ESTATE WITHIN A STATE

after communism's death, it's not easy being a Polish landowner

Dwor Chobielin, Poland THIS WILL be our first Christmas at Cho- bielin. The manor house itself is still a tumbledown ruin at the end of the drive its roof has now been removed so that the builders can replace the rotten beams but we have just moved into the keeper's lodge by the gate. Most of the work was finished in the autumn, but only the coura- geous actually enjoyed staying there this winter. It seems I chose the wrong type of boiler. Two, three, even four times a night, someone has to carry more coal up from the cellar and shovel it into the grate. Oth- erwise, everyone else wakes up frozen to his sheets. There have been a few other mishaps — the silicon finish we used on the floorboards, made in Czechoslovakia, continues to emit a strange smell — but none of this is spoiling the fun of rebuild- ing the ruined Polish estate my family bought two years ago.

Much has changed since we began. Not so long ago, restoring old manor houses was an act of anti-communist resistance. Today it is something of a fashion. We neo-squires even have a club, which meets on the last Thursday of every month in a dilapidated palace in Warsaw's Old Town. In threadbare tweeds and imported English shoes, with recycled signet rings flashing on their fingers, members report on the progress of the restoration work of their beloved palace, castle or manor house. Even though some have been at it for a decade, not a single house is finished yet. In the spirit of neo-feudalist cama- raderie, arguments rage over the relative merits of wooden versus ceramic roof tile. The former is more classically Polish, the latter more practical. For these harmless eccentrics, the victory over communism meant that they can again indulge freely in the innocent snobbery which the old regime tried to disinvest. Ziemianin (Landowner) magazine, Poland's answer to Country Life, may have the look of a cheap leaflet but the proles are still not welcome to subscribe.

We complain and gnash our teeth at every club meeting. When we say 'in the good old days', we rarely mean the pre-war arcadia. Only two years after the demise of communism, 'the good old days' are the times of People's Poland. Those were the days when a ton of cement cost £20, a square metre of oak flooring sold for ten- pence and £10 was a generous monthly wage for a plasterer! Last year alone, the cost of building materials went up five- fold while the purchasing power of the dollar (the currency in which the majority of the neo-squirarchy still keeps its sav- ings) has halved. The peasants and the workers are not the only ones who suffer under Poland's IMF adjustment pro- gramme.

When they don't complain about prices, the would-be gentry moan about the diffi- culties of purchasing the land they need to rebuild the farms or parks which once sur- rounded their houses. In Poland, the trou- ble is not in finding someone willing to invest in the countryside, but in finding someone willing to allow investors the privilege of doing so.

Take the case of my Chobielin estate. During the 19th century, the area around my manor house grew from a small farm into a big farm, with a flour mill, irrigated fields, and carp ponds. After the war thanks to communist land reform — it was thoughtlessly partitioned into incongruous bits. Now, one meadow near the manor (the size of two tennis courts) has five dif- ferent owners. On other patches there is one owner — the state — but under differ- ent guises: a collective farm, a state-owned mill, regional rivers' authority, state forestry commission, or various branches of local government. In all, over 30 owners or state institutions own or use various parts of the old estate, and the effects can be read in the landscape. The trees along the alleys are no longer cared for, water leaks from the ponds, the cobblestone roads are buried under mud.

But every piece of absurdity has to be paid for eventually. The dam on the river was originally built to power the turbine of the flour mill, and to irrigate meadows upstream. In the old days, the owner took the decisions about relative pay-offs: the more water was directed into the carp ponds, the less went through the turbine. These days, it would take a Norman Schwarzkopf to co-ordinate the activities of all the people and institutions involved. After half a century's neglect, the dikes and the locks are ruined, the fields are fallow, the carp ponds produce far less than they should, and the dam is leaking.

It has occurred to me, I confess, that I might be the one to recreate the estate in

its former shape. The mill could be repaired, the 900-acre collective farm, now losing money under inept state managers, could be made productive again. The carp ponds could be profitable if more of the fish were exported to deutschmark territo- ry, now only three hours' drive away. The trouble is that negotiating the change of the subdivided plots back into a sensible whole is a byzantine procedure which would give me stomach ulcers. My futile attempts to purchase land take up much more of my time and energy than the actu- al rebuilding of the manor.

Under communism, I would have known just what to do. The Party took or the Party gave. Usually it took, but if laws were unclear or contradictory, as they have always been, one telephone call from the local Party chief settled the matter; it was clear, that is, who had to be bribed. $100 used to be a sum large enough to over- come most pangs of socialist conscience. If one simply resigned oneself to the fact that the bribe was as much a part of the trans- action as stamp duty or the solicitor's fee, then land could be purchased swiftly and cheaply.

Today, the Party is over but with it dis- appeared the old bureaucratic apparatus and the routine of getting around contra- dictory laws. Whereas before the officials would issue a curt refusal, the ones I have to see several times a week (all veteran Solidarity freedom fighters) are afraid of giving any kind of answer at all. Some for- mer electricians make excellent Polish presidents, but not every plumber makes an efficient small-town mayor. In the old days, one could appeal to a higher authori- ty, or to greed. But there is no appeal from evasion, and the chaos gets worse the higher up you go. Only when the dam bursts and floods the town downstream, with national television looking on in hor- ror, might the various squabbling state bodies consider selling off the problem.

So far, I have put together a few measly acres of the old estate, the land immedi- ately surrounding the house. Maybe by the time this goes to print I will have complet- ed the paperwork on another small piece of wasteland — once a prime meadow along the river. At the rate I'm going, by the time the farm is reunited there will be nobody alive in the world who will still remember the 1990 reunification of Ger- many. But, as we say in Poland, Krakow wasn't built in a day.

Still, it's particularly gratifying to be finally living in the keeper's lodge because a month ago it looked as if we might never be able to move in. Just wizen we were fin- ishing the work — the water closet was in order, the telephone had been connected and the electricity was on — the lodge

turned out to be haunted. Haunted! In the late 20th century! News was spreading all over the parish that the old landlord — the one whom the communists executed when they confiscated the estate in 1945 — had come back in spirit.

The rumours began one night when Mr Erlich, the hearty peasant who squatted in the ruins of the manor until last year, went as usual to feed the chickens he still keeps beside it (right on the spot, it happens, where the fountain used to be). Passing the lodge, he noticed that the light in the upstairs room was on. 'The builders must have forgotten to switch it off for the night,' he thought. But half an hour later, when he was returning from the manor, the lodge was shrouded in darkness and silence. The elms in the alley whispered in the wind, and water running through the broken dam hissed in the distance.

He ran to fetch his son and a torch. Imagine their astonishment when, barely five minutes later, the light was on again! And still no signs of human life inside. The lights continued to switch on and off throughout the night, driving Mr Erlich and his family to distraction with fear. The whole neighbourhood breathed again when I demonstrated that a programmable timer on a lamp is quite an ordinary electric gad- get and a legitimate theft-prevention mea- sure.