By late afternoon, my train was drawing into the station at the town of Nowy Targ where I was to meet Magda. Butterflies still fluttered in my stomach and my heart raced. A few miles back, I had had a quick panic about not recognising Magda in the melee of friends and relatives tumbling over each other to greet alighting passengers. In the event, though, I had no problem identifying the tall middle-aged woman standing at the back, leaning against a pillar and watching everybody else. Like Mum and Urcky, she had the family face and dark chocolate eyes and I knew without being told that her frizzy, charcoal grey hair had once been mahogany brown. It was like seeing my elegant, feminine mother dressed up in creased cotton trousers and a boyish button-down shirt, with glasses and no make up.

“Marya!” I was grateful that she didn’t rush over to hug or kiss me. I wasn’t ready for it. She eyed my pack. “You travelling light, then?” She took a couple of steps towards the exit where all the other passengers were heading. “Fortunately for you, I'm parked close by. Although, if you’ve been taking that thing around Europe, you can carry it a few more metres to my car.” Her last few words were almost drowned out by the sound of the diesel engine revving up to depart. “You haven't left anything in your carriage, have you?”

“No.” Jenny had trained me to check my seat, the luggage-racks and the floor underneath where I had been sitting before I disembarked from anything.

Her car was amazing, a tiny, dusty, squashed-up green box with grills at the front and back. My pack being far too big for the boot, we had to squeeze it through the driver’s door and on to the back seat. “What make of car is it?” I demanded as we got inside.

“PolskiFiat.”

“I want one!”

“You can't have it. I was on a waiting list for four years for this.”

I supposed they must be collectors’ items, like Morris Minors.

“Marya,” Magda said, as she turned her ignition key, “I'm speaking to you in Polish. Is that all right?”

“Of course. We write in Polish, don’t we?”

“Yes, but writing and speaking are different things. I can read English, but not speak it.”

“I'm fine.”

She drove me out of Nowy Targ along mountain lanes, the PolskiFiat whining in second gear as she negotiated precipitous inclines and even sharper bends, through small villages containing just a few well-spaced breeze-block houses with steeply pitched roofs, a small sklep (shop) and a deserted bus stop with a perfunctory one-sided shelter. I didn’t see any buses though, only people trudging along open country roads on foot. At last, she pulled up outside the Pensionjat Kwiaty, which, as I knew, was both her home and her business. It was a chalet! Yes, it really was! Elinor Brent-Dyer, eat your heart out! This was a chalet, in Poland and with a corrugated iron roof, its gables dipping almost to the ground, walls built from horizontal pine beams, and shutters. Pink, blue and white flowers bloomed from wooden boxes in front of each window and around the pensionjat sign hanging over the door. A single brown and white cow, tethered on a long rope, was grazing in the front garden.

“It’s beautiful!” I breathed.

“We are very lucky to live in such a lovely place.” For a moment, she drank in the view through the windscreen, rolling foothills covered in spiky pines, behind them the white, jagged peaks of the Tatra Mountains, Poland’s Alps. “You’re staying in Zbigniew’s room by the way,” she said, as she got out her little PolskiFiat. “The pensionjat is full all this week, which is the way it should be mid-season, and, quite frankly, Marya, we need the money. Prices of most food items went up last month and everybody’s feeling it. Fortunately, we grow most of our fruit and vegetables and Agata… in the front garden… supplies all our milk. It’s what people round here do.”

“Where is Zbigniew?” I asked, climbing out my own seat. I wasn’t turning my cousin out of his own bed, was I?

“In Gdansk. I don’t think there’s much danger of him coming to visit his boring old mother and needing his room while you’re here.”

“He’s at university in Gdansk, isn’t he? Hasn’t his term finished yet?” I asked, as I dragged my pack from out the back seat.

“He graduated two months ago.. But don’t get me started! Come inside. Jacinta, my... business partner… is dying to meet you. Watch where you put your feet. Agata also provides manure for the vegetable plot.” She raised her hand cheerily to a man sitting in a car parked on the opposite side of the street. “Dzień dobry!”

“Dzień dobry,” I repeated politely.

He didn’t reply.

“You must be hot in that leather jacket,” she went on. After all the rain in Bratislava, it was warm and sunny in Poland.

He stared stonily ahead.

“If you need accommodation,” Magda continued, “I'm afraid the pensionjat’s full tonight. Try Nowy Targ.”

He pulled a cigarette from a packet on the dashboard, still saying nothing.

Picking our way with care, we walked through Agata’s pasture and into the chalet. Magda hesitated in the doorway. “I tell everybody here that Jacinta is my sister. No disrespect to your mother, Marya. It’s just simpler that way.”

Jacinta was in the kitchen cooking the guests’ dinner, a diminutive dumpling of a woman in a housecoat. “Cresc, Marya,” she cried, putting down the saucepan she was holding. “I've heard so much about you!” She stood on tip-toe to kiss me on both cheeks. “I do hope you enjoy it here.” She grinned at Magda. “Why does a young western girl want to come and stay with two old women?”

For a moment, I felt I was walking on to the set of “Cranford”.

Magda showed me up to Zbigniew's bedroom. The bed, draped with a heavy, beige, crocheted quilt, nestled under the slanted eaves of the chalet roof and the painted chipboard chest was etched with biro graffiti I didn’t understand. Dusty toy planes balanced on top of books in home-made shelves bracketed to the wall, but a vase of fresh flowers stood on the window ledge, an attempt to make the room more feminine for me, perhaps.

I took a shower in what appeared to be the guests’ bathroom. I was aware of their muffled voices and the thud-thud of their footsteps outside in the corridor and two fair-haired children, wearing shorts and carrying ski-poles, burst into giggles when I emerged swathed in a towel. Maybe this was not what you did in this country, but I wasn’t exposing anything. As soon as I was dressed again, I made my way downstairs again. The smell of dinner cooking permeating through the whole chalet was making me feel hungry, and I wondered how long it would be before we - as distinct from the guests - would eat.

As I entered the kitchen, Jacinta was bustling round the cooker, stirring soup and clattering plates, but when I offered to help she shook her head. “Nie, nie. You’re our guest.”

Magda was sitting in a corner by the dresser speaking on the telephone. “… You’ve got a…szczeniak?”

Szczeniak? What was that?

“What the bloody hell have you got a szczeniak for? How are you going to look after it?... Yes, I'm sure it’s adorable now, Zbigniew, but a szczeniak grows up into a whopping great pies in no time at all!”

Pies? That was dog. My mother complained about our neighbours’ pies, that it barked too long and too loud.

“I really don’t know what you’re doing up there on the coast, Zbigniew. What are you doing for money?... “Tak, tak. I know Ewa’s working, but you can't live off your girlfriend… No, Zbigniew, that’s not out of order. It’s saying it as it is… Zbigniew, Zbigniew, are you there?” The receiver was thumped down on its cradle, the bell rattling faintly in protest with the impact.

“He’s put the phone down on me!” Magda exclaimed.

“I heard,” Jacinta replied.

“I don’t believe he’s even looking for a job! He won’t talk about it and he says I nag.”

“You worry too much, Magda.”

“He says to me… oh… he could have a job at Gdansk Shipyard. They take in graduate engineers from the Technical University every year. So I ask him… have you written to the shipyard then? Oh no, he’s waiting to see if anything better turns up. What do I do, Jacinta?”

“Nothing, moj drogi. He’s twenty-two.”

“He could get something in Krakow, in Nowa Huta, but he won't. He’s up to something, Jacinta. I know it.”

“Nie, nie. He wants to be with his girlfriend in Gdansk.” Jacinta jerked her head in my direction but Magda wasn’t looking.

“I wish I believed that.”

“Believe it.” Jacinta took the soup off the stove and set it down on the worktop.

“He’s up to something. These food price rises… People are very angry. We know that. And we're aware of what people are saying and writing… He’s up to something. I'm worried about him.”

“Would you take away his passion?”

“There’s a man outside in a car. He’s been here for the past week.”

“Why do you suppose he is here for Zbigniew? From whom did your boy get his passion?”

Magda shook her head. “I am discreet.”

“Try not to worry, moj droji.” Jacinta lowered her voice as she ladled brown soup into garish, orange bowls using a big metal spoon. “The strikes are a long way away… at the Ursus Factory in Warsaw… Lodz… Lublin…“

“And each group of striking men is being bought off with promises of wage increases. Men! Now, if the strikers were women… We’d better take the soup out.”

She almost collided with me as she stepped towards the kitchen door carrying two steaming bowls. She drew in her breath sharply, as if she had forgotten I was here.

“Marya,” called Jacinta, turning to the stove again and stirring something in a pan. “I expect you have a lot of washing. Would you like to go upstairs and fetch it?”

I was being dismissed and I couldn't politely refuse. I bounded up the stairs two at a time in my excitement. Jenny had wanted dissidents and had settled for that pathetic bore in Graz. I had found the real thing!

Without really trying!