Aroundtown MEETS
‘‘Grandad Dan would take the kids up on Norland Moors picking bilberries and blackberries, or collecting baskets of mushrooms, sorrel, dandelion leaves and sweet chestnuts on their adventures.’’
biennial so are only available every other year. “In Yorkshire, there are many former industrial sites like old pits and engineering works where plants have begun to grow over the years. But who knows what chemicals have seeped into the soil. I can’t afford to supply products from contaminated or toxic environments so chefs like that I can tell them exactly where the produce they are serving their customers have come from.” These are just a handful of reasons why Alysia never shares her foraging locations with anyone – not even her clients – to ensure she protects the environment from haphazard and over-zealous harvesting. With mass produced food, supermarkets and restaurants at our disposal, it would feel like augmented reality if we were all reliant on finding food in its natural environment. During this year, we have all been aghast at the lack of flour on the shelves due to the mass hysteria of stockpiling food. But foraging is essentially a hallmark of human survival, our sheer existence the product of ancestral hunter gatherers. For Alysia, she owes her life – and her livelihood – to her Grandad Dan’s survival instincts. Dan Szperka was just a teenager when he and
his younger brother Ted relied on mother nature to take care of them. Born in Poznan in Poland, Dan and Ted were both railway engineer apprentices to their father when the Germans invaded in 1939. It was in their hometown that the Nazis built the first gas chambers to practice their execution technique on local residents who they saw as traitors for renouncing their German citizenship at the collapse of the Prussian rule.
The young brothers transported people to the concentration camp on rail wagons but rebelled by giving prisoners onboard food and water or undoing the locks to let them free. They were eventually caught by the SS and themselves taken to the camp, yet before arrival they managed to escape and flee into the vast forests. They knew they would never survive the harsh winter months – or evade capture from the ever- pressing Nazis – if they weren’t smart. They slept in caves and drank water from streams, staving off hunger by foraging. They ate young pinecones, ash keys, berries and nuts, then as spring arrived they found wild garlic and a fungus called chicken of the wood. They made fish traps from willow branches and rabbit snares from bootlaces and discarded tin cans.
Months and months of a stringent and solitary existence saved their lives. The brothers joined the Warsaw uprising before Dan was clandestinely relocated to the UK where he settled in the Bradford area.
He found work in a carpet mill where he met
Winnie Hickman from Hoyland in Barnsley. The pair soon married and moved to the Ryburn Valley in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Today, Dan and Winnie, now 95 and 93, still live in the very same house and will have been married 72 years on Christmas Eve. He rarely speaks about his time in Poland and only recently learnt his father was killed
by the Nazis when he and his brother escaped. Winnie and Dan had four children and, like most families in the post-war years, money was tight. Dan used what he’d learned at home in Poland and would pick mushrooms, fruit and nuts on his way home from night shifts at the carpet mill to supplement the grocery shop. Their daughter, Barbara, went on to have Alysia and her brother Adrian who spent most weekends with their grandparents. Alysia’s policeman father tragically died of a heart attack aged 31. Grandad Dan would take the kids up on Norland Moors picking bilberries and blackberries, or collecting baskets of mushrooms, sorrel, dandelion leaves and sweet chestnuts on their adventures. “Ever since I could walk I’ve been fascinated by nature. By the time I was seven or eight I could identify every tree, plant, flower, animal and bird that we came across - which things were safe to eat and which to steer clear of. Our childhood was spent outdoors playing in the woods, climbing trees and building dens.” Yet, the idea of turning this innocent family hobby into a career didn’t flower for Alysia until around 15 years ago.
After leaving school, she joined the Navy
as a helicopter engineer and was deployed to Cornwall. Here, she fell in love with coastal foraging, particularly the plants she wasn’t as familiar with such as pennywort and samphire which need a different climate and terrain than at home in Calderdale.
She then left the armed forces to begin a law and politics degree at the University of East Anglia. But, despite winning graduate awards, decided against a litigation career and moved back to Yorkshire to work in social care, unaware that her future steps would include a sturdy pair of boots and a machete.
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