I hadn't thought about the holiday in Poland at all until I bumped into Jenny at the doctors’ in April.  Since New Year, I had suffered with bad acne, something I felt I should have grown out of by now, and Clearasil wasn’t touching it.  I was walking out the surgery carrying my prescription when I spotted her in the waiting room reading “Woman’s Own”. 

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” I replied.

“How are you?”

“Well, I am at the doctors’.  How are you?”

“I hear you’re working in the Council press office,” she said.

“I'm the press officer’s temporary assistant.”

“With Len Williams?”

“Yes.” 

Jenny rolled her eyes.  “I'm afraid, at the “Evening News”, we think Len Williams is pretty useless.”

Len was the press officer proper, although most of my day was spent alone, at the end of the phone, explaining to journalists why he wasn’t there.  “Journalism isn’t a desk job, Councillor,” Len had once said when challenged.  He seemed to regard it as a bar-stool job.   But I could read press releases and committee agendas and minutes as well as he could and now callers were asking for me. 

“Marya, I was really sorry about your mum.”

“Thanks.”

“Look… I’ve been meaning to ring you…”  She closed her magazine and leant over to put it back on the coffee table.  “I'm probably being really tactless…  All hacks are tactless, as you’ve probably worked out by now.  About the holiday… Zilina, Poland.  I mean… do you still want to go?”

“I don’t know, Jenny.”  My spotty forehead creased into a frown.  “I haven't really thought about it these last few months.”

“Go!” said Dad, that evening as we were eating.  “You go!”

“But you’d be in the house all by yourself.”

“I'll be fine.  I’ll read.  Do the garden.  Go for walks.  And I’ll have Urcky and Lynn nearby.  You go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I wrote to Magda in Poland, suggesting I caught the train to Krakow and that she met me there, but she replied, “Marya, I would like to meet you very much after writing to you for so many years, but Krakow is too far away.  I live in a beautiful place by the mountains and I will meet you at my local station.”

We set off on Saturday, 2 August.  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” said Urcky, as she said goodbye to me.  Now heavily pregnant, she was wearing the maternity dress Lynn had worn on Christmas Day.  Maybe it had been Urcky’s dress in the first place.

“Well, I don’t intend to have a baby.”

“No, Marya.”

Driving to Chenham station, Dad gave me a lecture.  “Keep your passport with you.  Show it to anyone who asks but don’t let them take it away.  Don’t argue with officials.  In fact, Marya, don’t argue at all.  And don’t get into political discussions with Magda and embarrass her.”

“Dad!”

“You’re not still thinking of looking for Pyotr Murkowski, are you?” he asked, as we walked into the station and through the booking hall.

“Why not?” I panted.  My rucksack seemed so much heavier than when I had tried it at home, even though its compartments had seemed so small when I had been packing last night, and I had left lots of my stuff at home.

“Marya, it’s been a long time...”

We had to stop at the ticket barrier.  Standing still with this thing on my back was even worse. 

“He was a good friend to you.  You… need… friends.”  The pack bounced on my back as we walked down the steps to the platform.

“Pyotr was a good pilot and a very good friend in many ways, but… he was a Communist.”

“Dad, all Poles are Communists.”  On the bottom step at last!  “Poland’s been in the Eastern Bloc since the 1940s.  They have to be.” 

“Are you going to be all right, Dad?” I asked as we stood on the platform.  “Your stomach’s OK now, isn't it?”  I was changing the subject, to avoid him expressly forbidding me to look for Pyotr.

“Ssh!  Don’t tempt fate!  I haven't had any pain for a long time.  Now you be very careful and sensible, misia.”

“Yes, Dad.”

He put his arm around me and kissed, almost causing me and the pack to keel over.  “You look very well.  All your spots are gone.  I don’t know what the doctor gave you.  I don’t discuss my daughters’ medical things now you’re all grown up.  But whatever it was worked.”

I smiled into the frame of my pack.

A few minutes later, Jenny arrived on the platform.  Her pack was bigger than mine and she looked quite comfortable.  I pulled my shoulders back.  The man in the camping shop had said to stand up straight.

On the Dover-to-Calais ferry, Jenny started giving travel advice, and she would continue for several days.  “Don’t stand around on street corners with a map and look like a tourist.”  “Keep your cash in your money belt.”  “Drink what the locals drink.  It’s cheaper.”  Most embarrassing of all, she insisted on travelling with a Union Jack draped over her pack.  I pointed out that it made her “look like a tourist” and she smiled that knowing smile which was getting to irritate me.

We travelled through France, changing at Paris and Lyon, but all I got to see of these places was the inside of railway stations.  Jenny was rushing us round, taking in train destination boards at a glance, shoving me on to the next platform.  Despite us both having learned French to O level, she started every conversation with, “Do you speak English?” and, if the person didn’t say yes at once, she shouted it.  “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?”  By the time we were approaching the Italian border, I was getting used to it and able to mutter, “oui” and “non”, “s’il vous plait” and “merci”.  Then I got laughed at by a stallholder at Chambery station because I said “Merci beaucoup” when he handed me my change.

“The French say “Merci bien”,” Jenny told me.  “It’s not like in the textbooks at school.”

“Well, at least I tried!” I retorted.

We went through Italy because, according to Jenny, Switzerland was “expensive”.  Neither of us knew Italian, although, Jenny, who had played violin in the school orchestra, knew words like “andante” and “mezzo forte”.  I picked up on “favore” and “grazie”.  You can get away with a lot by just saying “please” and “thank you” and there was this word “prego” which they seemed to stick on to everything, so I did too.  Again, we were passing through famous places, like Torino, Milano and Verona, also Trento, where – said Jenny, who had studied history at university - the Catholics held the “Council of Trent” which kick-started the Counter Reformation. 

“Well, there was me thinking it happened in Nottingham.”

“Ha ha!  You can be bloody stupid at times, Marya!”

Jenny met some ex-pats on this train, and interviewed them for an article, an English couple, probably in their seventies, who went on and on about how beautiful Italy was.  Perhaps it was, but I wasn’t getting a chance to see, except through the carriage window.  The big thing for them was that they only paid the equivalent of 40p in tax.  They kept looking at me every time they mentioned this, as if I should congratulate them.  After they got off, at the Austrian border, Jenny told me again about her career plans, the “parochial” Chenham Evening News cramping her style, and her “contact”, at “The Daily Recorder” in Fleet Street, Dave, who was “really good-looking” although he never used her stories.

Neither of us knew German, as our acclaimed grammar school had seen fit to teach us Latin as a second language.  I wondered whether musician Jenny could make use of expressions like “H Moll” in Austria.  She said she was also looking for dissidents to write about and, in our hostel at Graz, she found this old bloke who claimed to have lived in the German Democratic Republic - over twenty years ago.  Fortunately for Jenny, he spoke English.  He said the former West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, had taken his orders from Moscow and all post-war British prime ministers were Communists.  “Including Mrs Thatcher?” I asked.

As our train edged towards the Czechoslovakian border post, Jenny turned to me.  “Czech’s pretty much like Polish, isn’t it?”

“No-o,” I replied.  We fell back on the “Do you speak English?” routine.

Behind the Iron Curtain at last, I should have been quite excited but hunger was uppermost in my mind and body, as Jenny had insisted on not buying food in “expensive” Austria and waiting until we got into “cheap” Czechoslovakia.   Our train didn’t stop until Bratislava and, all the way, I was having erotic fantasies about tall, dark men with Mittel European accents serving me dry, stale cheese rolls.  It was raining when we arrived, and dark, and we ate something described on the menu as “Hungarian goulash”, but seemed largely to consist of onions.  That night, l lay awake in our grotty one-star hotel with smelly toilets, thinking, “I’m nearly there.  I’m almost in Poland” and, to my surprise, my hands went all clammy.

In the morning, after several attempts and a lot of my Czechoslovak crowns clanking into a metal box, I rang Magda from the hotel phone.  “Dobrze,” she replied. “So, what time do you think you’ll get here this afternoon?  Do you have your train times?”

For years, I had confided my innermost thoughts to Magda in writing, but I had never spoken to her.  She sounded so brisk and efficient, abrupt even.  I had never before heard a real Pole – one who lived in Poland - speak.

A few hours later, our train was approaching Zilina and Jenny was gathering up her belongings, all the plastic carrier bags of bits and pieces which she had attracted over almost a week of travelling.  “Will you be all right by yourself?”  She frowned.  “When you get to the Polish border, have your passport ready.  And your visa.”

“Yes, Jenny.”

It was such a relief to see her get off the train.  Her friend, Flavia, a bottle-blonde, with dark roots, ran over the platform to greet her, picking up her bags and shouting “Hello”.  Then Jenny ran back to the train, shouting to me, “You don’t have my number in Zilina!”

“Yes I do.”

Nevertheless, she dragged out a scruffy bit of paper from one of the pockets in her pack, thrust a pen into Flavia’s hand and got her to write.  She shoved the scruffy bit of paper through the tiny train window as it was moving off.  I allowed it to flutter on to the empty carriage seat beside me, and, only after they and the station at Zilina had faded into small specks on the horizon, did I pick it up.  Within about an hour, I would be in Poland.

My hands went clammy again.  I was nervous.  I couldn't sit still in my seat and my heart was racing.  Across the aisle, a Polish family was eating lunch, nasty looking cakes from cellophane wrapping, the mother in a drab mini-dress, the grandmother’s lined face framed by a brown patterned headscarf, and two little boys, who had sat quietly for several hours as no English children would have done.  But for an accident of history, I would have been them.  I didn’t belong here.  Everything about me must scream that I was a westerner.  They must be looking at me and wondering why I was here.  Why was I?  To gawp?

The train was starting to slow down.  When we rolled into another station, all the passengers disembarked.  Following everybody else, I walked along the platform, past our now empty train, which appeared to be resting like a living thing, its Deisel engine ticking over, giving off dusty heat and smelling of oil.  People were queuing at Czechoslovakian border control, holding their passports in their hands, and, further ahead, I saw a dull, grey breeze block building, a large sign on its corrugated iron roof - Społeczeństwo Republika od Polska..  My lunch churned inside me.  I was here – almost.

I took my big blue British passport out of the zip pocket in my pack.  I was British.  How could I have presumed otherwise?

I passed out of Czechoslovakia then walked on to the Polish building. The Polish border guards wore khaki uniforms and jack boots.  I was shocked by the jack boots.  This really was Poland, the proper Poland, not the one in my imagination, or on the atlas on the dining room table.  I waited in the queue, my hands clenching and unclenching, my nails digging red marks into my palms.  When it came to my turn, one of the guards motioned to me to put my pack on his desk, so he could search it, and I handed my passport to the other bloke, holding it open at the page containing my tourist visa.

“Dzień dobry.”  This is what you said in Polish, although, in our family, we always said “Hello” or Hi”.

He smirked at his mate and I recalled the “Merci beaucoup” incident.

Now he was looking me up and down, staring at my Woolworths photo booth picture, then at me again.  “My photograph is quite old,” I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other.  “It was taken three years ago, when my hair was longer...”

“No-ooooo.  Your photograph is very good,” he replied, winking as he handed back my passport.  “Destination?”

“Er… Krakow.”  I couldn't remember the name of Magda’s village.

“There are lots of great bars in Krakow.”

The other guard pushed my rucksack along the desk.  “We can show round Krakow if you like, take you to all the good bars.”

“I'll find them myself!” I retorted with a giggle.  Then I entered Poland.