Next month will bring the 50th anniversary of a Morkis adventure that has been shared with just a few.
The reason this came to mind is that I was clearing out some of my father’s old papers and came across route planners from the Automobile Association (AA) to help with our journey from Scotland to Poland in 1971.
Thinking about that outward journey brought back a particular episode that my wife thought needed written down, seeing it as a possible scene in a comedy. So here it is, and it really wasn’t that funny when it happened.
It actually starts with those AA documents half a century ago.
Dad had organised what was to be a four-week stay with our family in Poland. Mum, dad and I would drive there in the Volkswagen dormobile while my sister was to join us a fortnight into the holiday by flying into Katowice.
As an AA member, dad, no doubt for a small fee, received a route package. This was contained on a number of yellow and black spiral bound books, covering the countries to be crossed. It was up to you to work out the exact roads you would be travelling on.
Probably because of my much-more-sensible-than-me sister’s absence from this cross-Europe expedition, my dad decreed I should be navigator and, given we would be mainly travelling on the right hand side in a right hand drive vehicle, I was also to be his eyes for all overtaking when we disembarked in Europe.
For a 14-year-old this was a huge responsibility, especially since my father would never in a thousand years have considered calling me “responsible”, so I decided to prove him wrong.
Over a number of weeks before we set off, I studied that route to the point where I could name every junction from Leven to the family door in Zawiercie. There was an added responsibility, once we had travelled to Hull, boarded the ferry, disembarked at Rotterdam, then travelled through Holland and West Germany, we then entered the Communist bloc.
The journey through East Germany was meant to be undertaken without stops; it was a no-nonsense autobahn run all the way to the Polish border.
For most folk today, it is probably hard to imagine what the East-West divide was like back then, especially if your father was Polish. Visas took a while to secure, checkpoints could result in all your luggage scattered in meticulous searches and you could be hauled into side rooms for long interviews. I remember once en route to East Germany we were overtaken by a car load of what probably would have been described as ‘hippies’ then, with flowers on the paintwork of their van, long hair, tie-dye tee-shirts – you get the picture.
When we caught up with them at the checkpoint, the customs guards had just finished with them, not just leaving them to re-pack all their luggage, but refit most of their car’s bodywork to the chassis, such was the scrutiny they had received.
Yes, crossing behind what Churchill dubbed the Iron Curtain was a tense experience. The Soviet bloc stretched to the West German border and it really was a time of “them” and “us”. To the West we were travelling into territory controlled by vicious ‘commies’ and an enslaved population. To the East we were capitalist exploiters threatening to undermine the entire socialist system. This was a time when atomic bombs were aimed at each side and a family travelling for a holiday reunion was deemed a potentially dangerous mission.
So, with that background, navigating the dormobile to a safe haven while dodging the cars whizzing by in the fast lane on the autobahns with no speed limits, was a task I took very seriously, aware as well that we should do nothing to antagonise the USSR and all its Warsaw Pact pals. To that end I even had a haircut.
We set off from Leven at the crack of dawn and made it to Hull without incident. My navigation was flawless. I was bunked up in a cabin on the ferry with three male strangers, something that wouldn’t happen to a 14-year-old these days, and the next morning we crossed Holland with me perfecting my shout of “clear” when it was okay for dad to overtake and by nightfall we were on the edge of West Germany, ready for the sprint through East Germany the next day.
Again, having cleared the customs and checkpoint, I navigated the family to my last frontier, the Polish border. Waiting for us there was my cousin. There was much hugging and kissing but then came the blow. Looking back it was understandable I suppose - he was a good few years older then me; this was his country; these were his roads. I was relegated to the back seat of the dormobile to sit alongside mum who knew I was peeved at my sudden and unexpected demotion. It had been a waste of time learning every road from the East German border to the family home in Zawiercie.
My instructions over the past hundreds of miles to turn left or right were replaced with my cousin’s “Na lewo” and “Na prawo”, and off we set.
I don’t think we were that far into our journey, maybe 30 minutes to an hour, when a “Na lewo” jolted me out of my huff. I had no recollection of a left turn here and a quick check of my AA plans confirmed that. It was time to speak up.
“Dad, I don’t think we take a left here, we go straight for another 50 km.”
My father relayed this to my cousin who rattled something back and dad said: “This is a shortcut. Your way is the long way. Now be quiet, your cousin knows the best route.”
The left turn we took wouldn’t really qualify as a ‘B’ road, though it did look fairly well used and led us deeper into a dense forest. After about half a mile the road became little more than a farm track, again well used, but very rough. This was the middle of nowhere.
It wasn’t marked on my AA documents and we started to climb a wooded hill, bumping and rattling along, the jolts shaking the ash off mum’s Embassy tipped. Then the track dropped quite sharply into what looked like a clearing below. I could hear the roar of engines so it looked like my cousin had proved a point, and he gave me a smug backward glance.
Dad steered the dormobile down the track and our beige VW emerged from the trees into a massive clearing in the forest.
The noise was deafening but slowly subsided as the drivers in this surprised Soviet tank company killed their engines.
It is hard to this day to really try and work out who was the most astonished. There at what seemed the only entrance and exit was a VW camper. My father and cousin would have had frozen expressions through the windscreen. Mum and I were peering out through our brightly coloured floral curtains. Nobody spoke.
I noticed the machine gun towers at the edge of the clearing, and the weapons now all seemed trained on us.
The tanks clearly had Russian markings and I was relieved the turrets didn’t all turn in our direction. One or two were manoeuvring on giant log ramps and carried on until they spotted us, then they too came to a halt. The silence was now very uncomfortable.
Then there was a bit of commotion from a building as what I reckoned to be officers raced out to see what and who had intruded on their armoured training. Mum might had given a nervous wave as a friendly “don’t shoot” gesture, while still puffing on her cigarette.
It seemed an age but was probably only a few seconds that we were locked in a Soviet-Scottish stand-off.
There was a fairly sharp dialogue in the front of the dormobile and my cousin, on national service and learning Russian, got out the camper and made his way towards the uniforms. There was a bit of an exchange and a lot of gesturing but it quickly became apparent that we weren’t about to put the VW up against some armour-piercing shells and we were duly allowed to leave – the way we came.
There were no friendly waves or cheerios from our gate-crashed military and they no doubt reckoned we were pretty close to being imbeciles.
The incident, among the Scottish family, was never discussed again and I suspect our detour was never relayed to the Polish family either.
However, it is something I have never forgotten and it must have been as a bizarre image for the Russians as it was for us. I would love to think someone took a photograph on their Zenith and it lies in some dusty Moscow archive of the Soviet armoured division's history.
I wasn’t reinstated as navigator until our return journey, and that provided other adventures, especially when I missed the turn off to Arnhem travelling through Holland. Having been dropped there in Operation Market Garden, my father was keen to see the battleground where so many of his comrades-in-arms had fallen, but that wasn’t to be. I had a good excuse though, and my father knew it, and it was his fault.
I was very drunk.
But that’s another tale.
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