22 Britannia Road
Amanda Hodgkinson was born in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset and grew up in Essex and Suffolk. She currently lives in south-west France with her husband and two daughters. This is her first novel.
22 Britannia Road
AMANDA HODGKINSON
FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
FIG TREE
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2011
Copyright © Amanda Hodgkinson, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
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reserved above, no part of this publication may be
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-96498-0
To my mother and father. With love.
The dead have need of fairytales too.
Zbigniew Herbert
Table of Contents
Spring 1946. To England.
22 Britannia Road, Ipswich
Poland, 1937
Poland, 1939
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
Poland
22 Britannia Road
Spring 1946. To England.
The boy was everything to her. Small and unruly, he had a nervy way about him like a wild creature caught in the open. All the dark hearts of the lost, the found and the never forgotten lived in his child’s body, in his quick eyes. She loved him with the same unforgiving force that pushes forests from the deep ground, but still she feared it was not enough to keep him. So she was taking him to England, determined Janusz would love him and keep him safe.
On the ship’s sailing list she was named as Silvana Nowak. Twenty-seven years old. Married. Mother of a son, Aurek Josef, aged seven years.
‘What is your profession?’ the British soldier asked her, checking the identity papers she put before him.
She looked at the documents on his desk and saw pages of women’s names. All were listed as housewives or housekeepers.
Behind her, hundreds more women, dressed as she was in donated clothes, stood silently with their children. Above the soldier’s head, a sign in several languages, including Polish, detailed the ship’s rules. All blankets and sheets remain the property of the ship. All stolen items will be confiscated.
Silvana tightened her grasp on her son. The soldier glanced at her quickly and then looked back to his papers. She knew why. It embarrassed him to see a woman so unkempt and a child with such restless ways. She touched her headscarf, checking it was in place, and pressed her other hand into Aurek’s back, trying to make him stand up straight.
‘Profession?’
‘Survivor,’ she whispered, the first word that came to her.
The soldier didn’t look up. He lifted his pen. ‘Housekeeper or housewife?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and then, aware of the queue shifting impatiently behind her, ‘Housewife.’
So that was it. She was recorded, written neatly into a book in indelible black ink. She was given a transport number, a label pinned on her lapel that corresponded with the details on the ship’s passenger list. Proof that she and the boy were mother and son. That was a good start. Nobody, after all, could disagree with or dispute an official document. Only the title housewife looked questionable. Together or separate, Silvana was sure nobody would believe the words house or wife had anything to do with her.
All night, while the sea carried the ship and its passengers towards another land, Silvana worked at remembering. She found herself a space in one of the crowded corridors below deck and sat, arms crossed, legs tucked under her. Curled into herself in this way, with Aurek hidden under her coat, she breathed through the odour of sweat and diesel fumes, the throb of the engines marking time, while she tried to recall her life with Janusz. Always, though, the same memories came to her. The ones she didn’t want to own. A road she didn’t want to travel. A filthy sky full of rain, and planes coming out of the clouds. She shook her head, tried to think of other things, to cut off the image that would surely come. And then there it was. The wet mud shining underfoot. Trees twisting in the wind and the child swaddled in a jumble of blankets, lying in a wooden handcart.
Silvana pulled Aurek tighter to her, rocking him back and forth, the memories departing. He snaked a bony hand out from under her coat and she felt his small fingers searching her face. And how was it that love and loss were so close together? Because no matter how she loved the boy – and she did, furiously, as if her own life depended on him – loss was always there, following at her heels.
By the time the dawn sky leaked light into the darkness, Silvana was too tired to think any more and finally closed her eyes, letting the heartbeat drone of the engines settle her to a thankfully dreamless slumber.
Morning brought with it a pale sun and salt-laden winds. Silvana pushed her way through the crowds to the upper decks, Aurek hanging on her coat-tail. Gripping the handrail, she let him settle in a crouch between her feet, the weight of him against her legs. Green waves lay far below and she stared down at them, trying to imagine what England would be like, a place she knew nothing of except that this was where her husband Janusz now lived.
She had been lost and he had found her. He must have thought he was reaching back into the past; that she would be as she was when he left her, his young wife, red hair pinned up in curls, a smile on her face and their darling son in her arms. He couldn’t know that the past was dead and she was the ghost of the wife he once had.
The heaving of the ship made her dizzy and she leaned against the handrail. She had left her country far behind and now there was no shoreline, no land to mourn, only water as far as the horizon and shards of dazzling light splintering the waves. She hadn’t seen Janusz since the day he left Warsaw six long years ago. Would she even recognize him now? She could recall the day they met, the date they married, his shoe size; that he was right-handed. But where did this awkward grabbing of dates and facts get her?
She squinted at the sea, the waves
churning, over and over. She had loved him once. That much she was sure of. But so much lost time stretched between them. Six years might as well be a hundred. Could she really lay claim to a man simply because she remembered his collar size?
Aurek pulled at her hand and Silvana dropped to her knees, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve, trying to smile. The boy was the reason she was making this journey. A boy must have a father. Soon the past would be behind them and England would become their present. There she was sure they would be able to live each day with no yesterdays and no memories to threaten or histories to follow them. She ran her fingers through Aurek’s cropped hair, and he wrapped his arms around her neck. She was on her way to a new life, and her one piece of Poland was still with her.
22 Britannia Road, Ipswich
Janusz thinks the house looks lucky. He steps back to get a better look at Number 22 Britannia Road, and admires the narrow red-brick property with its three windows and blue door. The door has a pane of coloured glass set in it: a yellow sunrise sitting in a green border with a bluebird in its centre. It’s so typically English it makes him smile. It’s just what he has been searching for.
It is the last house in a terrace, and although it stands next to a bomb site, somehow it has escaped any real damage itself. The only sign is a crack in the coloured glass pane, a line running through the bluebird that makes it look as if it might have problems if it tried to fly. Apart from that, it is possible to believe the war has never touched this building. It’s a fanciful idea, he knows, but one he likes. Maybe the house will share some of its luck with him and his wife and son.
‘Don’t you worry about that eyesore,’ says the estate agent beside him, waving his hand at the wasteland where dirty-faced children are playing. ‘That’ll be cleared in no time. We’ll have this town back on her feet quick enough.’ He straightens the cuffs of his tweed jacket and hands Janusz a bunch of keys. ‘There you are. All yours. I hope you like living here. Can I ask you where you’re from?’
Janusz has been waiting for this question. The first thing people want to know is where you come from.
‘Poland,’ he says. ‘I’m Polish.’
The estate agent pulls out a cigarette case from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘You speak damned good English. In the army, were you?’
And that is the second thing they ask: What are you doing here? But Janusz is at ease in this country. He knows the manners and ways of things. Keep everything simple and to the point. Let them know you are on their side, and they’re happy.
The first time someone had asked him where he came from, back when he had been anxious about his foreignness, seeing it like a birthmark, a facial port-wine stain visible to all, he had mistakenly tried to answer them. He’d not been in England very long – a year, if that – and the loud, bloody enthusiasm for war he found among his new comrades had lit a kind of fire in his heart. A rich blazing ran through his veins and flared in him an outgoing recklessness he’d never experienced before. He was in a smoky hall with a noisy crowd of RAF men, drinking beer the colour of engine oil, and launched into his own story, the whole journey from Poland at the very start of the war, to France and then England.
Too late, he realized he’d made it too complicated and in any case nobody was listening. Nobody wanted to know about the women he’d left behind. He carried on, stumbling over vocabulary, finishing up lost in his own regrets, mumbling into his beer in Polish, talking of painful things like love and honour. When he left the hall and stood in the sobering night air, looking up at a sky littered with stars, he regretted every foolish word he had uttered.
He squares his shoulders and closes his mind to those memories. ‘I served with the Royal Air Force,’ he says, his voice clear and steady. ‘The Polish Corps. I came over in 1940. I’ve been here ever since.’
‘Ah. Right you are.’ The man smiles and offers him a cigarette. ‘I was in the army, myself. I met quite a few of your lads. Great drinkers, the Poles.’
He lights his cigarette, flicks the match onto the ground and hands the box to Janusz.
‘Stationed around here, were you?’
‘No,’ says Janusz, taking the matchbox, giving a brief nod of thanks. ‘We moved about a lot. I was demobbed in Devon and offered work here or up in the North.’
‘Well, you’ll find this is a decent enough area. Ipswich is a nice little market town. And you got this house just in time. I’ve a list as long as my arm of people wanting this property. If you hadn’t been there, banging on my door before I’d even opened up, it would’ve been some other fellow who’d have got it. It’s a nice family house. Have you, er … any …?’
‘Family? I have a wife and a son. They are coming to Britain next month.’
‘Reunited, heh? That’s good to hear.’
Janusz takes a drag on his cigarette, blows a smoke ring and watches it drift out of shape.
‘I hope so. It’s been six years since I last saw them.’
The estate agent cocks his head on one side, a concerned look on his face.
‘That’s tough. Mind you, look at it this way, you’ve got this house, a job and your family’s coming over here. Add it up and you’ve got yourself a happy ending.’
Janusz laughs. That’s exactly what he is hoping for.
‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘A happy ending.’
When the Red Cross officer told him Silvana and Aurek had been found in a British refugee camp, he had not been able to smile. ‘They are in a bad state,’ the officer said. The man’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper. ‘They’d been living in a forest. I gather they’d been there for a long time. Good luck. I hope it works out for you all.’
Janusz jangles his new house keys on his finger, watching the tweed-jacketed back of the estate agent as he walks briskly down the hill. So this is it. Peacetime. And he’s got a house. A home for Silvana and Aurek when they arrive. His father would have been proud of him, bringing his family back together. Doing the right thing. Looking to the future. He can’t return to Poland. Not now that his country has communist rule imposed upon it. He must face facts. Dreams of a free and independent Poland are just that – dreams. His home is here. Churchill himself said Polish troops should have the citizenship and freedom of the British Empire, and that’s what he’s accepted. Britain is his home now.
If he ever speaks to his parents or his sisters again, if one day they answer his letters and find him here, he hopes they will understand that this is where he has chosen to be.
He pockets his keys and wonders what life here will bring him. When he was offered two jobs, one in a factory making bicycles in Nottingham and one in an engineering works in a town in East Anglia, he sat in a library with a map of Britain and put his thumb on Ipswich. It was a small town with a harbour squatting on a straggling line of blue estuary leading to the sea. With his little finger he could reach across the blue and touch France. That’s what decided it for him. He would live in Ipswich because he could be nearer to Hélène. It was a stupid reason, especially when he was trying so hard to forget, but it eased the pain a little.
He yawns and sighs deeply. It feels good here. The air is clean enough and it’s a quiet place. Terraced brick houses stretch away down the hill. In the distance, a church spire reaches for the sky, the top of it boxed in by scaffolding. Whether the scaffolding is there so that long-awaited repair work can be carried out or because of recent war damage, he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t care. He has stopped believing in God. Now he hopes for specific things. A job to go to. A family to care for and perhaps, one day, a small degree of happiness.
Beyond the church, rows of housing are hemmed by the river and the tall chimneys of the factories. Beyond them are fields and woodland. Above him, the sky is chewing-gum grey but some blue is breaking through. Hélène would have said there was just enough blue to make a pair of trousers for a gendarme.
He lights another cigarette and allows himself to think of France. It’s a weakness
that he savours briefly, sweet and good as an extra spoonful of sugar in bitter barracks tea. He thinks of the farmhouse with its red tiled roof and blue wooden shutters. Hélène standing at the kitchen door. Her tanned skin and her warm southern accent, the life in her beautiful eyes.
He finishes his cigarette and wanders through the house again, planning, making lists of things that need mending or replacing. Flinging open the back door, he strides out into the garden. It is a long rectangular piece of land. The grass hasn’t seen a mower in years and there are nettles and brambles everywhere. At the end of the garden is an old oak tree. It looks just right for a treehouse for his son. And when the lawn is cut and the weeds are dug up, he’ll have flower beds and a vegetable plot too. A real English garden for his family.
With his list of things to do in his hand, Janusz stands at the front door and watches the children playing on the wasteland beside the house. Hard to imagine his son Aurek will be one of them soon. Janusz is going to be a good father to the boy. He’s determined to get things right. In the grainy sunlight, the children laugh and leap, shrieking through the afternoon, their shouts mingling with the sharp-edged call of gulls from the quay. When Janusz hears the cries of women calling them home for tea, he locks up and walks back to spend his last night in lodgings.
At the town hall, he fills in forms and waits in queues for government vouchers for furniture and paint. The furniture comes from a warehouse near the bus station and is all the same: solid, square shapes in thin, dark-stained wood. He buys wallpaper from Woolworths: ‘Summer Days’ – cream-coloured with sprays of tiny red roses in diagonal lines. He gets enough for the front parlour and the main bedroom. He buys wallpaper for Aurek’s room too, asking the advice of a shop assistant, who says she has a son the same age.
He papers the hall and the kitchen in a pale beige, patterned with curling bamboo leaves and twiggy canes in soft green. Upstairs, rose-pink paint for the bathroom and landing. Aurek’s room has grey formations of aeroplanes flying across its walls. It’s a good-sized room. He’ll be able to share it with a brother one day if everything works out the way Janusz wants it to.
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