Anna and Sadie's Story — Accentricity

Sadie (voiceover): Small content warning: this episode contains a brief, non-detailed mention of losing someone to suicide.

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Sadie (voiceover): This is Accentricity Series Two: the Moving Project. Stories about migration, language, and identity from around the world.

Over the past year we’ve been teaching a free online course on how to podcast and helping a group of people to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. This is the final episode in the series and it’s my mum’s story. Instead of just asking me whether she could take part in the Moving Project, my mum went to the Accentricity website and filled in an application form just like everybody else did. So that I was sorting through the applications, and I came across hers and thought oh this is weird, this person has the exact same name as my mum, before realising that it was my mum.

Instead of the usual short audio piece and interview format this episode’s just a standard length Accentricity episode. Mum provided the content, and I did the editing, and there’s probably as much of me in there as there is of her. So really, it’s our family’s story told by both of us together. I asked her about things I’d never asked her about before, things that I don’t really know how I’d managed to never ask her about before, and I’m really glad that I did. Here’s our story.

[Anna singing in Polish]

Sadie (voiceover): My mum’s Polish but she’s not from Poland. She was born in Edinburgh. I have a memory of being maybe about seven and drawing a picture of myself. I was trying to work something out and it was something that I already understood to be quite complicated. First, I coloured my arms and face in yellow. In the code I’d made up for myself, yellow meant Scottish. Next, I did my legs in green. My legs were Irish because dad said that I had quite long legs like all his side of the family did, my Irish family. Then I coloured my arms and torso in purple, which meant Polish. I’d lived all of my life in Scotland but at that age I was proud that I wasn’t only Scottish. In school we sang O Flower of Scotland and learned about Robert Burns but I was proud that my family had other languages and other accents too. Even if they didn’t quite belong to me.

It’s a long time now since my family lived in Poland. Poland has changed without us. Communism has been and gone. Its borders have shifted. My family’s village has literally disappeared and the train station my great grandad worked at is now in part of the Ukraine. We’re Scottish now. Mostly. Except when we’re not. Still, even now, if you ask my mum, my Scotland born, Scottish accented mum, whether she’s Polish, she says that yes, of course she is. She teaches people how to say her name Durkacz [Polish pronunciation] not Durkacz [English pronunciation]. She sings Polish songs and makes friends with the new arrivals from Poland. She brought us up on Polish mass and bigos and opening presents on Christmas Eve.

Now that I study migration as part of my job, I often come across demands for migrants arriving in the UK to integrate. Some people will say yeah, we’re alright with immigration as long as people integrate. Integrating means fitting in with the local culture, adapting, maybe forgetting, maybe disappearing. And it’s something that my family haven’t really done. Why is my mum so Polish?

[Anna singing in Polish]

Anna: My mother was quite ill at the time when I was born. She’d suffered from high blood pressure and pre-eclampsia. My grandmother had fairly recently come over from Poland just before I was born, and she of course didn’t speak any English at all. She was quite involved in looking after me a lot of the time and she spoke only Polish to me.

Sadie (voiceover): My mum’s grandmother was called Jozefa Kosinska but in the family she’s only ever referred to as Babcia, the Polish word for granny. She was born in a town called Belz in 1899. When she was born it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and when she died it was part of the Ukraine, but she was always Polish. At the start of World War II, Babcia was living in a village called Sokoliki. Her two sons left in secret to join the Polish army and her husband Jan had to go into hiding. She was left behind by herself.

Anna: They captured my grandmother and they held her for I think maybe a couple of months, and they interrogated her about where her husband and her sons had gone. And this would be the Russians, Russian army yeah. Yeah, so she stayed in Poland. I don’t know what happened during the war, but it can’t have been very easy. Well, she talked to me about a lot of things, but she didn’t talk to me about what happened when she was captured by the Russians and held prisoner for a while. So I don’t know. I suspect she might have been tortured, who knows?

Sadie (voiceover): Babcia’s husband, Jan, eventually returned to the village but her two sons, Kazimierz and Tadeusz, never did. She assumed they’d been killed.

Anna: My Polish grandfather, my dziadek, he died I think shortly after the war. Anyway, so he died and so Babcia was on her own.

Sadie (voiceover): It wasn’t until much later that she was contacted by the Red Cross who were working to reunite families separated by the war. She found out that Kazimierz and Tadeusz had both survived and had ended up being stationed in Edinburgh, in Scotland, where they’d both stayed. Her sons were alive, and they were married with children. She had grandchildren and her grandchildren were Scottish.

Anna: I think I was -- yes, I was about to be born and I think my dad thought that it would give Babcia a chance. She could come over and make a new life for herself and help look after the children.

Sadie (voiceover): And just like that Babcia left Poland and moved to the other side of Europe.

Sadie (to Anna): She never spoke any English?

Anna: No, she didn’t. She didn’t have to. She didn’t have to. She would go to the Polish doctor, Dr Tomaszewski, the Polish greengrocer, delicatessen, and butcher, and so she didn’t really need to speak English.

Sadie: Because there was such a Polish community in Edinburgh?

Anna: There was, yes. Yeah, she certainly quickly made a bunch of friends because Polish people were so -- they were very devoutly religious, and the church was definitely a big centre of the community. She would have met a lot of people through the Polish church. So she wasn’t lonely. She had a bunch of old ladies, a lot of them were widows sadly, and they all wore beautiful hats. They had them tightly pinned to their heads with big hat pins and they never took them off. They would come round, and they would take off their coats, their fur coats, and put them down. Babcia would have baked all these wonderful pierniki and other Polish cakes. Makowiec, lovely. Lovely Polish cakes. She was a great baker. They would sit and eat cakes with her. My favourite was Pani Zarkiewicz who was a tall thin, bony, very old woman. Very glamourous. Always dressed in black with feathers in her hat. She was wonderful. She was like a sort of a crow but a magnificent sort of old one.

Sadie (voiceover): So my mum was raised speaking Polish.

Sadie (to Anna): Do you remember when you realised that not everyone could speak Polish?

Anna: Oh now. I think I must have realised very early really. It was almost like it was my private language -- my private home language with Babcia. [laughs] I think I must have known very early that not everyone understood. It was quite a strange thing at school because I think I was probably the only one in my class who spoke another language. In those days there weren’t -- there wasn’t the same sort of ethnic mix that there is today. There were a lot of Scottish kids in my class and who didn’t speak any other language and I think they were -- I was probably very shy about it, I think. I think I was shy because it just made me -- made me a little bit odd. I was a shy wee thing; I kept a low profile. I didn’t want to be sticking out like a sore thumb.

Sadie (voiceover): I think mum always felt the pull both ways. The desire to blend in and to be normal, but also the desire to show people every part of her cultural identity and to have a Polish community around her in Scotland. I think that’s a pull that still exists for a lot of Scottish Poles today, like the kids I worked with in my PhD research.

Sadie (to Anna): Do you think there was much of an idea of a demand for Polish people at that time to become -- to integrate, to let go of their Polishness and become Scottish?

Anna: Yes. I’m sure there was a hidden -- an unspoken need for that to happen and I’m sure that a lot of the Polish people felt that and wanted to integrate. Many of them changed their names from Polish. We didn’t.

Sadie (to Anna): No, I feel like you guys resisted that quite a lot.

Anna: Yes.

Sadie: And I mean you guys by our family. Like our family [laughs] has never really -- even now our family’s been in Scotland for a really long time, but I definitely grew up not thinking I was not completely Scottish. From both you and dad. I remember being a kid and being like yeah, I’m a little bit Scottish but I’m also Polish and I’m also Irish, even though I was born in Scotland.

Anna: Well, I think that’s something that’s very good and positive that’s happening now is that people are being taught that they should be proud of their heritage. After the war people would -- I think the Polish people would try to integrate and be as invisible as they could be and because they’re white they could. You don’t look at a Polish person and immediately think that they are immigrants but until you hear the accent really.

Sadie: With my PhD research there were definitely -- so one of the things I found that I wrote a bit about, was that amongst the kids I met, there were kids who very much -- I think I used the word visible and invisible. Like being visibly Polish and invisibly Polish. There were some kids who would change their names so that they had Scottish sounding names. They would not speak Polish at all, and they would just completely hide but then there were other kids who really resisted that, and they would be like -- they would deliberately pronounce their names in a Polish way, and they would speak Polish and they would make friends with the Polish kids. They would be like no, I’m not Scottish, I’m Polish, even if they had Scottish accents.

Anna: Yeah, from listening to your episode one, listening to Leon who he first introduced himself as Leon Żydowski [English pronunciation] or something and then he pronounced it properly the Polish Żydowski [Polish pronunciation] he pronounced it properly. But to me I mean right from early on I was always absolutely outraged if anyone mispronounced my surname [laughs] and they did all the time. They called me Anna Durkacz [English pronunciation] was the most common --

Sadie: You drilled it into me when I was little. --

Anna: -- I know.

Sadie: -- I remember you being like don’t let anyone say Durkacz [English pronunciation]. It’s Durkacz [Polish pronunciation]. [laughs]

Sadie (voiceover): Babcia died in the ‘90s. By that time, the Poles who’d moved over during the war were aging and their children and grandchildren were becoming more Scottish with every generation. As the older generation faded, mum had less people to speak Polish with. But then in the early 2000s, Poland joined the EU and Polish people began to move to Scotland again. Suddenly, mum was hearing Polish spoken in the streets again and meeting a new generation of Polish migrants.

Anna: When Polish people first started coming over to Scotland and I would hear Polish on buses, I would be delighted by it. And I would just introduce myself to people just because they were Polish, for no other reason. I mean that still happens really. That still happens. I think a lot of Polish people are quite surprised to find an older person who’s born here and who was obviously Scottish but who also spoke Polish.

Sadie (to Anna): Do you remember the first time that happened? When you heard someone speaking Polish and just started talking to them.

Anna: Yes. Well, yes probably it might have been Krysia and Magda who I met at the doctor’s surgery in Craigmillar.

Sadie: Did you?

Anna: Well, there was one of them she had a wee boy with her, and she didn’t speak any English. She was talking to the receptionist, trying to communicate with the receptionist and I just overheard, and I just offered to come in and help her because I could speak English. So I went into see the doctor with her and work out what was wrong with her wee boy who had earache.

Sadie (voiceover): One of the really strange things about living in diaspora is that the country your family left changes without you. The language changes without you.

Anna: I know that from speaking to a lot of young Polish people a lot of my Polish knowledge and understanding is quite old fashioned to them. For instance even -- well firstly even the way I speak is quite old fashioned. I speak a lot more politely. Like you would refer to people in the third person, the polite you rather than you. I think that’s possibly a bit less used now and in fact I think spoke rather politely to a young Polish woman once and she was a bit embarrassed by it. [laughs] It was only very recently that I had to teach myself certain words in Polish that my grandmother never taught me.

Sadie (to Anna): Swear words?

Anna: Just out of interest. Well, that yes. That sort of thing. Swear words and words about sex which she never taught me --

Sadie: -- [gasps] Of course.

Anna: -- and I didn’t even know existed in Polish. What are grandmothers for?

Sadie: Why did you have to learn them? Did you learn them like --

Anna: -- Oh I didn’t have to -- out of interest because I was -- I went to the library to get books out and there was a Polish librarian. She directed me to some very good current novels by current authors about life in Poland and just social situations and normal everyday life but really very good stories. There were words in that I had to look up in the dictionary [laughs] because I didn’t know them, and they didn’t have them in a lot of the dictionaries. So I had to resort to YouTube. [laughs] There is some very, quite funny videos on YouTube about yeah. Learn to swear in Polish. Learn how to chat up a girl in Polish. [laughs]

Sadie (voiceover): Nowadays the majority of mum’s life happens in English but it’s like Polish is always there, bubbling away just under the surface, waiting for opportunities to break through. She’ll go to get her car fixed and make best pals with the mechanic when she realises he’s Polish. She’ll go to a Scottish folk session and occasionally break out a Polish song. And then there are the unexpected moments when Polish ambushes her, taking her by surprise. Like the awful day when we lost my brother, Tom, to suicide. Me and my sister were on the bus from Glasgow and my mum had to be interviewed by the police by herself.

Sadie (to Anna): You told me a story that I was remembering when I was thinking about this, and I was working out what questions I wanted to ask you. When Tom died and you had to speak to the police.

Anna: Mm-hmm, yes.

Sadie: And the policewoman was Polish.

Anna: Yes. Oh my god. Yes. That was just very emotional but…

Sadie: So what was that like? Because the policewoman started to speak Polish to you, right?

Anna: Yes. [long pause] Well --

Sadie: -- Because had you been speaking in English up to that point?

Anna: Yes. Yes, we had. Yeah, but I think well I think it was -- oh it’s actually really hard for me to say it now. [starts to cry] It’s just brought it all back.

Sadie: I’m sorry.

Anna: No. It was --

Sadie: -- Sorry, I kind of sprung that on you.

Anna: -- yeah it was -- no but it’s an important point really because it was kind of like I was [long pause] -- that was the real me. It’s brought right back to my childhood. I was actually very, very, very -- [sighs] it’s an important one to very -- it was emotionally very powerful and strange. Very strange. I think she spoke to me at the end, and she lapsed into Polish. I think it’s just because she just found it [starts to cry] very emotional as well. I think she was -- you know she was just speaking to me on a very heartfelt level, and she found it easier to do it in Polish. That was it. Probably because Polish was something that I’d grown up with from tiny babyhood I think speaking with the policewoman it felt really kind of primal, if you know what I mean? That was -- I mean I couldn’t have -- [sighs] I just couldn’t have imagined that that would happen but it just -- I think at that point I felt like I’d made a very -- a very important contact with her on a -- on a very deep level somehow because she spoke to me in Polish. It surprised me how her speaking Polish touched me.

Sadie (voiceover): All through this episode the main point I’ve been making is just how important Polishness is to my mum. The culture, the identity, but most of all the language itself. So there’s one sticking point here: one thing that really doesn’t seem to fit. Why are we doing this interview in English and not in Polish?

Sadie (to Anna): So how come I don’t speak Polish, mum?

Anna: [laughs] Well, I did try to teach you some Polish, didn’t I? And we didn’t have any other Polish people around who would be chatting with you in Polish. Well apart from -- there was Aunty Renia, but we didn’t see her that often though. So in fact you could say the Lord’s Prayer in Polish. [laughs]

Sadie: [speaks the Lord’s Prayer in Polish]

Anna: That’s right. That one. Very good. You still remember it. [laughs] Very good and there was I must have taught you one or two wee Polish songs.

Sadie: [speaks Polish]

Anna: That kind of thing. Yeah. [laughs] Very good.

Sadie: But like yeah so do -- do you think if I was to actually grow up properly being able to converse in Polish, we would have had to be an all-Polish household?

Anna: I think that would have helped an awful lot. I think it would have been -- it would have been like a full-time job if I was going to be teaching you and your dad how to speak Polish. [laughs] Otherwise you see, you and I would have been having all of these private conversations and he wouldn’t have -- would have felt left out really.

Sadie: Do you think he would have minded?

Anna: I don’t know. It might have been inspired him to go off and join a proper Polish class. I don’t think he particularly wanted to learn to speak Polish. He didn’t see the need for it. If there had been --

Sadie: -- Yeah, well there wasn’t a need for it, I guess.

Anna: -- No, no. I mean nowadays if things had been different, and you had been born 30 years later maybe then yeah. Maybe now it would have been worth bringing you up speaking Polish.

Sadie: And then I guess because a lot of the -- you know Bilingualism Matters and stuff. There’s all these campaign groups almost now that are like raising your kid bilingual’s a good thing but maybe that wasn’t around as much in the childcare chat in those days.

Anna: No, it wasn’t at all. I mean I knew it in my heart. I knew that it was good to be brought up bilingual, but it would have been quite an effort just doing it on my own and not having any -- maybe if there had been like a Polish mother and toddler group or something then that would have made it worthwhile.

Sadie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally.

Anna: But there wasn’t.

Sadie: Because obviously then I just had that little bit of Polish and I always thought that was quite cool but -- and I would whip out my Polish whenever I could, but I would just mostly speak English. Then when I was doing my PhD -- so I started doing my PhD working with Polish kids and then I started going to Polish lessons at the university. I still don’t really speak Polish very well, but I do remember when I was like I’ve been learning Polish mum and I tried speak Polish to you and you were a bit like mm. [laughs] You were not that impressed by my Polish. [laughs] Do I sound weird when I speak Polish?

Anna: [laughs] No, it’s very good. It’s very good, darling.

Sadie: [laughs] It’s not very good.

Anna: You’re a good girl. [laughs]

Sadie: What does it sound like when I speak Polish?

Anna: Well, it didn’t sound correct. [laughs] The pronunciation is difficult, Sadie. You know it is.

Sadie: [laughs] I know. To be honest, I feel like your reaction when I tried to speak Polish to you was like almost disgust. [laughs]

Anna: [laughs] No. Oh no but I’m proud. I was a proud mum.

Sadie: Was it a little bit jarring hearing me try and speak Polish and sounding weird? Like be honest. Was it a little bit like why is my child not Polish? [laughs]

Anna: [laughs] Well, I’m kind of -- oh god I was about to say I was slightly disappointed. [laughs] That’s even worse.

Sadie: Because I was too. Because --

Anna: -- I’m so sorry.

Sadie: -- little bit of me -- I know this isn’t how language works but a little bit of me thought that I might have some kind of latent memory, inherited knowledge of like -- so I just kind of thought even -- I’ve been around Polish quite a lot so I thought the pronunciation might be in my blood or something. And then I discovered it’s definitely not. So it is a bit disappointing.

Anna: Yeah. It’s very difficult.

Sadie One day I’ll learn properly, and I’ll get really good, and you’ll be genuinely not disappointed.

Anna: No, I’m very proud of you, Sadie my love. Honestly.

Sadie: But…

Anna: No, no.

Sadie: I’m very Scottish.

Anna: Well that’s good.

Sadie: But does part of you feel like your children should be more Polish than they are? Because none of us are very Polish, let’s be honest.

Anna: No, no. I just think that you’re just kids that were brought up in Edinburgh so…[laughs]

Sadie: And that’s but is that okay with you?

Anna: That’s okay with me. That’s fine with me.

Sadie (voiceover): When I was little, I was proud of being Polish, even if it was just a small part of me. Then for a long time I didn’t think much about it but as I’ve grown up, I’ve started to become more interested in remembering something that I never really knew in the first place. Because the parts of me that I used to colour in purple for Polish, they’re not just parts of me, they’re parts of my mum and my grandad, Kazimierz, and my great granny, Jozefa, Babcia.

She taught my mum a song called Góralu, a Polish folk song. Mum sang it to me when I was wee, but I never knew what the words meant until I was making this episode and I looked up a translation. A Góral is a member a particular ethnic group from the Polish highlands. The song’s addressed to a Góral. And the words say:

Góral, do you not regret

Abandoning your paternal homeland

Spruce forest and chalets

And the silver streams?

Only the fathers remain in the huts

If you leave them to go in the distance

What will become of them, who can tell?

So the góral cries like a child:

Maybe I’ll never see them again

For the grandparents must be abandoned,

For bread, sir, for bread.

Babcia lived through two world wars. She saw her homeland change in front of her eyes and then away from her eyes when she was in Scotland. She died when I was two years old, the same year the Berlin wall fell. I don’t remember her, but she held me. This episode is dedicated to her and to all of the grandparents who had to leave or be left behind.

Dziękuję bardzo. I hope we make you proud.

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[Anna’s music: In Praise of Polish by The Professors of Logic]

I love the Polish language, with its sibilants and such

Logical, romantic and silky…

Sadie (voiceover): Thanks to mum for making this episode with me and for answering all of my questions, even the ones that made her cry. Mum’s a singer-songwriter and a member of two bands: Ravished Hearts and The Professors of Logic. She wrote this song about speaking Polish which I’m going to use to play out this series. I’ll put some links in the episode description if you’d like to hear more of her music.

[Anna’s music: In Praise of Polish by The Professors of Logic]

…and the passing of the seasons

Oh, I love the Polish language, but there is another reason

Gonna get dangerous, gonna speak Polish

Well my car needed fixing, so I called for a mechanic

He came…

Sadie (voiceover): I really hope you’ve enjoyed this series. Thanks to everyone who took part. Thanks to John McDiarmid, Martha Ryan, Seb Philp for making the music, and Aileen Marshall for doing the transcripts. Also, shout out to my brand-new puppy, Jeanie, who had a four-hour afternoon nap to allow me to record this voiceover. We’ll be back before too long with more stories about language and identity. Until then, keep talking, keep fighting, and remember that every voice is valid.

[Anna’s music: In Praise of Polish by The Professors of Logic]

…his syntax was so cute

His request for a cup of tea was beautifully put

Gonna get dangerous, gonna speak Polish

He started working on my car with his toolkit and his spanner

And proceeded to articulate in a fine linguistic manner

I was flattered with his use of words, his grammar was exquisite

His perfect mending of my car required a second visit

Gonna get dangerous, gonna speak Polish

Intent on demonstrating, with a measure of restraint

The eastern European man’s higher functioning brain

He leaned in close and then he put his hand upon my knee

I felt my legs go weak at the words he said to me

He said “Czy to bajka, czy nie bajka, myślcie sobie jak tam chcecie,

Przeciesz ja wam opowiadam, Krasnoludki są na swiecie!”

“Czy to bajka, czy nie bajka, myślcie sobie jak tam chcecie,

Przeciesz ja wam opowiadam, Krasnoludki są na swiecie!”