by Mary Nichols
‘Good,’ Louise said. ‘I’ll get some tea, shall I?’
‘Tommy is taking me to the dance tonight,’ Angela said. ‘Uncle Stan’s going to lend him his car.’
‘He’s way too old for you,’ her grandmother said.
‘Granny, he is only going to take me to the hop, we aren’t planning a steamy love affair.’
‘And you are too cheeky for your own good.’
‘Mum explained to me about my dad,’ Angela told Tommy as they danced. He danced beautifully, not only the old-fashioned waltz, foxtrot and quickstep but swing, bop and rock and roll. When they turned up, Rosemary had stared with her mouth open. Angela had introduced them and, much to Toby’s annoyance, Rosemary tried to flirt with him. Tommy bore it with good humour, but otherwise stayed close by Angela’s side.
‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘He was a good man, one of the best, and a brave man too.’
‘He didn’t die. He went back to Poland, he’s probably still alive. I want to try and trace him.’
They couldn’t talk and dance at the same time. He stopped and took her hand to lead her to one side where there were some chairs. He sat down and pulled her down beside him. ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’
‘Yes, I do. I want to find out what happened to him.’
‘You might be an embarrassment if he’s got a wife and family.’
‘I don’t intend to embarrass him. I simply want to find him.’
‘Do you know how to go about it?’
‘No, I don’t. I’ll have to find out.’
‘Are you really determined?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you told your mother?’
‘No. I don’t want to upset her.’
‘You’ll upset her more if you do it without saying anything.’
‘But nothing might come of it.’
‘Maybe not, but don’t go off half-cock, Angela. Think about it carefully.’
Louise had known Angela would not let the subject of Jan rest and was not at all surprised when she brought it up again on her return from the dance. She had waited up for her, as she always did, filling in the time preparing lessons for Monday morning and watching a report on television of Princess Margaret’s wedding to Anthony Armstrong-Jones, which had taken place that afternoon at Westminster Abbey. None of it served to take her mind off Jan. It was almost as if her daughter had brought him to life again, filled her heart, mind and body as he had done so many years before. She found herself listening again to his chatter, his infectious laugh, the feel of his hand holding hers in a firm dry grip, reliving his lovemaking until her body ached. It was a long time to remain celibate. Perhaps she should have married Bill Young, after all. But she couldn’t; he was much too nice a man to use as second best.
She heard the back door and voices coming from the kitchen and hastily opened Tracey Johns’ maths book. A minute later, Angela came in followed by Tommy. Her daughter was rosy-cheeked and animated. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ she asked her.
‘Yes, smashing. Tommy is a good dancer. Rosemary was green with envy. I’ve brought him in for coffee. We want to ask you something.’
‘Oh.’ She put the exercise books in a neat pile. ‘I’ll make the coffee first, shall I?’
‘Good idea.’
Louise left them sitting side by side on the sofa. Tommy looked a little uneasy; it made her wonder just what mischief her daughter was up to. He had obviously been dragged in to back her up in whatever it was. She made the coffee, loaded the mugs on a tray and went back to them. They had been talking in low voices but stopped when she came in. ‘Now,’ she said, handing them a mug each. ‘What is this big ask?’
Chapter Fourteen
‘Angela, I am not at all sure about this,’ Louise said after hearing her out. She had been half expecting it, but that didn’t stop her feeling fearful. What she was fearful of, she did not know. Was it that Angela might fail and this churning in her stomach would all have been for nothing? Or that she might succeed, only to find that the love Jan had once had for her had faded to nothing over the years? Or was it the risk involved in delving into a regime that was only half understood? ‘You may be stirring up a hornet’s nest.’
‘I don’t see why. I simply want to know what happened to him.’
‘Finding out won’t be easy. He might have died. He might have changed his name. He might have left Poland and emigrated.’
‘Wouldn’t he have come back here to us, if he’d done that?’
‘I would like to hope so, but not if he’s still married.’
‘Then if he’s alive, my bet is he’s still in Poland. It won’t do any harm to ask around, will it?’
‘Who are you proposing to ask?’
‘The Polish Embassy, the Red Cross, the British Legion, anyone in England who knew him. You surely know someone who might give us a clue.’
‘I can’t think of anyone. His friends have all dispersed – heaven knows where they are now, or even if he kept in touch with them. His brother emigrated to South Africa.’
‘You mean I might have cousins there?’
‘I suppose you might. I hadn’t thought of it.’ She turned to Tommy. ‘What do you make of all this, young man?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘But what I remember of Jan, he would want to know that he has a daughter he can be proud of. I’m sorry, this must be very distressing for you. And it’s all my fault, coming back like I did.’
It was distressing in a way. She found herself living again that last parting, the tears and the anguish, the sleepless nights, the way she had followed every bit of news to come out of Poland, wondering if, one day, his name might be mentioned. It never had. Gradually the torment had eased to leave a feeling of emptiness that not even Angela could properly fill. ‘No, it’s not your fault, Tommy. It was time I told Angela about him. You just jogged me into doing it.’
He laughed. ‘And now she’s got the bit between her teeth.’
‘It would probably have happened anyway.’
‘What do you say, Mum?’ Angela persisted.
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.’
‘What’s to think about?’ Angela demanded. ‘I only want to make a few enquiries.’
‘And then what?’
‘It all depends on what turns up.’
‘If you do find him, you can’t just go barging in. He might not have told his wife about us.’
‘I know that. I’m not stupid.’
‘If she finds him, they don’t have to meet if he doesn’t want it,’ Tommy put in. ‘The usual thing is to use an intermediary. It’s been done like that in the States …’ His voice tailed away.
Louise was tempted, very tempted. If only, oh, if only … Would there be any harm in it? In any case, the odds of succeeding were very long indeed, considering all the unrest in the Eastern bloc and the Soviet determination to put it down. She sighed and gathered up the coffee cups. ‘It’s late and we can’t talk about it any more tonight. I’m tired and ready for my bed.’
Angela was smiling as she accompanied Tommy to the door. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. She’ll give in, see if she doesn’t.’
‘Do you think I should let Angela do it?’ Louise asked Jenny. They had just come out of church and were walking towards the Pheasant. The day was warm and they were wearing printed nylon dresses, light cardigans and sandals. Faith, in what she considered the obligatory suit, hat and gloves, had stayed behind to talk to the parson. Angela was walking ahead of them with Tommy at her side.
‘She’s eighteen, Lou, you can’t really lay down the law, can you? If she’s determined, she’ll go ahead anyway. It would be better to oversee what she does and make sure she doesn’t get into trouble over it.’ She chuckled suddenly. ‘If she takes the job we’ve offered her, she won’t have much spare time. It’s probably only hot air, anyway.’
‘You are no doubt right. In any case, I can’t see her succeeding, given the political clima
te.’ Relations between East and West were as bad as ever. Only that week, the Russians had shot down an American aeroplane over Russian air space. They claimed it had been spying, while the Americans had maintained it was only doing weather research and the pilot had simply strayed off course. The row was seriously jeopardising the Big Four summit in Paris.
Jenny turned to look at her friend. ‘But there’s a part of you that hopes she does, isn’t there? Own up.’
Louise laughed, but it was a trifle cracked. ‘You know me so well.’
Angela finished her exams and said goodbye to school. While she was waiting for her results she helped out at the Pheasant and in her spare time set about the task of finding her father. But all her enquiries drew a blank. The Red Cross said they would put her request on their books, but finding anyone in Poland was almost impossible. She had the same reply from the Polish Embassy. The man she spoke to on the telephone even went so far as to warn her off.
‘I’m not surprised,’ her mother told her. ‘The embassy people are appointed by the Communist government and would not encourage Polish citizens to have contact with the West. I do hope you haven’t made things difficult for Jan.’
‘Leave well alone,’ her grandmother put in. ‘I don’t know why you want to stir up the past. What can you achieve? He can’t come here, can he?’
‘Why not?’ Angela demanded.
‘He’s supposed to be dead.’
‘Perhaps, he is,’ Louise said quietly. ‘Angela, I think you’ve done enough. Leave it now, will you?’
Angela did not reply. She was disappointed at not making any headway and even more disappointed that her mother wanted her to stop. Frustrated and annoyed with everyone, she slammed out of the house. Other girls had fathers, fathers who had watched them grow up, who had taken them on outings and holidays, who praised them, grumbled at them, who ferried them about in their cars when they wanted to go out, who were there, part of their lives. She had missed all that. Mum had done her best to make up for it, but it wasn’t the same. Somewhere, she had a father, somewhere, out there in a world she could only imagine, her tata lived, she knew it in her bones.
‘I’m home.’ Jan put his head round the bedroom door. ‘I’ll wash and change and then I’ll see about supper.’
Rulka smiled but did not speak. Talking was too much of an effort. Poor Jan! He could never have envisaged what his life would be like coming back to Poland. According to the tales he had told her, his life in England had been good, even in wartime. He had never been hungry and there had been a camaraderie, a shared destiny that the end of the war had shattered. Many of his friends who had also returned to Poland had been arrested and imprisoned, some of them shot. With the death of Stalin in 1953 and Nikita Kruschev’s vitriolic attack on Stalin at the Soviet Party Congress in 1956, the Soviet hold on the country had eased. A general amnesty at that time had meant the release of some of the prisoners, but they were broken and embittered men and found it almost impossible to find work. Jan was lucky to have his job as a bricklayer.
It was a far cry from his pre-war air force days when life was carefree and fun. How happy he and Rulka had been, looking forward to their life together, planning their family. As it was they would never have children. Near starvation during the German occupation and her ill-treatment in prison meant that she could never become pregnant. Jan had accepted that as he accepted everything with uncomplaining stoicism, but she wondered if he ever wished he could have had a family. He would have made a grand tata. Now, all he could do was work and sleep and look after an invalid wife who was no good to him at all.
Clean and in a fresh shirt and light trousers, he came back into the room, sat on the side of the bed and took her hand. ‘What would you like to eat, sweetheart?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘But you must eat. Look at you, all skin and bone. You’ll never get better if you don’t put some flesh on you. Try a little broth.’
She smiled. ‘For you, I’ll try.’
He went off to the kitchen to heat up the broth he had made before leaving for work that morning. The apartment, on the second floor of a block of flats, was the third one they had lived in since his return, each slightly better than the one before. From the cellar in Jasna Street, they had gone to a tiny one-roomed apartment with a shared kitchen and bathroom, and from there to one that had two rooms and a kitchen. Their present home was spacious by comparison and had the luxury of its own bathroom. It was a far cry from what he had hoped and dreamt of, but they were a great deal better off than many people. He had a job that paid him enough for them to live reasonably well, though nothing like his pre-war standard or what he had earned in the air force.
Sometimes he wondered if he could get a job flying with LOT, the civilian airline, which would have paid considerably more, but to do that he would have to produce credentials and that meant revealing his involvement with the RAF. Rulka had been vehemently against it. ‘You will stir up trouble for both of us if you do that,’ she had said. ‘It’s too risky.’
It wasn’t only the risk to him she had been thinking of but her involvement with the underground. The prospect of a free and independent Poland obsessed her. She could not give up fighting. She fought bureaucracy, she fought their political masters, she fought dirt and disease, she even fought him. Their renewed life together had been a constant battle of one kind or another. He had only a faint idea of what she had been through in the years they had been apart but he was sure it had been horrendous and had left her scarred, not only physically but mentally. He told himself it was up to him to make her life a little easier and be patient.
She had gone back to work almost immediately on being released from prison and they had soldiered on and in time had achieved a kind of peace with each other. One by one the years had rolled on. The past was a closed book; he did not speak of it. Thoughts of England, Cottlesham, Louise and Angela were buried deep inside him and not allowed to surface.
But in the end the years of privation and cruelty in prison had taken their toll of Rulka and she had started losing weight again. Three months before, while holding her in his arms in bed, feeling her bony fragility, he had found a lump in one of her breasts. She had made light of it, but he had insisted she spoke to Lech about it, who had done some tests and confirmed what they had both dreaded: she had cancer.
He took the bowl of broth and a spoon into the bedroom and put it on a side table so that he could help her sit up, then he fed it to her spoonful by spoonful, until it had all gone. She lay back exhausted. The radiotherapy always left her like that, but they both maintained the fiction that the treatment was doing her good.
‘I’m going to sleep now,’ she said. ‘I’ll be better in the morning.’
He tucked the bedclothes round her, made sure she could reach the little bell to summon him if she needed him and left her. He made himself a meal and sat in the kitchen to eat it, then he went into the living room, fetched a box containing his course work and settled at the table to read. In his spare time he was studying to be an architect. Much of Warsaw had been rebuilt, brick by brick, stone by stone, exactly as it had been. The Old Town had re-emerged historically accurate, with its quaint buildings and cobbled streets, and most of the churches had risen again; Communism could not stifle the Poles’ commitment to their religion. The ugly concrete apartment blocks built hastily immediately after the war to house the homeless were still an eyesore, but in time they would be replaced and perhaps if he qualified he could make a difference.
He had to believe there were better times to come, or he would not have been able to carry on. He had to believe that Rulka would recover and one day there would be an independent Poland, free of the Soviet shackles. He had taken a leaf from Rulka’s book and joined the workers’ union, and although it wasn’t like a union in the West, independent and able to negotiate freely; it was beavering away clandestinely to that end. He smiled wryly; who would have dreamt, back in those heady days before the wa
r when he had the world at his feet, that he would come to this and be grateful for it? He was grateful he had his health and strength, grateful for a job and a home, grateful and humble for Rulka and her stoical courage.
He told himself that a hundred times a day, but under it all was a deep melancholy for what he had lost. And days like today, when the work he was doing had been especially irksome and the books he was studying palled, and particularly when he had stood in the street and watched a single-seater aeroplane swooping low over the river, its wings glinting in the sun, he yearned for what had been and would never come again, and longed for Louise. He had never written to her. In the beginning he had started several letters but then realised the futility of it and thrown them on the fire.
Did she remember him with fondness? He liked to think she did. But what about Angela? She had only been four when he left, she would hardly remember her tata. Had Louise told her about him? Did she know who had fathered her? Or had Louise married and given their daughter a new father? He delved into the box of papers, extracted an envelope and tipped its contents into his palm. A tiny, soft blonde curl lay there. He closed his fist over it and wept.
‘Dear Miss Fairhurst, Further to your enquiry about Flight Lieutenant Jan Grabowski, I am afraid we do not know what happened to him after September 1946 when he was discharged from the Air Force. We believe he returned to Poland and though we are sometimes able to help ex-members of the air force in Poland, he is not on our books. We have, however, passed your enquiry on to a member of our association who may be able to help you. His name is Mr Boris Martel. You should hear from him in due course.’ The letter was signed by the secretary of the Polish Airman’s Association.
It had been Tommy’s idea to write to them. ‘I believe they give advice and financial help to ex-Polish airman in need,’ he had said. ‘I think it’s only for men still in England, but it’s worth a try.’