Charlie Britten
Visiting My Penfriend
Tea in a Glass with a Slice of Lemon
When I asked him for directions, he flinched as if I'd hit him. Seeing
as he was wearing blue workman’s overalls and was in the act of sticking up a
poster, I’d presumed him to be a railway employee. Abba blond, I rated him
‘ten’ on the ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ scale.
‘Over there,’
he said, jerking his head to the right and without meeting my eye. In an
instant, he was gone.
I’d arranged to meet
my cousin, Dominik, at the main entrance. For fifteen minutes I’d been
pacing up and down the concourse beneath Gdansk Glowny Station looking for it,
my pink, plastic flip-flops, purchased from Colchester Woolworths three weeks
ago, chafing between my toes. My first impressions of Gdansk, seen from
the train window, weren’t good: tower blocks looming like oversized tombstones,
skeletal cranes lunging from the skyline, grimy pipes running alongside the
track, and blackened industrial buildings with chimneys belching acrid smoke
which irritated my nostrils, even from inside my carriage.
I wasn't supposed to
be in Gdansk.
***
Dad, who’d fled Krakow in 1939, had done everything to dissuade me from
taking a holiday in Poland.
‘But Dad, it’s
1980,’ I protested.
‘Poland still
Communist,’ he said.
‘But I'll be
all right staying with Aunt Magda in the Tatra Mountains.’
‘For sure,
Tatra Mountains very beautiful.’
He agreed
eventually. I’d spent the last fortnight with my mother’s sister, in the south,
the nice area of the country. Dad knew nothing of my Polish penfriend. My mates
did, but, coming from a school of ‘Janets’ and ‘Janices’, they presumed my
‘Jan’ to be like their French ‘correspondantes’, a foreign replica of
themselves, into ‘Blondie’, ‘Fleetwood
Mac’ and maxi dresses.
Only the Estonian
girl, Eeva, guessed. ‘He’s a boy. Right?’ she said.
We never got
on, Eeva and I, both of us children of World War Two refugees, with one foot in
England and one further east. Driven by our families, and from within ourselves,
to achieve everything, we trampled over each other, to be in the choir,
orchestra, hockey team, tennis, chess team … and, oh yes, of course … for
academic awards. Now, at the end of our school careers, the greatest prizes
were boyfriends. I supposed she thought I'd got one up on her.
Wrong there,
Eeva, although you were right about one thing. In Poland, ‘Jans’ are male, as
is probably the way in Estonia. Did Eeva wonder, as I did, about what was in her
blood and how her different life might have been? I never used to – until
Polish John Paul II became Pope eighteen months ago.
Last Christmas, hungry for contact with the real Poland, I asked my
cousin, Dominik, to write to me. ‘Sorry,’ he wrote back, ‘Useless at
letters. Too lazy. But my flatmate, Jan, he’ll do it. He loves the music
of the Rolling Stones. He wants to know if you can send him records.’
It was all innocent.
Honestly. I had a Stones LP for him in my pack, bound with sellotape in layers and layers of brown paper. Dad didn’t know about
Jan, of course. Or my being here in Gdansk. He’d have got the wrong idea
too.
When my father vocalised ‘Communism’, the word curdled the air.
‘There must be
dissidents,’ I’d said to him many times.
‘In USSR and in
Czechoslovakia,’ he replied. ‘Not in Poland. Polish Army put down Prague Spring.’
***
Now in Gdansk I’d found proper dissident. I devoured what he’d left
behind. Plain and monochrome, the poster cried ‘Solidarnosc’ with ink blotches
inside the Ss and Os. It told of crane driver, Anna Walentynowicz, sacked
for distributing pamphlets, and a planned strike by the Gdansk Shipyard workers
calling for her reinstatement. Tomorrow. Dad didn't approve of strikes either,
something we’d seen a lot of in Britain during the past few years.
‘Communists,’ he’d say,
shaking his head at the television.
***
‘Marya?’
‘Dominik?’ Although
I’d never met him before, I recognised his face from family photographs on our
mantelpiece. When he kissed my cheeks three times, I felt like a proper
Pole.
We chatted for
several minutes about the weather; I'd expected Poland to be cold but this summer was unexpectedly warm.
‘We must find Jan,’
he said at last. ‘I told him I’d meet him at 17:00 hours.’
‘Oh … yes … I
suppose.’
Casting one last glance at the spot where my dissident had stood, I
followed Dominik’s confident step through the labyrinthine concourse to the
station exit. Red and white trams hurtled along the wide street, alongside
pavements thronged with workers in blue overalls, their heads and shoulders
bobbing up and down as they walked.
Then I saw a
ray of gold, the summer sun catching his Abba blond hair. My dissident again,
stepping towards us and carrying a pink rose.
My heart leapt.
Yes, it was him. Definitely. My stomach somersaulted.
Nearer and
nearer he came. But I was in Gdansk to meet – not him – but Jan, my penfriend.
Dominik raised
his arm. ‘Jan. Over here.’
Moments later, he stood next to us. With an old-fashioned bow, he
offered the pink rose to me.
About the author
Charlie Britten has contributed to FictionAtWork,
Every Day Fiction, Mslexia, Linnet’s Wings, CafeLit, Radgepacket and the Copperfield
Review. She writes because she loves doing it.
All Charlie’s work is based in reality, with a strong human interest
element. Although much of her work is humorous, she has also written serious
fiction, about the 7/7 Bombings in London and attitudes to education before the
Second World War.
Charlie Britten lives in southern England with her husband and cat. In
real life, she is an IT lecturer at a college of further education.