One home for all!

by Dorota Suder (Poland)

I didn't expect to find St Vincent & Grenadines

It was the last thing I expected to hear in those forlorn outskirts of the Caribbean. As we were approaching Wallilabou Bay on St. Vincent island, I distinctly heard the melody of an old Polish song. Someone was listening to Dzem, a popular band from long-ago communist times, when music was the only way we could express our protest, and the only means to break out through our closed borders. I was feeling a little woozy after several days of heaving up and down on the waves pushed by the trade winds which had brought our catamaran to this distant shore. So I was glad to be entering this peaceful bay graced by an arched rock which looked like a gated entrance inviting sailors to explore its mystery. With each passing league, the sound of the song grew clearer and clearer. “Must be some boats with a Polish crew anchored here,” I thought. However, as we sailed in, it became obvious that there were no boats in the bay, but still the song played on. We moored our catamaran to a rusty pole in the middle of the turquoise waters when I spotted a rather dilapidated house on the beach, with a tiny crooked table and a few equally crooked chairs beside it. That was where the music was coming from. Next to the house were two flag poles with two tattered flags blowing in the breeze. One of them was the flag of St. Vincent, and as I looked closer, I realised that the other one was the white and red flag of my home country. ”Well”, I thought, “some Polish people must be living here”. For such must have been the case. Poland is an inconspicuous country, squeezed between two much better known, larger neighbours. Few non-Europeans could find Poland on a map, and even many Europeans don’t know its music, so it was unlikely it was someone other than a Pole. So when we went ashore, I ran up to the house and knocked on the door, shouting a half-hearted ‘hello - dzien dobry”. I did so, expecting a Polish response. But the tall and lanky weathered man who answered the door, was not a Pole at all, but a native St.-Vincentian. When he looked at us, and past us to our boat marked with the Polish banner, a smile lit his face, wrinkled like an old map, “The Caribbean and Poland! One home for all!” he said inviting us to come later to his bar. And so we walked along the beach until we came upon a few old wooden coffins, and a semi-ruined building facing a gallows. The bay of surprises! These were the remains a setting for an episode of Pirates of the Caribbean which was filmed there. The ambience of the place was incredible, we kept peering out to seaward, looking for some sign of the Black Pearl. It grew dark quickly, as it does in those latitudes – always a surprise for central and northern Europeans. The darkness just seems to fall out of the blue. It was time to return to the mystery of the Polish songs. So we went back to the seedy beach bar which was Tony’s home; it simply morphed into a bar in the evening for any who happened by. “But why the Polish music”, we asked? He loved it from the first time he had heard it! And he heard it fairly often, whenever a Polish boat pulled in, which was much more common than we might think, he said. He always asked Polish crews to leave him their music, and in this way had accumulated an assortment of Polish recordings that would have been the envy of many a Polish music collector. Who would have figured? We spent the evening drinking rum and swapping tales of visiting sailors and distant lands. Perhaps one day Tony will close up his bar to travel the world and visit the land of his favourite music. Maybe one snowy winter evening we will all meet again in a bar in Poland where he will listen to the familiar music, and feel at home, thousands of miles away from Wallilabou Bay.