There's an Egg in My Soup (5 page)

Another area of the boarding building I learned to give a wide berth to was the main laundry room. This was located down in the basements. To get to it you had to descend a dark and very steep set of stairs, dropping so precipitously that you really had to sidle down tentatively sideways, like a crab. There in the steamy depths was where all the laundry for the boarding school was done, everything from sheets and blankets to the cooks' aprons, clothing, rugs, the lot. The job was left to one old woman, who toiled daily at massive machines that hissed and steamed and together created a room temperature of about thirty degrees Celsius. It reminded me of ghastly scenes in movies
about Russian submarines. I didn't envy the poor woman, but neither was I quite sure what to make of her. My doubts were more from ignorance than anything else.

As a guest I was invited to have my clothes and sheets washed there once a week. So every Friday morning, with some trepidation, I'd descend those steps to face the mood swings of this woman, who either smiled graciously or tutted and swore and muttered under her breath as she inspected my clothing. This went on for a couple of weeks, until I decided that it just wasn't worth it. It was much later that I realised the poor woman was only being paid a pittance each month, and a simple tip of a couple of quid from me – even as a token of appreciation – would have meant the world. It honestly never occurred to me. I thought that my clothes were just part of her job but, as it turned out, I was an extra workload for her – one that, I'm sure, she could very easily have done without.

Since laundries didn't exist in the town, the substitute for the steamy basement was my bath. I filled it with hot water and detergent every Friday, dumped the dirty clothes in and stirred for twenty minutes with the handle of the sweeping brush. I'd leave them there until Saturday morning, rinse them with cold water, then take the lot out and hang them over the bath to dry. When strange rashes began to appear on my skin I realised that the rinsing process wasn't really working. So I
asked the guys on the corridor how they washed their clothes.

They led me into the washroom, where a contraption like a metal bin stood near a drain. The top of this machine was open and, near the bottom, a short hose with a hook on the end of it jutted out like a small elephant's trunk. One of the guys grabbed the hose and, with the aid of the hook, fixed it to the top of the machine. Then he picked up a bucket and filled it with water, pouring the contents in at the open top. This was done several times, until the machine was almost full. Then he plugged it in. Considering the plug had been languishing on the soaking wet floor the whole time, I was quite happy to let him plug it in instead of me.

Suddenly the machine jumped to life, gyrating on the floor until a little whirlpool appeared in the water at the top. You simply threw in your powder and clothes, and that was that. It was a fairly primitive gadget, but more primitive still was the method of emptying the machine once the clothes were washed. There was no timer. You stuck your head in the door every now and again and checked the water. When it was dirty, you unplugged the machine, unhooked the hose and stood well back, unleashing a deluge of water out onto the floor. To rinse the clothes you repeated the above without adding detergent. After a few weeks of this frightening caper, I went back to the bath. You needed waders for the duration of the operation and anyway, I was sure that
plug had my name on it.

There was, however, a sense of adventure attached to everyday chores that I began to enjoy. Everything had to be worked for. Convenience was a rarity. If you wanted to, you could fill your day with enough tasks that even thinking about it all would be a job in itself. At the same time, I knew that it would eventually become pure tedium and that then the thrill of being somewhere new might easily wear off. That thinking up new plans to teach the kids, who I loved, would become just another job. That dodging the kitchens and searching the shops for food would become a nightmare. That the view from the window would eventually become dull, and that I'd even get sick and tired of myself.

The older of the English teachers has a bad habit of staring at me when I come into the staff room in the mornings. She makes me say, ‘Dzien dobry,' (good morning) several times over, much to the amusement of the staff. Also, like the woman in the kitchens, she pokes at my face regularly, indicating that I'm getting thin. She is clearly possessed of that mothering instinct that is particularly frustrating when you're trying to be independent. She tells me repeatedly about her son, who has since left town and who looks just like me. She is also obsessed with English grammar. Between lessons she nabs me in the staff room with several passages scribbled on bits of paper.

‘Tom, I have some questions for you,' she says, tugging on my sleeves. ‘Which is better and why? “Have you ever read
Wuthering Heights?
” Or, “Did you read
Wuthering Heights?
” How about, “I was in France three times,” or, “I have been to France three times?”'

This is the nightmare I had envisioned, the questions that would freeze the bowels. As her stare becomes more intense, I nod with an air of professionalism, telling her I am late for a lesson and I will explain in
detail later. Giving the kids a fifteen-minute assignment in class, I sift through the grammar handbook to find her answers. I finally avoided the staff room as much as possible, particularly when I knew this English teacher would be there. She was beginning to stray away from questions of grammar and onto more general ones about my educational background. I was terrified that one day I'd be exposed as a fraud.

I simply couldn't look bad in the staff room. There were rumours going around that I was an ‘expert' and so I was somehow put on a pedestal. The fact that I only had a BA degree and had legged it over there with a half-written Master's thesis was a constant burden that I often felt compelled to confess. It was probably a good thing in the end, since it forced me to complete that thesis. It filled those dark, lonely hours when winter came tapping on the window and the mind needed any kind of food it could get its hands on.

To become a teacher in Poland you have to have a Master's degree in your chosen subject. On top of that, teachers have to spend several years at the bottom of the salary ladder, until they've earned their stripes. So, to instil a further sense of guilt, I entered the school passing myself off as a fully qualified and experienced teacher, with a Master's degree and in receipt of a full salary.

The salary was actually paltry, about one hundred pounds a month. Pay day, though, despite the humble
pay packet, was still a day of high spirits for us all. The last Friday of every month, all the teachers would file down to the bursar's office and be handed a huge wad of money, about five million zloty. I was paid about two hundred pounds a month extra by APSO, so the school cash, which we termed ‘Monopoly money', would all have finished up in the bar tills of Warsaw by that Sunday. But when I thought about it, there were teachers there with families, who had to feed kids and pay bills out of that measly wage. Poland was cheap, sure, but it would still have been a great struggle to stretch that money out.

The English teacher was, however, an exceptionally kind woman and anxious to see that I settled in, both around the town and in the school. In the beginning, I don't know what I would have done without her, as I was, quite frankly, lost. This was a town that had no means of coping with a foreigner. The general response when trying to purchase something in a shop, for example, was either benign confusion or an abrupt grunt, unless you had something at least written in Polish to indicate what you wanted. If truth be told, for every question this woman had for me, I had about five in return. And by the time a couple of weeks were out, I had a list of things that I badly needed but had no idea where to find. Books for school, painkillers, a few new shirts, a slice for the frying pan, a toilet brush, a welcome mat for myself at the front door – those small
items that would make life a little bit easier. I approached her with this list and she immediately arranged a day to bring me around parts of the town that I hadn't yet discovered, beginning with the local market.

The market in the town was clearly the place to go. A great big bustling funfair, you could hear it long before it came into view. Here you could get everything you wanted, provided fashion wasn't on your list of priorities and, when it came to the derivation of foodstuffs, curiosity wasn't in your nature. Shirts and trousers that would have struck smiles of nostalgia on the faces of the Bay City Rollers were sold from the backs of trucks and carts. Giant, muddy vegetables in cloth sacks were heaped into huge weighing scales. In what seemed nothing more than primitive sheds, lumps of meat were being severed and split by an intimidating array of weaponry in the capable hands of the Polish butchers.

It was a lively, colourful place, but we had picked a bad day to go. Being muggy and wet, the ground beneath was a sea of mud. Occasionally a horse would invigorate the cold air with a rasping fart that mingled with the smells of feet, rotten vegetables, wet muck and alcohol. Eventually, after a couple of rounds of ogling, we began to barter with a man selling shirts and slacks from a stall. I bought a pair of black trousers and two shirts with wing-like collars and a sort of flecky pattern,
just so we could leave the bedlam behind us. I can't remember how much I paid for them, but I do remember that I never wore them. We managed to pick up a few of the other items on my list, however, so it was a reasonably fruitful forage overall.

After the market, we moved on to a couple of small stores where I got hold of a few more bits and pieces, stores that gave no indication that they were stores at all and could only be known through local knowledge. Tiny stores here specialised in the oddest things – shoelaces, batteries, wrapping paper – and how the people made a living from such wares was anyone's guess. What would happen to them when the chain stores and supermarkets moved in – and they would – was a more depressing prospect still, even if it would prove to be more expedient.

But from all the stores we visited that day I found only one that had foolscap paper. I needed mounds of it, because I had made the decision to complete my half-written thesis and, with no PC, would have to do it by hand. It made me feel like I had travelled back in time. By the end of that first year, I had on several occasions bought out all the foolscap stock in that one shop.

We also visited a couple of small bookstores, where I got hold of a dictionary, a chemist's for some drugs, and the church, of course, for a quick prayer. That afternoon I went to the woman's home to meet her mother, who
was still alive but barely visible in a dark corner of the house. Bearing in mind that the teacher herself had retired, and was only doing a few hours' teaching a week to keep her occupied, I was baffled as to the age of her mother. I even wondered, considering the lack of movement from the dark corner that day, whether she really was alive at all and had visions of myself being cracked over the back of the head with a spade during lunch.

Giving me a tour of the rest of the house, my colleague told me to visit as often as I liked, adding that her home was my home and that I was always welcome. This offer, as I was to discover much later with other families, was not made merely through courtesy, but was perfectly genuine.

After lunch, she meandered inevitably onto the subject of my weight loss, before escorting me rather worryingly to the army barracks. Standing in the doorway of a building that seemed like a large banquet hall, she informed me that you could get breakfast, dinner and tea there for next to nothing. I couldn't for the life of me comprehend going to an army barracks for dinner, and it took me more than two years to pluck up the courage to try. But when I did I was astounded. For the equivalent of roughly two euro, you could get a full meal in a clean, warm and comfortable dining area at fixed times of the day. Families would arrive on a Sunday afternoon, or there might be people like myself,
sitting alone to eat.

Usually there were two choices of menu, which included three courses – soup, a main course and a dessert. If you didn't fancy sitting in the main area you could head to the café/bar part, which I often did. The army officers used this area more frequently than the general public, and here light food, snacks and soups were available, as well as beer and vodka. There would almost always be a group of officers playing cards and sharing a bottle of vodka here, with a large jar of those slugs to chase it down. It would have been the perfect place to spend a Sunday afternoon reading a book and sipping a cold beer, only the air was so thick with the most pungent cigarette smoke, I'm surprised the officers even managed to tell the suits on the cards.

It was all part of the State service, and I soon discovered that soldiers – the common privates and raw conscripts at least – are in the same pool here as the lowest ranks of civil service or even the unemployed. It is the duty of a soldier to carry out a variety of local tasks that seem designed to make them feel worthless.

These tasks range from acting as doormen at the local hop to keeping the garden of an officer. Every year there is also the town clean-up, where students and their teachers traipse through the streets, across train tracks and into the woods with bags to collect rubbish. At various points around the town, soldiers serve pea soup from the backs of jeeps to give the cleaners
energy. I went on this escapade one year, and while the clean-up was a bit grim, the steaming bowl of pea soup and bread in the cold afternoon was a joy.

On any day of national celebration – and there are many in Poland – the army is there for support and to serve up this pea soup. The soldiers, however, are a morose bunch who look seriously underfunded and often malnourished. They form a part of the general populace of a town, ambling about the streets aimlessly like stray pigeons. Brawls and loud swearing in the middle of the night can usually be put down to a drunken soldier, and you soon learn where the phrase ‘smoke like a trooper' comes from. Ditto ‘swear' and ‘drink'.

Although the barracks eventually proved a better option than the internat for lunch, I was never able to thank this teacher for her tip. The following year she arrived on the first day to be told that she had no lessons. The poor woman was devastated. They never informed her that she was officially let go and she turned up for the opening ceremony, as she had done for God knows how many years, to find that this time her name was missing from the roster. I met her once after that and promised I'd visit her, but I never did. I never even saw her again before I left for good. It is easy to convince yourself that it was the fault of time, that you had gone too far to go back. When I'm old and grey, and forced to retire from whatever the hell I'm
doing, I'm sure I'll remember that.