Wendy: I have always had a longing to live in Poland. My father was Polish, and as a teenager and young woman I used to visit our family in Warsaw and Sopot. I loved those holidays, even during the harshest of Communist times such as the mid-eighties, when everywhere was still under the shadow of the recently lifted martial law. I loved the rich-sounding language (which I couldn’t speak as a young child), the amazing hospitality in all our family homes, the medieval architecture of Kraków and the giant monster-buildings of Warsaw ... I loved everything about the country. With the demise of the Communist system, I realised that my dream could at last be realised. My then husband and I applied for jobs at various languages schools and were very soon offered work in Kraków. In August 1992 we loaded up our old transit van, together with a six-year old daughter and six-month old son, and headed for Kraków.

Tim: Unlike Wendy, I had no family or cultural connections with Poland whatsoever. I was working in a College of Further Education in Coventry in 1993. I was planning to leave England and go to Valencia to teach English as a foreign language. One day a fax arrived on my director’s desk from a language school in Warsaw which was looking for twelve native-speaking teachers. I applied for one of these posts and, after a long phone interview, I was offered a job as Director of Studies. I packed my bags and flew to Warsaw in late summer 1993, only to find that the school had no premises, teachers or students. The Walter Mitty character who had sent the fax and placed a huge advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement perhaps hoped that if he got the teachers first the students would follow later. The first job he wanted me to do was sort throught the 200 other applications which had arrived. Even the young secretary of the school advised me to re-trace my steps and head for Spain. Pure stubbornness kept me there and I soon obtained work in two language schools.

Wendy: Despite living in a hovel in our first year in Kraków (or so it seemed, compared to our nice Victorian semi back in England), having to work all the hours God sent, and facing Kafka-esque bureaucratic problems when trying to get insurance for our van, I was in seventh heaven. We made lots of friends, both at the language school where we worked and at our daughter’s primary school, and were both blown away by everyone’s hospitality. We were valued for our native Englishness and admired for our bravery in coming to Poland. “Why do you want to live in Poland when all of us want to live in England?” one of our students asked us within the first week of term. We couldn’t properly explain why. Everything was just so ... different, changing almost by the day, the exact opposite of stable old England. No one was complacent and no one took anything for granted. It was a totally vitalising place to be.

Tim: I had spent a year in Madrid in the late seventies, soon after the end of fascism. I had expected to find in post-Communist Poland the same air of liberation, the same joy of unrestricted freedom of speech. Instead, all that I saw around me was joy in the freedom to consume on the Western model. My first impressions of Warsaw were extremely negative: a bleak, ugly, God-forsaken place with masses of high-rise blocks; wide, wind-swept streets and people literally fighting to get on to crowded buses and trams. I was 43, restricted for social contact to a couple of expat bars in the centre, and frankly lonely. The language was totally incomprehensible to me; nothing like French or Spanish or any western-European language. I didn’t even try to learn it because I knew that I would just work out the academic year and leave in June. Hah! Fifteen years later and I’m still here!

Wendy: In 1993 my ex-husband and I moved to Warsaw, where we had been head-hunted by the owner of St Paul’s International School. The salary was much better, but as far as I was concerned, our quality of life took a sharp decline. I missed Kraków dreadfully. When our previous employer in Kraków invited us to join him and another Polish colleague in setting up an international school, we accepted his proposal. Once again we packed up our old Renault Trafik van and headed back down south. The British International School of Cracow (BISC) was opened in September 1995, boasting a total of eight pupils, one of whom was our own daughter. Although my life on a personal level was emotionally strained in the first year of BISC (my marriage was breaking up), being in Kraków helped to sustain me through this crisis. Less than a year later I met Tim Murphy when I was looking for a part-time A level English teacher for our school. I interviewed him, or should I say he interviewed me; one thing led to another, and now we are married with a ten-year-old daughter. The BISC in Kraków has been successful, which is born out by the fact that the president of Wrocław invited us to open a similar school in another beautiful city, Wrocław. Three years on, this school is also thriving.

Tim: In the spring of 1994 one of my students put a proposal to me – that together we open a language school in Kraków, where she had done her degree at the Jagiellonian University. After initial resistance, I agreed to go down to Kraków with her. It was love at first sight. The main square took my breath away. Even walking up Florianska Street, which leads into the square, I was aware of a hum. When I saw the outside café life I realised that the hum had been the sound of thousands of human conversations. I knew that I could live here. In October 1994 the Stairway School of English opened its doors to 120 students. It was and still is a school which only employs native-speaking teachers, mainly from Britain and the States. Stairway has grown over the years and is now one of the well-established language schools at the quality end of the market. In the meantime, I had met Wendy ...

Wendy: Why have I stayed in Poland for so long? All sorts of reasons. I love the resilient people, the proud but tortured history, the sheer physical beauty of it ... especially the mountains of Southern Poland, which are utterly breathtaking at any time of year. I’ve even learned to ski relatively well, though I’ll never be able to compete with the local three-year-olds that whizz past me on the slopes without any poles! I also love the huge forests all over Poland; forests that are far wilder than any you’ll find in England. Some of them still have wild boar, lynxes and bison roaming around! I even love Warsaw, a city so many people hate. I think the very fact that it was re-built from 85% rubble cries home the Poles’ determined spirit and independence. But in terms of what really keeps me here, I suppose I have to admit that it’s Kraków. I say that with some reluctance, because the very beauty and unique atmosphere of this lovely place is precisely what’s pulling in the tourists and investors by the thousands. I’m terrified that that Kraków is going to be completely spoilt one of these days. Already prices are shooting up, old haunts closing down and being re-opened as Western look-alikes at twice the price; and huge hotels, apartment complexes and shopping malls are being constructed alarmingly near the heart of the old, historic city. Recently I’ve found myself wondering, will Kraków survive all these changes and still be the city I love? That remains to be seen.

Tim: I agree with everything Wendy has said about the beauty of Southern Poland and Kraków. I’d just like to return to the subject of the Stairway School of English. There is one surprising aspect of the history of the school. Since we employ no Polish teachers, I had expected a regular turnover of staff – the world is truly an English teacher’s oyster. At first teachers did come and go, but gradually an amazing stability has evolved. Most of the staff have been with us, or at least in Kraków, for between 8 and 12 years. We talk about this quite often, the other teachers and me. We do bitch about things here. For example, a foreigner getting married here will run into the tortuous, convoluted, gargantuan glory of Polish bureaucracy in all its terrible, frustrating splendour. But we agree that we are hopelessly, inexplicably and even reluctantly addicted to something about Poland, its people and its culture. Personally, I love their stubborn pessimistic streak, the very antithesis of the ‘Have a nice day’ beaming, white teeth optimism of a stereotypical Californian. This gives the Poles the ability to show appreciation for the small good things in life – a good meal, a book, a film, a day or two off work, an evening spent in conversation with friends. And the last of these I can even manage in passable Polish – a language I have grown to love.

So, Wendy & Tim, from starkly different points of departure, have somehow arrived at the same destination, and will never desert their abiding love for Poland and the Polish people.
 

Comments

No comments added