One of the best days of my life culminated in the POSK Polish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, West London. Let me explain.
I went to school directly opposite the POSK centre. I often walked past it, looking at the windows full of posters of beautiful places, described in a language I could not begin to decipher. But I never went in to the centre until my final year, when the school did a deal enabling us to put on our plays and reviews in the POSK’s main hall. Performing on a professional standard stage, with real adults operating the lights and sound boards – with a bar selling beer in the foyer – was unbelievably grown up.
All the world’s a stage: the POSK Centre gave a young Tony Brennan (centre back) a first taste of performing in front of an audience.
As this was my final year at school, I was beginning to plan my next stage in life. I was delighted to be offered an interview at my first choice university, but dismayed to see that this interview clashed with the school review, which enjoyed a four night run at the POSK, and in which I featured prominently.
The university was not so far from London, so I wrote to them, asking if it would be possible to be interviewed early in the day, as I had to be on stage in London that evening (I may have implied that the performance was Shakespeare, rather than a series of wonderfully silly sketches written by future historian James Wyllie).
The university said that would be fine, so I went up early in the morning, only to discover that my interview was down for ten to seven in the evening. I spent the afternoon arranging understudies for my parts in different sketches, and resigned myself to not performing that night. I did, however go to the interview room an hour early, just in case.
Sure enough, a little after six my interviewer arrived at the room, and looked rather startled to see me already there. I tried to explain why I was there early; he brusquely said “all right, all right, come on in” and sat me down. He sat down opposite me, flicked through the exam script I had written some months earlier and looked up at me. “You cocked up question three, didn’t you?”
“Er…yes, now you mention it…er…”
“But everything else was good. Now look, I’m not meant to say this sort of thing at an interview, but you don’t have anything to worry about.”
I took this as a positive. Chancing my arm, I said that, this being the case, I wondered if we might leave the interview there, as I was due on stage in London in seventy minutes. He wished me luck and opened the door, through which I ran, nearly knocking over the next interviewee, who must have wondered how bad things were if the previous candidate was running away half an hour before his interview was due to start.
I ran straight to the waiting getaway car in which my mother, showing less respect for the speed limit that I normally associated with her, raced down the M40, dropping me outside the POSK some twenty seconds before I was due to make my first entrance on stage. I still remember the look of surprise on my fellow actors’ faces as I walked on.
So, the POSK has a special place in my life, as it does for the many people from West London’s Polish community, which it has served for nearly fifty years.
I was therefore shocked to read about the mindless anti-immigrant graffiti that was daubed on its walls earlier this week. I was also deeply saddened by this act, which was so disrespectful of the contribution to Hammersmith’s life by that community in the decades since it took root in the 1940s.
The community was firmly established when I was at school in the 1970s and 80s; long before Poland joined the EU the area had a good smattering of Polish delicatessens and businesses with signs in the English and Polish languages.
Polish 303 Squadron was the most successful #BattleofBritain unit flying on Hurricanes. #BoBPoles #PolesinUK pic.twitter.com/lbD4mUZCrl
— Polish Embassy UK (@PolishEmbassyUK) June 26, 2016
One Polish establishment which I often walked past, and later in life went in to, was a restaurant called The Spitfire, whose street sign featured a red, white and blue roundel, and which honoured the many brave Poles who flew with the RAF during the Battle of Britain and throughout World War Two.
That may not be British enough for the graffiti-writing thugs. But it’s British enough for me.