Because I had arranged while at the Vancouver Sun to meet a copy girl named Helena Zukowski in Warsaw at high noon on July 1, I was in a panic. She had won a scholarship to study in Poland because of her Polish heritage, and I had figured there would be a main railway station in Warsaw and obviously there would be a big clock there. Of course, that was months before I left Vancouver. I had said I would stand below the clock at high noon on July 1.
Setting out through East Germany to Berlin, I immediately found a youth hostel. I then wandered around and came upon a food fair and saw they had a money exchange. I had arranged a visa for Poland in London, and the travel agency had exchanged the money for me, enough for my two weeks in Warsaw.
The exchange rate was one grosz to the dollar and a hundred groszy to one złoty. In the Berlin exchange I found it was four groszy to the dollar. So I was suddenly rich.
After several days, I headed for the Polish border again without proper papers or visa. They were so puzzled again by this silly kid on a Vespa that they somehow let me through. On the first day in Poland I was speeding toward Poznań. The Polish rural roads were filled with chickens, pigs, cows, everything.
Late in the afternoon I came across a herd of cows crossing the road. I stopped and let all of them go by except one lonely cow trailing the herd. When I zoomed the Vespa, the cow suddenly turned around and came back across the road.
I went ass over teakettle across the cow and landed on the rough macadam road with its raised gravel. It removed two layers of skin from each of my ten fingers. There are only two levers on a Vespa on the handlebars. One is the gas and the other is the brake. So each time I squeezed one of them, blood oozed out of my fingertips.
It was 5:00 p.m. when I arrived in Poznań. Everybody was leaving their offices and lining up at the bus stop. They looked at me, this guy with sunglasses, no helmet, and a wild red beard with blood dripping from his fingertips. A man stepped out of the lineup and said, “Come with me,” and took me down an alley.
I didn’t know if he was planning on mugging me or raping me. He produced a key and guided me through the back door. It turned out he was a pharmacist. Taking me into his store, he bandaged me up.
At play during my European travels.
Still trying to get to Warsaw by July 1 to meet Helena, I left Poznań early the next morning. After dropping my bags off at the Windsor Hotel in Warsaw, I went to the clock at the railway station and stood there for four hours. She never showed up. The next time I saw her, years later, she was editor of a magazine in Palm Springs, California. She apologized.
Upon returning to the hotel, my good fortune due to the exchange rate was immediately apparent to the staff. Because I had this ridiculous money that I had bought for 25 percent of its worth, I couldn’t bother with all of these hundreds of groszy that were tearing holes in my trousers. So I dumped them in a wastepaper basket in my hotel room.
The word soon got around through the cleaning women that a mad American millionaire was so rich he was throwing away money. Probably a week’s wages for them. So whenever I went down to the hotel dining room, three or four waiters attempted to elbow one another’s teeth out in order to serve me and get the tip.
Shortly after arriving, I sent a dispatch to the Vancouver Sun, which it ran on the front page. In the piece I said, in my innocence, “The secret police cannot be seen anywhere in Warsaw.” My close friend, Carol Gregory from The Ubyssey days, read this and sent a letter to the editor, stating that she wasn’t aware that people walked around Warsaw with badges on their jacket saying, “Hey, I am the secret police.”
As arranged in London, I had to have a Polish government tourist guide, and the young lady showed me all over town. By this time, I was fed up with the sunglasses and explained to her that I wanted to cut short the visit to get back to Berlin so I could buy new glasses. She sympathized with my plight and arranged for me to leave. So I left the whole country by making a profit.
Upon returning to Berlin, I met at the youth hostel a young South African architect who was doing the same thing as I was on a motorcycle. Someone who could come in very useful when years later I went to Cape Town to release Nelson Mandela from jail. We roamed around Germany together and then down to Austria. One day in Vienna, in heavy traffic, he was ahead of me and jumped the red light. I had to stop. As a result, we lost each other.
When I finally got back to London, I walked into a flat to pick up a girlfriend, and there was my old South African buddy in the same room, taking another girl out. Small world.
Then I went to Venice, Rome, over to Monaco, and the rest of France on the way to Spain where I was going to spend the winter and write the great Canadian novel. I found a little inn outside Málaga owned by a Dutchman who couldn’t speak English. One night he came to me, pointed at the sky, and started to bark. I couldn’t figure out why he was barking until he got through to me that the Soviets had just launched Sputnik with a dog in it.
The great Canadian novel not complete, I headed north for London. I came out of sleepy Spain into the first French town where it was filled with crazy French drivers. A guy zoomed out of a side street and hit me. I went up in the air and came down on top of the scooter.
Luckily, I didn’t come down in front of it as I would have been killed. I woke up in the hospital, not being able to speak a word of French. None of the staff in this small town in this small hospital could speak English. They had seized my wallet and my passport while trying to figure out what to do with me.
One day a man walked into my room. He said in English, “I fought with Canadian troops in Korea and they were good guys. I saw the picture of your wrecked scooter on the front page of the paper. What can I do for you?”
His name was Guy Chaumont. He had been an officer in the French Army and had just won the Legion of Honour (the French version of our Victoria Cross). Guy explained that because of this honour he had the authority to deal with all sorts of officials and solve my problems. He got my scooter fixed, bullied the hospital authorities so I didn’t have to pay, and took me home to recuperate with his wife, who was an American.
When I got to Paris, I stayed with a couple of girls from Vancouver — Carol Gregory and a friend. I was down to $10 and went to American Express to get it changed. As I walked along, a guy kept following me and whispered, “Money change, money change.” These wide boys, of course, hung around American Express, since they knew that was where the dumb tourists were going to be.
At that time, as in Poland, French currency was at an artificial rate, and this guy was offering me a much better deal. He said, “Follow me.” We walked and walked through alleys and around corners and came to a deserted building. He arranged a deal, and I tried to offer him my money, but the guy said, “No, no. Wait here.”
He went away for five to ten minutes, then returned with a big thick envelope that looked to be about the right size for the money I was to receive. After he handed it to me, I gave him my money, then he turned and ran off. I opened my envelope, and it was filled with newsprint. I sat on the curb and cried.
A policeman came along and asked what was the matter. I explained. He shook his head, shrugged, and walked away. Another dumb tourist fleeced outside American Express. I borrowed enough money off Carol to get me across the channel to England and arrived at the home of old friends Patricia and Tony Prosser with one cup of gas left in the Vespa.
5
London Town
I couldn’t get a journalism job in London but heard they were always short of substitute teachers in the east end of the city. The east end was slums. Full of poverty and crime.
Going out there, I found that the teachers gathered down the street some distance from the school and walked in together for safety. Apparently, if you went in alone across the schoolyard, the kids supposedly playing pickup soccer would aim the ball at you, occasionally accompanying it with rocks.
I