Times on Line Thursday 27 January 2005

January 27, 2005

Reportage

The Warsaw pact, 2005
Kamil Tchorek
'Teach me English and I'll be your beautiful girlfriend': why young British
men love Poland





“GARRRY from Crrroydon has been telling me all about the Whitgift Centre. He
has told me about the glass roof at East Croydon station and the Croydon
scene,” boasts Dominika.

She is a young Polish woman sipping vodka cocktails in one of the newly
opened Warsaw bars that put Soho and Greenwich Village to shame.

“Good use of the definite article, Dominika,” observes Gary.

He is a young English language teacher from Croydon. She is the archetypal
Slavic stunner, so terrifyingly beautiful that she would make a Polish
priest set light to his Solidarity flag.

Thanks to the union of Western and Eastern Europe on May 1 last year, this
scene plays out over and over again. It may be the EU’s most human
acheivement yet.

“Oh Gary, will again you tell me about Blue Orchid?” Smoke curls out of
Dominika’s mouth as she exhales and looks deep into Gary’s eyes. “Please.”

His jaw hanging off its hinges, Gary flicks his Burberry sports cap to the
back of his sweating head. His Hackett England top is sticking to his gut.

“Well, you know, I don’t like to boast, but lads do call me from all over
London to see if I can get them into the Orchid. Thing is, most times they
will come down and park the car out front. That’s as far as they will get. I
like to see them try.”

He stops there to check the damage. She smiles interestedly and adjusts her
killer black dress, knowing that her date will never guess that she made it
herself.

Shockingly, Gary promises Dominika a place on the VIP list at “the hottest
place in Europe to spend an evening”. Little does she know that the last
time Gary went to the Blue Orchid it was filled with 16-year-olds getting
high on cider, and he was one of them. Little does he know that this
effervescent dream of Fleming, Le Carré or even Tolstoy would normally have
to pay a day of her wages for a conversation class with a native English
speaker in Warsaw. In the short term, that is all he will get from her.

For there is a surreal subculture emerging in the “New Europe”, where cast
members from Only Fools and Horses are stumbling on to the set of Doctor
Zhivago and the cameras keep rolling. The phenomenon is certainly Britain’s
most prominent contribution to the social life of what is arguably New
Europe’s capital — Warsaw.

TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) courses are doing for young
British men here what the invention of the contraceptive pill did for their
dads when they were the same age in Swinging London. Very average British
youths have a chance of getting something they never thought possible.

Because it was so extremely implausable, we all suspended our disbelief when
watching Love Actually and saw the South London plonker from Central Casting
travel to America to be seduced by a pack of bisexual Playboy bunnies from
Wisconsin . . . because they liked his accent.

Not wanting to be cruel to Wisconsin, but that could never happen. Yet
something similar is happening for Gary in one of the last places people
would look. For despondent young male English language teachers arriving for
work in what may have been their short-straw destination — associated as it
is with Auschwitz, the North Pole, Chechnya, rusting shipyards and fanatical
Catholicism — Poland is often a pleasant shock.

Ask Adam Jones, 38, a veteran TEFL teacher from South London, why he has
held out in Poland for 12 winters, and his answer will be blunt.

“Women. We’re all here for them. Any man who says anything else is lying.”

Adam hasn’t bothered to learn the local language, he has a playboy lifestyle
and smugly asserts that all he does for a living is speak in his native
tongue in the luxury of his own home.

Ask Sean, a now loaded Irish property developer who started out in Warsaw as
an English teacher and found that he wanted to stay; he will tell you the
same. Ask Tom, an American journalist who started the same way too. They all
repeat the same mantra.

“Repeat after me: ‘The-dog-ran-across-the-road’,” Gary tells a class of
Warsaw It-girls (and three of their ex-boyfriends fuming at the back).
“De-dowg-rain-acrose-de-rowd,” repeats the class in unison, a waft of
perfume accompanying the chant.

“Good, that’s all for today. Now then, who’s coming down the pub?” “Me! ME!
MEEE!” the ladies shout, stabbing the air with their immaculate carmine
nails as if they had just been offered the chance to hold the class gerbil.
Not far off the truth.

With a nauseating grin, Gary ticks the register: Anetta the lawyer: tick.
Izabella the architect: tick. Justina the opera singer: tick. Dominika:
tick, tick, tick.

He slings his bomber jacket over his shoulder and gets swept out amid a
ferocious clicking of stiletto heels that echo down the corridor long after
they have left. The skin-headed Polish youths at the back are about to
repeal the act of accession to the EU. Or beat up Gary.

To this day, the learned men and women of Warsaw have debated what makes
their daughters get crazy for British males, especially because the ones
that end up in Poland tend to do so by accident and are more Bean than Bond.
Although there are pairings of British women with Polish men, the
overwhelming combination is the other way around.

Until the 1980s, cynics argued that nice young Polish kittens were by night
fanged British passport vampires, courting Britons in some elaborate
honeytrap with which they would make their way to the West. There were
examples, and often the surest way out of the communist nightmare was a
foreign spouse. But to generalise that it is all about mater- ial gain would
be unkind and inaccurate.

Since May 1, the UK is one of only three EU nations to allow unrestricted
immigration of Polish citizens. Poles don’t need British passports any more.
They don’t need British spouses for their alleged schemes. But they are
snapping up young British males in Warsaw with renewed fervour, and not
necessarily choosing to emigrate.

While feminism is almost as rare in sausage-mad Poland as vegetarianism,
Polish women are often drawn to British men for the subliminal training they
have received from mothers and sisters. Strangely, the British male who is
supposed to be in a deep crisis of identity at home has had more experience
of sexual equality than a Polish woman. In the New Europe, whether he likes
it not, he is a New Man.

“Why should I be a feminist?” a Polish woman has been known to jest. “My
husband already does what I tell him. And so does my lover.”

A repressive mix of communism and Catholicism ensured that Poland never
experienced a 1960s sexual revolution or a 1970s gender revolution as we
have in Britain. The effect is lasting. It is common to see a Polish woman
offer her hand face down for it to be kissed on meeting a man.

Gary might not impulsively go to fetch Dominika’s coat, he might not open
the door for her and hail her a taxi. But his (not necessarily callous)
disregard for Polish social protocol, his lack of any expectation for her to
perform a role of conservative femininity, will fascinate her.

Conversely, when without warning she fixes him breakfast the first time he
stays over — after she has washed and ironed his shirt — Gary may well have
a seizure. When she invites him for a walk in the forest to pick wild
mushrooms, his heart may start beating again. After she invites him to the
piano concert she is playing at, he may be a changed man.

At any rate, the exotic appeal of being British in Warsaw is set to be
watered down. As word gets out, the trickle of British men entering Poland
is turning into a flood. No fewer than four new low-cost air routes have
opened between the UK and Poland this year (courtesy of AirPolonia,
SkyEurope, Wizzair and easyJet), adding many thousands of new journeys every
week. Only about 60 per cent of them are filled with traffic caused by
Poles, some of them immigrant workers. Who is responsible for the other 40
per cent going the other way?

Gary, of course.