Poetry in the pint
The more Izzy travels around, the more she seems to find bits of her past in the strangest places... like the book she found by a Polish poet.
"I once heard that at the bottom of every pint glass lies a story. This story starts in the pub.
I had just moved to Cardiff, the latest of many moves to many cities, and was having a drink with some friends. By the wall there was a bookshelf. Never being able to resist a book, I searched and was thrilled when I found a book of Polish poetry.
Although I'd never heard of the poet, Galczynski, before, something about those words struck a nerve. Before I knew it, I'd finished my pint and devoured the entire book. When I asked my mum about it, she told me to speak to my Granddad.
My Granddad was fighting for Poland during the Second World War. He's seen and been through things I could barely imagine and which he hardly ever talks about. Even looking at those grainy black and white photos doesn't make it real. But that evening he told me how that same poet had changed the course of his life.
They had been together in a German prisoner of war camp and it was the poet who started to teach him his first, tentative words of English. That man, whose poetry I was reading on a Sunday afternoon, pint in hand, had persuaded my Granddad to move to the UK, a country he had barely dreamed of and where my family and I now live.
Since leaving home, I've travelled across the world, trying to find something that wasn't there in my life back in the UK. But somewhere at the bottom of that pint glass, a world away from the fighting, realised that there's only so far you can go, before you start to come home again."
Izzy Kaminski
