Blue Caller
Our family name was once the last entry in the old Glasgow telephone directory. That 'Z' followed by a 'y' was pretty hard to beat and, for a very short time, we took a kind of absurd pride in this alphabetical fame. Until, that is, the crank calls began.
"Congratulations on being the last name in the book. We here at the G.P.O would like to send you a prize...but first you have to test the line by standing on one leg and whistling"
That kind of thing pre-dated the radio "wind-up" by decades (sorry Russell Brand and Robin Galloway) but it was one of the least annoying kind of calls. In the main we would get rung up day and night by teenagers shouting racist abuse down the line. Racist and ignorant abuse, because many of the screamers couldn't make the connection between our name and its Polish origin. Instead they suggested that we return to Pakistan, India or, slightly nearer the mark, Germany. That, I have to say, is the closest I ever came to racism when I was growing up. Yes, of course, there was plenty of religious bigotry, but in the east end of Glasgow that went with the territory and those stories are for another day.
This afternoon, however, I boarded a train to Glasgow and began reading the paperback edition of Nella Last's Peace. It's based on the daily diaries that housewife Nella Last recorded as part of the Mass Observation project during and after the Second World War. It was chosen as a Book of the Week on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio 4
In one entry - from 1947 -Nella wrote about the number of Polish ex-servicemen who were hanging about the streets with no work to occupy them.
"Why don't they either send them home or let them work? They slouch so aimlessly about as if with no hope - they are dying slowly. If there is a risk of what the Russians will do to them! - well all life is a risk. They are men, and we have no right to spoon-feed anyone."
This passage was still in my mind when I got to Queen Street and took a taxi to Craigend so that I could deliver Christmas presents to my Dad. Over mugs of tea and fish-suppers we got to talking about those post-war years. Had he, I wondered, found it difficult to get a civvy job after his years in the Polish Free Navy ?
"Three years with no job, " he told me, "all the jobs were kept for returning British servicemen. We were so hungry, that's what I remember, hungry."
He went on to describe the graffiti on Glasgow walls. "Poles Go Home, Yanks Go Home..but we had no home to go to. The Russians were waiting at home. Poland had traded one set of occupiers for another."
After those three years my Father got a job at Faslane, breaking up old ships. But it meant leaving his wife and son (my Mother and oldest brother, of course) back in Glasgow while he and his workmates were housed in old army barracks. From that start, however, he began to learn the skills that finally led him to become a qualified welder. But at every turn he would confront some form of prejudice - sometimes even from trade unions - that would have to be overcome or ignored.
Today I can only count my blessings. Oh sure, there are a few vile comments about me on internet message boards, but you have to search them out (I do). More commonly I get accused of being anti-Scottish because I work for the British Broadcasting Corporation - or anti-English because I work for Radio Scotland. One or two zealots believe a person with a name like "Zycinski" must know nothing about Scotland. Those are the same kind of people who talk about blood purity and compulsory DNA testing.
But here's a thing: today on the train I heard someone talking about the new generation of Poles who have been arriving in Britain over the past few years to take up low-paid jobs in the service industry. That same someone suggested that the money those people have been sending back to Poland has, somehow, contributed to our current economic woes. It was time, said that someone, for them to go home, to go back to where they belong.
Is this how it starts? If so, don't call me at home. We're ex-directory these days.
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