‘An unlikely year’: How I moved to Poland to work in a chip shop, was offered a job by a Eurosceptic farmer and stayed with nuns Friends were surprised when Ben Aitken moved to Poland on a whim, but his year taught him about life, love and cod

I decided to move to Poland out of curiosity and boredom. Since the country joined the EU in 2004, about a million Poles have settled in Britain. I wanted to know what they were leaving behind. I was also tired of home. I wanted to uproot and replant myself. Moving to a former member of the communist bloc isn’t the only way to deal with a case of itchy feet, of course. But this was March 2016 and a referendum was in the diary, and so I thought I’d take advantage of my European mobility while I still had any, thought I’d exercise my freedom to move and work and love and learn in 20-odd countries before it was irrevocably lost.

Much is said about travel improving or stretching a person. “Didn’t she grow!” they say. Less is said of travel reducing a person, infantilising them, making a child of them, and doing them a service thereby. My knowledge of Poland was certainly childlike before I went there. If you’d shown me pictures of John Paul II and Lech Walesa, I don’t think I’d have been able to say which was the pope and which the ideology-crushing electrician. I knew nobody in Poland and not a word of the language. My ignorance, far from being a deterrent, was another reason to make the switch. I wanted to not have a clue. I wanted to learn.

Another thing that made Poland an attractive option was that whenever I mooted the idea of moving there, people generally laughed or frowned or told me not to. If I’d said France or Spain, or Denmark or Italy, nobody would have questioned my intent, because common sense has these countries down as desirable locations. In my experience, things that are commonly frowned upon or unsung tend to be immensely pleasurable. I hoped that Poland – a country of 40 million people, of Warsaw and Krakow, Chopin and Conrad, beaches and mountains – would prove another.

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I booked the cheapest flight to a place I’d never heard of – Poznan. When my mum urged me to be cautious and just go for the weekend, I shamelessly – and pompously – quoted Ezra Pound, who said that a glance is the enemy of vision, that a glance wouldn’t do, that if you’re going to go you ought to go properly.

Peeling potatoes and exploring the country

When I arrived in Poznan, I moved into a flat with three young Poles (an engineer, a beautician and a pizza chef) who would soon become friends. I tried teaching English to Polish children (I’m not sure how much any of us learnt), then accepted a job in a fish-and-chip shop on the minimum wage (about 10 zloty, or £2, an hour). When I wasn’t peeling potatoes and boning fish – and falling in and out of love with my boss, Anita – I was on the road scratching the country’s surface.

I was offered a job by a Eurosceptic farmer; stayed with a dozen nuns in a fourteenth-century abbey near Krakow; spent Christmas with a family of strangers because I knocked on their door and said I was alone. I did all this against a colourful political backdrop. Brexit. Trump. A divisive new Polish government. There’s no two ways about it, it was an unlikely year.

It was also an educational year. I learnt how to get the skeleton off a cod in under a minute. I learnt about sixteen words of Polish. I learnt that my favourite Poles are a pair of cartoon characters called Bolek and Lolek, chiefly because over the course of 600 episodes neither of them says a single word of Polish, a reticence I appreciated, and was able to relate to. I learnt that, on average, Poles would sooner fall to their knees and take a blow to the head than hear a bad word said about pierogi.

I also learnt that the more we move, the more our affection spreads. This may sound like a platitude, but to me it’s true. About halfway through my stay in Poland I met a young boy at Poznan airport. I had been in England for a wedding and was queuing to be readmitted to my new home.

‘The more we move, the more our affection spreads’

The man behind me in the queue was speaking in Polish on the phone. He sounded more Polish than anyone I’d ever heard. When he finished the call, his son, who must have been nine or ten, turned to his father and said, “Ere dad, will yer ‘old me coat for a bit?” The boy sounded more English than anyone I’d ever heard. He sounded like a greengrocer from the east end of London.

I turned to the pair and got some small talk going, probably about how crap the weather in London had been. I learned that the boy had lived in England all his life, while his father had lived in England for a quarter of his. It was obvious that the boy loved football. He was wearing goalie gloves and shin pads in an airport, for heaven’s sake.

Before long he was asking me, first shyly but then with confidence, what I thought of Messi, Ronaldo, Kane, Lewandowski, all that mob. I told the boy that a feather would tip the scales, and then asked him who he’d want to win if Poland played England at football. He looked at his dad, then at the floor, then at his dad, then turned to me and said: “I think I’d like it to be a draw.”

A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland (Icon, £12.99) is out now