Katowice III: working in the coal mines.

Zinc smelter workers. Christian Szoltysek, bottom right

Most of my family have connections with mining, sometimes spanning many generations; as I mentioned, my cousin Stefan, the son of a miner, has seen his son and his grandson go down the pits too.  It’s a closed shop, a tight-knit band of fellow workers who relied on each other for their lives.  My immediate family worked more in the metals business – my grandfather was a blacksmith who found more remunerative work in the iron foundries and zinc smelting plants.  The photograph on the left gives some impression of the mutual dependence workers felt; they look like a Wild West gang, the James brothers in Silesia.

From R to L: Przemek, Milsoz, Boezanna and me looking stupid in a hard hat.

I do the tourist version of course, at the Guido mine in Zabze, with Milsoz, Przemek and Boezanna.  The boys have never been down a pit before, and they are excited by the prospect; me too.  There are glimpses of the hell that it must have been, in particular  full size models of the horses which were kept in total darkness and trussed up to be lowered blindfolded down 800 feet deep shafts; that’ll appear in a story, believe me, and, knowing me, it won’t have a happy ending.  Funny that we often feel most for the dumb animals.

The guide – who speaks Silesian, a linguistic complication  of the region I didn’t know about – gives demonstrations of some of the latest machines working in the lower seams.  Even the air extractor is cacophonous.  With the drills and scourers and chewers that look like monsters from a steam punk comic, and with the rattle of coal trucks relentlessly ferrying the black stuff around, and with the heat and dust and the exhaustion of exertion… how do you capture that with words on paper?

Mine workers' hats indicating rank

The workers were organised on a military basis, with well-defined ranks and promotion structures.  Privates, the face workers, wore black feathers in their caps; red indicated those experienced enough to handle explosives, for example.  Medals were awarded for bravery, for long service, for promotion.  No wonder these men slipped so easily into the role of disciplined cannon fodder during the many wars that have been fought here.

My father worked away from home most of his life; he officially retired at 65, but worked on at whatever he could find, from highly skilled welder early on until, in his mid-seventies, he was a building yard minder.  Anything, basically, that kept him in the company of working men.  I think, now, I understand why.

Katowice II: Lipiny

The street where my father was born in 1913

My father was born in Lipiny, a typical Silesian industrial town.  Eugen and Danuta take me there; sooty red brick tenements sit cheek-by-jowl with steel works and chemical plants, and over there, Eugen tells me, just at the top of the street, there was a pit head.

Now, it’s dying.  The factories are closing one by one, the mines have gone and the area is riven by generational unemployment, alcohol dependency and abject poverty.  They are ashamed to bring me here, says Iwona; they needn’t be, it’s a story that could have come straight from the east end of Glasgow, only with heroin as the drug of choice.  No-one – least of all the EU which is building roads and rail tracks and infrastructure all over the area – has bothered to invest in this place and its people for so, so long.

Danuta is Lipiny born and bred; in fact, she was born in the same house as my father, the building itself now demolished but marked by that green tree you see on the left of the picture.  I look down the empty space, into the remaining three sides of a rectangle that was the backyard where my father played, and where he tended the hens or pigs which were kept in little outhouses.

We wander for a while; she shows me number 91, where she lived in a one-room and kitchen with her family, then the two-room they went up in the world to. In those days, I can imagine a vibrant community of people in the street, including my uncle Alfons, who apparently went from door to door singing operatic arias for a few coins when the unemployment bit hard in the 1930s; he was so accomplished, the local radio station had him and Hubert on to do a show.   The residents would have cared, would have had something to care about; now, everywhere is decay and stink.  Yet, still, fresh-faced children play in the streets, just like my father would have done with his brothers.  The German school he attended – built in 1906, it must have been state-of-the-art when he went there – is now used for some other mysterious commercial purpose, though, as is Danuta’s.

Lipiny's former German school, built in 1906

Not enough children to go round, it seems, not enough to make a difference.  It reminds me of my time at Linwood High School, a community built to service and then torn apart by the closure of the local Rootes car plant.  When it was built, the school held over 1200 kids; when I was there, the roll was under 500.

Churches, though, seem to do well enough in times of hardship. We visit the family Church, the one my father scrubbed up on Sundays for – and who knows how many other days Augustyna made him go.  Perhaps he carried his good shoes there and back, so as not to wear them out, ready to pass them on to his next brother when he outgrew them.

And there was always another brother.   Between 1905 and 1924, Augustyna had 13 pregnancies.  Ten of them survived; Georg, Marta, Alfons, Helena, Reinhold (my father), Wilhelm, Elfryda, Viktor, Karol, Hubert.  Almost constantly pregnant from the age of 16 to 35, she must have been exhausted.  But she had a family to look after.

I lay a little posy on my grandparents’ grave (they were joined by Alfons in 1982) and Danuta and I light candles.  Neither of us are religious, and I am not known for my sentimentality, but standing there is undeniably significant.  Without all the religious guff, I really can’t say why, other than it’s a type of coming home.

My grandparents' grave

I think one of the perhaps too rare moments in my life when I rose to the occasion was the eulogy for my brother-in-law, Donald Cringean, my sister Jennifer’s husband.  A handsome, physical lad who had boxed and was a black belt in karate, he was cut down by Multiple Sclerosis in his twenties, and it fucked him up for the best part of the next twenty years until he died obscenely young.  I was asked to say a few words at what was a humanist ceremony in all but name.  I spoke very personally about him, about my trips with him, about fishing and pool playing and all sorts of nonsense.  I like to think I did him proud.

Being Catholic, a priest was press-ganged into service for my father’s funeral years later.  Dressed up like a Spanish galleon, he never knew my father, never even met him.  ”I think he was a man who worked hard for his family,” he coos soothingly in his stereotypical Irish brogue and turns to my mother for a nod of agreement; suitably validated, he continues with platitudes that I don’t hear and certainly can’t remember.  I could have said more; bloody hell, our cat could have.

I remember my father talking about his death only once, when he said, “just don’t burn me”.  He changed his mind in the nursing home, apparently, and he was cremated.  His ashes were scattered in the Garden of Remembrance at Paisley Crematorium, a place he had never been to, I imagine.  My mother and others in the family still go there, lay some flowers on the spot where the jar was tipped empty.

I went once, one Christmas I think.  I am shown the spot.  A patch of dirt, and next to it another patch of dirt where the ashes of a young person must have been strewn, because plastic toys and other junk intrude on my father’s space.  It means nothing to me, and not because I am an atheist and a rationalist who knows that when you die, nothing is left to watch from “up there”; it means nothing to me, I think, because it would have meant nothing to my father.

And I am here in Lipiny, where he was born, at his parents’ graveside.  Of course it would have been just an empty  gesture to bring a little bit of the dust that was him home, but it’s a gesture I would happily have made if I’d known ten years ago I would make this trip.

Katowice I: meet the family.

The cast list (so far!).

Danuta, my lovely cousin.  She reminds me of my wee sister, Christine; similar hair, similar dimples.  She has put her all into my visit, organised the trips here and there, the cousins round for tea, the meals and stories and jokes.  She is a wonderful cook; a fantastic beetroot soup, a piquant goulash, stuffed peppers and beef, and cakes.  Oh goodness, the cakes.  I think I am in heaven when I taste her cherry cake (cherries from her own garden; she has green fingers), and then her walnut and apple cake (walnuts from her own  garden…) takes me to an even higher plane.  These would make her a wealthy woman in a Glasgow tea room.  There’s just one problem.  They tell me that Silesian food is unhealthy.  I disagree – there’s absolutely nothing on the plate that has ever seen the inside of a factory – but it is certainly rich.  Over the last few months, I’ve been working hard at the gym, feeling and looking better for it; I now think the process has gone into reverse, and I’ll have to redouble my efforts back home…

Eugeniusz, her husband, a gentle, cultured, cuddly bear.  He is a man of action, building not only his own house but half the street too, multi-layered, ingenious buildings that are light and spacious.  He’s a former climbing instructor, a mountaineer who, even in the Communist days, was such an ambassador for his country that he was granted visas to the highest places in Peru and Nepal.  He has lived with death and danger, always accompanied by Danuta; he was once offered a considerable sum of money for her by a warlord.  Wisely, he refused.  Utterly generous, he gives me a print on rice paper he brought all the way back from Nepal decades ago; I will frame it, display it, treasure it.

Milosz, their son, is a handsome, gentle, wise young man who gets affectionate when he’s had a few. He is charming and interesting and, in his excitement at the thought of going down a coal mine for the first time, still a wee boy.  He’s married to Iwona – the perfect princess Iwona – who is pert and pretty and completely charming too.  Even as she teases me mercilessly (she can’t help repeating every dzien dobry or dobranoc I attempt, giggling because “it just sounds so strange”), she is infinitely patient in her translations for me.  She has all the zizz of a lightning bolt.  For most of my visit,  she is my rock.  They are both fantastic company.  I invite them to Scotland;  next weekend would not be too soon.

They have another son, Przemek, a passionate intellectual who lectures in IT at the local university.  He is a born teacher, his gestures and tone and expressions filled with a zest for life that must have his students walking across hot coals to get to his lectures.  His girlfriend, the elegant, shy and lovely Borzana, shares his love of climbing and dogs  (they are experienced, expert  trainers); I have a notion that I’ll take them to some sheep dog trials when they visit.   When I tell Eugen that I think his sons are excellent young men, he almost bursts with pride of them, and grins and thumps his heart.

Stefania, Danuta’s mother, is a little bird of a woman, 84 years old with a razor-sharp memory.  It is a huge honour to meet her as she is the last of my father’s generation, and knew all the characters in his complicated family.  She is lovely, full of smiles and hugs when she accepts you; there is a deep strength in her, though.  She was my uncle Hubert’s first wife, and brought up three children under difficult circumstances; she’s the type of woman you want on your side.  She has a naughtiness about her, too; she laughs delightedly when we discover that the Polish word for “fart” sounds like “bonk”, and I explain what it means in English and why  I think it is appropriately onomatopoeic.

My cousins Teresa, Irena, Ingrid and Stefan are all in the mix too.  Teresa is a kind and jolly woman; she invites us to her house and presents us with a cake topped with fruit and jelly that looks as if it belongs in a jeweller’s shop window.  Irena and Ingrid tell me about their families, and show me photographs of their weddings in which they look like film stars. Ingrid, especially, deserves thanks, since her side of the family is most closely linked to my father’s story; it must have been difficult for her to meet me.  Teresa’s brother Stefan in a spry 76-year old who looks about 60.  He traces his branch of the tree for me.  A miner, with a miner for a son and a grandson, he gives me a little plaque made from coal that commemorates his service in the mine.  It is a treasured possession, and I’m honoured once more.

I met Halina, Eugen’s sister, her husband Dariusz and their very cool son Artur in 2006 when I visited Siegen.  Halina, an interior designer,  shares her brother’s grin and wicked sense of humour, and she gives me a beautiful little landscape painted by a local artist; I have just the spot for it in my house.  Daruisz is a mechanic; his yard is packed with lovely old Wartburgs that look like Volvo Amazons, and Polski Fiat rally cars that Jeremy Clarkson would scoff at but look fantastic.  He shows me the pride of his collection, his father’s 1966 Mercedes 230 sedan, with less than 50,000 kilometres on the clock and in absolutely pristine original condition.  It is gorgeous, an unusual cobalt blue decorated with acres of chrome.  He lets me sit in it: I almost pee myself with boyish excitement, but I am too afraid of ruining the seats.   The family shares that open-spirit and warmth that comes from having enquiring minds and a lust for travel; Dariusz has just worked on several cars taking part in an annual classic rally to raise money for charity in which his elder son is participating; he’s just been to Loch Ness on the tour.

When I go back to my hotel at night, my dreams are busy busy busy.  I am surrounded by hundreds of people, and I have lots of things to do.  I wake up tired by the effort of my unconscious mind filtering and sorting all the information I am swimming in.  Not surprising, I suppose.  But these are lovely people, with a lot to say to me, and I’m having a great deal of fun listening to them.