I Can't Stay Long by Laurie Lee

Author:Laurie Lee [Lee, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780241237182
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-07-06T23:00:00+00:00

A Wake in Warsaw

In the month of their worst weather – and the month also of their most melancholy historical memories – the Poles were paying tribute to Adam Mickiewicz, national poet, patriot, romantic, and a hundred years dead. And in honour of this affair the Polish Government – displaying a romantical-political-mystical view of poetry which I from the West found quite unusual – invited, from all over the world, professors, scholars, and poets to join with them in these celebrations. Five such figures were invited from Great Britain, all expenses paid. But as it turned out, I was the only one able to accept.

The invitation came to me in a warm and frantic voice over the telephone from the Polish authorities in London. It seemed that the other four had already made their apologies. The voice was that of a hostess determined to prevent the wreck of a dinner party. It invited me to fly straightway to Warsaw. But of course I was glad to go.

For what could be more innocent than the celebration of a Byronic poet a hundred years dead? Besides I dearly wished to join the ranks of the behind-the-iron-curtain bores and so be protected from them for ever more. I also wanted to prove whether I could survive the Polish winter. And to find out who Mickiewicz was.

But I decided not to fly. I wanted to taste, at the tempo of the train, the slow approach to Warsaw with all its frontiers. So tickets were provided, and I set off.

On the dawn of the second day I entered Germany, changed trains at Stuttgart, and waited an hour for the Warsaw coach. I had not been to this country before, and I observed with interest the hurrying Germans, so long the bogies of my childhood. Brisk, raincoated, carrying briefcases like heraldic shields, they emptied themselves from their suburban trains and hastened like lovers to their work. Porters, inspectors, and ticket-collectors were uniformed and swagger as Luftwaffe pilots. Painters, even at that early hour, were painting the station like mad. The obsession seemed to be: never to be caught not working – as curious a conformity as its opposite which prevails elsewhere.

My Warsaw coach, when it arrived, was labelled Second Class and Third Class – and it was explained to me that there was no official First Class, but that Second Class was in fact First Class though formally labelled Second (and, for that matter, Third was also Second). In my comfortable and super-heated compartment, I crossed that daylight Germany, through forests of conifers and hop-holes, across neat and banded landscapes striped like medieval England. Towards Nuremberg the sky darkened and it began to snow. One by one the American Army officers picked up their field-green luggage and left us. The restaurant car was taken off. The carriages on the train grew rapidly fewer. We were approaching Czechoslovakia.

The formalities at Schirnding, the German frontier, were swift and easy. Nobody seemed to care where we were going, or why.

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