22 Britannia Road

by Amanda Hodgkinson

‘The villagers call us kulaks because they think we’re on the side of the Germans,’ Marysia said. ‘But they’re jealous because we don’t have to work for the soldiers like they do.’

  ‘The Germans are not so bad,’ Marysia told Silvana when her mother had left the room. ‘Some of them are better than the animals that call themselves men in the village.’

  ‘Such gentlemen to take our country,’ Silvana replied.

  ‘Let them take it,’ Marysia said. ‘They’re welcome to it. Before they came we were hungry. Now I have food whenever I want. And look –’ She lifted her skirts and turned an ankle, showing off a pair of laced brown boots with a small heel. ‘These come from Paris. I’d let you try them, but I don’t think you’d get them on.’

  Silvana looked down at her swollen feet. Her toes were scarlet, her feet covered in a red rash that marbled up her legs, stopping just below the knees.

  Marysia tutted. ‘You’ll have scars. What were you doing in the woods anyway? Were you hiding? Are you Jewish? The boy looks Jewish.’

  ‘My son is Polish. So am I.’

  ‘I don’t care either way,’ Marysia said. ‘My father thinks you and the boy are a couple of miracles. He’ll let you stay here as long as you like. I’ll let you stay as long as you pull your weight.’

  Silvana stood up stiffly. It seemed as though she had lived many lives, that the day Janusz left her in Warsaw was the day one life ended and another began. And now here she was, starting again. A miracle no less. But she was nothing of the sort. She and the boy were foundlings from the forest, mysteries even to herself. In the kitchen, Aurek was sitting on Antek’s lap, wrapped in oilcloths. Antek was teaching him a song. ‘Oto dziś dzień krwi i chwały’, ‘Today is a day of blood and glory’.

  The old woman sat watching in a chair by the fire.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ Antek said. ‘Come and sit down.’ He handed Aurek to Silvana.

  ‘I was just saying how I thought you were nothing but a pile of old clothes when I found you. That’s all I thought you were: a heap of blankets. I found the chaise a few days before. Thought it might be useful. There’s lots of stuff in the woods now. People trying to get to the Russian side. They carry their furniture and belongings as far as they can, then abandon them. See that clock?’ A wide-hipped grandfather clock stood against the whitewashed wall. It had a hand missing and the front was made of a different-coloured wood from the body. ‘Mended it myself. I reckon it came from the same house the chaise longue came from. And then I saw you and I thought you were a pile of clothes.’

  ‘Do you think you could show me the chaise longue again, when the weather improves?’ Silvana asked. ‘I had a bag with me. I’d like to go back and try to find it. And a necklace. A glass pendant. It’s probably lost, but my husband gave it to me.’

  ‘I didn’t see a bag and I never saw a necklace. There was nothing but you and that broken seat.’

  ‘The things that come out of the forest,’ said his wife in a hushed voice. ‘You hear such stories.’

  ‘The drowned woman,’ said Marysia. ‘Tell us about the drowned woman.’

  ‘That’s a stupid story,’ grumbled Antek.

  ‘Go on, Mama, tell the story. I’m sure our guest wants to hear it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ela. ‘She was a drinker, this woman. She had a son but that didn’t stop her. Her husband chucked her out. Kept the baby and threw her out in the street.’

  ‘She slept with different men,’ said Marysia. ‘Nobody knew who the father of her baby really was.’ She stared at Silvana. ‘Do you like a drink?’

  ‘Marysia!’ snapped her mother. ‘Are you telling the story or am I?’ She shifted in her seat and continued. ‘The woman went straight to the Jewish tavern in the village. When the bar closed, she wandered around in the dark and stumbled into the forest, where she fell into a deep pond. They found her there the next day, drowned. The child screamed and cried, and nothing would silence it.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Silvana asked.

  Ela sat back in her chair. ‘She came back from the dead. Three days later she came back to suckle her son. The sound of him crying brought that wretched woman back. After that, she never left her cottage, never spoke a word, spun wool every night, prepared the meals and raised her boy. Her husband said he liked her better dead than alive.’

  ‘And it really happened,’ said Marysia.

  ‘Of course it didn’t,’ said the woodsman. ‘It’s a stupid tale you women like to tell. Why don’t you quieten down with all your nonsense and let me talk? At least I can tell God’s truth and not some story put about by women with too much time on their hands.’

  He stood up and warmed himself by the fire.

  ‘You couldn’t have been there long. I found you just in time. I rubbed you down with snow as fast as I could. I used up so much snow I was sweating by the time I brought you round. Sweating in all that snow! It made me laugh out loud. I cleared an area this wide. Back to the earth. If I hadn’t decided to take that red chaise home, you would have died. Like I said, it’s a miracle I found you. Like God had left you there.’

  Marysia snorted with laughter. ‘Either him or the devil.’

  Silvana shifted Aurek on her knee and pretended not to hear.

  Janusz

  Every morning, at first light, Janusz breakfasted with the family before they worked the fields together. He learned how to manage vines and grow crops, and took charge of the vegetable garden. The famer’s wife showed him how to tend roses and care for the fruit trees in the orchards.

  In the afternoons, when the heat was too much to work in and everybody slept, Hélène pulled Janusz into the barn, where they made love, salt settling on his lips, sweat stiffening his hair and dripping into his eyes, rivulets running down his back, between his buttocks. She seemed to turn the air thick with the heat of her lovemaking, always wanting more from him, always desiring him, loving him.

  He couldn’t bear to let her out of his sight. He was so full of her he couldn’t understand his joy. He knew the war continued, but it didn’t matter to him any more. It was all somebody else’s business. He was not part of any of it.

  The farmer asked Janusz if he was going to marry her. He didn’t want to know about Janusz’s past. He needed a man to work the farm. He wanted grandchildren. Lots of them.

  ‘If the Germans come down here, we’ll hide you. I know what war is like. I was a poilu in 1914. Stay here. Hélène’s a good girl. She’ll make you a good wife.’

  ‘I will, sir,’ said Janusz. He was so serious, he saluted the old man. And the old man stood to attention and saluted him back.

  Ipswich

  Janusz is counting on his promotion at work. He wonders if they will choose another man, a British man, over him. He is wearing his best shoes, the ones Silvana gave him, polished and bright. His hair is oiled, his face clean and his collar starched. There is not a man who works as hard as he does on the shop floor, of that he is sure. But will that be enough?

  He waits in the office where the secretaries work, listening to the chatter of typewriters, and when the boss comes out of his glass-fronted booth, cigar in hand, Janusz asks him whether he has made a decision about who will replace Mr Wilkens as foreman. The boss tells him not yet, but he believes the Poles are all damn good workers. Janusz runs a finger around the inside of his collar, clears his throat, feels suddenly hopeful and says so.

  The boss says he should be. He has a factory to run and doesn’t give a pig’s arse what the locals think of foreigners stealing their jobs.

  ‘But just don’t touch their women. We know what you Continentals are like. Young Lotharios, the lot of you,’ he laughs, and pats Janusz on the shoulder. Then he strides out, leaving Janusz alone in the room with six silent typewriters and six giggling secretaries looking at him as if they think he might be a Polish Casanova in blue overalls. It takes most of the afternoon for his normally pale cheeks to lose their red glare of embarrassment.

  Janusz has
always believed in things falling into place. He knows patience and a sense of duty will be rewarded. This belief comes from his father and his grandfather. He is one of Poland’s sons and has a steady understanding that right will somehow or other always be rewarded by right.

  Like a stream trickling over pebbles will smooth and shape them, so Janusz’s hopefulness is a slow and unending force that runs coolly through his life, rubbing, rolling and forming it. So when the chance to buy a car falls into his lap the same day the work promotion is almost his, he isn’t surprised at all.

  It is a black Rover owned by a teacher and his wife. Made in 1940, it has a four-speed gearbox, a busted radiator and two flat tyres. In 1943, the teacher’s wife drove it in a snowstorm and crashed into an oak tree. Since then it has been in a barn under a tarpaulin. Janusz overhears a man telling the story during lunch break.

  He turns to the man drinking tea from a flask and offers him one of his sandwiches.

  ‘They are cheese,’ says Janusz politely.

  ‘Cheese?’

  ‘Yes. Real cheddar. From the Co-op. With margarine and onion cut very thinly.’

  ‘Cheese, eh? All right then. Don’t mind if I do.’

  It costs him his lunch, but he leaves work that day with the teacher’s address.

  He doesn’t lift the tarpaulin. The rounded shape of the car underneath it is enough to make him dream of country drives, picnics with Aurek and Silvana, driving the boy to school and trips to the seaside on Sundays.

  ‘Yes,’ says Janusz.

  ‘Have a cup of tea first, old chap,’ says the teacher. ‘There’s no rush.’

  Janusz sits in the kitchen at a big refectory table. He looks out of the window, beyond the stone patio to a lawned garden bordered by beds of red and yellow tulips and behind them shrubs and trees. The kitchen has a black and white tiled floor, like the floor of his parents’ kitchen in Poland, and a big cooking range covered in pans. Above the range hangs a lazy-maid covered in baby clothes.

  ‘We’ve just had our fourth,’ says the teacher when he sees Janusz looking. ‘I’m afraid he’s got a few problems, poor little chap. We’re selling the car partly to finance a holiday for my wife. She’s finding it rather hard to accept the child.’

  Janusz doesn’t know what to say. He nods uncertainly.

  The man moves the kettle on the stove. ‘So you’ll be able to fix it up yourself, will you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  The teacher’s wife comes in and offers Janusz a currant bun to have with his tea. She is narrow-faced and creased with tiredness. Pushing her wavy brown hair out of her face, tucking loose strands behind her ears, a gesture she repeats as she speaks, she talks about Russia and the atom bomb and Janusz tells her politely that he is Polish, not Russian.

  ‘I think Russia having such a bomb would be a disaster. Poland will be Poland again one day, and the Russians will leave our country,’ he says, and then regrets the determined tone in his voice, the emotion he didn’t mean to show.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ says the teacher’s wife. She smiles at Janusz as if he has not quite understood the complexity of the discussion. ‘But we have to let the people take control. Follow a Russian model whether we like it or not.’

  Janusz is there to buy a car, not discuss politics. His collar feels tight, but he resists a desire to loosen it.

  ‘It’s all down to understanding,’ says the teacher. He wears his glasses on the bridge of his nose or pushes them back over his forehead into unruly waves of red hair. ‘This country is still having a hell of a time struggling with peacetime. We need to find a way to give everyone a sense of worthwhileness in their lives.’

  The sound of a baby’s high-pitched screaming floats down from another room and the teacher’s wife puts her head in her hands and gives a sudden cry. The teacher takes his glasses off and cleans them.

  ‘Susan, that’s enough.’

  ‘Enough?’ She lifts her head. ‘This is just the bloody beginning.’

  Janusz loosens his collar.

  ‘Can I see the car again?’

  He rolls the tarpaulin back, opens the door, dusts off the black leather seats and gets in. He gets out, walks round the car, runs his hand over the dented bonnet, kicks a flat tyre.

  ‘Yes,’ he says again, and they go back into the house where a woman in a white apron passes the crying baby to the teacher.

  ‘Hello, little chap,’ says the teacher, handing the child to Janusz. ‘He’s abnormal, I’m afraid. Quite heartbreaking.’

  The child has a thick mop of brown hair, and when Janusz takes him he stops crying and smiles, a wide smile that makes his eyes disappear and his face pucker into creases. Janusz holds him on his lap and jiggles his knee to make the boy laugh. He is solid as a block of lard and not much better looking, but Janusz has to stop himself from singing Polish songs to him.

  ‘You’re good with him,’ the teacher says, and something in his voice makes Janusz suspect he’d like to offer him the baby along with the car.

  When he leaves, with a promise from the teacher to help him move the car to Britannia Road on a trailer, the man’s wife hands him a tartan blanket.

  ‘Take this. You’ll need a car blanket. Good luck with your life here.’

  He can see tears welling in her eyes. There’s a wave of sadness coming off her that makes him feel he could drown in it.

  ‘Your son’s a lovely little chap,’ he says gently. ‘You’re a good mother.’

  ‘Sadly, I’m no kind of mother,’ she replies. ‘I hope you enjoy the car.’

  Janusz cycles home, the blanket balanced over the handlebars, compiling a list of spare parts he needs. Apart from the brown Humber van owned by a family that live three doors down, Janusz’s car will be the first in Britannia Road.

  His head is so full of his thoughts that he doesn’t notice a car pulling alongside him. He nearly slams straight into it when it stops in front of him on the concrete bridge over the river.

  ‘Evening,’ says his boss, winding down his window. ‘Glad to see you, in fact.’

  Janusz dismounts from his bike, smooths his moustache, stands up straight.

  ‘The job as foreman. You still want it?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s yours. Nice to give a bit of good news to somebody. Come into the office tomorrow.’

  He shakes Janusz’s hand and drives off, waving regally.

  Janusz climbs back on his bike. He reaches the bottom of the hill and, instead of dismounting and pushing the bike up the road as he usually does, he feels a spurt of energy, puts his head down and cycles as hard as he can, not looking up until he makes it to the top. He comes to a triumphant stop at the top of the hill and looks back at the town, the fields bordering it, the estuary that leads to the sea and the roads that go all the way to London and beyond.

  He is on top of the world up here. And this is a fine country, where a man can arrive with nothing but a broken heart and make something of himself. He’d like to be able to see his father and tell him the news of his promotion. He’ll write to him again. Useless, perhaps, sending letters when he has never had a reply, but he still does it. And why shouldn’t he imagine he can converse with the missing? Perhaps his father, wherever he is, might be thinking of his son too?

  He wheels his bike through the small alley they share with Doris and Gilbert and pushes the gate into his own backyard, taking off his bicycle clips and leaning against the wall while he waits for his breathing to come back to normal. Then he walks down to the potting shed.

  Inside, among cans of oil, the lawnmower and boxes of flower bulbs, are the letters. He takes them and lays them in a metal dish. With a match he sets fire to them, before he can talk himself out of his actions. It is time to put the past behind him. To do things right. If they are going to have another child one day, he has to stop hanging on to the past. The letters burn quickly, all her words turning to silver and black, small dustings of them drifting in the air. When the flames die down, he p
resses his fingers into the silken ashes and cleans the bowl.

  In the kitchen, Silvana looks up from the pot she is stirring on the cooker. He smiles at her as he opens the back door and puts the blanket on the table. She always manages to look startled when she sees him, as if she is still surprised to find him there beside her. Maybe she sees the same look on his face too. Maybe she reacts to him, to the fact that he is faintly relieved to find she hasn’t gone off on one of her walks and not come back.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A blanket. What are you cooking?’

  ‘Pearl-barley soup.’

  ‘Do we have any meat?’

  ‘No. Not today.’

  ‘We’ll have meat every day of the week from now on.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  She is wearing her best dress and the shoes he bought her, the white ones. She looks quite smart, if you ignore the splattering of soup on her shoes. He slides his arms around her waist. Janusz feels glad to have her in his arms – his wife, who would do anything to protect their son. That is how she presents herself. Like a soldier who would kill for her country. And her country is their son.

  And yet, no matter how Silvana juts her jaw at the world and holds her back straight as an iron bar, he knows she is fragile. She is made of the thinnest eggshell, her toughness a veneer that could be broken with a single clumsy move. He imagines her sitting in the passenger seat of his new car, the way she would hold her hands clasped together, the careful upright look of her.

  ‘I got my promotion.’ Janusz feels his cheekbones move, his face settling into an unexpected grin. ‘Wait, that’s not all. Do you want to know why I have a blanket? It’s to put over your knees when I take you for a drive.’

  She turns, the wooden spoon in her hand dripping soup on the floor.

  He takes the spoon off her and puts it back in the saucepan.

  ‘I bought a car.’

  ‘A car?’

  Aurek is sitting under the kitchen table, playing with a pack of cigarette cards.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ he asks the boy. ‘We’ve got a car. The Nowaks are going up in the world.’