“Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher,” they shouted. We didn’t know it was her who had taken it, but we knew it had gone. The daily routine of the crate of small bottles, straws, milk monitors … all gone. An early sign of the dubious advantages of austerity.
Now, 41 years later, and plenty of milk-deprived life later, my kids started Żłobek this week.
From the outside the nursery building looks as if it was built to keep high security prisoners from escaping. But once inside the door, one realizes that in fact is not a totally false analogy. The small ones will and do try to escape and keeping out unwanted big ones is not a bad idea.
About twenty nervous parents milled and sat, fretted, watched over their young ones as several Panis in civvy clothes and badged up with Aunti Gosia, Auntie Marta etc delicately introduced themselves to their small clients.
The Żłobek felt very calm, very safe, and very informal. No iron laws, black boards, harsh boundaries. The Panis smiled and cajoled.
The system is cheap, well-organised, local, friendly and no frills. Socialism, in its Polish form, was a bit rubbish. Most people can agree on that. It was grey, petty, bureaucratic, inward looking, intellectually backward, static and so on. But it did give working people a chance to offload their kids in a safe place, locally and for little money. They are fed, taught how to play with each other, how to pee into the pot, eat with cutlery. Spend some time in an inner London nursery and collecting knives at the door is not uncommon.
Our local private nursery is full of taut middle class faces, all piano lessons and precious I speak English 3-year olds. Showing off is the name of the game here. Mummies that aspire and babies that aspire to be like their mummies. Back in our state Żłobek the parents look as worried and lost as their kids, but the pressure is far far lower.
It’s easy to bemoan parochial Polish attitudes to child-rearing. Over-doting grannies, stern grandfathers, mothers that seem to have seven pairs of arms. Dads that drink too much. The lack of a social space that people seem comfortable occupying. Too many rules. Then there’s the very un-Italian attitude towards those pushing prams. No-one stops at zebra crossings, however many babies you are pushing along. Sometimes they will even wind down the window and snarl for good measure.
The bus driver will give you no time to get off the bus, and the hard faces of other parents in the playground don’t augur well for neighbourly chattings over the fence. Children that look like they’re going through the motions of being children and parents that know how to stay no far more than yes.
It’s early days of course but the Żłobek is an oasis of smiles, strangers being at least civil to strangers, where younger urban warriors are humanized, if only a little bit. I like the Żłobek, at least for now.