Friday 1 April 2011

WALK THE WILD ROAD

I'm delighted to say that my new book, WALK THE WILD ROAD, has just been published in the USA by Sourcebooks. Over the next few weeks I'll be writing about why and how I wrote the book.

Posted by Nigel Hinton at 08:30 0 comments
 

WALK THE WILD ROAD - THE FIRST STEP ALONG THE ROAD

My father died in 1989 at the age of 96. I was 47 at the time – so I was two years younger than he had been when I was born. There was much more than a large age gap between us. He was a child of the late Victorian period and I was born during the second world war and destined to be a child of the rock‘n’roll era. I must have seemed mysterious to him with my love of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley - "Put him out of his misery," he used to say when I was playing the music of my heroes . He certainly remained a mystery to me.

His generation didn’t talk much about themselves so I learned almost nothing about his early life: his years in Brazil and Argentina where, in his late teens and early twenties, he worked as a telegraph operator; his decision to come back to Europe in 1915 because his twin brother had enlisted and my dad felt that he couldn’t let his brother fight alone; his years in the trenches; how and where he met and married my mother. All of this remained largely unspoken to me. And perhaps I was not curious enough to ask and insist on answers. I suppose it all seemed so impossibly long ago and far away. If he’d been a Second World War RAF pilot, or had been captured and held in Colditz Castle perhaps I would have plagued him to tell me all about it.

                                          My dad in uniform during World War One

And then, when he died, I wanted to know everything – too late, of course. I asked my three sisters, all much older than me, and they knew more, much more. I had known that he liked women –he was much more obviously chatty and at ease with my wife than he was with me, for example – but now I was hearing suggestions about possible affairs. A more astonishing revelation, though, was to hear that he had been sent to prison sometime in the early1930’s. Even my sisters didn’t know the full story but they told me that he had apparently pilfered a small amount of money while working as a clerk in the Post Office. He was charged with ‘Theft as a Servant’ and sentenced to three months in Wormwood Scrubs. Even more shocking, in a way, was the news that the ‘breakdown’ that he had necessitated him going away to hospital when I was twelve was, in fact, a failed suicide attempt. He had tried to gas himself.

Suddenly this man whom I had taken for granted as my old, rather uninterestingly ordinary father, turned out to have a complex past. I wonder what he must have felt when he read my book, BUDDY, in which the young Buddy’s father is sent to prison. Did he wonder if I knew about him? And did I, in fact, know about it at some subconscious level, having heard whispers as I was growing up? How I wished to be able to talk to him about it all. Why had he taken the money? Was it because it was during the Depression and he needed it to support his family? What had driven him to try and take his life? He would have hated having to answer questions like that, I’m sure, and would have clammed up and kept it all locked away inside him.

But having found out all these things about my father, I now wondered about his family. His father, my grand-father, I vaguely knew had come from Poland. He had died ten years before I was born and, perhaps because of that, I had, again, been totally lacking in curiosity about his life. When I asked my sisters about him, they were able to tell me their memories of him as a man – warm and funny and friendly - and a few things about his life in England but very little indeed about his life in Poland. But what they did tell me really aroused my curiosity. Apparently he had left his home in Poland in 1870 when he was twelve. He had walked alone to the sea – a journey of nearly 200 miles. He had got on a boat, had gone round the world a couple of times and then, at about the age of fifteen, he had landed in London.

What a fabulous story! One which begged many, many questions. Why did he leave home? How long had it taken him to walk to the sea? Where had he caught the boat? But when I asked, no one could give me answers. A few guesses – poverty had driven him out. As the eldest he had taken the decision to go in order to leave one less mouth to feed. But just guesses.That was it. A few tantalising facts and nothing more. How could the details of such an adventure have been forgotten in just one generation? Or had they never been told? Had my grandfather, like my father, been a secretive man?

Whatever the reason for the lack of detail, the spine of the story - a twelve year boy alone on the road – was fascinating. And over many years, while I wrote other stories, I kept thinking that one day I would use it as the basis for a book.
Posted by Nigel Hinton at 12:58 2 comments
 
 
 

2nd Step Along The Road

For nearly fifteen years the story of my grandfather leaving home when he was a young boy stayed at the back of my mind while I wrote other things. From time to time the idea would surface for a while and I would play with various possibilities before tucking it away to wait for the right moment.

The moment came once I had finished my book TIME BOMB. That book was the first time that I’d directly drawn on my own life. The plot was entirely fictional but the setting – 1949; a street in South East London with a large bomb site; a group of boys who spent all their time out on the street or playing on the bomb site – was based very closely on the world I had grown up in. It took me nearly a year to write TIME BOMB and during that time I vividly remembered the sights and smells, recalling in great detail things that I had forgotten. That long trip into my past set me thinking about the family I had never known; in particular, my Polish grandfather. The English ancestors from my mother’s side didn’t interest me very much at all, except for the fact that when I was young I always thought that her father – in the few photos I’d seen of him – looked like a dead ringer of how I imagined Jack The Ripper. On top of which, he’d been working in Deptford as a doctor, the supposed profession of the Ripper, at the time of those infamous killings which took place just across the River Thames in Whitehall. A perfect suspect.

 
My maternal Grandfather


But, him aside, the one who really intrigued me was my father’s father, that intrepid 11 or 12 year old who made his way alone from home across Poland and into the unknown.

I did a bit of research about Poland at that time and was reminded that the country hadn’t existed as such in 1870. It had been divided among three powers – Russia, Austria and Prussia. And in that year Prussia went to war with France. Even more intriguing. Had my young grandfather tramped across a land at war? And, because no one knew any more than the bare facts of his leaving home, walking to the sea and getting on board a boat, I began to see the possibilities for inventing a story of adventure and daring. But still it would be interesting to know just a little bit more of his real life story.

I went back to grill my sisters for any detail that they might have forgotten. And my sister in New Zealand came up with a name. The family, she recalled, had lived on a smallholding in a village called Wilhelmsdorf. The parcel of land they worked went down to the River Netze. At last, something to go on. Wilhelmsdorf and Netze sounded very Germanic and I correctly guessed that they were probably to be found in the area that had been occupied by Prussia. The problem, though, was that these names were the German names and not to be found on any current maps where the names were in Polish.

I began searching on the internet and eventually came up with two new names – Polichno, was what Wilhelmsdorf was now called. And the River Netze was now known as the River Notec. And now that I had the modern locations I began the long search on old maps for the original place names.  And found them. The River Zetze ran into Nakel and then was channelled into the Bromberg Canal. And Wilhelmsdorf -  was there, just over the river from Nakel. I stared and stared at the maps. That was where my grandfather had lived.

Click on the maps to enlarge.





 
Posted by Nigel Hinton at 10:54 0 comments
 
 

The Map of the Road

Now that I had the geographical location of my grandfather’s birthplace and early home, I spent a lot of time looking at maps of that area and of the whole of Poland. Which way had he gone? It was unlikely that he would have walked westward to the North Sea, especially as, from the beginning of 1870, the Prussian army had been massed along the border with France and then the Franco-Prussian War had broken out. There was, I guessed, very little likelihood that he would have made his way through the battlefields of that brief but bloody war. Of course, it was tempting to suggest that he did – it would be quite some story. But though, in the absence of any firm facts about his journey, I had full licence to make up what I wanted for the purposes of the book, I did want it to be credible and to follow, as far as possible, the likely route he had taken.

So the most probable thing he would have done is to have headed north to the Baltic Sea. And the nearest big port was Danzig (modern Gdansk). The more I looked at the map, the more convinced I was that Danzig had been his destination.

Click on map to enlarge it



So how would an 11/12 year old peasant boy have found his way there? The answer was obvious. He would have followed a river, certain that it would eventually bring him to the sea. And there was only one real contender for the river he would have followed. It is a river known at the time by its Prussian name, the River Weichsel, though more commonly to the rest of the world as the Vistula, although its proper Polish name is the River Wisła. It is the longest river in Poland, flowing out of the Silesian Beskids, the mountains on the western end of the Carpathian mountains. It runs from the south of Poland, 651 miles across the country to the north coast where it flows out into the Baltic Sea near Gdansk

And in order to get to the river, I saw quite clearly on the map, he would have left his home in Wilhelmsdorf, walked the few miles to Nakel (nowadays Nakło nad Notecia), then followed the Bromberg Canal eastwards  to Bromberg (now known as Bydgoszcz) and thence on to the river to make the journey north to Danzig.

 
 

The Historical Background of The Road


Now that I had mapped out the probable journey my Grandfather had take in 1870 I began to research the time and the place. What a terrible period it was for Poland. The country had been increasingly taken over by its three more powerful neighbours - Russia, Austria and Prussia - in 1772, 1703 and 1795.



click to enlarge image

After the last date, Poland ceased to exist. Not content with that, during the 19th Century, the three occupying powers tried to eliminate the very memory of the country. In the case of the area where my Grandfather was brought up, Prussians were encouraged to move east and settle the new territory. They were given land taken from the Poles, and the Polish language was discouraged and only German was taught in schools. This kind of historical background I found out by reading books like, Norman Davis’ great work:  God's Playground. A History of Poland.

For more detailed descriptions of everyday life of ordinary poor people I read The Peasants, four novels by Wladyslaw Reymont – they trace the life in a small village during one year –  the books each span a season: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. It is set slightly later than my story but it gave me a great insight into a kind of peasant life that had hardly changed for centuries.

All of this information was useful. I knew I could work some of the historical setting into the book, especially the war between Prussia and France in 1870 but I began to realise there was one thing I had to do before I could write the book – I had to visit the country. I had trace my Grandfather’s footsteps.

My Grandfather's Childhood Home

I went to Poland in April 2005. The Polish Pope, Jan Pawel 2 (John Paul 2) had just died and the whole country was in mourning and almost every house had a photo of him in the window. I had travelled by train from London, via Brussels and Berlin, and almost as soon as I arrived in Poland and got off the train at Poznan I felt a sense of heightened emotion. Was it me? Was I exhausted from the long journey and worried at being alone in a country where I knew barely a word? Surely I wasn’t responding to the fact that I was in the country of my grandfather’s birth. Or was I? Or was it the fact that my father in law back in France was gravely ill, terminally ill as it turned out? Or was I tapping into the grief of the Polish people for their dead Pope? Whatever it was, I couldn’t deny that I felt in a tremulous state that first night in the hotel.  

The next morning I hired a car and drove straight to the village where my grandfather had been born: Wilhelmsdorf (now called Polichno).

It is a tiny, unremarkable hamlet of a few houses along a strip of road with a high, wooded bank on one side and flat, sandy fields on the other.

The road through Wilhelmsdorf (Polichno)

The wooded bank above the road

The fields run down to the River Notec (The River Nezte, when my Grandfather lived there) about half a mile away. It looked poor agricultural land and, on that cold, damp April day the whole place seemed rather bleak.

The fields run down to the River Notec beyond the line of trees 

I had no idea if my Grandfather’s house was still standing and didn’t really know how to begin looking for it. I walked up and down the length of the hamlet and saw some people gazing curiously, even suspiciously, at me. But with the few words of halting Polish that I had learned – “Hello…Goodbye…Can I have a room?...How much?...I am English…etc” I was sure that I would not get very far. I felt reluctant to try and I actually got back into my hire car and started to drive away. Then shame at my cowardice made me turn around. I had to give it a go.

I had a photo of my Grandfather’s house with some of his family outside it, taken in about 1905 –over thirty years after he had left. The family doesn’t look poverty-stricken and obviously the money which my grandfather and a couple of his brothers had sent home (he from London, they from the USA) had made a difference. Perhaps if I showed it to people they would recognize it.


My Grandfather (standing on something at the very back ) and
some of his family in front of their home in Wilhelmsdorf. The
little lad sitting at the front looks unnervingly like all of
my nephews when they were young.

I tried at a house at the very end of the hamlet where an old man was working in the garden. I pointed to the photo. I looked up ‘grandfather’ (dziadek), ‘house’(dom), ‘I am searching’(szukam) in my Polish phrase book and stumbled through the words. The man shook his head then signalled me to wait while he went into his house. He came back with his wife and I repeated the pointing and the stumbling words. I also added the name ‘Hinz’ – the name of my grandfather’s family and the name he kept all his life even when my father and his twin brother changed theirs to Hinton during the First World War to assert their Englishness when they volunteered for the army.

As I said the name I suddenly realised that it might provoke a negative reaction in this Polish couple, being so obviously of Prussian rather than Polish origin – my ancestors must have been part of that wave of immigrants who had been encouraged to move into the territory after 1795. But, no, they simply repeated the name a couple of times, then shook their heads sorrowfully. They couldn’t help.

A couple of houses further down I tried again, asking an old woman hanging up her washing in the garden. But once more, it was a shake of the head and “Przykro mi”  - ‘Sorry’.

I was about to give up when I had a bit of luck. A woman was just coming out of the tiny church/chapel on the other side of the road. She was carrying some faded flowers which she put into a dustbin. She lifted her hand and waved to me, giving me the courage to have one last try……….

The Very House Itself

……… The woman from the church listened to my dziadek and dom and szukam and looked hard at the photograph of my Grandfather’s house. She shook her head but she signalled me to follow and we went into the church. An old man was inside, putting fresh flowers in a vase next to a portrait of the recently deceased Pope John Paul 2.

The woman explained the matter to him at some length and he peered closely at the photograph. He shook his head and was about to hand the photo back when he stopped and pointed to something – a small mark on the lintel above the door, a mark I’d never noticed and could barely see now. His face lit up and he said, “Tak! Tak!” “Yes! Yes!”

He led me and the woman out of the church. She pointed to her watch and indicated that she had to leave. I shook her hand and thanked her, “Dziękuję”. She got into her car and drove away, waving as she passed me hurrying along the road with the old man who was grinning with excitement at this little diversion – helping an Englishman to find his roots. We eventually stopped outside a house. It had a small yard and a barn or stable on the far side. I suppose I had been expecting to see something less prosaic than this squat building with its corrugated asbestos roof and uninspiring greyish walls. Could this really be the place?



The man led me round the back and through a doorway that certainly did resemble the one in the photograph although I couldn’t see the mark that had led us here. He called in through the open door and then stepped inside. An old couple was there, evidently just about to eat. The woman was at the stove stirring a steaming pot of soup and the man was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table. My guide pointed to me and rapidly told my story.

When he finished, we were invited to sit at the table and were offered a bowl of soup. We accepted and in that small, bare, steamy space, eating a simple vegetable soup I began to feel a tremor of emotion. Perhaps my grandfather, all that time ago, had eaten similar simple fare in this very room. While we ate, my guide asked question after question of the old couple, occasionally turning to me and smiling and nodding or giving me a thumbs-up to indicate that, as he had guessed, we were in the right place.

We stayed for over an hour after the meal and with the aid of the trusty phrase book, a map of Europe and a crudely drawn family tree, I managed to indicate my grandfather’s journey and my relation to George Leo Hinz. My guide pointed to my grandfather’s birthdate – 1858 - and then looked puzzled. How old was I? he asked, and I could see that he couldn’t square the grandson being there almost 150 years later. I quickly drew a rough timeline. My Grandfather born in 1858, marries in 1888, has my father and his twin in 1892; my father has me in 1941. And here I am, a 64 year old man in 2005. The guide and the couple indicate that I don’t look my age and we all laugh.
It’s my turn for the questions. The couple have been here since just after the 2nd World War – he shows me medals he has won during the war. The house had been in a dilapidated state when they took it on and they had done renovations, alterations and extensions but affirmed, when they looked at the photograph, that this was indeed the building I was looking for.

I looked round at the walls, thinking of my young grandfather. Here, in this space, he had lived. And then, one day in 1870, he had taken that momentous decision to leave. He would have had no clue where he might end up or if he would ever see his family again. He would have walked out of that door into the unknown. I had known the bare facts but, here, it all became so much more real and I was unexpectedly moved. The old lady must have guessed my thoughts and she smiled at me, waved her hand round to indicate the room, then patted my hand. The tears I was fighting, came closer to the surface. I felt I had to leave now before I was overwhelmed.

Outside,  I diverted myself with taking photos of my guide and the couple.



I gave profuse thanks for their hospitality and help, said goodbye, and made the way back to my car. I drove along the road, past the house and out towards the main road to Naklo nad Notecia.

My Grandfather must have taken this route, I thought. And that was it – the tears I had held back now poured out of me and I had to pull over and stop the car as I began to sob. For him. For my father. For my dying father-in-law. For me. For the brief nature of everyone’s passage through this world. “Lif is læne” says the Anglo-Saxon poet who wrote Beowulf.  “Life is fleeting”.  I don’t think I have ever felt this truth so intensely as I did on that small, deserted Polish backroad.    
 
 
   

The Walk Along The Canal

I spent the morning looking round Naklo Nad Notecia and that’s where I got the idea that Leo (I preferred my grandfather’s second name for the purposes of the book) would meet one of his siblings here – a sister, I decided. It would be his last contact with anyone from his family before heading away from the area he had known all his short life. I imagined that it would be a desperate and heart-wrenching farewell.

I wandered to the outskirts of town and down onto the banks of the canal. This is the way I wanted my Leo to go – following the canal, so that he would not get lost, all the way to Bromberg (modern-day Bydgoszcz). There was the line of water, stretching away straight to the horizon.



My head was filled with questions about the plot and I decided to walk along the canal bank to think about them. As far as I knew, the real George Leo had left home to help his family by giving them one less mouth to feed. I wanted my fictional Leo to have grinding poverty as his background but I needed a more dramatic start to his journey.

I walked for about ten miles along the canal before heading back to town and during that twenty mile walk I came up with the outline of the start of the story. Leo and his sister, as the oldest in the family, had been hired out for work – she at an inn in Nakel, and he on a large estate some miles away. Unjustly accused of a crime – I didn’t know what yet – beaten and humiliated, I wanted Leo to fight back against his accuser – the bullying son of the aristocratic landlord perhaps – compounding the offence in everyone’s eyes. Facing the prospect of a flogging and jail, Leo flees and, in order not to implicate his family, he decides to take to the road. The only one of his family he can see in order to explain what’s happened is his sister.

I was pleased that the story was beginning to come together. Then on the walk back, I saw something I had missed on the journey out– at the edge of a field was a telegraph pole with a large round nest on top and, further away, another one – storks’ nests.



Storks, the symbol of fertility and abundance. No wonder poor communities set so much store on trying to attract these birds to their area, in the superstitious hope that they would bring good luck with them. By the time I got back to my car in Naklo nad Notecia, I had the skeleton of a plot and the opening sentence of the book:

Leo was the first to see the storks.
 

Bromberg/Bydgoszcz: The First Stop on the Road

It rained nearly the entire time I was in Bydgoszcz. The weather suited the mood of the nation – the Poles’ great hero, Pope John Paul 2, had died and his funeral was going to take place in a couple of days. Photos of him adorned almost every window and candles burned in the main square of the city.

Large crowds in the gathered in the
Old Market Square
to lay flowers, light more candles and to join in a communal sense of grief at their loss.


I had read a lot about Poland during the time of the partitions and during the German occupation when the country didn’t exist as such, so I knew that the Catholic Church had been very influential in keeping a Polish identity alive during those hard times. It was only natural, then that the Pope – the first international figure that the re-constituted Poland had produced – should be so important in the country’s consciousness.

Pope John Paul 2


The young future Pope after his first communion



While the nation mourned, I walked round the city trying to imagine it through the eyes of my young hero, Leo, in 1870 when it was known as Bromberg.

                                              
Bromberg inhabitants in 19th Century

I walked along the banks of the River Brda (the River Brahe in Leo’s time) and tried to picture Leo, the innocent from the country, dazzled and deafened by the sights and sounds of the city – the factories, the barges, the carriages, the wharfs and the timber mills. How noisy and overpowering it would have seemed to a young boy whose prior experience of crowds would have been the small market in Nakel.

The River Brahe




I walked up to the station and imagined the square in front of it crammed with soldiers waiting to take trains towards the border in readiness for the conflict with France which was beginning to seem inevitable during the first half of 1870. I saw the possibility of Leo making friends with one of the soldiers.


The station in Bromberg

I walked in the narrow streets in the oldest part of the town and I saw two young boys walking together, laughing and jostling each other. I suddenly realised that I wanted Leo to meet up with another boy. I saw how much it would add to the story if there was a kind of Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn quality to their relationship. So, I began to visualize a meeting with Tomasz in these streets.

The Old Market Square in Bromberg

Now I had another character to consider – what was he like? what was his back story? And why was he alone in the streets of Bromberg?
 

BYDGOSZCZ STREETS

I liked Bydgoszcz. I loved walking the streets thinking about my two boys, Leo and Tomasz. Perhaps they would run down cobbled streets of Bromberg, as it was then known, to avoid trouble - or get out of it.


I thought of the dangers they would face, alone on the streets - poor, perhaps barefoot.


I imagined them in the marketplace. Perhaps cadging food, or begging, or even having to resort to stealing to keep themselves alive.


I pictured them dodging and out of the crowds assembled in the streets, perhaps to watch the soldiers marching to the station to catch trains towards the French front in readiness for the impending war.


And all the time they would be thinking of ways of getting away from the town and down to Danzig (Gdansk) to the sea - that immense stretch of water that they could only imagine, never having seen it. Down to the sea and then away to a new land. And I thought of ways for them to travel - perhaps they could get on a barge on the river Brahe and then onto the River Vistula.


I began to think about Tomasz's back story. Why was he on the streets alone? Where had he come from? What was he running away from? And that marvellous, inexplicable process of inspiration/invention/ creation began. Little details flitted into my mind - the son of a cobbler perhaps? And has learned the trade. Could he get work for them both? Or perhaps, he thinks he is the cobbler's son but he isn't really?

I began to feel the energy and drive of the boy. Something irrepressible. A huge sense of fun and optimism in the face of the adversity he has faced. He started to live in my head as I walked round the town and I began to love him and what he would give to Leo. Was this him, cheeky and full of mischief, attempting some scam to raise money to buy food for them both?


It was raining heavily the morning I left Bydgoszcz. And it was the morning of the Pope's funeral. The streets were totally empty, everybody inside watching the ceremony on TV. Their beloved Karol Józef Wojtyła who had represented them and brought honour to the nation as John Paul 2 (Jan Pawel Dwa), was being buried and they all wanted to watch.

The rain fell as I drove along the wet, empty streets out of Bydgoszcz. I saw one other car - a Police car, whose occupants stared at me suspiciously wondering why I wasn't inside watching tv with all the other decent people.

I was heading the few miles to Fordon. To the Vistula. To the river. Because despite having considered them getting a ride on a cart, or hiding on a barge, and despite the fact that I knew they would attempt to get on board a train with disastrous results, I had decided that my boys were going to make their way by foot down the river towards the sea.

I had my steamy heated car to keep me from the elements. No such comfort for them. And the river looked wide and the banks difficult walking under the grey, glowering skies.

 
 

DOWN THE ROAD APIECE


I made my way up to Torun, known as Thorn in 1870 and spent a couple of days looking round there, making notes for the story. Then I started down the River Wisła.



After all the rain, the river was running high and there were signs of flooding in low lying fields.





All these signs of flooding, and the fast-running river began to give me good background for Leo and Tomasz’s walk towards the sea and, after a time, a crucial part of the plot began to form in my mind.

Then, when I was walking along the riverbank one day, a dog began following me. She was a lovely creature and was obviously pleased to have someone to walk with. She stayed with me for a couple of hours until I retraced my steps to the car and, for all the world, seemed ready to jump in beside me. I wondered if she was lost or a stray and, as I drove away, I realised that I had a companion for Leo and Tomasz on their journey down the river.


 
  
 

The Road Towards the Sea

I made my way slowly down the River Wisła (Vistula) – walking along the banks as often as I could, imagining Leo and Tomasz seeing these sights as their stray dog, Bel, scampered ahead of them.

I passed Graudenz, now known as Grudziadz. Perhaps, I thought, the boys could look for work in the town - maybe at the granaries on the small dock where boats and barges brought the wheat and took away the flour.





The old granaries and the skyline of Grudziadz
from the bank of the Wisła


Then I journeyed on, past Neuenburg (Nowe) to Mewe (Gniew) with its crumbling old walls and spectacular castle built by King Jan 111 Sobieski for his beautiful French wife, Marie Casimire Louise de La Grange d’Arquien, popularly known in Poland as Marysienka.

King Jan 111 Sobieski


Marysienka

The castle is now transformed into an hotel where I stayed the night.




Further downstream I came to Dirschau, now known as Tczew.



 It has two mighty bridges spanning the River Wisła. The first one, completed in 1857, had amazing castle-like turrets and I knew I would have to refer to it in my story.



While in Tczew I visited the Vistula River Museum housed in a grim looking old factory building.


Despite the unpromising exterior, the exhibits inside were fascinating and some photographs and one model entirely changed my ideas about Leo and Tomasz’s journey down the river. I learned that, at that time, it was common practice to float Galician pine trunks, bound together in long rafts, from the forests in the south of the country all the way down to the port of Danzig where the timber was shipped abroad. These 'rafts', often comprised as many as 15 'floats', each float consisting of 24 tree trunks. Men lived and worked on these rafts as they made their way down the river, negotiating dangerous obstacles such as sandbanks and rapids. Suddenly, I could see the possibility of adventures, and perhaps accidents, for the two boys afloat on the mighty river.

The river grew wider below Tczew and soon there were so many small streams and tributaries flowing into it that it was difficult to keep moving along parallel to the main stream. Then, eventually, there was  a salty tang to the air and glimpses of a broad stretch of water ahead – the river was meeting the sea.





I made my way through a pine forest and a huge sand dune and there was the Baltic Sea.

 
 

THE END OF THE ROAD

At last I came to Gdansk (known as Danzig in 1870, at the time of my story). Recent history, during the 1970s and 1980s, had seen it as the centre of the Solidarity movement  (Solidarność) which, with Lech Walesa at its head, had been the force that eventually led to Poland becoming a post-communist state. But I was looking for details of life in this Baltic port a hundred years before that, when my young hero, Leo, and his friend Tomasz were heading there, dreaming of catching a boat to the USA.

I walked the rivers and tributaries down which the boats would have sailed with their cargoes of grain and timber and amber. I strolled along the docks, imagining the boys filled with hope, and driven to find a boat across the Atlantic.

Scenes of the docks in Danzig as
Leo would have seen them in 1870.
Note the rafts of logs, like the ones
the two boys rode down the Vistula.


Then, on my last day in Gdansk, I walked up the hill to the old Napoleonic fort and looked down at the railway station and the distant spires and cranes and buildings. It is covered with grass and crumbling now but in 1870, with the Franco-Prussian War being waged, it must have been bustling with activity. As I wandered round an idea began to form in my mind of a tragic scene that Leo witnesses near the end of the book.





And then my journey was at an end. I had visited all the places that my Grandfather must have seen if, as I believed, he had made this journey from his tiny village, Wilhelmsdorf, along the Bromberg Canal to Bromberg and then down the Vistula to Danzig. I had made the journey, thinking of him, and yet imagining another boy making that journey. Leo. He had become real to me, this brave boy facing dangers and carrying on when all must have seemed hopeless. And his companions, too - his friendTomasz and their dog, Bel - were alive in my mind. I loved them.

Now I had to return to England and my desk. Now I had to find the right words which would make my readers share that journey. The words which would make them Walk The Wild Road in step with my young hero. And if I could do it right, I felt I would be honouring my Grandfather who had walked that road when he was no more than a little boy all those years ago.

 
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