Jania's Story

Jania is very thin, and very beautiful. She looks more Russian than Polish and reminds me of Kitty in Dostoevsky's Anna Karenina. Her eyes are full of life, her cheekbones are high and she polishes cutlery in the back of an Italian restaurant. She is 23 years old, like me, and yet she sees her life as one filled with opportunity. Jania's optimism is striking. She loves nature, exercise and parks and she loves Hyde Park. The way she pronounces Hyde Park is delicate: Hyde becomes Hy-ed, just like the Israeli's make their country into a three syllable word.

"It's very hot in here." We're both polishing cutlery furiously. There is a constant knife shortage in the restaurant and each shift I've worked another packet of knives is circulated, and yet there is always a customer demanding the second half of his cutlery set. Jania's face gleams with sweat as we both feed cutlery into the polisher. The whole staff are in general agreement that the machine does nothing. Each knife comes out grainier than when it went in before, so our work is doubled. Company policy tells us that we must feed cutlery through the machine, and yet we must also scrub it by hand too.

"This job is so tiring" says Jania, with a smile. Every complaint she makes, she smiles, as if to soften the blow.  I ask her if she works full time.

"At the moment I work full time yes. I came here a year ago to work and I'm still here. I want to study here as well though, but it will be very expensive because I already have a first degree."

Guiltily, this revelation shocked me. In three weeks, it was the first time she had mentioned having a degree.

"Yes, it's in social work. I really want to be a social worker."

I ask her why she's here if she wants to be a social worker.

"In Poland, life is hard. A professional wage can be as low as £300 a month. With the Euro, the prices of everything are really high, and it is a struggle. The only thing that is different, are the, how do you say, apartments, rooms? The cost of those in Poland are a lot lower than here."

I explain that London can feel like a separate country to the rest of England, and if she wanted cheaper rent the whole of the UK didn't cost the same as London.

"Ok, that's good to know, but I want to be here, in London. I have a boyfriend here now. And then I can save to study. I just want to read all the time to help me get on the degree course. I think I want to study psychology on top of my first degree so I can really specialise in social work. I'm reading Freud at the moment, in English. It is a challenge, but it is so interesting."

At the risk of sounding like someone from Ukip, I asked her why she wants to pursue Social Work in England rather than Poland.

"The money, and of course, I know that England is short of social workers because is it perceived to be a difficult job. It is a challenge to come to the UK and do this."

I found it difficult to work out why, other than money, she had to come to the UK to do social work. There are plenty of people in Poland who need caring for. I wondered whether Polish immigration was motivated by something other than money.

"My mother left my sister and I when I was 17 to go to Italy to find work. My father works in plant near our town. A lot of people leave. How do I feel about it? I like the EU, as it means that I can earn more money waitressing here than I could at home. I know, the cost of living is higher, but, it's nice."

Do you send money home?

"No because my sister is an English teacher so she earns enough. And my mother is still in Italy working. It is very bad for families at the moment. We are all split up and we don't see each other. I worry that the future of Poland will not have the family at the heart, because I know in my generation, so many people are leaving to find work abroad that we don't feel we have families any more. We are all separate."

And yet people  keep leaving?

"It is seen as successful to leave and earn money abroad. There is nothing for me in Poland. My mother is not there, there is no motivation to be there."

But is this exodus sustainable? I asked her whether she would go back?

"I think it is the dream of most Polish people to work somewhere like England for 10 years in whatever job they can do, and then go back to Poland to start a family when they're like, 30 years. That is when they start doing the job that they dreamed of in High School."

I asked what the dream of most polish girls was when they left school.

"Some want to be famous, just like the whole world. But many want to be teachers, and nanny's. We have to be realistic in Poland."

So what was her plan now? Jania had been working at the restaurant for a year now and she still hadn't been promoted from back of house cutlery polisher to waitress because of her language skills. Jania who reads Freud and hopes to become a psychologist after being a social worker.

"Now, I save for my degree. I want to do here, in England. And then I will get experience for free by volunteering with social workers. And then hopefully I can get a job. My polish degree is not worth anything here because I need to translate all the papers and it's not the same as the UK. It's tiring. Sometimes I want to make myself feel happy, you know?"

And her always optimistic face momentarily creased into a frown.

It's not just me.

The word job can be read in several ways. It can mean job as in a part-time job, a Saturday job, the odd paper-boy shift, a career or a dream. I'm still job-hungry. Currently I work 45 hours a week as a waitress during the evening and weekends, and 40 hours a week during the day for Time Out as an Intern. I have been accepted onto a course to study Magazine Journalism come September, but right now, I don't feel as though I have a job yet. I have a means to pay my way, and a selection of choices that will help me attain my dream job. I'm in limbo, waiting. 

At work number two last night I was cleaning a table when I noticed a former editor of my student newspaper sitting with a friend. "I'm a news producer for Sky", he told me. We exchanged handshakes and comments about the state of our lives, and agreed to organise a Palatinate alumni get-together again at some point. I was enormously impressed with what he had a achieved, and I couldn't help but stop and look at myself, cutlery tray in hand, aching feet and a smelly dishcloth in my waitressing pouch, its wetness slowly seeping through my apron to leave a damp spot. 

I went into the back of the restaurant and slowly put some lipstick stained glasses into the machine. I had chosen to be here and I was angry that I had to be. I had a deep, flashing moment of frustration with myself for not taking my place at City immediately out of university. I could have been done by June. I would be a journalist, not an intern-come-cutlery polisher. But this is the path I chose, and the mistakes I made somewhere along the line have contributed to my current exhaustion. Last night, stacking the glasses into the dishwasher, I realised that I had lost the core of what I was even doing there, why I was there in the first place. It was to keep my dream of becoming a journalist alive, I reminded myself. This is what we all have to do. But it had become a robotic existence.

At home, my book lay unfinished, one chapter to go until the end. Three articles that I had offered to write for Time Out were unwritten, with no foreseeable time in which to write them. I don't even have time to eat a meal. A box of as high-calorie food as I can find-polenta, tofu or mushrooms-eaten quickly on the 15 minute bus journey home at 1am. And the endless days in the stuffy Time Out office where I struggle to keep my eyes open and focus on the screen. The feedback from editors, silly mistakes from not proof-reading because my eyes just won't stay open. And when they all received the Time Out card for staff members, a card that entitles you to 50% off dining out and none of the interns did, my first thought was not of exploitation, but instead realised that this would increase customers at the restaurant where I worked.

In perpetuum. 

But something shook me out of this self-pitying mess. Something that made me open up my laptop and restart this blog. Compared to other people, my life is easy. 

And the following posts, will be their stories.