22 Britannia Road (7 page)

‘We’ve been betrayed. Poland’s been pissed on from both sides.’ The boy rolled his eyes when he spoke, showing the whites, like a horse about to take flight.

Janusz looked at their stubbled faces, saw the tiredness in their eyes. He couldn’t understand how things had moved so quickly. The older man must have seen the confusion on Janusz’s face. He spoke slowly and carefully, explaining what was happening. Warsaw had surrendered to the Germans. The Russians had first entered Poland as allies and had quickly become occupiers, too quickly for anybody to understand. Now the country was being divided up between the two of them.

‘Bruno Berkson,’ said the older man, holding out his hand. ‘And this is Franek. Franek Zielinski. We were part of the defence on the eastern border. When the Russians came, our officers told us not to attack. We laid down our guns and the Russians took everything, our weapons, tanks, food. They took it all. Franek and I escaped when they were marching us to a prison camp. We’ve been on the run ever since. Hiding in woods and barns. If you could give us something to eat we’ll be on our way.’

Janusz put down the spade, dusted mud off his trousers. ‘And Warsaw? What do you know about Warsaw? My wife is there …’

‘From what we’ve heard, the city’s in ruins.’

Franek sniffed. ‘And full of
szkops
. Overrun by Germans.’

Janusz turned to Bruno. Already he preferred the older man to this boy with his hurried speech and uncoordinated limbs.

‘But how did it all happen so quickly? What date is it?’

‘October 8th,’ said Franek. ‘My mother’s birthday. I wanted to send her a postcard, but Bruno says we’ll have to do it when we get to France.’ He nodded at the freshly turned earth behind them. ‘What are you doing up there? What’re you digging for?’

Janusz looked at the old woman’s grave. He had no wish to tell them the truth.

‘I was burying a dead dog. If you’re hungry you’d better come this way. I can find you something to eat.’

He led them to the cottage, thinking about what they’d said. Had he really spent over a month here? He glanced back at the mound of earth. A mass of flies still buzzed above it. How he hated those insects. If it was already October, the coming Polish winter would soon kill them, and he’d be glad. The old woman would be able to rest in peace. Then she might finally stop haunting his dreams.

‘Come in,’ he said to the men, holding the door open. As they entered he realized he was glad they were there. He’d been alone too long.

Ipswich

Aurek has his own room. His mother told him it was just for him, and he wonders what he’s going to do with it. He doesn’t understand why he can’t share with her, why she has to sleep in another room where he is not allowed. He pulls his sheets into a ball, drags his eiderdown up to the headboard of his rickety iron bed and makes a nest. He’d rather sleep under the trees. He misses the feel of the shelter he and his mother squeezed into for so long.

With his knuckled spine pressed hard against the wall, sheets twisted around him, his eyes follow the upward tilt of hundreds of small grey aeroplanes flying in formation across the bumpy walls. There is a dark wardrobe he won’t open in case a man with an axe is hiding in it, and a bookshelf with heavy-looking English books stacked on it. The one thing he likes is the picture on the wall; a black-and-white print of puppies crowded into a basket with ribbons around their necks. That’s the image to concentrate on when the night comes and the wardrobe starts mocking him for sleeping alone.

He climbs out of the muddle of bedclothes, takes a leap past the wardrobe, and is up on the windowsill, face against the window.

There are other houses across the way, red brick with outhouses just like this one and long rows of gardens where washing lines flash and billow. The tree at the bottom of his garden is covered in new leaves tight as children’s fists. It’s a perfect tree for climbing and already a towering friend to Aurek. He can almost smell the earthy, beetle-shell scent of its bark and he longs to climb into its branches.

But he can’t go into the garden. His mother is down there, kneeling in the earth, planting seeds. The man she says is his father is working alongside her, digging a trench for potatoes. That’s the man who has taken his mother away from him.

The glass is cold against Aurek’s cheek.

‘You’re not my father,’ he breathes, a circle of mist appearing on the windowpane. ‘
Pan jest moim wrogiem
. You are
enemy
.’

In the garden, Janusz stops his work and wipes his face with his sleeve. He looks up at the sky, and Aurek wonders if he has heard his whisperings and is considering what he said. As Janusz slams his spade into the ground and begins turning over the soil again, Aurek leaps back onto the bed, pulling the covers over him.

Beyond the closed knot of his folded limbs, he is sure he hears the wardrobe door creak. He is shot through with fear. He huddles deeper into his nest and croons to himself, a soft birdsong to keep the enemy away.

In the first few months, Janusz struggles to find an order to their life. He leaves home early for work and when he returns, he teaches Silvana and Aurek English. They read together and then listen to the radio, mimicking the crystal-clear accents of the presenters.

He’s surprised and pleased at the way Silvana picks up the language. She looks better week by week. Her skin is still pale but she has put on a little weight and he’s hoping she will soon lose the watchfulness in her eyes, the constant look of mistrust. What he hadn’t bargained for was the amount of time he would spend teaching Silvana and Aurek not to do things. Not to take a bath in their clothes. Not to fidget when they listen to the radio. Not to steal vegetables from the allotments by the river. After coming home from work several times to find the front door open and the house empty, he also teaches them not to wander off into the town and spend hours getting lost. Aurek has to learn not to hide food around the house; that it belongs in the kitchen. He must not go into his parents’ bedroom. Ever. Nor must he touch his mother’s breasts. Ever. That’s something Janusz has lost his temper over, sending the boy
wailing to his room. The boy also learns not to bring animals of any description into the house after Janusz finds a nest of harvest mice wrapped in a tea towel in his bed.

‘You have to get used to living in a house again,’ says Janusz. ‘Put the past behind you both. The war’s over. This is peacetime. A new
start for us.’ He tries to soften his voice. He is aware that he sounds harsh. ‘I know it’s hard. You must miss Poland. I did too, to begin with.’

He watches their faces: his wife’s nervy stare, the boy’s silent eyes, blank as carved stone.

‘There’s a club in the town. A group of twenty or so Poles like us. Displaced people who have ended up living here. Some of them have children. You could speak Polish there, make some friends …’

‘No!’ Silvana replies, and he is surprised by the fierceness of her response.

‘I don’t want to see any other Polish people,’ she says. ‘They’ll just remind me of what I have lost.’

‘What we’ve both lost,’ he replies, and she turns away from him, as if he has said something stupid.

Janusz brings home pamphlets. They have pictures of smiling families waving British flags on the front of them. He reads to Silvana from a booklet called ‘Learning the British Way of Life’.

‘Home Entertainment for Foreigners’ brings a smile to his wife’s face when he shows it to her. It has a picture of a housewife holding a tray of tarts on the front page. The woman’s frilled apron rises up around her ears like the fluted ruff of her pastry.

‘How to Learn British Manners’ is Janusz’s preferred reading. The illustration on the front cover is of two men shaking hands and lifting their hats to each other. Janusz insists they read it together.

‘There are ways of doing things here,’ he says. ‘You need to learn them if you are going to fit in.’ He clears his throat, lifts an imaginary hat from his head. ‘Good morning, Mrs Nowak. How do you do?’

‘How do you do?’ Silvana repeats dutifully, a small smile playing around her lips.

‘Lovely weather for the time of year.’

‘Yes,
eezn’t
it.’ Silvana giggles.

Janusz’s eyes crease at the corners. ‘Yes,
eezn’t
it.’ He laughs a little.

Silvana bites her lip and concentrates. ‘Lovely vezzer,’ she repeats, her voice breaking into laughter.

‘Weather.’

‘
Vezzer
. Wehhzer?’

‘Wait a moment,’ says Janusz. He comes back from the kitchen with a bottle. ‘I got this today. It’s called sherry. You should try it. It’s what they drink here.’

Silvana takes the glass he offers.

‘Oh, no, no. You mustn’t drink it down in one. It’s not like vodka. Here they sip it slowly and say, “Chin chin. God save the King.”’

It is sweet and cloying, but they drink the bottle dry and dance around the room, the wireless playing Glenn Miller, Aurek lying on his back on the rug, making small, off-key noises to himself. Janusz puts a porcelain bowl on his head and pretends it is a bowler hat, while Silvana waves an umbrella in the air. Their voices are loud and full of laughter.

Swinging Silvana around in time to the music, Janusz thinks they must look to the outside world like a couple of newlyweds. People who have never been touched by the war. He holds her close and feels … young. A young married man. A husband and a father. Something he has not felt for a long time. He will make up for the years they have spent apart. The war and all its horrors will be forgotten in this house. He has been given a second chance. It’s all falling into place, this new beginning.
Yes
, he thinks, as he watches his wife’s face.
This is a lucky house. And if it wasn’t before, it is now
.

Most nights the dreams still come to Silvana. She cannot stop them. Being with Janusz has brought her to a kind of calmness, and yet his nearness brings back memories that she has kept from herself for years. Memories that threaten to undo her. Their son before the war; Janusz’s parents’ garden with its smooth lawns; Eve playing her violin for Aurek and his delighted, high-pitched laugh. It was there Aurek had taken his first steps, the child grinning with a smile only Janusz could have given him, father and son inseparable as a cloud’s reflection in a lake. Memories like this seem to pour out of her, and she finds herself crying for those lost days.

Her dreams are dark and terrible. Her son is swimming in unfathomable waters, and try as she might to save him, he always slips from her grasp, falling back into the inky depths. She wakes, trying to scrape the skin from her fingers, thinking of lost children, the groups
of homeless street kids she saw, the orphans at the camp. Where are they now? Still searching for their dead parents? She cannot get the children out of her head. They haunt her nights. And all the women searching for their babies call to her in her dreams, begging her to help them.

She knows she disturbs Janusz with her night frights, but he says nothing. He is quiet and patient, but already she wonders whether he regrets bringing her to England. It is surely not the reunion he must have had in mind. Have they both made an awful mistake?

One morning, she knocks on the door of Doris, the neighbour who always waves hello, the only one in the street who acknowledges them at all.

‘I need to learn how to be a good British housewife,’ says Silvana, smoothing her hands over her apron front, trying to ignore the way Aurek is pulling on her sleeve. ‘Can you help me?’

‘Show you how to be a housewife?’ says Doris with a look of surprise, as if Silvana has asked her the daftest question she has ever heard. ‘Come on in, dear. Bring the little lad in too. I’ve got some toys he can play with.’

Doris is hard to follow. She bustles around, filling the coal scuttles, beating rugs, washing curtains, counting her housekeeping money. She scrubs her kitchen floor on all fours, bare-armed, sweating with exertion, tendrils of red hair sticking to her forehead. When it’s finished, she grabs a basket of wet clothes by the back door and strides into the garden, where she hangs the washing out with deft precision, shaking Gilbert’s overalls into shape, slapping the creases from wet sheets, already talking about peeling potatoes for the evening meal. Keeping up with her is like trying to run after a departing train.

According to Doris, a good housewife should keep her home clean, do her washing on Tuesdays, her ironing on Fridays, make sure there’s bread and jam on the table at weekends and bake Victoria sponges on high days and holidays. Surely Silvana can do these things.

In her own home, Silvana spends hours wandering through the rooms in a daze. She forgets to fill the coal scuttles and doesn’t find the need to sweep or dust. When she makes the beds she often lies down and falls asleep on them.

Janusz doesn’t give her housekeeping money. He says he is waiting until she understands pounds, shillings and pence. The money is strange, the notes bigger than Polish currency, the coins thicker. And she’ll never get used to ration books, no matter how often Janusz explains them to her.

Janusz is a good husband. More than she deserves. He takes her shopping and teaches her the names of household goods: corned beef, flour, Pear’s soap, Bovril. He patiently writes her shopping lists in English and stands next to her when she reads them to the man behind the counter at the greengrocer’s, correcting her when she makes mistakes.

‘I want to buy flower seeds,’ Janusz says in Woolworths. They are looking at rows of brightly coloured seed packets. Silvana can recognize some of the flower illustrations, but the English names mean nothing to her.

Janusz hands her a packet with a brightly coloured picture of an orange flower on it.

‘Coreopsis. A few years ago, I saw a garden in Devon filled with them. And look at these hollyhocks – what a lovely red colour. Do you like them? Lady’s mantle grows well in this country. The English use it for ground cover. What do you think? Is there anything you would like to plant?’