Book description
'You have to be on your guard when you go back to special places.
You may be able to locate them easily enough on the map, but maps
tell only one story. Times change and places and people with them.
The memory plays curious tricks, and things aren't always as you
remember or expect.'
Twenty years ago, Tom Fort drove his little red car onto the ferry
at Felixstowe, bound for all points east. Eastern Europe was still a
faraway place, just emerging from its half-century of waking
nightmare, blinking, injured, full of fears but importantly full of
hope too. Things were different then. Czechoslovakia was still
Czechoslovakia, Russia was the USSR and the Warsaw Pact had not
formally dissolved. But what did exist then, as they do now, were the
rivers: the nations' lifeblood. It was along and by these rivers that
Fort travelled around Eastern Europe meeting its people and immersing
himself in its culture.
Since that trip though, much has changed and in more recent years
around one million Poles have settled in Britain. Fort's local paper
has a Polish edition, his supermarket has a full range of Polish
bread, sausage and beer and an influx of Polish businesses opened in
his town centre. And it's not just the Poles, his gym has a Lithuanian
trainer and the woman who cuts his hair is from Hungary.
As a tide of people began to leave Eastern Europe and settle in the
UK, Tom Fort started to wonder about what they were leaving behind and
whether the friends he had made all those years ago remained. And so
he decided to make the journey again, travelling against the flow of
the steady human stream to explore the once familiar places. As he did
so, many began to return as the recession took hold of Western Europe.
Tom was keen to find out what had changed and how the places, people
and way of life had moved on and of course fit in a spot of fishing
along the way.
Tom Fort read English at Balliol College, Oxford before going on to
work as a reporter on a newspaper and then on to the BBC where he worked
for over 20 years. He is married with five children and is the author of
five other books. (
Under the Weather
and
Downstream
published by Century and
The Grass is Greener
,
The Far From Compleat Angler
and
The Book of Eels
, published by Harper Collins).
