Arriving in Warsaw, I receive a text from my friend: ‘Hi, I am in a pub/club at pl. zbawiciela… let me know when you land, if you want to meet there or at mine…’

I check the bus timetable. I’ve just missed the last bus but there is a night bus going to the centre of town in a short while. (God bless Warsaw night buses, you can almost get anywhere) Do you need help? asks a woman who was on the same plane. I explain that I’m wondering whether to go to Ochota or to pl. zbawiciela. You don’t want to go to Ochota, she says, it’s a very rough part of town. There are some great bars at pl. zbawiciela. This is a good place, I can show you.

She tells me that she just got back from Portugal, where the weather was good but her skin did not tan. Now I need to go to the Solarium tomorrow, she says, otherwise my friends will not believe I have been away.

I decide to get off the night bus at Banacha, thinking I might walk that way, but there’s a bus to Szczęśliwice. The end of the line, by the park. So I go to Ochota anyway and my friend is now at home, with a pot of soup ready.  Don’t ask questions, just eat it. It might seem peculiar because I made it and then decided there wasn’t enough if all the musicians came round who had promised to come round, so I added another base to it. But only Adam the guitarist came, and he doesn’t like it so there is a lot of soup. It has a sweet and sour taste, but I get used to it and eat it all. Sometime after 2 am we take a taxi to Praga to a musicians after hours party in a bar in a courtyard.

The musicians are in good spirits, playing in twos and threes. Others simply crowd the bar and consume the spirits. There are two guys at the bar who start talking to or at us as we wait to get served. Ignore them, they’re jerks, she says, they make me sick. They are making assumptions about us. They’re saying, ‘Is she with him? Bloody foreigners coming here and taking our women, he must be a fucking artist.’ One of them asks me what I do, while the other starts talking French and Russian to me. I tell them I’m an artist. What else can I say? I don’t encounter this attitude very often, this kind of soft antagonism mixed with national pride. It’s hard to be an independent woman in Poland, she says later, you always have to be in the possession of some man. This attitude really annoys her (for the next few days). I suggest we could get t-shirts saying ‘We’re not a couple’ or ‘Actually, we’re gay’ or ‘I should be so lucky…’ She is not amused.

We drink a Wisniowa cherry vodka poured over a large glass of ice. This Praga is sometimes usually described as the wild part of town (in the quality press, as in ‘take a walk on the wild side’…) The guitarist is here tonight in preference to a gig on the TV show ‘You’ve Got Talent.’ He could have provided the accompaniment to a post office worker, Pani Marianny, who will be singing a song about a little dove. She has wanted to be an actress for the last 30 years, and this is her big chance. The guitarist has chosen, perhaps wisely, to be here instead of in a TV studio, where he would have been obliged to wear a sombrero. He calls us on Saturday to remind us to watch the programme, and celebrate his missed opportunity. This time Pani Marianny does not win the sympathy of the audience or jury with her unusual vocalisations. She is beaten by a rather good acapella group covering a Red Hot Chili Pepper song and a blonde blind girl whose guide dog is very ill who performs a song about her deceased father. She looks like a saint and she’s bound to win the final.

Helena

Use milled rye. Pour hot  water over it to make it really sweet. Cool it to 27 degrees. Add yeast. Let it ferment for three or four days. Distill it. It is very easy to burn it, so distill it using steam. Get the water boiling hot and steam it through a pipe. The most important thing is what you distill and ferment it in. If you use a metal container, you can get iron particles. My Dad used glass, and stainless steel sometimes. Charcoal filters remove the impurities and carbon filters remove any smells.

This is his recipe:
1 kilo of sugar
3 litres of water
10 decagrammes of fresh yeast
26/27 degrees
7-9 days to ferment it
Cool it for a day or two
Distill it
Add fruit or jam for taste

You can use tomato puree because tomatoes have lots of potassium and yeast likes potassium.

The best one is when you just use rye, or the yeast for making wine. The wine yeast takes longer because it requires longer temperature.

Like to flavour your vodka? Put sugar onto a thin slice of bread skin, burn
it and drip into the glass. (I have a bad memory of my daughter lighting a glass of absinthe and her friend burning her lip.)

The old manor house is crumbling into the earth. No-one has seen the owners, who are believed to live in America if they exist at all. The aristocrats sold up in the 1920’s, fled, left behind their debts. We climb through the brambles and overgrown foliage, like in a fairy tale. There is a chill in the air. There is hardly a sound. A carpet of plums lies undisturbed at our feet. There used to be an orchard here with apple, pear and cherry trees. Edible berries on the bushes remain untouched. You can still make out the shape of the grounds,  planted with Canadian redwood, spruce and pine, linden and czarny bez (black elder). The roof is collapsing, the once solid floors cracking apart. I hesitate to descend to the basement. Bits of wooden furniture are strewn about, some rusting keys, parts of a spinning loom. There are hardly any white tiles left in place on the floor to ceiling stove at the centre of the house. As a child she was scared to come here, thinking it was haunted. It is beyond repair, but must have been a fine home once upon a time.

Once upon a time, war came to these parts. There was a wooden house, built by her Grandfather. This was occupied by the Polish army, then the German Army, then the Red Army. Why, no-one knows. It does not seem a strategically important place. It is not like the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte at the battle of Waterloo.  It is not even the highest point, this being some ways away and despite being called the Big Hill, it looks like a small mound with a scattering of trees. Woods obscure some of the views. Perhaps it was just comfortable, this farmhouse of shaved logs, and that may have been sufficient reason for weary soldiers far from their own hearth. 

We drank vodka, his home made recipe. The Germans shot people like dogs, he said, they had no mercy. Not all Germans, you understand, to be more specific, I mean the SS troops. For a time we had to run away into the woods and we ate boiled flour with water, and boiled swede. The Russians were more friendly. They weren’t so bad. You know, they were sad to leave, singing an old song, “Why did we have to get to know each other, oh why did we part…?” They went back to Moscow and sent letters to the family, but this was a time when partisans were still active in the countryside and it was best not to reply. My Mother was killed in the yard in 1944 during an artillery bombardment, Russian shells or German shells, no-one really knew. I was ten years old. Two years prevously, I saw vodka being made for the first time by my Father and Uncle. I didn’t touch a drop until I was eighteen. Or smoke a cigarette.

This current house dates from 1972. You can still see the old foundation stones in a corner of the basement, alongside a store of local wine, coal, potatoes and the ancient accoutrements to make bimber. The essential equipment came from a man near Gdansk. They look like parts of a rusted car to me. These are dairy farms, producing milk for one of the biggest producers in Poland, and in particular for serek wiejski, a local cottage cheese. (I am not a fan of cottage cheese, but this is delicious at breakfast.) And, as is tradition, they produce their own vodka for home consumption.

She is drinking crème źołądkowa gorzka. Children’s vodka, her Father says quietly, though later she proves to be quite capable of matching him, homemade glass for glass. There is a bottle of Orzechówka Lubelska on the table at the beginning of the evening. I have to say this walnut vodka is one of my least favourite drinks, a little too smoky and like cough medicine for my palate.

We talk about how to make vodka. I feel like I am falling into the past, of my childhood visits to family in Ireland, to the bars in the back rooms and the potcheen stills. And something about the landscape reminds me of this too.

He tells me he used to make vodka without yeast, just with rye and some herbs and honey, and how it tasted just like cognac. But it was hard to make he said, it often failed.

In communist times there were great efforts made to stamp out home production.
I have seen numerous propaganda films about the evils of bimber.  I ask, What’s the situation like now?

He shrugs: It is not illegal to make it for your own consumption at home. It is not advertised that you make your own vodka, but since 1989 I don’t think people pay attention. There was a guy in the next village that died. Police came and investigated and asked, What were you drinking? Home-made of course. They took away a sample to the lab to test and the alcohol was fine. He was 27 years old and had a heart attack and cracked his head open on the ground, but it was not the quality of the alcohol that caused the problem. He concludes that alcohol is good for your heart. He says that most heart medicines are based on alcohol. (I resolve to invite Dr. Middleton for a drink to discuss this matter in further detail).

I text Iwona and ask her what are the rules about making home-made vodka. She replies, enigmatic as usual: Only one rule, when it is proposed one should not refuse.

What else did I learn from my evening? In these parts, the definition of an alcoholic is a man who drinks alone. And though he tells me that sleep is the best cure for a hangover, he rises every day at 5 am to milk the cows. I will try to milk the cows, but later in the day.

As I drift off to sleep, all I can hear is a gentle wind, rain and cows, cows, cows.