Against the Flow Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Fort

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  1. Leaving

  2. Bus to Kraków

  3. Raba

  4. Leszek

  5. The Jews

  6. Holy river

  7. Hungarian train

  8. A programme

  9. The fishiest river

  10. Balaton

  11. Saturday in Žilina

  12. Times change

  13. Ja!

  14. Brown coal and spotted trout

  15. Subtle fish, fool’s gold, fallen angels

  16. Town and country in Transylvania

  17. Two streams and a castle

  18. What’s in a name?

  19. Grigore’s story

  20. Delta

  21. Lost world

  22. Poles apart

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Twenty years ago, Tom Fort drove his little red car onto the ferry at Felixstowe, heading east. The old order that had held eastern Europe in its grip for half a century had gone, and no one yet knew what the new order would be. Politically, spiritually, economically, everything was changing at a speed people found hard to comprehend. What hadn’t changed were the landscapes, and the rivers that flowed out of the mountains of Poland, Slovakia and Romania, and across the plains of Bohemia and Hungary.

  Over the next two decades a new Europe was forged, so different that it’s hard to recall the old one. The European Union and NATO opened arms to the former Eastern Bloc countries. Young people flooded west in search of work and prosperity. Quite suddenly the UK was full of Poles, Polish shops, Polish businesses, even Polish pubs.

  As the human tide flowed and then ebbed, Tom Fort wondered what had happened to the places he remembered so well, and to the friends he had made all those years before. In the end he went back, starting this time on the bus from London to Krakow, and retraced his steps, wandering the rivers and streams again. With a fishing-rod and a pair of waders, of course.

  About the Author

  Tom Fort went to Eton and read English at Oxford before becoming a local newspaper reporter. He joined the BBC and worked as a journalist there for more than twenty years. He is married with five children, and is the author of Under The Weather and Downstream (published by Century) and The Grass is Greener and The Book of Eels (published by HarperCollins).

  Also by Tom Fort

  The Grass is Greener (HarperCollins)

  The Book of Eels (HarperCollins)

  Under the Weather

  Downstream

  To my brothers James, Matthew and Johnny – and my sister Elizabeth

  Chapter 1

  Leaving

  EUROLINES SERVICE 194 for Kraków swung out of the dark cavern of Victoria Coach Station at exactly 1.30 on a Monday afternoon, 9 June 2008. London was sunlit, warm, at ease: no bombs, no dark clouds in the sky, no mention of Lehman Brothers, no sign of gathering storm. Sunbeams danced across the brown Thames below Vauxhall Bridge. I looked down, trying to work out which way the tide was flowing. Upstream, Battersea Power Station squatted at the water’s edge, brooding on its fate.

  The lady ticket inspector made a lengthy announcement in Polish. I waited for the English version, in vain. I felt isolated as well as uninformed, as if I was already in a foreign place where unfamiliar customs prevailed.

  Crossing the river, I was thinking of another journey, another time.

  May 1990, a gorgeous early summer’s day, the sun sparkling on the smooth blue sea as I drove my little red Peugeot on to the ferry at Felixstowe, bound for Hamburg and points east. One great high-pressure system covered northern Europe, giving blue skies and blissful sunshine across the continent. But although we happened to have the same weather, eastern Europe was still a faraway place then, in a way difficult to recall two decades later. Huge upheavals had upset the familiar geopolitical landscape: one earthquake, one landslip, one tidal wave after another. At the same time, Czechoslovakia was still Czechoslovakia – just. We still talked about East Germany and West Germany and the Soviet Union, for a while longer anyway. The Warsaw Pact had not yet been formally dissolved.

  Over there, behind the rail from which Churchill’s Iron Curtain had hung for so long, people were waking to a new order. They blinked in wonder, torn between hope and fear. And I – what was I doing in my little red car?

  At that time I was working as a sub-editor at a BBC news desk in London. From within familiar, unshakeable Broadcasting House I watched and listened to the great events unfolding in Gdańsk, Prague and Berlin, and helped refine them into a form digestible to our Radio Four audience. Like the listeners, I was stirred by the extraordinary spectacle of Europe coming apart at the seams; like them I was ineluctably detached as well. The Polish shipyards exploded. The Berlin Wall was ripped down. The regimes in Prague and Budapest ran for cover. In the Romanian city of Timişoara a priest no one had even heard of before preached revolt, and within a month Nicolae Ceauşescu faced an impromptu firing squad.

  I watched and marvelled. We all watched and marvelled. Then we took the train home. I gave the children their breakfast, mowed the lawn, walked the dog.

  Distinguished and not-so-distinguished BBC correspondents dashed to the hotspots and, amid the wreckage of the divided continent that we had all grown used to, tried to make sense of it all. They reported what they were told, citing the sources, they analysed as best they could, they speculated as intelligently as the general confusion permitted. They discussed matters with local journalists whose primary – sometimes only – qualification was fluency in English, and with politicians, experts and supposedly informed sources selected on the same grounds. Passers-by were grabbed by eager producers, retained if they could string together a sentence in English, discarded if not.

  I used occasionally to wonder, in between bursts of word-churning for news bulletins and summaries, about the story we never heard. Away from the rage and exhilaration foaming through the streets and squares of the cities, there were people – probably quite like us, with children to give breakfast to, dogs to walk, even, conceivably, lawns to mow – looking on. Ordinary people with ordinary lives to organise. They must have been bemused, excited, fearful, uncertain. But who were they?

  I had an idea that nagged at me until it drove me into the office of my BBC manager with a request for five months’ unpaid leave. The idea was simple. The borders were now open. What if I crossed them? What if I kept away from the cities where the action was concentrated? What if I had a way to reach some of those onlookers and find out what they made of it all and how they were managing? I thought I had a way.

  They had rivers, those countries, and where there were rivers there were fish, and where there were fish there would be anglers. I was an angler, and I knew that the passion was essentially the same wherever it was found. It flows between frontiers and differences of culture and language, and creates bridges where politicians and diplomats encounter walls of brick and concrete. If I could find the fishermen and go fishing with them, I would get a different story. That was my idea.

  Rather to my surprise (I half-thought I was indispensable), my BBC manager readily agreed to let me go. At the time I was also writing a fishing column for the Financial Times, and the wise and far-sighted editor of its Weekend section, Max Wilkinson, commissioned a series of articles about my forthcoming travels and even contrived a useful contribution towards my expenses. The final piece fell into place when a rich friend, with more faith in my abilities than I had, said he would underwrite the enterprise.

  So I went. From Hamburg I drove east around Berlin into Poland,
then south-east, past a string of grim towns with impossible names such as Strzemieszyce, Zabrze and Krzeszowice, to Kraków; from Poland to Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. I went fishing with a dentist, a doctor, a vet, two factory workers, a traffic policeman turned glass engraver, a company boss, a refrigeration engineer and a painter, among others. In Romania I slept twice in beds that Ceauşescu himself had slept in, and stayed in a village where, the week before, a woman rounding up cattle had been fatally mauled by a bear.

  In most of the places I got to I was the first Englishman who’d ever asked for a fishing licence. Apart from letters collected poste restante and very occasional telephone conversations from PTT offices on abysmal lines, I was cut off from family and the familiar. I always felt very far from home. There were no laptops then, no email. No one had a mobile phone. It was a very different Europe.

  When I returned to the BBC newsroom colleagues peered up at me with short-lived interest and asked if I’d had a good holiday. I wrote a narrative of my journey which ended with my driving across the Danube from Romania to Bulgaria at half-past one on a steamy night, and looking down at the river: ‘silent, shrouded in darkness, gleaming quietly like coal, lit here and there by the lights on top of the buoys swaying in the current’. It nearly got published by a reputable publisher, but not quite; which was a great disappointment at the time because I was unsettled by urges to be a writer rather than a BBC word-churner. Much later I realised that whoever had rejected my manuscript had unwittingly done me a favour. There were good things in it, but not enough of them.

  I settled back into the old newsroom routine, still troubled by the urges. My first marriage foundered. In time I married again, left the BBC, had more children, wrote some books which were published. A new Europe took shape, which made me think of the old one and of the story I had happened upon there, still untold. I thought I should try again.

  This ancient history came back insistently as I sat in my seat on Eurolines service 194, bound for Kraków. At the same time I began to take more notice of the human geography around me.

  The seats immediately in front of me were taken by a woman and a boy, presumably her son, who was clutching a Charlie and Lola book. They were seen off at Victoria Coach Station by a man who repeatedly pulled the boy to him in a desperate, longing way, whispering urgently in his ear. The parting between mother and father – assuming that’s who they were – was perfunctory. There seemed to be a finality in the air around the three of them, which the boy either did not feel or was unable to acknowledge. The mother was young and pretty in a dark, smouldering fashion. I feared that if I tried to talk to her she would assume that I was trying to pick her up; and that even if I managed to persuade her that this wasn’t the case, everyone else on the coach would assume that it was.

  Across the aisle from the mother and son was a young woman on her own. I could see only the top of her head, but I knew she spoke English because she was having an urgent conversation on her mobile in which she said she was going back to Wrocław with no money, no clothes, nothing. Her tone was anxious bordering on distraught. I didn’t want to intrude. She might also have thought my motives were amorous, even predatory.

  Behind me was a dumpy middle-aged Polish woman, and across the aisle from her another, older Polish woman, grey and faded. They quickly struck up an acquaintance, leaning towards one another to exchange chat in low tones. What could they be talking about? Going home? Children, grandchildren, husbands? The English weather? The impenetrable mysteries of England and its customs? I had absolutely no means of knowing.

  The coach was less than a third full, and the remaining passengers – one couple, the rest single males, presumably workers returning home – were scattered about the back half of the coach. It was strange, but as the journey went on I felt more and more separated from them, more and more inhibited from getting up, turning to face them, approaching them, asking them anything. Some kind of psychic chasm had opened between us when we took our seats. I made excuses to myself. What would I say to them, anyway? That I was going to Poland to write a book about Polish people going back to Poland? How absurd would that sound?

  The truth was that I didn’t have the nerve. I had somehow forfeited or mislaid the journalist’s impudent assumption of the right to accost anyone and ask anything. Without realising it, I had turned into one of those islanders who, in Emerson’s words, ‘is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable’.

  A compelling factor in my deciding to take a car to eastern Europe in 1990 was that many people there did not have their own transport. To get to the rivers I would need to drive. Furthermore I took dollars, which in those days still possessed an almost super-natural power to unlock doors in foreign parts. With dollars I would be able to obtain the fuel that was in wretchedly short supply for those with only Polish złoty, Czech korun, Hungarian forint or Romanian lei at their disposal.

  Eighteen years later none of that applied. Everyone had a car, petrol was as freely available there as anywhere else, and their currencies were in more buoyant shape than the dollar or sterling. The obvious way to get around was by public transport, beginning with the coach. I could, of course, have taken the two-hour flight to southern Poland instead of submitting myself to 26 hours on the road (by air I could have got to New Zealand in the same time). But I was persuaded that the bus was the way to get the story.

  The story was, or appeared to be, this. In May 2004 eight countries in eastern Europe – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – had joined the European Union. Over the next three years somewhere between half a million and one and a half million citizens of the new member states made their way to Britain to live and work, roughly two-thirds of them from Poland. Curiously, no one took the trouble to measure the scale of the influx, which remains a matter of guesswork. The attitude of the British authorities appeared to be that the border was open so what was the point of checking who came in and out so long as they were legal and white (and therefore non-Islamic).

  It took a while for the human tide from the east to register in the public consciousness. Then, quite suddenly, it became news. In my local town, Reading, the Poles infiltrated the Oxford Road. Delicatessens appeared where you could buy six kinds of Polish sausage, Polish smoked bacon, Polish bread, ready-made pierogi, beer and vodka; whose windows were filled with cards advertising jobs, rooms, travel, church services and social events for Poles. For a time the local newspaper published an edition in Polish. One of the pubs, long on its uppers for want of local patronage, sprang to life as a Polish gospoda.

  The media woke up. Sections of it responded in the usual sour, mean-spirited, xenophobic way. Thanks to ‘the EU’ we had been invaded. Our jobs were being taken by an army led by a figure of mythic status, the Polish plumber. With the Polish plumber came his mate and a raggle-taggle horde of bricklayers, plasterers, electricians, bar workers, fruit-and-veg pickers, all accompanied by a train of camp followers intent upon leeching off the proverbially open-handed British welfare system. Polish women were able to obtain the abortions they were denied at home, courtesy of the NHS. Schools were overwhelmed by monoglot Polish children. Councils were besieged by families waving EU rules on emergency housing. Police forces struggled to contain localised crime waves of a sinister Slavic kind, concentrating on drugs and under-age prostitutes, with a distinctly un-English attitude towards casual violence.

  Typically, the incomers were depicted either as sabotaging the labour market by their willingness to work incredibly hard at menial jobs, for wages and under conditions no self-respecting British worker would accept (this strand of attack demanding a certain flexibility from commentators more used to berating the British working man for his laziness), or as welfare scroungers. Cultural differences were gleefully seized upon. For a while the angling press was rife with stories of barbarous behaviour by fishermen ‘of eastern European origin’, who declined to buy licences, poached riotously, used every
imaginable illegal means (including submerging a supermarket trolley fitted with a car battery in a lake to electrocute the carp), and were implicated in the unforgivable crime of killing and eating the fish they caught instead of returning them alive.

  Local authorities were mocked for putting up road signs in Polish, while an accident involving a Polish driver would automatically be attributed to inability to comprehend traffic instructions in English. Councils that issued leaflets in Polish or trained staff to speak a few words of the language were accused of wasting taxpayers’ money. Polish workers who sent money home were charged with depleting the UK economy.

  An important element in this narrative was the incomers’ mode of arrival. The coaches crossing from the far side of Europe to this little island were the symbolic equivalent of the wagons of the Boer Voortrekkers, the ships of the Pilgrim Fathers, the locomotives thrusting their way through the American West. The budget airlines quickly muscled in on the business but the coach route remained fixed in the public perception as the pathway from the east, with Victoria Coach Station as its portal.

  Obscured within this fog of myth-making and journalistic invention was a dry story of economic opportunism. A large number of people – possibly a million or so, the great majority of them young and single – had come to Britain because they were allowed to, and because they could get work easily and earn significantly more than in their countries of origin. The jobs they took were mostly generated by an expanding economy with very low unemployment and were often in sectors affected by existing labour shortages. Some stayed, some travelled home unnoticed, some went back and forth. Comparatively few came with the intention of settling in Britain for good.

  The idea was that I would take the bus in order to go back the way they had come. Against the flow … hence the title of the book. What I did not know – because hardly anyone had then realised it – was that the flow was no longer a flow but an ebb. The direction had reversed. The Polish plumber, his mate and the rest of them were in fact going home. It is now believed (the absence of precision in these calculations still strikes me as extraordinary) that by May 2008, a month before I boarded the coach for Kraków, around a half of the influx had become an exodus.