Tailor of Inverness, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

He was kept under surveillance the whole time he was in Ukraine.
    Adam worked as a foreman in a local textile factory. He had never risen higher because he refused to join the Party,which would have encouraged the spooks to keep an eye on him in Ukraine. He had succeeded in teaching himself quite a sophisticated level of conversational English by listening to the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe, a subversive act. While Adam was interested in listening to a Western perspective on the world’s news and political developments, his priority was to learn English from RFE. He was happy to bring up his family, have fun with his friends and tend his large garden and his bees. He had around twenty hives and produced a substantial quantity of honey every year, most of which he sold or bartered. This kind of free-market activity was much more common in the country than in the cities. Country folk produced more by themselves and were under less surveillance.
    Like most apiarists, Adam had developed an immunity to bee stings. We hadn’t, so it was unfortunate when, during my first visit, in 1961 at the age of two, I took against the bees and started kicking away at their hives. The bees didn’t like that, so they attacked. I was rescued by my mother and my sister. I’m told they received far more stings than I did.
    Adam had also supplemented his income by engaging in a smuggling operation across the Czech border. I don’t know the extent of his activities, but I do remember being shown a suitcase in his attic once. I think Jurek must have taken us up there. He claimed it was full of banknotes, his father’s smuggling profits. I don’t know if it really was full of banknotes. If Adam was secretly rich, he couldn’t spend his money in large amounts as it would attract suspicion. How could a factory foreman have so much money? But his was the first house in the neighbourhood to have a modern bathroom installed, with a bath and a flushing toilet. This was in the early ‘70s. Prior to that, we used an outside toilet, a cubicle next to the henhouse with a wooden platform seat above a hole in the ground. I always approached a visit there as a test, to see how long I could hold my breath.
    Later in the ’70s, Adam and Aniela bought a car for Ula, a rare luxury for Polish families. It was a 600cc Polski Fiat 126, the most common private car on Polish roads during that period. The Polish government, under Edward Gierek, wanted to gain popular support by increasing consumption, pumping money into the economy and making more consumer durables available following the austerity of the ‘50s and ‘60s. It revived a pre-war licensing agreement with Fiat and built a new car plant to produce the 126. What was a city runabout in the West became a family car in Poland, for those lucky enough to own one. Sometimes we would see these tiny cars packed with four, five or even six family members, with luggage piled on a roof rack, off on their holidays, just like us.
    Adam, Aniela, Mateusz, Ula, my sister Angela and Jurek, Lesna 1959

4: Our Polish Summers
    We stayed in Lesna for nearly a month. The town lies in the foothills of the Karkonosze Mountains, a western offshoot of the huge Carpathian arc. We went on day trips to Swieradow Zdroj, a small mountain spa, and Szklarska Poreba, the main ski resort, pretty places, full of ornate wooden buildings, cafés and souvenir shops. The big chairlift at Szklarska took us up to 1300 metres and within a kilometre of the Czech border.
    The weather was normally hot and sunny. We spent a lot of our time at Czocha, a man-made lake located only three kilometres from Lesna. Often we would walk there, making our way through the undergrowth at the back of the long garden, up the bank and onto a path which led through fields and then a forest in a deep gorge. We passed abandoned factory buildings, the workplace of slave labourers during World War Two, connected to a sub-camp of the huge Gross-Rosen concentration camp