A Different World

by Mary Nichols

  They woke next morning to reality with Angela scrambling over them to snuggle down between them. Jan put his arms about her while tears rained down his face. She put her finger up to touch his cheek. ‘Tata sad.’

  ‘No, sweetheart, Tata is not sad. He is happy he’s got you, his little Angel.’ He put her from him and gave her to Louise, then made a dash for the bathroom, where he locked himself in and gave way to the despair he felt. How could he leave them?

  Louise did not see him again until breakfast time. He had dressed and gone out, she had no idea where. She was as emotional as he was and finding it difficult not to burst into tears herself. She had been right to tell him to go home, but it had taken every ounce of her strength. Would he go? How long before he left?

  He came back as she was sitting down to breakfast with Angela and Jenny. Stan was in the cellar, taking stock. The wedding had almost drained the pub dry.

  ‘Enjoy your walk?’ Jenny asked as he sat down and helped himself to coffee.

  ‘Yes. I think I had rather too much to drink last night, I was decidedly hungover.’ He did not need to ask for translations of English sayings now and used them readily, rarely in the wrong context.

  ‘I doubt you’ll get much tonight, we’re almost out of beer.’

  ‘I must get back to Framlingham.’

  ‘Must you?’

  ‘Can’t overstay my leave. We haven’t been demobbed yet.’

  ‘When is that likely to be?’ Louise spoke for the first time.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose people will start to leave when they have places and jobs to go to. The trouble is that I don’t know about anything except flying. Some of the chaps are learning to be publicans, waiters, car mechanics or gardeners. I know one who has set up a scrap metal business, there’s plenty of that around, and another has rented a smallholding and is rearing chickens and pigs.’ All this, Louise guessed, was simply to make conversation; she did not think he was seriously considering any of it.

  ‘Being a publican is not a bad life,’ Jenny said, going to the oven to fetch the rasher of bacon and scrambled dried egg she had been keeping hot for him. ‘If you don’t mind the hours.’

  ‘It’s a thought,’ he said. ‘We will have to wait and see what turns up.’

  ‘I’ll give you a good reference. You’ve helped in the bar many a time when we’ve been busy.’

  ‘Thank you. I enjoyed it.’

  He and Louise went to church, came back for lunch and then spent the afternoon wandering about the village with Angela in her pushchair, well wrapped up against the cold. They didn’t talk much, neither could think of anything to add to what had already been said. Everyone they met greeted them and said what a grand wedding it had been, and looked knowingly from Louise to Jan. If this embarrassed him, he did not show it. At teatime they returned to the Pheasant, and after picking at a meal neither had an appetite for, they put Angela to bed and Jan told her a story which had to include Cuddles. She was fast asleep with the teddy bear in her arms when they crept from the room.

  He left in Bill Young’s taxi soon afterwards. Louise clung to him as they said goodbye. ‘Hey,’ he said, using his forefinger to tip her chin up. ‘Cheer up. It might never happen.’ Then he kissed her, settled his cap on his head and picked up his holdall. One more swift kiss and he was gone.

  Louise watched the taxi out of sight and went back indoors. Goodbyes in wartime were taken on the chin as a necessary evil, but just lately they had become harder and harder to bear.

  A week later Russ and Agnes came back from their honeymoon and took Tommy and Beattie away. Russ was going back to his camp to wait his turn to be sent home, but Agnes and the children were going to a camp at Tidworth in Hampshire. This was a holding camp for GI brides and their families where all the paperwork and checks would be made before they embarked on the Queen Mary for New York. Russ hoped to be back himself by then and would meet them there.

  ‘We’ll come back one day and visit,’ Agnes told Louise and Jenny. ‘And you must come and visit us. Isn’t that right, Russ?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Anytime.’

  ‘I’m grateful to you for looking after my children so well,’ Agnes went on. As a parting present she gave Jenny and Louise a large dish each, painted with a picture of the King and Queen and inscribed ‘VE Day May 8th 1945.’

  ‘Can we go to the station in the pony and trap?’ Beattie asked.

  ‘Course you can,’ Stan said. ‘But I don’t know about all that luggage. Poor Beauty won’t be able to manage it and four passengers as well.’ There was a mountain of it, though Russ had said there was no need to take so much; they could buy what they needed when they found a home of their own. In the meantime they would be living with his parents. Louise wondered how that would work out but kept her thoughts to herself.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Russ said. ‘You children go in the trap and your mum and I will follow in Mr Young’s taxi with the luggage. How’s that?’

  This suited everyone and Stan went out to hitch up the pony.

  The pub seemed empty after they had gone. For over six years it had echoed to the sound of children running up and down, shouting to each other, laughing, crying, making their presence felt, and now there was only Angela. Louise felt the time was fast approaching when she must do something about finding somewhere of her own. She had been putting it off, hoping that the situation with Jan might resolve itself, but she was slowly coming to the conclusion it wasn’t going to happen.

  One by one Jan’s comrades were disappearing, finding jobs, going on training courses, taking the risk to go back to Poland or, like Jozef, emigrating to the Commonwealth or America where there was already a sizeable Polish population. It was about time he did something himself and he enrolled on a bricklaying and stone masonry course. Bombed houses needed rebuilding and new houses built, in Britain as well as Poland. This meant he was away from his base Monday to Friday but his weekends were often spent in Cottlesham.

  On 22nd February, which was a Friday, he dashed straight from his training course to Cottlesham to be there for Angela’s fourth birthday, taking a small wooden rocking horse, which he had bought from another Polish airman who was learning to make toys. It was white with brown spots and had a mane of grey hair.

  She had been allowed to wait up for him and ran to be hugged. ‘I’m four,’ she told him solemnly.

  ‘I know. And young ladies of four need a horse to ride, don’t you think?’ He undid the bulky package he had brought and stood the horse on the living room floor. He picked her up and sat her astride it.

  ‘You spoil her,’ Louise said, smiling at the child’s round-eyed delight, as he showed her how to make it rock.

  ‘She is worth spoiling, and so are you.’ He kissed her hungrily. ‘What do you want to do this weekend?’

  ‘You could help me look for a house to rent.’

  ‘Why? You don’t have to leave here, do you? Jenny isn’t throwing you out?’

  ‘No, of course not. But the time has come to move on. Stan and Jenny have plans of their own.’

  ‘Where do you want to go? Back to London?’

  ‘No. John Langford is retiring at the end of the summer term and I’ve been offered the headship. Angela can start school then, so it fits in very nicely.’

  ‘You’ve got it all worked out, then?’

  ‘Sort of. I will be able to move into the schoolhouse when John leaves. He is going to live with his sister in Dereham, but until then I need a home of my own.’

  ‘Where do I fit in?’

  ‘Wherever you want to fit in, Jan. It’s up to you.’

  She was throwing the ball back into his court. It made him feel uncomfortable, as if he were surplus to requirements. And yet he knew it was his own fault. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I get the picture.’

  She laughed. ‘You use more slang than an Englishman.’

  ‘I’m not though, am I? I’m a Pole.’

  ‘I know. I wouldn’t have you any other w
ay except for one thing and that is something we cannot help. Let’s not talk about it.’

  The next day they left Angela with Jenny and went to Swaffham to call on an estate agent there. They might have saved themselves the bus fare. There was a housing shortage everywhere, even in places that had not suffered the Blitz, and they found nothing suitable. Either it was too big, too small, too derelict or too far from Cottlesham. They returned to the Pheasant with nothing accomplished.

  ‘I could have told you that,’ Jenny said. ‘You had better stay here.’

  ‘But I can’t get into the schoolhouse until August.’

  ‘So what? We are in no hurry to make the alterations. We can’t get the labour and materials to do them anyway. And the place is like a morgue without the children. If you and Angela go it will be worse. And you do help with the housework and in the bar. I can’t think why you took it into your head we wanted you to go.’

  So she decided, unless something turned up that was ideal, she would stay where she was. The Pheasant had seen her happy, had seen her sad, had witnessed her growing love for Jan and the birth of her daughter, had been her liberation as a woman. She had so much to be thankful for.

  ‘Jan, there’s someone to see you,’ Tadek Sawicz, the Camp Administration Officer, said, catching Jan crossing the grass towards the Nissen hut he shared with several others. ‘He’s in my office.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He says his name is Boris Martel.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Nevertheless he must have heard of you.’

  He made his way to the office and found a man he had never seen before sitting in a chair by the window. He was thin as a rake, his complexion pasty and his civilian clothes all seemed too big for him. He rose when Jan entered. ‘Flight Lieutenant Grabowski?’ he queried, holding out his hand. His fingers were long and bony, Jan noticed, as he nodded and they shook hands. ‘My name is Boris Martel.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Martel?’

  ‘I have come from Warsaw.’

  ‘Warsaw?’ Jan sat down hurriedly on another chair. ‘You have news of my wife?’

  ‘Yes.’ He returned to his seat. ‘She asked me to try and find you.’

  ‘She is alive?’

  ‘She was when I left her, six months ago.’

  ‘Thank God. Tell me what happened? We get so little reliable information here. How is she? Is she well? How has she managed?’

  ‘Hold on!’ Boris smiled. ‘I can understand your anxiety, but let me tell it in my own time.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes and lighter and offered one to Boris.

  ‘No, thank you. I have a chest complaint and cigarettes make me cough. But don’t mind me, go ahead.’

  Jan lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘Your wife, Flight Lieutenant, was one of the heroines of the resistance. She was brave, selfless and resourceful. She deserves a medal, but she won’t get one, there is no one to give it to her.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you are English.’

  ‘I was born in Poland, but my parents brought me to England when I was three years old. I have dual nationality. It was why I volunteered to be dropped into Poland to help the Home Army. I was one of the cichociemni, “the dark and silent” ones.’

  ‘Is that where you met Rulka?’

  ‘Yes’

  ‘Tell me what it was like.’

  ‘With the Germans in control you could not call your life your own. There were so many rules and regulations, you could not avoid breaking them at some time – and then, woe betide you. Executions were commonplace.’ While Jan smoked his cigarette, Boris went on to describe in graphic detail what it had been like: the resistance in the early days, the reprisals, the Ghetto where thousands of Jews were crowded into one small area of the city and its complete destruction after their ill-fated uprising, and the Home Army Battle for Warsaw a year later in which he and Rulka had been involved. ‘There were shells and mortars landing everywhere,’ he said, ‘and tanks rumbling about shooting anything that moved and they didn’t stop if someone got in their way. They detonated mines and set fire to buildings, even churches. The church where Rulka was working with the wounded was torched with the patients inside. Rulka was lucky to escape. There were dead bodies all over the place. Without the help we had been promised, we were lost. Casualties were in their thousands and those of us that were left ran out of ammunition and starved. In the end, there wasn’t a horse, a dog, a cat or a pigeon alive in our sector of the city centre. We had to surrender. When I left in October, they were still finding bodies in the rubble.’

  ‘And Rulka?’

  ‘We didn’t use real names. She went by the name of Krystyna Nowak, code name Myszka.’

  ‘Mouse,’ Jan murmured. ‘That was my name for her.’

  ‘Yes. When she knew I was coming back to Britain, she asked me to try and find out what had happened to you. She had no idea whether you were alive or dead and could give me no address, but knowing the name of your squadron in Poland led me to you.’

  ‘Why did she change her name?’

  ‘She was wanted by the Nazis for sabotage and the gunning down of a senior German officer who was known for his brutality.’

  ‘She is a nurse, dedicated to saving life, what was she doing getting involved with assassination and sabotage?’

  ‘She managed to fulfil both roles, and very efficiently too.’

  ‘And now? Where is she living? I understood Warsaw has been destroyed.’

  ‘So it has, but there are still a few hardy souls living in the ruins.’

  ‘Why didn’t she try and get out? I heard the civil population had been evacuated.’

  ‘Yes, the old, the sick and the dying, as well as the healthy, were marched twelve miles to German transit camps which were later “liberated” by the Russians. Most of them were arrested by the Reds on the grounds they were collaborators and sent to the gulags.’

  ‘Rulka too?’

  ‘No, she was a member of the Home Army, not a civilian. She marched out to captivity with the army, but she managed to get away from the German guards taking the women to a prisoner of war camp and made her way back to Warsaw. I had been arrested by the Soviets and taken to jail in Moscow, but I kept insisting I was British and the British government knew where I was. I don’t know if they checked on that, but they must have decided it would be expedient to let me go. I went back to Warsaw which was when I met Rulka again and she talked about you. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get here. It was not easy to get out. I offered to bring her out with me, but she said Warsaw was her home and having fought so hard for Poland’s freedom, she would not abandon it now. I could not persuade her.

  ‘I left her in the ruins of Warsaw and made my way to Odessa, which meant going on foot or hitching lifts, earning my bread and butter on the way and dodging Russians and Ukrainians, but I’ve had plenty of practice at that, and I managed to board a Greek ship going to Athens. There I was taken on board a British destroyer which took me to Gibraltar, from where I was eventually flown home. Once here I had to be debriefed and that also took time, but I came as soon as I could.’ He paused. ‘Your wife, Flight Lieutenant, is waiting for you.’

  ‘Oh.’ His own words came back to him: I will come back. It crossed his mind to try and fetch her to Britain, but he knew that was a foolish idea. How could he live with her here, knowing Louise and Angela were not far away? And in any case, would Rulka come? She had already refused Boris Martel’s offer. ‘Can you get a message to her?’

  ‘Possibly. I can’t guarantee it. It’s harder now than when the Germans were in control.’

  ‘Tell her I will join her as soon as I’m discharged.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Boris stood up to leave. ‘Glad to bring you good news, Flight Lieutenant. Now I have a less pleasant task. I have t
o visit Mr and Mrs Crawshaw. Their son, Colin, escaped from a German prisoner of war camp in ’42 and spent the rest of his time fighting in our sector of the Home Army. I have to tell them he was killed in the Rising. He died saving Rulka’s life.’

  ‘Then I owe him a deep debt of gratitude.’

  ‘I will tell them that. It might be of some comfort.’

  They shook hands and Boris left. Jan sat down again and put his head in his hands. It seemed Fate had made up his mind for him. But, oh, how was he going to steel himself to say goodbye to Louise and Angela?

  Chapter Twelve

  1946-47

  Ever since Jan had been told his wife was alive, Louise had known there was no alternative; he had to fulfil a promise he had made over seven years before. He was too honourable to do anything else. But she also knew he was going back into danger. The Soviet Union had installed puppet governments in the whole of Eastern Europe and made a kind of fortress of it. Churchill in a speech in America had said, ‘From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’ Jan was voluntarily going behind that iron curtain to an uncertain future, so he must love his Rulka very much. It was all very well to be practical and try to do what was right, but it was hard to subdue the feeling of jealousy that it roused in her.

  ‘If I can, I’ll let you know I’ve arrived safely,’ he said on his last visit to the Pheasant. ‘I’ll write to you too, just to keep in touch.’

  ‘No, Jan, don’t do that. You have to make a life with your wife, you can’t hang on to the life you had here with me.’ He could not have known the effort it took to say that when all she wanted was to keep him with her. A clean break was the only way she was going to be able to cope. ‘Try to forget me.’

  ‘Louise, how can you say that? How can I forget? You and Angela mean the world to me …’