Fantazja Ułańska! Dziękuję!

Poles eat a lot of cabbage. They pickle it, salt, it, and, best of all, ferment it - into bigos. Every housewife here has her own recipe and method for making bigos, and it never fails to be magnificent.


An old joke runs, "Why are the Poles such good people? Because Satan doesn't like cabbage."

But I digress.

Yesterday was a very sad day for me because it ended my six year tenure of the English teaching post at my local liceum, the happiest job I have ever had. And how did I come to be working there? A story full of coincidences.

When I was eight, my parents had two Polish lodgers, Tony Topolski and Joe Elsner, both typical Poles. Tony, an aristocrat from his name, tall, dark, gloomy, with a long moustache, and Joe, small, fat, and with a Słowanic spherical head. Refugees from communism, they worked in a local factory and were learning English, with a little help from me by way of conversation.

And they told me stories of ułans charging German tanks on horseback, armed with Molotov cocktails and sabres, of patriots executed by the communists for fighting independently of the U.S.S.R. I vowed one day to go to Poland an see for myself the fantazja ułańska..

More than fifty years later, sitting in a Moroccan cafe in Bow, I asked the waitress where she was from.

"Warsaw, Poland. Have you ever been there?"

"No."

"Why not?"

So I went for ten days, loved Warsaw, stopped off in Paris on the way back, got talking to a young woman in Paris whose father, a Pole, was teaching in Poland, and wanted to retire. She gave him my email address, I stayed with him and his wife for a week, taught a few lessons in his school, got the job, and have been here ever since.

Thanks be to God, some of the happiest six years of my life.

Hah! And all my pupils passed Matura this year!