Guest 1. Mania Lewandowska

14/2/18. Mania Lewandowska

I moved to London in (a) September.

They had organised a farewell party for me, where my brother said: “I remember when you were three and you would scream your lungs out every time you saw a fly. And now you’re going to uni. I can’t believe it.”

I couldn’t really believe it either.

A week later, on the first day of Freshers’, I twisted my ankle running through Camden to catch a bus, and spent five hours in the accident and emergency waiting room of UCLH, dozing off with my head resting on my mum’s shoulder. She was supposed to fly back the next day, and I was supposed to stay, mature and independent, on my own. They told me the leg wasn’t broken and gave me a pair of wobbly crutches; it was 3a.m. as I hopped back to my dorm along Euston Road. It was the first time that I realised that traffic was a constant thing in London, happening not only in rush hour, but absolutely always. You could be stuck in a senseless jam at 4 at night and you would simply have to accept the fact that in London sometimes you are just not meant to get rest.

My mum did leave the next morning and I stayed, alone with my crutches in the plain, hotel-like room. The sun shone mercilessly through the tiny window that wouldn’t open wide; I couldn’t hide from it and there, in that boiling room, I realised that I had no idea what I was doing in this strange city, on this obscure and useless degree and that was definitely the most powerless and lonely I had ever felt in my life.

Then of course it got better, as it always does; November came and the sun wouldn’t reach my cell window. We started taming London and accepting that we would never really succeed. As I was getting onto a packed train on Tottenham Court Road with two of my Polish friends, one of them said: “Do you know what I hate about London the most?”, and we replied in unison: “Everything?”.

Yet in spite of the crowd giving me anxiety, cars driving on the wrong side of the road and the omnipresent smog, I grew to love London, because it offered me something that no place in Poland ever could — diversity.

Out of 38 million people living in Poland, 1% is of non-Polish origin and 5% is non-Catholic. Even if you went to the top high school in Warsaw and try really hard to be open-minded, liberal, tolerant and unprejudiced, you can never know if you are, because you are never confronted with anything or anyone different.

Coming to London, where I had 22 different nationalities among 50 people in my year, was like a revelation. I remember meeting my soon-to-be best friend for the first time and find out she was Jordanian, and how I spent the day wondering if and how I could ask her is she was Muslim.

I had never met a Muslim person before.

In this ultra-international group, I finally started feeling safe and comfortable, because it seemed like we didn’t have to fake British accents and pretend to like pudding to feel like we belonged. Our pictures looked like a tacky Erasmus leaflet. Still, even in that group I sometimes had a sense of estrangement, especially in the beginning, when I often felt either tired of speaking in a language I had never before spoken on a daily basis, or frustrated that I couldn’t express myself just as I wished to.

When I first articulated that it was hard for me to accept that I was so much funnier and smarter in Polish, Laila said “I’m funnier in Arabic, but smarter in French”, and it made me realise that, although I was far from being trilingual, from then on my life would be something of a constant practice  of translation.

Only after some time the frustration gave way to appreciating the words that seemed untranslatable (niedosyt? cringy? obrażać się? cuddle?), to not-always-successful-but-always-satisfying attempts of explaining and redefining, and adding more and more to our multilingual dictionary.

In spite of the wonderful group of friends that shared that dictionary with me, I often did feel lonely, living in a single room in a massive, rather hostile dorm, mostly because every human contact that I wanted to experience required effort. The enormous shift from 45 hours of classes a week in school, and being constantly surrounded by people without having to arrange things on your own, to approximately an hour of lectures a day at uni, was painful for me, because it reinforced the feeling of isolation and the impression that if I don’t try hard enough, I will be absolutely alone.

What really changed everything for me and what made London something quite close to a home, was moving to Holloway to live in a house with my friends. It wasn’t only a matter of finally having my own bit of space or of being with people that I really want to be with, but also of living in an area that feels like an essence of London as I understand it - a mix of cultures and languages and cuisines, where because no one really belongs, in a way everyone does. And so I felt like it was my place as well, and started discovering, from the fruit stall that sells 5 avocados for 1 pound, to the Nag’s Head Market, where we would get out Ethiopian/Taiwanese/Colombian/Italian/Nigerian lunch and then squeeze through a tiny window on the top floor of our house onto the rooftop, where we ate, drunk wine and watched the sun set over the ridiculously enormous Odeon across the street, and I remember thinking that t I would never feel as happy again.

I still feel sad sometimes, obviously; I go to Sainsbury’s and stop by the Polish shelf and stare at the jars of mayonnaise Winiary and boxes of Delicje and I let myself be taken over by a flow of nostalgia, even though these are not even things that I would buy back at home.

Although sometimes I think that I paradoxically like London most when it doesn’t really resemble London - when you can just look at it from distance, surrounded by the greenery of the Telegraph Hill, or when you can forget completely that you’re still there, like in the middle of Hampstead Heath or in between the old brick houses of Walthamstow Central - sometimes I also think there is something special about walking through Waterloo Bridge in the middle of the night, with the soft breeze, because it really feels like you were in a film, and not actually living your life.

Insta: @manialewandowska


'The Sea' runs March 1-3 @ Camden People's Theatre
Tickets: https://www.cptheatre.co.uk/production/the-sea/