Having gotten hold of a few books in English this week (and swallowed two of them in as many days), I have realised that the Poles have made their way into the pages of British literature. They manifest there as surly migrants, mangling their idioms and dropping their articles and pining unpronounceably for Zdroj. Occasionally they try to extract some poetry from their migrant experience but they seldom demonstrate any wit. The women are bossy and demanding and enamoured of short skirts.
It’s interesting to see that none of this gels with my own personal stereotypes about Poles, carefully cultivated over the last year. I especially object to the unfunniness of the literary version, though I have observed that gratuitous smiling is met here with suspicion or derision (are you drying your teeth?). Or maybe mass migration produces some sort of mutation in the national character ?
I have also observed a general mistrust of strangers which could easily turn into glowering paranoia in exile. It also makes routine icebreaking so excruciating that the conversation often goes no further. My latest experience of this was a dismally failed attempt to chat up two out-of-towners from Bydgoszcz at an English for Business workshop on Friday. Rather than the usual banalities opening the way to more interesting topics, the relationship ended after a brief interrogation from my side led them to visibly shrink away from me as they produced monsyllabic answers and turned to each other for shelter. After this I gave up and, surveying the room, noticed that almost all the unaccompanied attendees preferred to lurk in lonely corners avoiding all eye contact, rather than expose themselves to the sort of social agony I had just undergone. After thatI wasn’t brave enough to try again with one of the wallflowers and only dared approach people I already knew.