ABSTRACT
Armed with Jan's reservations I should have been able to adopt a more critical view of Walesa when I met him. But like many others after me I enjoyed his potent mixture of humour, charm and arrogant pomposity. Meeting him on the eve of the Gdansk shipyard strike in Anna Walentynowicz's flat, I was struck by his habit of injecting humour into serious business, his ability to take the floor and most of all by his lively, twinkling and definitely mischievous eyes. I had been allowed sit in on what was a private and conspiratorial meeting of the Coastal Free Trades Union movement. Looking back, I am still not quite clear why the committee tolerated my presence at such an important time. Neither can I understand why people who were as busy as they were, in the days before the strike, bothered giving interviews to an unknown
journalist from the remotest outpost of Europe. But they were confused and in some respects trusting times. Years later, Alina Pienkowska, then a shipyard nurse and committee member, told me that her future husband, Bogdan Borusewicz, a founding member of the Free Trades Union movement, was furious that the committee had talked about the strike plan to a foreign journalist. Walesa displayed no such fury. Even though I had been followed by secret police, on my arrival in Gdansk, Walesa offered to travel home with me by tram from Anna's flat. It was a kind gesture from a man who must have been preoccupied on that sunny evening in mid-August.
