by Sue Gee
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Sue Gee
PART ONE
Preface
1. London, 1958
2. Warsaw, 1939
3. Warsaw, 1939–1941
4. Warsaw, 1942–1944
5. Uprising: Warsaw, 1944
PART TWO
6. London, 1960
7. England, 1968
8. London, 1970s
9. Poland, 1979
PART THREE
10. Warsaw and London, 1980–1981
11. London, 1981
12. London, December 1981
13. Warsaw, January 1982
Sue Gee
Spring Will Be Ours
Sue Gee
Sue Gee is an acclaimed and established novelist. Reading in Bed (2007) was a Daily Mail Book Club selection; The Mysteries of Glass (2005) was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She ran the MBA Creative Writing Programme at Middlesex University from 2000–2008 and currently teaches at the Faber Academy. Sue Gee has also published many short stories, some of which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and her most recent publication is a collection of stories, Last Fling (Salt 2011). She lives in London and Herefordshire.
For the family – the living and the dead
PART ONE
The Lighthouse Keepers
Preface
In December 1981 I went on a demonstration. The weather was cold: snow fell as we marched from a rally in Hyde Park down Oxford Street, towards the Polish Embassy – tens of thousands of us, flanked by police and carrying banners, those up at the front preparing to deliver a petition, demanding the release of thousands of internees. Poland, after the heady, astonishing days of Solidarity, was under martial law.
I was on this demonstration in the company of my Polish partner, Marek, and his family: parents and grandparents who in 1946 had come to this country as exiles after the war. They had made their home here, but their spiritual home was still in Poland. They had brought up their children as Polish children, who, as they grew up, experienced a deep sense of displacement, of belonging neither here nor there. When the world’s spotlight turned, between 1979 and 1981, on a Polish pope returning to his homeland, on the shipyard gates of Gdansk strung with Solidarity banners, on Lech Walesa, carried shoulder high, there had been, for the first time, a sense of identity and belonging. Now, as the telephone lines from Poland to the rest of the world were cut, and General Jaruzelski delivered implacable statements from behind dark glasses, it felt for these children of exiles as though an umbilical cord had been cut, too, and that a country whose history was so deeply entwined with their own childhood had been robbed of hope.
In the summer of 1983 I went for a walk down a Sussex country lane. I was pregnant; my father had just died. The weather was sunny and mild after rain, the grass was lush. I could hear cows cropping it, behind tall hedges. I thought of how utterly English all this was, and how deep lay my own roots in a country childhood. My father had brought us up on a farm: his clergyman father, whom I never knew, had died at the vicarage breakfast table. Marek also had a grandfather he never knew: a doctor and a Reserve Officer in the Polish Army who, with thousands of the Polish intelligentsia, was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1939. Many of those men died infamously at Katyn. This man was taken to the prison camp at Starobielsk, whose inmates, in April 1940, were transported in small groups to a KGB prison in the Ukraine. There they were executed, and buried in mass graves in the forest.
I walked down the lane thinking of these two men, whose ends had been so different, and one so terrible. I thought of how Marek and I, their grandchildren, had met, decades later, and begun a life together. I recalled Marek’s childhood, spent in a London flat overlooking a railway line, and of the excitement he had told me he felt on first moving there, watching the trains. I saw, in an image which would not go away, this little boy, whose parents had lost everything, and who were struggling to rebuild their lives in a foreign country, standing at a dusty window, looking down on to the railway track, at the trains, arriving and departing.
I did not write a word of this novel until some eighteen months later, but it was then that it began. From the research I did while writing, and from the many letters people were kind enough to write to me when it was first published, I know that although it focuses on a single family, there are echoes and reverberations in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Polish families who came here after the war. They had lost beloved relatives and friends, their home, their country. Many of them chose not to take up British citizenship, and thus acquire a British passport, but to wait in the hope that one day they would be able to return, freely, to a free Poland.
Now that day has come. I don’t think that fourteen years ago there was anyone, public figure or private individual, marching on that demonstration, or attending the candlelit one outside the Polish Embassy a few nights later, who would have dreamed that before the end of the decade the Berlin Wall would come down, and the countries of Eastern Europe discover liberation.
It would be foolish to pretend that in Poland, as in the other countries which used to make up the Eastern Bloc, this fast-changing state of affairs has not been without its own problems. A free market economy has brought unemployment, as well as thriving shops and cafés. It has brought resentment of those who have raced ahead. A friend recently in Warsaw says: ‘It’s all there, and so many people can’t afford it.’ On the whole, however, life is undeniably better. There is freedom of exchange – of goods and ideas. There is freedom to come and go.
For some, this has come too late. For some of the older generation, living here, it is simply too painful to go back. People deeply traumatised in youth bear the scars for ever. But, even so, there is hope. A wall has fallen, an iron curtain is gone. There has been much more than a thaw in the long cold war which divided east from west. In this new, more optimistic climate, it is more important than ever to keep alive the memories of those who, in dark days, lost everything, and to pay tribute to their courage.
London, 1995
1. London, 1958
When he was almost five, they moved to a long dark street in Clapham. Three-storey mansion blocks, with dark green paintwork, lined either side; indoors, the paintwork was brown, and the stairs were covered with linoleum. Every time the tenants went up and down, the banisters trembled. There was a notice pinned to the front door of their block: No Banging.
It took the whole afternoon to move them all into the two flats on the top floor. His grandparents were to be on one side of the stairwell; he and Mama and Tata and Ewa on the other. Linoleum covered not just the stairs, but the narrow corridors and the floor of each room; all day, it was discovered, and for much of the night, you could hear footsteps, chairs scraping, the clack of brush against skirting board, heavy saucepans bang on to heavy stoves. And voices, but to these he did not pay much attention.
There was another noise. A mighty rhythm of hissing and puffing, lit by an orange glow and sparks. He stood on tiptoe in the empty room at the back and gazed through dusty glass at the networ
k of tracks, at the huge, black, beautiful engine and the men inside; at the gleaming green coaches, the cloud of steam. The tree-lined streets of Streatham disappeared: a half-remembered sunny afternoon, the walk from Ewa’s school, and they were gone.
He would live here always.
‘Jerzy?’
Leave me alone.
‘Jerzy!’
‘Yes, Mama?’
Rapid footsteps echoing along the corridor; the half-closed door flung wide.
‘All alone? There is tea in the kitchen. Come and sit down.’
‘Yes. Look, Mama.’
Her thin skirt against the side of his head, her hand on his shoulder. A sigh.
‘Yes. It will be very noisy. Come along now.’
Hand in hand; more echoes; everyone round the varnished table; lifted on to his chair. The same chair.
‘Mama?’
‘Yes?’
‘Where shall I sleep?’
‘With Ewa.’
‘I should like to sleep at the back. Please.’
‘Perhaps.’
That night he lay in his bed in the room at the back, filled with unpacked cardboard boxes; a blanket was pinned over the window. Movement in the bedclothes on the other side of the room.
‘Ewa?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you like it here?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘I like it.’
‘Good. Go to sleep now.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
He waited, listening until he was sure she was asleep. Then, when a new clanking and hissing came from the track below, he crept on bare feet to the window and pulled aside a corner of blanket. For as long as they were there, he watched the dark shapes of the driver and of the firemen, bending and stoking, feeding the red belly of the engine. Chilled, he tiptoed back to bed when it had gone; beneath the linoleum a floorboard creaked. He must watch out for that. Under the blankets he rubbed, one cold foot against another.
From somewhere in the flat came the low voices of his parents and grandparents; doors closed; downstairs, a baby cried, then stopped abruptly. He slept.
Brown paint; pale light. In the days since the move, Anna had washed every door, every window frame, and skirting board. Dust and grime was lifted, but the colour must stay; there was not a penny to spare for decoration. To relieve her eyes she paused every now and then to gaze through the freshly washed windows at the autumn sky. September’s departing sunlight was unable to break through continuous thin cloud, but there was no rain, just the great pale flatness, over the railway line and the rooftops of unknown houses.
The wireless played Music While You Work. She sat in the kitchen, slicing potatoes and carrots. The children were in the front room, playing – Ewa had a cold, and was off school today; there was more space for them here, and Dziadek and Babcia could feel secure, living two steps across the landing. There were other Polish people living in the street – the housing association evidently found them reliable tenants, and though the rent was higher than Streatham it was just affordable.
‘But don’t expect me to pay all the bills as well,’ Jan had said, the Sunday morning after they arrived. He was tired after carrying all the boxes up three flights, and a night broken by the trains. Anna said nothing; she would have to find work once Jerzy started school. Her English was quite fluent now, certainly adequate for everyday use, but even so, the thought of having to use it all the time was terrifying. And she would have to start all over again, to explain all over again:
I have my mała matura, my Polish A-levels. I studied for them in secret, in occupied Warsaw, where if I had been discovered I would have been arrested; quite probably, if that had happened, I should not be here now. But I was not arrested, although many other things happened to me then. I took some of the exams in the transit camp in Italy, in 1945, the rest in the resettlement camp in Herefordshire in 1946. No, I have no English qualifications. When I realized that I could not return to Poland, I began to train as a nurse; I knew hardly any English then, but I managed, sitting up late with dictionaries and textbooks. And then I got married, I got pregnant, I gave it up …
A whistle blew, and further down the track a train drew breath and prepared to leave for Victoria. Anna dropped the vegetables into the black saucepan, filled it with water and set it on the stove. Then she went to the window and watched, as if from a great distance. Already, she was able to blot out most of the noise at night, though she was still awake at once if the children called. She yawned, turned away when the train was past, and began to lay the table. Half a loaf on the breadboard criss-crossed with lines; a saucer of margarine. Three mats, three white soup plates, the Woolworth’s spoons, two apples. For herself she did not mind, but the children must have one each day.
She went into their room to fetch the mending she had put aside that morning. Jerzy was in there, face pressed to the window; he did not turn round, and jumped when she touched his shoulder.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing, Mama. Just watching.’
‘I thought you were with Ewa – I didn’t hear you in the corridor.’
‘I was with her. But I came here by myself.’
She stroked his hair. ‘You must have tiptoed. Like a little mouse.’
He smiled.
After lunch, Anna switched on Listen with Mother. Ewa could understand almost everything she heard on the wireless now: Jerzy was beginning to pick out quite a lot. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin …’ The mellow voice of Daphne Oxenford filled the kitchen; the children sat, elbows on the table, chins in cupped hands, listening while Anna washed up.
‘Simple Simon met a pieman
Going to the fair.
Said Simple Simon to the pieman:
Let me taste your ware …’
‘Mama? What does he mean: “taste your where”?’ asked Ewa.
She shook her head, rinsing the plates. ‘We’ll have to look it up.’ How could she possibly get a job?
‘Said, the pieman unto Simon
Show me first your penny,
Said Simple Simon to the pieman
Sir, I have not any …’ The singer was called George. He had a deep voice which sounded as if it should be in a church, even on stage. Anna had a sudden vision of him all dressed up by himself in the studio – Jerzy thought he lived in the wireless – singing nursery rhymes very loudly.
‘Mama? What are you laughing at?’
‘Just a thought.’
After the story, and slow, sleepy signature tune on the piano, which they all liked, Anna sent them for a rest on their beds, then cleared the front room, putting small cars, farmyard animals and dolls neatly into cardboard boxes, all ready to come back to after their walk. It was important that they should have fresh air and exercise each day. She swept the floor and then she allowed herself, as always, fifteen minutes’rest, lying down on the double bed. For a few moments she thought, exhausted, of nothing at all. Then she turned on her side and looked at the photographs on the varnished chest of drawers.
In sepia tones, from a gilt and plastic Woolworth’s frame, her mother gazed at her. She wore a soft white blouse; her hair was cut short, her brown eyes enormous. The photograph had been taken in Warsaw in 1930; Anna was four then, her brother Jerzy six. He laughed at her from another frame, from another year, much later, sitting with their father under a silver birch tree, on a sunlit river bank.
There were many memories of Jerzy and Tata; two particular ones of her mother. Occasionally she allowed herself to relive them.
Anna closed her eyes and saw a great expanse of snow.
Dark clumps of fir trees broke up the glittering whiteness; distantly, far up the mountains, were tiny figures on skis. Anna did not know why she was not with them, how she came to be standing alone under a tree, staring at the empty slopes. She began to cry, and the sound of her own sobbing on the cold silent air frightened her still more
. Then, with a great, wonderful swooping movement, her mother was beside her, snow on the tips of her skis, on her dark hair and gloves.
‘Mama! Mama!’
‘Maleńka – little one – here I am.’
She was clasped in a warm, delicious hug of heavy tweed, fur brushing her cheek, the smell of snow breathed in deep.
On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of the following year, Anna stood outside her father’s study door, listening to the murmur of voices.
‘I am sorry, Tomasz,’ her mother was saying. ‘I don’t like to worry you …’
‘But of course you must tell me. Anyway, I can see how unlike yourself you are these days. So tired …’
There was a long sigh. ‘Always so tired. Sometimes I can hardly get out of bed – and when I go for even a short walk with the children, I’m almost crawling by the time we get home.’
‘Poor Ewa. Perhaps you’re anaemic – we must send you for a blood test.’
‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘It’s not just the tiredness. I – I keep having these silly nosebleeds. Quite often I forget to tell you about them, but I suppose I must have one almost every day. And I don’t know why, but I seem to bruise more easily, or something. I keep finding bruises in places I can’t remember hurting myself at all …’
‘Do you?’ Anna heard her father’s chair pushed back as he got up from behind his desk, piled high with medical textbooks. She loved looking at them when he was out on his calls, carefully tracing the diagrams with her fingers, smelling the leather bindings.
‘Let’s have a look at you, my darling. Where are these bruises?’
Silence. Anna pressed her ear to the crack of the door, imagining her mother undressing, her father’s gentle touch.
His intake of breath was just audible. She waited, suddenly frightened: what was wrong with Mama? Then a door opened at the end of the passage: Aunt Wiktoria was coming. She fled.
Two clear memories only: of the day she was lost and found, and the day when she knew, somehow, that her mother was lost to her for ever. Anna had half-understood a number of facts from her father’s textbooks. It was not until she was much older, ten or eleven, that he told her he had been studying the symptoms of leukaemia during the weeks that her mother grew so unwell. Anna listened gravely as he told her of the Sunday afternoon when he examined her, and understood why. She never let him know that she had heard the terrifying silence of his discovery.
