My dear friend “Shrinking” (Ha ha!) Violet Hornblower wrote to congratulate me on my stunning piece on the lake district last month (it’s rumoured Andrzej Zuławski has already secured the film rights, with Bogusław Linda as Harold and Sophie Marceau as myself!). Vi of course was here in the olden days as a young Embassy flapper, and I thought younger readers (both British and Polish!) might like to know that there was life before MacDonald’s.
Hornblower Heights
69 Acacia Avenue
Surbiton
Surrey
Dear Daphne,
How lovely to hear about your jaunt to the lakes, and I must say it does bring back some very fond memories of my two trips to Mazuria in the 80s. Hotel accommo-dation was a bit thin on the ground in those days, the only option being (at vast expense) the Hotel Mongrovia at Mrągowo.
Being a humble grade 9 at the time (on zero allowances and £28.00 a month DPA, which had doubled from the original £14.00 because of the Embassy renovations), this was beyond my pocket. So in early November, armed with three men, two Ford Escorts and two small tents, we set off for the Lakes. I seem to remember that the purpose for this visit was to avoid the DHM’s party, and more particularly the brown corduroy suit he insisted on wearing to any informal event (and which the doctor’s dog finished off at a later date).
I digress. North east Poland, November. Cold wasn’t the word. An inadequate nylon sleeping bag, several layers of Damart and a large Geordie did nothing to keep it out. Vast quantities of beer meant going outside for a pee in the night – not a good idea, and besides, there were lots of strange animal noises (Wolves? Bears? Or just snoring from the other tent? Never did find out). We pitched our tent a few yards from a “No Entry” sign near a town called Granica Panstwowy or something like that). By about 7.00 a.m. it became clear that none of us were going to get much more sleep, due to both the cold and the strange noises, so we decided to decamp to the Hotel Mongrovia, use their loo and have a coffee. We got rather lost getting there and arrived at 11.00 just as the restaurant was opening for lunch. It was lovely to be warm again, and we celebrated the fact with Beef Wellington (never seen before in Poland), chips and some sparkling Bulgarian red wine before hitting the Pewex and stocking up on such essentials as perfume, earrings and soft toys (there wasn’t a lot to spend your money on in Poland in the 1980s). We then decided to go to Rastenburg to see the Wolf’s Lair, and like you and Harold, got horribly lost. We finally found it (I thought it was at Kętrzyn, rather than Gierłoż, but that may have been why we got lost) and had a poke round. A guide would have been nice but we could only have had a German speaking one. Strange, as in those days there wasn’t a German in sight.
My second trip took place when the weather was a little more clement, with only two men (one of whom was the aforementioned Large Geordie) and one Ford Escort. We had decided not to camp this time and were given the address of one Frau Bauerfeind of Mikołajki (alas, no phone so we couldn’t book ahead), who sometimes took people in for B & B. We took a chance that she wasn’t inundated with German tourists. She wasn’t. Frau Bauerfeind, who somehow seemed to have got left behind after the war when the rest of the German population decamped from Ostpreussen to Westphalia, must have been 90 if she was a day. To say she lived in Mikołajki was stretching it a bit – like about five kilometers. Nevertheless, she provided clean sheets (we had to make our own beds), a communist duvet (brown acrylic blanket stuffed inside a white sheet with a large hole in the middle) and two bedrooms, plus strong black coffee and sausage with tubes in it for breakfast, out of her meat ration (which she made a point of telling us). The second man (who was on TDY in Warsaw and therefore a little more fastidious than the Large Geordie and I) made loud gagging noises while the LG and I tucked in.
We spent a pleasant day pootling around the lakes, at one point venturing out on one of them in our blow-up dinghy which we had brought with us. TDY man was very nervous about capsizing (not sure if it was the combined weight of me and LG which worried him, or the fact that the stopper kept popping out of the dinghy and we had to keep pausing to puff it up). Anyway, he declined to come further than six feet from the shore, so we left him there while LG and I ventured sedately across the lake and back. Lunch was a slurry tube (optimistically called a hot dog) wrapped in cellophane and propped up in a slice of stale grey bread garnished gaily with ketchup and mustard so bright that the seeds must have been affected by the fall-out from Chernobyl. More gagging noises from TDY man who opted for Zapiekanki from the next caravan.
In the evening we ate at the restaurant in the only hotel in Mikołajki. The menu was full of “nie ma” in those days and we settled on Zurek (more sausage with tubes in, more noises from TDY man), Kotlety z frytkami (which were cold and greasy) and the ubiquitous spoon-bendingly hard lody to follow. Not from choice, you understand, but because there was nothing else on offer. I seem to remember that it was accompanied by the cucumber salad called “mizeria”, which rather aptly summed up the whole meal. The bar offered only vodka and grapefruit juice (an interesting combination, but not one that I have tried since), not a Zywiec in sight, so tails between our legs, we returned to Frau Bauerfeind’s and were tucked up in bed by 10.00.
How things have changed! But do tell me – does the Pink still serve “Gordon Steak”? And Goulash Soup on a Friday? A little consistency would be nice in this changing world…
