Edek was not so fortunate. Many of the children admitted to the village showed signs of tuberculosis. But hardship and lack of good food had made Edek much more delicate than most. He had to be sent away to a sanatorium, and for the first month or two the doctors despaired of his life. But the will to live was strong in him and he grew better. After eighteen months he returned to his family. Another six months of open-air life in the mountains made him fit enough to go to Zurich and study engineering. He had always wanted to be an engineer.
And what of Jan, that charming bundle of good intentions and atrocious deeds? His complete record, so far as it was known, was sent to the its, but nothing came of it and his parents were never traced. So he became a Balicki. During the war his mind had suffered more than his body, and minds usually take longer to heal. He did not take easily to a secure and peaceful life. He was excitable and could not concentrate on one thing for long. He liked to play at firing squads and torture, at crossing the frontier secretly and at smuggling. He was always fighting. Though he had all the food and clothes he needed, he was the biggest thief in the village. He broke into the other houses and raided the larders – it was usually the German house, for he still hated Germans and could not forgive them for what they had done to Poland. Margrit Balicki treated him as lovingly as she did her own children, but he was often rude to her. Ruth was the only person who could manage him, and he remained as devoted to her as ever. She knew that the way to his heart was through animals. She persuaded her father to let him keep rabbits and goats. She took him to neighbouring farms, and soon the farmers found that he could do anything with a sick animal. If a cow was ill or a horse lame, they found it would get better more quickly if they sent for Jan instead of for the vet. And of course it cost them much less.
So in time even Jan grew up, and his bad ways began to drop from him. There were no more raids on larders, and the German children no longer got a shower of rotten apples at their heads whenever they passed the Polish house.
Lastly, Ruth. She had all the time been so brave, wise and unselfish that you might have expected her to present no problem at all. But she had grown up too quickly and shouldered responsibilities far beyond her years. As she wanted to be a teacher, her father lost no time in arranging for her to go away to a university to be trained. She refused to go. Her parents and her new home meant so much to her that she could not bring herself to leave them. She behaved like a young child, clinging to her mother and following her about everywhere. It seemed as if she were trying to recover the lost years of her childhood.
But this phase did not last long. Little by little the magic of her new surroundings worked its spell upon her. In 1947 she went to Zurich University to study for a degree. Four years later, as a qualified teacher, she married a young Frenchman who had come to work in the children’s village. When a second French house was built, she and her husband were made the house-parents. The last time I heard of her she had sixteen French orphans under her care, as well as two small girls of her own. As far as I know she is still there, bringing them up in the spirit of the children’s village, giving them all the trust and affection that young people need.
And over the way, at the Polish house, in a velvet-lined drawer of her jewel box, Margrit Balicki keeps her proudest possession – the silver sword.
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The Backstory
Learn fascinating facts about The Silver Sword and have a go at making your own box of secret treasure!
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Afterword
My father started The Silver Sword in 1951, six years after the Second World War ended. He was a schoolteacher, and the book took him five long summer holidays to complete, working at his old Remington typewriter in the study. The large hardbacked school notebook which he used as a plot-book has a label on the front which says ‘Next Novel’, and then three crossed-out ideas for the title (‘I Will Return’; ‘The Sword in My Hand’; ‘No Surrender’) before he finally writes ‘The Silver Sword’ with a confident flourish. Sellotaped inside the plot-book are cuttings from magazines like the Quaker publication The Friend, which tell of the ruined cities of Europe, of children who jumped the trucks of goods trains to steal food, ‘cellar-dwellers’ and children who, like Bronia, drew whatever they saw around them. Sketches of canoes, hastily scribbled on the back of an envelope, are also stuck into the plot-book, and at the back there is a rough coloured sketch of the different war-zones.
Ian Serraillier at the time of writing The Silver Sword. The photo was taken by one of his pupils at Midhurst Grammar School.
A page from Picture Post: ‘A triumph of the year 1945: a German boy discovers a mouldy loaf of bread.’
Picture Post article about a Pestalozzi village.
He also had other sources for the background of the book, such as the popular photographic magazine of the time, Picture Post, which had many pictures of the devastation in post-war Europe. It had a feature on the newly opened Pestalozzi children’s village, and one on the composer Michael Tippett listening to the first rehearsal of his opera A Child of Our Time – you will see a quotation from it at the front of this book. Unesco publications with titles like Children of Europe, and War-Handicapped Children also helped. Ruth, Edek, Jan and Bronia were based on real children in Red Cross records. But in real life, they all came from different families. The real ‘Edek’ died of his TB.
You may perhaps be surprised that my father needed to do all this research for his book. But he himself had never witnessed the scenes he describes here. As a Quaker and a pacifist, he believed that it is wrong ever to kill anyone, and he had refused to fight in the war. Some people who felt like this were sent to prison, but on 5 November 1940 he went before a government tribunal which, recognizing his sincerity, registered him as a ‘conscientious objector’ on condition that he continued teaching English, did Air Raid Precautions work, and loaned his car to the Friends Ambulance Unit (a group of Quakers and others who did go to the war-zone to help injured people, but would not carry weapons).
But many experiences from his own life have found their way into the book. My father was born in September 1912. When he was six, the oldest of four children, his father died, a victim of the terrible influenza epidemic which spread across Europe and killed more people than the entire First World War. His mother suffered badly from asthma, and had to spend many months each year in the Alps for the good of her health. When he was a schoolboy, my father often took his younger brothers and sister by train across France to Switzerland, an experience which filled him with anxiety. Once there for the summer holiday, his mother allowed them enormous freedom: at the age of sixteen, my father and his brother Anthony climbed the Matterhorn with a local guide. While at Oxford University, where he studied first Classics and then English, he went on work-camps and camping holidays in Austria, and canoed on the Danube. His first job was as a teacher of English in an international school on Lake Geneva. So he knew the landscape of the book well.
A road with ruined buildings – a typical photograph from Children of Europe, which the original illustrator Walter Hodges used as a background in Chapter 11, ‘The Road to Posen’:
A book of Unesco photos which made a deep impression on Ian Serraillier.
Canoes photographed by Ian Serraillier during a canoeing holiday on the Danube when a student at Oxford.
By the time he came to write The Silver Sword, my father had already written nineteen books – poetry, retellings for schools, and four adventure stories (of which There’s No Escape, another war story, is closest to The Silver Sword. The teenage Emil, with his streak of wildness and his role in the resistance movement, could be a rough sketch for Edek or Jan). Whatever he was writing, however, the process was the same. Usually he had his best ideas while out walking on the South Downs near his home. He would hunt for a pen in his jacket pocket, and scribble them down on the back of an old envelope. Many sections of The Silver Sword came to him like this, such as the conversation b
y the fireplace at the Wolffs’ farm, which appears on an envelope (sent to him on holiday with his brother in France) as:
Frau W: ‘Would you like to stay with us, Jan?’
Jan: ‘Yes, but I’d rather go where Ruth goes. And besides, there’s the sword.’
Ray of light catches the silver & it gleams.
Inspiration while on a walk, scribbled on an envelope from the BBC.
The handwritten first draft of Chapter 1, crossed out and discarded: ‘Nobody had ever escaped from the prison camp at Zakoryna in the mountains of SW Poland …’
A buff envelope with a BBC heading begins:
Chap. 29. Children’s Village. The war produced many tragic stories, & few ended as happily as that of the Balicki family.
You can tell that this is an early draft, as it continues,
Even Ludwig the dog survived that terrible thunder storm, the most severe one of its kind within living memory.
Back at the house, in his study (where, as children, we were allowed to play while he was working – but only if we didn’t quarrel), he wrote a first long-hand draft of different sections of The Silver Sword in two blue school exercise books, using the notes from the envelopes. Much was later discarded, but this rough version contains many fascinating fragments:
Judge: ‘Jan, have you any parents?’
Jan: ‘The grey cat was my mother, Jimpy was my father. But they are dead now, & Ruth is my mother, & Joseph is my father.’
Judge could make little of this … At end, judge sentences Ruth to sending him a p.c. when they got to Switzerland.
The following notes are particularly poignant:
The night’s camp before lorry driver takes them to Lake Constance.
Make this the night in which Edek, whose illness has always gone in fits & starts, does not expect to live till morning. R. encourages him … let her blame the sultry, oppressive weather. Sure there will be a storm, ‘& when the air is clear of thunder, you will feel better.’
E. ’s health was finally crumbling. – For a while despair overwhelmed her – what she had feared for so long but dares not admit even until now. She was swallowed in sadness. It seemed to her that all their joy had been trampled under the wheels of war, & wd. never live again; that life meant parting without meeting, journeying without finding, & the hope that had so long sustained them was after all only a delusion. Then she remembered the story of Daniel …
Folded into one of the exercise books, my father has hastily written a letter as from Kurt Wolff to a friend with a job in the newly formed International Tracing Service:
I’m afraid I’ve nothing to help you except the enclosed silver sword – a present to Joseph Balicki from his wife before the war … I’ve no means of returning it to the family, so I send it to you in case it’s some help.
Emmie keeps well, but still feels the loss of the boys dreadfully. A tragedy that can’t ever be mended. But this Polish family, there’s a grain of hope there.
Perhaps this is one of those tragedies that can – a chance in a thousand, but we’d like to do something to help it come off.
At the back of one of the exercise books are some notes about all the main characters for the final chapter, like this about Margrit Balicki (which includes the original crossings-out and choices of phrasing):
The mother
In this story she has no part, except as one too dazed who after a life that had for years been/was no more than a nightmare is still too dazed, in the midst of so much loss, to realise the greatness of her good fortune. Gradually she will get her bearings & resume her place as mother again.
Jan
That moment on the lake when he was faced with a tricky the decision of whether to save the dog he loved or the boy friend whom through jealousy he loved less was probably a turning point in his life. Anyone who had known him up to then wd. have expected him to choose the dog. But he had made the right decision, & from that there cd be no turning back.
Ruth
If greatness has anything to do with goodness & courage & unwavering purpose, then it cannot be denied that Ruth had seeds of greatness in her. She had grown up too quickly & was too old now ever to get her rightful taste of the carefree years of childhood.
The next stage of writing was to put the story onto the typewriter, but it took several drafts and many deletions with the xxx key to get it right. With his full-time teaching job, and four young children at home to help look after, writing a novel had to wait until the summer holidays. As he wrote to his publisher several years later, who was urging him to produce a successor to The Silver Sword.
Time is the real problem. At the moment I am busy with poems, bits of which get scribbled on the backs of envelopes during the day, and I work over them in the evenings when I can. They don’t need the sustained attention that a novel requires. The editorial work for the New Windmill series, which my wife helps me with, is also work which I can do in odd moments. The Silver Sword, short as it is, took me 5 years to complete, but I could never get long stretches at it, and its path was strewn with muddles and frustrations.
But in one way, his work as a teacher was a real help. Before he could declare the book finished, there was another vital stage to be gone through: trying it out on his pupils at school, and changing any parts where they became restless or inattentive. As he said in a letter to a boy in an Australian school twenty-five years later, ‘Yes, I did enjoy writing The Silver Sword But it took a long time to write – 5 years – as I was busy teaching then. I was form master of a class very like yours. I wrote it with them in mind. When I got to the end, I sat on my desk, with my legs dangling over the front, & read it to them.’ Even after he had taken the manuscript up to his publishers, Jonathan Cape, in January 1956, he was still making changes, and (much to the publisher’s irritation!) he telephoned them through to the office just before typesetting began in March. Yet among these additions are some of the best passages of the book, such as the end of Chapter 27 (‘In that moment of decision, Jan began to grow up’), and Chapter 28 (from ‘She had been in a concentration camp …’ to ‘“You can keep it for ever if you’ll be my mother.”’)
The final draft, telephoned corrections inserted by hand in the office.
The idea for the silver sword itself had come from an actual paper-knife, just twelve centimetres long, that my father’s brother Michael, who was a photographer, sent him from Toledo. It arrived with the post on the kitchen table just at the time when my father was wondering how to link together the different scenes of the book that he had already worked out. As he said in the letter to the Australian school, ‘In the book the sword becomes a narrative device that links the various episodes of the story. For the children, it is a reminder of their home & a constant encouragement to them in their search for their parents.’
Joseph holding up the sword in the illustration by Walter Hodges.
At first, my father does not seem to have realized that The Silver Sword was of a different order to his other children’s novels. For a start, it was not immediately popular. I can remember us all standing round the ‘wireless’ in 1956, listening to a review of the year’s best children’s books. It ended, ‘And we have saved till last the very best of this year’s books. It is The Silver –’ and here Dad held his hand up in excitement for us to listen – ‘Curlew, by Eleanor Farjeon.’
But when a Junior Bookshelf review came out beginning, ‘This book is touched with greatness,’ and praising him for breaking with the prevailing tradition in children’s books where children were shielded from ‘harsh realities of life’ like war; when he received correspondence from children all over the world; and when the book was chosen as runner-up for the prestigious Carnegie Medal, my father began to understand the importance of what he had written.
There are probably many reasons why this book has never gone out of print, and why many people have said that reading it was one of the most memorable experiences of their childhood. It could be the fact that, like othe
r great stories my father would have known well – Homer’s The Odyssey, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – it is about a journey, a quest. It is about the triumph of hope over despair. But perhaps the fact that, at a time when few other children’s writers would have done this, he trusted you with the truth about war and its effects, also helps us to see the book as ‘a classic’. When it was first televised, in black and white, as a Sunday afternoon serial, the head of BBC Children’s Television, Owen Reed, received a pile of protesting letters saying that children should not be shown this terrible chapter of human history. Owen Reed wrote later, ‘Significantly none came from children, by whom this story is remembered with gratitude because it treated them as responsible citizens who could be trusted with a frank account of what the war and its by-products, like juvenile delinquency and refugees, was really about.’
My father was sometimes asked to talk to schoolchildren who had been studying The Silver Sword. He gave them a slide show of the sources he had used while writing the book. He always ended with this photograph from the Unesco publication Children of Europe, and the words, ‘No child should ever again have that expression on his face.’
Jane Serraillier, 2003
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Who’s Who in The Silver Sword
Joseph: Ruth, Edek and Bronia’s father. A former primary school teacher imprisoned by the Nazis. After escaping his prison he makes his way back to Warsaw and meets Jan to whom he gives the silver sword.
Margrit: Ruth, Edek and Bronia’s mother who is taken away by the Nazis at the beginning of the book.
The Silver Sword Page 13