She begins the story as an adventurous city bred ingenue, enriched by her mixed Polish-Scottish heritage, embarking on a new relationship both with a somewhat older Scottish boyfriend and with the call of nature in a lonely farmhouse embedded in the rolling terrain of the Scottish lowlands. Unlike perhaps other cautious young people finishing university, anxious to start a career somewhere, she seizes opportunity with both hands to satisfy a dream of country living, prepared to undergo whatever hardship it takes to make a success of it for herself and her new partner. It begins with the expected delights and traumas, including the arrival of a pair of mischievous goats who consume all the new plants she had laid out in her grow bags and littered her whole garden with their droppings. Eventually their tiresome presence and head-butting abilities in breaking down the surrounding fencing leads to the nightmare of an incursion by a cow into their little paradise and the subsequent need to palm off the animals to some helpful nuns.
The goats are but a sample of her rural vicissitudes and strengthens her philosophical acceptance that where there is the pain of failure there is also the reward of experience. She has the same approach to other aspects of her life, whether physical, emotional or spiritual as she continues her quest for self-discovery. She seeks it not only in her relationship with her partner, William, and not only in the rural retreat which she had hoped to idealize, but also in lavish therapeutic sessions, including on a remote Greek island, in the wilds of Canada, in Hawaii and earlier in the mountains of Poland. Each ordeal is grasped in full, celebrated and then analysed as she absorbs the energy of nature’s seasons and the wisdom of her teachings and readings. She sucks out any new experience to the full and wrings it dry in her colourful description of each sensation.
She is not old enough to be an Earth Mother. That is more the role of her worldly and sensuous mother. But she is an Earth Princess, delighting in each manifestation of nature’s beauty and cruelty, and reflecting the changing moods of the season, but displaying at the same time a true knowledge of the fauna and flora that surrounds her. She draws too on the wise comments of her barefoot Scottish neighbourly guru, Hamish, who invades her life and appears like a deus ex machina to guide her in moments of doubt.
Yet the text is also peppered by a massive lists of “bon mots” from authors and song writers, steeped in Eastern as well Western traditions, with which she can comment on her musings on weddings, on fatherhood, on the need for elegance, on friendships, particularly with her delightful collection of Polish “mongrels” in the Snob Club, on unexpected catastrophes such as the plane crash which kills the Polish president, on death and on the breakup of a relationship (as William fades further and further away in the course of her story). Although it would not suit the nature of such a short book, one could imagine that she could have provided a two-page index simply of people she has quoted in her text. She scatters this eclectic mix of quoted pearls of wisdom like a coating of raisins to enrich the literary cake that she has baked and presented between the covers of this delightful and imaginatively illustrated book.
Wiktor Moszczynski
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