My great grandfather was a shoemaker in a small village, now it is Ukraine, but before the War it was east end of Poland. Ukraine nationalists killed my great grandparents, but their sons were not at home, other people from the village helped them to escape and then my grandfather ended up as a slave worker in Germany. And the youngest brother that settled here, he was sent to Siberia or somewhere by the Soviet Union when they invaded Poland. And then through Syria, through Africa, where he met his future wife, Polish as well, she’s still alive, they ended up in Huddersfield. My grandfather wanted to come to see his brother and he took his favourite grandson with him, so I came to visit my family and I spent over a month holiday.
Back in Poland I was studying law, I finished my uni with reasonably good grades, actually quite good grades, and I was dreaming of an amazing legal career. But a legal career in Poland is for the rich or connected, so if you don’t have a lot of money, then forget about it. I spoke to my mum many times that there is no future in Poland, so when I saw a job ad by an English company, they actually came to Poland to recruit, I went for an interview and within two weeks I moved to Walthamstow. They put us on two coaches, about 80 people, the journey was 29 hours, on such a journey people drink. I didn’t, the driver did, he had two or three shots, so imagine, you fall asleep in Poland and you wake up in London with a hangover. My plan was to study law here and security work was just to start. We arrived to Lea Bridge Road training hostels, a cheap hostel, three or four floors rented by the council, they’d put here drug addicts and so on, so first impression was terrible. There was a Turkish shop opposite where there was a lady calling everyone darling, so they called her Mrs Darling! Some people were very nice and some people actually seemed to hate us and people who didn’t like us were not of English descent themselves. There was a local conflict with some young people, they didn’t like that suddenly 80 Polish guys moved into the area and they assaulted two of us, I think, three of us, then the whole hostel went down to the battle; fire extinguishers, iron bars, 15 of them against 40, 50 of us.
We had interviews in the company’s office and they only took half of us, but they basically took the first 40 people and rejected the second 40, which was ridiculous, because some of us could hardly say a few words in English and they got jobs. There was a conflict with the Polish agency, because we got £4 an hour and we rebelled, there were some threats that they would beat us up and we started making a lot of fuss and the company got rid of that dodgy agency and then we got our money paid.
[3:51] Daita arrived, she was officially my fiancée. I didn’t want Daita to go to that hostel and there was an agency on Hoe Street where a Polish girl was working, she found a room for me and so we moved in. It was a terrible condition, windows that couldn’t be opened or closed properly, with some dodgy people inside. The guy next door said that it’s not acceptable that so many people live in one house. We started saving money for our wedding and I started looking for a university to study law here, obviously Polish law is totally different, so apart from European Union law, it was quite useless. Uni was part-time evenings, I had to work around my job and then when [4:38] Ellen was born, I had to work around that as well. I was working basically all weekend to have two or three evenings off. I was leaving home before eight o’clock and I was back after midnight. The company never respected us and I stopped doing it. When I told my area manager that I wanted to opt out from over 48 hours working a week, his jaw dropped and I said, ‘And this is non-negotiable, because this is the reason I came to this country,’ and I left him with his mouth open, eyes like two pound coins, totally shocked!
When I finished my Masters in November last year, I got my current job, which is a paralegal in a property development firm. Very nice, good money and we were lucky to get shared ownership of this lovely, three bedroomed flat and after nine years it’s our home. It would be difficult to move back to Poland. We’re doing better than we would do in Poland.
