out the shadows.

The rain in New Orleans. Hurricane season. Rainbow flags and cocktails, and dancing, sprawling tourists, visitors to New Orleans’ spirit of intoxication. Some with a hand on their money, others unguarded, out on the lookout for reckless times. And those elongated souls who look as if they had spent a day too many street wheeling, freewheeling, they forgot where they came from and where they were going.

The French Quarter is like a film set framed in black and white with the tension of a thriller. The restless fans and fire escapes, in all those old detective movies where the private investigator sits late at night in his office, nursing a whisky tumbler. 

We widen and lengthen our walks to the outlying districts, long streets of bright-coloured wooden houses, each one different from the next. It is slow progress as we stop to look at every house, on the way to Frenchmen Street, where the sun has broken through cloud, and shines powerfully through the heat and skies cast over. 

Next to the painted elegance of the dark turquoise green and white house, dark red doors, with its balcony under the sweeping shade of the tree; is a tiny pink house, with a small pointed roof and large windows and doors, green and purple shutters, its steps and iron railings besieged by trailing plants, ivy-covered like something from a story. 

There are pillars with overhanging roofs and lanterns, steps out onto the street. We walk the pavements through trees and plants, depth and shade, and flowers pink and red. Looking down the tree lined street, pillars next to the trees, and shutters purple and green, blue and white, yellow in the streets beyond the French quarter, in Marigny and Bywater. A play of light and shade, shade and light. 

The streets make a poem to the transient. Trees in flower everywhere and hanging baskets with ferns or lanterns decorate the houses, each one taking on new colours and depth, a beautiful façade of permanence claimed back at night by shadow, the deep shadow of darkness that covers the streets when night falls, changing them back. 

Here the pavement is brick and uneven, the roots of the tree below the surface, deep cracks in the road. I always knew the earth was moving but here is the proof spread large. Living on borrowed time, borrowed land, propelled by its legends – the new and the ancient exist side by side - as if this city reveals its faults and its truths like the deep cracks in the road. Life is uncertainty, the roving spirit says it best. The feeling that life is closer here, that it is right at hand, to be lived; the tenuous and unsettled feeling, the one that doesn’t put down roots, or none too deep. For the roots of trees lie just below the surface and erode the stone above as they spread outwards, upwards; as if they might uproot themselves and walk away.

I want to piece it together, to work out if I belong here. So, the saying goes, the legend tells, the city will let you know if you were meant to stay, meant to leave. And I want to be the one the city welcomes, but I know also that there is something here that unsettles, that displaces me deep down.

Under the bridges, the tent cities remain. New Orleans evokes this sense of wandering – for those who choose it, those who don’t. In the faces of those who pace back and forth, day and night, up and down, for a dime, a dollar, a nickel, in the patient, hunted faces of those who lost everything, those who never had it, those who go looking.  

They make paper monuments now to honour all those who were forgotten, unrecorded. You can find them at street corners, down by the water, if you’re looking. From where we cross by boat, to Algiers, on a deserted ferry, to deserted streets between the heavy showers of rain. Heat-steeped, sleepy Algiers, where we trail around, looking for something we never find. 

New Orleans wears its history in layers, like the paper ghosts standing on corners. The city haunted by the spectres of all those who passed through. I float through the map, tracing the streets as I go. I can only write the poem of a stranger to this city, another visitor entering its spell, city of illusion, of powerful emotion. New Orleans you keep on returning to me, keep calling me back. I walk along your streets in shadow. 

I walk along your streets in shadow, watching the changing light, remembering how darkness falls like a cloak, changing the streets, calling them back. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

From Travail to Travel

By Ian C Smith:

On Saturday mornings in post-war London he thrills to the idea of escape.  For sixpence he sees a hero, dressed more like a movie star than a cowboy, elude a dull-witted gang, sidling from a spot tighter than his belt and boots, while the juvenile audience, escaped from grey boredom, jeers hoarsely.

Freedom: scheming prisoner motivation, the door left unlocked, exit road snaking away to the hills, or shaking off hounds by crossing streams, or the fairground life, always moving on, appeals, his hourglass almost done, parents edging closer to learning of his shoplifting, their emigration to Australia offering him an escape tunnel.

Vanished people intrigue: a car stranded under a tree, keys no longer swaying, silence, the stars, restless wind, the only witnesses; fresh starts, no difficult goodbyes, off to find Utopias gloved in dreams.  Isolated Australians’ penchant for flying overseas triggers his idealised self as a secretive drifter who makes unscheduled stops.

Travelling light to New Zealand where the South Pacific, Tahiti, await, island hopping the Dateline, splendour beckoning beyond dock lights, then hitch-hiked highways, youth hostels somewhere in America, this yearning for other lives, his homing instinct, exempts him from worn out love, income addiction, the fetid weight of a wasted life.     

About the author:
Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Antipodes, Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry Journal,  Critical Survey,  Prole,  The Stony Thursday Book, & Two-Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

Printed Matters: NANSEN Magazine

As small independent publishers of a small independent journal, we are always interested in the work of like-minded folk, especially if the subject matter relates to our own investigations of people and place. NANSEN Magazine is a new project from an old friend of ours and tells the story of migrants of all kinds. Their first issue was published yesterday, and we caught up with editor and publisher Vanessa Ellingham to find out more.

Hi Vanessa! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and what inspired this new magazine?

I’m a journalist and editor, originally from Wellington, New Zealand, now living in Berlin. I’ve been here for four years, but before moving to Berlin I lived in Copenhagen for a year with my partner, who’s Danish.

My year in Copenhagen didn’t go very well. I was struggling to settle in, find work, make friends and feeling pretty lonely. One of the things I did was go and volunteer at a refugee camp, where I met other newcomers in a very different situation to myself - for one thing, if I was so fed up I could just move home again, which they absolutely could not. It got me thinking about all the things we had in common as newcomers to Denmark and the solidarity to be found between different kinds of people living far from home but all giving it their best shot.

What is it about the topic of migrants and migration that interested you?

Migration has always been part of human life on earth and it certainly isn’t going to stop. I think the events of 2015 only highlighted the need for us to better understand why people leave home in search of a - hopefully - better life.

I first had the idea for a magazine about migrants a couple of years before the “refugee crisis”, when I was standing in IKEA in Berlin, having just shopped for new furniture in a new country for the second time in a year.

With NANSEN Magazine we want to introduce our readers to all kinds of people on the move and explore the personal experiences of migration that other migrants can relate to and non-migrants probably will, too.

Because migrants aren’t just refugees. We’re also doctors and artists and lovers and diplomats. Some migrants are better known for being movie stars than for their immigration status. But they likely have many shared experiences with other people who’ve upped and left home.

That’s why we focus on one migrant per issue, to go deep into their experiences so that, after reading the magazine, you feel like you’ve really gotten to know that person.

What can we find in issue #1?

Issue 01 centres on Aydin Akin, someone many Berliners will know, although most likely not by name. Aydin is a 78-year-old Turkish-German man who cycles across the city each day, demonstrating for migrant rights.

It’s an endurance protest - his trip takes three hours each way - and he’s been doing it for 12 years. But if you spot Aydin on his bike, decked out with his handwritten protest posters, his two megaphones blasting music and his protest chant, and the annoying whistle he bleats on as he rides, it can be hard to see him as anything other than totally crazy.

Turns out Aydin has some great ideas for how to better welcome newcomers to Berlin and Germany. He’s spent almost 50 years now living in Germany and advocating for equal rights for all of Germany’s migrants. He believes that giving newcomers equal footing from the get-go is the best way to prevent the anger, hate and violence that occurs when people are excluded from the societies they live in. I think Aydin’s someone worth listening to, whether you live in Berlin, Germany or somewhere else.

So Issue 01 is about Aydin and his life in Berlin. But because he’s so focused on others, and the broader migrant community, this issue spins out to explore what it’s like to be a Turk living in Berlin today. We spend a day waiting in line at the Ausländerbehörde, we chart the history of Turkish guest workers in Germany - another large group of migrants who arrived en masse by train, decades before the 2015 “refugee crisis” - we talk about Willkommenskultur and we meet the next generation of Turkish-German Berliners.

What is next for Nansen?

We plan to make future issues of NANSEN about migrants of all kinds living all over the world.

And we promise they won’t all be people working in the area of migration, Aydin just seemed like a great subject to start with. We like to be bold and a little playful - you can expect us to go beyond the melancholy of traditional migration reporting. Because there’s plenty of joy in being a newcomer, too.

But making future issues really depends on how Issue 01 sells. So we’d love to sell you a copy of our mag!

Can you also tell us a little bit about the Give Something Back to Berlin project?

At GSBTB I work in communications. I edit and manage the online magazine, which is by and about Berlin's newcomers.

GSBTB started as one answer to the gentrification taking place in Berlin neighbourhoods like Neukölln, where hip young newcomers were moving in and pushing up the cost of living, to the frustration of the locals, both Germans and other, more established migrants. GSBTB offered a platform for newcomers to be matched up with volunteer opportunities, enabling them to give back to their new home city.

We started with a Facebook post in 2012. Today GSBTB runs many of its own projects, from cooking groups to social meet-ups to art therapy, that support newcomers to get settled in Berlin. At any of our events or projects, you’ll find locals, expats, refugees and people somewhere in-between all mucking in, invested in the idea of doing something good for the city together.

NANSEN Magazine website
NANSEN Magazine on Facebook
Give Something Back To Berlin website