A Special Duty

by Jennifer Elkin

  “Greetings to pilot and crew of RAF bomber who, on a mission from Brindisi over Poland 1942, were forced down River San. Stayed with partisans at Ulanow until taken over to Allies by Russians in July 1944. From partisan commander.”

  Who had placed this strange advert, and why? About this time, their old partisan friend George got in touch and, in an exchange of correspondence with Patrick Stradling, warned that they should not respond to The Times notice, saying: “The Soviet partisan who sent you to Russia [Kunicki] is now living in Poland, not wanting to stay in Russia. He was in prison too. He was not the author of the greetings!” George explained that he had been unable to get in touch any sooner because he had been seriously wounded while fighting with the Polish Second Army in Czechoslovakia towards the end of the war, and had spent months in a military hospital. He had returned to the army after discharge from hospital, reaching the rank of Major and then, in 1951, he was arrested on political charges. There followed three years of investigation, after which he was given a prison sentence of twelve years.3ii At the time of making contact with the British men, he was working with a foreign trade organisation, and had begun to write an account of his years with the partisans.4 He asked for details of the crash and information about the crew to assist with this memoir, but Tom took the cautious approach, and did not respond to the letter. It had arrived with a covering note from the Air Attaché in Warsaw, saying: “You would be best advised at this stage to write in terms of happiness at having contact again and not reveal any names of other crew or information which might not be permitted to be passed by Air Ministry.”

  Tom was unsettled during this period, feeling threatened and nervous if a stranger came to the door, telling Rita: “Don’t answer, just in case”. However irrational his fear seemed, he really thought that the Russians were trying to find him. Group Captain Ridgway, Air Attaché in Warsaw, wrote to all four men with regard to The Times item, advising them not to reveal any information about their aircraft, the crash, or their experiences, until he contacted them again, and suggested that if they needed to get in touch with him, they should only do so via the Foreign Office because: “Letters through the open post will definitely be censored”. These were the Cold War years, and the “atmosphere of unbounded suspicion” that Burrows had spoken of was no longer confined to Moscow. Rita kept the household running during Tom’s crisis, but then one day the company car disappeared and a stack of cardboard boxes appeared for us to pack our belongings in. “Where are we going, Mum?” She smiled, and said: “I’m not sure yet”. Now she was the calm, reassuring voice that made everything seem alright.

  Tom Storey with his daughters 1957

  We moved to a boarding house in Morecambe and, although we had not planned to take in visitors, when a family of holidaymakers knocked on the door and asked if we had any rooms, Mum thought: “Well, why not?” We were clearly not business people because we ended up accommodating one or two long-term boarders who had fallen on hard times, and were unable to pay for their lodging. One was a musician from the Joe Loss Orchestra, who was sacked while playing with the band on the Central Pier. His one-week stay turned into weeks as he worked on his legal case for wrongful dismissal, promising to pay for his lodging when he won the case. Pat spent many hours writing and rewriting pages of evidence for him, but it came to nothing and he eventually moved on. Dad managed to get his job back briefly, and it seemed that things were looking up, but it didn’t last, and he seemed quite broken by the weight of responsibility and his inability to get well. Mum got an extra job as manageress of a new café attached to Twell’s corner shop, and because of that, when we suddenly had to move from the boarding house following the death of the landlord, we were offered the flat above the shop and café. I could see the forecourt of the Central Pier from my bedroom window, and we were all quietly pleased to have escaped the boarding house business, which none of us had enjoyed. Free time was spent leading donkey rides along the sands and searching for the pennies that used to fall from the slot machines on the pier, dropping through the planking and onto the wet sand beneath. I joined the Sea Cadets during this period, and loved to march along the promenade playing a bugle in the band, but we also took summer jobs, which was an easy thing to do in a seaside town. One blissful summer of 1959, Pat and I were sent to Ireland to stay with Mum’s sister and our Irish cousins in Killybegs, Donegal. What a joyful, free-spirited summer that was.

  Then life over the shop came to a sudden end when Mr Twell, the owner, closed up one night, put the contents of the till in his pocket, and walked out. He simply disappeared, and it was many years before we learned that he had caught the Heysham ferry to Belfast and begun a new life in Ireland. At the time we had no idea what had happened to him. The shop and café closed and we were on the move again. This final move was to a house at Hest Bank, a ‘passing through’ sort of place on the A6 between Morecambe and Carnforth. We managed to get the house at an affordable rent because the owners had suffered a terrible tragedy when their only child was killed on the busy A6, which ran along the bottom of the road. They moved out as soon as we agreed to move in and, although the house seemed to harbour grief, Dad seemed happier as he dug and tended a vegetable plot in the private back garden, which shielded him from the outside world and, most of all, from anyone who called at the house. He spent hours digging, raking, planting, and weeding, and the absorption seemed to lift his spirits. He got us an old canvas canoe to mess about in on the canal and talked a local farmer into giving us a Border collie, which in the absence of any sheep, took to rounding up the two pet rabbits that ran free in the garden and played havoc with the vegetable plot.

  We caught the school bus into Lancaster every day and life was a whirlwind of friends, homework, and the nightly ritual of jiggling the TV aerial so that we could get a good enough picture to watch Top of the Pops, or Ready Steady Go. Every Sunday, Mum would cook a roast, which Dad would carve. He always had fresh vegetables from his garden plot, and from time to time they sang together as the food was prepared. There were flashes of life as it used to be, when Dad would play the mouth-organ for us as a treat at bedtime, “D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay…”, or dance around the room singing a silly song. We clung on to these happy moments because they were increasingly rare, and what we knew, but couldn’t express, was that Dad was by now only partly with us. It was the fire now that absorbed him almost totally. He would sit hunched over it and stare into the flames for hours, sometimes until it died and went cold, and still we would chatter and sing and argue as though nothing was wrong. He had aged far beyond his years, and his physical health was also beginning to fail, with a collapsed lung and long bouts of illness. Once a week he would put on a suit and catch the bus into Lancaster to queue at the Labour Exchange in the hope of finding work, but he would not work again.

  When the end came, it was unexpected. Even with such intimate knowledge of his mental and physical health, we were not prepared. Pat had just started work as a lab assistant at the technical college, which is where she was on the Thursday that it happened. Dad’s brother, John Storey, had called in the early afternoon and he had done his best to find words of encouragement and motivation as he sat at the bedside. Mum took a cup of tea up shortly after the visit and placed it gently on the floor by the bed – Tom appeared to be asleep. She was in the kitchen as Susan and I arrived home on the school bus. It must have been around half past four, and we dropped our bags on the floor and went running upstairs to see Dad, where we found him dead. Pat got a call at work to tell her to go home straight away, and as she walked through the front door, Dad’s body was being brought down the stairs. From that moment on we were bonded to each other by the tragedy and the profound sense of loss, which was almost never talked about from that day on. We didn’t talk about it outside the house, and we didn’t talk about it amongst ourselves. We wrapped a protective cloak of silence around it; a silence that lasted for years.

  A crew reunion took place the year aft
er Dad’s death as a result of a personal notice in the Daily Mirror. The item was placed by Ivan Shevtsov, radio operator on the Pavlov crew, who wanted to meet up with the airmen he had flown to safety in June 1944. The newspaper managed to trace Jim Hughes, Charlie Keen and Patrick Stradling, who were reunited with Shevtsov in March 1965 in London, in the company of Pravda correspondent, Oleg Orestov, and a Daily Mirror reporter. The subsequent article titled: ‘The Great Reunion of the Englishman, the Irishman, the Welshman and the Ukrainian’ made a full-page spread, and mentioned that the pilot, Thomas Storey, had not been traced for the reunion. None of them knew that Tom was dead and, maybe more remarkably, they believed that Walter had been shot by the Germans and had no idea that he had eventually made it home and was alive. Walter read the story of the reunion in the Daily Mirror and immediately made contact with his fellow crew members. Rita also read the article, with some sadness since Tom could never be part of his crew again, and she contacted the Daily Mirror to tell them of his death. Charlie Keen and Jim Hughes very quickly made their way to the home of Walter Davis in Kent for a second reunion, and the news of Tom’s death was given to them by the Daily Mirror reporter. It was the 23rd April, 1965, twenty-one years to the day after baling out. The following day, Walter wrote to Rita. “It seems such a pity now that I have never had the pleasure of meeting you and of seeing my beloved skipper again.”

  Over the next couple of years, Mum tried a few ventures to make ends meet, such as turning the house into a convalescent home, a business which was not particularly well regulated in those days. Our first ‘convalescent’, a frail and elderly lady, fell out of bed and broke her hip soon after arriving, which quickly put an end to that idea. Then, at the age of 42, she got a job as a teaching assistant, and discovered her vocation. She went back to college, got a teaching diploma, and embarked on a successful teaching career, giving her a regular income and an occupation that she loved. She was finally in a position to buy her first little cottage, and was kept busy in her spare time stripping beams, ripping out fireplaces, and turning her hand to any work that needed to be done. By this time we were married with families of our own and, as we got older, we began to talk of Dad more often. We found that we had all retained slightly different memories, some of which were anecdotes from his time as a pilot, usually related to us by Mum. The burning of Tito’s coat was a favourite, and we knew that a crew member had fallen from his plane, and that Dad had been with partisans in Poland, but we had no clear idea of the type of work he was doing. Why was he flying from Libya and Italy? We didn’t really know. Then in 2011, my daughter Rachel did some research on the internet and found that journalist Paul Lashmar had taken an interest in the story, with a view to making a television documentary based on the Storey crew’s final flight. When she eventually tracked him down he was living just a few miles away and, with great generosity, he gave us copies of his research material. This was the start. The information was intriguing and, by this time, I had also come across a book by Graham Pitchfork, ‘Shot Down and on the Run’, which contained a chapter on Dad’s crew, and a book by Nina Mierzwinska-Harper, which told the same story but from the viewpoint of the Polish partisans. My interest was growing with every bit of information and I wanted to know more. I decided that the first step was to gather all the threads of information together into one cohesive narrative, and then fill in the gaps, if possible.

  Greg Kusiak, Tarnogora 2013

  I began my own research, and in the early stages much of this was on the internet. I posted questions on various websites, particularly with regard to the exact crash site of Halifax JP 224, but had little response. And then, out of the blue, I received a message from Greg Kusiak, a young man from the village of Letownia in southern Poland, just a few miles from the area where the Halifax came down. He had always taken a great interest in the historic event, and wrote offering to take a picture of the crash site for me. He did just that, but what I had not expected was that a memorial stone had been erected at the location, between the village of Tarnogora and the hamlet of Poreba, in the district of Nowa Sarzyna. The reason I had not expected it, was that nobody had died in the crash. The little monument, alone in a field on the edge of the village, was to commemorate the actions of brave partisans and villagers who had saved the lives of four British airmen in April 1944. At this point, the summer of 2012, Mum, my sisters and I decided to travel to Poland. Dad had written in his letter to Ali all those years ago: “I would really like to come to Poland and see you all, but unfortunately I am not a rich man, so I doubt if I can ever be able to do it”. There seemed no reason why we couldn’t go to Poland for him. So, on the 19th April, 2013, the four of us, ‘the team’, boarded a flight from Liverpool John Lennon Airport to Krakow, and then took a train to the town of Przeworsk. There we were met by Edward Kak, the man whose dedication and perseverance had seen the erection of the monument, and kept the story alive for the young people of Tarnogora.

  Nothing could have prepared us for the welcome we received upon arrival. From the moment we arrived at the railway station we were looked after by Edward, his family, and the villagers of Tarnogora. We were introduced to mayors and schoolchildren alike, and taken on a tour of all the sites relevant to us, in the company of historian Piotr Galdys and ex-partisan Bronislaw Smola. We were invited to eat at the home of Bronislaw Sowa, who as a young man had run to get help for Tom Storey on that first night, and everywhere we went, someone came along to help with translation, transport, or to provide food for us. We were quite overwhelmed by the hospitality and the strong sense of community in Tarnogora. On the anniversary day, the 23rd April, we gathered at the Tarnogora primary school, where the children presented us with flowers and then danced, recited poetry, and sang for us. From the school, we walked to the monument, which was adorned with flags, and Rita unveiled a new plaque dedicated to the seven airmen on that ill-fated flight. Piotr Galdys presented Rita with the airman’s flying helmet, which had been salvaged from the crashed Halifax by Sebastian Lyko almost seventy years earlier, and Edward Kak gave us each a piece of the salvaged wing section. It was a particularly emotional day for us as it was also the anniversary of Dad’s death in 1964, and for all those years following his death we had struggled with the memory of his leaving us, and wanted, above all else to understand why. We needed some peace of mind, and although we did not expect to find it in Tarnogora, that is exactly what happened.

  Author with Edward Kak, Tarnogora 2013

  We knew that the 23rd April was a significant anniversary for Dad because every year, on that date, he would withdraw completely from everything around him and seek some kind of oblivion. That led us to believe that the place he retreated to was a lonely and fearful place. It was the fire that began to open our minds to the truth – the fire lit by Piotr Galdys and Lukasz Kak in the forest close to Tarnogora. Having collected dry brushwood from the forest floor and got the fire alight, they pulled up clods of damp peat with their hands and brought them to surround the flames and contain them. Fresh twigs were then gathered, and sausages skewered on the end for us to cook on the fire. Bronislaw Smola talked of his days with the partisans, as Edward, Barbara and Joanna Kak carried baskets of food to the woodland camp. A bottle of vodka and a shot glass came out of one of the baskets, and many toasts were drunk. ‘Na zdrowie!’ (Cheers!). Fire meant something to Dad far beyond the need to keep warm, and suddenly we knew why – it was the fire of comradeship, purpose and the company of people who know the value of life, and were the best companions a man could have in his lifetime.

  Back at our hotel, we sat in the lobby in semi-darkness and talked, and talked. We had all experienced something quite profound, and were very affected by it. We now realised that Tom had been in the company of people who were fighting for their lives and the freedom of their children, yet were able to extend the hand of friendship and care to an outsider, who could offer them nothing, and whose very existence brought the prospect of death to them and their families. We had
all experienced a complete reversal of our previous thoughts. He did not look back on this as a scene from a nightmare, but as a brief period in his life when his fate was in the hands of people who not only kept him safe, a complete stranger, but valued his attempt to bring them help when all around them was abandonment and betrayal. He offered to fight alongside them, and the offer was genuine because he felt as though he belonged and was part of the struggle himself. We felt quite stunned by this sudden realisation, which had not come from my detailed research, or even from first-hand crew accounts. It had come from our own communion with the families who, seventy years earlier, had offered a lifeline to Tom and his crew: Kida, Kak, Galdys, Smola, Wolcz, Sowa, and many more. It was these same families and the community of Tarnogora who were extending the hand of unreserved friendship down the generations to us, and we were humbled by it.