Bookpacking’s Blog

A plague of locusts buzzed hungrily from one shelf to the next, sucking each space dry, then moving on to see what other pickings could be greedily gobbled up. In stark stationary contrast, tired parents stood in a huge resigned line; supervising a choir of misery, their hungry babies protested their hunger and boredom as they queued for tills empty of change. On one hand Woolworths felt like a refugee camp, except it was excess that was the issue here.

In a photo negative of the darkest days of Communist Europe - when the hapless proletariat queued for hours to get into empty shops - here they queued to get out, weighed down by cut-price Christmas booty as store chain and high street institution Woolworths started its closing down sale. To the consumer victor, the spoils of retail war. The collateral damage: 30,000 shopworkers put out of work at Christmas.

You have to pity staff who have nothing to look forward to in January but job-hunting in a recession. Those under 30 may have no concept of what a recession is like, and they’re in for a shock. At least in the South East they’ll have a fighting chance to find another job, but it’ll be an anxious wait for the guys at Sunderland’s Nissan plant as the company reconsiders its viability.

The 80s were brutal in NE England. Despite TV documentaries’ 80s-shorthand consisting of 5-second clips of red-brace wearing Yuppies chugging champers under Canary Wharf, it was a grim time in many parts of the country. Recession, riots, wide-scale industrial unrest, weekly factory closures and the ever-present background threat of all-out nuclear war. By all means wear the legwarmers, but please leave the rest behind.

And yet we endure. Like the Buddhists say: “Everything arises, everything falls away.”

A bitter breeze blew off the Baltic and the towering masts of a ‘tall ship’ swayed gently in the night sky to the sound of waves. This lonely outpost on the end of a pier in Gdynia seemed an appropriate location for the squat grey head of Joseph Conrad to sit in contemplation. Though, given his penchant for travel and mystery it would have been more appropriate for him to be looking out to sea, and not towards the most westerly of the Tri-City group.

From west to east they are Gdynia, Sopot and Gdansk. The middle one is known as a fashionable resort, the other two for building ships. A rose between two thorns if you were being uncharitable, were it not that Gdansk is actually quite pretty and on this desolate winter’s night Gdynia appeared only plain, not ugly.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, to give him his full and un-anglicised name, was born in what is now Ukraine, but used to be Poland (Yalta rears its head again, the 1945 carving-up of newly-liberated Europe between the Allies). We heard this is the only statue of him in Poland, though there is a plaque in Krakow at one of the places he used to live. He became a British subject in 1886, and with titles like “The Secret Agent” lived and wrote a life of adventure and travel.

Respected novels like “Nostromo” were lost on Bookpacking as a sixth-former, we weren’t really interested in the “taciturn capitaz de cargadores”. It always seemed that our teacher hated school even more than us, so perhaps that had an influence. Our French teacher was committed and not a little ruthless; today we speak almost fluent French, so read into that what you will.

Despite this, whenever we are near London’s East End, we think of the 1800s, and a ship on the Thames – gateway to a relatively unknown world for a maritime nation built on Empire – and the starting point for Conrad’s most famous book. Presciently, given the horrors that swept Europe in the following century it was this Pole who gave us the “Heart of Darkness”.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised; in broad terms it’s a backwater of the psyche he’s talking about, and not a particular geographical location. But if you’d asked around in the cafes and parlours of Western Europe, we bet his contemporaries would have said of the savagery: “It couldn’t happen here”.

History casts a long shadow in Gdansk, and so we do. Bookpacking loves this kind of light and spent hours photographing the old and the new in this city. This is the old German street of Biskupia, and if you look hard enough you’ll see the odd bit of German lettering. Heading up the steep cobbles it was hard to believe it was only 10 minutes walk from the city centre.

When Gdansk was known as Danzig this area would have presumably reverberated to the sound of German not Polish, a la “Tin Drum”. Today the Polish postie stops to chew the fat with a couple of local ladies and all is tranquil in the sharp winter sunshine. The only skull and crossbones designs we see now are the ‘danger of death’ signs on the electricity junction boxes.

Those poor plucky Poles. Sometimes an alliterative and slightly patronising cliché can be justified. In this case it was the only thing Bookpacking could think to say in Gdansk on reading the region’s history. It’s amazing they have any culture, given the concerted attempts of Hitler and Stalin to wipe out intellectuals, artists or indeed anyone at all who might just offer any kind of inspiration or leadership to a doomed populace who saw WW2 “liberation” turn into half-a-century of oppression.

Like an empty crisp packet on the beach, Poland’s borders have blown this way and that as other empires re-divided a place seen not so much as a country, but as a junction on a route between more powerful destinations. WW2 actually started in Gdansk, in a place called Westerplatte, when (how cynical) a German battleship on a supposed goodwill visit fired the first shots of 1st September 1939. The free city of Danzig, as it was then known, was part of the “Polish corridor” which gave the Poles access to the sea and divided up Prussia; Hitler wanted this important Baltic port back in German hands. Poles would later play a vital role in Battle of Britain, and despite the idea that Poland was a pushover, they held out for a week at Westerplatte.

German author Gunter Grass based “The Tin Drum” around these times in Danzig, though his celebrity status in Germany has been recently dimmed by his finally admitting he was in the SS. He never killed anyone though, ok! (No-one ever does, which makes you wonder how the death tolls get so high?). Mass rape followed the Soviet invasion, just in case the Poles were getting too chirpy about the Nazi’s departure, and of course at Katyn they’d already wiped out the officer class.

Miraculously though, under communist auspices the old town of Gdansk was completely rebuilt as it used to be several hundred years ago. With a nod to Flemish architecture, the elaborate facades give the main street a carefully constructed olde worlde charm that you wouldn’t expect from Stalin’s lackeys. They’ve moved on, and Gdansk is now well worth a weekend, if not a week. The funky beach resort of Sopot sits only a half-hour away, but with its museums and alleyways Gdansk was a revelation to Bookpacking who was expecting the whole spectrum of naught but grey. Those stereotypes’ll creep up on you when you least expect them…